A consoling and melancholic reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A thought-provoking meditation on human relationships at the cellular level as well as our relationship to Earth, the cosmos, and life itself.
Midwestern novelist Rhodes’ latest work is a return to the fictional town of Words, Wisconsin, the setting for Driftless (2008) and its sequel, Jewelweed (2014). The novel opens in the near-future Chicago of 2027, where the reader is introduced to August Helm, a 30-year-old biochemist working in a research facility at the University of Chicago. After having his position eliminated due to budget cuts and enduring a devastating breakup, August impulsively abandons the big city to return to his hometown in rural Wisconsin, a home he last saw years ago. Although much remains the same (as things do in small Midwestern towns), a new luxury housing development called Forest Gate has been built practically on top of Words, and the locals tolerate the wealthy, gentrifying “Gaters” with varying degrees of grace, suspicion, and resentment. Despite this, August ends up house-sitting for Forest Gate resident April Lux and promptly falls in love with her. A pervasive strangeness begins to permeate the narrative at about the halfway mark; the final third incorporates elements of science fiction and mystery, and what may have seemed to be a meandering narrative picks up steam and accelerates toward a satisfying—and weirdly surprising—conclusion. Rhodes has a knack for writing acute psychological realism; these characters live and breathe, and by the time the novel ends we feel like we know them. Additionally, several story arcs reveal a humanistic, righteous indignation regarding the violence toward women so endemic to Western civilization, and characters frequently engage in thought-provoking discussions of everything from cellular science to sexual politics and world economies. The epilogue recalls Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles (2000), albeit much more optimistic. Although elements of the novel are adjacent to the near-future SF of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Rhodes is primarily concerned with the timeless human phenomena of love, loss, origins, family, and community.
A consoling and melancholic reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5-7131-1-412
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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