Mysterious, gemlike, and strange, these stories end up oddly predictable by defying narrative conventions in similar ways.
Miniscule stories from a master of the form.
In her latest collection, Williams delivers another serving of the teaspoon-sized stories with which she’s made her career. Some are as brief as a sentence or two while others span several pages. Either way, her sentences are constructed with an equally exquisite attention to detail. In “The Tune,” a narrator whistles along with a whistling bird. “He was my creature briefly,” Williams writes. “We didn’t even vary the volume.” That beauty at the granular level comes as a godsend because it's sometimes difficult to say what these stories are about—or even what is happening on a literal level. Williams’ leaps in logic can seem to contain the width of continents. “ ‘I am afraid I’ve overdone it,’ Connie said, and she patted her belly, and from the street I heard a hammer that was hitting metal somewhere,” Williams writes in the title story. It’s nearly impossible to categorize Williams’ work. She interrogates both the mundane and the metaphysical (“Could there be a speck of my original self anywhere?—that I have left behind”). In story after story, she upends what readers have grown to expect from traditional narratives—a beginning, middle, and end, to say the least—sometimes leaving us without any of those elements at all. A Williams story might be made up of a fragment of dialogue, a thought, a description, or some combination of these. But reading one after the other, something improbable occurs: The stories, in their very unpredictability, start to become predictable. You may not know where the stories will go, but you might start guessing where they won’t go.
Mysterious, gemlike, and strange, these stories end up oddly predictable by defying narrative conventions in similar ways.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781641294782
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.
During an annual beach vacation, a mother confronts her past and learns to move forward.
Her family’s annual trip to Cape Cod is always the highlight of Rocky’s year—even more so now that her children are grown and she cherishes what little time she gets with them. Rocky is deep in the throes of menopause, picking fights with her loving husband and occasionally throwing off her clothes during a hot flash, much to the chagrin of her family. She’s also dealing with her parents, who are crammed into the same small summer house (with one toilet that only occasionally spews sewage everywhere) and who are aging at an alarmingly rapid rate. Rocky’s life is full of change, from her body to her identity—she frequently flashes back to the vacations of years past, when her children were tiny. Although she’s grateful for the family she has, she mourns what she’s lost. Newman (author of the equally wonderful We All Want Impossible Things, 2022) imbues Rocky’s internal struggles with importance and gravity, all while showcasing her very funny observations about life and parenting. She examines motherhood with a raw honesty that few others manage—she remembers the hard parts, the depths of despair, panic, and anxiety that can happen with young children, and she also recounts the joy in a way that never feels saccharine. She has a gift for exploring the real, messy contradictions in human emotions. As Rocky puts it, “This may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063345164
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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