A reflective yet meandering tale about the people who shaped an actor’s life.
In this debut novel, an actor held hostage in his own home reflects on his artistic and romantic life.
Seventy-three-year-old thespian Ben Newby has just wrapped up a run as King Lear, and there’s only one role he wants to take on next: the memory-plagued protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape. Tormented by quite a few memories himself, Ben has no trouble embodying the part. After running through the first preview performance—it went perfectly except for the one time he dropped his script—he receives a note left him by a woman from his past, one whose relationship with him is anything but simple. After drinks with a friend, he wanders home to his apartment building late at night only to be accosted by a man in a Donald Trump mask. Knocked unconscious, Ben wakes inside his own apartment, his arms and legs taped together, with the intruder sitting beside him on the sofa: “For the longest time no one said anything. Neither terribly frightened nor eager to instigate any emotional distress, I simply directed my gaze into my visitor’s eyes, clearly visible through the holes in the mask.” While Ben calmly tries to figure out the identity and aims of Trump (as he calls him), memories from earlier eras of his life flash before his eyes. Ben particularly focuses on his relationship with his great love, Sudie Cardness, a fellow actor whose death he still identifies as the most profound loss of his life, and their close friend Billy Painter, a playwright who challenged the protagonist to be a truer version of himself. But can Ben locate something in these echoes of the past that explains the masked man sitting in his living room?
Seymour’s prose is by turns hefty and delicate, as here where he writes about an early skinny-dipping experience with Sudie and Billy: “Our smiles were broad, the laughter rolling gently from our naked bellies to our open mouths, and the touch of each other’s skin a reminder that while all three of us might live in an age that had declared god no longer existed, the energy that was passing through our blood streams at that moment might be the closest any of us would come to knowing something like god.” The author, who is a playwright, expertly blends Ben’s actorly concerns with his life offstage, and though there isn’t much about his situation that is terribly Beckettian, his world is rich and well rendered. The novel is perhaps weighted a bit too much toward the flashbacks, with not enough of the significantly more dramatic experience of Ben’s being held hostage in the present. The reveal that it all builds toward is the stuff of theater, and Seymour executes it well. But there’s never quite enough at stake in the story for it to feel fully dramatic, and its meditative pacing may cause some readers to sneak out before the final curtain falls.
A reflective yet meandering tale about the people who shaped an actor’s life.Pub Date: July 20, 2022
ISBN: 979-8885311755
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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