It's too bad about the dogs, but they died for a good cause.
Ranked sixth on the Wall Street Journal's list of Best Places to Live, the fictional town of Littlefield, Massachusetts, is far from paradise.
First there are crude brown-paper signs—"Leash Your Beast Or Else"—stuck up around the park. Then there's a dead white bull mastiff, the first in a series of dogs to turn up poisoned. Dr. Clarice Watkins, a sociologist who's just moved to town to study "what must be the world's most psychologically policed and probably well-medicated population," soon realizes her subjects' supposed state of grace is under siege. She's causing a bit of a stir herself as a short, black woman who wears a turban and is believed to know the Obamas; she's invited to share her "tribal cuisine" at Celebrate Your Heritage Day. One of the more troubled residents in Watkins' study cohort is Julia Downing, the preteen daughter of a fraying marriage between a hypervigilant, bored mother (about to embark on an affair with the town's literary novelist) and a depressed, recently jobless dad. Their little girl is a bit of a sociologist herself. She keeps a popularity report on the seventh grade in which the top 10 shifts every day, but her own position remains at 73. For her history class, she's working on a survey of Littlefield, in which she counts 23 banks, 6 dog groomers, 4 yoga studios, 4 liquor stores, 1,146 psychotherapists, and 679 psychiatrists. For all her mother's helicoptering, Julia manages to get into some real scrapes. She falls through thin ice when trying to rescue a dog out on a wintry pond. Soon after, she screws up a babysitting job so badly that hospitalization and euthanasia are involved. These disasters have the perverse effect of making her a celebrity on social media. Berne (Missing Lucile, 2010, etc.), who won the Orange Prize for her first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997), is a sure hand at the dinner parties, school concerts, teacup tempests, and true moments of suspense that make a suburban comedy of manners par excellence.
It's too bad about the dogs, but they died for a good cause.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9424-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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