An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.
An unnamed narrator and his elderly interlocutor weave together forgotten queer histories in Torres’ second novel, following We the Animals (2011).
When the 20-something narrator wakes up from a blackout to find his kitchen flooded, he drives into the desert to visit Juan, an elderly friend who lives with “a badling of queer ducks” in a housing complex called the Palace. In exchange for a place to stay, the narrator agrees to carry on Juan’s life project, which involves a (real) 1941 research study called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. Though the research was begun in 1935 by Jan Gay, a lesbian anthropologist, the author named in the published study was psychiatrist George W. Henry, who used the text to pathologize homosexuality. Perusing Juan’s copy of the study, the narrator discovers largely blacked-out pages featuring highlighted fragments of text that Juan calls “little poems of illumination,” exercises in erasure that attempt to wrest the text from Dr. Henry and blow life back into the individual testimonies collected by Gay. Scans of the blacked-out pages of Sex Variants, in addition to related photographs and documents from Gay’s fictional archive, punctuate the novel’s short chapters, which capture Juan and the narrator’s conversations. Composed of stories both real and invented, collective and personal—Juan frequently asks the narrator to tell him about his sexual exploits—the novel's interlocutory structure recalls Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. As playful, inventive, and at times kaleidoscopic as the book may be, the dialogue between Juan and the narrator often comes across as forced, with some blocks of storytelling (including the entirety of Torres’ short story “Reverting to a Wild State,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2011) feeling wedged in. The novel shines and surprises, though, in sections where the characters interweave cultural and historical artifacts, as well as memory and literary references, to reconstruct and revise queer history. Here, the novel’s central question about where storytelling ends and history begins comes to the fore, albeit with no clear resolution. It's up to the reader, the narrator concludes, to decide where truth and fiction converge.
An inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780374293574
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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