Addictively engaging, profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master.
McFarlane contemplates the ripple effects of violent crime in 12 intricately layered stories based on an actual string of serial killings in 1990s Australia.
The diverse stories travel across decades and continents. The criminal investigation never becomes the central plot; the killer himself, here called Paul Biga, remains offstage while his victims appear only in fleeting mentions or glimpses. The protagonists’ connections to the crimes range from close to barely tangential. Timing matters, one story traveling back to 1950, when Biga’s future mother is 8 years old, another heading forward to a 2028 true-crime podcast. The opening story introduces the crimes’ physical reality, following a reluctant visitor to the forest where Biga’s victims had been found years earlier and where a sense of evil, and sexual, possibility still pervades. In 2003, an elderly woman’s lingering shame over her adolescent love for another girl resonates more powerfully than her more recent memories of Biga as her neighbor. Secret sexuality permeates characters’ lives, as does paranoia. Readers share a young woman’s growing fear in 1996 as she follows news reports that reveal a disquieting number of traits her boyfriend shares with an unidentified killer on the lam. Is it protective or paranoid maternal instinct pushing another woman to warn her younger sister against marrying a vaguely creepy boyfriend a decade earlier, in 1986? McFarlane uses the adventures of British schoolgirls in 1995 Rome to create misleading fear and tension before revealing a character who symbolizes resilience in the book. The travails of a politician unfortunately named Biga running for office four days after Paul Biga’s arrest offers discomforting comic relief. Given the large role media influence plays throughout, inevitably a television series about Biga shows up in 2024. So does Covid-19 in 2020, putting into perspective a single serial killer’s insignificance in a world reeling with global crises. However entertaining, McFarlane’s stories continually remind readers that behind true-crime stories’ escapist pleasure exist real death and human pain.
Addictively engaging, profoundly serious fiction from an underappreciated master.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780374606268
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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