An intimate, compelling portrait of a woman under psychological tension.
Driving down a dark, lonesome interstate, Alma is finally alone, finally away from her husband, Asa, and their two small children. Will she do the unthinkable and really abandon them?
The wife of a college professor, Alma spends her days tending to their fairy tale–like Vermont farmhouse and raising Eden and Phin, making sure their furnishings are a bit shabby chic and their days are spent mostly outside, limiting screen time and creating meals from their garden and chicken coop. From the outside, Alma is a picture-perfect version of the organic goddess extolled by Instagram influencers. She’s even an artist who dabbles in painting neo–Bloomsbury Group scenes. She considers writing and illustrating a children’s book with a rather lucrative contract but frets over the environmental waste inherent in the project—after all, how many of these books will be printed? Who will even read them? In her spare time, precious hours stolen in the nighttime while her family sleeps, Alma is working on a book that will show she's a serious artist. A meditation on the myths about maternal domestic work, Alma’s book will star a woman she calls Celeste, who will rise above all of the lies to become the perfect mother. She models Celeste on a woman whose social media accounts offer Alma a window into the life she desires. And somewhere along the line, Alma becomes alarmingly obsessed with the fake Celeste. Goodman devastatingly charts Alma’s anxieties about being a good-enough mother, a good-enough spouse to take to cocktails and dinner with colleagues, a good-enough advocate of all the trendy issues, including climate change and gun control, public versus private schools, organic versus micronutrient-dense foods. The tension builds, pushing Alma to plan her escape, but her journey forces her to face reality outside the filters afforded by social media.
An intimate, compelling portrait of a woman under psychological tension.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-57131-136-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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