Oscar Wilde weathers all the uncouthness that the Old West can throw at him in this bawdy, bewildering historical fantasia.
Notch’s tall tale opens in 1910, as two racist 10-year-olds in a Southern town offer rotgut liquor to an elderly African-American man, Erastus Greener, in exchange for stories of his youthful adventures in the Old West. He complies with the letter, if not the spirit, of their demand, by recounting a sprawling fable that reimagines the author Oscar Wilde’s real-life speaking tour through the American West as a slapstick picaresque. Stranded for months in Colorado in 1882 when his train breaks down, Wilde finds himself immured in the squalid mining town of Leadville, living in a saloon and rubbing shoulders with all manner of colorful ruffians. These include a man with Tourette’s syndrome whose uncontrollable bursts of profanity don’t disqualify him from becoming Wilde’s manservant; a derelict Native American man aptly named He-Who-Breaks-Wind; and a coarse buffalo hunter whose vicious, omnidirectional and sometimes quite funny insults make him Wilde’s main rhetorical foil. Then, feminist icon Susan B. Anthony comes into town by stagecoach; she’s a preachy, humorless woman who insists on being addressed by the gender-neutral title “Person Anthony,” and sets about rallying the town’s prostitutes to the cause of female suffrage. This may sound lively, as does a subplot about a psychotic outlaw dispensing Mormon gold, but what mainly happens in the book is a lot of windy dinner-table palaver. This usually pits Wilde’s subtle, ironic repartee (“America is a cosmopolitan land,” he says, upon seeing a Native American drinking in a saloon), which goes way over everyone’s head, against the cussing, farting and braying of the yokels and rogues around him. Occasionally, it lapses into earnest soapboxing about the injustices borne by women and gay men. Notch writes vigorous prose (“The Salt Lake City Kid pulled a revolver from his holster, cocked it, and emptied all six shots into the sign, grouping three inches across, except a single flyer that flew wild. He did not count those. Few shooters did”), and his vivid characters certainly have distinctive voices. But his gross-out humor is so overwrought that it grows tiresome long before the line “I pee pee in my teepee” surfaces. As a result, readers lacking the patience of Eustace’s 10-year-old audience may find it rough going.
A verbally boisterous fish-out-of-water satire that’s sometimes entertaining, but often grating.
Pub Date: April 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499151510
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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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