Never underestimate the power of a good short story to lift your spirits.
In her first story collection since 1988, Schulman peeks into the romantic lives of a loosely connected community of characters.
“Many moons ago, my beloved husband, Miguel Herrera—have you heard of him?—gave an earthshaking performance in an event space in the East Village, Henderson Square (actually our friend Hattie Henderson’s studio apartment), which completely changed our lives.” This is the kind of sentence that inspires you to Google “Helen Schulman husband,” be reminded that she’s married to humorist Bruce Handy, and slap your forehead. Right, it’s fiction. Anna Herrera’s tale of her husband Miguel’s appearance in a same-sex performance of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, the play that gives both story and collection its title and theme, is actually the account of how she met her second husband, a marriage we return to in the last story in the book, at which point Herrera is just an “ethnic surname” she picked up “in a short heartbreak of a marriage, a name that has stood me well all these years, grant- and prizewinning-wise.” Also introduced in the first story is Anna’s sixth grade boyfriend, Hershleder, who becomes the antihero of the saddest story, “The Revisionist.” (Schulman notes in an afterword that both this and “P.S.” grew into novels in the years since their creation, making this book interesting for archeologists of her career.) We also meet an agent named Jeannie Elbazz, “who reps Jake Kamins”—both Jeannie and Jake return in “My Best Friend,” a story in which lovelorn foolery reaches dizzying heights. Without attempting to be a novel in stories, the collection is free to go off on wild tangents, such as a story narrated by an evil baby, Lucien H., and a tale of forbidden love with a married Orthodox rabbi in Paris. In multiple stories, people come back from the dead, and everywhere, there are sentences to make you laugh: “Thank God she’d grown up at a time when lunatic sexual behavior was expected; she’d been able to have her cake and eat it whenever she wanted without any damage to her reputation.”
Never underestimate the power of a good short story to lift your spirits.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593536254
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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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