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trip is to meet Pamela—the older sister of Jen’s recently deceased childhood friend, Sarah—in order to return Sarah’s unpublished manuscript, titled Panthers and The Museum of Fire, which Pamela gave to Jen at her sister’s wake and then requested back, unread.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
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
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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