A book that’s sometimes formulaic but alluring in its strangeness.
A debut collection of short stories that examine love and death with flashes of dark wit.
“Pizza Monks,” the first of the 14 stories in this book, has an intriguing strangeness. Written in the first person, it tells of a pizza shop worker who, when about to close up, is approached by two Buddhist monks who request 20 pizzas. The pizzas are a favorite of a member of their brotherhood who plans to set himself on fire at sunrise. That storyline helps to set up a collection in which the motif of fire is prominent throughout: In “Smoke,” a man agrees to torch his brother’s house as part of an insurance scam, and “A Lesson in Fire” describes a girlfriend’s father inexplicably self-combusting. Other stories tell of a man who learns that his father enjoys wearing women’s lingerie, a goat discovered in the bathroom at a McDonald’s, and a salesman who falls in love with the word “languid.” Augello’s writing is richly textured. In the disturbingly dark “Call Me Your Unbroken,” the conception, pregnancy, and birth of a daughter all happen over the course of one night. The author’s words are loaded with suspense: “She was naked, her body slender and taut, her hips small again, as if she’d never given birth. She held the baby at her breast as she took a step, then another, toward the edge of the balcony.” On other occasions, Augello employs a fiendishly macabre wit. Describing the recently self-combusted father, he writes: “We tried to put out the flames with glasses of water and little cups of coffee, but it just didn’t work.” Almost every story relies on a hook—an uncanny occurrence—to draw the reader in. Although the subject matter of the stories varies, the approach becomes predictably familiar and starts to feel programmatic toward the end of the collection. That said, this is a promising debut indicative of a wild imagination and a burgeoning talent.
A book that’s sometimes formulaic but alluring in its strangeness.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-943900-41-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Duck Lake Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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