A stylist whose fictional expansiveness underscores his singularity.
Shepard's fifth story collection—his first book since his well-received novel, The Book of Aron (2015), which was a Kirkus Prize finalist—demonstrates why he's a writer who defies categorization.
An extended bibliography shows just how meticulous Shepard's research is, as usual. There’s nothing confessional in his work, no possibility of confusing the author with his protagonists, who include a frontier housewife in a loveless marriage (the title story), a French balloonist in the 18th century who is as impractical as he is imaginative (“The Ocean of Air”), and a British submariner in World War II “immersed in a haze of inertia” (“Telemachus”). Some of his stories take the form of diaries, and he writes in the language and cadence of the period, suggesting an occasional stylistic affinity with Conrad and Melville. Yet these aren’t historical fictions or period pieces but meditations on the past as prologue, on seeing the world to come (as the title has it) in the world that has been. This world is one in which impersonal bureaucracy trumps individual initiative at every turn, whether Shepard is writing about the seemingly predestined collapse of an Air Force information tower (“Safety Tips for Living Alone”), illuminating “the state of most of our railway infrastructure, which on a good day can look like the shittiest Third World footings and tracks on a bad day” (“Positive Train Control,” which has pages that read like investigative journalism), or a doomed 19th-century seafaring exploration ("HMS Terror"). In addition to institutional forces, fate and nature make humanity seem very small in these stories; so many of their protagonists are somehow feckless and hapless as they try to find some semblance of a lifeline in the most tenuous connections, in what the final story terms, with a tinge of irony, “the silver lining of their intimacy.”
A stylist whose fictional expansiveness underscores his singularity.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-524-73180-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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