Old-fashioned, rich in detail and incident, a story of marvelous skill and poignancy: Maillard is a national treasure.
Vancouver-based Maillard returns to West Virginia, where he was born and bred, in this finely rendered account of a young man stranded in a hardscrabble mill town.
Raysburg (the setting of Maillard’s previous trilogy: Gloria, 2000, etc.) was a gritty place in the best of times—and the best of times were long over by 1969, when Jimmy Koprowski returned from the Army. He’d never got beyond Guam, where he repaired B-52s, so he’s not one of your shell-shocked Vietnam vets, then, but he’s still got problems. The steel mill in Rayburn closed down years ago and there’s little for an ambitious young man to do. Jimmy gets a job repairing TVs, but what he really wants is to head out to Texas for work in the burgeoning aeronautics industry. It’s not so easy to get away, though. Even if he had the cash to float himself for a few months (which he hasn’t), he would feel held back by the presence of Old Bullet Head (his father), his kid sister Linda, and his friends from the neighborhood (most as aimless as he is). And, just as Jimmy is finally working up the nerve to break loose, a further complication develops in the person of Connie, a wealthy married woman from the other side of town. Jimmy and she begin a torrid, obsessive affair (as for how obsessive, they often have to resort to makeshift venues like the back of Jimmy’s car for their trysts). Like many men in his stymied position, Jimmy is also drinking too much—way too much. But there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, being shone by Janice Dluwiecki. A friend of his sister’s, Janice starts out as an annoyance to Jimmy, but the two eventually fall in love. Can he get rid of Connie, stop drinking, and get on with his life?
Old-fashioned, rich in detail and incident, a story of marvelous skill and poignancy: Maillard is a national treasure.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30889-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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