Predictable soap, laden with psychobabble and silly clichés about relationships.
Neglected wife finds new love, in a glum tale by the author of Hawke’s Cove (2000), etc.
Cleo Grayson McCarthy, midlist novelist and middle-aged mother of two, flees her family for the mountains of New Hampshire in order to finish her manuscript. Sean, her insurance-agent mate, is a workaholic; he won’t miss her much, and she’s still sulking about the brief affair he had a while back. Cleo figures that her children, Tim and Lily, are old enough to do without her for a summer—besides, it’s high time Sean did his share of parenting. A lesbian pal lends her a lakeside cabin, and Cleo settles in, laptop and binoculars at the ready. Ostensibly birdwatching, she spots a sexy neighbor hanging out his faded jeans to dry. What, no wife? Actually, Ben Turner, a composer, was married once, according to local gossip. Cleo makes his acquaintance, and, little by little, they trade life stories. She, the only child of hard-drinking, upper-class WASPs, has never had much fun. Sean is attracted to stupid younger women, her children love (gasp) spongy white bread. Moreover, although Sean’s boisterous Irish-American family practically adopted shy Cleo, she doesn’t trust his mother, Alice, who tolerated her own husband’s philandering and once advised her to do the same. Cleo is not so inclined, however, when Sean dumps the kids with her in New Hampshire and pretends he’s working late every night. She enrolls Tim and Lily in summer camp and finds herself spending even more time with Ben. Turns out that his young wife, Talia, comatose after a diving accident, is slowly dying in a nursing home near Cameo Lake. Grieving, guilt-stricken Ben, a former rock star, composes advertising jingles to pay for her care. Will Sean stop fooling around with his succulent secretary? Will Talia die and leave Ben free to love again? Will Cleo ever stop whining? At the close, she’s virtually swept away by Mahler’s Fifth and Ben’s deeply moving “new, never performed concerto.”
Predictable soap, laden with psychobabble and silly clichés about relationships.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1276-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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