A monochromatic sketch of emotional disconnect.
Five Japanese quarter-lifers disclose secrets and glimpses of their dark sides in a chilly slice of vérité from Yoshida (Villain, 2010).
An assailant is roving the streets near the Tokyo apartment at the center of this novel, Yoshida’s second translated into English. But the residents have other things on their minds. Ryosuke is a college student trying to work up the nerve to make a move on a friend’s girlfriend. Kotomi is having an on-again, off-again relationship with a young actor who’s suddenly become a star. Mirai is a hard-drinking woman who’s spliced together a tape of rape scenes from various movies, a horrid inversion of the cheery climax of Cinema Paradiso. Satoru is a prostitute with a penchant for breaking into homes, and Naoki is a film buff whose concluding revelation clarifies much of the preceding story. Yoshida is cannily aware of the ways that people in their late teens and 20s play-act at personalities, taking on ideas and tossing them aside. (And, being originally published in 2002, the novel is a reminder that such narcissism isn’t a function of social media.) The downside of writing about such personalities in process, though, is that emotional footholds are hard for the reader to locate; Parade dedicates a section to each of the five players, but each has a quotidian flatness. The most intriguing of the group is Mirai, who’s the savviest about calling out the white lies and bragging of her roommates, but she’s oblivious to the reasons behind her own alcoholic self-annihilation. “The only way I can be a true humanitarian in Japan today is to be snide and disagreeable,” she says. Why so snide and disagreeable? Yoshida might argue that providing a pat answer would undercut the mood of alienation. But as it is, the book is dour and distant.
A monochromatic sketch of emotional disconnect.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-45493-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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