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HOW TO SELL

Name: HOW TO SELL
Author: Clancy Martin
ISBN: 978-0-374-17335-7

by Clancy Martin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2009

A bleak, unpleasant story, very well told by a talented young writer.

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Assured debut novel about the ethically tarnished jewelry trade.

At 16, Bobby Clark steals his mother’s wedding ring and sells it at a pawnshop. His next entrepreneurial move involves a case of class rings, and this theft gets him kicked out of school. His older brother Jim urges Bobby to leave Canada and join him at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange in Texas. His girlfriend seems eager to see him go, his long-gone father not very eager to see Bobby in Florida, so he doesn’t have a lot of other options. Once he arrives in Dallas and starts work with Jim, Bobby quickly learns that the legitimate jewelry business is no more honest than his own amateurish crimes, just more elaborate. He learns to sell used Rolexes as new. He’s introduced to coke and meth. He sleeps with his brother’s girlfriend. While hardly an innocent when he arrives in Texas, Bobby retains several youthful illusions that dissipate as he sinks further and further into Jim’s world. Martin (Philosophy/Univ. of Missouri), who won a 2007 Pushcart Prize for his story “The Best Jeweler,” worked in the gem trade before taking refuge in academia. His philosophical and retail backgrounds both serve him well in this novel, which depicts a universe in which buying and selling have surpassed or replaced all other forms of human interaction. There’s nothing shocking or even particularly surprising in Martin’s sordid revelations; their verisimilitude is, sadly, quite convincing.

A bleak, unpleasant story, very well told by a talented young writer.

Pub Date: May 20, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-374-17335-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW NOT TO KILL YOURSELF
by Clancy Martin

- BOOK REVIEW
LOVE AND LIES
by Clancy Martin

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.