If Chuck Palahniuk and Stephenie Meyer teamed up to write a spec script for Succession, this is what you might get.
This skewering of Silicon Valley startup culture is biting satire—complete with fangs.
Set in San Narciso, a barely fictionalized version of San Francisco, the story follows Chuck Gross, the disappointing scion of a billionaire who made his money the old-fashioned way: arms and labor exploitation. Chuck thinks he’s eager to separate himself from his family—he’s changed his name from Charles Grossheart and started a punk record label (secretly funded with family money, natch)—but everything changes when he’s actually cut off financially. He catches a break when he’s hired as a “creative consultant” by his college friend Olivia Watts, known as “Steve Jobs, but with a heart” in this fictional Silicon Valley. The one catch is that she would like the Grosshearts to invest. While Chuck doesn’t mind helping his family acquire more wealth, he quickly realizes that her startup’s “world-changing medical technology” is working toward the goal of “remov[ing] all human expiration dates” through means that are less scientific and more Nosferatu. Even as the perennial black sheep, Chuck has to decide if he can really involve his family in a plan that Bram Stoker couldn’t have dreamed up. It’s a clever idea, and as in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, it’s a bit hard to tell where the line between satire and reality lies. If it turned out that the buzzy weight-loss drug Ozempic were derived from vampires, would people actually stop taking it? It’s hard to imagine a world where rich folks offered a shot at immortality and incredible wealth wouldn’t take it, even if it came with insatiable bloodlust. While the plot takes a while to unfurl and Chuck, who seems to embody the concept of “failing upwards,” is not exactly relatable, anyone who enjoyed the delicious schadenfreude of the Theranos trial will get a kick out of this book.
If Chuck Palahniuk and Stephenie Meyer teamed up to write a spec script for Succession, this is what you might get.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593469675
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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