This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.
A fictionalized version of Lucille Ball’s life, including a love affair with the author’s grandfather.
For decades, Strauss, the author of the award-winning memoir Half a Life (2010) as well as novels including Chang and Eng (2000), has been obsessed with the fact that his grandfather Isidore Strauss might have met Lucille Ball at a 1949 party thrown by Donald Trump’s father to celebrate the destruction of the Pavilion of Fun on Coney Island. The complicated concoction of memoir and fiction that has emerged from this spark of inspiration interweaves imagined scenes from Ball’s life on and off the set with imagined scenes from his grandfather’s. Between these chapters, he slips in vignettes of what seems to be memoir, documenting his earlier attempts to bring attention to this passion project. The novel begins at Trump’s party, written up in a highly stylized, flashy prose style: “Hey, that’s your favorite celebrity over there. On the boardwalk, her white shoes scuffed black with sand. (If she’s not famous now, just wait.) She’s striding—confidenting—right into this party.” Before the night’s over, Desi Arnaz will have punched Isidore Strauss in the eye. What follows incorporates impressive research into the progress of Ball’s career—the author hopes to “remind people that Lucille Ball starred in America’s first big-time interracial love story; was the first powerful woman in Hollywood; that she owned more movie sets at one point than did any movie studio.” However, in addition to grafting his made-up story onto the facts of Ball’s life, he admits to monkeying with other details, which undercuts even the informational aims of the book. Mingling fictional characters with famous historical ones worked to brilliant effect in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and many similar novels since, but this feels more like a thought experiment than a compelling story. The jaunty narrator is not just omniscient, but presumptuous and intrusive, spending a good deal of time in the characters’ heads, confidently reporting their thoughts. In a scene in which Ball is having sexual intercourse with the author’s grandfather, Strauss has her meditate on why she likes him so much. “Really, it was the fucking. It’s hard not to love something you’re really good at. She was really good at that.” Oof.
This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9276-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Even when it stress-tests your senses, this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing.
Equal parts detective story and sociocultural history, James’ new novel takes a deep, harrowing dive into the tragic consequences of violent homophobia.
The “disappearers” of the title are Orrin Turner and Matt Chin, who dominate this decades-spanning saga without being seen or heard through most of it. They are two of the gay men—“battymen” in Jamaican idiom—who show up at a Kingston house on a June night in 1988 to rehearse for a production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a play set in a prison. The group is savagely attacked by a mob, leaving one of the actors dead, one blinded for life, and the rest bloodied and injured. Survivors of the attack spend most of the succeeding years recovering from both physical and psychic wounds, among them Jordan Brown, who describes himself as “full-time battyman, sometime prostitute. Occasional thorn in somebody’s backside,” and Eddy Porteous, who arrived too late at that fateful rehearsal to become a casualty but nonetheless is haunted, like Jordan, by the inexplicable disappearance of both Turner and Chin since the attack. Despite constant carping between them, Jordan and Eddy team up roughly six years after the attack in search of clues to their friends’ whereabouts. While the process yields few hints, their inquiries on the streets, in bars, and at other gathering places for Kingston’s battymen contribute to a grim but illuminating collective portrait of the country’s gay community at a time when the AIDS crisis was in its early, often frightening stages and of the alarmingly widespread homophobia leading to that brutal attack. As in his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), James brings multilayered life to a troubling era in his homeland’s recent history. He engages with his landscapes and the diverse characters populating them with intensity, passion, and bountiful, often graphic detail. With the same affinity for Dickensian storytelling he’s shown in his sword-and-sorcery epics, James tells this searingly realistic tale through interview fragments, journal entries, letters, and, in recreating the horrific attack, with random, frantic voices that leave unsettling echoes.
Even when it stress-tests your senses, this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9780593717202
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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