An intriguing but uneven grab bag of assorted pieces.
Short stories, plays, and essays sit side by side in this volume.
A mélange of topics and forms is found in this omnibus of McCormick’s work, both fictional and nonfictional. In the “sovereign citizen”–tinged short story “Just Harry,” a man destroys his license and credit cards in order to become a nobody, but his antics soon land him on the wrong side of the law. In the play Trapped, a couple engage in a bit of improvised theater about getting trapped by an avalanche—which proves to be grimly prescient. More speculative elements crop up as well. In “VR17,” a dystopian tale about a future where people are divided into lowly “Cheeses” and elite “Cakes,” a group of lab workers discovers an alarming variation in the medical data related to a virus. The novella How Death Lost to Walter Williams is narrated by the eponymous man who has just committed suicide after murdering his wife and neighbor. With his soul trapped in the woods where he died, he thinks back on all that has led him to this tragic end. The essays range from the personal to the political. The humorous “Age 75: An Inside Look” laments the pitfalls of growing old. “I do not expect to get better at this ‘doing stuff,’ ” writes McCormick, “and I expect to hear and see less and less until I fall into the lake and my diamond back water snake eats me. He is getting very large now and I saw him eat a catfish that had a head as large as mine so I will not be hard to swallow.” The essay “Children of Darkness” explores America’s state of decline, comparing it to the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire. Another essay offers a proposal to alleviate poverty in the developing world by creating “Another Sunday,” a weekly protest during which people abstain from working on Mondays. Also included are several short pieces by members of the author’s family. The book ends with the family trees of both McCormick and his wife as well as a dozen color photographs of his loved ones.
Despite the wide range of subjects, McCormick’s prose is reliably plainspoken. Here the newly disenfranchised Harry wallows in prison: “On the morning of the sixth day they served S.O.S. on stale toast. It was gray and sticky and had too little hamburger meat in it, but Harry ate it anyway. He asked the guard for something to read and the guard gave him an old copy of ‘People’ magazine.” The short stories are the best of the lot, though they often have structural problems that keep them from making as much of an impact as they should. The plays are less entertaining given the author’s relative weakness for sharp dialogue. The essays range from the oddly captivating to the drafty and undercooked, and they often include elements of Roman Catholic theology. In total, the book feels like a series of odds and ends pulled from a computer hard drive rather than a volume of finished works. But while there isn’t much order to them, they deliver occasional moments of imagination that will delight readers.
An intriguing but uneven grab bag of assorted pieces.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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