An intriguing, sometimes effective tale about redemption and a remarkable mentor.
The lives of a dissolute sideshow sword swallower and a self-destructive young man intersect.
Debut novelist Robinson introduces this story as a fictionalized account of the sideshow performer Capt. Don Leslie’s life and the author’s own journey. The result: colorful storytelling combined with self-conscious, confessional messaging about addiction and dysfunction. The novel, spanning decades, begins in the 1960s with Robinson’s third-person narrative about a sword-swallower named Duke. The performer is in San Francisco for his Florida-based circus’ off-season, fueling his addiction to alcohol and methamphetamine and eagerness to get back to the big tent. Duke’s gritty odyssey encompasses his growing celebrity, a life-changing stint in prison, and his affection for the so-called sideshow “freaks” that became his family when he joined the circus as a 15-year-old runaway. This section is often genuinely moving, despite the choppy cadence of short, declarative sentences (“Alcoholism and religion prevailed. It was rarely peaceful at home. Duke was smoking cigarettes at thirteen”). Before a much older Duke and 35-year-old fictional Gary meet by happenstance in Chico, California, the latter picks up the narrative as a nihilistic high school graduate in the 1980s, embarking on decades of addiction and dysfunction. Gary recounts this as an exhaustive series of anecdotes, with a jarring blend of reminiscence, self-flagellation—“I am no superstar, and that is killing me”—and philosophical interjections: “The purpose of why we are here and who we are engaged with is rarely revealed until the moment has arrived.” This aspect of the book becomes increasingly forced. The impact of Gary’s redemptive journey—sparked by Duke’s mentorship and a consciousness-raising encounter with a vomiting woman named Angel—is further weakened by long passages quoting 19th-century secularist Robert G. Ingersoll and ruminations about Christianity and the morality of criminalizing drug use. The narrative flow is hampered, too, by characters who repeatedly speak “assuredly” and “excitedly.”
An intriguing, sometimes effective tale about redemption and a remarkable mentor.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0999469804
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Grobinbooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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