Wry details and witty, dead-on dialogue charged with biblical echoes give Watt (Haley, Texas 1959, 1999, etc.) real class.
East Texas novel built on the Cain-and-Abel story.
Ray Reynolds lost his bank job and just missed jail when a grand jury found that his best buddy’s loans and real-estate appraisals were shot full of more holes than a SLOW sign on a country road. His wife Sheila dumped him, picked up their twins, Larry and Garry, and set off for her well-to-do daddy’s ranch in West Texas, while Reynolds took what cash was left and bought a liquor store in East Texas. Now, life drifts by on Clear Creek Lake and, in his mid-40s, Reynolds gets half past mellow on bourbon and dances alone after closing hour. His latest live-in woman is Joy, a waitress at the Next to Nowhere Cafe, half his age and hot to leave his trailer out back of the store—and his bottomless supply of booze. Reynolds’s far-right brother Perry, an ex-Marine, former football star, and flake, teaches history at Cottonwood High School and has been warned to desist from feeding his students his kooky antigovernment line. Perry is deep into the sale of black-market automatic weapons to nuts who are preparing for the inevitable overthrow of the US government, and he sells the guns by dark of night right off Reynolds’s boat ramp. In their family, Perry is the beloved son, Reynolds the outcast, while their dad, Ray Senior, a retired Ford pickup dealer (his yellow-gray hair is “the color of foam that floats to the top when you boil a chicken”), leaves their daft mother Edwina to thump her Bible while he tries to invent a perpetual motion machine. Edwina’s death from exposure after she snaps her hip (Reynolds is too drunk to hear her cries) draws the brothers into a showdown at Perry’s safehouse of ammo and weapons.
Wry details and witty, dead-on dialogue charged with biblical echoes give Watt (Haley, Texas 1959, 1999, etc.) real class.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87565-265-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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