A flashy, astute read for knowledgeable lovers of American art history.
In the wake of his lover’s death, a long-time San Francisco art-scene insider curates her final words on the subjects of culture and belonging.
Marcia Lang is a force to be reckoned with. The only child of Jewish entrepreneurs who left Berlin just ahead of the Third Reich, Marcia has an indomitable sense of self that transcends her parents’ expectations that she marry, have children, and tend to her writing ambitions on the side. Instead, she becomes the “bossy, sometimes overbearing” center of a group of young bohemians attending Berkeley in the late 1940s. There, alongside a revolving coterie of artists, poets, and puppeteers, Marcia builds a name for herself as a keen cultural critic, deeply invested in the San Francisco scene. That is, until she commits the ultimate left-coast sin and leaves San Francisco for a career in New York City, where she becomes the kind of critic who can make an artist’s career by giving them “the full Marcia Lang treatment,” even if she’s tearing their work to shreds. Newly returned to California and predicted to be “the voice of the decade,” Marcia unexpectedly dies during the intermission of “yet another farewell tour by Martha Graham,” leaving her lover, Burt, himself a poet and publisher, the job of completing Marcia’s “coffee-table book for intelligentsia” about the postwar San Francisco scene. What follows is a pastiche of Marcia’s catty, colloquial, and piercing observations interspersed with Burt’s own more laconic takes on the same parties, happenings, and arguments. Perl, a celebrated art critic who has charted the course of more than one movement himself, provides an expert’s eye for the nuance of both the art’s making and its philosophy. However, as a novel interested in the nuance of a relationship between two people—one a firebrand who burns out too soon, the other left to navigate his loss in the wash of her immortal opinions—the book does not live up to the potential of its premise. Like Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve or John Berger’s A Painter of Our Time, Perl’s debut novel could be both an astute critique and an affecting Künstlerroman for the critic-as-artist, but the balance of the book’s attention lies on the side of criticism rather than character development; a missed opportunity that hopefully serves as a call for this insightful and often delightful author to try again.
A flashy, astute read for knowledgeable lovers of American art history.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781566897648
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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