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WORDS OF MY ROARING

Name: WORDS OF MY ROARING
Author: Ernest J. Finney
ISBN: 0-517-59107-3

by Ernest J. Finney ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 1993

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A sweeping old-fashioned novel that ambitiously explores an unfamiliar theme—life in wartime California—with sometimes too much corroborative detail. This time out, Finney (Winterchill, 1989; Birds Landing, 1986) describes the effects of war on a small town near San Francisco that becomes home to a naval-training base for Pacific-bound recruits, and a shipyard that attracts families seeking work- -families like the Mitchams, who come all the way from Tennessee to join the rich mix of reluctant recruits, veteran sailors, and teachers from out of state. The story, told in the first person by a rotating succession of characters, covers the war years, with a final fast-forward to 1975 to provide a satisfying wrap-up. At the heart of the novel are Chuck Sweet, a Navy veteran, and Avery Fontana, a young boy, who, like characters in a William Golding novel, act as agents of grace evoking redeeming responses from the rest. Both are haunted by the past: Sweet's Hopi mother committed suicide, and more recently he himself not only survived the attack at Pearl Harbor but came through a further ordeal at sea. Avery, whose father is in prison for a murder that Avery witnessed, lives with an aged cousin. He befriends young Ruthie Mitcham, who will ultimately hold her family together as they survive the father's death, a brother's desertion, and their shipyard-worker mother's depression. Sweet, troubled by memories of his ordeals, fears going back to sea; he also fears falling in love with Avery's teacher, the pretty Elaine, who lives next door to the Mitchams. Lives intersect, and the war is a constant presence as rationing, air raid alarms, and troublemaking recruits dramatically affect life in the town. But happiness wins out—sort of. Finney has the period down pat—but, finally, the story falters amidst all its conflicting if admirable ambitions. Still, a readable tale of life at home during the Big One.

Pub Date: July 2, 1993

ISBN: 0-517-59107-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CALIFORNIA TIME
by Ernest J. Finney

- BOOK REVIEW
FLIGHTS IN THE HEAVENLIES
by Ernest J. Finney

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.