WHAT I LOVED

Name: WHAT I LOVED
Author: Siri Hustvedt
ISBN: 0-8050-7170-9

by Siri Hustvedt ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2003

Well-narrated plot and credible people—but told in a gossipy, insider’s tone likely to put off anyone not in (or interested...

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A mannered, somewhat formulaic account of a critic’s long and complicated friendship with an artist, presented by Hustvedt (Yonder, 1998, etc.) with just a touch of melodrama amid the melancholy.

Bill Wechsler is a nice Jewish boy from suburban New Jersey who, after college, came to New York, in the 1940s, to paint. With first wife Lucille, he had his only child—a son, Mark. For decades, Bill worked in obscurity, making money in the daytime, painting in the evenings, his work so atypical that few galleries knew what to make of it. But then, in 1975, the Columbia critic and art historian Leo Hertzberg buys one of Bill’s paintings at a SoHo gallery, and the two become close friends. Partly because of Leo’s interest, Bill is soon widely recognized. He and second wife Violet (a suicidal NYU student) buy a loft in the same building that Leo lives in with his wife Erica and son Matthew, and the two families become almost one household for several years, even sharing a summer house in Vermont. After Matthew dies in a boating accident at summer camp, however, he withdraws into his grief—compounded not long afterward when Bill dies of a heart attack. Leo tries to look out for the now fatherless Mark, who’s become a fixture of the downtown club scene and has nearly overdosed several times—but Leo had to back off after discovering Mark’s theft of $7,000 from him. Eventually, Mark becomes friends of the transgressive artist Teddy Giles, whose portraits of corpses have made him a sensation in the art world. But Teddy is soon arrested for the murder of his 13-year-old boyfriend, and Mark is implicated in the crime. For Leo, by now an older man, it is one more reminder that the world has become a stranger and a grayer place without Bill in it.

Well-narrated plot and credible people—but told in a gossipy, insider’s tone likely to put off anyone not in (or interested in) the New York art world.

Pub Date: March 6, 2003

ISBN: 0-8050-7170-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MOTHERS, FATHERS, AND OTHERS
by Siri Hustvedt

- BOOK REVIEW
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
by Siri Hustvedt ; illustrated by Siri Hustvedt

- BOOK REVIEW
A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN
by Siri Hustvedt

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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.