Heady, intellectual, ambitious, and not fully realized.
An academic couple weathers pandemic quarantine in two different versions of what their marriage might have been.
In the opening pages of Viswanathan’s third novel, a woman named P, her husband, Mac, and their two children, Aakash and Deepa, come together in the kitchen on the day in March 2020 when the world shuts down. Cracks already exist in the marriage—P, a tenured professor in translation, loves her job but feels the strain of being a South Asian native of Montreal in the deeply conservative American South. Mac, whose work on the intersections of “industrial design, corporate structures, and feminism” is what first brought them to Arkansas, is in danger of being denied tenure but refuses to jump through the tenure committee’s hoops, thus threatening the whole family’s stability. As quarantine wears on, those cracks are widened beyond repair by a truly disturbing secret P uncovers on Mac’s laptop one night, pushing her into a burgeoning self-reliance that takes the form of a Maggie Nelson–style book about the color chartreuse. On a parallel course, a woman named P, her husband, Mat, and their children, Nikhil and Sarojini, come together in the kitchen in March 2020 on the day the world shuts down. P and Mat are both tenured professors, both more-or-less fulfilled in their careers, though while Mat loves Arkansas and the economic freedom it affords them, P feels she has been “trailing him since they fell in love” and longs for recognition on her own terms. When P is accepted for a fellowship at the Sorbonne to work on her book about the color chartreuse, Mat’s response destabilizes the careful fairness of their marriage. Periodically interrupted by passages from P’s chartreuse essay, the twin narratives mirror each other in different lights—one revealing the inequities in a marriage founded on secrecy, one exploring the consequences of unfettered choice. The result provides ample fodder for a reader interested in the knotty problems of preserving individual identity within a family or society; institutional inequity in academia and beyond; or just the possibilities inherent to a woman who gives herself time alone to think. Unfortunately, the author makes structural choices that allow the sections on chartreuse to float untethered from either of the two P’s narratives. The result is the creation of a third P—the author of the essay—who, rather than bringing all the P’s together, muddles the tension of the novel and allows it to hang, slightly baggy, from the structural armature of its own form.
Heady, intellectual, ambitious, and not fully realized.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781567928143
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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