An affecting, experimental tale of race and reinvention.
A Black couple launches an ambitious plan to reinvent society in this potent allegory.
Bump’s second novel—following Everywhere You Don’t Belong (2020)—centers on a pair of young academics, Rio and Gibraltar, whose plans as writers, thinkers, and influencers are suddenly disrupted when their infant daughter dies. Taking a cue from her grandfather’s stories of his upbringing in an idyllic, remote Florida town, Rio imagines creating a similar utopia in an unlikely locale: under a restaurant near their western Massachusetts home. In short order she finds a wealthy benefactor to fund what they’ve dubbed the New Naturals. As she and Gibraltar get to work, the narrative alternates among various characters who find themselves headed toward the commune, including Sojourner, a journalist; Bounce, a one-time star college soccer player who’s hit the skids; and Buchanan and Elting, two homeless men. “All she wanted was a place for people to live and love and hide,” Rio thinks. “Was that too much? Was that impossible?” Maybe so, Bump suggests. Bump’s study of race and marginalization is built more on brief character sketches than deep-grain realism, which makes for some gorgeous and lyrical writing, especially around grief; dialogue-heavy scenes with Buchanan and Elting have a darkly comic tinge that recalls Waiting for Godot. (There are echoes throughout of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout as well.) Inevitably, the best-laid plans of the New Naturals come under attack, which opens up questions of what structures make for an equitable society, and whether our divisions are hard-wired. But Bump doesn’t speak over his characters, letting their own struggles and ambiguous destinies speak to the depth of the challenge.
An affecting, experimental tale of race and reinvention.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781616208806
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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