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KING OF THE MISSISSIPPI

Name: KING OF THE MISSISSIPPI
Author: Mike Freedman
ISBN: 978-0-525-57378-4

by Mike Freedman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2019

A solid entertainment from a writer of considerable talent and promise.

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Two alphas battle to be top dog at a global consultancy in this amusing satire on business, ambition, and entitlement.

Brock Wharton, at 33, reckons he has logged “a lifetime of doing everything right.” Quarterback at the University of Texas, married money, Harvard Business School, and on the fast track to becoming managing director of Houston-based Cambridge Consulting Group. But while interviewing new hires, he meets his nemesis, Mike Fink, who seems comfortable being all wrong for CCG. Weak GPA at Tulane, majored in English literature, and sartorially unsplendid: “Navy double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that Wharton would never enter.” But Fink’s resume includes serving as a Green Beret in the Middle East. So while Wharton thinks of the military as “the last stop for the talentless,” CCG’s managing director feels that “in our post 9/11 world, these heroes are a lot more real to clients than another fresh-faced MBA.” Wharton soon realizes Fink is no hick. During a session with client Dr. Pepper, Wharton spouts CCG’s usual mix of jargon, arrogance, and newish ideas. The wily Fink undermines his slideshow and charms the CEO with a paean to corporate tradition. Freedman (School Board, 2014), a former Green Beret himself, uses Fink to skewer the style and substance of consultancies, Houston’s moneyed class, and male egos in general—the novel’s women barely rise above cliché. The scattershot satire can be rough or forced, but it has a compelling energy, like Rodney Dangerfield’s shtick. Freedman’s debut was a broadly comic look at business interests in Houston’s politics as a charismatic teen vies with an oil executive for a school board seat. Maybe there’s another city portrait in the works, something akin to William Kennedy’s Albany novels.

A solid entertainment from a writer of considerable talent and promise.

Pub Date: July 9, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-57378-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
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- SEEN & HEARD
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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.