The chaotic structure and multiple points of view keep what action there is at a distance—and Jarrard’s (Over There, 1997)...
Drifters and dreamers in rural Texas and the Southwest, going nowhere fast.
Hardware and lumber storeowner Carl Blalock loves his black-haired Venus, and he’s reasonably happy with life—until a young, six-foot-six troublemaker wanders in to use the bathroom and ask for a job. Any kind of job, he doesn’t care. Carl Stein is tired of being on the road, and so is his pretty blond wife May. Blalock invites the Steins to Thanksgiving dinner, and so begins the slow destruction of their settled lives. It all starts innocently enough: The older Carl hires the younger man to flock Christmas trees, and Venus and May become fast friends, talking into the wee hours. But sinuous, soft-voiced May, who’s quite the corrupting influence, somehow persuades the middle-aged Venus to cheat on her husband in a tawdry one-night stand with a cop. Then the two couples picnic by an artificial lake where May is mysteriously sucked into a hidden cistern and drowned. Grief-stricken, her husband steals $7,000 from the Blalocks and hits the road again. Venus and Carl split up, but he runs into her now and again as they begin their own pointless hegira through Mexico and the Southwest, blowing money in casinos and arguing whenever they meet. Venus sleeps around. The older Carl wonders where it all went wrong. The younger Carl moves on restlessly, looking for someone new to hustle. Various members of the supporting cast pop up to offer their opinions from time to time, and there’s a lot of strenuously unsubtle philosophizing about the meaning of life, the nature of fear, and other deep stuff.
The chaotic structure and multiple points of view keep what action there is at a distance—and Jarrard’s (Over There, 1997) odd, self-conscious stylistic tics don’t help to draw you in.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-58642-026-7
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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