Perrotta's delightful first novel, The Wishbones (1997), and a preceding story collection, Bad Haircut (1994), observed with wry and hilarious wit the agonies of growing up (and also of refusing to) in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s. Here, the author surveys an essentially similar territory and theme, but this time the formula is somewhat less successfully mixed. The year is 1992, the town is Winwood, and the plot revolves around the upcoming election for its high school's president (apparently a single one for all four classes). In a curiously unabsorbing narrative (though it's readable enough), half a dozen characters narrate in mini-chapters their versions of the intrigue that dominates the election campaign, the kids' own screwed-up self-images and sexual confusions, and their elders' parallel truancies. Popular Tracy Flick, for instance, buoyed by her superabundant energy and ``amazing body,'' knows she's the odds-on favorite to be her classmates' choice. But when history teacher and faculty advisor Jim McAllister (``Mr. M.'') persuades football hero and all-round good kid Paul Warren to run against Tracy (and that isn't all Mr. M. does), the plot thickens—and grows thicker still when Paul's kid sister Tammy, an unusually introspective misfit with a double-barreled identity crisis, also enters the contest. It's hard to pinpoint where the generally entertaining story goes wrong. But it feels simultaneously footloose and overplotted; the characters' voices aren't skillfully differentiated; and Perrotta doesn't sense the inconsistency of resolving some of his characters' fates (the final sequence is a beauty), while leaving others awkwardly hanging. No matter. It's a done deal that Matthew Broderick will play Mr. M. in the forthcoming film, and that Perrotta's well-deserved success will undoubtedly enable him to write better novels than this one—perhaps even another as good as The Wishbones. (Film rights to MTV Films/Paramount)
Pub Date: March 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14366-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
SEEN & HEARD
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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