A rawer Waiting to Exhale, punctuated by powerful human moments despite run-together, derivative prose.
Three African-American sisters navigate the hostile world of men and drugs in a first novel set in North Philadelphia during the late1960s and ’70s.
Philly suffers from gang violence, racial tension, Vietnam War fallout, and drug infestation as the sisters battle to support each other through the grief of losing their father to lung cancer. Tired, pretty Violet has two teenaged boys and a philandering husband who brings her only misery; sculptor and single mother Rose changes bedfellows like shoes because of lingering pain over the early breakup with the abusive Charles; drug-addicted Lilly turns tricks and floats through her brief life without purpose. In alternating chapters that meander murkily throughout the years, the sisters’ stories are narrated in the third-person, although Rose lends an overall cohesion in intermediate chapters called “Studio Time.” She meets writer Charles when she’s 17, during the tumultuous Revolution Now! and Black Power movements, while Lilly first shoots up heroin with her boyfriend as a freshman at Temple University. Violet sublimates her own will to successful, overbearing Jerome and middle-class comforts, only to ask herself later, “At what price being pretty and keeping quiet?” The mid-1970s women’s movement brings joy in the form of a loving new man in Rose’s life, but it’s threatened by Charles’s sudden, inexplicable insistence that he wants to see his eight-year-old daughter Imani. At the same time, more tragedy arrives in Lilly’s tortured existence. Johnson etches bitterness into these stories, hints of anger at the way her characters allow men to determine their fates, and yet she evinces enormous sympathy and tenderness as well. But her tendency to propel her narrative in the progressive tenses while loading up on ungrammatical constructions grinds down the reader and makes for a monotonous voice.
A rawer Waiting to Exhale, punctuated by powerful human moments despite run-together, derivative prose.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94654-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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