An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker’s limitations.
An aging Ralph Waldo Emerson grapples with an ethical dilemma.
Over the last decade, the stylistic range and subtle connections on display in Lock’s American Novels cycle have afforded many pleasures. This latest installment focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, opening two and a half years before his death. He’s showing the effects of dementia—which, unsettlingly, include a moment in which he doesn’t recognize a passage from one of his own works. Emerson also converses with other people, living and dead, with whom he crossed paths. “I hope Garrison doesn’t take it into his head to visit me. His opinions are fiery, and I dread being scorched,” he thinks at one point. In his introduction, Lock writes that this book “can be thought of as a play for voices”—and an early passage in which Emerson ponders the word spoon suggests, perhaps, a slight influence of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in the mix. Eventually, Emerson must try to focus on the present moment; he meets James Stokes, a Black soldier who deserted after defending himself from a racist attack and killing another soldier in self-defense. As in A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), Lock explores the gulf between some transcendentalists' idealism and their reticence to take a stronger moral stance on racism and slavery—and Emerson occasionally muses on Samuel Long, the protagonist of that earlier novel, strengthening the connection between the two books. There’s a profound sadness here, as Emerson muses on his losses, noting that “our bereavements bring us no nearer to God.” And his awareness of his own condition is heartbreaking to ponder: “Soon the universe inside me will slip out like a yolk from an eggshell.”
An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker’s limitations.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781954276178
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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