An imperfect but often arresting fiction collection.
A volume of literary novellas and short stories ponders death and God.
Heaven isn’t far away in this collection—but its proximity isn’t necessarily a good thing. The house of the title novella is home to the Rosenweigs, Polish Jews fresh from Hitler’s Europe, who seek to build a new life for themselves in upstate New York. The novella takes its name from the adjacent seven-story ramp used by workers at the local General Electric plant. The family’s youngest daughter, Davora, wants nothing more than to break out of the rigid future prescribed for her by her parents—even as strange religious visions cause her to question her sanity. A second novella, A Factotum in the Land of Palms, follows a former Florida real estate agent with loose morals who loses his job when his employer is investigated for human trafficking. The ex-agent moves to California looking to start over. There, he is thrown for a loop by the many disparate characters and philosophical traditions he encounters in and around Los Angeles. The accompanying short stories deal with aging and loss: A man in his 70s contemplating his life and legacy sees a phantom coffin on his lawn; a husband, whose health-nut wife just left him, stages a condiment-heavy feast for one. Morganstern’s prose is sharp and surprising. He’s able to capture his characters’ humanity with a few revealing descriptions, as here in A Factotum in the Land of Palms: “I stared at him, the guy I knew in college. The angle man as he was known because he was the self-proclaimed master at zeroing in on what benefited himself the most at any given moment. At least he did when he wasn’t drunk and hurling partially digested pizza and beer on the monuments in the quad.” The novellas have impressively expansive worlds, but both drag a bit, especially in comparison to the three short stories. Even so, the pieces are in conversation with one another, and the book works as a thoughtful, evolving meditation on grief and acceptance.
An imperfect but often arresting fiction collection.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73374-647-2
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Recital Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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