A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.
A chronically ill theater professor upends her life when she stages Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.
After a freak accident, Miranda Fitch—who was a dazzling, up-and-coming stage actress—loses her acting career, her marriage, and her formerly pain-free life. Working at a university’s “once flourishing, now decrepit Theater Studies program,” Miranda is spiraling out of control. Her days pass in a flurry of pills, doctor appointments, and dissociative conversations; she struggles to manage her chronic pain and to make others believe the extent of her suffering: “On vague fire in various places, all over, all over. Burning too with humiliation and rage.” Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided. During a particularly tumultuous appointment with one of her doctors, Miranda says she knows what he thinks of her: “One of those patients. One of those sad cartoon brains who wants to live under a smudgy sky of her own making.” For the student production, Miranda wants to stage the “problem play” that took everything from her: Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. But her students—her lively, limber, and treacherous students—want to put on Macbeth, and it looks like they will get their way until Miranda meets three strange men in a bar. In exchange for “a good show,” the men offer her what she’s always wanted: no more pain. Once Miranda realizes how to transpose her pain to others, her luck begins to change—or does it? As her physical aching dissipates, almost everything else in her life becomes more vibrant. However, when no longer tethered to her pain, Miranda becomes unmoored from reality in increasingly dangerous and deranged ways. Imbued with magic and Shakespearean themes, the novel swings wildly between tragedy and comedy and reality and unreality. Although the novel sometimes struggles under the weight of its own surreality, Awad artfully and acutely explores suffering, artistry, and the limitations of empathy.
A strange, dramatic novel where all’s well, or not well, or perhaps both.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982169-66-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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