No plot, no character development, so Parish’s fluid narrative skills are wasted.
The partying is intense in this first novel, a look at America’s bright young things under a cloud or two.
The kids from Lawrenceville, a private New Jersey boarding school, are getting hammered at a birthday party in a Manhattan bar. One girl has passed out. Two guys, Tom and Clare, both seniors, volunteer to take her home. Tom Alison, the narrator, was the school’s pot dealer until he was busted; now he’s on probation. Clare Savage was one of Tom's clients. His father, Michael, has been much in the news: A money manager targeted by the Feds for insider trading, he's fled the country. Columbia has withdrawn its offer to Tom, and Clare is stuck on the waitlist for Yale, so they have thwarted ambitions in common. Tom’s single mom, who has a lucrative catering business in Princeton, invites Clare to stay with them. The other new person in Tom’s life is Kelsey, who designs clothes in St. Andrews, Scotland, where Tom is headed (small world); he and Clare will lie low at the university there. St. Andrews is a party campus. The town is all pubs. The first one Tom enters, oh joy, reveals Prince William (the year is 2003). He’s kicking back with his mate Jules, Kelsey’s new/old boyfriend; Jules owns a castle, a good catch for a Jersey girl. Drugs are everywhere. Will may be prince, but cocaine is king. The action recalls another debut, Less Than Zero, but Bret Easton Ellis’ novel was permeated by nihilism; it had a worldview. Parish just skips blithely from one binge to the next, no direction in mind. He flies in the fugitive financier for a banal meeting with Tom, then sends the boys home for Christmas, scaring up some drama around Tom’s best friend, Casey, a major coke dealer, before whisking the whole gang back to Scotland for some poorly staged mayhem at Kelsey’s big-bucks fashion show.
No plot, no character development, so Parish’s fluid narrative skills are wasted.Pub Date: May 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01642-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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