A complex, sometimes confusing work by a talented writer.
This ambitious debut covers 15 months of a teenage boy’s prep school yearnings and traumas.
The novel’s Kennedy School is a costly coed facility modeled on Lawrenceville, also in New Jersey, from which Jenkins graduated in 2011. His narrator is a Kennedy alumnus who decides to trace the rise and fall 10 years earlier of Foster Dade, who became a school legend mainly for his expulsion for dealing Adderall and other stimulating “study drugs.” Foster is a smart, sensitive kid who’s having panic attacks about not fitting in at Kennedy. He starts selling drugs, initially prescribed by his therapist, to classmates seeking to improve their academic and athletic performance or just to supplement the buzz they usually get from booze and cocaine. (Yes, they’re only 15 and 16, but make allowances for big allowances.) Eventually he acquires a major supplier and customers on 17 campuses. He also finds friendship and affection, but several epic binges reveal a darker side of coolness, hookups, and chemically induced euphoria. Jenkins weaves through his disjointed narrative a finely observed account of teen angst and awkward sex in an academically demanding environment marked by privilege and cliques and the cruelty they breed. The disjointedness stems from a pretense of reportage set up in the alumnus narrator’s almost comically overwritten preface (“the loose nebula of half-truths has unfurled under the myth-making tendencies of time”). His intrusive commentary often interrupts the story as he explains how he knows what he knows, expanding on interviews, citing medical records. Then there are the textual jolts of age-appropriate, social media–savvy elements: Facebook threads, iChats, phone texts, iTunes playlists, and Foster’s online diary. It’s possible that Jenkins—who refers several times to coverage by Vanity Fair and other media—is aiming for a pastiche of the exposés such periodicals trot out in the wake of an eminent school’s scandal. If so, his novel suggests that fiction has a better chance of getting at more of the truth.
A complex, sometimes confusing work by a talented writer.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781419764769
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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