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THE SEARCH FOR CIRCE

Name: THE SEARCH FOR CIRCE
Author: Chris Metteer

by Chris Metteer ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A flashy but jumbled tale about a man and his novel.

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A hubristic writer sets off on a dangerous course with forces much greater than himself in this metafictional thriller.

Denver, 2021. Sean McNabb firmly believes this is the greatest day of his life. Chicago publisher Octagon sends the marketing consultant and aspiring author a plane ticket. Sean is certain that this is a sign that Octagon has accepted his book, The Cursed Man. The novel follows the life and times of Darrington Circe, a hyperdisciplined yet anonymous man who begins to see phantom crosshairs appear on the bodies of people who are about to die in various accidental ways. Sean travels to Chicago with a confidence that borders on egotism: “My novel will sell well in the heartland. I know the Midwest, and I know my novel. The big advance is understandable, as are the royalties that will come cascading in, sweetening my world with caviar…and young women with supple breasts to die for.” But when he arrives, he realizes he has been summoned for a different reason. He is one of 16 novelists who submitted manuscripts to Octagon that contained the same passage word for word: a paragraphlong description of an apocalyptic landscape. All 16 have been summoned to Chicago to get to the bottom of the common paragraph, and though they are not able to, Sean leaves more than a little intrigued. He takes with him the manuscript of one of his fellow rejected novelists, a dying woman who assures him her SF tale is a true vision of the future. She instructs him to “read it and tell the truth contained in here.” In alternating chapters, Sean and his fictional alter ego investigate their respective mysteries that nevertheless seem to lead to the same place: an endgame scenario that has been a lifetime in the making. Metteer’s (One Summer Season, 2016) prose deftly replicates the methodical, if slightly unreliable, voice of his protagonist, a man who is dependably precise and dramatic: “I make the shower as hot as I can stand it. I let the warmth melt away whatever possessed me. It’s my slow resurrection. The shower is followed by a shave, a 10-minute ordeal as the razor rakes away the last sign of my descent into mental hell.” But Sean is a patently off-putting narrator: a racist, misogynist, and narcissist consumed with getting even with those who have doubted him—his father, Big Mike, most of all—and who keeps a detailed diary of his sexual conquests. While the author attempts to redeem Sean as time goes on, it proves to be an impossible task. Metteer sets up a number of intriguing mysteries, particularly in the first 50 pages. Unfortunately, the toggling between Sean’s adventures and those of his fictional creation becomes more tedious than elucidating. One can imagine the Chuck Palahniuk–style mind-bender that the author was envisioning, but the pieces here just don’t quite come together, and the intended message becomes increasingly muddled.

A flashy but jumbled tale about a man and his novel.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: BookBaby

Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.