An unlikely take on the buddy story, this book offers a conventional plot but strong, nuanced characters.
A debut novel follows two young Mormon missionaries in the late 1970s.
When the reader first meets narrator Kenny Feller, he is 20 months into his two-year commitment of finding converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Proceeding with his project in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, Feller is largely unsuccessful. As he explains, “In my entire twenty months sharing the gospel, my companions and I had shepherded a total of two seekers into the waters of baptism. Two.” In August 1979 he is teamed up with a new partner, Jared Baserman from Idaho. Wisecracking (“You never knew, with Jared, if you were walking, unwittingly, into a punch line”) and flippant, Jared boasts a well-meaning but financially inept father and a marijuana-loving sister. Sent on his mission as a way to redeem his family, Jared is hardly the squeaky-clean figure one might expect from a proselytizing Mormon. Forming a friendship, Kenny and Jared face a world that often displays hostility to their church and challenges their personal beliefs. Detailing the aspects of the seemingly impossible missionary process (such as encouraging potential converts to “read the Book of Mormon—all of it, preferably, or at least some of its choicest selections—and then ask Heavenly Father to convey to them a testimony of its truthfulness”), the book provides a wealth of information on problems common in the field. Persuading strangers to take up a religion is certainly no easy task and the narrative effectively treats its protagonists as multifaceted characters. Exploring thornier issues of Mormon Church beliefs, like the rule that black men could not hold the priesthood until 1978, the story remains investigative without being overly facetious. But descriptions can prove less than illuminating, such as when a character looks at Jared “with his eyes bugging out of his head.” But on the whole, the plot moves quickly despite such distractions. While the book’s conclusion, particularly as Jared becomes ever stranger, seems self-evident, the tale’s excitement comes in the characters and their struggles along the way.
An unlikely take on the buddy story, this book offers a conventional plot but strong, nuanced characters.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5188-8109-1
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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