The rest of the book is punctuated by sharp insights and wry observations on the human condition, featuring strong,...
Over several decades, in small towns scattered throughout North Carolina and Tennessee, young and old couples attempt to connect in Earley’s (The Blue Star, 2008, etc.) quirky and penetrating story collection.
In “Haunted Castles of the Barrier Isles,” a long-married couple is bereft when their only child, a college freshman, is less than happy to see them during a surprise birthday visit. With nothing better to do, the couple embarks on a trip to the nearby barrier islands, where they wander into a lackluster beach resort soon to be swallowed up by the encroaching ocean. This desultory vacation is colored by the shock and disappointment of the college visit, and their resulting marital crisis is described with mastery and subtlety. In "Mr. Tall," 16-year-old newlywed Plutina Scroggs sets off in 1932 with her new husband on a seemingly endless rail and mule journey from her hometown to his remote mountain cottage. Earley conveys with genuine humor and insight Plutina’s bewilderment about sex and her initial regrets about the hasty marriage. Plutina later becomes obsessed with her never-glimpsed nearest neighbor, a hermit known as Mr. Tall, during the long weeks she spends alone. These first two stories are the strongest and most memorable of the collection. Additional tales are linked through the use of repeating characters; Plutina reappears as an aging neighbor in “The Cryptozoologist,” in which a new widow becomes infatuated with the yetilike “skunk apes” she glimpses in the woods behind her home. In “Just Married,” a collection of shorter anecdotes, characters appear and cleverly reappear in different phases of their lives with different partners. The only misstep in the book is the novella "Jack and the Mad Dog," a well-crafted but tedious postmodern fable about “THAT Jack, the giant-killer of the stories,” that is out of keeping with the rest of the collection.
The rest of the book is punctuated by sharp insights and wry observations on the human condition, featuring strong, idiosyncratic characters having small epiphanies in their small towns.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-24612-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
PROFILES
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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