Intricately structured, powerfully emotional, beautifully written: This is as good as short fiction gets.
A dozen paired stories, thematically unified across decades and centuries.
Echoing a song form popular in 18th-century New England, the second story in each pair deepens and clarifies the first. A painting of a bird left as a parting gift in 1796 (“Edwin Chase of Nantucket”) turns up in a widow’s attic more than 200 years later (“The Silver Clip”), yet in both it is a token of regret and loss. The Massachusetts apple orchard where Hope abandoned her baby in 1881 (“Graft”) has been reduced by the 21st century to “a few grizzly old apple trees” on a property owned by a couple desperate to help their son, lost to drug addiction (“Tundra Swan”). A mysterious 1991 photo of a bird presumed to be extinct prompts a podcast episode 30 years later in “Radiolab: ‘Singularities,’” but in “The Auk” we learn that it is a husband’s poignant tribute to his dying wife. This particular pair is the only one that presents an explicit explanation of a mystery posed by the first tale; the unsettling duos of “August in the Forest”/“The Journal of Thomas Thurber” and “The Children of the New Eden”/“Introduction to The Dietzens…” are more typical in evoking a sense of connection without presuming entirely to explain the mysterious workings of destiny and the human heart. The paired stories that open and close the collection are perhaps the saddest: Wax cylinders used to make field recordings of traditional folk songs in 1916 appear as symbols of cherished first love lost in “The History of Sound,” but in “Origin Stories” they prompt a painful acknowledgment that first love sometimes would be better left behind. Shattuck writes with delicacy and restraint of the uncertainties, missed signals, and mixed feelings that trouble personal relationships across the centuries even as we yearn for love and meaning.
Intricately structured, powerfully emotional, beautifully written: This is as good as short fiction gets.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593490389
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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