A haunting, complex look at love, gay history, and the passage of time.
In Horrigan’s novel, a gay academic reflects on past and present relationships.
In New York City, professor and author James Fitzgerald has just had a successful reading from his latest novel, American Scholar. Then the sister of Gregory Lenda, a long-ago ex—to whom James dedicated his book—shows up, throwing him off-kilter and into reminiscence. The narrative alternates between James’ reflective roaming across the city in present-day 2016 and his forays into academia and gay culture in 1987. Eighties-era James, who goes by “Jimmy,” meets the charismatic Gregory at a gay men’s study group; the two quickly develop a strong connection and start dating. The naïve Jimmy struggles to navigate Gregory’s history of mental illness, his own feelings about sex, and his dissertation on (real-life) early-20th-century critic F.O. Matthiessen, a closeted gay man. In the present, James reflects on tension with his husband, Fran; visits his younger boyfriend, Snyder; and stops by Gregory’s old house in midtown Manhattan. The book has a pensive, dreamlike quality to it; the flashbacks will feel natural to anyone who’s taken similar long evening walks. But there’s also a captivating intensity throughout, from Gregory’s dark, urgent personality to the no-punches-pulled depiction of the effects of HIV and AIDS on the gay community in the late ’80s. James’ other relationships are well limned, including those with college friends and fellow study-group members. Both Horrigan and his protagonist are literature professors with Columbia doctorates, and this sometimes breeds dry, academic passages. Still, it’s intriguing to follow Jimmy’s fascination with Matthiessen, whose life serves as a historical parallel to aspects of Jimmy and Gregory’s relationship. Above all, readers will recognize the ache of the absence of a great love: After considering Virginia Woolf’s assertion that life is “a procession of shadows,” James thinks, “He wanted to speak about ghosts. Shades. Shadows. Hauntings. (Was that just another way of saying, he wanted to write about Gregory?)”
A haunting, complex look at love, gay history, and the passage of time.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781590217368
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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