Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.
Memories—elusive, shattered, or tormenting—are central to a tender story of unlikely love.
In his 15th novel, the prolific Jacobson (Pussy, 2017, etc.) considers the debilities of very old age in a shrewd, surprising tale centered on a feisty nonagenarian who wraps herself in boas and baubles and a reticent bachelor. “Memory is a sadist,” observes Mrs. Beryl Dusinbery, who styles herself the Princess, after Scheherazade, seductive teller of tales. But Beryl’s tales are fragmentary and vexing: Troubling memories rise unbidden while the pleasures of her erotic past swirl mistily. “In her heyday,” Jacobson’s wry narrator reports, “Beryl Dusinbery had been able to drive the thought of any other woman out of a man’s mind. It wasn’t infidelity she conjured, it was oblivion.” Now, though, oblivion threatens her, as she struggles to remember the details of her many lovers; mixes up the identities of her two grown sons and their offspring, none of whom interest her; and frustrates her two caregivers with capricious demands. At the age of 91, Shimi Carmelli, like the Princess, exudes old-world sophistication with his “air of elegant, international desolation” and refined wardrobe. Other than in his appearance, though, Carmelli stands in sharp contrast to the Princess: Formerly a seller of phrenology busts, he tells fortunes, reading cards at a local Chinese restaurant and at charity events attended by widows eager for new love. He has lived a circumscribed, solitary life, striving in every way “to remove the stain of common humanity from his person.” Unlike the Princess, Carmelli is beset by remembering. “I have selective morbid hyperthymesia,” he confesses, unable to forget anything, most notably a childhood transgression that has haunted his entire life. Jacobson treats with compassion the dilemma of old age, when the future seems to hold nothing more than “the same, unvarying story” and an inevitable diminishment; instead, he offers his brittle Princess and self-effacing fortuneteller a chance to discover deeply hidden capacities for kindness and caring and the inspiration, as the Princess puts it, to “risk another end.”
Wise, witty, and deftly crafted.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984824-21-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
