An expert example of a complicated form that will reward even more on subsequent readings.
A novel-in-stories that culminates during the Covid-19 pandemic follows a Big Pharma family over the course of several generations, with an emphasis on how social repression and unchecked privilege can both thwart lives.
The famously divergent paths of poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens—the former dedicated to structure and surface during a lifetime of mental instability, the latter an almost prim attorney whose work explored human subjectivity—here illuminate the unspoken stories attached to the monied Dietrich clan from Philadelphia. Beginning with a love story between two sideshow performers in Chicago and ending with an individual’s recognition of loss, Hinnefeld’s linked collection reflects how little we know about our own family histories, or ourselves, particularly when faced with societal crisis. Characters meet Pound and Stevens, whose actions and relationships weave in and out of decades; for example, when one character winds up in Venice in 2019, he notes that right-wing young Italian men call themselves “CasaPound” due to their belief in the poet’s reactionary beliefs. Meanwhile, Stevens, historically also a racist, shows up as the voice of overly genteel ideas about women’s behavior and appearances, perhaps most strongly in “Winged Siren Seizing an Adolescent,” about a young wife and mother named Tess who lives in Lisbon. That story is also a great example of how the separate pieces of a novel like this exist as stand-alones while also connecting to the characters, chronology, and concerns of the whole; a Missoni dress that Tess gifts to her former nanny reminds readers of change. Speaking of change: That titular coin, at first signaled by the “dime shows” in which English-born Maude appears, has a little-known tie to Stevens—really to Mrs. Wallace Stevens—and signals the all-too-American tension between self-determination and national mythologizing that falls apart completely in the book’s second half, “Philadelphia, April 2020.” In these four stories about the global pandemic, we see how quickly anyone’s dreams and comforts can be eliminated by disaster. Somehow the coda, “Those Who Can,” provides the perfect moment of resolution.
An expert example of a complicated form that will reward even more on subsequent readings.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781609531577
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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