Varied, inventive, uncanny, and playful: a gifted fabulist's cabinet of curiosities, his book-length memento mori.
Brockmeier's latest is a collection of 100 tiny tales, each precisely two pages long.
But these ghost stories do their haunting in a wide variety of tones and moods and modes. These miniatures aren't always long on narrative. Many are thought experiments, meditations, fables, allegories, head-of-a-pin paintings. What unites them is first and foremost Brockmeier's questing sensibility, a fascination with abstract ideas that find form in fiction the way spirit is said to find form in phantasm. The book's central idea, it seems, is that death is a permeable membrane—indeed, it's here crossed casually and constantly, from every side and in every conceivable way. The dead aren't dead, nor is alive the other half of a simple binary. Instead, Brockmeier's world has a perpetual hum of oddity, a numinous glow. He's a master of defamiliarizing the everyday, of what the Russians call "making strange." Uncanny and unsettling but also consistently amusing, the book shares a title with Robert Schumann's tortured final work but not that work's tone. Pachyderms overhear a scientist's recording of a dead friend and—fooled by this aural ghost—search the savanna for her ("Elephants"); a commercial logger with a mania for clear-cutting finds that it extends into the afterlife ("A Blight on the Landscape"); a woman communicates with her dead lover by way of their mingled aromas ("Bouquet"). One minor disappointment: It seems that, perhaps to make this feel more like a novel and less like an anthology, Brockmeier has created an elaborate organizational schema. Not only is the book divided into 11 thematic sections ("Ghosts and Time," "Ghosts and Love and Friendship," and so on), but there's also a 20-plus-page "Partial Concordance of Themes." Ultimately this apparatus seems labored, clunky—but that minor flaw doesn't detract much.
Varied, inventive, uncanny, and playful: a gifted fabulist's cabinet of curiosities, his book-length memento mori.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-524-74883-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry.
What happens when a midlist author steals a manuscript and publishes it as her own?
June Hayward and Athena Liu went to Yale together, moved to D.C. after graduation, and are both writers, but the similarities end there. While June has had little success since publication and is struggling to write her second novel, Athena has become a darling of the publishing industry, much to June’s frustration. When Athena suddenly dies, June, almost accidentally, walks off with her latest manuscript, a novel about the World War I Chinese Labour Corps. June edits the novel and passes it off as her own, and no one seems the wiser, but once the novel becomes a smash success, cracks begin to form. When June faces social media accusations and staggering writer’s block, she can’t shake the feeling that someone knows the truth about what she’s done. This satirical take on racism and success in the publishing industry at times veers into the realm of the unbelievable, but, on the whole, witnessing June’s constant casual racism and flimsy justifications for her actions is somehow cathartic. Yes, publishing is like this; finally someone has written it out. At times, the novel feels so much like a social media feed that it’s impossible to stop reading—what new drama is waiting to unfold. and who will win out in the end? An incredibly meta novel, with commentary on everything from trade reviews to Twitter, the ultimate message is clear from the start, which can lead to a lack of nuance. Kuang, however, does manage to leave some questions unanswered: fodder, perhaps, for a new tweetstorm.
A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780063250833
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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