The texture of this replete portrayal of Middle America and its discontents suggests an inspired collaboration between Anne...
The burdens of grief and secrecy borne by the people of a small Midwestern city are analyzed with keen compassion, humor, and insight in this luminous fifth novel from the author of Mystery Ride (1993) and American Owned Love (1997).
The college town of Hayden, Illinois, excitedly prepares for the arrival of Peter Ivanovich Kamenev, a Russian dissident writer most famous for having had (and missed) an opportunity to assassinate Joseph Stalin. Peter, who also claims (falsely) to be 100 years old, plans to live with his middle-aged daughter Zhenya, a professor of political science; her husband, a union activist turned garbageman, known only as Morgan (his surname); their unmarried daughter Emma; and Emma’s young son. Boswell skillfully widens the novel’s scope, layering in the lingering aftershocks of the suicide, ten years earlier, of Emma’s older brother Philip—and the emotional agendas of other Haydenites variously orbiting around the Morgans’ history and continuing individual and internecine conflicts. Unusually full characterizations thus absorb us in the lives of Morgan’s hulking, probably criminal garbage-truck partner Danny Ford; policeman Roy Oberman, a genuine “good man” who nevertheless may have caused Philip’s death, and who harbors additional dark secrets; and Adriana East, the patrician widow who leads an abortive fight against the devastation of urban renewal, and succumbs to the elder Kamenev’s wily Old World charm. These, and several other characters, are vivid originals (Peter Ivanovich is a wonderful combination of egomaniac, charlatan, and genuine visionary intellectual), and Boswell directs them surely toward a celebration climaxed by his characters’ astonished “intuition that their lives had meaning and might still one day be redeemed.”
The texture of this replete portrayal of Middle America and its discontents suggests an inspired collaboration between Anne Tyler and John Cheever. Only a handful of Boswell’s contemporaries have written anything better than Century’s Son.Pub Date: April 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41237-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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