No less insightful and stylish than Huston’s previous fiction, but no matter how you stuff ’em, the lives of academics are...
The third from Calgary-born, now Paris-based Huston (Slow Emergencies, 2001, etc.) concerns an alcoholic, neurotic, dying, famous Irish poet who invites a circle of friends from the New England college he teaches at to a last Thanksgiving dinner.
An audacious conceit distinguishes Huston’s tale from standard academic fare: specifically, the voice of God periodically interrupts the evening’s story to describe the future deaths of the assembled guests. Even so, only Sean, the host, has any inkling of his end, the doctor having recently told him of his inoperable cancer, but that doesn’t mean he has any intention of changing his tune. Smoking and drinking himself into oblivion throughout the evening, he can still enjoy the success of his plan to get everyone drunk as quickly as possible so that essential truths can be shared. The company includes two of Sean’s former lovers, one a secretary at the college, the other a philosophy professor (her philosophy-professor husband is also a guest); a black poet going through a bitter divorce; Sean’s lawyer and his contentiously feminist wife; Sean’s nearly deaf baker; a frustrated artist from Ukraine and his doting wife; a novelist of a literary stature equal to Sean’s, with his new wife and baby boy. But even with Sean deftly steering the conversation as he staggers from chair to chair, some secrets remain uncovered. The baker, in truth a Russian Jew who fled pogroms in Odessa to become a professor in apartheid-riven South Africa, remains a baker. And the novelist’s young wife, sneaking upstairs to snort cocaine on the pretense of checking on the baby, has a lurid past that the others—including hubby—couldn’t begin to imagine.
No less insightful and stylish than Huston’s previous fiction, but no matter how you stuff ’em, the lives of academics are about as exciting as turkey on a platter.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-58642-028-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.
Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.
The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.
Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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