Completing the trajectory of her early triumphs with a pandemic masterpiece, Wolitzer takes our breath away.
Thirteen timeless stories of what goes on between men and women, grounded in an optimism that is no stranger to sorrow.
Ninety-one-year-old Wolitzer, author of five novels and mother of Meg, collects for the first time her stories from the 1960s and '70s, many first published in Esquire, Ms., and elsewhere, and adds a brand new one from 2020. A foreword by Elizabeth Strout alerts us to the particular joys of Wolitzer's prose style and storytelling—how she "leaves enough spaces between the lines" for us to "enter the story with our own experiences and therefore make it our own." After the crystalline title story zips us straight back to the mad housewife era and a second introduces the centrality of female desire in Wolitzer's work, there's a run of seven narrated by Paulette, or Paulie as her husband, Howard, calls her. Full of the pleasures of intimacy, these are unusually happy stories about a complicated marriage. No matter that it begins with an unplanned pregnancy; weathers infidelity, an extended visit from Howard's first wife, and the appearance of a sex maniac in the building ("about time," thinks Paulie); and tackles her insomnia and his depression (usually responsive to a day spent driving around to visit model homes). "Why am I so happy?" wonders Paulie. "I know the same bad things Howard knows." Spoiled as we are by the tonic power of Paulie's worldview, it's an adjustment to embrace three grimmer stories that follow. But wait—in an amazing grand finale, Wolitzer brings Paulie and Howard back a half-century later, reckoning with the usual dirty tricks of old age. "Howard, who had once been so gorgeous," is now "grizzled and paunchy and gray," but Paulie is still Paulie: Where she used to check her husband's side of the bed upon waking for "a promising rise in the bedclothes," she now rejoices in the simple evidence of breath. It seemed like the world “would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn't." And along comes the novel coronavirus to do its worst.
Completing the trajectory of her early triumphs with a pandemic masterpiece, Wolitzer takes our breath away.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-762-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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