Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.
A half-dozen loosely interconnected stories chronicle life in Charlottesville in the grip of Covid.
Beattie taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and her familiarity with the town surrounding it shows in the references to the streets, shops, and local landmarks through which her anxious characters wander—masked or social distancing in some stories, as the collection moves from the early days of the lockdown through the turmoil over the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. The decision to remove the statue and rename the park Market Street Park prompted the 2017 Unite the Right rally that ended with the death of a counterprotestor. Beattie’s protagonists are middle-class, liberal people appalled by the rally but ambivalent about “Lee’s visage [serving] as a magnet for all that was wrong with race relations, the past, the present, the future.” They are also preoccupied with personal issues. The woman living with her fiance’s father during lockdown (“Pegasus”) wonders how committed her absent lover is and worries about the father’s failing memory. He’s not the only one getting lost in familiar places; the confusion of several elderly characters serves as a metaphor for the larger bewilderment of people who once had a comfortable, secure existence and now feel adrift in an angry world. Of course, as memories unfold in “In the Great Southern Tradition,” “Alice Ott,” and “Monica, Headed Home,” we see that family relations, marriages, and friendships have always had tensions, but the furious outbursts in “Pegasus” and “Nearby” seem fueled by outside forces as well. Beattie allows her characters to speak for themselves as they grapple with old problems and the new normal. Their underlying malaise becomes explicit in the collection’s closing story, “The Bubble,” set in a nursing home housing several characters we have met previously. Charlottesville was once envied as existing in a bubble, thinks the facility’s head nurse, “but in Lee Park, that bubble had popped—as had her own protective bubble.”
Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781668013656
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
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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