Another of Townsend’s shrewd, evocative, wryly humorous, occasionally didactic scenes of Mormonism and its discontents.
Countless fibs, evasions, and hypocrisies buttress the verities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in these slyly subversive stories.
Townsend’s (Gayrabian Nights, 2014, etc.) latest probe of Mormonism’s queer underbelly features upstanding families struggling to hold together strands of church dogma as they fray against reality. In “French Kissing Sister Andrews,” a teenage wiseacre hurls gibes at the anti-sex platitudes of his church youth group. In “A Name and a Blessing,” a father finds himself turning a blind eye to his transsexual son’s scandalous behavior. In “A Hall Monitor for the Celestial Kingdom,” a clueless prig’s refusal to forgive anyone’s transgressions leaves him smugly isolated. In “Lord of the Cul de Sac,” a Mormon couple appeases an irascible neighbor with baked goods, to comically disastrous effect. In “The Three Nephites Drink Eggnog,” a father hires actors to play characters from Scripture as a Christmas Eve rite—and ends up inadvertently exposing the charade, and much else, to his sardonic son. In “Burying the Fig Leaves,” a devout Mormon woman consoles herself that her sister died strong in the faith, despite evidence to the contrary. And in “The Blood Clot,” a woman convinces herself that she has a terminal illness so she can lead a gracious life. As always, Townsend’s subtly realistic prose vividly captures the counterpoint between the ordinariness of daily life and the often boring routines of religious obligation. There’s a self-consciously political note here, with much pondering of up-to-the-minute progressive issues, including the Ferguson riots, and occasional snatches of dialogue that sound like they come from a cultural studies seminar—“My gender is female. It’s only my body that’s male”—instead of a 14-year-old Mormon. Townsend seems eager to battle and caricature religious conservatives—a rancorous introduction castigates traditionalists who write dismissive reviews of his books and compares Mormon zealots to Nazis—and, in “Escape from Zion,” he paints a lurid vision of an America ruled by a Mormon theocracy. Still, especially in his quieter stories about gay Mormons weathering exile from the church, he gets under the skin of his characters to reveal their complexity and conflicts.
Another of Townsend’s shrewd, evocative, wryly humorous, occasionally didactic scenes of Mormonism and its discontents.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1634901567
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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