Needfully discomfiting.
A bestselling author explores art, justice, and grief as he questions what makes a story true.
“Awhile back, I stopped writing fiction.” This is one of the first things the narrator has to say about himself. After a description of the (implausibly brief) existential crisis that followed the end of his fiction-writing career, he addresses the reader directly: “If that leaves you wondering about this book—wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—everything here is real.” This may look like reassurance, but it’s actually a warning. Using a young girl’s murder as an inciting incident, Guterson tests the reader’s understanding of story, truth, and how the two intersect. The narrator’s father, Royal, is an attorney approaching the end of his own career. When Royal agrees to defend a White woman accused of killing her Black adopted daughter, the narrator becomes intrigued by the case. Again and again, his father cautions him that the real justice system doesn’t function the way it does on TV, but then a judge delivers a speech that provides exactly the kind of moral satisfaction we want from crime shows. This speech serves as a bookend to an earlier passage in which the accused woman’s mother rants about all the ways in which White Christians are oppressed in contemporary America. The shape of this text—a single, uninterrupted paragraph spread over multiple pages—strains credulity, but its content is instantly recognizable to anyone who pays even scant attention to right-wing media. Guterson seems to be asking why righteously elegant oration seems realistic when it’s coming from the bench but an equally impassioned soliloquy delivered in the living room of a double-wide in rural Washington feels like a literary contrivance. The author subverts expectations over and over again. After the narrative begins to take the shape of a courtroom drama, the story shifts back to the personal concerns of the narrator—including a lot of thought and conversation about the craft of writing—for so long that it seems possible that the dead child has been forgotten. She has not. It’s just that real life seldom has an obvious beginning, middle, and end. The book closes with the narrator turning toward his wife in the dark while she whispers, “We can love people….What else is there?” This might feel like an easy out for a story in which hateful people and dumb mortality wield their power. Or it can feel like a gentle acknowledgement of our collective precarity.
Needfully discomfiting.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-52132-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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