A witty, warm and wise look at the human condition in the digital age.
Goodman (Intuition, 2006, etc.) shows two sisters grappling with romantic, professional and moral quandaries at the height of the dotcom boom.
In the fall of 1999, Emily and Jess meet in Berkeley to celebrate Jess’s 23rd birthday—belatedly, because 28-year-old Emily is ten days away from the IPO of her data-storage company. Flaky philosophy grad student Jess is more interested in the sexy leader of Save the Trees than in buying shares of stock whose price, her sister assures her, “will go through the roof.” Across the continent in Cambridge, Mass., Emily’s boyfriend Jonathan, whose own startup encrypts web transactions, is confident that “we’re all going to be gazillionaires.” George is already rich, a “Microsoft millionaire” who used his fat dividends to launch Yorick’s Used and Rare Books, where Jess works part-time; he uneasily but longingly eyes his young employee, whose idealism challenges his middle-aged cynicism. Emily, though more practical than her sister, is also an idealist, horrified when one of her partners turns a data-monitoring program into an electronic surveillance system. When she makes the mistake of telling Jonathan about it, however, he’s not so scrupulous. Meanwhile, Jess helps George snag an astonishing collection of rare cookbooks, and dotcom stocks soar, then plummet as the bubble bursts in 2001. The formidably skilled and intelligent Goodman juggles multiple points of view to chronicle her characters’ intricate maneuvers for advantage and satisfaction; she even throws a pair of Bialystoker rabbis and some long-lost relations of Jess and Emily into the bustling plot. Frequently laugh-out-loud funny but always fundamentally serious, the novel takes a clear-eyed look at the competitive instinct and the profit motive as they clash with our equally strong need for love and connection. In the wake of 9/11 (whose aftermath is depicted with refreshing astringency), a wedding affirms the presence of joy without denying the reality of loss: “They held each other, although nothing stayed.”
A witty, warm and wise look at the human condition in the digital age.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-34085-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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