A challenging but fresh and inventive set of prose poems.
An offbeat batch of short and flash fiction, generally concerned with domesticity but more notably obsessed with the sound and feel of language.
These experimental stories from McIlvoy (The Complete History of New Mexico, 2005, etc.) revel in their peculiar setups. A man buys a lawnmower from the poet Basho; a group of suburban men run through their neighborhood like werewolves, “a pack of men pulling a sleigh full of prostration”; vets go golfing in the snow; a narrator contemplates a person dressed as a Sprite can. Straightforward plots never follow from these premises, but McIlvoy is more interested in wordplay and observation than narrative. That can have some pleasurably jarring effects: one cycle of stories concerns a skateboarding-obsessed man named Teacher Reptile who writes epic fantasy novels and speaks in a patter that’s half King James Bible, half Thrasher magazine. (“Give unto me the great chain, that I may rule the pit without bottom, the session that hath not end of grind.”) McIlvoy can play up the humor and absurdity of language, as when he connects possessives like boxcars (“Inside their home’s heart’s sounds: the tub’s faucet’s dripping’s splashings…”) or upends the conventional aggression of the bank-robbery note. Even so, the overall mood is somber and contemplative, filled as the stories are with the likes of drowned people returning home, lonesome ghosts playing music in a bar bathroom, and hard-luck types aimlessly riding a bus in New Mexico. Most somber (and revealing) of all the stories is one teacher’s recollection of a student producing a grammatically clumsy but charming sentence. “I have needed, wanted your flooding truth to kill what I have been,” the narrator writes, echoing McIlvoy’s consistent urge to distrust telling the story straight and to let the provocative premise and odd delivery carry the day.
A challenging but fresh and inventive set of prose poems.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935536-98-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Four Way
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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