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MY BEFORE AND AFTER LIFE

Name: MY BEFORE AND AFTER LIFE
Author: Risa Miller
ISBN: 978-0-312-36013-9

by Risa Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2010

Like her protagonists, Miller (Welcome to Heavenly Heights, 2003) shows respect by taking religion seriously.

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While on vacation in Jerusalem, an older man becomes “a born-again Jew,” much to the chagrin and displeasure of his daughter.

Honey Black, the novel’s narrator, is not pleased when her father begins to become an observant and orthodox Jew, for she has spent much of her life either indifferent or hostile to her religious upbringing. She’s thoroughly secularized, a successful lawyer who feels she doesn’t need rituals she sees as ludicrous in the 21st century—not being able to turn lights on or off, for example, or not being able to relax with her favorite TV programs on Shabbos. She and her sister Susan stage a “rescue operation,” flying to Jerusalem to save Dad from what they see as, at best, a character weakness, at worst a sign of oncoming dementia, but they’re astonished to discover that their father has a newfound peace of mind and depth of soul that he’d never demonstrated in his previous life as the most successful vendor of scaffolding in Brookline, Mass. Evelyn, Honey and Susan’s stepmother, is proud of her husband’s orthodoxy. In fact, the couple is so content that they’re considering moving permanently to Jerusalem, where they can participate in orthodox ceremonies and visit the Wailing Wall for prayer. Honey uses every strategy in her arsenal (especially sarcasm—she calls her father “yarmulke man”) to try to coax Dad home and away from what she sees as the baleful influence of Jerusalem and religious superstition, but he resists at every turn. Eventually, even Susan begins to see some validity in their father’s position, and Honey feels doubly betrayed. Since her neighborhood association back in Massachusetts is battling the expansion of a Hebrew school, she also feels she’s fighting on two fronts.

Like her protagonists, Miller (Welcome to Heavenly Heights, 2003) shows respect by taking religion seriously.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-36013-9

Page Count: 240

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009

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.