A 115-year-old newspaperman looks back on both his life and a century of American-made toxic masculinity.
Sam Cunningham, the narrator of this high-concept historical novel, is the last living World War I veteran. As the story opens, on the night of Donald Trump’s election as president, he’s in a retrospective, embittered mood. He recalls his childhood in Louisiana with his closed-off, racist father, his stint in the war as a crack Army sniper, and, most prominently, his career at a Chicago newspaper, rising from cub reporter to editor-in-chief. Butler, who in recent years has focused on historical thrillers, is attuned to the details of war zones and the journalism world, emphasizing how we fail to see history’s cruelest men in the moment. Turning a blind eye to mobsters like Al Capone, fascists like Hitler, and demagogues like Huey Long as they emerged, Butler suggests, is an American tradition that led directly to Trump. Butler is strongest, though, when he approaches the theme from a more intimate perspective: the way Sam’s father rationalized lynchings and how the hypermasculine newsroom environment distanced him from his own son. (Sam's wife, Colleen, who first took him in as a boarder after the war, is a sensible sounding board with a progressive streak.) The novel’s conceit—Sam’s extreme age and debates with God during his long night of the soul—fits somewhat awkwardly over the more domestic details, and Butler telegraphs plot turns that make the story feel predictable. But the novel is affecting as Sam’s private reckoning with what Colleen calls his “ ‘be a man’ crusade,” recalling the better work of the late Ward Just, who wrote similar novels about fathers, sons, and (often misguided) senses of duty.
Sage historical fiction that gets into the emotional grit behind major news events.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5882-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.
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The adventures of a trio of genius kids united by their love of gaming and each other.
When Sam Masur recognizes Sadie Green in a crowded Boston subway station, midway through their college careers at Harvard and MIT, he shouts, “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!” This is a reference to the hundreds of hours—609 to be exact—the two spent playing “Oregon Trail” and other games when they met in the children’s ward of a hospital where Sam was slowly and incompletely recovering from a traumatic injury and where Sadie was secretly racking up community service hours by spending time with him, a fact which caused the rift that has separated them until now. They determine that they both still game, and before long they’re spending the summer writing a soon-to-be-famous game together in the apartment that belongs to Sam's roommate, the gorgeous, wealthy acting student Marx Watanabe. Marx becomes the third corner of their triangle, and decades of action ensue, much of it set in Los Angeles, some in the virtual realm, all of it riveting. A lifelong gamer herself, Zevin has written the book she was born to write, a love letter to every aspect of gaming. For example, here’s the passage introducing the professor Sadie is sleeping with and his graphic engine, both of which play a continuing role in the story: “The seminar was led by twenty-eight-year-old Dov Mizrah....It was said of Dov that he was like the two Johns (Carmack, Romero), the American boy geniuses who'd programmed and designed Commander Keen and Doom, rolled into one. Dov was famous for his mane of dark, curly hair, wearing tight leather pants to gaming conventions, and yes, a game called Dead Sea, an underwater zombie adventure, originally for PC, for which he had invented a groundbreaking graphics engine, Ulysses, to render photorealistic light and shadow in water.” Readers who recognize the references will enjoy them, and those who don't can look them up and/or simply absorb them. Zevin’s delight in her characters, their qualities, and their projects sprinkles a layer of fairy dust over the whole enterprise.
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32120-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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