A beguiling collection that merges off-kilter concepts and classic style.
Everyday people are stalked by strangeness in this artfully bemusing story collection.
It’s been two decades since the publication of Rescue, O’Connor’s debut collection, but his affinity for quirky premises clearly remains undiminished. A recurring set of stories features a “professor of atheism” who’s presented with seeming evidence of the afterlife—a set of angel’s wings, a paradisial retreat, his resurrected father. In “Based on a True Story,” a man is asked to play himself in the movie of his life, and he wrestles with his feelings toward the woman who is playing his wife with unsettling accuracy. In “Disappearance And,” a man is told the precise time of his death by a bird and spends his final hours deciding how to end his life with dignity. O’Connor’s taste for unusual setups resembles that of George Saunders, but O’Connor is a more bleakly critical writer, and the bulk of his stories seem designed to reveal how ill-equipped we are to deal with mortal concerns. The beautifully turned “White Fire,” for instance, is narrated by a soldier newly arrived home from Iraq, and his casual, staccato language—dotted with many utterances of “like” and “so then”—belies just how much fear he carries with him. Similarly, the protagonist of “Love” heads to a cabin retreat to work on her dissertation (on child abuse, forebodingly enough), and her paranoia about her boyfriend’s fidelity transmogrifies into terror that she’s being stalked. The power in these stories emerges from O’Connor’s style, which can be as controlled and elegant as John Updike’s but which serves a very different purpose; instead of stressing the strangeness of the premise of “Ziggurat,” about the relationship between a minotaur and a video-game-obsessed girl, the author emphasizes its normalcy, making the story feel surprisingly realistic. And pure realism is easily within O’Connor’s grasp too: “Aunt Jules” is a simple but deeply affecting story about a woman’s relationship with her sister and brother-in-law, with whom she had a brief fling. The author places it at the end of the book, as if to suggest that normalcy is the strangest, toughest trick of all.
A beguiling collection that merges off-kilter concepts and classic style.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8199-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
