An engrossing and unsettling tale of self-mythology and self-delusion.
A man’s story of his time in China may not be what it seems in this literary novel.
Cole Chen spends a year in Hunan Province, where his American friends provide him with a job and an apartment in the bustling city of Changsha. “You’d set two goals for yourself that year,” he narrates to himself, “find a girlfriend and write a book (your first time attempting either). You’d had plenty of hookups in school but never really made it much further than that….What was the saying? ‘Sow your wild oats.’ ” He meets a woman named Harmony, a painter who also turns out to be a con artist. The two begin an affair, though one fated to end abruptly. Back in San Francisco after his year abroad, Cole is editing his memoir while overstaying his welcome on his brother Abraham’s couch. Rumors circulate about Cole making women “feel weird,” and Abraham suspects something happened in Changsha. As the two timelines unfold side by side—Cole in China from his own perspective and Cole in America from the viewpoints of those around him—a contradictory narrative emerges. The story that Cole tells about himself may not be the whole truth, especially given the writerly flourishes of his memoir. But will the rest of the tale come to light? Whether aligned with Cole or someone else, Carroll’s prose is exact and cutting, as here where Abraham ponders the silences in his brother’s tale: “It was clear that something had happened in Changsha. You would never know it, though, given the way he spoke. It was all adventure this and freedom that, roses and green fields, when the reality of the situation was something closer to the fact that he had hit rock bottom.” This is one of those novels of which the less said, the better. As readers realize just what the author is doing, the work morphs from a bookish-man-abroad tale into something more thrilling. It’s a story of a subtler sort of toxic masculinity, one that feels timely and yet organic. From concept to execution, Carroll delivers.
An engrossing and unsettling tale of self-mythology and self-delusion.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78869-251-9
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Camphor Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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