A welcome return that will leave readers looking forward to future work from McIlvain.
The author of Elders (2013) serves up another story of true belief and its discontents, this time set in the time of failing banks, rising inequality, and the Occupy movement.
It seems fitting that McIlvain should begin his story with a tennis match: tennis, after all, is the beloved domain of David Foster Wallace, patron saint of latter-day postmodern literature, but it also makes a nicely convenient symbolic backdrop against which to pit friends about to face a shattering agon, “a pair of pale intellectuals disgracing the game.” Sam Westergard is a Mormon-turned-socialist; the narrator, Eli, a bookish young man who finds Sam a perfect sparring partner in a Marxist theory course in grad school. (“I was just tired of poetry workshops,” Sam sighs, “and maybe a little curious.”) Theory becomes praxis when fellow travelers turn activist—and when their attention to matters of social justice takes on deadly seriousness. With its distant villain a shadowy Enron-era energy conglomerate, the story recalls Newton Thornburg’s novel Cutter and Bone at a few points, but whereas the earlier story was all sinewy, whiskey-soaked action, McIlvain seems more interested in exploring the contours of friendship and betrayal, with murder and intramural politics more bits of backdrop against that larger scenario of manners and ideas. Readers may find it helpful to have nodding familiarity with Marxist and Trotskyist thought to get some of McIlvain’s learned humor, but old-school lefties will surely nod in appreciation and recognition at his knowing description of communard angst: “What’s with all the Stalinist secrecy around here?” demands a comrade, Jamaal. “Do we have to fuck our way to the top?” An admonition swiftly follows: “What a charming reactionary you’d make.” Altogether, the story seems a touch more labored than McIlvain’s assured debut effort but still memorable, the details just right.
A welcome return that will leave readers looking forward to future work from McIlvain.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-41788-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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
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