Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon’s work, but overall a disappointment.
The author of a smart, tart series of political novels—most recently Landfall (2019)—casts an equally well-informed, unromantic eye on the entertainment industry and its closeted gay denizens.
Once a moderately successful actor, then a shady antiques dealer, Dick Kallman is dead when the novel opens on Feb. 23, 1980. Narrator Matt Liannetto, a Broadway pianist and intermittent friend, recalls the strained dinner party Dick threw on the night of his murder, interrupted by the arrival of a supposed client who in retrospect is a glaring suspect. (Kallman’s career and death are factual; the circumstances of his murder are bent to fictional use.) Matt then flashes back to 1951, when he was pianist for the musical Seventeen, Dick had a supporting role, and both were smitten by leading man Kenneth Nelson (among the many real-life show-biz figures who make appearances). Dick’s crush proves to be a lifelong obsession as chapters alternate with mechanical regularity between the rise and fall of Dick’s career and the grim aftermath of his death. The crime brings love to Matt in the person of much younger Devin Arroyo, a former hustler now working at the police precinct, and their sweet romance provides a welcome respite from Mallon’s depressingly accurate portrayal of life on show business’s striving fringes. From landing a promising spot in Lucille Ball’s television empire, through decent gigs as the lead in Broadway touring companies, to a one-season television flop, Dick always finds that his embarrassingly obvious scheming ends up thwarting his naked ambition. He stops getting work by the 1970s, he admits to himself, “because nobody, at least nobody that knew him, liked him.” Dick’s personality is skin-crawlingly plausible, but that makes it hard to feel sorry for him, even as Mallon acidly limns the ridiculous games gay actors were forced to play—dates with “beards,” fake engagements—in those pre-Stonewall days. The novel’s tone is generally sour and sometimes nasty. That may be why Dick’s unrequited love for Kenneth Nelson, clearly intended to be a poignant leitmotif, never rings wholly true.
Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon’s work, but overall a disappointment.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781524748197
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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