Strange, wondrous, luminous—a lovely coda to a career (and a life) cut sadly short.
From an American original, a posthumous collection that includes short stories old and new.
Watson’s stories—those in the volumes published in his lifetime and the new ones—are wry, tender, darkly funny, and deeply idiosyncratic. His first book, Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996), focused on dogs—always simply themselves, and therefore enviable and admirable—and often inhabited their bodies, channeled their voices. In one story here, “The Zookeeper and the Leopard,” Watson’s animism goes yet further; a zookeeper’s miscalculated revenge against a rival results in his being eaten by a big cat...and by story’s end his consciousness has been scattered among piles of scat that carry—poignantly, if you can believe it—what remains of his voice. In the terrific introduction here, Joy Williams speaks of the “strange, piteous, futile, and fickle” characters—often thwarted men self-exiled from their families—who people Watson’s world, and the kinships between his work and hers come clear. There’s the attentiveness to animals and the conviction—which never seems mean-spirited—that they’re superior to people; there’s the strong, often elegiac sense of the natural world. But perhaps the strongest link is an imaginative fearlessness that seems, finally, doglike: Both Watson and Williams exemplify Watson’s remark that a dog “is who he is and his only task is to assert this.” The stories in Watson’s two earlier collections were excellent, lyrical, moving (see the title pieces, “Last Days of the Dog-Men” and the doomed-young-love story “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” both included here), but the new work seems even deeper, stranger, riskier. The title piece is surely the sweetest, gentlest story ever to center on the dialogue (yes, dialogue) between a serial killer and the wig stand that she’s covered with grim bodily trophies of her kills and named Elizabeth Bob. “Noon,” about the loneliness and emptiness that can enter a marriage post-stillbirth, ends with a dream in which the grieving woman, who is so delicately entwined with a catfish that her husband cannot, even with his best filleting knife, “detach the fish’s brain from her own,” dies. Her husband buries her in the yard, and over time, as she “drift[s] into the soil,” she keeps an eye on him. “The times between mowings were ages,” it concludes—a Watsonian happy ending.
Strange, wondrous, luminous—a lovely coda to a career (and a life) cut sadly short.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781324076421
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
