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THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN

Name: THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN
Author: Joseph M. Schuster
ISBN: 978-0-345-53026-4

by Joseph M. Schuster ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2012

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An engrossing yarn about a man and his love of baseball.

Edward Everett Yates shows promise as a young ballplayer in the minor leagues. But can he make it to the Major Leagues? Perhaps talent is just one of the factors, although “Edward Everett” might make a marginal big leaguer at best. One day he gets to play for the Saint Louis Cardinals in a rain-soaked game. He’s having a good day until he leaps for a fly ball and changes the direction of his life in an instant. Face it, he is never going to be a Babe Ruth, but God knows he loves the game. For other young men, baseball is a phase of life, a skin they shed before going on to lives as truck drivers, salesmen or lawyers. But Edward Everett can never seem to leave the game for long, and after a brief stint as a flour salesman, he becomes manager of a single-A ball club. He is decent toward women, but his constant travel and assorted shortcomings make stable relationships tough. Nothing about his life’s arc screams “superstar,” but he is a usually considerate man whose character shows through in tough situations, like the suicide of one of his players. Throughout the novel, he tentatively tries to learn about a child—does he have a son?—who stays just barely out of his reach. Schuster paints in vivid detail the crappy ballparks and sometimes desperate wannabes who cannot admit that they should just move on from baseball. This is a terrific story that goes beyond the sport and deals with promise and aspirations, dreams and disappointments. No little boy would fantasize about being the next Edward Everett Yates, but readers will root for him. Like so many of us, he is an ordinary, flawed human being whose life is full of might-have-beens.

Pub Date: March 20, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-345-53026-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.