If only these characters could decide whether “to be or not to be,” but that’s a different tragedy.
A novel about a Memphis theater company envelops onstage classical tragedy within offstage domestic farce.
Like a playbill, the novel opens with a “Cast of Characters,” beginning with “The Three Main Characters” and followed by “And the People Around Them.” The three principals are Thaddeus Deerforth, general manager of the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis; Malcolm Ruark, a recently disgraced local TV news anchor–turned-thespian; and Claudette Bradley, one of the company’s principal actors. Each of them has a troubled marriage—two recently ended, and one looks increasingly shaky. Further complicating their stories, as they prepare for their newly renovated theater's grand relaunch with King Lear, are issues of alcoholism and substance abuse, aged parents with dementia, sexual impulses they find difficult to understand and control. The people around them number a few dozen, and it’s tough to keep them straight even with the cast list, but they include a couple of aging lechers—a visiting director from academe and a lead actor known from a Netflix series—who bring plenty of their own issues and have trouble adjusting to Memphis culture, and a pair of billionaire donors, the “Cosmetics Tycoons,” who are funding this attempt to put Memphis on the map of world-class theater cities. What could go wrong? The romantic entanglements, past and present, can be impossible to predict and tough to keep straight, while the dramatic production itself must please the billionaires, impress the city, and manage to keep people who can’t stand each other working together. Outwardly, some of the plot verges on slapstick, but inwardly, there is quiet desperation. “He began wanting a fight,” Bausch writes of one character at a pivotal juncture. “Something to bring it all to a head, some sort of catharsis. But he wouldn’t act on it.” So the reader also waits for some catharsis, or something to happen, to move this plot and these characters forward.
If only these characters could decide whether “to be or not to be,” but that’s a different tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780451494849
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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