An intelligently conceived, sporadically luminous collection that sometimes misses the mark.
This volume of short stories explores New York City’s immigrant communities.
“Survival comes in all shades, from all angles, all the time, and is worthy of reflection,” observes Shaw in the preface to his latest collection. Many of the 23 tales assembled here focus on the resilience of immigrants, particularly New Yorkers of Italian or African American descent. Each is tied to a particular location and time—for instance, the opening story is entitled “Sunday Gravy With Uncle Del (Todt Hill, Staten Island), September 12, 1982” and sumptuously describes the Neapolitan weekend ritual of families gathering to eat pasta before recounting Del’s mob-related yarns. Concentrating predominantly on 20th-century New York, the volume includes tales like “Out of the Sky,” which provides a ground-level account of the aftermath of a 1960 midair collision from the point of view of the Park Slope, Brooklyn, community where one of the planes crashed. “Miles Live!” captures the jazz musician Miles Davis appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1986. Shaw also turns his attention to personal struggles. “Last Dance” deals with a woman coming to terms with the death of her aging husband, and “It’s the End”examines an alcoholic writer, inhabiting a room in a flophouse, whose will to create is overtaken by his need to drink. Meanwhile, the author addresses contemporary unrest in “What Happened to the News?” which depicts the “Peoples’ Justice Collective” storming Grand Central Terminal.
This is an ambitious, varied collection with a number of standout stories. “The Shadow in the Valley: A Twisted Tale,” about a man who repeatedly encounters a female passenger on the subway who he suspects may be a spirit, makes for eerily compelling reading. When the man seeks the advice of a Jewish friend, confessing that he does not believe in ghosts, the retort is deliciously blunt: “You’re a Christian. You worship a spirit.” Shaw shows flashes of brilliance and is able to move readers. For instance, he elegantly captures the nuances of grief: “She had accepted that he was dying. She had reconciled her soul to what was coming, in the hope of a dignified departing that had been earned by them both.” But his narrative often deteriorates into mechanical reportage: “We were…looking out from the twenty-fifth floor after an entire morning of serial lovemaking….We returned to that bed and made more love.” The author’s use of dialogue is occasionally contrived and uncomfortably unrealistic: “Which do you want more, this meal or me? I have the key to a hotel room. Can you turn your hunger into food and be with me?” This meticulous volume is a courageous attempt to reflect the multifaceted nature of New York life, and the final offering, which portrays the empty metropolis as “drained of its blood,” is both timely and chilling. Yet Shaw’s execution is inconsistent, resulting in a disappointingly uneven collection. Avid lovers of New York will still enjoy this book, but others will struggle with its frequently flat narrative approach.
An intelligently conceived, sporadically luminous collection that sometimes misses the mark.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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