TROMPE L'OEIL

Name: TROMPE L'OEIL
Author: Nancy Reisman
ISBN: 978-1-941040-03-4

by Nancy Reisman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015

An almost narcotically depressing novel; its fine writing, artsy digressions, and close psychological study require a...

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A slow, lyrical exploration of a family's unspooling after the death of a child.

As Reisman's (The First Desire, 2004) second novel begins, James and Nora Murphy are about to take their three young children on vacation from their home in Massachusetts to Rome. One of them dies in an accident there, and the novel follows the survivors, and two children born later, for decades. In those years, just about every other bad thing that can happen to a family piles on to the original tragedy, accruing in short chapters and poetic language. A landscape: "August thunderstorms...jagged lines to the northeast, and the felt-sense of water spilling over into the dark." A sex scene: "a place of liquid and muscle and bone. A salt tang, a pale gray drifting...." A dinner: "the kettle almost announcing itself as kettle, the paper shell of the garlic feathery against his skin, tart slices of lemon brilliant on the counter." One admires Reisman's skill, but these lapidary descriptions eventually become tiresome. Ornamenting the narrative further are vignettes analyzing various paintings and sculptures which can be seen in Rome—by Caravaggio, Fetti, Bernini, many more. Each moves from description into second-person philosophical inquiry. "If she could escape the harsh light, the judging view, might the shame dissolve into more tender melancholy? Beyond the frame and any view—even yours—she might rest." If these sections develop the plot, it's so subtly that one could easily skip them, like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. Too many paintings, too many houses, too many emerald green pieces of broccoli: the Murphys' lives become as wearying to the reader as they are to the Murphys themselves.

An almost narcotically depressing novel; its fine writing, artsy digressions, and close psychological study require a special sort of reader.

Pub Date: May 12, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-941040-03-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tin House

Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.