A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.
A collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories provide electrifying jolts to the very notion of “Black Experience.”
Allen is both a poet and novelist whose prose reverberates with colorful imagery and crystalline lyricism. In his new story collection, he shows greater assurance with plotting and characterization, which only bolsters his agile imagination. In a few pages at a time, Allen can endow even the ghosts of dead children, as in “Four Girls,” with vibrant, combustible, and poignant personalities. In similar fashion, he can persuasively envision real-life personages from the recent past, as in “Heads,” which has rock god Jimi Hendrix hanging out with British painter Francis Bacon somewhere around the disquieting hinge of the 1960s and ’70s, each man reaching for his own transcendence through distortions of time and space. And speaking of space: In “Orbits,” Allen reimagines the near conclusion of Muhammad Ali’s boxing career on a planet Earth with émigrés from the moon helping him prepare for his 1980 bout against Larry Holmes. Other prominent Black men include Jack Johnson, the Ali of his era, who’s tearing through Australia (“Fat Time”), and Miles Davis, gloomily huddled in his Manhattan apartment (“Pinocchio”). Not all of Allen’s characters are famous; “Big Ugly Baby” chronicles the yearslong erotic intimacies between two at-risk teen boys, while in “Fornication Camp,” couples gather at an Illinois religious retreat in a villa moved from Italy and reconstructed piece by piece by Abraham Lincoln. The range of subject matter and the ingenuity of the storylines draw readers in, but it’s Allen’s intricately poetic language that keeps them there, as when he describes Hendrix noodling on his guitar and how he “knows how to worry chords into the black shape of time. Knows how to anchor weight on a string and sink a barbed note into the muddy depths below, then bend that string and yank up a struggling catfish.” The whole collection hums and throbs with such startling craft.
A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781644452394
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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