The unsympathetic characters are less a problem than the artificial, lifeless world Vickers forces them to inhabit.
Vickers (Where Three Roads Meet, 2008, etc.), usually adept at combining philosophy with romance, stumbles in this airless story about a British widow who travels by ocean liner to visit an old friend in New York.
Violet’s husband, a kindly lawyer she never passionately loved, has recently died, so Violet decides to splurge on a luxury sea voyage to visit her old friend Edwin, a poet she lost touch with years ago, even before he moved abroad. On board, Violet rather haughtily looks down on her fellow passengers, whom she considers boring and/or pretentious. But she is also frazzled. She’s lost her cell phone and contact list. Cowed by her well-meaning if overbearing room steward Renato, she attends a tea dance where the Italian instructor Dino (real name Des, Italian accent fake) quickly susses her out as a possible mark, a lonely woman with money. She enjoys dancing with Dino, but her mind is actually elsewhere. She’s more interested in remembering her life in the 1960s when she met Edwin. Her teacher at Cambridge, he took her under his wing and became her mentor and closest friend. Soon they moved in together, platonically since he was gay, and began a literary magazine. He encouraged her writing. But the idyll was disturbed when his old school friend Bruno showed up. Violet claimed to hate Bruno and his bullying personality, but soon they were lovers. Edwin moved to Oxford, and Violet moved in with Bruno in London. Before their terrible marriage ended badly, Bruno caused Violet to abandon Edwin in a time of need. Or so she’s believed all these years. Once she reaches New York—after a few unsurprising on-board intrigues—she learns not only that Edwin holds no ill will but also what readers have assumed—that Bruno and Edwin were lovers all along.
The unsympathetic characters are less a problem than the artificial, lifeless world Vickers forces them to inhabit.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-22316-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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