Hypnotizing and inscrutable.
In this hallucinatory, impressionistic novel by a 23-year-old Australian writer, a girl’s involvement with an artist opens up a world preoccupied by money and drugs.
Fifteen-year-old Monk lives in a dingy Chinatown apartment with her dad, a lapsed art professor who, after Monk’s mother left him, spends most of his time on their brown couch watching nature documentaries and nursing a dependency on alcohol and anxiety medication: “Xanax as a white hunk. Dad takes his with Earl Grey tea. Little yellow sappy sags for eyes.” Monk meets a high school senior named Santa Coy and quickly becomes obsessed with him, but once she starts inviting him to her apartment, Santa Coy begins making “Basquiat-lite” art in the kitchen for her father. The two men host exhibitions of Santa Coy’s work in the apartment, attend art shows, and start having muttered discussions about paint and profit. Monk begins to feel left out, though it’s unclear whether she wants Santa Coy’s or her father’s attention all to herself, to make art herself, to have art made of her—or all of the above. Santa Coy and Monk’s father suddenly come into a lot of money, and Monk’s father is just as suddenly attacked and ends up in the hospital. Perhaps, Monk thinks, it’s because she asked her friend’s mother, a “healer” named Honey, to help her with her situation, which only draws her further into an underworld suffused with scammers and violence. The novel is told in a series of titled, hyperassociative, impressively strange vignettes. The entirety of “This Generation Asks for Signs,” for instance: “Do you think in Heaven everybody will be the same amount of appealing, and never stop? In the mirror my body’s becoming a tree.” Lau narrates the drug-laced high school parties and booze-drenched art world parties Monk moves through with the same ambiently threatening mood—selling “fake art” and selling “fake drugs,” it’s clear, are much the same thing. The prose is laden with significance, repeated references to jazz and cowboys and panthers and deserts that can get so dense it’s unclear, in the end, what it’s all supposed to mean.
Hypnotizing and inscrutable.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56689-594-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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