With his labored, sometimes overwrought style, second-novelist Lewis (Sister, 1993) gussies up a rather ordinary tale of deception and intrigue: a study in identity that never fully explores the unreliability of its strange narrator. The first-person story is told in the voice of a fortyish woman, originally named Caroline Harrison, who—we find out by the end—is speaking to her teenage daughter, explaining her aimless life of reinvented selves and a crime committed nearly 20 years earlier. As a 27-year-old fleeing a bad marriage in New York City, Caroline literally crashes in Sugartown, Texas, a small, idyllic community where she finds work as an orderly in an old-age home and friendship with a fellow drifter named Bonnie Moore. The novel veers into improbability when the two women get caught up in a Sugartown riot (over police brutality), during which Bonnie dies and Caroline bashes in the skull of a policeman. Assuming Bonnie's identity, Caroline heads back east, eventually ending up in upstate New York, where an old codger from the nursing home has sent her with a mysterious package. In a remote house in the woods, Caroline can't figure out whether she's a prisoner or a guest of the three ex-cons holed up there; nor is she certain what they're doing with the eight-year-old who's living with them. Eventually, the trio lets her in on their scam—they're counterfeiters, not the pornographers she'd suspected. As soon as they finish their work, they head west, where, with a new identity, Caroline gives birth to a daughter fathered by one of the cons—the same daughter to whom she directs this entire narrative, an explanation of their endless moves and of the cops who finally burst through the door. The elements of the thriller—unexpected turns and surprising coincidences—serve to propel a novel that never seems entirely sure of itself. Despite bursts of sharp imagery and startling turns of phrase, Lewis's odd book falls short both as art and mystery.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60109-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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