An uneven but often entertaining book.
After entering an essay contest with a $1 million prize, one man wrestles with memories of women, boats, and David Hasselhoff.
In his first book, Barbarian Spring (2015), the Swiss writer satirized capitalism and conspicuous consumption. Here he takes wry shots at academia, technology, and venture capitalists via a self-centered German professor with money woes and unsettling memories. Richard Kraft’s current marriage is collapsing and his finances are in tatters from a previous one. He travels to California, where judges will choose the winner of the essay competition, which requires the writer to defend Alexander Pope’s proposition “Whatever is, is right” in relation to technology. After a week, though, Kraft has produced nothing. Mostly his mind wanders. He recalls Ruth, a lover who rarely appears without a reference to the size of her breasts and/or hips, and Johanna, another, who ended their four-year affair inexplicably and left for San Francisco. He remembers watching the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, starring Hasselhoff and a talking car, and climbing the Berlin Wall, where he is reunited with Ruth and a son he was unaware of as Hasselhoff sings about “looking for freedom” from a crane basket. Elsewhere in essay-avoidance, Kraft goes rowing in the San Francisco Bay and loses his bearings, his boat, and his clothes before getting rescued and charged $8,000 for the lost boat and oars. He goes searching for Johanna and learns why she left him. And he has high-end macaroni and cheese with the contest’s wealthy sponsor, who is also backing a floating-island project that would fit right in on Swift’s Laputa. As with Robert Menasse's in The Capital, Lüscher’s satire requires some knowledge of recent European history and politics. It’s also diffuse, but Kraft’s seriocomic fumblings and failings help to hold it together.
An uneven but often entertaining book.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-18214-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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