The pages turn at such a blistering pace that readers will happily overlook the improbable plot.
A Hollywood writer, not content with adequate wealth, aims for filthy lucre with disastrous results.
The golden door has finally opened for David Armitage, Hollywood scribe. After years of struggling as a unproduced playwright and low-paid bookseller (while his actress wife Lucy worked as a telemarketer to support him and their child, Caitlin), David’s sitcom pilot, Selling You (think Mad Men as half-hour comedy), has been sold to Fox by his doggedly persistent agent, Alison. All of a sudden he’s a hot commodity with a hit series. Movie deals come out of the woodwork, as does money—soon David has a potty-mouthed but shrewd broker earning him pre-crash returns (this novel was originally published in 2006), and a Fox executive, Sally, showing more than professional interest. Besotted not only with Sally but with the Hollywood clout she represents, David leaves Lucy, gladly agreeing to hefty alimony and child support payments. Out of the blue, reclusive billionaire Philip Fleck invites David to his private island near Antigua to discuss making (and paying vast sums for) one of David’s unproduced screenplays. While lolling on the island in luxury undreamt of by mere rich writers, David is distracted from wondering why his host has gone marlin-fishing by Fleck’s wife Martha, who plies him with Stalin-era Stoly and almost seduces him. Fleck, seemingly oblivious to any hank-panky, finally appears to green-light the picture. To cement David’s good fortune, the Emmy gods smile on Selling You. Then it all heads south. And that’s when the real drama begins.
The pages turn at such a blistering pace that readers will happily overlook the improbable plot.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0210-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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