Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.
The stories of a half-dozen different artists, each identified solely by the initial G, investigate the nature of art, artists, reality, and family relationships.
Readers of Cusk’s previous fiction will recognize the masterful way she locates specific personal histories within a relatively abstract narrative framework (minimal details of place, time, and chronology) to unsettle the reader’s expectations about what fiction can or should do. An omniscient third-person narrator takes us inside the thoughts and emotions of some Gs: an insecure male artist famed for painting upside-down and his unhappy wife; a male filmmaker fleeing repressive parents; a female painter spurred toward art by a miserable childhood, mired in a dysfunctional marriage with a man who inspires the same feelings of shame her parents did, then liberated by his death. At other times, a first-person narrator profiles Gs whose lives and work she has read about or seen: a female sculptor of cloth forms; a 19th-century female painter dead in childbirth at 31; a Black male painter marginalized by his peers. This narrator, sometimes “I” and sometimes “we,” also chronicles episodes from her personal life, including a grimly unforgiving account of her dead mother’s toxic parenting and a lengthy restaurant conversation among five people associated with an exhibit of one of the Gs’ works, closed for the day after a man dies by suicide at the museum. That conversation makes explicit questions that animate all the stories: What drives people to make art? Do artists perceive reality, or invent it? Can women artists with children create as freely as their male peers? Why is family life so fraught? Simmering underneath all the stories and talk is the desolate sense of how alone people can be even, perhaps particularly, in the most intimate relationships—existential issues by no means limited to those who make art. Cusk’s prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights.
Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780374610043
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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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