Though the protagonist will test your patience with his road stories, he has some great ones.
A white Midwestern boy’s wanderlust sends him on an unlikely path around the world and deep into the Salvadoran revolution.
Tobar’s third novel is based on the true story of Joe Sanderson, who was, among other things, a failed writer; his overheated prose, appearing in letters home and rejected novels, is quoted often. But his copious journals and letters also provide a narrative throughline for this shaggy dog epic. Tobar stumbled upon Sanderson’s diary in El Salvador in 2008, and the author is plainly charmed by the story of an all-American gringo who gave up a comfortable upbringing to see the world. Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, Joe caught the travel bug early, exploring nontourist pockets of Jamaica as a teen on a family vacation. After brief college and Army stints, he bummed rides through Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia, witnessing the escalating Vietnam War and the famine in Biafra. Tobar renders Joe as naïve and dispassionate early on, a young man eagerly gathering fodder for his bad novels but not gaining much empathy. And though Tobar is a gifted storyteller in both fiction (The Barbarian Nurseries, 2011) and nonfiction (Deep Down Dark, 2014), his hero’s lack of emotional growth makes much of the heart of the novel draggy and listless. (Joe occasionally interrupts the narrative via footnotes in which he speaks directly to the reader, mentioning that Tobar’s editor and agent recommended he “trim the shit out of” the novel. True or not, it’s not bad advice.) The novel gains thrust and becomes more affecting in its final third, when Joe joins the anti-government revolutionaries in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early '80s; Tobar’s depiction of the 1981 El Mozote massacre is chilling and imagines a genuine shift in Joe’s character.
Though the protagonist will test your patience with his road stories, he has some great ones.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-18342-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593190265
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668045145
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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