A long in-joke, but a good one.
Adult and children’s author Blacker (Homebird, 1993, etc.) reveals far more than anyone should know about a writer’s inner and outer lives—in a very amusing bit of madness that will prove hideously embarrassing to anyone who’s ever dreamed of literary success.
Dark and scary in spots, but mostly riveting and wildly entertaining, this send-up of literary and middle-class life, as well as of the London publishing scene, takes no-longer-Young-Turk Gregory Keays from the depths of creative-writing-class-and-writers’-magazine hell to the heavenly heights of prepublication raves on the strength of a stolen manuscript. Thickening, unlovely, adulterous, and still smug, Keays is making a few thousand quid a year, trading on the ancient success of his one youthful novel, teaching writing at an undistinguished institute, scribbling for something like Writers’ Digest, and suffering serious Martin Amis envy. After many damply false starts, his only real writing-in-process is a book of literary lists (which turn up amusingly throughout the story). It’s his wife Marigold who brings home the bacon as London’s leading feng shui decorator. The Keayses’ marriage is on life-support, and their son Doug is in the running for most revolting adolescent in the UK. But things look up for Gregory when Peter Gibson, skinny, intense, handsome and brilliant, enrolls in Gregory’s writing class and reveals true talent. Gregory takes Peter under his wing and then, in a shocking bit, between his sheets. It’s a onetime thing for Gregory, but not for Peter, who pines away in rejection, leaving this earth and a brilliant manuscript, which Gregory takes for his own. Retyped and only slightly tweaked, the stolen novel brings Gregory in from the cold and sells for zillions. The only shadows in the sunshine falling on the next toast of London are cast by Pussy McWilliam, the lit world’s favorite gangster, with whom Gregory has done sordid dealing, and by Doug, who turns out to have been cleaning Dad’s wastebaskets.
A long in-joke, but a good one.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28329-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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