A Lucky Jim for the millennial woman; blistering, darkly comic, and splendidly written.
The protagonist of Smallwood’s debut novel endures the humiliations of life as a contingent faculty member.
As the novel opens, Dorothy is on the toilet. She's in the midst of a miscarriage, and she has chosen to undergo this outside a hospital setting. As weeks go by, she tracks her continued bleeding, harboring this personal secret as she contends with her precarious position as a nontenured humanities Ph.D. She muses about cultural representations of the apocalypse—her current research interest—as she endures her own small apocalypse, and though she thinks and reads and writes ad nauseum about the global version, she suffers her own in silence, examining her bodily processes with mild interest. She even keeps her miscarriage from her two therapists—one of whom she has enlisted to help her work on her relationship with the other. At an academic conference in Las Vegas, she navigates the awkwardness of relationships within academia, whether it be with the adviser she will gladly abase herself to impress, a cohort member she once slept with, or a friendship with a strong undercurrent of competitiveness and jealousy. The novel’s satirical edge—unflinching but never mean—lies in the stark contrast between the lofty ideas that constitute Dorothy’s day-to-day professional existence and the private humiliations of the body, of being human, that she keeps to herself. She approaches every experience and emotion with all the hyperactive wit and self-reflexivity of a professional overthinker. Dorothy’s interiority can be an exhausting place to reside, making the reading experience a bit claustrophobic at times—but that’s precisely the point. Smallwood’s talent for psychological acuity shines through here as she paints an achingly familiar portrait of someone who spends too much time in her own mind. All of this is buoyed by Smallwood’s luminous prose, which heralds the arrival of a real talent.
A Lucky Jim for the millennial woman; blistering, darkly comic, and splendidly written.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-22989-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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