A potent, peculiar, and hallucinatory anti-romance.
A 19th-century sailor reckons with the murder he committed and his love-hate relationship with the man who drove him to it.
Moshfegh’s (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, 2018, etc.) 2014 debut novella, now reissued, is set mainly in 1851, the same year Moby-Dick was published. It’s hard not to imagine a connection: Its title character is a hard-drinking New England seafarer who could have been one of the crustier, more bedraggled members of the Pequod’s crew. McGlue has a crack in his head from a fall from a train, unabashedly lets loose with homophobic slurs, and stands accused of killing Johnson, one of his shipmates. His instinctive reaction to this news is profane defiance of everyone around him, up to and including his mother; his main wish is to “dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.” But time in jail, and sobriety, gives his character some contours, if never anything resembling likability: He recalls childhood friends, youthful carousing, and dreams about Johnson that suggest McGlue’s early robust utterances of “fag” are evidence he’s protesting too much. Moshfegh’s fiction often fetishizes the repellent (vomit, blood, our capacity for callously using each other), but in time McGlue’s tale acquires tenderness of a sort. That’s partly thanks to Moshfegh’s lyricism: McGlue pleads for healing of his “hot snake brains…slithering and stewing around, steam seeping through the crack in my head.” But it’s mainly in his internal struggle over how much to concede he cared for Johnson (“he refound me and took me over”; “I was already drunk on him”). So as McGlue’s trial approaches, the novel evokes another classic, The Stranger, whose narrator also tried to comprehend the cruelty of the world and how much cruelty he’s responsible for himself.
A potent, peculiar, and hallucinatory anti-romance.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52276-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more...
Four close friends, their husbands, their children, their housecleaners—and one application-only magnet school that will drive them all over the brink.
A Boulder-esque town in the Front Range of the Rockies, Crystal, Colorado, is a progressive paradise where four entwined families are raising their children, though death, divorce, and drugs have taken their toll on the group since the moms met at baby swim class years back. The women give each other mugs with friendship quotes each year on the anniversary of that meeting, and they get together every Friday morning for a 4-mile run, "a ritual carved into the flinty stone of their lives…shared since they'd first started trimming up again after the births of their children." Beneath the surface, resentments are already simmering—one family is far wealthier than the others; the widowed mom is a neurotic mess; one of the couples didn't make it through elementary school and he's remarried to "a hot young au pair who was great with the twins [and] a willing partner in mindblowing carnality." Then comes the announcement of a public magnet school for exceptional learners, with a standardized test as the first step in separating the wheat from the chaff. The novel's depiction of the ensuing devolution is grounded in acute social observation—class, race, privilege, woke and libertarian politics—then hits the mark on the details as well. From the bellowing of the dads on the soccer field to the oversharing in the teenager's vlog, down to the names of the kids themselves—twins Aidan and Charlie Unsworth-Chaudhury; best friends Emma Z and Emma Q; nerdy chessmaster Xander Frye—Holsinger's (The Invention of Fire, 2015) pitch is close to perfect.
The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more timely, and the Big Little Lies treatment creates a deliciously repulsive and eerily current page-turner.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53496-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Here's another alcoholic nightmare told against a thoroughly knowledgeable background of Mexico, the people and the customs. Geoffrey Firmin's crowded life the world around slowly cracks through drink; not even his marriage to Yvonne, loyal but loved by his step-brother, Hugh, can save him. She leaves to get a divorce, while Geoffrey finds sympathetic cronies and old friends to accompany him from one binge to another. Yvonne's return, just as Hugh is leaving, brings about a new high in Geoffrey's drinking, and a new low in his hangovers. In futile altercation with the local police, Geoffrey is killed. Through the three central characters, there is the Joycean outpour of consciousness, a diarrhoeatic total recall, in the search for the cause of their rejection of life, in their rationalization of their self-portraits, in their knowledge of their griefs, despairs, bewilderment. Their casual, veiled conversations, wandering soul searchings, are highlighted against the Mexican setting, and the effect, sometimes with a brilliance, is a delirium of phantoms. For sophisticates.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1946
ISBN: 0061120154
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Reynal & Hitchoock
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1946
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