An entertaining, challenging read that may appeal mainly to Lethem fans and scholars.
The award-winning Lethem makes a puzzling return to the scene of an earlier novel.
The title of Lethem’s 13th novel stirs memories of his comic-noir treasure, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), but the clear antecedent here is The Fortress of Solitude (2003); the new book stands as a kind of sociological survey of the urban street life that underpinned Fortress. The crimes involved stem largely from a real estate revolution starting in the 1960s that transformed run-down parts of Brooklyn into desirable residential areas. Lethem focuses on the same Dean Street that featured in Fortress. The narrator, who is from the neighborhood, cites the white “pioneers” who venture into mainly Black areas and renovate old buildings. With vague thoughts of fostering integration, they end up forcing their school-age boys—girls and women are scarce here—to endure getting their pocket money regularly stolen by Black youths from nearby housing projects, an intricate ritual called “yoking” in Fortress and here termed “the dance.” The book consists of brief chapters with recurring characters, like the two boys who cut up quarters in a funny scheme that won’t be resolved for hundreds of pages. Much of the narrative touches on youthful pastimes and traumas, from muggings to skateboards to graffiti, Spaldeens, shoplifting, and sex. The crimes range from actual ones, like theft and rape, but also implicated are poor parenting and property inflation along with the nabe-jolting sins of gentrification. The title notwithstanding, the book is at best an interesting alternative to a conventional novel. Maybe, with its dizzying array of local color, it’s a memoir gone rogue, as is a lot of fiction. The narrator says "it is about what a small number of people remember” and how that knowledge “wishes and doesn’t wish to come out.” When it does, it's Fortress, or it's this.
An entertaining, challenging read that may appeal mainly to Lethem fans and scholars.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780062938824
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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