Fashion and celebrity are, of course, viable fictional topics—think Jennifer Egan or Jay McInerney—and there’s a place in...
Imagine the contents of an Entertainment Channel hostess’s mind turned into print. Voilà this fiction debut!
In a bid for tabloid press attention and a chance at hooking a titled, moneyed bachelor, 29-year-old Cat McAllister throws her fourth annual 25th-birthday party—then manages to miss it. She wakes hungover the next morning to a call from Citibank: her accounts are “severely overdrawn.” Her trust fund has dried up, her globetrotting socialite mother is incommunicado, and her Art Deco penthouse triplex on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue is sacrificed to an old antagonist and current rival for tabloid press attention and titled, moneyed bachelors. Cat’s best friend, India Morgan Beresford-Givens, a transsexual fashionista, helps her land a job as a fashion columnist at a developing celebrity-gossip Web ’zine. (Are you burning your Blahniks yet?) In her quest for financial stability, Cat angles for invites to benefits, where she agonizes over seating arrangements while dropping every name in the Palm Pilot of interchangeable celebrity. The Estée Lauder sisters are mentioned several times, along with Town and Country luminaries. Cat shops frequently, almost always at Barney’s, which apparently is supposed to mean something. She is overcharged, overdressed, hungover, and underfed. Hip, cute, trendy acronyms and attitudes abound. When Chinese orphans appear “in,” Cat dispatches her Asian-Indian au pair to China to buy one, only to learn that Chinese adoption agencies don’t take Visa. The prose is flat, the dialogue dead, the subtext nonexistent. The irony is that there is no irony. Wow.
Fashion and celebrity are, of course, viable fictional topics—think Jennifer Egan or Jay McInerney—and there’s a place in the world for beach books. But could a book this light—with a plot so weak, and characters so caricature—hold down even the corner of a towel?Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0504-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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