A gritty, heartfelt journey through the recent past.
In Stockwell’s three connected novellas, a man stumbles through addiction, recovery, and the countercultural scene of 1990s Washington.
The epigraphs of the first two novellas collected here come from Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski; like these writers, Stockwell is concerned with those down on their luck. In these stories, he traces the wobbly arc of Jack, a “microcosm of Generation X” who is “addicted to everything.” When he is first introduced, Jack is 28 years old and living in a psychiatric institution after losing his mother, his primary support system. The first novella, Sleeping in the Daytime, largely traces the period following his release from the institution, including his time in a halfway house rooming with a schizophrenic Vietnam War veteran who never showers and working up the courage to ask out the barista at the local coffee shop he frequents. The narrative includes regular flashbacks to Jack’s past, including his physically abusive relationship with his older brother (“Besides the sporadic 911 calls, occasional attempted knifings, and regular baseball bat duels, things had actually been pretty good between Laurence and Jack back then”) and his attempts to “liberat[e] his mind from Mormon indoctrination.” The second novella, Courting Mediocrity, fills in more of Jack’s backstory, focusing mainly on his first institutionalization at age 18 and how he met most of his crew of friends/fellow drug dealers and abusers. It also charts Jack’s brief stint in Utah, where he turns 30 and finds employment at a Taco Bell. (Jack finds some relief in this stability, but it does not last long.) There is more redemption in the final novella, Squattingin the Shadow of an Ant, which tracks Jack’s path down to Seattle and the most stable of his major relationships. Throughout, Stockwell balances the hard-edged, Gen X tone with more wistful reflections on a time lost. This comes through most strongly in the final few chapters, as Seattle morphs into its present form. Though occasionally repetitive, there is enough life and truth in the prose to keep the reader afloat, even as Jack repeatedly falls into the same destructive patterns.
A gritty, heartfelt journey through the recent past.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781963805895
Page Count: 340
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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