The reappearance of a childhood bully throws the life of a New England man into turmoil.
When the book opens, Todd Nasca is spending time on the beach with his 6-year-old son, Anthony. They moved to New Granard four months ago, and soon Todd will start his position as a high school English teacher and Anthony will begin school for the first time. After having kept the boy out of kindergarten, Todd is anxious about his son entering the world; he feels like he's “pushing Anthony off a precipice.” Todd and his wife, Livia, divorced four years ago after a brief and tepid marriage, but Livia is back from her travels in Europe with renewed interest in knowing the son she left behind. Todd is alarmed when a stranger approaches Anthony at the beach—except he turns out to not be a stranger at all. Jack Gates transferred to Todd's high school when both boys were seniors, but they haven’t seen each other in years, and for good reason: Flashbacks detail how Jack viciously bullied Todd, calling him homophobic slurs, threatening him, and alienating Todd from their peers. Underlying the meanness was a tension that has followed both men to the present—a feeling it's possible they've been purposefully avoiding. When Todd presses, Jack is vague about the state of his marriage, how long he plans to stay, or if his sudden reappearance in Todd's life might be more than just coincidence. The longer Jack’s around, the more Todd’s discomfort grows, building to a shocking act of violence that inextricably links the characters and forces Todd down a path of alienation, lies, and madness. The tension is palpable on every page, and Habib skillfully illustrates the complexity of relationships and the pain of unmet desires, both queer and otherwise. His prose is as brutal as it is profound and beautiful: “Is everyone unhappy? Is everyone stuck? I think, Jack, I was happy sometimes; no, I was, I was before you, before you showed up; and you were happy when you got here, and Livia was happy before she met me, and Anthony was happy; and then, what? Everything is fine and then something shows up and you can’t be happy after that; what is that?”
A brutal and gorgeous tale of manipulation, control, and desire.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-54217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
A fictional account of the agony and ecstasy of making a movie, from someone who’d know.
For his sprightly debut novel, actor/writer/national treasure Hanks—author of the story collection Uncommon Type, 2017—imagines the making of Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall, a mashup of Marvel-esque superhero fare, war story, and artsy melodrama. The movie’s concept seems like an unworkable, even bad idea, which is part of the point—Hanks stresses the notion that successful movies aren’t just a matter of story but the people who make them. So he’s assembled an engrossing cast of characters: Bob Falls, the World War II vet who served as a flamethrower in the Pacific theater and became a PTSD–struck biker; Robby Andersen, the nephew who turned him into alternative-comix antihero Firefall; Bill Johnson, the well-decorated Spielberg-ian director who acquires the Firefall property and writes the script; and the small army of actors, assistants, and technicians charged with shooting the film in the Northern California town of Lone Butte—on time, lest morale collapse and the budget inflate. Hanks ably depicts how easily things derail. The male lead’s ego wrecks the shooting schedule. A stray social media post complicates security. On-set flirtations threaten a marriage. But the novel reflects the sunny stick-to-it-iveness of many of Hanks’ roles, and his central thesis is that every movie’s true hero is anybody who reduces friction. To that end, his most enchanting and best-drawn characters are the director’s assistant, Al Mac-Teer (full name Allicia), and Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz, a ride-share driver with no movie experience but a knack for problem-solving. “Most of the film business is done by meeting folks,” one character says, and Hanks suggests that meeting the right people—and being kind to them—is half the battle of successful moviemaking. Overly romantic? Consider the source. Regardless, it’s a well-turned tale of a Hollywood (maybe) success. (Sikoryak illustrates some comic-book pages related to the Firefall backstory and film.)
A loose-limbed, bighearted Hollywood yarn.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780525655596
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION
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