Darkly entertaining yarns about people trying to bridge the gap between shabby reality and improbable dreams.
Grand visions intrude into banal lives in this sometimes-hangdog, sometimes-luminous debut story collection.
Zasada’s tales foreground mostly underachieving protagonists whose disappointments are heightened by an uneasy feeling of unfulfilled purpose. A New York deli manager eating a sandwich in Central Park has an enigmatic vision of a mountain, a river, and raging horses; a rock star who finds his life increasingly frenetic but hollow puts off his suicide plan only to accidentally overdose and fall into a coma filled with dreams of heaven and hell; a young couple whose lives are a blithe, nonmaterialistic idyll break up when the man starts to feel stirrings of ambition; a closeted gay political operative in Portland rescues a vagrant injured in a bike crash who turns out to be the golden boy he had a crush on in high school; a dismissed Pakistani government functionary who thinks of California as a paradise of honesty and nubile women gets a chance at a lucrative new berth in the bureaucracy, but only if he cooperates with sleazy bribery schemes; a middle-class man comes into a fortune but struggles to translate it into a happy or meaningful life; a professor communes with the shade of a long-dead Jewish philosopher who teaches her that death is more productive than life; an 18th-century Native American in California who has seen his world collapse with the arrival of Spanish conquerors goes in search of the mythic source of the world’s water; an American greenhorn in Australia sets out on a yacht voyage into fearsome Pacific waters and takes on a crew of chatty ghosts; and a Jewish man saved from certain death by his mother’s magical incantation spends his life wondering if his survival was mere luck or a sign of a higher destiny.
Zasada’s stories form a connected cycle, with characters and motifs popping up in several narratives in a common fictive world centered on a few resonant themes. The stories are capacious and sweeping, often taking characters from childhood to old age to fit their seemingly haphazard experiences into a larger arc. Zasada combines pitch-perfect renditions of small, dejected lives (“That night, alone, Mickey drank tequila from a shot glass and sat by a window, looking out at the sleepless street below his apartment. He felt all wrong—just all wrong”) with evocations of the cosmic sublime that they feel is looming just beyond their reach (“He lay on his back for a full hour looking up through a small opening in a stand of tall straight pines as the sky became star-filled and infinite…he was conscious of the mountain beneath his body pressing toward a secret and jagged hole leading into a greater universe”). Spanning these two registers are his characters’ clumsy but penetrating stabs at philosophizing: “As for the Incantation, it’s all just coincidence. Some old mumbo jumbo and selective observation….I don’t like the boys hearing any of that crap. Like religion, it confuses them. And it makes them think there’s like, some way out of things, when there’s not. There’s no way out of things.” By turns funny, touching, and bleakly ruminative, Zasada’s yarns captivate as their characters struggle to reconcile their vast yearnings with the meager victories that the world begrudges them.
Darkly entertaining yarns about people trying to bridge the gap between shabby reality and improbable dreams.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-88585-8
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Upper Story Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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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