This novel awes on the sentence level but ultimately bludgeons the reader with the brutality of its larger vision.
A grim meditation on the purpose of survival.
In the opening scene of Williams’ debut novel, youngest child Agathe watches as her father, who is also her uncle, wheels her older sister—the languageless, legless Dolores—into the forest, where he will leave her as a fertility offering to a perhaps apocryphal group their mother believes lives on the other side of ruined Prague. Agathe thinks that Dolores has been chosen for this abandonment due to “the blunt promise of her anatomy: the slack mouth and the round pig eyes; the antiquated languor of her fat white hands.” The cruelty of these perceptions herald the tone used throughout toward the book’s characters, who scrabble to survive in the aftermath of a holocaust which left the Matriarch and her brother as the only viable survivors. Rather than give in to the lethargy of despair, the Matriarch set herself the task of repopulating the denuded Earth, but though the family does survive and even thrive after a fashion, the lack of diversity in the gene pool has a predictable effect. When Dolores crawls back from the forest alone, neither bride nor sacrifice, the Matriarch’s uncharacteristic fallibility destabilizes the precarious balance between the older generation and the younger children who, in their violent strangeness, seem the true inheritors of this new Earth. Williams compiles her images in breathless, smothering drifts that mimic both the oppressive landscape and the gauzy unreliability of the main characters’ perceptions with virtuosic intensity. But while Williams’ linguistic project is akin to the early work of Cormac McCarthy, who mines similar themes with a similar sense of claustrophobic animality, her more absurdist touches (including a TV show featuring Thomas Aquinas and stories within the story that echo both pop culture and the Arabian Nights) guide the novel. This is unfortunate in a book that insists so fervently on the fetishization of its main characters’ disabilities. The result shifts an already deeply challenging book from a meditation on cruelty to an enactment of the same cruelty Williams set out with the intent to explore, but not, the reader has to believe, to indulge.
This novel awes on the sentence level but ultimately bludgeons the reader with the brutality of its larger vision.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0508-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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