A refreshingly humane comedy about the lies people tell themselves—and others—just to survive.
Think of the biggest liar you’ve ever known, a truly repulsive human being, and imagine what it would require to feel compassion for him.
In The Locklear Letters (2003), Kun showed that he could take a truly pathetic specimen of a person—in that case, a compulsive writer of astonishingly clueless fan letters to the titular actress—and find the honest spark within him without resorting to fakery or sentimental machinations. In this more ambitious fiction, the central piece of sad-sackery is a more complex creation, and the author makes him a near-epic character. Sam Shoogey likes to regale next-door neighbor and narrator Hamilton (Ham) Ashe with stories that are as wonderfully dramatic as they are probably untrue. The book opens with a real corker that we soon learn Sam tells at every conceivable opportunity: about the time he killed a man in “the war” (unspecified) and then years later got a visit from the fellow soldier whose life he had saved, who promptly borrowed money from him. This gem of hardnosed poetry and heartache understandably enthralls Ham, a lawyer who barely supports his wife and child by working ridiculous hours. It turns out that Sam is not only a fantastic raconteur but also a mystery writer and lover of a woman who needs Ham’s help with a little divorce problem he’s having. Thus begins their odd friendship, which sprawls through this lengthy but breezy text and starts to unravel in strange circumstances before it has a chance to truly blossom. Kun manages to make Ham’s life, with its routines and lassitude, seem just as engaging as Sam’s speedy, high-octane antics; he conveys just as much feeling for moments of quiet familial grace as he does for comic extravaganzas. When Sam’s house of cards begins to collapse, You Poor Monster becomes sadder and grows more resonant as a result.
A refreshingly humane comedy about the lies people tell themselves—and others—just to survive.Pub Date: June 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-119-6
Page Count: 350
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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