The latest volume in Murray's sweet and smooth roman Ö fleuve (Trainwhistle Guitar, 1976; The Spyglass Tree, 1991) takes his boy Scooter into early manhood and up from the South; it's a self- consciously heroic tale of a charmed life, patterned on the ``vamps, choruses, riffs, call and response patterns, breaks, chases, and so on'' of jazz. One needn't rely on Murray's convenient gloss—the simultaneously published The Blue Devils of Nada (see p. TKTK)—to appreciate the rhythms and structures of Scooter's story. Just out of college in the 1920s, bass-playing Scooter (renamed Schoolboy) is invited by the Bossman himself (modelled on Duke Ellington) to join the best roadband in the country. He begins crisscrossing the US not only covering the great historic trails, but also grooving on the ever-expanding world of American culture. In the band are men whose nicknames indicate their characters and resonate with the fullness of domestic life and world myth. Murray's Whitmanesque troop includes Old Pro, a walking embodiment of the canon of musical history, technique, and lore; Osceola Menefee, the all- American mutt from Okefenokee; Malachi Moberly, who could have had a career in baseball; and Mucho Moola, a rich kid from Chicago, trained on the violin but hooked on the trumpet. The Bossman introduces Schoolboy to Daddy Royal, a Harlem king who retired from dancing and who warns about settling for a hustle over hard work and class. Schoolboy, still planning on accumulating enough cushion to go to grad school in the humanities, nevertheless attends to the wisdom of his elders. The Bossman even sets him up, on the sly, with a Scheherazade, Gaynelle Whitlow, who hips him to the truth about Hollywood after Schoolboy's extended personal appearance in the bedroom of Jewel Templeton, a beautiful movie star with a thirst for knowledge as voracious as his own. Murray's quest narrative finds Schoolboy heading back home after all this sophisticated yawping. One only hopes this Proustian stomp ain't over yet.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43986-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
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