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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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