Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
An Orthodox Jewish soap opera, for mature audiences only.
Like every other wife in her Southern California community, Rina Kirsch is “the invisible hero of the relentless Jewish calendar,” and Emerson’s debut gives a dire, almost furious sense of the cleaning, cooking, hosting, and gift giving this entails. Usually when you read pages and pages about food and cooking, it makes you hungry, but here the long lists of ingredients and dishes evoke not pleasure but the repetitive, draining female labor involved in their procurement and production. The pleasure center of Emerson’s debut is not food but sex, but even there the pleasure sometimes mingles with revulsion. As the novel opens in June 2011, the men in Rina’s husband’s circle have decided to permit themselves an evening of wife swapping: “It’s a thing that people do. It helps marriages last.” The swap is described in the graphic terms that are a consistent feature of this intensely carnal novel; think A Sport and a Pastime for Haredi Jews, and get ready for sentences like this: “Sometimes at home he would beat off while thinking about beating off at class to his mikveh fantasies.” In any case, being “traded” for an evening to another man is for Rina an indelible, unforgivable betrayal. Nine months later, she begins an affair with a rabbi and soon after she meets Will Ochoa, the teacher of an evening painting class her husband suggests she take. Rina and Will quickly realize that what is happening between them is real love, the kind that requires you to read Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With the Blue Guitar” out loud during intercourse, the kind that can cause a complete rupture with life as you know it. The plot continues to unfold at a breakneck pace, including vehicular trauma, unexpected pregnancy, religious conversion, life-threatening illness, and more, as the brute force and inexorable rhythms of orthodoxy thrum continually in the background.
Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096530
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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
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