The whodunit twists are fun, at least for a while; the heavy-handed treatment of motherhood not so much.
Women don’t stand a chance in Audrain’s pessimistic suspense novel concerning a child’s mysterious fall from his bedroom window.
Ten-year-old Xavier lies in a coma from which he may not recover. His mother, Whitney, sits silently distraught by his hospital bedside. Months earlier, at a garden party Whitney hosted for her neighbors, guests overheard her berating Xavier through the same open window he’s fallen from. Emergency room doctor Rebecca lives across the street, in a gentrified neighborhood of an unnamed city, and was at that party with her husband. Now Rebecca can’t help asking herself the obvious question: Was it an accident, or did Xavier jump, or was Whitney somehow responsible? As other women from the block come into focus, it becomes clear that Whitney is not the only woman with guilty secrets. (Forget the men, who are given no inner lives.) This is Audrain’s second novel about troubled children and their troubled mothers, following The Push (2021). These mothers, whom childless Rebecca envies—after multiple failures she is desperately, secretly trying again to get pregnant—are all miserable, although their situations vary. Devoting herself to her daughter, who happened to bully Xavier at school the day he fell, Whitney’s friend Blair has given up her career and now feels trapped in a comatose marriage to a man she doesn’t like, yet she panics when she suspects he may be cheating on her. Elderly Mara quietly nurses private anguish over the death of her emotionally delicate son and silently hates her husband for being cruel to him. As the novel’s central force, Whitney is problematic. Not because she is unlikable, has anger issues, or even because she might have hurt her child, but because she is a caricature of the striving careerist with no redeeming characteristics, a bad mother, bad friend, bad wife, serial adulterer, and liar with a pathological lack of empathy.
The whodunit twists are fun, at least for a while; the heavy-handed treatment of motherhood not so much.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781984881694
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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