Cohen’s greatness is largely obscured in these atmospheric, derivative early drafts.
Previously unpublished early fiction by the iconic singer/songwriter, mostly domestic tales of love and loss.
Composed between 1956 and '61, the stories in this collection by Cohen (1934-2016) showcase a writer heavily under the sway of the Beats and existentialists, usually with young male protagonists heavily under the sway of others. The narrator of the short title novel is compelled to clear space in his Montreal apartment for his grandfather, a boorish man prone to spitting, physical assault, and other bodily offenses. Rather than be repulsed by this behavior, the narrator finds it oddly liberating and pursues a series of humiliations and abasements. The mood is one of warmed-over Sartre, with proclamations of life as a theater of cruelty (“How sad and beautiful we were, we humans with our suffering and our torturing”), topped off with a facile comic plot twist. The 16 additional stories are generally miniatures, curiosity pieces, and linguistic experiments featuring prostitutes, jazz musicians, sullen lovers, another boorish grandfather, and other hard-luck types; a series of stories feature Mister Euemer a milquetoast suburbanite who is alternately humiliated by a neighborhood boy and by his wife, who in one story is oddly obsessive about shaving. There are flickers of the wry, sensitive tone that marks Cohen's song lyrics, as in “Lullaby,” a Bellovian story about Euemer’s impending fatherhood, “Short Story on Greek Island,” about a relationship between a pair of expats, and “Trade,” about a young man and woman sharing stories about their stints in a psychiatric ward. Still, had these pieces appeared in their time, they likely would’ve been seen as also-rans compared to Kerouac, Selby, and Bukowski. Today, they largely read like the juvenilia of a writer whose best work is still ahead of him.
Cohen’s greatness is largely obscured in these atmospheric, derivative early drafts.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6047-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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