A detailed business drama that evokes Sex and the City but is hampered by awkward execution.
Kline’s debut novel presents a three-decade chronicle of a financially struggling woman working her way up in the beauty-product industry.
Emma O’Farrell Paige always wanted more out of her life. When she was a child, her parents, career con-artists, bounced her around from town to town as they pursued their latest schemes, which made it impossible for Emma to feel at home anywhere. When her mother and father move her to her grandparents’ land in a rural part of the state, she finishes high school with the goal of getting out of there. She and her boyfriend, high school baseball star Ethan Paige, plot their way out; he has a dream of playing ball in the major leagues, and she follows her path to success in the beauty-product industry, which involves cosmetics, perfume, and many colorful characters. As Ethan’s goal becomes increasingly unlikely, Emma quickly rises in her chosen field, making herself indispensable to industry leaders. She makes allies and enemies who propel her further along her trajectory. Along the way, Emma faces a series of tribulations, including vindictive and overbearing bosses, job insecurity, backstabbing, classism, an FBI investigation into perfume counterfeiting, and a marriage beset by challenges. Kline displays an impressive knowledge of the business in which Emma dwells, and this is the novel’s main strength. However, the story suffers from the fact that it often states what the characters are feeling, rather than showing it through action. Also, Emma confusingly narrates the events of her life from some unspecified future point; the story begins in 2003, flashes back to her ’70s childhood, then moves chronologically to some unspecified time, years after the story began. Some moments of dialogue are amusing and effective, and readers may be left wanting more of it: “Your banker-on-a-spring-afternoon ensemble does not exactly scream Moschino brand.” Instead, the narration too often reads like a passive summary.
A detailed business drama that evokes Sex and the City but is hampered by awkward execution.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2021
ISBN: 9781528987783
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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