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SHARK

Name: SHARK
Author: Will Self
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2310-7

by Will Self ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 2014

Puzzling and ponderous but never predictable—very much in line with Self’s trajectory thus far, in other words.

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A hallucinatory, maddening, difficult novel by the shape-shifting Self (Umbrella, 2013, etc.), who dons his best Pynchon-esque finery.

It’s not a screaming that comes across the sky, not exactly, but instead a chunking guitar that herald’s Self’s opening: “owowwow-owww! the clawed chord howls in the hallway and tears up the stairs.” It’s the tail end of the 1960s, the day four kids are being shot down in Ohio, and over in tony London, a psychiatrist, for reasons that are not entirely clear, decides to test the therapeutic possibilities of lysergic acid on his own bad self. Time slips away, and so do the niceties of syntax, until some hundreds of pages later he begins to latch hold of his trip: “Lost in the curdled depths of the Labrador’s mild-brown eyes, Zack isn’t shocked by this hallucination, instead rather admires the dog’s American accent.” But more is afoot than just a lava-lamp swirl: During the proceedings, truths are unfolding about the century past in the jagged confessions of two haunted residents, one a survivor of the shark-doomed Indianapolis, which before sinking had carried the atomic bomb across the Pacific to the waiting Enola Gay, the other a witness to the obliteration of Hiroshima. The clash of “disabled ex-servicemen” and “bloody hippies” is obvious, as is the presence, perhaps real and perhaps imagined, of a malevolent German (“[v]ery gutt patientz, the Kraut soothes, ve-ery nize patientz”), but the whole enterprise collapses in a meltdown of ellipses and em dashes until we’re not quite sure where we are in the proceedings. Self’s presentation is too clever by half, and though undeniably artful, it’s a chore for readers: The book seems destined for cult status, to be sure, but it’s hard to imagine even the most die-hard of Gravity’s Rainbow fans warming up to this one.

Puzzling and ponderous but never predictable—very much in line with Self’s trajectory thus far, in other words.

Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2310-7

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ELAINE
by Will Self

- BOOK REVIEW
WHY READ
by Will Self

- BOOK REVIEW
WILL
by Will Self

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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.