Idiosyncratic, controversial, and eminently readable: a masterwork of alternative history.
An acerbic, brilliant history of the age of AIDS spills over into a second overstuffed, antic volume.
Screenwriter, playwright, and gay activist Kramer’s sprawling novel is narrated by an omniscient “Roving Historian,” but a killing virus has an ample voice, too: Four sentences in, it says, gamely, “I, too, am glad you’ve come back to learn more about my taking over the world.” But what to call it? Learned scientists, many of them ex-Nazis, have settled on “Underlying Condition,” having rejected “Fairy Flu,” “Gay Cancer,” and “An Unidentified Fatal Male Malady,” names popular among the malevolent straights—but, even so, “UC” doesn’t please the gay population, either, “which might be thought to like the name for the very reason that others don’t.” Daniel Jerusalem will learn just how ill-willed the majority can be. At the beginning of the novel, his twin, David, is working in a gay brothel established by none other than J. Edgar Hoover in order to entrap and blackmail its clients; Daniel, meanwhile, is embarking on a medical career that will find him teasing out the virus. Early on, Daniel is smitten by a budding writer named Fred Lemish, who shares the attraction, knowing that “they both belong to a people the House of Representatives doesn’t want to see at all.” With a Joseph Heller–like satirical sweep full of goofy names and unlikely situations, Kramer examines the kinky sex lives of presidents and politicians, one in particular, Peter Ruester and his “wretched Lady Macbeth,” clearly meant to invoke the dreaded Reagans. Not far in the wings is Mordecai Masturbov, a soft-porn mogul who echoes Hugh Hefner, while down the road awaits Dereck Dumster (guess who?), another president whose judicial appointments “are filled with hatred for almost everything.” Gay and straight worlds collide, as Kramer chronicles, but never align: Though the book is a flawless exercise in black humor, it is also filled with righteous anger—and, as each page indicates, not without good reason.
Idiosyncratic, controversial, and eminently readable: a masterwork of alternative history.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-10413-9
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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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