This is a writer who thinks hard and deep about the country that forges his fiction.
A collection of stories in search of an America that resists road mapping.
In nine stories and two short “interludes,” Stansel presents protagonists from all over the country in search of their identities (from sexual orientation to musical category), attempting to come to terms with mortality (their own and others), trying to find meaning and order in a world of chance and chaos. Wherever they go, they find themselves—and they generally find themselves adrift. But, as one of the narrators advises, “The world tells us things if only we bother to hear it.” With story formats ranging from question-and-answer to the alphabetical glossary of the title story, the centerpiece of the collection is “The Caller,” based around a radio call-in show. The protagonist, Max, concocts a tale to share on Voices for the Lost, a program about people who have disappeared in the Mexican drug wars, saying his brother disappeared near Juarez. He did lose his brother to drug violence, though not to a Mexican drug cartel, and he invents the story to provide a connection with others on the program, a connection that can offer some relief from his aimless torpor, “a sad amazement at still being alive.” Inevitably, though, connection leads to consequences beyond his control. Elsewhere, the thematic ambition turns heavier handed. In “North out of Houston,” a family faces a metaphysical crisis as they're stalled on the highway while trying to evacuate ahead of a tropical storm. Mother, father, and son must each confront and attempt to resolve some issue related to sexuality amid a storm that is plainly metaphorical as well as natural. There is just too much symbolic baggage for a single story to carry. In “Modern Sounds in Country and Western,” a Brooklyn band’s progression from indie to alt-country results in a breakthrough hit and a terrorist attack. There’s a lot going on in these stories and a lot at stake, but the philosophical weight is sometimes too much for the slighter among them to bear.
This is a writer who thinks hard and deep about the country that forges his fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-946724-34-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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