A monochromatic sketch of emotional disconnect.
Five Japanese quarter-lifers disclose secrets and glimpses of their dark sides in a chilly slice of vérité from Yoshida (Villain, 2010).
An assailant is roving the streets near the Tokyo apartment at the center of this novel, Yoshida’s second translated into English. But the residents have other things on their minds. Ryosuke is a college student trying to work up the nerve to make a move on a friend’s girlfriend. Kotomi is having an on-again, off-again relationship with a young actor who’s suddenly become a star. Mirai is a hard-drinking woman who’s spliced together a tape of rape scenes from various movies, a horrid inversion of the cheery climax of Cinema Paradiso. Satoru is a prostitute with a penchant for breaking into homes, and Naoki is a film buff whose concluding revelation clarifies much of the preceding story. Yoshida is cannily aware of the ways that people in their late teens and 20s play-act at personalities, taking on ideas and tossing them aside. (And, being originally published in 2002, the novel is a reminder that such narcissism isn’t a function of social media.) The downside of writing about such personalities in process, though, is that emotional footholds are hard for the reader to locate; Parade dedicates a section to each of the five players, but each has a quotidian flatness. The most intriguing of the group is Mirai, who’s the savviest about calling out the white lies and bragging of her roommates, but she’s oblivious to the reasons behind her own alcoholic self-annihilation. “The only way I can be a true humanitarian in Japan today is to be snide and disagreeable,” she says. Why so snide and disagreeable? Yoshida might argue that providing a pat answer would undercut the mood of alienation. But as it is, the book is dour and distant.
A monochromatic sketch of emotional disconnect.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-45493-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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