Felicitous characters and a scrumptious plot make Hicks’ second novel refreshing and fun.
The personal and social lives of a group of friends are on display in this modern novel of manners.
Hicks’ second novel, after Boarded Windows (2012), is smart, witty, and endearing. In a brief prologue, dated April 1972, we meet the Crennel family. Marion, a daughter, has written an unfinished novel that was “meant to be a parody and refraction of the kind of nuptial denouement one finds in Shakespeare or Austen.” (Sounds a lot like Hicks’ own novel.) She hides it in the attic. Then Part 1, titled "Prenuptial," begins in May 2011. The novel is divided into months over 11 years. Episodes go back and forth in time. We meet characters in one episode and then jump a few years ahead in the next episode to see them now older, maybe wiser. New characters, mostly minor, pop up along the way, and gradually, all the characters are jumping back and forth in time, slowly moving toward Part 2, "Postnuptial," with the last episode set in September 2011. It’s very much a modern Austen-esque novel of manners. Carefully plotted, it’s jumpy at first, but once settled in, the story takes off, providing a clever, jaunty ride. In May 2011, we first meet Karyn and her young son, Maxwell. She’s been invited to her cousin Archer Bondarenko’s wedding to Gemma in June. His family makes dildos, and they’re plenty rich. He’s published a successful novel which he may or may not have written. In August 2004, we meet Sara Crennel, a burgeoning writer; she’s with Lucas Pope, who was previously with Gemma. Sara may or may not have written Archer’s novel. Scandal ensues. A handy score card of who what when helps keep track of everyone in this sprightly tale about friendship and courtship, money, love, assorted complications—and writers.
Felicitous characters and a scrumptious plot make Hicks’ second novel refreshing and fun.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56689-432-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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