"You have longings, the male Eros does that to you; you take the sexual path and it leads you into lewdness, lewdness opens up into insanity, a world of madness rushes at you full face." This, for narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg, 35, assistant prof of Russian literature, is the "pain schedule," the "unique ordeal" for brainy, refined men in 20th-century America: men with "the privilege of vision," men with no "gift"—but lots of yearning—for love and sex. And Bellow's new novel—Kenneth's rambling, often richly comic monologue—details the agonies that come when two such men insist on seeking love (in a world where Eros is debased) instead of settling for exquisite isolation. Kenneth's primary focus is on his beloved Uncle Berm, renowned botanist and esteemed professor at a Midwestern university, a man of epic mind and soul: "He had the magics, but as a mainstream manager he was nowhere." So, despite protective maneuvers by Kenneth, widower Benn has recently fallen into "a succession of sexual miseries": seduction by an alcoholic divorcee neighbor; near-entrapment by a freaked-out, jet-setting former beauty; and now—impetuous marriage to "glittering, nervous" Matilda Layamon, social-climbing daughter of a rich, crass local doctor. Living with his pushy new in-laws in their palatial duplex, passive Berm is out-of-place, cut off from his resonating plant-world. Matilda—whose allure has always had a menacing aspect (her wide, thin shoulders remind Berm of Tony Perkins in Psycho drag)—spends half the day asleep, the other half planning her grand salon (with Benn as social bait). Worst of all, the greedy Layamons prod Benn—against all his finer instincts—into raking up an old family quarrel: Great-Uncle Vilitzer (a corrupt city power-broker, now 80, ill, in legal trouble) once cheated Benn and his sister (Kenneth's mother) out of a real-estate fortune. While recounting Benn's degradation (and ultimate escape), however, Kenneth also broods on his own turmoil as the unsexy, academic son of "a father with a world-historical cock." Kenneth's ex-girlfriend lives in Seattle with their child, spurning his obsessed wooing, preferring rough-stuff lovers. Meanwhile, since women too "die of heartbreak," Kenneth's platonic friend Dita (who has bad skin) undergoes awful plastic surgery in an attempt to increase her desirability to him. The provocative socio-sexual ideas on display throughout—the brain/body split (cf. Bellow's story "Cousins"), the futility of love, the "fallen state" of humankind—don't hold up well under incessant repetition without development; Kenneth—part authorial alter-ego, part figure-of-fun (pompous and prim)—is an unsatisfying novel-length narrator, ambiguous yet flat. Often, in fact, this seems to be a dense short-story or two, stretched out to 336 pages—winding down to mild denouements (which are heavily foreshadowed) instead of barreling towards them. (All too aptly, Kenneth likens his speculations to "a stationary bicycle.") Still, there are great chunks of fine, funny Bellovian rhetoric here (that aphoristic blend of scholar and stand-up), along with enough sporadic narrative zing—amused, appalled vignettes worthy of a Jewish-American Balzac—to compensate readers for the longueurs and overall puffiness.
Pub Date: June 15, 1987
ISBN: 0142437743
Page Count: -
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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