The author’s first collection of shorter fiction in more than a decade underscores his reputation as a contemporary master.
A superbly crafted and deeply moving collection of fiction, with a provocative back story.
The Irish-born, New York–based McCann (who won the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin) here offers four pieces of fiction that focus on the process of writing and the interplay between art and its inspiration. As he writes in a concluding Author’s Note, "Every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical. For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.” He provides literary framing with the title, evoking the oft-cited Wallace Stevens poem. As for autobiography: the title novella's multilayered narrative evokes an incident that—amazingly—happened to McCann after he wrote the story, in which he was cold-cocked on the sidewalk by a stranger in a seemingly senseless attack. The story’s protagonist is an aged judge of failing body but nimble mind who has just had dinner with his boorish son when he’s assaulted on the street. The story is told in the third person, but most of it hews closely to the judge's point of view. As he ponders his mortality, he muses, “Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, even the problem of being alive.” Other perspectives come from a series of seemingly omnipresent security cameras—in the judge's apartment, in the public areas of his Upper East Side building, and in the restaurant where he has dinner with his son; their images are investigated after the attack by detectives whose work McCann compares with literary critics interpreting a poem. The three other stories are shorter, often involving a crime or a loss or a threat of some sort, with the writer’s presence most evident in “What Time Is It Now, Where Are You?,” which begins, “He had agreed in spring to write a short story for the New Year’s Eve edition of a newspaper magazine,” and then proceeds through possible variations of that story. “Sh’khol” explores similarities between a story the protagonist has translated and a possible tragedy she's facing. The closing “Treaty” has an activist nun of advanced years and unreliable memory disturbed by images of a man who brutalized her almost four decades earlier.
The author’s first collection of shorter fiction in more than a decade underscores his reputation as a contemporary master.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9672-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Collins invokes both Voltaire and Defoe here, and she forges an unlikely but sadly harmonic connection with both these...
There’s betrayal, depravity, pseudoscience, forbidden love, drug addiction, white supremacy, and, oh yes, a murder mystery with tightly wound knots to unravel.
The citizenry of 1826 London has worked itself into near apoplexy over the sensational trial of “The Mulatta Murderess,” aka Frances Langton, a Jamaican servant accused of brutally stabbing her white employers to death. Though caught on the night of the murders covered with blood, Frances cannot remember what happened and thus cannot say whether or not she is guilty. “For God’s sake, give me something I can save your neck with,” her lawyer pleads. And so Frannie, who, despite having been born into slavery, became adept at reading and writing, tries to find her own way to the truth the only way she can: By writing her life’s story from its beginnings on a West Indian plantation called Paradise whose master, John Langton, is a vicious sadist. He uses Frannie for sex and as a “scribe” taking notes on his hideous experiments into racial difference using skulls, blood, and even skin samples. After a fire destroys much of his plantation, Langton takes Frannie to London and makes her a gift to George Benham, an urbane scientist engaged in the same dubious race-science inquiries. Frannie’s hurt over her abandonment is soon dispelled by her fascination with Benham’s French-born wife, Marguerite, a captivating beauty whose lively wit and literary erudition barely conceal despondency that finds relief in bottles of laudanum. A bond forms between mistress and servant that swells and tightens into love, leading to a tempest of misunderstanding, deceit, jealousy, and, ultimately, death. Collins’ debut novel administers a bold and vibrant jolt to both the gothic and historical fiction genres, embracing racial and sexual subtexts that couldn’t or wouldn’t have been imagined by its long-ago practitioners. Her evocations of early-19th-century London and antebellum Jamaica are vivid and, at times, sensuously graphic. Most of all, she has created in her title character a complex, melancholy, and trenchantly observant protagonist; too conflicted in motivation, perhaps, to be considered a heroine but as dynamic and compelling as any character conceived by a Brontë sister.
Collins invokes both Voltaire and Defoe here, and she forges an unlikely but sadly harmonic connection with both these enlightenment heroes in her gripping, groundbreaking debut.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285189-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Weirdly compelling and compellingly weird.
A story of taxidermy, political intrigue, and love between men from the author of The Convalescent (2009).
The story begins at the beginning—or close enough. It begins with the birth—or close enough—of our planet. Several eons pass over the next few pages until a Victorian naturalist traveling in Africa encounters his first aardvark. Then another story begins, and in this story, “you”—these sections are narrated in the second person—are an up-and-coming young Republican legislator with a Ronald Reagan fetish. These two stories become intertwined when an aardvark specimen Sir Richard Ostlet sent to his friend and lover Titus Downing, a taxidermist, is delivered to Alexander Paine Wilson’s D.C. town house. As both narratives unfold, it becomes clear that Wilson and Downing have a great deal in common. The taxidermist is compelled to be circumspect about his relationship with Ostlet because what they do together is an actual crime in 19th-century England. For Wilson, coming out is impossible not only because of his political party, but also because he doesn’t even define himself as gay. Yes, he has frequent and very enjoyable sexual encounters with a philanthropist named Greg Tampico, but they’re just two straight guys who happen to enjoy sex with other men. The aardvark serves as a sort of intermediary between these two men and their lovers. Resurrecting this strange beast allows Downing to stay connected with Ostlet even after Ostlet has abandoned him and married a woman. When a FedEx truck dumps this selfsame aardvark on Wilson’s doorstep, he sees it as a message from Greg—one that the congressman will spend most of the novel struggling to decipher. In addition to providing a lot of detail about the art of taxidermy, Anthony offers meditations on the interconnectedness of all things. There are also ghosts and Nazis, in case all that isn’t enough.
Weirdly compelling and compellingly weird.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53615-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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