From Green (Wave Upon Wave, 2009), a collection of short stories about growing older and making life choices in middle age.
Alex Harris is having a midlife crisis. He’s overweight; his job in the construction industry stresses him out; and his wife left him for another woman and has custody of their daughter. Now, Alex can’t find the phone number of a woman whom he met the previous week. His search for it takes him back to his old home, where his ex-wife and daughter still live. Before he knows it, he’s out on the street having a cardiac event. So ends the titular story, but Alex features in four more linked tales, which alternate with four others, unrelated to the central narrative. This separation is well-judged, as readers will likely struggle with spending time with Alex for too long. Green writes Alex’s stories in the first person and is adept at building a sense of character and place. His protagonist, however, is thoroughly unlikable—abrasive, bigoted, selfish, and destructively bullheaded. Granted, his story arc is one of redemption; for all the ways that Alex messes up his relationships, he does grow as a person. Even so, he very rarely engenders sympathy. Of the remaining four tales, the two written in the third person are fairly inconsequential: “Hero of Main Street,” a vignette about the unlikely hero of a bank robbery; and “The Caregiver,” in which all is not as it seems in a nursing home. The remaining two show what Green is capable of with a less-objectionable protagonist: “Guardians of Summar’s Point,” in which a threadbare lawyer finds his sense of purpose during a property dispute; and “The Story Quilt,” about a Baltimore “ad man” dogged by supernatural influence. Green has some off-putting quirks, such as shifting midparagraph between past and present tense and putting ordinary words in quotation marks (“Lucia comes out with a mound of tomato ‘red’ objects”), as if their legitimacy were in question. However, he undoubtedly has a knack for slow-building, descriptive narrative. “Guardians,” in particular, is reminiscent of Bill Pronzini’s work, which by itself is enough to suggest promise.
An engaging and immersive, if not always pleasant, set of tales.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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