This rediscovered collection feels as clear and colorful as if it had been written today.
Three novellas worth resurrecting.
In recent years, A Public Space Books has reintroduced the works of the undeservedly overlooked Howland (1937-2017), publishing a collection of her stories, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and W-3, a 1974 memoir of her time in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. Now the imprint has republished, with a new introduction by author Rumaan Alam, this slim volume of three novellas, which Howland originally released in 1983—the year before she won a MacArthur Fellowship and then, presumably overcome by the pressure of heightened expectations, stopped publishing. This is another unburied treasure, with Howland’s glimmering talent again on full display. Each story showcases the author’s intelligence, insightfulness, and incomparable eye for illuminating detail and ear for captivating dialogue as well as her ability to evoke a specific place and time (often gritty midcentury Chicago and its environs) and the emotional complexities of close relationships (family and otherwise). In Birds of a Feather, Howland’s young female narrator quietly comes of age amid the cacophony and oblique warmth of her father’s loud Jewish family, “the big brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels.” The Old Wheeze focuses on the events of a single snowy Chicago night following a divorced young mother’s date with an admired older man and captures the differing perspectives of the mother, her elderly babysitter, her nursery-school-age son, and her lover. In the third and final novella, The Life You Gave Me, a daughter reckons with her complicated relationship with her father as she is summoned to the hospital to visit him on two separate occasions. “My father’s size and strength were more than physical. Mental, temperamental. Character traits. Mind Over Matter was his motto….To see him brought down, laid low, damaged, hurting, like any other injured creature—was to see him disgraced,” Howland writes. “All of which is not to say that my father was ever a simple man. Only that he didn’t know his own strength. But I did.” Howland, too, may not have understood the strength of her own writing. But now, thanks to the reissuing of these and other stories, we do.
This rediscovered collection feels as clear and colorful as if it had been written today.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9982675-6-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: A Public Space Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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