Family politics as usual, if they’re usually a mess.
A rich moment in political history is distilled through its long-term impact on a disjointed Washington family.
It takes only a few sentences for the second novel from Olsson (Waterloo, 2005) to divulge its author’s roots as a reporter. Despite her Hollywood screenwriting aspirations, Helen Atherton narrates with the granular detail and on-the-fly analysis of a journalist born and bred in D.C., as Olsson was. Helen’s story is set partially against the backdrop of the Iran-Contra hearings, which ruined the career of her father, Tim, a midlevel player in the Reagan administration. When she moves home to help care for Tim after his heart attack almost 20 years later, Helen slips back into the familiar struggles of a black sheep and middle child. Olsson captures some sweet moments of reconnection as dad and daughter tiptoe around each other, but the more complicated and compelling relationship stews between Helen and her sister Courtney, a high school superstar who eclipsed her younger siblings until she fell off the rails senior year. Courtney’s tale of woe crisscrosses with Tim’s and several B plots centered on slimy guys (the Atherton women share a taste for them, if little else): most crucially the late Dick Mitchell, a friend and colleague of Tim’s, who behaved worse but fared better in Iran-Contra; and his stepson, Rob Golden, a former drug dealer who seduces both Helen and Courtney with his good looks and indifference. “In my family we hardly ever recalled our past to each other,” Helen notes. “We compartmentalized.” Olsson does the opposite in this affecting but tangled book, which takes long enough to sort itself out that it may lose you in the process.
Family politics as usual, if they’re usually a mess.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-28132-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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