LAND OF THE FREE

Name: LAND OF THE FREE
Author: Woodrow Landfair
ISBN: 978-1940500355

by Woodrow Landfair ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2014

An uneven road-trip tale that attempts to take readers straight to the heart of America.

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In this debut novel, a lost man finds that the best way to get to the facts is through fiction.

Following college, Landfair’s unnamed narrator buys a motorcycle that he doesn’t quite know how to ride. He resolves to find himself by exploring his native land and learning about its character. However, neither his years as a benchwarmer for his college baseball team nor his ROTC training adequately prepare him for the harsh realities of life on the road. There are bitter winters to contend with, highway robberies, homelessness and all manner of other hardships. The protagonist’s impetus for his journey seems to stem from unfulfilled dreams of glory, and not from a deep-rooted desire to better understand the U.S. of A. Yet he rarely reexamines his quest, even when adversities mount. Although others might have turned back and sought comfort with friends and family, he presses on, eager for the next adventure. Along the way, he picks up odd jobs—as everything from a community organizer to a building superintendent—to pay his way. But his real payment comes in the form of stories that people tell him. When he crosses paths with Sam, a carnival operator and consummate showman, he begins to nurture his own knack for storytelling. Suddenly, the yarns he spins help him find his way into the good graces of those he meets during his travels. He learns to adapt his own experiences and those of others into larger-than-life legends, and before long, he’s selling out venues as a bona fide American hero—a Daniel Boone, of sorts. Throughout, Landfair’s evocative prose places the reader on the seemingly endless highways and byways of our expansive country (“Cars sped past on either side—blurs of headlights and turn signals”). However, for all of its focus on trying to understand the American spirit, the novel fails to divulge very much information about its main character. Readers know that he’s on a quest, but it remains unclear what his real motivations are. Although readers spend a lot of time with him, they’re always riding shotgun, never really getting a peek below the surface. Intriguingly, the story’s trajectory is eastward, reversing the usual trend for this type of road story, but in the end, its resolution is no surprise.

An uneven road-trip tale that attempts to take readers straight to the heart of America.

Pub Date: June 10, 2014

ISBN: 978-1940500355

Page Count: 204

Publisher: Harbinger Book Group

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.