A sordid tale that, when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, does.
An extremely grim first novel, about the way victims can all too easily shade into victimizers, from an Irish poet and prize-winning storywriter.
Alice is married to the wealthy, cold, brutal Paddy Lynch, a man significantly older than she and once involved with Alice’s now-dead older sister. Years ago, Alice used Paddy’s advances to escape from her family and from a childhood sex abuser, but now she is trapped in a loveless, abusive marriage and can find only temporary comfort in spending her husband’s considerable wealth on expensive artworks. She seeks solace in bed with John, a naïve graduate student who’s head-over-heels for her and who’s friends with Sandy, the skittish young gallery manager who may or may not be having an S&M affair with Mick Delaney, a former footballer and Paddy’s college chum, the handsome man Alice had hoped would “rescue” her those many years ago. But instead of Mick, she got Paddy, while Mick went off and married certifiably crazy Nora (after Paddy dumped her for Alice so long ago), who is about to poison the neighbor’s cat. Such is the incestuously bound group of miserable souls around whom Wall has built a bleak narrative of lies, betrayals, manipulations, and ugly twists. Nora articulates the emptiness at the core of their lives: “My doctor is a great believer in the golden mean . . . If you can get the right combination of uppers and downers you won’t ever have to experience anything at all.” Wall’s prose, though occasionally crystalline, is often confusing—until the last third of the story, when things race toward their bloody conclusion. What keeps the reader interested is not genuine caring—even Alice, with her history of victimization, is difficult to root for—but a perverse compulsion to see how badly things will turn out.
A sordid tale that, when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, does.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-05001-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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