Where Clarke's novels veer toward social satire, often hilariously so, this uneven collection ranges from the inscrutable to...
This collection of short fiction features writing as straightforward as the perspective is askew.
Readers might find themselves asking a couple of questions when reading Clarke's (The Happiest People in the World, 2015, etc.) latest story collection. The first is What is this story about? The second, Why would anyone write a story about this? These are mostly first-person narratives featuring hopelessly deluded protagonists who live in a world where the usual principles of human behavior don't seem to apply. The title story, which opens the collection, proceeds from this premise: “On Monday, an unarmed black teenage boy was shot in the back and killed by a white city policeman. On Tuesday, there was a race riot.” A simple statement of cause and effect, until the mayor determines that the explanation is too easy, that the riot had in fact been sparked by a white barber who offered cut-rate haircuts and allegedly made a racist remark while giving one. The explanation satisfies the narrator and his white cohort but leaves them in a quandary. Should they go protest at the barber shop? Or should they get one of those discount haircuts that are such a better value than their expensive ones? They expect black protestors when they arrive at the barber shop, but all they see is a long line of white customers wanting their own bargain haircuts. A parable? Then there’s “Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife,” in which a mystified husband finds himself invited without explanation to join his wife—who had recently kicked him out of the house—at a B&B in the former home of the notorious ax murderer, where he joins other equally confused guests. For pure literary pleasure, the concluding “The Pity Palace” shows a masterful command of tone on a number of different levels. Though written in the third person, it focuses on an Italian man, Antonio Vieri, despondent because his “wife had left him for the famous American author who wrote those best-selling novels about Italian gangsters in New York.” In other words, Mario Puzo, whose name Vieri can’t bear to hear spoken and who happens to be dead. And was dead at the time Vieri suggested to his wife that if she liked those novels so much, like the one whose translated title was The Patriarch of the Gangster, she could just leave him for the author. If he ever actually did that. If he ever actually had a wife. If any of this signifies anything more than words on a page in a book. Vieri's dialogue seems to have been inspired by idiomatic English translated into the Italian vernacular and then back into English, a virtuosic feat.
Where Clarke's novels veer toward social satire, often hilariously so, this uneven collection ranges from the inscrutable to the astounding.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-817-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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