Unconventionally structured novel of identity and relationship permutation: narrator John appears in alternate realities that usually involve paternal brutality and a gay lover named Martin—in a promising if somewhat insubstantial debut for a 24-year-old stylist. John and his guilt-ridden, closeted drag-queen father move to Kansas after leaving mother/wife Bea to die of a degenerative disease. No: John, Bea, and father Henry live together on the prairie; John discovers a boy named Martin in the barn. No: John is raped by stepfather Martin after his father's death. John has a stepmother named Bea. He and Martin fall in love and live in Kansas working nightshifts, dreaming of New York. Martin is an independently wealthy New Yorker who showers John with gifts. Henry is the stranger who tortures John throughout a long sadomasochistic weekend, blowing his mind clear of Martin's death from AIDS. A scar around the left eye, a hand crippled from abuse, a woman named Susan reappear. ``John'' also designates the older men the narrator sometimes hustles: ``a name that remains unconnected to any identity no matter how many times it is assumed.'' Susan eventually ruptures what illusion remains, calling John by the author's name, ``Dale.'' Later, the authorial voice explains that ``Each fiction is always opposed to some truth....Soon the stories I imagined were as horrible as the one I lived.'' The multiplicity and truncation here eventually feel like a game instead of painful obsession or real probing into the imaginative life. Despite powerful, sometimes tender moments, then: ultimately more writing exercise than existential exploration.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-20311-3
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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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