Stories that capture both the magic and disappointment of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s lives.
Raffetto’s collection of stories is haunted by one of American literature’s most glamorous and tragic couples.
The romantic but troubled relationship between the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda permeates all three of these collected stories to some degree. From beyond the grave, Scott Fitzgerald narrates “Young Scott and Zelda” (“I died at the peak of my writing powers”), commemorating a time when his youthful confidence was boundless despite obstacles (Scott’s mother disapproves of his novel writing, preferring him to pen ads, and editor Maxwell Perkins doubts that Scott’s book will sell many copies). Zelda, ambitious herself, doesn’t want to marry. Yet, suddenly, life becomes a fairytale—Scott’s novel is a best-seller, and Zelda agrees to wed. In “Three A.M.,” Scott no longer narrates, and the couple’s lives sour. Scott and Zelda throw wild parties, flirt with others, and accumulate debts. Scott is often a mean drunk, while Zelda develops mental health issues that lead to her hospitalization. “Kristen B.,” the last story, is only peripherally about the Fitzgeralds. A young woman, Kristin, shows her Scott and Zelda screenplay to a producer who sexually assaults her. Emotionally scarred, Kristen begins an intense relationship with Holden, a sensitive ex-baseball player with a violent family history. Well-chosen vignettes from the Fitzgeralds’ lives fill the first two stories, such as Scott callously kicking a tray out of the hands of a woman selling food and Zelda’s scorn at Scott’s flinching when he dives into water. But in “Three A.M.,” the narrator’s intrusive opinions weaken the story; readers are told it’s laughable to imagine Scott and Ernest Hemingway as lovers, and that Zelda would probably have left Scott “if their story had taken place sixty years in the future.” “Kristen B.” is the strongest of the three stories, capturing the flavor of the Fitzgeralds in modern times. Like Zelda and Scott, Kristen and Holden are damaged, unable to assimilate into the practical world of 9-to-5 jobs and sedate married life. Unlike the Fitzgeralds, Kristen and Holden move beyond trauma (albeit not in an ideal manner) and end on a hopeful note.
Stories that capture both the magic and disappointment of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s lives.Pub Date: April 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780990614982
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Noovella.com
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.
A story of friendship, technology, oceans, and a small island.
Powers juggled nine lead characters in The Overstory (2018), his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Here he wrangles just four, but the result is almost as complicated. Two nerdish boys, Rafi Young and Todd Keane, bond in high school over chess and Go. In college, Rafi falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Hawaii-born Navy brat whose mother is Tahitian. The men fall out shortly after brainstorming over Todd’s idea for a computer game called Playground. This strand of the novel is told in retrospect by Todd at age 57, addressing an unidentified “you,” after he receives a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies; he’s an unreliable narrator in more than one way. Interspersed are scenes in later years on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, scarred by phosphate mining and down to a population of 82, including Rafi and Ina and the novel’s fourth lead, an elderly Canadian scuba diver named Evelyne Beaulieu. Her lifelong love of the diversity and preciousness of aquatic life provides the book’s other narrative strand and its environmental theme. Through Todd, Powers sketches the computer and social media revolutions, from early coding to gaming to AI. The counterpoint to this high-tech history is Makatea, a paradise lost to industrial mining that decades later must decide whether to accept a consortium’s lucrative proposal to use the island to build floating autonomous cities. This is a challenging novel, fragmented but compelling, with fine writing on friendship and its loss and on the awe and delight the ocean inspires. Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys’ competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers.
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781324086031
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
