Thoughtful if small in scale, the drama’s ambivalences and ambiguities remain almost too low-key to build readers’ interest...
A master at portraying the hurdles faced by upwardly mobile African-Americans, Southgate (Third Girl from the Left, 2005, etc.) focuses her third novel on a marine biologist trying to escape her heritage.
Growing up in black working-class Cleveland, Josie and her younger brother Tick were raised to excel by their parents, a nurse and a factory worker with a highly sophisticated love of literature. Both kids received scholarships to attend private school, but by the time Josie began to study marine biology at Stanford, her father’s quiet alcoholism had destroyed her parents’ marriage. Although he’s been sober for years, Josie has never forgiven him. Now in her late 30s, she is wrapped up in her seemingly perfect life researching marine mammals at Woods Hole, where she lives with her gentle, loving scientist husband Daniel. When her mother asks her to return briefly to Cleveland to bring Tick home from the rehab center where he’s been in treatment, Josie obliges. But she avoids becoming involved in her brother’s recovery. Despite a dream job as a trainer for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Tick fell prey to alcohol and cocaine addiction. His wife has given up and left him, but now that he’s clean again, the Cavaliers offer him a second chance. He moves in with his mother and begins to attend AA meetings. Back in Massachusetts, Josie walls herself off from her feelings for Tick and her parents, and also Daniel, who can’t help being white or loving Josie more than she allows herself to love him. Instead she falls into an affair with newly arrived researcher Ben, who happens to be the only other African-American at the lab. Then Tick turns up at her doorstep in desperate need. Declaring the novel is Josie’s narration, Southgate uses some creaky machinations to allow other points of view.
Thoughtful if small in scale, the drama’s ambivalences and ambiguities remain almost too low-key to build readers’ interest before the tragic if unsurprising climax.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56512-925-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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