A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.
In Schulze’s novella, a new parent decides to raise his son in an analog-only household and imagines a future revolution.
One night, two weeks after finalizing the adoption of his 4-year-old son Quentin, an unnamed man in Danvers, Massachusetts, is suddenly struck by the enormity of his new responsibilities as a parent. The narrator, who describes himself as a “Zillennial”—someone who’s “too young to remember the 90s but old enough to remember a world before the Internet”—decides that he and his much-older husband, who was born in 1964, will raise Quentin without any modern digital technology. Instead of relying on smartphones and tablets to entertain and educate his son, like other parents, he plans instead to replicate a pre-internet lifestyle to nurture Quentin’s developing mind. As he tucks Quentin into bed, he vows that his son will be “raised right. With love of this world. The real world. IRL.” Invigorated and inspired, the narrator loses himself in an elaborately constructed vision of the future, in which Quentin graduates college with no friends and no career prospects, due to his lack of a digital footprint; after a failed suicide attempt, he creates a web-based manifesto condemning the internet’s infiltration of every aspect of society, and the millennials who encourage such an environment for their children, ending with a call to “#Unplug” that goes very viral. Schulze’s novella is a biting and viciously funny satire about online radicalization, hypocrisy in politics, capitalism, and faux nostalgia. The book is written almost entirely in the future tense, which has the effect of elevating the dry humor to a high level. All the characters (including figments of the narrator’s imagination whom Quentin will allegedly meet) are well developed, and the story flows at a nice pace throughout. Readers may especially enjoy the story’s exploration of intergenerational conflict, as well as the sincerity of the depiction of the existential anxiety of parenthood: “How am I supposed to do this?” the narrator despairs at one point. “How does anybody do this?”
A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.Pub Date: May 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781737037866
Page Count: 187
Publisher: David Schulze Books
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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