Sharp, observant, darkly funny and deeply humane. Another winner from Appel.
Winner of Butler University’s Pressgang Prize, this collection examines the dangers and seductions of fantasy and lies.
Hardworking Appel (The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, 2014, etc.), an attorney, physician, bioethicist, essayist and fiction writer, published a strong story collection in Scouting for the Reaper (2014). Now, in the eight stories comprising this volume (some previously published in literary magazines), he offers an equally strong, striking follow-up. Many of the stories here involve characters being asked to participate in some kind of deception, ranging from children’s fibs to murder. In the title story, a travel guide identifies a family’s run-down bungalow as the cottage where Albert Einstein spent his Princeton summers. When tourists arrive, the narrator’s father puts up a blackboard with equations scribbled from a math textbook and starts charging money. But then an old woman shows up claiming to be Einstein’s niece—and claiming, therefore, ownership of the house. Bewilderingly, she succeeds: “That marked the end of Papa’s clever ideas.” In the superb “La Tristesse Des Hérissons,” Josh, the narrator, humors his girlfriend Adeline’s obsessive caretaking of a pet hedgehog, such as keeping quiet during sex lest “an errant moan…alarm our barbed roommate. Actually, the word she used wasn’t alarm. It was traumatize.” Expensive veterinarian and pet psychiatrist visits follow. Diagnosis: hedgehog depression. Treatments include complete darkness, so Josh light-proofs the apartment, “while Adeline tend[s] to the hedgehog in a rented darkroom at the Manhattan Institute of Photography.” Appel brilliantly contrasts Josh’s pungent wit about the situation’s absurdities with the couple’s real, mostly unspoken needs, conflicts and sad family histories. By the end, it’s clear Josh values the hedgehog, too, exactly for its prickly, stabbing neediness. “Paracosmos,” a very different story, shows a similar ambiguity about fantasy. A woman meets her daughter’s imaginary friend’s seemingly real father and has an affair with him. She doesn’t question his reality—why would she: “[W]hether Steve was the product of a coincidence or a hoax or a paranormal vortex, she did not want to lose him.”
Sharp, observant, darkly funny and deeply humane. Another winner from Appel.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0984940585
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Pressgang
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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