CHALKTOWN

Name: CHALKTOWN
Author: Melinda Haynes
ISBN: 0-7868-6656-X

by Melinda Haynes ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2001

All the trappings of southern gothic—death, race, religion, and violence among country folk—coupled with big ideas about the...

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Second-novelist Haynes (Mother of Pearl, 1999) prunes back her lush plotting, while maintaining both an extraordinary style and a firm grounding in her native South of the 1960s, to produce a satisfying tale of violence and redemption.

Haynes's double plot, as one of her characters might say, don't shake square. Beginning in 1961, she recounts the journey of 16-year-old Hezekiah Sheehand to Chalktown, a mythic place where folk communicate with one another on chalkboards posted on their porches. With him he carries his retarded five-year-old brother Yellababy. Their mother, Susan-Blair, has alternately worried about Yellababy and physically abused him through the years. But in her world, this don't count too strong against a woman trying to get life's floorboards straightened up. Cutting to 1955, Haynes introduces Annie and her mother Rosie, together with Aaron, Mr. Prox, and Johnny Roper—all of them involved in various ways with the death of Annie and her stillborn child. After much narrative evasion, the official inquiry lists Annie's death as suicide, though no one believes it, and Rosie soon starts posting biblical passages on her porch chalkboard. Back in 1961, Hezekiah arrives with his brother and Cathy, a curious, ponytailed girl he's met on the road, and takes up residence in Annie's abandoned house. The foundling boy immediately consumes Rosie's attention, and the town is more or less tidily healed. Presiding over both stories is Marion, a wise black neighbor to the Sheehands, who, weary and tolerant of the South's racist suffocations, is the perfect witness when the two strands finally come together.

All the trappings of southern gothic—death, race, religion, and violence among country folk—coupled with big ideas about the place of God in these proceedings. Yet Haynes's lyrical prose will captivate readers willing to overlook a few ungainly knots in the storytelling.

Pub Date: May 2, 2001

ISBN: 0-7868-6656-X

Page Count: 336

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WILLEM’S FIELD
by Melinda Haynes

- BOOK REVIEW
MOTHER OF PEARL
by Melinda Haynes

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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.