Quirky, uneven, but enchanting.
In a book of autobiographical short stories, Everett exhibits the same rakish charms as a writer that he shows as an actor but also reveals a deep streak of romanticism.
The title refers to the way film pitches are rejected in Hollywood: after loud initial enthusiasm, silence. No stranger to the phenomena, Everett blithely announces, via the narrator of “Hare Hare,” that he has turned his rejected ideas “into a book of short stories” and goes on to describe a meeting with director John Schlesinger with precision and fatalistic insouciance. While discussing a film the two were making together (presumably The Next Best Thing, 2000), Schlesinger dismisses Everett’s suggestion for a funeral scene, a tragicomic story Everett now tells to establish his book’s purposeful blurring of memory and invention along with its themes of exile and lost family. Even when Everett struts his signature jaded wit—particularly in a story about a band of Hollywood losers with questionable scruples whose act of creepy desperation inadvertently turns them into successful entrepreneurs shilling “deals in fertilization”—what resonates is loneliness offset by flickering moments of connection. The longer, less glibly polished stories show more sincere emotional commitment. In “The Last Rites,” based on a fictionalized combination of his great-grandmother and Margaret Wheeler, a woman who mysteriously survived India’s First War of Independence in 1857, Everett writes a poignant almost-ghost story about a British woman stuck in India in a bad marriage. The description of India is haunting, the ending strained. Similarly, Everett’s story of a shipboard romance between a British man and Greek woman emigrating to Australia after World War II combines heart-wrenching characters with an earnest, even sentimental plot. There are stories about the lives and works of two gay literary icons, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. Throughout, though the plots can sometimes feel contrived, Everett renders scenes in vivid, often moving detail.
Quirky, uneven, but enchanting.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781668076453
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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