A consistently accomplished debut that’s still hard to take because the family’s anguish seems too little distinguished from...
Ten years after the fall of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, his legal counsel, Roy Cohn, is still unwillingly claiming victims—in this first novel of a family turned inside out by their loyalty to Cohn.
Invited to give off-the-record testimony against his longtime friend in Cohn’s conspiracy case, New Jersey toymaking executive Will Clemens politely declined. His loyalty won him a subpoena, and by 1964 the misdemeanor to which he confidently pled guilty has led to a one-year sentence in the federal pen at Woeburne, New York. No sooner has the door slammed shut on Will than he finds that Cohn can’t deliver on his promises of special treatment: there’ll be no segregation from the general prison population, no extra TV or visitation privileges. And when Will declines another invitation, this time to sex with a willing young thing who’s been smuggled onto his work detail, he’s beaten for his trouble. Meanwhile, the family he left outside is having problems of its own. His numbed wife Kay, unable to resist the matter-of-fact advances of their neighbor, keeps darting back into Cohn’s orbit to disconcertingly little effect. His little boy Bo, ravaged by cancer, is living in a world bounded by hospital walls. His teenaged daughter Lou-Lou, largely sidelined to the care of her mother’s ravisher and his wife, is the only family member who seems able to think about the Clemenses as a going concern. Unfortunately for both Will and the novel, the malaise of splintered relationships and missed connections is epidemic, as Hughes shows in a series of tableaux bringing Cohn and his circle to melancholy, sympathetic, but ineffectual life as their little cosmos seems to be holding its collective breath waiting for the worst.
A consistently accomplished debut that’s still hard to take because the family’s anguish seems too little distinguished from the general social funk to provide much narrative energy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-835-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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