A small masterpiece from an old master whose oeuvre bulks large in our literature and will last.
Auchincloss’s umpteenth (The Headmaster’s Dilemma, 2007, etc.) tells the story of a prestigious Manhattan law firm and the families in its orbit.
Yet another variation on the story he’s been telling for decades, it’s also a moving depiction of an often tested, never abandoned lifelong friendship. Adrian Suydam, scion of a fine old New York family, presents, embellishes and reflects on his published history of the firm of Saunders & Suydam, woolgathering about the life of his partner-mentor Ernest Saunders, a flinty conservative who in old age “achieved a national reputation as the stalwart champion of the old ways.” The more liberal Adrian has always deferred to Ernest’s brilliance and resolve. As he recalls their early years, during which Adrian fought with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders while Ernest steadfastly acquired professional experience and power, the novel gradually becomes a series of episodes: the brilliant, heartbreakingly brief life of Ernest’s perfect son Mark; the messy, demanding adult lives of both partners’ surviving children; the scandal-ridden and politically significant cases that made the firm’s reputation and sometimes put Saunders and Suydam at odds with each other. Further stories are told in extended “memorandums” written by several major and minor characters; handled woodenly and not credible as the narratives they purport to be, they are the novel’s major flaw. The final chapters are superb, notably the long-withheld story of Ernest’s dignified wife Bessie, whose stoical understanding that she has sacrificed passion for a life of reason and security shakes the compassionate Adrian to his core and may wring tears from the most jaded reader. Auchincloss is our Trollope: a productive, elegant artist whose keen understanding of the small worlds his characters inhabit permits him to examine their surprising variety with an energy undiminished even this late (he is in his 90s) in his brilliant career.
A small masterpiece from an old master whose oeuvre bulks large in our literature and will last.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-15275-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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