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HALF WILD

Name: HALF WILD
Author: Robin MacArthur
ISBN: 978-0-06-244439-4

STORIES

by Robin MacArthur ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

A promising debut and admirable survey of adolescent and middle-aged crises in rough country.

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Rural Vermonters are eager to cut loose from the responsibilities of work, family, and community in this debut story collection.

As the title suggests, MacArthur specializes in men and women who are trying to access an inner ferality. Sometimes they act out in nature, as in “Creek Dippers,” in which a mother and daughter go skinny-dipping, or “Maggie in the Trees,” narrated by a man who conducts an affair with a married woman in a cabin in the woods. The lightly linked stories all take place in a fecund, unpaved region of the state that seems to sanction bad behavior: “God’s Country” is written from the perspective of an elderly woman whose grandson is using her falling-down barn as a meeting place for a white-power group. Many of the conflicts are more interior, though, as is the case with the narrator of “The Heart of the Woods,” who married a wealthy real estate developer but comes from lower-class logging stock: “How many years will I have to walk this line—trying to prove myself in both worlds I belong to?” In the best-turned story, the concluding “The Women Where I’m From,” MacArthur captures the subtle and irresistible pull of place as the narrator returns home from Seattle to care for her ailing mother. (“What is it, this tether?”) Lacking many options, women tend to lapse into bad relationships. Meanwhile, 10 join the military to meet their fates in Vietnam or the Middle East; the young mother of “The Long Road Turns to Joy” finds her Buddhist calm challenged by her son’s decision to enlist. MacArthur writes about all this with intellectual force and grace, though also with an evenhandedness that doesn’t always match the subject matter—one wishes for a little more wildness in the prose. But she’s mapping unexplored territory.

A promising debut and admirable survey of adolescent and middle-aged crises in rough country.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-244439-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.