Giving a sly nod to genre conventions, Durrant ends with a marriage proposal, but this is no fairy tale, and Maggie’s...
British journalist Durrant’s first novel follows a familiar trajectory for high-end romantic fiction, yet it’s a standout for its rich detail and deceptively weightless prose.
While Jake works late at the ad agency, Maggie Owens raises their two boys in a comfortable London suburb (even though Jake and Maggie remain unmarried). The two have lately grown distant, when Maggie bumps into Claire, the golden girl from their schooldays (a popular plot device this season: see Jane Green’s Bookends, p. 515) who is still glamorous and still makes Maggie feel dowdy and boring. Claire’s behavior, in fact, soon convinces Maggie that she’s the reason for Jake’s long hours and frequent business trips, and when Pete, the Aussie gardener, enters her life, Maggie embarks on an affair of her own. Nothing new so far, but Durrant’s wry and precise observation of Maggie’s middle-class milieu—from the sub rosa playground status wars (“nonworking mothers are all obsessed with other people’s help, as if our children’s preoccupation with fairness had rubbed off on us”) and the casual detail perfectly conveyed (a pregnant woman in the shallow end of the pool with her “legs splayed like a Beanie Baby plonked on a nursery shelf”) and on to the nature of long-term relationships (“something with edges was flying around in the air, catching in our hair and jangling our nerves)—makes it all seem like unexplored territory. Except for a car accident that serves as the crisis causing Maggie to see things anew, there are no singular, dramatic ups and downs: Maggie’s world is an accumulation of unremarkable moments, hence with the feel of real life.
Giving a sly nod to genre conventions, Durrant ends with a marriage proposal, but this is no fairy tale, and Maggie’s response, along with all that’s come before, puts this one head and shoulders above most of the “chick-lit” that will flank it on the shelves.Pub Date: June 3, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-215-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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