If only these characters could decide whether “to be or not to be,” but that’s a different tragedy.
A novel about a Memphis theater company envelops onstage classical tragedy within offstage domestic farce.
Like a playbill, the novel opens with a “Cast of Characters,” beginning with “The Three Main Characters” and followed by “And the People Around Them.” The three principals are Thaddeus Deerforth, general manager of the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis; Malcolm Ruark, a recently disgraced local TV news anchor–turned-thespian; and Claudette Bradley, one of the company’s principal actors. Each of them has a troubled marriage—two recently ended, and one looks increasingly shaky. Further complicating their stories, as they prepare for their newly renovated theater's grand relaunch with King Lear, are issues of alcoholism and substance abuse, aged parents with dementia, sexual impulses they find difficult to understand and control. The people around them number a few dozen, and it’s tough to keep them straight even with the cast list, but they include a couple of aging lechers—a visiting director from academe and a lead actor known from a Netflix series—who bring plenty of their own issues and have trouble adjusting to Memphis culture, and a pair of billionaire donors, the “Cosmetics Tycoons,” who are funding this attempt to put Memphis on the map of world-class theater cities. What could go wrong? The romantic entanglements, past and present, can be impossible to predict and tough to keep straight, while the dramatic production itself must please the billionaires, impress the city, and manage to keep people who can’t stand each other working together. Outwardly, some of the plot verges on slapstick, but inwardly, there is quiet desperation. “He began wanting a fight,” Bausch writes of one character at a pivotal juncture. “Something to bring it all to a head, some sort of catharsis. But he wouldn’t act on it.” So the reader also waits for some catharsis, or something to happen, to move this plot and these characters forward.
If only these characters could decide whether “to be or not to be,” but that’s a different tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780451494849
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
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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