A powerful novel, rich in language and dark intensity.
In this stream-of-consciousness wilderness saga set in the 1840s, on the eve of the California Gold Rush, a reclusive trapper rejected by society fights for survival on a westward trek filled with treacherous encounters.
As a child, Silas Hall is the bane of his Pennsylvania family’s existence. He is prone to tantrums, acts of destruction, and prolonged escapes into the woods—behavior that gets him dosed with laudanum. As a young adult, he fathers a baby with his mother’s nonverbal housekeeper. But overwhelmed by the demands of intimacy, he abandons them, making the wild his permanent home, as he says, "so I might live in a world that could hold me." Heading across muddy and jagged terrain with a mule and a musket, he comes across dead bodies and avoids becoming one of them by committing his own killings. Setting foot on Sierra Nevada soil, where few white men have dared go before, he periodically visits a Nisenan chief, No Rope, whose friendship he has earned by helping in the fight against white antagonists who, in due course, will eradicate entire Native populations in pursuit of gold. Another tribe isn’t so friendly to Silas, wounding and taking him captive and, in a super-tense scene, threatening to deal him the gruesome fate visited upon the men he had hooked up with. Alternating between third-person narration and remorseful letters from Silas to his son, the novel boasts powerful natural images, such as a massive flock of passenger pigeons that blackens the sky at a dark moment in young Silas’ life. An exhaustive and sometimes exhausting book written under the influence of Cormac McCarthy and perhaps James Joyce, Weil’s follow-up to The Age of Perpetual Light (2017) is as much about sounds and smells and distant visions as it is about human action. The great tragedy of Silas’ life remains his father’s cutting-down of the elm tree that once called out to him through his bedroom window.
A powerful novel, rich in language and dark intensity.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550994
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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