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LOVE IN THE RUINS

Name: LOVE IN THE RUINS
Author: Walker Percy
ISBN: 0312243111

by Walker Percy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 1971

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A fanciful, suggestible, strafingly comic view of man and all his manifestations at a future point in time when "Death is winning. Life is losing." And in terms of most readers, a more palpable and accessible book than The Moviegoer or The Last Gentleman. What will be happening — what won't — in an America divided is seen from Mr. Percy's native Louisiana and more particularly a Howard Johnson's at the "southwest cusp of the interstate cloverleaf." On the one hand you have the liberals and Knotheads (the old Republican Party although very little is coming out of the "Tel-a-Viv Hilton on Pennsylvania Avenue") and on the other the divers miscreants who live in the swampy outback — black guerrillas, drugheads, Ku Kluxers, dropouts, communists, etc. All have dreadful physical complaints, suppurating from the soul and running in particular to and from the bowels — "the real enemy is within, don't you think?" Tom More, our Bad Catholic, also a genius and a widower and a cuckold and a psychiatrist has, like his colleagues, "a few problems of (his) own, little rancors and terrors and such." He is holed up at the Howard Johnson's with three women who love him too much, two more than he can handle. In fact Tom has been institutionalized; he also has invented a Lapsometer which can diagnose and treat the "perturbations" of the soul and he is seeking official funding for it before the melee which takes place on a not so glorious Fourth of July. At the close, Tom is seen cultivating his garden of collards in a slave quarters but like his famous ancestor he has learned that "All any man needs is time and desire and the sense of his own sovereignty. As Kingfish Huey Long used to say: every man a king." As will have been apparent, it is impossible to indicate the range of Walker Percy's septic but indulgently appealing satire with its fallout of ideas and phenomena and magnificently funny moments. It is to be read — and best read more than once.

Pub Date: May 17, 1971

ISBN: 0312243111

Page Count: 418

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1971

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND
by Walker Percy

- BOOK REVIEW
THE THANATOS SYNDROME
by Walker Percy

- BOOK REVIEW
LOST IN THE COSMOS
by Walker Percy

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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.