A book that Vonnegut’s casual fans and students of his work alike will want to have.
A bookended set of early and late works by the late, great and surely lamented dystopian Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country, 2005, etc.).
When Vonnegut died in 2007, he left behind piles and boxes of manuscripts. Among them, as his daughter Nanette writes in her foreword, was a piece, “Basic Training,” from the late 1940s or perhaps 1950—not so long, in other words, after Vonnegut’s military service and all the terrible moments he would bring from it into his work. The piece, much longer than the usual short story of the time but perhaps a little short of a novella, too, is a conte à clef about Vonnegut’s time as a teenager on a country farm haunted by the stern presence of a senior officer who’d seen service in the trenches in World War I and wasn’t about to put up with any of the young protagonist’s guff. That guff, of course, involves getting well acquainted with the General’s daughter, a local beauty; says one of the protagonist’s conversants, “The General says she’s a lot smarter than some of the livestock in the neighborhood, too.” The tale quickly devolves into a great big shaggy-dog story full of Vonnegut’s soon-to-be-customary anarchic, cynical good humor; everyone goofs up, but just about everyone, including the General, retains humanity by virtue of simply being flawed. There’s none more flawed than the protagonist, though, whom the General greets as less than a fellow-well-met: “[A]nd what sunshine are you going to bring into our lives today? Shall we poison the well or burn the house down?” The second piece, unfinished at the time of Vonnegut’s death, is, well, of a piece, its language much saltier and its air much more world-weary; but if at times it seems as if Vonnegut is dipping into a well-used bag of tricks, at others it seems just as much that he’s putting a fresh coat of paint on classics such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), as with this nice little outburst: “You think people farts are bad? The polar ice caps are melting, I shit you not.”
A book that Vonnegut’s casual fans and students of his work alike will want to have.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59315-743-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
In Japan, a daughter explores the crime of passion that took her mother’s life.
Sumiko was just 7 when her mother died and her father moved away; she was raised by her grandfather, who has always maintained that her mother was killed in a car accident. Twenty years later, she answers a phone call meant for him from a prison administrator with information about inmate Kaitarō Nakamura; when the caller realizes whom she is speaking with, she hangs up. With just this detail, Sumiko begins an obsessive quest. She turns up an article headlined “WAKARESASEYA AGENT GOES TOO FAR?” from which she learns that Kaitarō Nakamura was an agent in the “marriage breakup” industry. He was hired by her father to seduce her mother in order to provide grounds for divorce. Nakamura claims that he and her mother had fallen in love and were about to start a new life together. When Sumiko visits Nakamura's defense attorney, the woman hands over all her files and videotaped interviews with her client. Weaving through the story of Sumiko’s search and her recollections of her childhood is the story of her mother and her lover, from the moment he pretended to meet her accidentally at the market and moving inexorably to the murder scene. Scott is a Singaporean British writer born and raised in Southeast Asia; her debut is inspired by a 2010 case in Tokyo and based on years of research. The book proceeds slowly, lingering on enjoyable details of Japanese landscape and food but perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages.
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54470-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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