Contemplative and charged; a thought-inducing thriller.
Selgin presents a literary novel about the dark side of sibling rivalry.
When Stewart Detweiler, author and former instructor at the Metropolitan Writing Institute, arrives at a lake house in Georgia, the situation is bleak. Stewart’s twin brother, Gregory, has taken his own life. Does Stewart notify the police? Nope. He dumps the body in the lake and assumes his brother’s identity. While Stewart was scraping together a living at a tenement apartment in the Bronx, his twin enjoyed fame and fortune. Gregory was once a mild-mannered professor in Vermont, but that all changed. A chance encounter on an airplane inspired him to enter the self-help market with a book called Coffee, Black. The premise of Coffee, Black boils down to this: One is free to make changes in one’s own life. The book, published under Gregory’s new persona, “Brock Jones, Ph.D.,” became a runaway bestseller. Gregory became a changed man. This is all much to the chagrin of Stewart, who, though having a few published works under his belt, could never dream of the kind of success of Coffee, Black. If the basis of Brock’s message was that we can be whomever we want to be, why can’t his brother take the place of someone people adore? It seems like a good plan, yet Stewart learns that being Brock isn’t as carefree as he imagined. To add to the drama, this very text, the reader is told, has been hastily written on a series of composition pads.
The premise of a twin’s assuming the identity of his more successful brother sounds comedic. In execution, however, the story takes a more sinister tack. If, for instance, Stewart is going to successfully put his brother’s body at the bottom of the lake, he is going to have to stab it several times so it does not float to the surface. As Stewart points out, his brother is already dead. But does that make it OK? Back at the lake house, Stewart considers an obsession of his father (who was also a professor and also died by suicide) with twins and doppelgängers. Then, to complicate matters, it seems the lake is being dragged for a body. Never mind strange text messages Stewart receives on his brother’s old phone. This all culminates in an atmosphere that is thoughtful, tense, and fascinatingly morbid. By contrast, flashbacks to Stewart’s life are tame. The reader gets more than a few rehashes of what Stewart taught his writing students (e.g., how to write a pitch paragraph) and a clunky disagreement Stewart had with a barista concerning decaf espresso. Such recollections do not exactly leap from the page. Nor do they add much to this clearly troubled protagonist. After all, the reader knows well there is at least one body at the bottom of the lake.
Contemplative and charged; a thought-inducing thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947175-43-3
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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