Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.
“Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes.” Li expands on this premise in a collection of 11 short stories.
Revisiting the territories of grief and loss she’s explored in earlier works, Li places her protagonists in situations of reflection upon the circumstances of their bereaved lives. Mothers contemplate the deaths of children, wives recall long-estranged husbands, and women are haunted by missing friends. An infinite variety of ways to survive—or, at least, march through—devastating loss are cataloged in Li’s cool and measured litany of pain. In “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” the mother of a teen who has ended his own life opens a spreadsheet of all those she knows who have died in a literal calculation of grief. (The same mother muses upon whether life is just the antechamber for death.) The dead and missing in Li’s stories are not without voice: A woman who is the lone long-term survivor of a teenage suicide pact in which several of her friends died—detailed in “Alone”—realizes the other girls have made themselves more present in her later life through their absence. The bereaved often carry the weight of either casual or calculated misogyny along with their life burdens, and echoes of #MeToo claims underlie other injuries. The relative values of memory and forgetting are examined, too, as one woman does not “indulge” in focusing on the past (in “Hello, Goodbye”) and another muses that memory is actually nonlinear and more of a jumbled haystack of incomplete stories which can only attempt to distract from an absence (“When We Were Happy We Had Other Names”). The cumulative mass of the stories is sobering, a gorgeous almanac of the world of pain.
Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780374606374
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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
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