Winterson somehow manages to make ghosts boring.
Speculative stories and essays about what comes after death—and after reality as we understand it now.
Winterson’s last novel, Frankisstein (2019), demonstrated that she has a sincere appreciation for horror and science fiction and understands how these fantastic genres create a space in which we can ask big questions. In 12 Bytes (2021), she shared her thoughts about how technology, from Ada Lovelace’s protean computer programs to Artificial General Intelligence, changes not just how we experience the world but also how we comprehend ourselves. In this collection, she presents modern ghost stories alongside essays about what ghosts have meant to us historically and how they might manifest in a post-human future. Regrettably, it feels like a step backward for her, though the essays might be compelling to readers who have never given much thought to the concept of an afterlife or technological change. “Religion can be considered as humankind’s first disruptive start-up—what’s being disrupted is death” is a creaky attempt to apply contemporary jargon to prehistory, followed by a lot of spurious theology. But even if we assume that most readers are here for the stories, this collection has very little to offer anyone familiar with the last 200 years of ghost stories written in English. Winterson adds flourishes like virtual reality gear, and in one story, she suggests that we might live on as digital avatars. Even as she’s riffing on a long tradition of spooky tales, she writes as if she doesn’t understand how they work and why they endure. For one thing, most of these stories seem to lack purpose. Even though Winterson’s subjects are life and death, there seldom seems to be much at stake here. More significant, though, is that the menacing specter who appears in “A Fur Coat” and “Boots” is the only truly frightening phenomenon in the whole book. There are, however, some poetically chilling lines here and there, such as, “Maybe that’s what haunting is: time trapped in the wrong place.”
Winterson somehow manages to make ghosts boring.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780802161512
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
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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