Few can match the muted humor, lingering poignancy and depth with which Hornby (A Long Way Down, 2005, etc.) limns his...
British woman finds herself in an intimate e-mail relationship with the obscure ’80s rock star her music-obsessed ex idolizes.
Annie can understand liking American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe. After all, his masterful breakup album, Juliet, is one of her favorites. The problem is that her longtime live-in boyfriend Duncan (an older, sadder version of Rob in Hornby’s High Fidelity, 1995) lives and breathes Tucker Crowe, to the exclusion of having an actual grown-up life. After 15 years, Annie realizes she has wasted her childbearing prime tied to a man who feels more passion for a reclusive musician than he could ever muster for her. Duncan then makes it easy for Annie to kick him out by cheating on her with Gina, a new performing-arts instructor at the school where he teaches. In the meantime, Annie has inadvertently begun a web correspondence with Tucker himself, who finds her through an astute post she leaves on one of Duncan’s geeky fan sites. The years have not been kind to Tucker, who lives in suburban Pennsylvania with his young son. His life bears little resemblance to the legend that has grown up around his disappearance more than 20 years earlier. Their meaningful exchanges awaken feelings in Annie that she had nearly given up on, while also giving her a vicarious thrill over one-upping Duncan. Tucker likes her too, finding her wit and kindness refreshing after years of chasing models. Living in a sleepy English seaside town, Annie has little hope of actually meeting her correspondent, but when a family drama brings Tucker to London, she sees an opportunity for adventure—and more. Tucker arrives, personal baggage in tow, and what happens next transforms both their lives in ways they could not have anticipated.
Few can match the muted humor, lingering poignancy and depth with which Hornby (A Long Way Down, 2005, etc.) limns his forgivably human characters.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-887-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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