Johnson is asking hard questions about race in America but he’s using an awfully tame approach to work out the answers, at...
A middle-aged failure struggles with his identity and masculinity when he’s forced to return home to Philly.
Johnson (Pym, 2011, etc.) digs autobiographically deep for this tragicomic novel about grudgingly returning to one’s roots. Our narrator is Warren Duffy, whose complex back story lends credence to his character. He’s a failed comic-book artist suffering from the triple whammy of a fresh divorce from his Welsh wife, losing his comic-book store in Cardiff, and his father’s death. Returning to his family’s palatial home in urban Philadelphia, Warren finds his old neighborhood has long gone to seed. He’s very conflicted as the light-skinned son of a black mother and an Irish father who long ago fled his racially charged hometown. Fate can’t resist kicking home once again when Warren discovers that he has a daughter, Tal, from an empty high school liaison with a local Jewish girl who's long since dead. The reluctant father warily takes in his daughter and stumbles across a local school called The Mélange Center, which devotes itself exclusively to supporting multiracial students. There, he discovers that others see him as a “sunflower”: “yellow on the outside, brown on the inside. A slang term for a biracial person who denies their mixed nature, only recognizing their black identity.” As a narrator, Warren is complicated and articulate, but readers may struggle to identify with his multifarious quarrels with the neighborhood locals, his aggressive yearning for one of Tal’s teachers, and the perpetual tightrope he believes he walks between the black and white worlds. The author is clearly interested in what it means to be biracial in America and whether it's better to identify publicly as white, black, or biracial. But he does the heavy lifting on the writing side, too, consummating his story with an absurd but comic conflagration on the occasion of “Loving Day,” a real but little-known celebration of the day the Supreme Court struck down all laws criminalizing interracial marriage.
Johnson is asking hard questions about race in America but he’s using an awfully tame approach to work out the answers, at least this go-round.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9345-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
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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SEEN & HEARD
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