A witty, wide-ranging exploration of complex emotions.
Troubled men and women hit crisis points that drugs, jokes, sex, and the letter of the law can’t alleviate.
The protagonists of Bissell’s second story collection are usually having their good times spoiled by feelings or memories that keep nagging them. In “A Bridge Under Water,” two newlyweds on their honeymoon in Rome get the creeping sense their marriage was an error, culminating in an ugly scene inside a historic synagogue. The couple in “Creative Types” are spicing up their marriage by hiring an escort, but the husband is unsettled by her “Cla$$y Lady” tattoo, and she in turn is unsettled by his noticing. In “Punishment,” an ill-paid but intellectually satisfied magazine editor’s past life as an eighth grade bully reemerges when his former partner in crime pays a visit. And in “The Fifth Category,” a lawyer who helped find legal loopholes to justify torture during the Iraq War receives a potent and peculiar form of comeuppance after a high-ticket speaking engagement. Bissell is a deeply precise writer, and his sense of the emotional disorientation his characters face is literally gut-level. (“From his stomach, the staging area, his body spit his most recent meal into his intestinal coils,” he writes of the torture lawyer.) Bissell’s background in detail-oriented journalism comes in handy both in terms of language and form: “My Interview With the Avenger” is a satire of magazine profiles that doubles as a study in vigilantism. And he can deliver in a variety of milieus, from Tallinn, Estonia, where an aimless young woman embraces a fellow expat’s drug habit in “Love Story, With Cocaine,” to the set of Saturday Night Live, where the assistant to James Franco (not fully named, but obvious) runs a gauntlet of demands and mercurial personalities. The stories’ endings sometimes lack the crispness of their setups, but Bissell is trading in anxiety, not resolution.
A witty, wide-ranging exploration of complex emotions.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-524-74915-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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 tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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