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THE SEASON

Name: THE SEASON
Author: Tom Kelly
ISBN: 1-55821-489-5

by Tom Kelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 16, 1996

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An Alabama woodsman looks back at a lifetime of turkey hunting, refracted through the lens of his most recent season, and he likes what he sees. Kelly, who wrote Better on a Rising Tide (not reviewed), widely regarded as a sporting classic, has hunted the elusive wild turkey for more than 50 years—every one ``more thorn than rose.'' The titular season framing these freewheeling reflections is no exception. From the anticipation that builds toward the mid-March opener to the ``after-season personal-critique stage,'' which lasts months past the late April closing, Kelly's flatwoods encounters with the adaptive birds constantly remind him how cagey they are. Humble about his own woods-savvy, he sardonically devalues his observations: ``I am, at best, teetering along the ragged edge of senility, and the only drink I ever turned down in my life was because I misunderstood the question.'' Don't buy it. Kelly's trained eye (he grades timber for a living) and hunting know-how yield plenty of revelations, although he denounces the fashionable Grand Slam (bagging turkeys of all four subspecies in a single season) as a vain manifestation of a record-keeping, goal-oriented society he plainly feels has no place in the woods. Kelly's greatest pleasure comes not from the kill but from ``Indian guiding'': showing a novice the ropes. His conversational, digressive writing (a lively mixture of tall-tale grandiloquence, profanity, and true insight) accomplishes that instruction admirably, spinning entertaining riffs on Celtic mysticism, taxonomy, forestry, and wildlife management and communicating his love for the land, the bird, and the sport. While he's certainly capable of the lyricism that's common in nature writing these days, Kelly's gruff, self-deprecating humor is a welcome departure from the sentimentality that mars far too much of the sporting genre. A genuine love song to outdoorsmanship as sharp-eyed, bawdy, and unbridled as a gobbler in full strut.

Pub Date: Dec. 16, 1996

ISBN: 1-55821-489-5

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Lyons Press

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996

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.