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LAKE CITY

Name: LAKE CITY
Author: Thomas Kohnstamm
ISBN: 978-1-64009-142-9

by Thomas Kohnstamm ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2019

Amusing as snarky social commentary on the world of Seattle have-nots.

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Lane was sure he had escaped Lake City for good. But suddenly he's back slicing meat at a discount deli counter and grubbing his mom's boyfriend's beers. This calls for extreme measures.

Lake City is a neighborhood on the fringes of Seattle: "the mistress that grown-up Seattle kept around from its younger, untamed years. The one with electric blue eyeliner and a missing incisor," "the leaky, yellowed fridge in a remodeled kitchen of granite countertops and fresh stainless steel appliances." In other words, the part of town left behind by the Microsoft/Amazon/Starbucks explosion. After landing a wealthy girlfriend at the University of Washington, Lane was able to leave his trashy roots behind and reinvent himself as a married Columbia grad student in New York City. But shortly after 9/11, the dream is over—Lane’s wife, Mia, has been supporting the couple and paying Lane's tuition with her family’s money, but now her father is instructing her to dump Lane and cut off funds. Lane finds himself back home at Christmastime, sleeping in his mom's TV room, driving her car, working at the local Fred Meyer discount store, trying desperately to avoid being reabsorbed into the loser lifestyle of the drug- and booze-addled locals he grew up with. In a frantic bid to make enough cash to get back to New York and reclaim his beautiful life, he gets involved in a creepy scheme a wannabe adoptive couple has cooked up to sabotage their little boy's birth mother so they will be awarded permanent custody. Kohnstamm (Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, 2008) stirred up a hullaballoo with his Hunter S. Thompson–style exposé/memoir of the travel-guide industry; a cynical worldview and gonzo aesthetic remain in play here. His delusional, narcissistic antihero and unsympathetic supporting characters—some dangerously close to offensive stereotypes—don't catch many breaks as they ricochet from one nasty situation to the next, with cheap beer, repellent food (beware a riff on the composition of deli turkey), illegal drugs, and other local specialties never far from hand.

Amusing as snarky social commentary on the world of Seattle have-nots.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64009-142-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018

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.