Highly personal yet socio-politically acute: a debut collection that cuts to the bone of human experience and packs a...
Race is less subject than context in these eight finely crafted tales, all consistently challenging readers’ basic assumptions.
Like many of Packer’s characters, Dina, in the title story (previously published in the New Yorker’s Debut Fiction issue in summer 2000), is a studious loner whose disdain toward her fellow students, black and white, covers years of angry hurt. The Yale freshman begins a friendship with a white girl but can’t follow through. Dina appears again in “Geese,” living in Japan with a multinational group of down-and-outers and discovering how far down she’ll go to survive. These are not cheerful tales. In the marvelous opener, “Brownies,” a Brownie troop plots to beat up a white troop at their camp over a suspected racial offense; but the white girls turn out to be retarded innocents. Packer frequently uses the black church as background; in “Every Tongue Shall Confess,” religious and romantic longings get tangled together for a lonely, devout nurse. Tia, in “Speaking in Tongues,” runs away from her aunt’s devout but stable home to find her crack addict mother in Atlanta. In “Our Lady of Peace,” an educated young woman leaves her mostly white hometown in Kentucky to become a high-school teacher in Baltimore, where she’s defeated by her unreachable students and her own naiveté. “The Ant of the Self” offers the collection’s only male protagonist, a studious high-school debater in Louisville who finds himself driving his dead-beat dad to the Million Man March, where his father, ignoring the spirit of the event, abandons him. The last story, set in 1961, deals directly with race as the subject. The eponymous heroine of “Doris Is Coming” tries to understand the Civil Rights Movement within the framework of her small but complex world. When she enacts a one-person sit-in at a local lunch counter, the waitress says she can’t officially serve her but offers Doris her own unfinished milk shake instead.
Highly personal yet socio-politically acute: a debut collection that cuts to the bone of human experience and packs a lasting wallop.Pub Date: March 10, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-234-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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