A manic and often funny investigation of fandom.
In Rosenholtz’s epistolary novel, a desperate man reveals his psychological unraveling across a series of fan letters to Taylor Swift.
An unnamed 53-year-old high school English teacher and self-avowed music snob is shocked when he discovers how deeply he enjoys the Taylor Swift album Red (Taylor’s Version), which he listens to accidentally one day on his commute to work—his 13-year-old daughter, Allie, loves TS, of course, but the man is shocked that the music of the pop star speaks to him on such an elemental level. Soon he is listening to nothing else, declaring his car a “TS-only zone” in which his daughters’ other musical requests are not allowed. He embarks on what he calls the “Year of TS,” listening to Swift’s albums in chronological order and assimilating them into his being. “And then there’s Folklore—to be honest, I don’t even say the album’s title aloud, just as I never let my students say ‘Macbeth’ when we’re reading Shakespeare’s Scottish play,” gushes the man, who, because the novel is formatted as fan letters, always addresses Swift in the second person. “I feel unworthy of passing the word through my lips. The most perfect of your perfect albums.” By the time Midnights arrives in the fall of 2022, the man is so obsessed that he stays up until 3 a.m. to download the bonus content despite having to teach the next day. As he recounts his love for Swift’s music, the deleterious effects of his obsession on his life—from his work to his ability to drive to his relationship with his daughters—are increasingly apparent. The letters become more unhinged as time goes on, revealing the desperate fears and irrational dreams of a man on the edge of oblivion.
The author’s narrative voice is deviously comic, with glimmers of mania shining through the generally polite and friendly prose: “Sometimes, your music has even resulted in me losing my temper just a little, typically when anything or anyone comes between me and my enjoyment of you. I tend, for example, to yell quite vigorously at the woman with the disembodied voice who lives deep inside my car’s sound system whenever she interrupts the soothing sounds of your voice.” As the narrator discusses the fact that he and Swift share a birthday or speculates as to whether or not she has read Kurt Vonnegut, the sad realities of the narrator’s life are slowly revealed, such as how his wife kicked him out of the house and how his daughters are embarrassed that he cries whenever certain TS songs come on. Rosenholtz skillfully deploys the phenomenon of fandom—and Taylor Swift fandom in particular—to paint a detailed portrait of a lost soul for whom obsession serves as a kind of life jacket. The premise is a fun one, but it is slightly one-note; though the novel extends to only 220-odd pages, the idea loses some of its steam before the end. Perhaps because the narrator is ultimately so difficult to relate to, the book ends up feeling more like a lengthy black-humor piece than a work of psychological fiction.
A manic and often funny investigation of fandom.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798988180920
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Demersal Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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