A lyrical, unsparing, intricately woven, if not always surprising, portrait of a celebrated writer.
A debut novel focuses on a surly literary star.
Marvin Goodspeed has found great success as an author. He left the corporate world to write a “satirical epic” of modern life that has fans entranced. Even if some critics are skeptical, his first book, The Satellite Man,has sold well. Not that the casual onlooker would know Marv is a famous writer. He drinks a lot, spending a good deal of his time at a local establishment called Asa Inman Blue Ribbon Buffet. He’ll also smash a radio to smithereens if it disturbs his writing. He’ll even turn violent in an interview if the questions get too confrontational. When readers first meet Marv, it is 1997. He lives in a Southern city in the midst of a revitalization/gentrification movement. Though gang violence occasionally occurs, the place features hip curiosities like a former gas station that’s been turned into a cool bar. This city is also home to an alternative local paper called The Weekly. Cyrus Cleburne is an enterprising Weeklyjournalist bent on trying to get to the bottom of the renowned local author and all that makes him tick. The prose throughout Buckhout’s stylized literary novel produces dense poetry. Marv’s city includes a “zone separating the immaculate staged snapshot city leaders wish to portray from the cordoned-off beat down blocks no one outside them needs know exist.” At one point, Marv reflects on how, for the average worker, “freedom is painfully incremental, a thing achieved in small slivers over expanses of well-murdered time, if at all.” Such passages paint vivid, nuanced pictures. But some of the details about Marv’s complex journey are not as enthralling. Readers learn much about his life, such as the events at the bar he frequents and the day he broke free from the corporate world. The activities at the bar are exactly what readers would expect (arguments over Bob Dylan; excitement about a baseball game). Marv’s freedom story is equally predictable (he’d “stopped not even to clean out his desk”). Readers will instead be interested in finding out where the truculent protagonist will eventually land. After all, the ’90s won’t last forever. What will the future hold for a wild genius like Marv?
A lyrical, unsparing, intricately woven, if not always surprising, portrait of a celebrated writer.Pub Date: April 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63649-576-7
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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