For all its technical virtuosity, Ford's chummy narrative fails to transcend its rather tired genre: the male, mid-life crisis novel. Unavoidably confessional, this back-slapping fictional memoir by the author of A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck boasts of its "dirty realist" conceit: "the only truth that can never be a lie. . .is life itself." In this case, "life itself" (a.k.a. Real Life as opposed to the artifice of sissified fiction) means the extraordinary ordinariness of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old sportswriter for a magazine much like Sports Illustrated, who's part of a "modern, divided family." His ex-wife, "X," lives nearby in suburban New Jersey with their two kids and the shared memory of a "genetic" existence. What brings them temporarily together at the novel's outset is the same thing that inspires Frank's uncharacteristically introspective ramble: the birthday of their son Ralph, who died a few years back from Reyes. Until recently, Frank's managed to "face down regret" and "avoid ruin"; once a promising fiction writer, he now prefers to write about a subject for which he holds no special brief. As he tries to explain in his own meandering way, everyone touched lately by his unexemplary life seems bent on destroying the equanimity he finds in suburban anonymity. There's Herb, for instance: the crippled, ex-football player who Frank interviews in hope of an uplifting tale, but who offers instead a bitter story of a sportsman without a sport (i.e., a man without a metaphor for his life). There's also Waiter: the newest member of the Divorced Men's Club, who, by confiding some dark secrets to Frank, transforms male bonding into a kind of male bondage. And then there's Vicki: Frank's latest flame, a sexy young nurse whose taste runs to synthetics, but who refuses to be the pliant bimbo Frank really seems to want. When it comes right down to it, though, it's never very clear in this confused novel what Frank wants, except to convince the reader that "being a man gets harder all the time." Ford's singular voice seems squandered on such disposable wisdom and such an insignificant life.
Pub Date: March 1, 1986
ISBN: 0679762108
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
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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