Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.
A half-dozen loosely interconnected stories chronicle life in Charlottesville in the grip of Covid.
Beattie taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and her familiarity with the town surrounding it shows in the references to the streets, shops, and local landmarks through which her anxious characters wander—masked or social distancing in some stories, as the collection moves from the early days of the lockdown through the turmoil over the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. The decision to remove the statue and rename the park Market Street Park prompted the 2017 Unite the Right rally that ended with the death of a counterprotestor. Beattie’s protagonists are middle-class, liberal people appalled by the rally but ambivalent about “Lee’s visage [serving] as a magnet for all that was wrong with race relations, the past, the present, the future.” They are also preoccupied with personal issues. The woman living with her fiance’s father during lockdown (“Pegasus”) wonders how committed her absent lover is and worries about the father’s failing memory. He’s not the only one getting lost in familiar places; the confusion of several elderly characters serves as a metaphor for the larger bewilderment of people who once had a comfortable, secure existence and now feel adrift in an angry world. Of course, as memories unfold in “In the Great Southern Tradition,” “Alice Ott,” and “Monica, Headed Home,” we see that family relations, marriages, and friendships have always had tensions, but the furious outbursts in “Pegasus” and “Nearby” seem fueled by outside forces as well. Beattie allows her characters to speak for themselves as they grapple with old problems and the new normal. Their underlying malaise becomes explicit in the collection’s closing story, “The Bubble,” set in a nursing home housing several characters we have met previously. Charlottesville was once envied as existing in a bubble, thinks the facility’s head nurse, “but in Lee Park, that bubble had popped—as had her own protective bubble.”
Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781668013656
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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