Can a Künstlerroman also be a gas? Yes!
A riffy, funny, whip-smart novel about comedians and their art form.
The nearly 10-year-old Stand-Up MFA program is housed—awkwardly, a little resentfully—within the English department of a Chicago university. Bordas’ novel begins in a most inhospitable place for comedy, a faculty meeting: worse, a faculty meeting in which people are waxing indignant about the impending hire of a visiting professor, scandal-ridden celebrity comic Manny Reinhardt. The novel spans a single Wednesday, and its point of view moves freely among those in the program: faculty members, students (Olivia, who’s reluctant to mine her trauma for laughs; Phil, who’s too hesitant to offend; Jo, who’s obsessed with Andy Kaufman and believes he’s still alive and 40 years into the deep, dark, edgy bit of his “death”; sweet, accommodating Artie, who’s hampered by being too handsome), and Reinhardt himself, who’s on his way to Chicago a bit early and may get to meet his new students at a late-night competition they’re having with an improv troupe. Though there are minor disasters and sources of anxiety aplenty, this is not a book that hinges on plot events or reversals. Instead, Bordas wittily constructs her narrative out of minor encounters, incidents, riffs, meditations. Stand-up, we learn, isn’t any of the cliches, a craft or a knack or a calling; for these practitioners, it’s less a way of making a living than a way of living. Bit-writing, funny-making, is the lens they use to understand themselves and the world. What makes the book work, first and foremost, is that it’s funny—fast and fizzy and dangerous in the way the best stand-up feels improvisatory without ever actually being improv (a discipline for which they feel mostly contempt). But beneath the laughs and digressions lies a surprisingly profound book about the costs and consolations of art. Does doing comedy make these people’s lives better? The question is moot, pointless. The last word of that question falls away, has to; the material and the life are the same thing.
Can a Künstlerroman also be a gas? Yes!Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780593729847
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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