A bumpy collection of booze- and pill-soaked tales of desperation.
A volume of poetry and prose documents the dark lives of San Francisco’s drunks and strippers.
Life in San Francisco is a seemingly unending series of unpleasant incidents and disappointing outcomes. In one story, a bouncer must cope with the suicide of his father and his on-again, off-again relationship with a woman plagued by mental illness. In another, a man watches some amateur basketball at Kezar Stadium before barhopping and, later, drinking beer with his adult paperboy, a former basketball player. A drug dealer tries to win his wife back after his stash is discovered in her house, resulting in her losing her job and spending six days in jail. A man who has lost his job and his driver’s license rides a bicycle to get drunk at a bar, but once there, he’s forced to deal with the probing questions of an older man. The tales, often no more than a few pages, are filled with neighborhood characters and local geographies, sliding up and down Taraval Street or haunting the environs of Columbus and Green. Four of the stories follow the romantic adventures of the stripper and poet Eskimo and her locally famous brawler boyfriend, Joxer. They participate in billiard competitions, attempt to drop off poems at City Lights Bookstore, witness shootings in the local watering holes, and get arrested for crashing cars while drunk. Interspersed are poems supposedly written by Eskimo on similarly dark and mundane topics: pop songs, stains, tea, physical abuse. A sense of fatalism inhabits each piece, whether it ends in tragedy or merely the suggestion of tragedy. These are characters who will never escape their plights. In fact, many of them seem not even to want to.
Boilard’s prose deftly evokes the gritty minimalism of Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, and other bards of self-destruction and substance abuse: “The deejay introduces her as Eh, Eh, Eskimo. Joxer sits in the front row. She dances slow and sexy and sad to Johnny Cash doing his remake of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails and Joxer can’t believe it. He loves that version. It must be some kind of fate. When she finishes her routine, she sits on his lap and rubs cocaine into his upper gums with her index finger.” The poems are sparse and Beats-inspired. “Blackout” reads: “I was drunk / & / forgetting things / & falling / down & / we both / hated me / then.” They seem to exist mostly to supplement (and break up) the stories. While the tales are the main course, they feel no less derivative or overreaching. The men are mostly violent nihilists, the women mostly sexual ones. The San Francisco in which the stories are set—the eponymous “Junk City,” as one character calls it—seems to be simultaneously that of the 1950s, ’80s, and the 2010s: one in which bohemians still pay for rent bartending and dream of making enough money to “get out of this place.” While there are occasional moments of epiphany or stark imagery, such a book feels a bit outdated in 2020.
A bumpy collection of booze- and pill-soaked tales of desperation.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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