Though clinical at first glance, this well-turned story packs plenty of emotion. Among the smartest of the batch of recent...
A mother considers the fate of her son, a Navy SEAL, with equal measures of intellect and heartbreak in this debut.
Carpenter introduces Sara, the lead of this assured novel, in a state of high anxiety: Her son, Jason, has been missing after a mission went awry, and though his fellow soldiers and military brass are supportive, details are scarce. With too much time to think, she considers her affair with Jason’s father, a high-ranking diplomat, and her son’s unlikely transformation into a top-tier warrior. Carpenter alternates between Sara’s perspective and Jason’s, the latter allowing her to display the depth of her research into brutal special-ops training and the curious equipoise that great soldiers possess. Indeed, the novel contains a lengthy bibliography, underscoring the story’s chief flaw: Its descriptions of life in the Special Forces at times obscure Jason’s character. Yet Carpenter isn’t piling on factoids à la Tom Clancy, and her prose throughout is elegant and considered. When Sara’s wait for news ends, the story picks up more drama and tension, but the emotional temperature ticks up only a degree or two; this is ultimately a novel about how everyone, from soldiers to diplomats to parents, semisuccessfully attempts to keep their balance amid the wild inexplicability of war. In the process, Carpenter explores the mythmaking elements of warfare, from training folklore to the dissembling that authorities reflexively engage in. In that regard, the relative coolness is an odd but welcome shift in the war novel. Stripped of either satire or extreme violence, it lingers on the cold inevitabilities of conflict, which makes it a highly moral anti-war novel without noisily announcing itself as such.
Though clinical at first glance, this well-turned story packs plenty of emotion. Among the smartest of the batch of recent American war novels.Pub Date: June 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-96070-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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