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GENEALOGY

Name: GENEALOGY
Author: Maud Casey
ISBN: 0-06-074089-2

by Maud Casey ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2006

A bit too much, yet not enough.

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The author of The Shape of Things to Come (2001) returns with her second novel.

Samantha Hennart is a poet who no longer writes poetry. It’s been at least 20 years since she has composed a line, and she’s not much of a wife or mother, either, and, when she falls to the kitchen floor as an aneurysm explodes in her brain, her family is scattered. Her husband, Bernard, left when he found her having sex with the “hippy carpenter” hired to renovate their bathroom. Her 25-year-old son, Ryan, is across the country in California and relieved to have finally separated himself from his dysfunctional family. And her daughter, Marguerite, 18, is—unbeknownst to anyone—in a mental hospital. This is the story of their history before Sam’s aneurysm and the collective fate that awaits them after it. Casey’s debut was widely praised as ambitious and accomplished. Her second feels self-consciously literary. Every page is filled with lyrical turns that don’t quite convince. The author pushes her characters to dazzle and charm. In one early scene, Sam doesn’t just call her family to dinner, she proclaims, “No more drifting in and out. No more eating in front of the television. No more blah, blah, blah, fuzzy around the edges.” Marguerite—who is named for a medieval mystic—is mesmerized by her brother’s nose, which is not just his nose but his “miraculous nose.” Bernard describes his wife’s forehead as “revelatory”—repeatedly. Indeed, this is a family given to erudite in-jokes and well-worn epithets, but what, exactly, does Sam’s forehead reveal? The fact that we are left without a clue means either that the reader is not worthy of joining the Hennart clique or that Bernard’s rhapsodizing is empty of actual meaning, just as the characters in this novel are not actual people but a series of pretentious poses and ostentatious tics.

A bit too much, yet not enough.

Pub Date: May 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074089-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CITY OF INCURABLE WOMEN
by Maud Casey

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ART OF MYSTERY
by Maud Casey

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY
by Maud Casey

- PROFILES
Maud Casey

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.