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THE POSER

Name: THE POSER
Author: Jacob Rubin
ISBN: 978-0-670-01676-1

by Jacob Rubin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2015

A strong debut that remains steadily written, even as it drifts away from its best material.

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Rubin’s debut novel tells an imaginative story of American emptiness.

Encouraged by his mother, Giovanni Bernini has nursed his gift of imitation since childhood, practicing on friends and teachers, always performing flawless facsimiles of those around him. Finally pushed into the spotlight by a talent agent named Max, Giovanni becomes, pardon the cliché, the toast of the town, and one imagines an old-timey montage from a 1940s movie: newspaper headlines twirling, champagne corks popping, and hammy impresarios introducing the great impressionist upon stage after stage. This old-fashioned, show-biz quality is one of the more appealing aspects of Rubin’s novel—there’s even a love interest named Lucy Starlight (a singer, of course) and a villainous theater owner named Bernard Apache. But Giovanni is the center, and he’s a complicated figure: a man who, in his attempt to perfectly mimic the characteristics of others, ultimately realizes he has no characteristics of his own. Rubin excels at detailing the specifics of impersonation, as when Giovanni breaks down what different gestures mean—“nodding while breathing out your nose (to express amused agreement), raising your eyebrows while suppressing a smile (mild scandal), or shaking your head while breathing in through the mouth (sympathy)”—or when he discusses “the thread,” the aspect of personality that everybody has and on which a great impressionist pulls to begin unraveling the subject (“the thread” is a masterful governing metaphor). As Giovanni drifts from New York into Hollywood, then into politics, then into therapy, the novel starts to feel diffuse, as though Rubin wants to do too much. It doesn't help that, as an occasional screenwriter, Rubin tends to sketch his scenes sparsely—mostly dialogue and gesture—as though awaiting a director to fill in the rest.

A strong debut that remains steadily written, even as it drifts away from its best material.

Pub Date: March 17, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-670-01676-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Jacob Rubin

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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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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

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An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.