A collection of unpredictable postmodern jests with more than a little pathos underneath the levity.
A collage of surrealistic short fictions that range from playful one-liners to Bukowski-tinged ruminations on life and death.
Ridge offers a new collection of stories, reminiscences, fragments, and fables that are firmly in his wheelhouse of finding whimsical humor in the everyday world. It opens with a series of interconnected stories that mostly follow the musings of a jaded, heavy-drinking refugee from Kentucky as he bombs around Los Angeles on his motorcycle. Ridge also occasionally touches upon unusual real-life characters, penning a somber tribute to the late musician Elliot Smith and a melancholy portrait of an aged Babe Ruth, among others. The clever duet of "Noir" and "The Second Detective" offers a minimystery, about a private eye looking for a missing girl, replete with the genre's tropes. Most of the stories are extremely short and meticulously minimalist, but Ridge devotes more real estate to the longest story, "Hey, It's America!" involving one man's determination to throw a quirky festival starring Clint Eastwood. Next, we get a big batch of abrupt but ambitiously experimental stories. "Three Prayers for Artists" offers eccentric good wishes for Subway sandwich artists, con artists, and conceptual artists. Most seem like flash fiction, staccato bursts of scenes such as "On Acid," which reads in its entirety, "I glance at our guru’s finger as he’s pointing at the moon, but then I realize it’s his middle finger pointed at a riot cop and it’s the middle of the afternoon.” The penultimate set of stories starting with "22nd-Century Man" purports to turn some chatbots loose to answer the questions posed in Padgett Powell's novel in questions, The Interrogative Mood (2009). Finally, Ridge finishes with an acid series of stories that follow around Death as the Grim Reaper grapples with anxiety, work stress, and human resources during a well-earned vacay in LA.
A collection of unpredictable postmodern jests with more than a little pathos underneath the levity.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-946448-56-9
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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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