THE DARK FLOOD RISES

Name: THE DARK FLOOD RISES
Author: Margaret Drabble
ISBN: 978-0-374-13495-2

by Margaret Drabble ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

The lack of narrative drive may irk some readers, but those who appreciate her able combination of intelligence, wit, and...

bookshelf

From veteran novelist Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby, 2013, etc.), a meditation on modern old age spiked with astringent humor on a subject “too serious for tears.”

Fran Stubbs, “well turned seventy,” works for a charitable trust to create better housing for the elderly, but she herself lives in a shabby, poorly maintained North London apartment building for the sake of the garage and the view. She’s not ready to move into expensive exurban retirement like her friend Josephine, and she’s relieved not to be housebound like her terminally ill former husband, Claude. Yet Fran is wryly conscious of her fading memory and increasing scattiness as she bustles around to conferences, brings ready-to-reheat meals over to Claude (with whom she’s resumed friendly relations a half-century after their divorce), and lets Josephine talk her into seeing a production of Happy Days. These typically self-aware Drabble women agree that Samuel Beckett could have spared himself all that angst about impending death when he was in his 20s and 30s: “There’s time for that later, plenty of time.” Mortality is much closer at hand for Bennett, an elderly historian living in the Canary Islands, and his considerably younger but now middle-aged lover, Ivor. “Who will push [my] wheelchair?” Ivor wonders, fearful that he will be alone and destitute once the man he has tended for so long dies. The link between these two storylines is Fran’s hard-drinking son, Christopher, a television arts presenter who has a professional connection with Bennett, and numerous other vividly drawn characters swarm in a text notable for Drabble’s customarily sharp social observations and willingness to let her plot amble where it will. The final destination of several key figures should come as no surprise, given their age, but the author evokes a palpable sense of sorrow and loss nonetheless.

The lack of narrative drive may irk some readers, but those who appreciate her able combination of intelligence, wit, and rue will willingly follow Drabble into the sunset.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-374-13495-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU'LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE
by Elizabeth Taylor ; edited by Margaret Drabble

- BOOK REVIEW
THE PURE GOLD BABY
by Margaret Drabble

- BOOK REVIEW
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMILING WOMAN
by Margaret Drabble

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.