Urban thirtysomethings dissected with wisdom, literary skill, humanity, and knowing humor. More, please.
An insightful, warm, and gently funny first novel whose considerable narrative drive derives almost entirely from emotional nuance.
Memoirist Cunningham’s (A Place in the Country, 2000, etc.) deftly structured group portrait of six Manhattan women at midjourney begins with substantial sketches (most could stand alone as short stories) of the friends as they head to a party to celebrate the first (wanted) pregnancy among them. Amusingly and effectively, we are introduced to each through real estate. Fifteen years ago, they met at the Theresa Residence for Women; now only Claire, free spirit, world traveler, and expectant mother, remains as the building is razed around her. Among the others are Jessie, a journalist newly in love rushing to prepare her downtown loft for the party, determined not to be a woman waiting for the phone to ring; and pale, frail painter Lizbeth, who fights eviction from her rent-controlled haven while sinking into fantasies of the married man who left her. With one over-the-top exception (self-deluded, materialistic Martha), these are recognizable, multidimensional people, and the accommodations they've made with life are real and poignant. Much of their talk concerns the intransigence of men, the hope that it might be different, and disappointment when it isn't; Cunningham captures it all with sympathy and humor. Nina, consistently left by the many men she beds, asks, “Is there any sound as loud as a zipper on its way up?” Lizbeth, who seeks the consolation of sleep on high-thread-count sheets, “had always had an excellent relationship with her bedding.” Martha, the group's overcritical, puritanical, maternal superego, provides both the tension (will she go too far and ruin the party?) and the too-pat ending, when she admits to the flaws in her perfectly planned life and her need for her friends' support.
Urban thirtysomethings dissected with wisdom, literary skill, humanity, and knowing humor. More, please.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3401-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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