A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.
A Tasmanian family grapples with death, extinction, and vanishing limbs.
Anna, Terzo, and Tommy Foley have a problem: Their 86-year-old mother, Francie, is dying, and they have to decide whether to let her. This choice pits Anna and Terzo—the “successful” siblings who, having left Tasmania to pursue joyless careers, now feel guilty for having neglected their mother—against Tommy, “a failed artist” who still lives in the Hobart area. Confusing a material existence for a meaningful one, Anna and Terzo demand life-prolonging intervention after life-prolonging intervention. Francie has surgery. She goes on dialysis. She is intubated. Time passes. Francie dwindles and suffers but, in a sense, lives. Meanwhile, Australia is burning, birds are dying, and parts of Anna’s body are vanishing. Literally. First her finger. Then her kneecap. Then another finger. Then her whole hand. Gone. “Like the thylacine and the Walkman. Like long sentences. Like smoke-free summers. Gone, never to return.” Yet what does Anna do about it? She reaches for her phone and “stare[s] solemnly at her screen,” taking a perverse comfort from the dead firefighters and charred songbirds of the Anthropocene extinction. Flanagan’s latest is haunted by a central feature of our modern epoch: human denial in the face of social and environmental cataclysm. Yet though Flanagan is justified in his outrage—the natural world is literally disappearing in front of our glazed eyes—he fails to embed his outrage in a convincingly articulated story. With every scene, every character, and every sentence deployed in unabashed support of the book’s themes, the novel lacks the narrative verisimilitude it needs to transcend the realm of polemic—a problem exacerbated by Flanagan’s summary-heavy style, his refusal to explore any setting, person, or idea with adequate depth or complexity. The disappearance of Anna’s body parts, for instance, is barely integrated into the story: She is rarely debilitated by her missing limbs, and the entire phenomenon reads like an overearnest symbol, an errant plot arc that the author, grasping for Gogol-ian profundity, pasted in and forgot to flesh out. Heartfelt though his work is, beautiful though his sentences are, Flanagan has given us an early draft—a fleshy sketch of a denser, better book.
A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31960-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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