A dense, sometimes claustrophobic novel that flirts with the boundary between memory and invention.
When her childhood friend dies, leaving behind a manuscript she is both reluctant and compelled to read, Jen Craig experiences the literary breakthrough she has waited for her entire life.
The main character in this novella of interiors shares a name with the book’s author. She also shares a city—Sydney, Australia—and an impassioned compulsion to write. In these ways, this unusual book has a relationship with autofiction along the lines of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series or Teju Cole’s Open City, sharing a thematic focus on the sources of writerly inspiration, ultimately seeming to propose that all subjects are really reflections of our selves. Jenny, the character, lives in Glebe, a suburb of Sydney. One Monday morning, she leaves her apartment to walk to a cafe on Crown Street in Surry Hills, some two and a half miles away. The goal of this trip is to meet Pamela—the older sister of Jen’s recently deceased childhood friend, Sarah—in order to return Sarah’s unpublished manuscript, titled Panthers and The Museum of Fire, which Pamela gave to Jen at her sister’s wake and then requested back, unread. As Jen walks, she thinks. As she thinks, she carries the reader through the intervening years, from her childhood friendship with Sarah to Jen’s own anorexia to a religious conversion instigated by Pamela; from her “one real friendship” with her college friend Raf to her father’s consuming failure to write the “one great work that everyone continues to ridicule him about” while he slowly succumbs to cancer; from her own sense of her grandiosity and potential to a lingering dread that even the closest people in her life ridicule and shun her. The distinct scenes of this book—the “house party” at which Jen finds religion in her youth, a date with Raf some years earlier, Sarah’s wake two days prior, and a dinner with Raf only the night before—weave in and out of Jen’s progress across the meticulously rendered landscape of the city proper as her thoughts spiral, double-back, wallow, and soar. Sarah’s book, which is named for a road sign on the outskirts of Sydney, is simultaneously “nothing at all” and the instigating event for Jen’s own literary awakening—a book that gets to the “quick” of things and is, in fact, nothing but quick. It frees Jen from her own foundering attempts to write and shows her a new way forward. The result is the book the reader now holds in their hands four years after the day that Jen, the character, first set off on her book-length walk.
A dense, sometimes claustrophobic novel that flirts with the boundary between memory and invention.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1557-1344-448-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Zerogram Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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