This tightly focused study of two marriages and its partners’ carefully guarded inner lives is the first full-length novel from the veteran poet and prose writer whose earlier fiction includes several story collections and the novella Tenorman (1995). Huddle tells the tale through the reminiscences of seven different narrators living at various times in a Cleveland suburb: the result is a kind of suburban midwestern, domestic Rashomon whose finest sequences offer disturbingly candid revelations of how even the most intimate and trusting relationships are fraught with misunderstanding and secrecy. Beautiful Marcy Bunkleman, for example, will never confess either to her parents or her husband the affair she conducted, when only 15, with her mother’s 40ish married friend Robert. Neither Marcy’s self-absorbed husband Allen (nicknamed “A.B.C.”) Crandall nor her best friend Uta will reveal that their friendship led them to a single (shabby) sexual episode—nor will Uta’s deferential “house-husband” Jimmy Rago (who’s also Allen’s old college buddy) let on that he’s guessed their secret, or attempt to act on his lifelong love for the amiable though indifferent Marcy. The emotional gyrations these four push themselves (and one another) through are cast into vivid relief in single sequences that are narrated, respectively, by the aging Robert, who even years afterward cannot come to terms with his feelings for Marcy and memories of his “seduction” of her; by Robert’s unhappy wife Suzanne, who understands her wayward husband’s psyche far better than she knows her own; and finally by Marcy’s adult daughter Suellen, whose climactic view of her mother alone (after Allen has left Marcy) hauntingly underscores the several ways these people have isolated, second-guessed, and, ultimately, both served and cheated themselves. An old story (comparisons to Updike and Cheever are inevitable), but Huddle makes it fresh by giving his characters vividly distinctive personalities—and the rueful honesty to see themselves as the flawed people they have somehow become.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-96605-1
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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