In her early fiction, Oates often displayed a sharp talent for the texture and rhythm of psychological obsession—but this study of the feverish friendship between two women is unconvincing, thin and artificial, from start to finish. The novel is presented from the viewpoint of Monica Jensen, a 30-ish, fair, rather repressed sort who takes a teaching job at a private boys' school in rural Pennsylvania—largely in order to recover from her recent bad-marriage, which has left physical scars (an abortion, a small facial scar from a fight) as well as emotional ones. But soon Monica meets her temperamental opposite: dark, artistic, sensual, hedonistic Sheila Trask, 42—a semi-famous painter, widow of a famous sculptor, a local landowner. And immediately Monica feels,"the tug of a powerful attraction," elated when Sheila seems to take an interest in her: "Monica knew secretly that her capacity for love—for love and what is meant by 'passion'—was deficient set beside Sheila Trask's". . . while Sheila seems equally awed by Monica's good-natured, competent, "blond optimism." The women begin talking together regularly; Monica dotes on Sheila's visits, gawks over Sheila's artistic talent; she even tags along when Sheila dons working-class disguise to engage in bar-and-grill flirtations with truckers. (The novel catches fire briefly here.) The friendship quickly sours, however—as the other side of Sheila's artistic soul emerges: combative, insecure, alcoholic, suicidal. Monica breaks away, reenters the safe, superficial world she lived in before. But something is missing—and when a needy Sheila makes a bid to rekindle the relationship, Monica eagerly agrees, but on new terms. "Now she would be cautious—she would be in control," as Monica becomes Sheila's indispensable confidant/helpmeet and the friendship edges toward open eroticism. . . but then plunges Monica into a nightmare of rape, illness, and self-exposure. Neither of the women here is credibly drawn; nor are they persuasive as polar "types." And Oates' prose belabors each point repetitiously—making this often read like a heavily padded short story. Mildly intriguing at the start, then increasingly murky and tiresome.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1984
ISBN: 0865381003
Page Count: 223
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1984
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary...
A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of “flaming youth” in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami’s most appealing—if uncharacteristic—books.
Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe’s insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru’s narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing “campus riots,” focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness (“It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself”), continues to tug away at Toru’s emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents’ painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating—though never actually experiencing—sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru’s hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa (“a secret reader of classic novels,” and a compulsive seducer); Naoko’s roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles’ songs as the one that provides Murakami’s evocative title) who’s perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru’s boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There’s a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald’s and Hesse’s) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that’s nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos.
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction’s most energetic and impressive bodies of work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70402-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
........ is a disquieting examination of a central, contemporary issue, and substitutes political conscience for the spiritual concern of Greene's recent vela but the battleground is still a highly personal terrain- and an individual is the chief casualty. Tom Fowler tells the story, in an attempt to exercise his guilt, and Fowler is an Englishman, a man of middle years, of few scruples, of even less courage, and disillusioned to the point of diffidence. It is in Salgon where he is stationed as a reporter that he meets Alden Pyle of the American Economic Mission, an innocent and an idealist, who belongs to ""a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the 'u'"". They have only one thing in common-Fowler's mandarin mistress Phuong whom Pyle is ready to marry. Fowler's first act of betrayal is toward Phuong- as he conceals from her the fact that his wife- in England- will not free him. His second is toward Pyle who has been engaged with a small time local General in an attempt to back a Third Force against the Communists, and when a bomb demonstration misfires, Fowler is equally responsible for the retaliation which leads to Pyle's death... A morality tale of these times- of impulsive idealism which is often ignorance on the one hand, up against the moral inertia of the rest of the world. Indochina, and the shabby, shoddy accent of the East sharpens the background for a novel which is an effective entertainment as well. It should assure a wider audience than Robert Shaplen's A Forest of Tigers (Knopf) which deals with this theme and this part of the world.
Pub Date: March 9, 1956
ISBN: 0143039024
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1956
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