A meta-novel that stings and touches the reader.
Impudent humor, dark farce, and the looming threat of violence somehow merge in jittery tandem in this novel, along with a pair of storylines about Black writers on book tours—and in personal upheaval.
On the one hand, there’s Soot, a Black writer who is “the age of early evening bedtimes and early morning ibuprofen.” (In other words, 44 years old.) He’s visiting Minnesota in the dead of winter, away from home to promote his new book, and one senses from the start that it isn’t just the snowy, frigid air that’s making him shudder. On the other hand, there’s a younger, friskier National Book Award–winning Black writer, also on a literary tour, in the more temperate climes of southern Europe. Neither the latter’s age nor name are specified here. But he’s perfectly OK with people who mistake him for Ta-Nehisi Coates or Colson Whitehead or even Walter Mosley. (“Turns out I can be anybody you want me to be if I’m just willing to say the words.”) These mercurial men are the dual (if not dueling) protagonists in this latest from Mott, a follow-up of sorts to his 2021 National Book Award–winning novel, Hell of a Book, in which Soot appeared in younger form, growing up in North Carolina. Soot spends most of his narrative here bouncing back in time to when he was still happily married, and his daughter was still alive. Inferences of the tragic calamity that took Soot’s daughter’s life intrude on the public and private moments of his tour. Meanwhile, the other author is having a time of it overseas as he’s embraced by a rich and famous Frenchman who offers him lasting wealth if he never returns to the U.S. As this transaction plays out, the author meets an enigmatic young man named Dylan who hates it when the author calls him “Kid” (and who also seems a carryover from Mott’s previous book) along with an effusive Black giant who loves H.P. Lovecraft and speaks with a Scottish brogue. The younger author is also being marked for death by a madman named Remus—the latter development compelling the author to secure a firearm. Indeed, guns are the subtext that link both narratives, along with the trauma they instill in those who witness and survive their malign use. The whole book seems the literary equivalent of a post-bop jazz performance, with oblique happenings that compel attention because of the book’s antic energy and lyrical passages.
A meta-novel that stings and touches the reader.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798217047116
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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