An ambitious novel that effectively braids corporate greed, outdoorsy grit, and human connection.
An abandoned Borscht Belt resort becomes an unlikely flashpoint in a tale of big business and PTSD.
Nicorvo’s lively, if at times overly busy, debut novel is an ensemble affair involving a land battle for the Standard Grande, a one-time Catskills getaway that Milton, a Vietnam vet, has turned into an alpaca farm/halfway house for vets with PTSD. That sounds like a good hiding place for Bellum, an Army deserter who can’t stomach leaving for her third deployment to Afghanistan. But Milton has debts and late-stage cancer, and a conglomerate called IRJ, Inc. is pondering a takeover of the land for fracking purposes. A pair of informal spies are conducting advance surveillance: Evangelína, a spitfire health nut and family friend of IRJ’s COO, and Ray, an Iraq vet who’s split with Milton but lives in a yurt near the camp. It takes a while for Nicorvo to get all these chess pieces in their appropriate positions, and he’s prone to overlong descriptions and gassy exchanges of military tough talk. But by midpoint, after a key character is mauled by a cougar near the Grande, the novel finds a solid groove, becoming a seamless blend of road-trip saga, love story, and critique of military contractors. Bellum is the best-drawn of the cast of characters, from her PTSD issues to her estranged, pill-slinging husband to her struggle to find solid footing as a deserter. (The novel suggests that those who turn themselves in are forgiven with relative speed.) As such, for all its convolutions, the novel is thematically a straightforward tale about finding a home: “Maybe the place to begin was to make one supportive relationship and go gradually upward and outward from there,” Bellum thinks, but Nicorvo smartly renders the legal, corporate, and military forces that can stand in the way of so simple a goal.
An ambitious novel that effectively braids corporate greed, outdoorsy grit, and human connection.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10894-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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