A provocative debut. Not entirely successful, but James Franco and B.J. Novak better watch their backs.
Noted actor and director Penn tries his hand at fiction and pulls it off reasonably well.
There’s not much clef in Penn’s debut roman, although his protagonist, the titular Bob Honey, does log a little time visiting New Orleans after Katrina and fulminating about the sad state of the world. Bob, “God’s squared-away man,” is a pronounced nuisance around his California neighborhood, the kind of fellow whom the neighbors are always ratting out to the constabulary, a report from whom reads, “Neighbors complain of excessive lawn mower noise—0300 hours. When patrol arrived at scene, all was quiet. Scent of fresh cut grass permeating the air.” Divorced, creatively spiteful, Bob pursues the oddest of career trajectories, selling septic tank systems here, working angles there to “explore opportunities in the waste management sector” in Baghdad right after the U.S. invasion. Oh, and to boot, Bob isn’t above scratching out a few bucks by executing oldsters whose only crime is drawing down the social welfare coffers, “a reckoning of their uselessness in a world where branding is being.” Things get more tangled from there. Penn paints with a broadly satirical, Vonnegut-ian brush throughout, though as this slender story progresses, he gives nods (by way of sly footnotes) to the likes of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. That story is sometimes too absurd, sometimes too labored; on encountering sentences like “But as the music and its pulse rose, Bob began to follow, finally finding the spastic gesticulations that would purge his pond of pirates,” the reader might be forgiven for wondering if Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High had not somehow found his way to a wayward thesaurus, a suspicion that won’t abate when the alliteration comes faster and thicker (“rarified resins liquefied during a life languishing unloved”) as Bob’s life becomes ever more unmoored. Still, it’s good fun, and as a bonus, Donald Trump gets a nice drubbing, too.
A provocative debut. Not entirely successful, but James Franco and B.J. Novak better watch their backs.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8904-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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
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