Fine prose and lovely strokes of portraiture throughout, but overall a bit of a disappointment from so ambitious and gifted...
O’Nan’s exceedingly low-key seventh novel (after Everyday People, 2001, etc.) depicts a family’s final week in the summer cottage its widowed matriarch has just sold.
Following husband Henry’s death, Emily Maxwell doesn’t feel up to the demands of owning a vacation home on New York’s Lake Chautauqua while living in Pittsburgh, especially since neither son Ken nor daughter Meg is in any position to help. Ken is trying without much conviction to find himself as a photographer, though both he and wife Lise suspect he has no great talent. Meg’s husband left her a year ago shortly after she completed rehab; she’s not drinking but still smokes pot and is as angry as ever. Unsurprisingly, Meg’s ten-year-old son Justin worries about everything, while teenaged daughter Sarah simply stonewalls her. Ken’s daughter Ella spends the week trying to hide her lesbian crush on pretty, sexy Sarah, while son Sam steals items he hopes won’t be missed. Henry’s sister Arlene, a retired schoolteacher, observes the clan’s uneasy interactions while mourning the sale of a cottage she feels is as much hers as Emily’s. As always, O’Nan limns his characters with authority and empathy, doing so especially with Emily, who can’t help expecting the worst in every situation and constantly makes lists of the tasks everyone else has failed to perform. The most moving passages occur during a day trip to Niagara Falls as Emily’s recollections of her honeymoon there mingle with memories of Henry’s death. Everyone misses Henry, portrayed by O’Nan as a quiet man who held the family together but papered over conflicts that should have been confronted. On the debit side, it’s hard to take much interest in characters who all see themselves as dreadfully ordinary when their author neither counters that judgment nor makes any claims for the importance of ordinariness.
Fine prose and lovely strokes of portraiture throughout, but overall a bit of a disappointment from so ambitious and gifted a writer.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1715-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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