Where you can see the stars at noon, a Dante reader will know, is in Hell—and Johnson, who has plumbed the territory before in Angels (1983) here surveys a corner of it that is Sandinista Nicaragua, 1984. His narrator is a female American semi-journalist, semi-hooker, a woman whose entropy is her strongest suit, who hustles at the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Managua against a background of brain-frying tropical heat and the appalling self-destruction of a hapless society. Not a book, in other words, you'd give as a gift to your local Witness for Peace: in Johnson's portrait, Nicaragua comes off as a catastrophe plain and simple. And a menacing one, too. After the narrator meets a pale, tall, bumbling Englishman who represents an oil company and seems to have accidentally made vague commitments to Sandinista, Contra, and CIA alike, she finds herself in love/lust with the schmo but also having to fear for her life: he's casually but irrevocably been marked, and she'll get it also unless they can escape the country at the nearest border. That, in the end, she will, saving herself but also betraying her lover, is somehow only fitting in the jaundiced, ashen-mouthed scheme of the book. Some fine, illusionless, poetic prose is put to this purpose—but Johnson is working more with language and mood here than with people: the Englishman is especially nebulous and jellied, while the narrator, who over-quotes W.S. Merwin, also speaks in what's-it-to-ya dialogue that would have given even Raymond Chandler pause. What is most memorable—why this might have been a better non-fiction book—are the atmospheres: sounds, feels, smells; Johnson delivers an evocative and potently depressing travelogue, and does so with more savvy and unromantic political velleity than is found in books by, say, Graham Greene or Joan Didion. Ugly as sin but a little too pleased with that, maybe.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1986
ISBN: 978-0-394-53840-2
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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