A whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprising—and a lot of fun.
If Thomas Pynchon and Elmore Leonard had conspired to write North Dallas Forty, this might be the result: a madcap, football-obsessed tale of crossed destinies and criminal plots gone awry.
You know you’re in fictional territory when the Dallas Cowboys are portrayed as a winning team; the world is veritably upside down when things like that happen. That’s one of many conceits de la Pava (Personae, 2011, etc.), New York City public defender by day and shaper of the modern canon by night, plays with in this loopy yarn, which embraces surrealist art, the law, theoretical physics, politics, and just about everything else under the sun. But especially football: At the heart of de la Pava’s shaggy dog tale, overlong but not overworked, is an unabashed love for pigskin. Young Nina Gill hauls up the underdog Paterson Pork team from deepest obscurity in a scenario out of a gridiron version of King Lear after having been shoved aside from inheriting said Cowboys after her father dies; in grim revenge, Nina decides to take the indoor-playing Pork to the NFL championship, an impossibility, of course. She’s an encyclopedia of the game: “Before ’seventy-eight defensive backs could hit receivers with impunity all the way down the field provided the ball hadn’t been thrown,” she tells sidekick Dia Nouveau, who’s scrambling to keep up with “the various permutations of football knowledge that woman is essentially compelling her to acquire.” Dia has bigger fish to fry, though, and so does Nuno DeAngeles, street philosopher and would-be crime lord, who’s gotten himself tucked away on Rikers Island and finds that his “only ally now is René Descartes,” inasmuch as Cartesian dualism allows his mind to flow freely out into the boroughs to work mischief until his body can catch up. Parts of the story are seemingly the standard aspirational sports rah-rah, but turned on their head, and the caper that plays out alongside Nina’s championship run, laced with philosophy and cornerbacks, is a blast to watch unfold.
A whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprising—and a lot of fun.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4722-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's...
A young woman with a knack for trick shooting heads west in the late 1800s to track down her outlaw brother.
Jessilyn Harney, the folksy narrator of Larison’s third novel (Holding Lies, 2011, etc.), has grown up watching her family lose its grip on its prairie homestead: Her mother died young, and her father is an alcoholic scraping by with small cattle herds. He’s also persistently at loggerheads with Jess' brother, Noah, who eventually runs off to, if the wanted posters are to be believed, lead a Jesse James–style criminal posse. So when dad dies as well, there’s nothing for teenage Jess to do but head west to find her brother, which she does disguised as a man. (“A man can be invisible when he wants to be.”) Her skill with a gun gets her in the good graces of a territorial governor (Larison is stingy with place names, but we’re near the Rockies), which ultimately leads to Noah and a series of revelations about the false tales of accomplishment that men cloak themselves with. Indeed, Jess’ success depends on repeatedly exploiting false masculine bravado: “I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm,” she writes. The novel’s plot is a familiar Western, with duels, raids, and betrayals, brought thematically up to date with a few scenes involving closeted sexuality and mixed-race relationships. But its main distinction is Jess’ narrative voice: flinty, compassionate, unschooled, but observant about a violent world where men “eat bullets and walk among ghosts.” The dialogue sometimes lapses into saloon-talk truisms (“Men is all the time hiding behind words”; “Being a boss is always knowing your true size”). But Jess herself is a remarkable hero.
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's voice is engaging and down-to-earth.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2044-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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