A strange encounter with the natural world ignites an artist’s career.
On an English beach one otherwise unremarkable day in June 1976, Ray Eccles is struck on the head by a plummeting sea gull. That mishap inexplicably transforms the furloughed local government photocopy machine operator, so desperate for stimulation he believes an unexploded bomb beneath the sand “might be good company,” into an acclaimed artist, obsessed with capturing, in a series of portraits all entitled “She,” the image of the unknown woman who was the sole witness to the startling event that triggers his metamorphosis. Paige’s slim debut novel is the elegiac story of the enigmatic Ray and the handful of characters who gravitate to his equally mysterious work. They include George and Grace Zoob, sophisticated collectors of outsider art, who discover Ray’s “intimate, magical and strange” painting when he’s first producing it only on the walls of his small home in Southend-on-Sea, using everything from food to his own blood and semen; their daughter, Mira; and Jennifer Mulholland, Ray's inadvertent muse, who’s trapped in a companionable but sterile marriage, her quiet despair only deepened by the memory of the moment her life collided with Ray's at the seaside. Whether it’s Grace, who “felt herself being filled in, fashioned anew, a second, truer skin knitting itself around her like a healing wound” as she models for Ray, or Jennifer, aching with the realization, when she reflects on her long union, that “the longer they were married the less they knew each other,” Paige exercises impressive restraint in her emotionally precise portrait of ordinary people groping for something extraordinary to fill a hole in their lives. Only some of the novel’s principal characters even approach that goal, but as Paige depicts it in a moving climax at London’s Tate Modern gallery, great art can serve as a “direct, sensuous response to the world” that’s not only pleasing to the eye, but also profoundly engaging to the heart.
A gentle fable about the mystery of artistic creativity.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77196-239-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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