This restless, intentionally unsettling novel establishes Porter as a distinctive, confident literary voice.
Deep in the heart of the Covid-19 lockdown, a pregnant Brooklynite goes missing.
Porter’s sophomore novel again features a large cast of diverse New Yorkers, this time met during the spring of 2020. It opens with a list poem about the Union Square Greenmarket, then moves to a chapter called “Daily Cleanse” that starts with this sentence: “Mr. Harper takes sex in doorways.” Theo Harper, a white man we never like much, works in real estate. He has an open marriage to a pregnant white woman named Darla Jacobson, whose mother is living in Paris and who counsels Theo to get Darla out of the city for “breathing room and fresh air.” Darla’s best friend is Ruby Black, a Black woman who owns a restaurant in Union Square with her husband, Katsumi Fujihara. There’s also Xavier Curtis, “The Teenager in the Cardi B T-Shirt” (this and a number of other images are illustrated with small photographs), whose uncle lives in the same Park Slope building as Theo and Darla. Xavier is isolating in his uncle’s empty apartment. It’s a bit unclear where all this is going until a subordinate clause in the fourth chapter reveals that Darla, on the drive upstate to follow her mother’s advice, “turn[s] off her cell phone, which would remain off until it was found in the woods a month later.” The main plot revolves around Darla’s disappearance after a fight with Theo on a hike during which he discloses that he has a Black ancestor; he becomes the main suspect in the police investigation. At the same time, we explore the back- and side stories of the other characters, finding nuggets of practical information and advice along the way—why dull knives are more dangerous, the use of cream of tartar to remove bathtub rings, a guide to the club scene in Japan, and this advice about loss, offered by a private investigator named Yvonne Tender: “Seek out the living and find little things to love until something or someone worth loving comes along.” Meanwhile, a second mystery plot involving 9/11 surfaces. The novel eventually settles its gaze on matters of race and class, underlined by its breathtaking ending.
This restless, intentionally unsettling novel establishes Porter as a distinctive, confident literary voice.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593241868
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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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