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MASSACHUSETTS, CALIFORNIA, TIMBUKTU

Name: MASSACHUSETTS, CALIFORNIA, TIMBUKTU
Author: Stephanie Rosenfeld
ISBN: 0-345-44825-1

by Stephanie Rosenfeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

A good strong voice that never lets in the waterworks.

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A hilariously caustic first novel by storywriter Rosen (What About the Love Part?, 2002) follows a girl drawn in the wake of her dingbat California mother’s “grand adventure.”

Addicted to abusive men and floundering in service jobs, single mother Colleen Hanley hits on the harebrained scheme of dragging her two girls, Rona, 5, and Justine, 11, to Massachusetts to look up an old boyfriend who won’t even remember who she is. Her last boyfriend, Dale, a nasty Jesus freak and actually Rona’s father, ends the shaky relationship when he punches sassy Justine in the back after a disastrous trip to Disneyland. Justine is no fool about her mother’s lunacies, and, as the ill-begotten road trip is undertaken in a rented truck, it’s plucky and intrepid Justine who serves as the responsible parent—foraging for food and reminding their mother that the truck must be returned following an extended layover in Salt Lake City, when Colleen becomes infatuated with a new loser. Finally, in Hadley, Massachusetts, the penniless, homeless, ragged three must stay with Colleen’s manipulative high-school friend Marie, whose attempts at making Colleen employable become a means of further debasing her already nugatory self-esteem. As a fifth-grade assignment, Justine begins a diary of imaginary pioneers and their numerous children on a dangerous trek in reverse, from Amherst to California; pages from the diary, chronicling hardships of cold, hunger, and sickness in tongue-in-cheek fashion, are interspersed with Justine’s eye-rolling real-life narrative. And while Justine’s troubles would make a bonanza for any social worker—her newly growing body provokes swinish ribbing from the boys in the class, while her mother sinks into such a profound winter depression that she can’t even get out of bed to take the girls to school—Justine’s belligerent resistance to self-pity works in clear-eyed counterpoint to her delusionally doomed mother.

A good strong voice that never lets in the waterworks.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-44825-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.