A powerful, eerie debut novel that investigates stillness and selfishness.
A woman transforms from a junior lawyer into a reclusive fitness influencer.
“I liked watching her,” Elliot says of this novel’s unnamed protagonist. She’s the newcomer at his gym, self-possessed and at ease hoisting heavy kettlebells; he’s a loner who tries to take a creepy video of her while she exercises. An obsession with fitness brings them together. But her goals are unorthodox. “Have you ever wanted to be a plant?” she asks Elliot. What she wants is stillness. “As she became stronger, her movements slowed down,” Elliot says. “She walked slowly, talked slowly. Even her breathing seemed slow.” She will soon retreat to the countryside and become an unusual internet figure, posting sparse videos in which she holds demanding yoga poses for over an hour. Metcalfe’s triptych is written in clean, matter-of-fact prose. The other two narrators are Bella, the protagonist’s artist mother, and Susie, a roommate. Biographical details are unspooled slowly and with deliberateness: The protagonist had a troubled childhood. She dated Paul, a law colleague who grew controlling and locked her in their apartment’s spare room. These things can explain why the protagonist has adopted fitness, but they can’t explain the intense effect she has on the people around her, whom she routinely uses and then discards. “She has a power over the people who find her,” Susie says. “Once you’ve known her, it’s hard to go back to a time before.” The internet will soon help thousands of people know her. Some of her followers abandon their lives and seek the protagonist’s isolation in the countryside, following her mantra: Aloneness can be beautiful. Has she empowered these followers or merely indulged their anti-social tendencies? Has she rediscovered monasticism, or is this a totally modern phenomenon? Metcalfe won’t say, and readers of this excellent novel will stew on these questions for weeks.
A powerful, eerie debut novel that investigates stillness and selfishness.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593446959
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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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