An ominous, often alienating piece of experimental fiction set along a hellish highway.
A man journeys along a nightmarish path in Taylor’s experimental novel.
Highway 28 West is a desolate place. It’s a stretch of road where “everything takes at least two hours or two days or two months or two years longer than it should,” as one resident puts it. “Unless it’s something bad, and then it happens a lot quicker than it should…” Along its winding route are trailer parks, ponds, and houses of worship like the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church. It’s home to vultures, roadkill, 18-wheelers hauling pine, and, in the winter, enough snow to strand a traveler in his tracks. That’s what happens to Preacher. Preacher isn’t really a preacher—he goes by a nickname he picked up in high school. His actual beliefs about God—or anything else for that matter—are rather ambivalent. When his pick-up truck stalls on the snowy highway, he approaches a trailer home to ask to use the phone and interrupts a couple in the midst of a screaming match. The wife invites Preacher to stay for coffee while the man steps away to sneak some whiskey in the bathroom. The wife takes the opportunity to seduce Preacher, then tells him of her plan to murder her husband with the shotgun hanging above the fireplace. Fleeing the trailer and impending murder, Preacher visits another one nearby, where a woman cares for her sick husband and son. The very next day, after getting his truck fixed, Preacher wanders into the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church only to discover a joint funeral for the boy and his father. These are just the first of several strange encounters Preacher experiences driving up and down Highway 28 West. He also finds a pit-bull puppy and a dead man, takes a job at a boxing plant, fails to help two teenagers drowning in a pond, and witnesses a mass shooting at a high school pep rally.
The novel is formatted like a play: Preacher recounts his adventures as monologues delivered to a crowd of people, many of whom have heard aspects of the story from other sources. They shout out comments, observations, and critiques of Preacher’s storytelling ability (during the telling of the anecdote about the arguing couple, one crowd member shouts, upon learning of the shotgun, “Just shoot the damn thing!”). Some members of the crowd have distinct personalities, like Lizzie, the “Girl Poet in Crowd,” who offers cryptic verses now and again between Preacher’s speeches. The stories Preacher tells are hard to make sense of—they have the fluidity and ambiguity of religious allegory, and both Preacher and the crowd often have difficulty assessing their meaning; the format itself adds an additional layer of abstraction. Preacher sometimes tells his stories in the first person, sometimes in the third, and there’s a slipperiness to the time and setting. Fans of Samuel Beckett and other aggressively postmodern writers may enjoy picking apart the layers of Preacher’s dreamlike soliloquies, but most readers will probably be left baffled by this difficult-to-parse work.
An ominous, often alienating piece of experimental fiction set along a hellish highway.Pub Date: May 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781952386602
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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