Elegant, enigmatic, and haunting.
A mass high school shooting prompts a reckoning for a controversial talk show host and those around him in duBois’ (Cartwheel, 2013, etc.) third novel.
“He was Matthew Miller then,” remembers a man named Semi, the host's lover in the 1970s, who knew him as an idealistic lawyer and then a candidate for mayor of New York. But in 1993, when The Mattie M Show publicist Cel is struggling to defuse reports that two high school boys who gunned down multiple classmates watched his show regularly, Mattie presides over a TV carnival of people confessing to “vices and depravities the average viewer didn’t even know existed.” The show’s evolution from a substantive public affairs program to a wildly popular venue for “rubbernecking and mayhem” is more explicable than Mattie himself, an empathetic interlocutor of the damaged and deranged on camera but a mystery to his staff off the air. Semi’s recollections of their affair and break-up intertwine with Cel’s story to create an atmospheric chronicle of New York’s bohemian gay subculture in the freewheeling 1970s, a keening depiction of the AIDS-stricken '80s, and a poignant portrait of Cel, who got out of the rural working class via Smith but still lacks the self-confidence to claim—or even know—what she really wants. Mattie remains remote and enigmatic, even in his final encounters with Semi, which move him toward a fateful change of direction without readers ever really understanding him. This is not a fault but simply a given of duBois’ accomplished narrative, which ranges widely to investigate contemporary culture through the complicated human beings who inhabit it: Cel’s party-girl roommate and a judgmental pal from Smith, a predatory journalist, the TV show’s seen-it-all producer, and one of the shooters (via a scarily thoughtful letter to Mattie) are among the other characters sketched with acuity and perception. The ending respects Matte’s opacity but allows him to make some kind of amends to Semi, while Cel gets the fresh start she deserves.
Elegant, enigmatic, and haunting.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9588-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
PROFILES
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
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
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