For McMurtry fans, there’s some heat here, but little light.
Compared to the literary feasts McMurtry has previously delivered, this is barely a snack.
The publication of Duane’s Depressed (1999) billed that novel on its jacket as “the final volume of The Last Picture Show/Texasville story.” Not so fast. Duane’s back again in a slim, slapdash volume promoted as a sequel to Duane’s Depressed, though it seems like little more than a coda to that trilogy. Duane Moore is now 64, widowed and retired. He’s still depressed, or he’s depressed again. He has just returned from a trip to Egypt when he stops by the office where he no longer really works and discovers a new employee, a young woman in a see-through blouse who keeps jabbering about her nipples. Since sex is no longer much a part of Duane’s life, he can’t tell whether he’s aroused or disturbed, or simply obsessed. He discusses the new arrival to small-town Thalia with his lifelong friends Ruth Popper and Bobby Lee, who are still snapping at each other. He also makes the woman a focus of his ongoing therapy with his lesbian psychoanalyst, Dr. Honor Carmichael, after whom he has lusted (when lust was part of his emotional range). Dr. Carmichael tells him he knows nothing about sex, and that many men who have had long marriages know little more. Duane will ultimately find his libido lifted more than once (in graphic detail for a McMurtry novel), and his spirits will lift as well. Thalia has plainly changed—the fast-food industry has fallen to Sri Lankans, which also helps perk Duane’s appetite—and he must decide whether it’s time to leave Thalia, to change with it, or to follow the old ways into the grave (where his wife and much of his past resides). He also must deal with complications concerning his two married daughters, one of whom has decided to become a nun, while the other has discovered she’s a lesbian.
For McMurtry fans, there’s some heat here, but little light.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4165-3426-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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