This material does not do justice to Schutt’s sharp-edged vision of contemporary mores.
This third novel from Schutt (All Souls, 2008, etc.) is the desultory story of an unhappy marriage.
Ned and Isabel met in graduate school at Columbia. Pretty Isabel was smitten by the equally pretty Ned. Even then, Isabel had migraines caused by “sloth, envy, anger, uncertainty.” Both wanted to be writers; Ned had the ambition. After attending Ned’s cancer-stricken mother in California, they married in Vegas. We first meet them in London a year later, living frugally off Ned’s fellowship. Schutt is known for her elliptical style. What we gather through the ellipses about their sex life does not bode well: He’s importunate, she’s withholding. Isabel finds out she’s pregnant and decides on an abortion; she wants a career before motherhood. Ned attaches them to a rich, obnoxious banker (Schutt fixes him with a beady eye), and they vacation in Rome on his dime. Back stateside, Ned reconnects with Phoebe, an old flame. She’s newly married, but so what? Cheating is part of the fun. Isabel does it with Clive, an elderly, rich, married painter. Such a shame that the old boy is “practiced in taking advantage of the stunned or wounded.” He invites her up to Maine for some modeling. Isabel brings the uninvited Ned; if he drops Phoebe, she’ll stop servicing Clive. Her plan doesn’t work, though she cries and cries at a B&B on the way. (Its ancient owners, who bookend the novel, have an old-school marriage, loving and loyal.) This is where the younger couple’s marriage essentially ends, though the reader must piece together the details; this is surely one ellipsis too many. Perhaps tiring of mopey Isabel and vapid Ned, Schutt shifts attention to Clive. There’s not much drama there either.
This material does not do justice to Schutt’s sharp-edged vision of contemporary mores.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2038-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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