A witty, wide-ranging exploration of complex emotions.
Troubled men and women hit crisis points that drugs, jokes, sex, and the letter of the law can’t alleviate.
The protagonists of Bissell’s second story collection are usually having their good times spoiled by feelings or memories that keep nagging them. In “A Bridge Under Water,” two newlyweds on their honeymoon in Rome get the creeping sense their marriage was an error, culminating in an ugly scene inside a historic synagogue. The couple in “Creative Types” are spicing up their marriage by hiring an escort, but the husband is unsettled by her “Cla$$y Lady” tattoo, and she in turn is unsettled by his noticing. In “Punishment,” an ill-paid but intellectually satisfied magazine editor’s past life as an eighth grade bully reemerges when his former partner in crime pays a visit. And in “The Fifth Category,” a lawyer who helped find legal loopholes to justify torture during the Iraq War receives a potent and peculiar form of comeuppance after a high-ticket speaking engagement. Bissell is a deeply precise writer, and his sense of the emotional disorientation his characters face is literally gut-level. (“From his stomach, the staging area, his body spit his most recent meal into his intestinal coils,” he writes of the torture lawyer.) Bissell’s background in detail-oriented journalism comes in handy both in terms of language and form: “My Interview With the Avenger” is a satire of magazine profiles that doubles as a study in vigilantism. And he can deliver in a variety of milieus, from Tallinn, Estonia, where an aimless young woman embraces a fellow expat’s drug habit in “Love Story, With Cocaine,” to the set of Saturday Night Live, where the assistant to James Franco (not fully named, but obvious) runs a gauntlet of demands and mercurial personalities. The stories’ endings sometimes lack the crispness of their setups, but Bissell is trading in anxiety, not resolution.
A witty, wide-ranging exploration of complex emotions.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-524-74915-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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