A mix of great setups and occasionally frustrating misfires.
A debut collection of short stories featuring characters with even shorter tempers.
Greenberg’s set of 11 tales starts with a dictionary definition of “exasperation,” and that “feeling of intense irritation or annoyance” radiates from each of these quick narratives. In the tradition of essayists such as David Sedaris and TV shows like HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Greenberg tells stories of highly neurotic antiheroes and their outsized responses to life’s little problems. In the opener, Mitchell Weinberger, a divorced father, suffers through small talk with overbearing parents at his child’s back-to-school gathering. In “Panic in Shubert Alley,” a nameless man runs around New York City’s Times Square theater district looking for his forgetful mother’s purse, and in “A Side of Exasperation on the NJ Turnpike,” a desperate dad finds himself trapped in a drive-thru while trying to order hamburgers. Greenberg consistently keeps to his theme, but in some works, he stretches into particularly imaginative displays of irritability, as when he constructs an entire story out of text messages between a husband and wife, or personifies the entire nation of Argentina as a deadbeat friend. The author effectively marshals a wide array of annoyances, but a standout appears in “The Last Couples Dinner,” in which a woman faces off against an “X+1”—a man who feels compelled to one-up everything anyone else says. There are several mentions of the Covid-19 crisis over the course of the book, which cleverly link the tales to the collective exhaustion of the past year. Despite the stories’ extremely short lengths, Greenberg occasionally manages to kindle slow burns of awkward irritation, as in his reveal of a subway stench in “Malodor on the Number Five Express.” However, several jokes don’t quite connect, including a Billy Joel–based breakup that turns into a list of lyrics, and as the title implies, the author often relies too much on expletives to get laughs.
A mix of great setups and occasionally frustrating misfires.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-835799-3
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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