Aside from the exotic setting, Soli’s idiosyncratic prose style is the main attraction here.
Escapees of all stripes wash up on a remote South Pacific atoll.
If your chef husband’s dreams of a new LA fusion restaurant have fallen apart, thanks to a spendthrift partner, and creditors are about to seize your bank account, painstakingly saved over a decade of slaving in a soulless law firm, what would you do? Withdrawing the cash and hopping the first plane to Tahiti is only the start for Ann, the lawyer, and Richard, the chef. Once at a private island resort with no electricity or Internet (which still costs an alarmingly high price), the couple has to contend with their fellow vacationers and the island’s staff. The former include fellow Angelenos Dex, an aging, much-married rock star, and his 20-something “muse,” Wende. The latter include Tahitians Titi, the cook and housekeeper; her betrothed, all-around handyman and diving coach Cooked; and the manager and island’s owner, Loren, a Frenchman who harbors a dreadful secret about the fate of his daughters after he abandoned their mother to an abusive second marriage. This is a promising setup, but Soli’s insistence on granting equal voice to every one of these characters results in narrative chaos; Richard and Ann’s predicament is dropped as they're caught up in the dramas of these chance acquaintances. Ann’s compassion for Loren grows after a few absinthe-soaked afternoons, although she considers his installation of a webcam on the island a betrayal. After contemplating just how many hours of each day go into maintaining her hotness, Wende embraces the revolutionary zeal of Cooked, who wants to expose the horrible toll exacted on the South Pacific by nuclear testing. Jealous, Titi sulks, and Richard takes over the kitchen, learning that food is his primary passion—but we knew that. As progressively less plausible crises proliferate, some very real sharks get jumped.
Aside from the exotic setting, Soli’s idiosyncratic prose style is the main attraction here.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04396-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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