Lively but broad and overcaffeinated.
Di Prisco's latest is part Mafia thriller, part comic farce, part lament about the anguish of dementia—and all hyperkinetic.
Mikey Festagiacamo is a second-generation mob boss who should, at 57, be in his prime. But as the novel opens, he's suffering ever more frequent memory lapses that seem to presage the same slow, fatal progress his father experienced with dementia—the Alzhammer, in Mikey's lingo—and this is intolerable. Just as Mikey's pondering suicide, a new and mysterious outfit starts trying to kill him, and having his ticket punched by someone else is an indignity not to be suffered. Enter Zayana, Mikey's ex, who's been romantically involved with a sinister U.S. senator and whose attempts to disentangle herself (and get a bit of payola on the way out) seem to have precipitated the crisis. Mikey hands the reins of the family business to his sister, an ex-academic who turns out to be ideally suited to the role of Don Rosey, and he and Zayana (pretending to be Christian Scientists) hide out in an unlicensed nursing home near Las Vegas, where Mikey befriends a transgender nurse named Carololina and acquires a sex-starved septuagenarian sidekick named Hercules. After a whorehouse-and-casino van trip Mikey leads goes first bad and then, thanks to security videotape, viral, one of Mikey's old gunsels and the senator's chief enforcer show up for a final confrontation in the "Goners' Ward." The novel is fast-paced and often charming, especially in the nursing-home scenes, but its attitude toward subtlety isn't so much to eschew it as (this happens to a would-be assassin in the novel) to run it over with a Ferrari and then bring in a milk truck to mangle the corpse and drag it several miles.
Lively but broad and overcaffeinated.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942600-43-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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