A sensitive story that’s admirably free of sentimentality.
In Elzinga’s novel, an ailing construction surveyor takes a job rife with complications and wrestles with loneliness and his looming mortality.
Forty-something Tom Bishop loves his job working as a surveyor for Midwest Stable Platforms, a company that builds the foundations for wind turbines, “those tall spindly brigades of white acrobats you’ve seen cartwheeling across the landscape of rural America.” Divorced for nearly 20 years—his marriage to Paige only lasted three—he finds solace in his “nomadic lifestyle,” traveling wherever the home office sends him, a lonesomeness that Elzinga renders unsentimentally but poignantly. His current job is in Pigeon Falls, a small, friendly village in Wisconsin that affords its visitors “absolute quiet” during its sleepy evenings. However, the client, Burnell Sandberg, is not peaceful; in fact, he’s a “a sad man with an appetite for creating conflict when none is necessary.” He wants the foundations for two turbines to be built before the freeze arrives—a very challenging task for Tom that isn’t made any easier by Burnell’s truculence. However, the compensation is excellent, and the hard work distracts Tom from anxieties about the pending results of some medical tests. He suffers from terrible abdominal pain and suspects they’re caused by something life-threatening—a terrifying prospect for a man without a family to offer him comfort. Meanwhile, a young restaurant server, Candace Cane, who reminds Tom of Paige, is being physically abused by her husband; one of Tom’s crewmates, Eddie, a hardworking teenager, begins a friendship with her that promises to bloom into more—a frightening and complex predicament, delicately conveyed by the author. There’s a moving strain of melancholy that runs through the entire book, especially in the tension between hope and resignation. The thoughtful Candace, who’s taking philosophy classes, tries to balance the two in her own understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche’s amor fati—one must learn to love one’s destiny, whatever it is. Overall, this is a deeply engrossing, if heartbreaking, tale that impressively refuses to succumb to melodrama.
A sensitive story that’s admirably free of sentimentality.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781952526213
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Waters Edge Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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