Few characters here get what they deserve in life, a characteristically southern insight Yarbrough delivers in fluid prose.
A competent if slightly flat instance of classic southern gothic, set in shabbily reconstructed Loring, Mississippi, during1902, as the federal government appoints a “colored” woman postmistress.
The genre promises buried legacies, burdens of guilt, and a handful of cruel maulings, and Yarbrough’s compact second novel (after The Oxygen Man, 1999, etc.) easily satisfies these programmatic requirements (though a buried secret revealed near the close proves decidedly unsurprising). Loda Jackson, a college-educated woman whose sophistication distinguishes her from many in Loring, takes up her role in the post office just as Tandy Payne shambles his way back into town. Tandy is a gambler, smooth talker, and overall failure who returns home only to meet up again with his brother Leighton, Loring’s mayor and newspaper editor whose unbroken string of modest achievements makes a shaming contrast with Tandy’s failures. Tandy, Leighton, and Loda are linked in a past dominated by Sam Payne, father to the brothers and vicious slave owner whose possessions once included Loda’s mother. Loda and her husband, Seaborn, an insurance company owner known as “the biggity nigger” for his stature and income, quickly become obvious targets of resentment for Tandy, who begins the simple task of stirring up trouble over her appointment. After he brutalizes a friend of Loda’s, she submits her resignation, which is declined personally by President Theodore Roosevelt. This federal intervention spurs Tandy on in his newfound political career, and before long a black man is murdered. Leighton and Seaborn, the story’s moral centers, are repeatedly thwarted in their efforts to keep the peace during a crisis that the author never really resolves. We simply meet Loda years later as she recalls the ghosts of her past; her decision to stay, we realize, was prompted by domestic and historical necessity more than courage.
Few characters here get what they deserve in life, a characteristically southern insight Yarbrough delivers in fluid prose.Pub Date: May 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41159-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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