Social conscience meets psychological despair in stories that show plenty of literary command.
Families fall apart and occasionally come together in this debut collection.
Each of these 10 stories features a first-person narrator, a man or a woman, gay or straight, likely in their 20s or 30s, trying to make some tenuous connections amid the confusions of modern life. Who are they, where are they, why are they? They don’t know where their jobs are going, where their lives are going, where they belong, or with whom. And they live amid the threats of climate crisis, terrorist bombs, and an expanding chasm between the haves and have-nots. “The Birds of Basra,” the opener, is one of the best and most ambitious of the stories; it imagines a model of caregiving in which the elderly and infirm are charged for each individual task, their attendants nickel-and-diming them until they either die or their funds run out. The young narrator, a female caregiver, has a partner who is more socially aware and who tells her, “You rob elderly people.” Yes she does, but the narrator also feels something for the woman she watches. The money runs out, and the job will as well, but the story doesn’t really resolve itself. These stories rarely do—they start in the middle of something and end somewhere else in the middle, with the reader learning something more about the narrator and the others than perhaps these characters know about themselves. There is plenty of disease and death and babies, wanted or not. In “Phosphorous,” a man has something of a psychotic breakdown and risks criminal charges to procure a baby after his wife dies in childbirth. In “The Paragon of Animals,” an unanticipated pregnancy leads to complications that a married couple had assumed they would never face. The closing “Tennessee” finds the narrator’s institutionalized mother going crazier while his wife is about to give birth.
Social conscience meets psychological despair in stories that show plenty of literary command.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9798885740128
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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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