Before it finally finds its groove, though, the slow pace and soft diffusiveness try the patience.
A short, quiet novel moves very slowly through uneventful lives in the 1950s.
Bea Maxwell ages from her youth to spinsterhood without ever having a serious romantic, or sexual, relationship. Her indifference to boys, or theirs to her, was apparent as early as high school. Something may, or may not, have happened to her during a short post-college stint in Chicago before she returned to Wisconsin’s Keck Road area to stay. But with faint echoes of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, she’s soon selling real estate. While Bea’s the central figure here, she shares center stage with June, a college friend and sorority queen from the “new part of town,” and with Shelley, somewhat younger, a victim of polio induced, ironically, by the polio vaccine. Two things link the three women: Keck Road and Bill Alberts. Simpson (A Regular Guy, 1996, etc.) shows how development resembles destruction. In one of the story’s finer moments, local firemen practice their craft on a tree they set ablaze, then extinguish, again and again; while Bea and Shelley look on transfixed, it is a tree they remember. Meanwhile, Bill Alberts offers the women a chance at romance, but one as compromised as Keck Road’s “progress”: he’s an unhappily married philanderer whose one true passion is jazz drumming. Across several decades, Alberts carries on flirtations with all three women, or they with him, but their dalliances never find swing time. Neither, unfortunately, does Off Keck Road. Not much happens in these lives, or in this place, over those decades. the story simply covers too much time with too little incident. History barely intrudes. And by alternating sections between Bea and Shelley, the energies get dispersed: what the novel’s about is almost defiantly concealed until nearly two thirds through. Which is too bad, because when the pace finally accelerates and the dramatic focus resolves, Simpson’s careful, quirky eye finds poignancy, even grace, in these simple lives.
Before it finally finds its groove, though, the slow pace and soft diffusiveness try the patience.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41010-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
