A treasure trove of fictional gems.
How well do we ever know another person? That’s the leitmotif of this witty but piercing new collection by Man Booker winner Lively (Dancing Fish and Ammonites, 2014, etc.).
The title story sets the tone: narrated by an exotic pet in Roman Pompeii, shortly to be eradicated by the C.E. 79 eruption of Vesuvius, it shows genuine communication only between the purple swamp hen and a slave girl in an aristocratic household otherwise roiled by people who can’t get along and communicate (angrily) only in a crisis. The collection’s keystone, “A Biography,” couples interviews conducted for a book about Lavinia Talbot, a charismatic public intellectual, with the interviewees’ private, unshared recollections to create a poignant portrait of a woman with a secret wound at the heart of her life’s work and to simultaneously suggest that we can never fully understand her. “Lorna and Tom” also painfully demonstrates the possibility of loving someone without ever really grasping his or her essence, giving a quietly wrenching account of a marriage that ultimately founders on the shoals of Britain’s terminal class-consciousness—though not, because Lively rarely does the expected, in the way readers might anticipate. Yet there are also radiant stories like “Point of View,” in which a screenwriter and her live-in boyfriend, each yearning for a child and convinced the other doesn’t want one, finally stumble into mutual accord. “The Bridge” is perhaps the collection’s best showcase of Lively’s gift for embracing the full range of human complexity. “How can something have happened twice over? One way for him, another for me?” asks a woman about a family tragedy she and her husband literally saw differently. Yet the story’s conclusion shows the characters groping to surmount their limited perspectives, prodded by love. A droll update of Pride and Prejudice and a couple of satisfyingly scary ghost stories provide some lighter entertainment, and even in her darkest tales, Lively’s fundamentally serious take on our tangled emotional lives is never bleak, merely ruefully accepting.
A treasure trove of fictional gems.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2203-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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