Expertly blending plot and character, each of these taut, propulsive tales possesses novelistic depth.
Seven linked stories explore aspects of contemporary manhood.
Though all but one are set in a small corner of Michigan’s remote, rugged Upper Peninsula, the seven stories that compose this collection are anything but claustrophobic. Probing deeply into the male psyche, Caputo (Some Rise by Sin, 2017, etc.) confidently tackles subjects that include the sometimes-catastrophic price of failure, the relations between fathers and sons, and the emotional battles faced by returning combat veterans. While hunting figures prominently in most of the stories—like “Blockers,” in which three high school friends reunite on a fateful weeklong bird-hunting trip, or “The Nature of Love on the Last Frontier,” set in the Alaskan bush as a father and son lock horns in a tense generational conflict that turns life-threatening—even readers unfamiliar with that pursuit will find themselves immersed in Caputo’s fast-moving narratives. In vivid and minutely observant prose, he writes with assurance about his characters’ wilderness experiences and with equal sensitivity about the captivating natural beauty that surrounds them. Will Treadwell, a Vietnam veteran and one-time owner of a popular local brewpub, appears in five of the stories, including “Dreamers,” which is built around an incident of frightening violence, and “Lost,” an understated evocation of the terror of accidental isolation in the unforgiving forest. His recurring presence is a quietly effective linking device. “The Guest,” a portrait of an episodic middle-age affair and the only story with a female protagonist, brings back Lisa Williams from “Blockers” years after her life has been altered irrevocably by the events of the earlier story. The collection’s final entry, “Lines of Departure,” again features Treadwell and a narrator named Phil, whose biography bears some resemblance to Caputo’s own. Unfolding at a weekend retreat for troubled veterans, it’s a compassionate glimpse of how “the psychic pain of war’s aftermath could be as isolating as acute physical pain” and a fitting conclusion to an intense, often unsettling journey into the male mind and heart.
Expertly blending plot and character, each of these taut, propulsive tales possesses novelistic depth.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62779-476-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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