A conversation starter about gender roles and sex work, but a lackluster mystery and limited critique.
After moving back to her hometown, a new mother becomes captivated by an unconventional community where she believes she can reclaim her body and purpose.
When Dani tells her husband, Clark, that she’s pregnant, he insists that they move to Metcalf. Metcalf isn't merely Dani’s hometown; thanks to her father’s waste-processing “kingdom,” Dani is local royalty. Feeling the weight of her legacy, Dani fears returning with a husband and baby but no career. As she and Clark settle into parenthood, Dani grows increasingly frustrated with her financial dependence on Clark and his lack of gratitude for her domestic labor. Just as Dani’s existential crisis hits its peak, she stumbles on The Temple, a yoga studio where vibrant women provide sexual stimulation to and promise emotional healing for the men who visit. Immediately drawn to The Temple’s “village” of confident and beautiful women, Dani quickly befriends the owner, Renata. But when Renata disappears, Dani begins to wonder if the healing center really contains the higher purpose she’s been seeking. Hogarth’s novel opens strong with creeping suspense, laugh-out-loud humor, and smart critiques of the ways gendered expectations wear on people’s self-worth, enjoyment of life, and relationships. But the book is not for everyone. The stakes of Dani’s choices rely on the assumption that toxic masculinity can only be cured by cisgender, heterosexual sex; if employed in a way that allows the men to access their deepest vulnerabilities, such sex can “fix the whole world.” Also, despite Renata’s passing comment that she respects other kinds of sex workers, readers are repeatedly reminded that The Temple is not full of “cracked-out streetwalkers.” Temple women are exceptional—and therefore acceptable—because they don’t have sex for pleasure alone, and neither do the men they heal, but for the greater good. They’re not like other women, and especially not the caricatured stay-at-home moms who share their love of yoga but who don’t even know how their credit cards work.
A conversation starter about gender roles and sex work, but a lackluster mystery and limited critique.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593467046
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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