This whole novel comes across like a brash, in-your-face sales pitch leavened with punchy, go-for-broke mother-wit.
A first novel satirically lays out the wretched excesses of turn-of-the-21st-century capitalism as it both enriches and disfigures a bright young Black man’s coming-of-age.
Darren Vender is a 22-year-old product of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood who graduated first in his class at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science but passed on college and is quite happy with his life as a barista at a ground-floor Starbucks on Park Avenue. His life changes on the morning he decides to flash some impromptu genius to a charismatic suit named Rhett Daniels by convincing him to buy a different drink from the one he ordered. “Did you just try to reverse close me?” a flabbergasted Daniels asks before offering Darren a job with a startup sales company called Sumwun located several stories above the coffee shop. Reluctantly, Darren agrees and soon finds himself sharing a lofty, turbulent office suite with several tightly wound Type A White strivers obsessed with closing deals, pleasing Rhett, and rising higher within the company. Because Darren is the first and only African American employee, he has to endure being told by Rhett and other Whites how much he resembles Martin Luther King Jr., Morgan Freeman, Dave Chappelle, and other Black notables who resemble each other hardly at all. He emerges from rigorous, emotionally bruising indoctrination to become a high-octane fast-tracker among Sumwun’s army of sales tyros—and that’s when the money and fame start flowing into Darren’s life along with several layers of trouble, much of it coming when Darren struggles to accommodate his newfound prosperity to the life, along with the family and friends, he’s left behind in Brooklyn. As Darren himself puts it at one point, “The turns in this story are half-absurd, half jaw-dropping, and a whole heaping of crazy.” And, one might add, borderline corny and secondhand in narrative tactics, too. Still, even with its drolly deployed nuggets of sales tips directed at the reader throughout the narrative, the book's biggest selling point is the writing: witty, jazzily discursive, and rhythmically propulsive.
This whole novel comes across like a brash, in-your-face sales pitch leavened with punchy, go-for-broke mother-wit.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-38088-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals.
Historical fiction concerning the intricate battles over succession within the family that controls a poor rural county in post–World War I Virginia.
Duke Kincaid owns most of Claiborne County, both financially and politically. A charming, ruthless autocrat, feared yet beloved, he has three acknowledged children by three different wives (not to mention unacknowledged offspring). Shortly after his fourth marriage, the Duke dies unexpectedly. Although pragmatic, street-smart middle child Sallie is his intellectual and emotional heir, the Duke leaves his estate to her emotionally oversensitive half brother, Eddie, because he’s the only boy. Seventeen-year-old Sallie is devoted to Eddie, who's 13, but after he commits suicide she's torn by conflicting loyalties to her weak but lovable stepmother; her father’s scheming but able sister; and her older half sister, Mary, who's next in line to inherit the Kincaid empire but has not lived in Claiborne Country since her parents divorced. Family intrigue plays out against the backdrop of 1920s Claiborne County, where racism is a given, Prohibition is the law, and bootlegging is the main source of income for Blacks and Whites. Staunch prohibitionist Mary goes to war against the bootleggers using an enforcer who employs extreme violence. Sallie wants to support her sister but sympathizes with the bootleggers—her neighbors and tenants—and recognizes that the family's finances depend on trading whiskey. Defining what is moral becomes complicated for Sallie. So does defining family. Tough and independent, Sallie refuses to let womanhood limit her ambitions as she earns the nickname Queen of the Kincaid Rumrunners. History buffs will enjoy the many hints Walls sprinkles to show that Tudor England is her novel’s template (the Duke’s marriage to his brother’s widow; his banished daughter, Mary, and short-lived heir, Edward; the Kincaids’ counselor Cecil, etc.). Television buffs will smile at the Kincaids’ resemblance to the Roys of Succession.
A rollicking soap opera that keeps the pages turning with a surfeit of births, deaths, and surprising plot reveals.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781501117299
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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