A Southern original adds to his gallery of Southern originals.
Legendary South Carolina absurdist Singleton weighs in with another rollicking collection—17 quick-paced, chatty, funny stories.
Singleton’s protagonists—often overeducated, tempest-tossed white guys working bizarre jobs that are “nonprofit” in one way or several—have often been called “eccentrics,” but one joy of inhabiting his satiric vision is the constantly reoccurring thought that despite their flaws (impulsiveness, a predilection for drink, a little larceny in the heart, a sense of justice that can get out of hand), the South might be better off if these guys were nearer the middle of it. In “Dispensers,” a man who collects and saws down and sells graffitied old wooden desktops stops off with his wife at a Georgia diner, where they meet and have their faith restored a little by the grizzled old men of VAGINA: Veterans Against Guns in North America. “Echoes” features doting but hapless grandfather Big Les Tolbert, who takes his way-too-worldly, cyber-dependent grandson on a quixotic, impromptu, and doomed expedition to see the ocean at Myrtle Beach. In “Protecting Witnesses and Witnessing Protection,” a husband—detoxing in spouse-forced exile in the boondocks—wakes to find a vintage tractor in his driveway...which turns out to provide a surprising path to a community of fellow sufferers. Again and again, Singleton focuses on the accidental burdens conferred on us by names—whether of people, businesses, do-gooding organizations, professions—and shows us characters doing a frantic dance around their sense that there’s a destiny in what you’re called. This turns out to be a great way of dramatizing, as Singleton wants to here, the effort well-meaning people expend to make peace with who and what and where they are. The stories don’t always have destinations, but one of the fundamental laws of Singleton’s invented world is that destinations are way overrated. Nobody complains that a carnival isn’t tautly plotted; you just plunk down your dime and wait for wonders.
A Southern original adds to his gallery of Southern originals.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781950539864
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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