A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.
Driven to somehow expunge the stain of her racist upbringing, a young woman from a white supremacist family dedicates her entire life to becoming the ultimate double agent.
It’s not surprising that the Nazi-loving male figures in Rubin’s “near historical fiction novel” (set in the years prior to the Oklahoma City bombing) are terrible husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles. Sarah Cartell, the earnest protagonist in the eye of this storm of would-be stormtroopers, already understands this by the time she’s 8 years old and is sentenced along with her siblings to do penance on the rocky shores of “kneeling beach.” The kids’ crime? “Mixing” with a boy new to Goderich, Ontario, named Curtis Otonga, the son of a Nigerian doctor now working as a janitor at the local grade school. Sarah’s trespasses continue when, at 14, she and Curtis secretly become an item and she lands a job assisting the neighborhood librarian, Mrs. Broder. The librarian takes young Sara under her wing and reveals the awful truth about the girl’s Holocaust-denying “Grandpa” Thomas Cartell. Determined to not only escape the Cartell clan but also to thwart it, Sarah heads off to McGill University in Montreal on a mission to bring the white supremacists down before they and their clandestine network of skinheads and Nazi sympathizers can cause more harm. She does her best to break through the walls she’s erected around herself and manages to form close friendships with the very kind of people the Cartells abhor. But the increasing stress of being both a progressive university student and an undercover faux Nazi ultimately becomes too much for Sarah to manage, and she finds herself committed to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre under the care of Mona Rubinoff, who helps Sarah deal with the painful familial complexities inherent in being one of the Cartell clan’s unhappy progeny.
Rubin excels at keeping the humanity tied up in Sarah’s thorny situation front and center. Although committed to confronting the Cartell’s ignorant brand of evil head on, Sarah cannot simply eliminate the familial bonds that she shares with them—no matter how much she loathes their tainted worldview. Sarah can’t even reconcile the animal attraction she feels for her boyfriend Marc and her absolute revulsion regarding every sickening racist thing he advocates. The increasing angst and turmoil roiling inside Sarah’s slight 104-pound frame is rendered with startling realness, only increasing as the young woman further pursues her life’s mission. The author achieves this level of authenticity through the use of lean prose and stark dialogue, which often crackles with the energy of exchanges in a John Cassavetes movie. Readers are practically airdropped into Goderich, Ontario, to meet young Sarah Cartell in summer of 1982 and continue on with her all the way to the Sunnyside Mental Health Centre in the mid-1990s; the “in the moment” feeling Rubin achieves is even more impressive when considering that the dark back story of the Cartell men (and two women who managed to escape their hateful existence) runs concurrently throughout Sarah’s intense journey.
A provocative exploration of the ties that bind and the mad hatred that kills.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781998206308
Page Count: 200
Publisher: re:books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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