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
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.
During an annual beach vacation, a mother confronts her past and learns to move forward.
Her family’s annual trip to Cape Cod is always the highlight of Rocky’s year—even more so now that her children are grown and she cherishes what little time she gets with them. Rocky is deep in the throes of menopause, picking fights with her loving husband and occasionally throwing off her clothes during a hot flash, much to the chagrin of her family. She’s also dealing with her parents, who are crammed into the same small summer house (with one toilet that only occasionally spews sewage everywhere) and who are aging at an alarmingly rapid rate. Rocky’s life is full of change, from her body to her identity—she frequently flashes back to the vacations of years past, when her children were tiny. Although she’s grateful for the family she has, she mourns what she’s lost. Newman (author of the equally wonderful We All Want Impossible Things, 2022) imbues Rocky’s internal struggles with importance and gravity, all while showcasing her very funny observations about life and parenting. She examines motherhood with a raw honesty that few others manage—she remembers the hard parts, the depths of despair, panic, and anxiety that can happen with young children, and she also recounts the joy in a way that never feels saccharine. She has a gift for exploring the real, messy contradictions in human emotions. As Rocky puts it, “This may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063345164
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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