Even Vonnegut's weaker myth/cartoon parables of 20th-century American life—Slapstick, Jailbird—have had a certain gravity and a strange shapeliness in their whimsical digressions, their near-childish interplay between silly plots and Big Themes- Here, however, though the Message circles around such weighty matters as Art and Disarmament, there's no majesty in the doodling, no sense of a pattern worth following to the end. Vonnegut's little-man protagonist this time is narrator Rudy Waltz, born in 1932 to millionaire Otto of Midland City, Ohio—a no-talent pharmaceuticals heir who fancies himself an artist (he studied in Vienna with beloved classmate Adolf Hitler), briefly promulgates Nazism in Ohio, and collects guns with passion. So Rudy grows up with a love and knowledge of firearms—till the day in 1944 when, at age twelve, he takes his beloved Springfield ("I liked it so much, and it liked me so much, since I had fired it so well that morning") up to the roof, shoots a bullet into the sky . . . and manages to kill a pregnant woman. Result? The family fortune is lost, father Otto goes to prison, the dead woman's husband is forgiving but writes an eloquent editorial. ("I give you a holy word: DISARM.") And the disarmament theme pops up, in nuclear form, elsewhere too: Rudy's mother will die from radiation poisoning, thanks to a mantelpiece made of radioactive cement from Oak Ridge; the whole town of Midland City will be depopulated by the "accidental" explosion of a neutron bomb in transit. ("My own guess is that the American government had to find out for certain whether the neutron bomb was as harmless as it was supposed to be. So it set one off in a small city which nobody cared about. . . .") But equal space is given to: asexual pharmacist Rudy's 1960 attempt at playwrighting in Greenwich Village; the doomed teenage love of his brother Felix (future NBC exec) for a wrong-side-of-the-tracks girl who later commits "suicide by Drano"; the evidence that Sir Galahad was Jewish; etc. And though Vonnegut's closing statement here—"We are still in the Dark Ages"—presumably can embrace all those fragments of story, character, and preachment, this is a sluggish potpourri of elbow-in-the-rib ironies . . . and perhaps Vonnegut's weakest fiction ever.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1982
ISBN: 0385334176
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1982
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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