An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.
Imprisoned for his lack of streamlined perfection, a subversive eco-guru (or perhaps ordinary human man) finds solace in the minute remnants of the natural world that infiltrate his cell.
The narrator of this dashingly absurd novel has been imprisoned for the crime of appearing outside his dwelling in possession of a “knobby stick” whose organic imperfections offend the robot Plotinus, which apprehends him. Stripped of his coveralls, shoes, socks, and stick, the narrator is flung into a closet whose only aperture aside from the locked door is an air vent set high up in the wall. Here he is attended solely by the Plotinus, who arrives clanging and screeching to deliver ancient breakfast rolls or punish forbidden hoarding of dust and twigs. Rather than succumbing to his deprivations, however, the narrator sets himself the task of “consider[ing] the positive aspects of exile and of [his] diminished circumstances,” as he raps his knuckles against the air vent in the coded sequences that translate into the novel. In addition to the Plotinus, the narrator has another caller: the gullible Vector, who, “cloaked in his Ginza and treading air,” pops in to marvel over the narrator’s own organic knobbiness and quest to become “a thing that knows nothing beyond what it is.” The narrator fully expects to spend his incarceration, which will surely equate to the rest of his life, trading the pseudo-mysticism of his memories with the Vector for the twigs, sacks, and crumbs the Plotinus will shortly discover and whisk away. But then a third entity enters his orbit: a hornet who flies in through the air vent and stings him on the knuckle. The insect, whom he names Smaragdos, becomes the central focus of the narrator’s impressive powers of attention and offers a way of reinhabiting the world outside his closet. Ducornet’s latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity’s severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. Ultimately, whether or not the Plotinus succeeds in breaking our narrator’s spirit, the Vector succeeds in mythologizing his failing body, or Smaragdos succeeds in living her alien life alongside his own, the reader is assured that what will be left for us is the truism that “the poor will inherit the earth. (Such as it is.)”
An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781566896818
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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