Thoughtful, amusing tale-spinning with, one imagines, serious film potential.
Whitehead, author of the acclaimed Intuitionist (1998), returns with a hilarious, heart-tugging take on the evolution of the American folk hero John Henry—and on the theme of inevitability, or the power of fate.
African-American J. Sutter is a “junketeer,” a freelance journalist who specializes in covering publicity events. Along with his junketeer colleagues, J. excels at finagling his expense account and mooching in general as a way of life. But lately another goal drives him. It’s his quest to beat the junketeer record of nonstop event coverage set by the legendary Bobby Figgis, an aim that has led him into the John Henry Days Festival assignment. The manic, jaded lives of the junketeers form the main line of Whitehead’s busy story—and then there’s a surreal tale told by a junketeer about the murder of the black man by Hell’s Angels at the Stones’s Altamont concert, a tale that just pops up out of nowhere, real Tarantino-like and fateful. But in the tradition of fiction like Doctorow’s Ragtime, Whitehead follows many narrative strings and colorful folk from different eras to explore his theme. Some of those characters come together at the festival in Talcott, West Virginia, a town outside of the Big Bend Tunnel where John Henry supposedly met his Waterloo in his race against the steam drill. Of them all, J.’s path will cross most dramatically with those of Pamela Street, a young black woman who has come to Talcott to meet with the prospective buyer of her dead father’s extensive, obsessively acquired John Henry memorabilia collection; and of Alphonse Miggs, a collector of commemorative stamps who saved J.’s life in an outrageous prime-rib choking incident. Further still, Whitehead spins off riveting stories about John Henry himself, the scholars who traced his legend, and the singers and peddlers who popularized the John Henry ballad.
Thoughtful, amusing tale-spinning with, one imagines, serious film potential.Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49819-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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