An unforgettable tale with rich and moving connections, poetic storytelling, and an inimitable style.
A man who hears voices joins a colorful alliance of South Florida eco-warriors.
Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral (2014) and Flame Vine (2017), the first two books in this fictional autobiographical series, tell the story of Aubrey Shallcross, a man who sees and hears things others don’t—most notably, slippers: “Homunculus forms, three to four inches tall, from the world of mental cases and mystics.” Aubrey’s chief slipper is Triple Suiter, or Trip, his guardian angel. Trip, Porter, and Aubrey constitute the trinity that narrates this third installment. Aubrey, 50, has nicely recovered from being shot in the head two years ago by his common-law wife Christaine’s ex-husband. Nowadays, Aubrey focuses on the sport of dressage, enjoys family life, takes regular camping trips, and tells bedtime stories to Drayton, his 5-year-old son. When crooked property developer AM Sermon threatens to destroy 1,500 acres of wetlands, Aubrey wants to stop the disaster but doesn’t have much hope. Still, he vows to try when asked by Osceola and Captain Nemo, slippers who protect two alligators called the Dragon and Two-Toed Tom. Also working to prevent the development is Freddie Cowkeeper Tommie, a mixed-race Spanish Seminole who carries on a battle against invasive species in Florida and sometimes rides the gators, one foot on each like a charioteer, while meting out ecological justice. Eventually, others join the struggle, including carnival performers Speedy Tanks and Roberta, the Woman With No Legs. An alliance of people, slippers, and animals comes together to shake Sermon’s conscience and preserve the wilderness, meanwhile revealing a long-standing mystery—the true identity of the Tin Snip killer, who murdered Christaine’s mother.
As in the previous books, Porter employs amazingly inventive, multivalent wordplay that taps into buried meanings. Sometimes these “private cryptonyms” can be puzzling, though once explained, they seem just right. For example, to call something mansion, Aubrey explains to Drayton, means (by extension from big house) “anything that is a big deal or gets a lot of attention.” A poetic economy characterizes this wonderfully original argot, as when an asylum inmate says everyone “told stethoscope lies, and he could hear their hearts beating children.” Beating does double duty here and makes the stethoscope image perfectly understandable: hidden untruths that need special equipment to be detected. This third volume is more accessible than the first two and often humorous, suggesting that Aubrey has settled more comfortably into his life. Porter’s books are always captivating, but this tale gains maturity and depth from the characters’ heartfelt concern for animals and ecology, which they put into rousing action. The work’s presentation of the slippers’ points of view is so compelling that readers may agree when Trip insists that “this is not imagination. It is a reality of a rare and mostly unknown kind.” The root meaning of schizophrenic is split—yet Aubrey seems not divided but multiplied.
An unforgettable tale with rich and moving connections, poetic storytelling, and an inimitable style.Pub Date: July 9, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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