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
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 tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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