A performance curiously devoid of sound and fury.
A disappointing second novel from the award-winning author of Some Things That Stay (not reviewed) focuses on a group of actors gathered for a 1971 provincial theater production.
Director Will Bartlett, nearly 60 and obsessed with saving his small resident theater company from Broadway incursion, has the brilliant idea of bringing his cast to his midwestern farm for a month in early summer, during which they will live the characters they’ll play in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Will's lonely wife, Myra, a former actress and singer who froze up one opening night and never performed again, is none too pleased to have her sanctuary and sanity invaded. Meanwhile, their resentful 16-year-old daughter Beth, who listens to Led Zeppelin and experiments with drugs, wants desperately to get a part in the production. So when the lone actress doesn’t show up and Will asks Myra to play the only female role, Beth smolders, vowing to get even with her mother. Willis recounts her summer-stock tale almost matter-of-factly, employing narrators ranging from the self-searching Myra to the production’s least significant actor. And blocks of declarative sentences do nothing to speed the slow, methodical action. Willis lacks the ironic take on the ’70s that animated Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994), and her terminally low-key prose offers nothing as an alternative. Not even attempts to introduce dramatic tension in the form of flirtations and electrical storms can animate these characters: too many tertiary actors diffuse the energy. Will, a blustery though wounded dictator, father, and husband, fails to intimidate us. With his weaknesses constantly underscored by his wife and daughter, it’s hardly a surprise when the cast ultimately packs up.
A performance curiously devoid of sound and fury.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-24861-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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