Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
An Orthodox Jewish soap opera, for mature audiences only.
Like every other wife in her Southern California community, Rina Kirsch is “the invisible hero of the relentless Jewish calendar,” and Emerson’s debut gives a dire, almost furious sense of the cleaning, cooking, hosting, and gift giving this entails. Usually when you read pages and pages about food and cooking, it makes you hungry, but here the long lists of ingredients and dishes evoke not pleasure but the repetitive, draining female labor involved in their procurement and production. The pleasure center of Emerson’s debut is not food but sex, but even there the pleasure sometimes mingles with revulsion. As the novel opens in June 2011, the men in Rina’s husband’s circle have decided to permit themselves an evening of wife swapping: “It’s a thing that people do. It helps marriages last.” The swap is described in the graphic terms that are a consistent feature of this intensely carnal novel; think A Sport and a Pastime for Haredi Jews, and get ready for sentences like this: “Sometimes at home he would beat off while thinking about beating off at class to his mikveh fantasies.” In any case, being “traded” for an evening to another man is for Rina an indelible, unforgivable betrayal. Nine months later, she begins an affair with a rabbi and soon after she meets Will Ochoa, the teacher of an evening painting class her husband suggests she take. Rina and Will quickly realize that what is happening between them is real love, the kind that requires you to read Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With the Blue Guitar” out loud during intercourse, the kind that can cause a complete rupture with life as you know it. The plot continues to unfold at a breakneck pace, including vehicular trauma, unexpected pregnancy, religious conversion, life-threatening illness, and more, as the brute force and inexorable rhythms of orthodoxy thrum continually in the background.
Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096530
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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