Worthy company for work by other naturalist/novelists: Nabokov, Matthiessen, Kingsolver.
An elegant, eccentric novel of love, loneliness, and lepidoptera.
There’s plenty of clef in this debut novel by noted naturalist Pyle (Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature, 2016, etc.), in which a Yale-educated scholar of butterflies finds himself on a mountain in Colorado among grylloblattids, ptarmigan, and city-fleeing monks in search of—well, himself, for one thing, but also a species of butterfly that has made its home in the world there: “A minute tube of life,” Pyle writes of one nascent representative, “he sleeps on as the world of Magdalena Mountain freezes, solid and pale.” Erebia magdalena is the true hero of Pyle’s nature-rich tale, wanting only a little room to flutter and reproduce in the short span of life allotted to it. Complicating the picture is James Mead, our intrepid scientist hero, who confides to his diary, “All I want for Christmas is a Magdalena,” but who, in the spirit of discovery, has plenty of other questions, too—for one, why Magdalena Mountain bears that name. Answering some of them is the enigmatic Mary Glanville, a medical mystery: She’s survived a long fall off the mountain, has suffered a trauma whose “exact nature…is puzzling,” and now identifies with Mary Magdalene. (“I do not advertise the fact widely, for reasons that will be clear to you if you have ever been incarcerated,” she tells James.) Mary has fled a group home in Denver in a season and place where fresh snow falls on the old slush “like a clean diaper over a dirty one,” and on the mountain she falls in with a community of monks who just happen to bear butterfly-ish names like Xerxes, Oberon, and Attalus. Not all of them are on the up-and-up, leading to a craggy chase scene that would do Zane Grey proud. The story is a touch predictable at moments, but mostly Pyle pulls off some pleasing surprises, and with a butterfly-light touch.
Worthy company for work by other naturalist/novelists: Nabokov, Matthiessen, Kingsolver.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64009-077-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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