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
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
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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