AND SOMETIMES WHY

Name: AND SOMETIMES WHY
Author: Rebecca Johnson
ISBN: 978-0-399-15452-2

by Rebecca Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2008

Unremarkable, though fans of Ann Packer and Jodi Picoult may appreciate Johnson’s careful foray into post-crisis fiction.

bookshelf

Well-written but formulaic debut explores a family’s grief after a tragic accident.

Intellectually engaged, financially blessed, possessed of good values and better luck, the attractive McMartins have never known real heartbreak until, on an otherwise unmemorable morning, 16-year-old Helen sets off to break ties with Bobby, her secret older boyfriend. With four beers in his belly and a gas tank full of sugar (courtesy of a jealous ex-girlfriend), Bobby crashes his motorcycle into the car of reluctant celebrity Harry Harlow, host of a famous game show, Would You Rather? Bobby dies instantly, and Helen is in a coma. Her father Darius, an esoteric English professor with a photographic memory, holds vigil at her beside, refusing to give up hope for her recovery. Mother Sophia, an arts administrator racked with guilt over her blindness to the signs of Helen’s ill-fated romance, becomes obsessed with Bobby, especially after detectives suggest that he had criminal ties. Elder daughter Miranda, a freshman in college, allows herself for the first time to be drawn into a relationship with a man, someone she met on the day of Helen’s accident. Meanwhile, though he was not at fault in the accident, Harry finds that he can’t let go of his guilt. He begins acting erratically, is fired from the game show, divorces his young wife, pursues a tentative friendship with Sophia and launches a bizarre business venture. As it becomes increasingly apparent that Helen will never recover, family members flee to their separate spaces. Miranda follows her man to Alaska’s remote backcountry; Darius insists on moving Helen home to care for her himself; and Sophia, sensing a crumbling marriage, moves to New York City. The final bleak development is anticlimactic, given how many lives have already been irrevocably altered.

Unremarkable, though fans of Ann Packer and Jodi Picoult may appreciate Johnson’s careful foray into post-crisis fiction.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-399-15452-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
I’JAAM
by Sinan Antoon & translated by Sinan Antoon & Rebecca Johnson

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.