A ménage a trois with enormous potential that never quite gets aloft.
Slow-going, made-for-TV family drama about a waiflike NYC ballerina on the rise who fatally attracts the first violinist and his young married son: a first adult novel from children's author and editor McDonough (The Barbie Chronicles, 1999, etc.).
Virginia “Ginny” Valentine is the toothy, skinny upstart from Louisiana who shimmies her way to solo stardom in one Ballanchine production after another (The Four Temperaments being one of them), while aging, well-established Oscar Kornblatt adores her from the orchestra pit. He feeds her ravenous appetite and helps organize her life, and even brings her home on the Upper West Side to be fed by his patient, good-hearted wife, Ruth, who suggests they introduce her to one of their three grown sons. But Oscar has begun to bed her, too—until the Kornblatt family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner and Ruth comes upon her married-with-infant architect son, Gabriel, kissing Ginny passionately in a bedroom. What follows is the tortuous tale of their illicit affair, told in chapters of alternating points of view and in detail so excruciatingly drawn out that the actual loving gets quietly buried. McDonough backtracks ceaselessly to establish the limping relationship between Gabriel and his obsessive-compulsive wife, Penelope; her teenaged riding accident and later collision with a deer; Ruth’s volunteer activities and selfless need to mend; Oscar’s depressed ambition and hapless longing; and Ginny’s ballet training since early childhood. Curiously, the accumulated detail is general rather than specific, so that the reader ends up feeling swamped instead of sympathetic. The symbolic, retributive ending in a tragic accident reinforces the sensation that the author is pulling her characters’ strings with a heavy and moralistic hand.
A ménage a trois with enormous potential that never quite gets aloft.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50361-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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