A consoling and melancholic reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A thought-provoking meditation on human relationships at the cellular level as well as our relationship to Earth, the cosmos, and life itself.
Midwestern novelist Rhodes’ latest work is a return to the fictional town of Words, Wisconsin, the setting for Driftless (2008) and its sequel, Jewelweed (2014). The novel opens in the near-future Chicago of 2027, where the reader is introduced to August Helm, a 30-year-old biochemist working in a research facility at the University of Chicago. After having his position eliminated due to budget cuts and enduring a devastating breakup, August impulsively abandons the big city to return to his hometown in rural Wisconsin, a home he last saw years ago. Although much remains the same (as things do in small Midwestern towns), a new luxury housing development called Forest Gate has been built practically on top of Words, and the locals tolerate the wealthy, gentrifying “Gaters” with varying degrees of grace, suspicion, and resentment. Despite this, August ends up house-sitting for Forest Gate resident April Lux and promptly falls in love with her. A pervasive strangeness begins to permeate the narrative at about the halfway mark; the final third incorporates elements of science fiction and mystery, and what may have seemed to be a meandering narrative picks up steam and accelerates toward a satisfying—and weirdly surprising—conclusion. Rhodes has a knack for writing acute psychological realism; these characters live and breathe, and by the time the novel ends we feel like we know them. Additionally, several story arcs reveal a humanistic, righteous indignation regarding the violence toward women so endemic to Western civilization, and characters frequently engage in thought-provoking discussions of everything from cellular science to sexual politics and world economies. The epilogue recalls Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles (2000), albeit much more optimistic. Although elements of the novel are adjacent to the near-future SF of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Rhodes is primarily concerned with the timeless human phenomena of love, loss, origins, family, and community.
A consoling and melancholic reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5-7131-1-412
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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