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THE NEW INHERITORS

Name: THE NEW INHERITORS
Author: Kent Wascom
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2817-1

by Kent Wascom ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2018

Family drama and love story, Wascom’s latest is evidence of an evolving talent. Look for more.

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Wascom (Secessia, 2015, etc.) delivers a lyrical, emotionally charged study of life along the Gulf Coast a century past.

With less self-conscious flash than in his previous novel, largely set in New Orleans, Wascom moves out to shore and “the sea of storms” with this comparatively modest tale of nature-knowing Isaac Patterson and his love for Kemper Woolsack, the heiress to the fortune of a family who constituted “a machine that fed on misery,” its riches bound to extracting the resources of the Gulf with no regard for the cost in the lives of others. Rich or poor, Wascom’s characters harbor secrets—especially Kemper’s brother, Angel, “hopelessly, helplessly bound” to a thinly closeted life as a gay man in a time when such a life is harshly punished. Angel’s torments are bound up as well in a Shakespearean family dynamic that plays out among the rusting hulk of the Maine, the streets of Havana and the hills of Haiti, and mildewed manses from Louisiana to Florida. Suffice it to say that not much can end well given such ingredients. Even so, the tragedy that closes Kemper and Isaac’s life together comes as a swiftly onrushing surprise, as does a galloping conclusion that follows a much more languorously unfolding narrative, one that takes in wayward women, country preachers, orphanages, steaming ports, and a thousand well-observed period details. The best moments of this very good book are those in which Wascom writes with sententious but not sentimental poetry: “There are those who condescend to tell you about love and loss, and have known neither at its full pitch, which is nearest to madness and sends us out to wander unknown, night-black countries, seeking what we cannot have, the land growing less and less familiar with each step.”

Family drama and love story, Wascom’s latest is evidence of an evolving talent. Look for more.

Pub Date: July 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2817-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SECESSIA
by Kent Wascom

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLOOD OF HEAVEN
by Kent Wascom

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.