An ominous, often alienating piece of experimental fiction set along a hellish highway.
A man journeys along a nightmarish path in Taylor’s experimental novel.
Highway 28 West is a desolate place. It’s a stretch of road where “everything takes at least two hours or two days or two months or two years longer than it should,” as one resident puts it. “Unless it’s something bad, and then it happens a lot quicker than it should…” Along its winding route are trailer parks, ponds, and houses of worship like the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church. It’s home to vultures, roadkill, 18-wheelers hauling pine, and, in the winter, enough snow to strand a traveler in his tracks. That’s what happens to Preacher. Preacher isn’t really a preacher—he goes by a nickname he picked up in high school. His actual beliefs about God—or anything else for that matter—are rather ambivalent. When his pick-up truck stalls on the snowy highway, he approaches a trailer home to ask to use the phone and interrupts a couple in the midst of a screaming match. The wife invites Preacher to stay for coffee while the man steps away to sneak some whiskey in the bathroom. The wife takes the opportunity to seduce Preacher, then tells him of her plan to murder her husband with the shotgun hanging above the fireplace. Fleeing the trailer and impending murder, Preacher visits another one nearby, where a woman cares for her sick husband and son. The very next day, after getting his truck fixed, Preacher wanders into the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church only to discover a joint funeral for the boy and his father. These are just the first of several strange encounters Preacher experiences driving up and down Highway 28 West. He also finds a pit-bull puppy and a dead man, takes a job at a boxing plant, fails to help two teenagers drowning in a pond, and witnesses a mass shooting at a high school pep rally.
The novel is formatted like a play: Preacher recounts his adventures as monologues delivered to a crowd of people, many of whom have heard aspects of the story from other sources. They shout out comments, observations, and critiques of Preacher’s storytelling ability (during the telling of the anecdote about the arguing couple, one crowd member shouts, upon learning of the shotgun, “Just shoot the damn thing!”). Some members of the crowd have distinct personalities, like Lizzie, the “Girl Poet in Crowd,” who offers cryptic verses now and again between Preacher’s speeches. The stories Preacher tells are hard to make sense of—they have the fluidity and ambiguity of religious allegory, and both Preacher and the crowd often have difficulty assessing their meaning; the format itself adds an additional layer of abstraction. Preacher sometimes tells his stories in the first person, sometimes in the third, and there’s a slipperiness to the time and setting. Fans of Samuel Beckett and other aggressively postmodern writers may enjoy picking apart the layers of Preacher’s dreamlike soliloquies, but most readers will probably be left baffled by this difficult-to-parse work.
An ominous, often alienating piece of experimental fiction set along a hellish highway.Pub Date: May 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781952386602
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 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
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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