Insightful about racial and family relationships and the power to forgive.
A young photographer deals with psychological wounds from her narcissistic mother and father.
As this novel begins in 2004, young Artie (short for Artimeza) is recovering in a swank facility following a mental breakdown after catching her husband and her mother, Serena, engaging in oral sex. As Artie speaks to her compassionate psychiatrist, Dr. Ligon, intermittent flashbacks (from several characters’ points of view) fill in past details, particularly the painful period in 1990 when Artie was 10 and her mother abandoned her. Readers slowly learn how Serena also faced a childhood marked by abandonment; how Artie’s father, Rico, contributed to the unhealthy family dynamic; and how Serena’s conviction that she’s worthless affects her life. “Like your mother, your father put his needs before yours,” Dr. Ligon explains. “That narcissistic behavior results in negative feelings. But you didn’t learn that you had a right to express those feelings.” Artie struggles to understand her past, acknowledge the truth of her pain, and to forgive, especially when she’s tempted to get revenge on her mother after leaving the hospital and being pursued by Serena’s younger lover. Through the course of this novel, both mother and daughter learn to understand themselves and each other better—often backed by the sound of the jazz music they both love. Johnson (Vibrant And Clear: How To Be Acne Free, Naturally!, 2012, etc.) writes with sensitivity and a good ear for dialogue. She is both musically and psychologically acute, showing a solid understanding of the subtlety and flamboyance of narcissism. Her view of forgiveness is multilayered, and her characters’ mostly mixed-race status adds an interesting dimension to their experiences, e.g., in several backgrounds, a history of “passing for white.” Serena, so beautiful and talented, is defensive about her skin color: “She wanted…to show them that though she may not have been able to pass, she was beautiful nonetheless.” For Serena, that “nonetheless” means dark skin is something to overcome, not something to appreciate.
Insightful about racial and family relationships and the power to forgive.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940503028
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Nortia Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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