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
Maybe you can go home again, but do you really want to? An atmospheric elegy to innocence lost.
On the eve of a return visit, a long-absent hometown boy recalls the sad summer after eighth grade.
Jimmy Perrini was in the middle of a baseball game when the news arrived: His mother, just 41, was dead. He knew she’d had cancer but she’d assured him she would never leave him, and he’d believed her. More than 50 years later, the man who now goes by Jay Perry is invited by the mayor of Creamwood, New Jersey, to come back for the naming of a new municipal building after his late father. In the intervening years, Jimmy Perrini has become the only famous writer the town has ever produced, though the early promise of his literary novels petered out and he’s become known for a children’s series that became an animated TV show, Ghost Teacher. Perrotta’s evocation of 1970s suburban New Jersey is filled with resonant period details: the Top 40 playlist, the Mexican dirtweed, the tension between the largely Italian American blue-collar residents and the very few in their midst who are different. One of these is Jimmy’s cousin Wayne, who lives next door with his possibly non-white girlfriend and their summer houseguest, a young Black man named Hector. Set adrift by grief and his father’s and older sister’s inattention, Jimmy floats into an unsavory friendship with a rough stoner named Eddie. He also connects with a super-smart older girl, Olivia, who suggests they try to contact his mother using her Ouija board, and is also game for a bit of sexual initiation. Perrotta, who’s known for edgy satires like Election (1998) and Mrs. Fletcher (2017), creates a very different mood here: melancholy, moving, dark, redolent with regret and loss. His sharp characterizations and social observations serve to bemuse rather than amuse this time, but as he builds to a shocking climax, it turns out he’s just as good at that.
Maybe you can go home again, but do you really want to? An atmospheric elegy to innocence lost.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781668080634
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Weird and haunting and excellent.
The much-anticipated second novel from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004).
The narrator of this novel answers to the name “Piranesi” even though he suspects that it's not his name. This name was chosen for him by the Other, the only living person Piranesi has encountered during his extensive explorations of the House. Readers who recognize Piranesi as the name of an Italian artist known for his etchings of Roman ruins and imaginary prisons might recognize this as a cruel joke that the Other enjoys at the expense of the novel’s protagonist. It is that, but the name is also a helpful clue for readers trying to situate themselves in the world Clarke has created. The character known as Piranesi lives within a Classical structure of endless, inescapable halls occasionally inundated by the sea. These halls are inhabited by statues that seem to be allegories—a woman carrying a beehive; a dog-fox teaching two squirrels and two satyrs; two children laughing, one of them carrying a flute—but the meaning of these images is opaque. Piranesi is happy to let the statues simply be. With her second novel, Clarke invokes tropes that have fueled a century of surrealist and fantasy fiction as well as movies, television series, and even video games. At the foundation of this story is an idea at least as old as Chaucer: Our world was once filled with magic, but the magic has drained away. Clarke imagines where all that magic goes when it leaves our world and what it would be like to be trapped in that place. Piranesi is a naif, and there’s much that readers understand before he does. But readers who accompany him as he learns to understand himself will see magic returning to our world.
Weird and haunting and excellent.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-563-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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