Without sermonizing, but with warmth and wit—this is in large measure a funny book—McCown’s second (after The Member-Guest,...
In an ordinary small southern town, a war’s being waged—one that this amusing, sharp-eyed little novel makes extraordinarily vivid.
Nolan Vann knows just about everybody in Lincoln, Tennessee, and just about everybody knows him. They know that his mom killed herself. They know that his dad was a war hero and that his wife Laney was a cheerleader. They know she’s having an affair with Steve Pitts, who went to high school with both, and who might or might not be the father of Laney’s unborn child. They know Nolan’s not selling life insurance any more because Jimmy, his dad, who owns the business, fired him for ineptitude. So they’re guessing that Nolan’s life is falling apart and that he has no idea what to do about it. They’re right about much of that, but what they can’t guess—he’s so good at camouflaging the effort—is how hard he’s battling to find his way. Nolan himself sees negligible progress. And then through a series of tiny victories, some minor enough to be confused with defeats, Nolan begins to understand the redemptive power of certain time-honored ideas. Like accepting responsibility, for instance, or making hard choices, or taking risks for the sake of someone you love. A wise old friend, a survivor of WWI, tells him that “ditch panic” is what happens when a person goes a bit crazy from trench warfare. Or from getting clobbered by life’s slings and arrows, all those nonstop “miseries” the human condition is heir to. That’s what he’s had—a case of ditch panic—Nolan recognizes, after he’s finally figured out how to quell it.
Without sermonizing, but with warmth and wit—this is in large measure a funny book—McCown’s second (after The Member-Guest, 1995) restores some shine to “family values.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55597-312-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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