An intriguing idea for magical realism in Harlem delivers too little of either.
A first novel with fertility on its mind.
The book opens in 1998 with a dire prediction for the luckless and pregnant Laila, a brownstone-dwelling member of the Harlem bourgeoisie. Her dismal history near ordains it: “Some of the fetuses grew, saw the dents of their past siblings in her womb, and joined them in the ether.” Laila will end up having a book-length conversation with these spirits after she bloodily and publicly loses this pregnancy, then her mind. Her architect husband skulks away. Laila blames the Melancons, a notorious family of women up from Louisiana way. They refused to sell her a piece of caul, the amniotic membrane that encloses a gestating fetus. (Folk medicine links the caul to healing and protection.) The Melancons know how to fuse these membranes to their newborns’ bodies and cut away chunks as the child grows, always for a hefty price—mostly for White people. As the family line sputters, the Melancons luck into the clandestine adoption of a serene infant with a perfect, intact caul. The child's teenage mother, Amara, names her Hallow and hands her off to an intermediary, eyes instead on her path through Columbia and Yale. The twist arrives two decades later as Amara, now a Manhattan assistant district attorney, seeks to prosecute the reviled and grasping Melancons only to meet her doppelgänger, a grown Hallow. Cultural critic and essayist Jerkins, author of This Will Be My Undoing (2018), is drawn to questions of gender, family, identity, race, and belonging. The trouble lies in her leap to fiction. This novel sinks under the weight of clunky melodrama, a river of tears, an awkward bloom of adverbs, and a plot so far-fetched that interior logic collapses. Readers keen for the indelible links among Black generations would do better with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's The Revisioners (2019) or any of Toni Morrison's novels.
An intriguing idea for magical realism in Harlem delivers too little of either.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-287308-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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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