A bleary-eyed ramble through generational grief, inherited hurt, and the collateral damage that nobody expects.
An alcoholic writer who recently returned to Mexico City grapples with despair in the wake of loss.
Skipping along on many of the same thematic touchstones as Morrison’s debut novel, Myth of Pterygium (2022), this follow-up marinates in its literary navel-gazing while simultaneously amplifying its pedestrian horrors. This weird dissonance can distract from the genuinely moving human suffering. Our narrator (mostly) is Aureliano Más, a 30-something writing student who has come back from New York City at the behest of his Aunt Rose, an influential novelist who has used her influence to secure him a writing fellowship and a mentor. When we meet him, he’s daydreaming about day drinking with his writing pal Chris at their old Brooklyn watering hole, but reality soon sinks in. There are reasons behind Aureliano’s misery, but they’re doled out in such fragments and delivered with such emotional gravitas that their actual impact on the page seems diminished. He claims a deep desire to write the novel that obliterates magical realism from the Mexican canon, but the defining fact of Aureliano’s life is his deepening alcoholism. There’s some humor here—Chris’s cleareyed dissections of his output being one, while Aureliano’s award is named the Under the Volcano Fellowship, nodding to Malcolm Lowry’s mezcal-soaked tragedy. Mostly it comes from a place of terrible pain, though, as Aureliano tries to reconcile the absence of his mother, long since disappeared, with literary balms. Between blackouts, we also get a large chunk of Rose’s failed novel about her early life with Aureliano’s mother, an unapologetic confession from his father, and the prototypical absence of resolution. One might think that sudden violence, two earthquakes, and the ravages of drink would breathe some much-needed life into the tale, but alas, no. We leave our man in much the same place we found him—searching for answers that never come.
A bleary-eyed ramble through generational grief, inherited hurt, and the collateral damage that nobody expects.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781953387400
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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