A collection of perceptive portraits of life in rural England at the turn of the 20th century.
These 15 short stories from a respected, if not widely known, English writer who died in 1957 penetrate the outwardly simple existence of an assortment of inhabitants of rural Britain to produce sophisticated depictions of their inner lives.
Even the slightest of Coppard’s tales exude a strong sense of place while some of the longer ones possess an almost novelistic scope. In the latter category are stories like “The Handsome Lady,” which movingly depicts the life of a man torn between his duty to his invalid wife and his love for another woman. “Ring the Bells of Heaven” traces the career of Blandford Febery, who leaves his family’s farm on a Suffolk heath to become first an actor and then a revivalist preacher before experiencing a crisis of faith. In “The Higgler,” an itinerant peddler lives to regret an imprudent romantic choice that alters his life forever. Coppard neither creates rustic stereotypes nor condescends to his characters, consistently capturing their essences in a few economical brush strokes. That’s true of Phillip Repton, from the O. Henry–esque story “Fifty Pounds,” a writer who finds that his projects “insolvently withered, and morning, noon, and evening brought his manuscripts back as unwanted as snow in summer,” or Molly Wickham, in “The Wife of Ted Wickham,” who is “sound as a roach and sweet as an apple tree in bloom.” A house with windows that would “often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire” is but one of the many striking settings Coppard sketches in sharp, vivid detail. Though the details of his characters’ daily routines may seem alien to modern sensibilities, their emotional struggles are instantly recognizable and memorably evoked.
A collection of perceptive portraits of life in rural England at the turn of the 20th century.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-305416-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.
The making of a woman scientist over four decades of change in the middle of the 20th century.
“So what do you actually do?” Dr. Lottie Kristin Hart Levinson—aka Dr. Rat Westheimer—is asked at a cocktail party in 1984. “This may sound odd to you,” she replies, “but I study rat salivary glands. They’re more important than people think.” Her subsequent explanation details the role of cunnilingus in rat sex. Neither Lottie nor her creator is squeamish in any way—not about rat sex, or rat dissection, or human sex, all described with brio in these pages. As Lottie tells her football-star high school boyfriend, who becomes her first husband, “I want to know everything about my body, about your body, I want to try everything there is in the world, I want to try it all with you.” Actually, she saves some for her intrepid second husband 30-odd years later; there hasn’t been a menstruation sex scene like this since Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. Heyman’s debut novel after a successful story collection, Scary Old Sex (2016), also brings to mind Marge Piercy’s domestic dramas of the 1980s, which told the stories of women whose consciousness and lives were changed by the feminist movement and the new options it created in American life. From Lottie’s childhood in Michigan in the early 1940s through her struggles in the Vietnam War era to her maturity as a scientist, mother, and stepmother in the mid-1980s, her curiosity and intellect drive her as strongly as her hormones. It takes decades to tunnel her way through the walls sexism builds around her potential and find her way to the career in science she was made for. Caring as much about her work as she does about domestic life is a constant issue in Lottie’s adulthood; tragic consequences threaten and are not always averted.
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-471-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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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