Bighearted stories of domestic discord by a writer with a cleareyed view of Alaska's romance and hardscrabble realism.
Eight gritty, harrowing stories of bravery and bluster set in the wilds of Alaska.
The women in this absorbing debut collection are larger than life, perhaps because this is what the harsh Alaska landscape demands. Dutch, the narrator of “Howl Palace” (selected for The Best American Short Stories), is selling her house after a string of unsuccessful marriages. Plucky and tough, she installs herself in the mysterious “wolf room” during the open house, and the devastating reasons for her resourcefulness come into sharper focus. In “High Jinks,” Jamie and Katrina, just tweens, have to fend for themselves on a father-daughter float trip after both their dads fail them in emotional and material ways. The 73-page “Alcan, an Oral History” follows a single mother and her two children and two women, friends and recent college grads, both groups headed overland to Alaska, and how their lives are forever altered when their paths converge. The fabled frontier is often depicted as a redemptive space, but Newman’s characters can’t outrun their problems. In “Slide and Glide,” a standout, a father takes his family on an epic ski trip to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, hoping to rekindle his marriage only to realize how powerless he is. That’s also true for Genevieve, a rebellious heiress who discovers that early-20th-century Alaska is every bit as socially restrictive as Milwaukee. These stories are rich with wit and wisdom, showing us that love, marriage, and family are always bigger and more perilous adventures than backcountry trips. “Was this marriage,” a newlywed wonders after witnessing his wife lusting after another man, “how well the worst in you worked with the worst in the other person?”
Bighearted stories of domestic discord by a writer with a cleareyed view of Alaska's romance and hardscrabble realism.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982180-30-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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
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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