CIRCLES

by James Seymour ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2022

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION