A throwback literary novel about the anxiety of art and aging.
In Eron’s debut novel, a failed lawyer takes stock of his life in the weeks leading up to the wedding of a rival.
Presner’s life since law school has not been what he hoped it would be. He’s spent the last 13 years working the graveyard shift selling magazines and cigarettes at a 24-hour newsstand and chipping away at his long-unfinished play. His friends from law school have gone on to high-powered careers, including his nemesis, Gary Marx, who has become a prominent ambulance chaser. Presner has never really forgiven Marx for stealing his girlfriend during law school (or for the cheesy commercials—“Gary got me $20,000”—that have run on television for the last few years). When another old friend stops by the store to let Presner know that Marx is engaged, Presner can’t feel happy for him—even if he plans, like the rest of the old crowd, to attend the wedding. Presner hopes it will provide an opportunity to jump-start his life: He’ll ask his longtime crush, Lisa Caner, to be his date, and he’ll finish his play so he’ll have something to brag to everyone about. But the reunion does not turn out to be the triumph that Presner hopes for. The keystone member of the group—the reason they are a group at all—has always been Norman Fitzhugh. Ever since Fitz helped Presner’s sister, both legally and emotionally, during her battle with cancer 12 years earlier, Presner has considered the man his closest friend. But when it becomes apparent that Fitz has been mismanaging his friends’ money, Presner must figure out how to help vindicate the man—a job that will take all the tricks Presner learned in law school and all the empathy he’s learned as a playwright.
Eron’s prose captures Presner’s analytical, neurotic view of the world, with sentences folding in on themselves to accommodate stray thoughts and observations. Here he describes Presner’s unwillingness to show his play to his perennial crush, Lisa: “Since he’d met her, it was understood that she’d read his play when ready, when abandoned, to quote da Vinci (art’s never finished, but abandoned); even during their yearlong hiatus he had Caner in mind for this capacity—but now that he was sending it out Presner found himself demurring.” The novel unfolds slowly, with every incident filtered through its slacker protagonist’s self-deprecating, emotionally numbed commentary. Presner is like a latter-day Bellow or Roth protagonist, navigating evergreen crises of aging and failure; Eron updates this tradition with Gen X concerns about art and authenticity. The playwriting material feels slightly contrived (Chekhov comes up a lot, and the book is divided into five acts), but the legal material is quite inspired: In his relationship with the charming but untrustworthy Fitz, Presner is able to pick at the graces and flaws of the legal profession. The book may read like it was published in the 1990s, but plenty of it remains relatable to millennials entering midlife.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1958015049
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Contingency Street Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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