Blaise has gathered here a smart, sprawling collection of stories about family, rootlessness, and identity.
A six-decade retrospective of short fiction from an accomplished Canadian American writer.
The first two-thirds of this book can feel old-fashioned, but mostly in a good way. The stories have an autobiographical buzz and intensity; many feature an adolescent perpetual outsider, son of a mythologized, largely absent salesman father and a mother who, despite her nearness, always seems more distant and unknowable. The stories are as peripatetic as the family, which moves constantly, never assimilating, from racist Florida backwaters around World War II to industrial cities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Then, in several stories, there's an abrupt move to Canada (in one case sparked by the father having assaulted someone). Several portraits feature an observer-protagonist who wants, by thinking about un-self-conscious doers like his father or uncle and the wide swath they cut, to convince himself he has grandeur in him, that he is "not just the timid academic son of [his] mother's rectitude." These stories cover ground not only geographically. They are also crowded with character and incident, always fiercely and smartly observed; Blaise is, as Margaret Atwood puts it in her foreword, "the eye at the keyhole...the ear at the door." Later, we follow a version of this protagonist to Montreal, where he is a young father, husband, and writer in love with the city and its flux, diversity, unpredictability, and cross-pollination. Many of the final stories, set in California and Europe, feature an Indian family (Blaise was married for decades to the writer Bharati Mukherjee, until her death in 2017) and another, only slightly less autobiographical approach to what dislocation feels like. What is it like to be a citizen of the world who nevertheless finds himself, again and again, in a strange, small space or a strange, small self that must for now be home?
Blaise has gathered here a smart, sprawling collection of stories about family, rootlessness, and identity.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7719-6489-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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