Shrill, labored, and boring. Unless this is actually Smith’s first novel, it’s a disappointing step backward.
The follow-up to Smith’s smashing debut success (White Teeth, 2000, film rights recently sold to Miramax) is an uneasy mix of Sunset Boulevard, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, and James McCourt’s fey romantic comedies about dementedly self-absorbed beautiful people.
The arresting, promising prologue describes a day trip to London’s Royal Albert Hall to attend a pro wrestling match, undertaken by 12-year-old Alex-li Tandem (son of a Jewish mother and Chinese father) and two young friends—during which Alex-li meets a younger boy passionately devoted to autograph-collecting, and loses his father, a 30ish surgeon, to a heart attack. Alas, it’s all downhill thereafter, as Smith zooms ahead to focus on her protagonist at age 27; his frustrated romantic relationship with a young woman (Esther), who’s also cardiacally challenged; his search for religious certainty among the arcane minutiae of Jewishness, “Goyishness,” and Zen Buddhism; and his career as a collector, “verifier,” and marketer (and sometime forger) of celebrity autographs. The real love of Alex-li’s insular life is reclusive former screen beauty Kitty Alexander, and the quest for her rare signature takes him to conventions and auctions, misadventures with a host of walk-on weirdos (a trio of rabbis, commenting like a Borscht-Belt Jewish Greek chorus; importunate celeb-hunter Brian Duchamp, and others too numerous—and arbitrarily bizarre—to mention); and a trip to New York City to attend an Autographicana Fair, following which “the most famous whore in the world” assists his discovery of the now-moribund Kitty, living in Norma Desmond–like seclusion, guarded with Cerberus-esque ferocity by her p.r. manager Max Krause. It’s even less appetizing than such summary sounds, because all the characters are brash, opinionated cartoons, and the loose texture is repeatedly stretched to accommodate interpolated jokes, faux parables, lists, diagrams, and whatnot.
Shrill, labored, and boring. Unless this is actually Smith’s first novel, it’s a disappointing step backward.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50186-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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