A thoroughly absorbing and deeply moving consideration of “the strength of love” matched against “the strength of death” dominates this wonderful second novel by the author of the widely acclaimed The Sixteen Pleasures (1994). Center stage is Alan “Woody” Woodhull, a middle-aged professor of classics at a small Illinois college, whose oldest daughter “Cookie,” during a terrorist bombing of an Italian train station, is killed in 1980—a senseless loss that pulls the Woodhull family apart. Cookie’s mother Hannah leaves her husband and enters a convent. Younger siblings Sara (who narrates part of the story) and Ludi go their separate ways. And Woody, an impressively well-rounded and endearingly decent human being, seeks consolation in the ancient writers he adores, in a passionate avocation as blues guitarist and singer, and in an ill-judged tryst with a beautiful Iranian student (whose mother had formerly been his mistress). Disgraced and suspended from teaching, Woody travels in 1987 to Bologna when the terrorists responsible for Cookie’s death (as well as others—) are brought to trial, and there he achieves both a vita nuova and a greater understanding of the forces that impel some people to become cold- hearted killers, others only well-meaning adulterers. In this amazingly rich story, Woody Woodhull is shown in the context of his many “loves,” is celebrated in generously developed scenes (many during holidays: ceremonies intended to bind people together), and is examined in superb extended conversations: Woody’s Christmas visit from Hannah; a classroom discussion that makes you want to curl right up with The Odyssey; and, climactically, Woody’s meetings with the agonized father of convicted terrorist Angela Strappafelci; and then—the book’s most risky and powerful scene—with the unregenerate Angela herself in her jail cell. The primal power of family, and the limitations and blessings of the intellectual life, are unforgettably explored in a wrenching story that demonstrates precisely how “It’s not the great stories that give meaning to the little ones; it’s the other way around.— (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 21, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85026-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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