Like a long Monty Python sketch.
And now for something completely different: a broad farce from a British novelist renowned for his literary subtlety and command of tone.
Having finished his five-volume series of autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels (At Last, 2012, etc.), which have been hailed as one of the foremost achievements of modern literature, what could St. Aubyn do for an encore? Though a lethal sense of humor has been crucial to his skewering of the British upper classes, here he exchanges the darkness of hell and redemption among the coldhearted aristocracy for a laugh-out-loud sendup of literary prizes. Instead of the Man Booker, Britain’s most prestigious award is the Elysian Prize for Literature, determined by one well-meaning academic and a motley assortment of philistines, sponsored by a “highly innovative but controversial agricultural company” whose chief critics are environmentalists “claiming that [its products] caused cancer, disrupted the food chain, destroyed bee populations, or turned cattle into cannibals.” The judges for the prize generally have hidden (or not so hidden) agendas that don’t require them to actually read the books, and one doesn’t even bother to attend their deliberative sessions (he’s an actor on tour with “a hip-hop adaptation of Waiting for Godot”). The plot pivots around the promiscuity of a nubile novelist who has “averaged twenty lovers a year since she was sixteen” and who is in the process of juggling three or more through most of the narrative. Both the author and the reader have great fun with this, as the virtuosic novelist provides excerpts from nominated works, including a historical novel about William Shakespeare, a pulp page-turner and a scabrous (and hilarious) spew that the highest-minded judge dismisses as “sub-Irvine Welsh.” Through preposterous plot machinations, a cookbook of traditional Indian recipes is mistakenly submitted as fiction and becomes an unlikely contender, “operating as the boldest metafictional performance of our time.” The madcap climax involves an assassination plot and a stuck elevator at the awards banquet before surprisingly resolving itself with a (tentative) happy ending.
Like a long Monty Python sketch.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-28029-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.
In Beartown, where the people are as "tough as the forest, as hard as the ice," the star player on the beloved hockey team is accused of rape, and the town turns upon itself.
Swedish novelist Backman’s (A Man Called Ove, 2014, etc.) story quickly becomes a rich exploration of the culture of hockey, a sport whose acolytes see it as a violent liturgy on ice. Beartown explodes after rape charges are brought against the talented Kevin, son of privilege and influence, who's nearly untouchable because of his transcendent talent. The victim is Maya, the teenage daughter of the hockey club’s much-admired general manager, Peter, another Beartown golden boy, a hockey star who made it to the NHL. Peter was lured home to bring winning hockey back to Beartown. Now, after years of despair, the local club is on the cusp of a championship, but not without Kevin. Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic. Despite his love for hockey, where fights are part of the game, Peter hates violence. Kira, his wife, is an attorney with an aggressive, take-no-prisoners demeanor. Minor characters include Sune, "the man who has been coach of Beartown's A-team since Peter was a boy," whom the sponsors now want fired. There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor: the club president’s table manners are so crude "you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating." Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports; it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save more than one person from self-destruction.
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6076-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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