A riveting novel in which the deceptively clear narrative voice offers no easy answers.
In British writer McKinlay’s fiction debut, a carefully modulated morality play, a middle-aged woman who knows she is dying struggles with a basic dilemma—“whether a good deed cancels a bad one, whether evil is undone by penance.”
Married for over 20 years, Frances and Phillip live in rural England, where Frances has devoted herself to raising Phillip’s now-25-year-old daughter Chloe, whose birth mother abandoned her, as her own. At 45, Frances is diagnosed with a fatal tumor, and Phillip drops his life in London to stay at home and care for her. But Frances has recently discovered a letter that links him romantically with a younger woman named Josee, the London-based editor of his books on marketing. Without confronting Phillip, Frances follows him into the city and witnesses what is obviously a farewell meeting. Over the next months, as she watches Phillip’s behavior, she reflects back on her own behavior as a footloose 22-year-old in Mexico and feels compelled to record in writing her involvement with a group of wealthy Americans whose selfish hedonism bring to mind The Great Gatsby: The three couples—Patsy and Richard, Bee Bee and Ned, Sally and Mason—seem interchangeable when they first meet Frances at a bar and invite her to come stay with them at the lavish estate where they are spending the summer. But soon Frankie, as they call her, begins a passionate affair with Mason. She considers Sally the villain and chooses to ignore that Mason and Patsy are also lovers, until it is too late. Guilt over her own culpability in the affair, and in its aftermath, pervades Frances’ last days, during which she recognizes Phillip’s loyalty and love along with his betrayal. As the novel glides fluently between Frances’ reactions as an obsessively thoughtful dying married woman and Frankie’s as a callow girl whose selfish desire for Mason trumped all other reactions, an uneasy sense of ethical murkiness grows.
A riveting novel in which the deceptively clear narrative voice offers no easy answers.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-871-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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