Ambitious, unpretentious, yet not memorable. There’s just too much here, and Jackson’s only-serviceable prose isn’t up to...
A young woman flees the rural South in a kind of literary Guernica for American life in the ’60s.
The smart kids know enough to flee dying Wattles, Tennessee, observes Dahlia Jean Coker, a 16-year-old coming of age there. Wise Dahlia gets away after a botched robbery at the diner where she works. She latches on to the money the robbers wanted, then teams up with one of the two thieves—young, darkly handsome Cole—who readily splits from domineering ex-con Twitch, the mastermind of the hit. Dahlia and Cole light out in a pink Cadillac, and Dahlia’s initial impression that the car might belong to Elvis serves as the first hint that Jackson (Leavenworth Train, 2001, etc.), a five-time Pulitzer nominee, is working symbolic terrain. Dahlia and Cole will be compared to Bonnie and Clyde, the Younger gang will be invoked as Twitch’s ancestors, and a flood of near-biblical scale will engulf Dahlia and Cole and their pursuers, Twitch and Dahlia’s mother Burma. The observant Dahlia underlines the import of this apocalyptic event, wondering if they’re all part of “a doomed race of Huck Finns goin’ nowhere but crazy . . . .” To Jackson’s credit, he keeps his narrative focused on Twitch and Burma’s hunt for Dahlia and Cole despite a slew of offbeat characters (snake handlers, Freedom Riders, Klansmen, even a refugee from Castro’s Cuba) who fade in and out during the picaresque journey. Can love survive such a world? Twitch suggests that it can’t: “ ‘This ain’t love. It’s fuckin’,’” he tells Burma when they hook up. Dahlia and Cole, doing “better things” by piloting the refugee on a boat to Cuba, suggest that it can.
Ambitious, unpretentious, yet not memorable. There’s just too much here, and Jackson’s only-serviceable prose isn’t up to the epic scale of the work.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1284-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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