A lurid, tense, and compelling novel.
Cassie is just like many other women in Silicon Valley: She works hard, lives alone, and has few relationships that matter.
Cassie is also, perhaps, nothing like other women, because an actual black hole hovers over her, growing and shrinking and shimmering, matching her anxieties and moods. Through these contradictions, Etter has created a surreal landscape gradually building in bleakness. The first-person narrative follows Cassie as she struggles to perform at her startup's ruthless pace; she burns out regularly and does cocaine to keep up. Her precious hours outside work are spent in the company of friends who barely care about her or in pursuit of a man who, because of his existing girlfriend, refuses to be involved with Cassie beyond their intensely erotic dates. Set just as the Covid pandemic is beginning, the book evocatively depicts Cassie’s anxieties—about her precarious employment, rising rent, and a possible unplanned pregnancy. As in her Shirley Jackson Award–winning first novel, The Book of X (2019), Etter builds a lush and decaying landscape around a woman with an impossible affliction, but as the novel progresses it becomes clear that dead-end labor in a toxic workplace is even crueler to Cassie than the space-time collapse of a black hole following her around. Presenting a cross between the cruel relationships in Mona Awad’s Bunny, the painful work conditions in Raven Leilani’s Luster, and the unethical tech-industry practices in Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, this novel reveals seemingly ordinary terrors. Etter's prose is spare: The story is told through short narrative sections interspersed with sections starting with a word and its definition (for instance, sex, work, and Salisbury steak) in which Cassie describes a memory through an idea or an object, as well as lists and notes. While the novel unfolds slowly, the violence and intensity of Etter’s style (as well as its calculated silences and pauses) produce a horror that lingers long after the story has ended. As Cassie says, “The truth of the world bares itself when the tide goes down: devoured, used, rotting.”
A lurid, tense, and compelling novel.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781668011638
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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