Percy's fifth novel is tightly bound to the theme of his other four: Why is a person nowadays "two percent of himself"? Why are we all so unhappy? And it's most especially and clearly linked to his second (and perhaps best) book, The Last Gentleman. Here, grown older and incomparably richer (having married a cheerful, fat, crippled heiress who died), is again Will Barrett—who's still having spells and blacking out ("petty-mall" attacks, his doctor/golf-partner calls them). But now Will is coming out of those spells into a reality that includes the 30 or 40 million dollars he has; a grown, born-again daughter; and the slowly sharpening, interweaving memory of his father, on a hunting trip with boy Will, trying to kill them both on purpose. Then—to complement Will's abstracted search for what the hell it all comes out to—Percy brings on Allie, a girl in her twenties (who is later revealed as the daughter of Will's old flame from The Last Gentleman, Kitty). Allie, shock-treated and not about to be zapped again, has escaped from a sanitarium and taken shelter in an abandoned North Carolina greenhouse adjacent to Will's property. There's not much that she can remember about the business of the world—how to talk to people, for instance—but she gets along with the help of elemental physics (blocks, hoists, and tackles are needed to fix up the greenhouse) and conundrum-like speech that only Will, when they accidentally meet, seems to understand and appreciate. Two slates, then: one overfilled (Will), one about empty (Allie)—and Percy takes it gleefully from there. As with any Percy novel, the wealths here are almost humbling: the spookily precise descriptions of odd physical sensations; the satire on the complacent and dead modern South; the rage and the Kierkegaardian comic curiosity. ("The present day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an asshole—which is why he is a bigger asshole than the Christian because a crazy asshole is worse than a sane asshole.') True, there are sections in which these not-always-meshing attributes go on too long, saved only by Percy's enormous charm as a stylist; it's a generally slow book, wide-seamed. And the lack of any great advance in characterization does not lend a what-comes-next? anticipation. But this is Percy, our cool Dostoevsky, totally at his leisure (as he wasn't in Lancelot), more personal than ever before (the father-son flashbacks are fine)—and, page for page, there's more acute fiction and better prose here than you're likely to find anywhere else in American writing today.
Pub Date: July 7, 1980
ISBN: 0312243243
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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