Too much self-analysis by whiny Charlotte, but an engagingly provocative page-turner.
Manning’s flawed but compelling debut is not about O.J. and Nicole, despite some obvious similarities in this story of a disintegrating interracial marriage between a handsome athlete/sportscaster/movie star and his wife.
After an unfortunate first chapter in which Charlotte Robicheaux, recovering from a vicious attack for which authorities have arrested her husband Milo, ruminates obsessively about race and love with pretentious metaphors, Manning retraces the Robicheaux marriage from its romantic beginnings up to the fateful night when Milo may or may not have cut his wife’s throat. Charlotte, a classic California blond, is attending college in Vermont when she first notices Milo, a star on the college ski team, where he is the only black. After her affair with one of Milo’s teammates goes bad, Charlotte leaves school and becomes a well-known fashion model. Meanwhile, Milo wins a slew of Olympic medals. Crossing paths in New York, the two act on the mutual attraction that was left unspoken five years earlier. Manning is masterful at developing the relationship, its normal uncertainties heightened by issues of race and fame. Milo in particular is a riveting, complex character; his upbringing by fiercely loving and intellectually ambitious parents in an otherwise white New Hampshire community has made him a charismatic loner who trusts no one but his family. Charlotte and he strive to make their marriage work, and they adore their baby daughter. But Charlotte, who offers too many examples of her ignorance about the world to be believable in her perceptive-narrator role, makes some glaring blunders on the race front just as Milo falls under the sway of an agent whose espousal of black empowerment includes thinly veiled antagonism toward Charlotte. As liquor-tinged jealousy worms its ways into both their hearts, trust disintegrates. . . .
Too much self-analysis by whiny Charlotte, but an engagingly provocative page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33287-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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