An engrossing collection of tales about grace—and disgrace—under pressure.
Competitive runners face triumphs, defeats, bitter rivalries and unlikely affections in these well-crafted short stories.
Elliott, a former Kansas University runner and author of The Competitive Edge: Mental Preparation for Distance Running(1984), zeroes in on the subculture of high school, collegiate, and professional runners to probe the human psyche under stress. A teen track phenom is found to have two hearts that prompt her toward light or darkness; a University of Oregon runner remembers his deceased teammate, the legendary real-life star Steve Prefontaine, as a narcissistic jerk rather than the sports martyr he became after a fatal car crash; an aching college runner gets an excruciatingly painful massage from a witchy physical therapist; a punked-out professional marathoner fights a duel of head games and physical assaults against her seemingly picture-perfect opponent, “the Bitch”; a 10-year-old enters a transcontinental race that shows her a panorama of America both beautiful and corrupt; a head coach boosts his assistants’ morale during a losing season by playing Russian roulette with a nail gun; a middle-aged accountant ponders the path his life might have taken had he run the mile 1.2 seconds faster. Elliott’s yarns feature piquant characters and lively, twisty plots that go down to the wire; they paint vivid portraits of the runner’s life, with its grueling training regimens, mystical coaching mantras—“Let your plans be dark...and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt”—and Machiavellian ploys (“I watch her right foot coming back, her back-kick, and I time it so that my left foot nicks her right, pushing her foot inward so it tangles with her left foot, causing her to trip….It always looks like an accident”). Elliott’s supple prose registers the beauty of athleticism—“He had a stride that was crafted by angels….Like those cheetahs on TV—from a trot to a blur in one second”—amid gritty, sharply observed settings (“I see interesting stuff on the roads…a dead rattlesnake smashed flat, a red bike missing a wheel, a roll of dollar bills, a stuffed crocodile, a large pink bra, a box of bullets, some puke that crows were eating, a license plate from Alaska, and a bracelet that said Briana on it”). The result is a finely wrought, resonant fictive world.
An engrossing collection of tales about grace—and disgrace—under pressure.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 298
Publisher: RichElliottProductions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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