A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and thoughtful.A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and...
In this novel, three caretakers try to conceal the death of their long-standing patient in order to keep their jobs.
Once Maj. Roger Thorndike suffers a stroke, he’s surrounded by multiple shifts of home attendants. A lonely widower, he enjoys the company of his caretakers and often flirts with them enthusiastically despite his diminished condition. The women, especially Loretta Hardwick, take to him with affectionate fondness, but they also rely on him for their livelihoods. He pays particularly well for Sinkhole County, West Virginia, a place whose name accurately sums up its economic prospects, an example of Clearman’s delightfully cheeky gamesomeness. One day, the major jokingly encourages Loretta to replace him with a local, Lyle Dunbar, an older, largely mute man who bears a striking resemblance to him. Once the major dies, Loretta decides to take that offer seriously and convinces the two caretakers who share her shift, Tammy Oakes and Cass Furrow, to join her in the subterfuge. Loretta makes this morbid proposal with a certain innocent tenderness: “If he don’t die, we still have our jobs. His kids don’t have to stress, we just carry on like we’ve been doing. Everybody’s happy.” But keeping a secret, especially one so extraordinary, is a tall order, and the major’s son, Hume, quickly discovers that the man he visited at his birth home is not his father. To further complicate things, as well as make matters even funnier, a disgruntled nurse named Trisha Vance, let go by Ruth Blitzer, the major’s daughter, gets wind of the conspiracy. Trish is more than happy to leverage that knowledge to her own advantage.
Clearman’s portrayal of the caretakers, in particular Loretta, is marvelously nuanced—these are women with bills to pay, facing the “threat of destitution,” who have a genuine devotion to the major. Cass, hilariously, teaches a course in medical ethics at a local community college, and is relatively quick to acquiesce to Loretta’s mad plan. Hume is also moved by a complex dynamic of motivations. He’s sad that his father died without his family around him, but he’s also relieved that the major’s incessant cascade of catastrophes is finally coming to an end. Hume has this thought when he realizes that, though his father is presumably alive, someone has just been buried next to his mother: “The fresh grave. The false Major. His grief mingled alarmingly with relief. His father was so much better off dead. The last four years had been a slow, grim descent into misery. Roger’s suffering, anger, delusion, and his loss after loss after loss.” While it’s predictably inevitable that word will get out that the major is actually dead, this obvious fact never undermines the plot. In fact, the stark impossibility of Loretta’s gambit is part of the book’s farcical strength. This is an impressively subtle novel—brimming with comedic sharpness, but also a sweet but unsentimental glimpse into the strange ways love expresses itself in the real world.
A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and thoughtful.A mesmerizing conspiracy tale that’s entertaining and thoughtful.vel, entertaining and thoughtful.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798988023418
Page Count: 270
Publisher: New Meridian Arts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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