An ultimately unknowable hero in extreme and hopeless situations makes a tough read for non-pessimists.
A modern master takes a gloomy look at the damage wrought by mental illness.
Noble Norfleet, senior in a small North Carolina high school, member of the track team, polite oldest son of a vanished father and difficult mother, wakes one morning after a pleasant and instructive romp with his Spanish teacher to discover his brother and sister dead in their beds, having been ice-picked in their sleep by their mother, who could have done in the exhausted Noble, too, but didn’t. This is not a total surprise for Noble. Edith Norfleet has exhibited psychotic symptoms for years, but, this being the ’60s and the pre-Republican South, she’s been pretty much left to make life hell for her family. The prolific Price (A Perfect Friend, 2000, etc.) follows his square-shooting but, alas, humorless young hero through the process of committing Edith to the state facility and getting on with his life. There is unsatisfactory contact with his only close relative, an unhelpful uncle, more satisfactory contact with the Spanish teacher, whose nice husband is in Vietnam, helpful dealings with the crusty black lady who used to clean for Edith, and some surprising counseling sessions with the local minister, who is every bit as attracted to the handsome young lad as the Spanish teacher was. Noble’s cooperation with the clergyman leads to a slightly spooky weekend at the beach and further tragedy. The Spanish teacher returns to her own incestuous family. Time moves on. Noble enlists in the army, becomes a medic, visits Edith occasionally, goes to war, has more slightly spooky experiences, becomes a nurse, and learns over time that black people never let him down and that he’s happiest in one-sided sexual contact with women (he’s the worker—they just have to lie back and relax), only to find that that’s not enough for most women.
An ultimately unknowable hero in extreme and hopeless situations makes a tough read for non-pessimists.Pub Date: June 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-0417-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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