A gemlike, melancholy novel infused with personal and national history.
A ghost haunts a Tokyo train station, with history and tragedy much on his mind.
Kazu, the late narrator of Yu’s second novel to be translated into English, spent his life as an itinerant laborer, one of eight children who moved from his home in Fukushima to help build facilities for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Fukushima was the epicenter of the 2011 nuclear power-plant disaster, which also plays into the story.) Kazu recalls pieces of his life in digressive fashion as he wanders the grounds of a homeless encampment near a busy Tokyo train station. He listens in on conversations and recalls how he himself wound up residing there. His mood is scattered (“noises, colors, and smells are all mixed up, gradually fading away, shrinking”), but it’s soon clear in this brief, piercing novel that Kazu is circling around a series of heartbreaks, and when Yu finally hits on them—Kazu's separation from his family for work, the death of his son, the financial desperation that led to his homelessness—the novel gains a pathos and focus that justify its more abstract and lyrical early passages. As Kazu chronicles the funeral rites and his own fallen fortunes, the novel becomes a somber cross section of Japanese society, from the underclass to salarymen to the royal family to the homeless people subject to the whims of government (like the potential closure of the camp due to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics). Yu’s first novel in English, Gold Rush (2002), was a hyperviolent, American Psycho–esque tale of Yokohama street youth. This more restrained and mature novel is a subtle series of snapshots of “someone who has lost the capacity to exist, now ceaselessly thinking, ceaselessly feeling.”
A gemlike, melancholy novel infused with personal and national history.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08802-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Frey’s literary affectations don’t get in the way of the good times. Let the revels begin!
A swingers’ party leads to murder in a wealthy Connecticut enclave.
After a seven-year hiatus from publishing adult fiction, Frey has found a groove with this gleefully trashy page-turner set among the one percent: four couples in the fictional town of New Bethlehem whose lives are thrown into chaos when two of the wives plan a spouse-swapping evening. (Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, The Ice Storm, lurks in the background, unnamed: “You know Key Parties were invented here.” “I’ve seen the movie, I’ve read the book.”) Their short-range goals are to sleep with someone other than their husbands (one is a sadistic nightmare, the other impotent), but there’s a long-range goal the reader won’t know about for a while. Frey is in his element here, with his signature breathless, over-the-top, unpunctuated sentences and one-sentence paragraphs; laundry lists of high-end brand names (at one meeting, people sit on Boca do Lobo sofas and Roche Bobois armchairs in Gieves & Hawkes suits); and a pharmacopeia so rich it almost gets you high to read it. (“He had cocaine from Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Pink coke from L.A., which has slight amounts of ketamine and ecstasy cut into it. He had mushrooms in raw form, in pills, in chocolate. He had twelve different strains of weed, four each of sativa, hybrid, and indica. He had ecstasy from the Netherlands. He had acid from Northern California. And he had the rarest of recreational drugs, quaaludes.”) Wild excess is everywhere, and is often played for laughs. As we happily race toward the sequenced reveals of who is murdered, who did it, and what happens to all these delightful people, Frey pauses to rhapsodize about his home state in a lyrical chapter titled “Color Fields”: “Oh, Connecticut, how beautiful you are.…Your Maples. / Sugar and Red. / In all their motherfucking glory. / And it is glorious.”
Frey’s literary affectations don’t get in the way of the good times. Let the revels begin!Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9798893310269
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Authors Equity
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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