A Rooney-esque exploration of power and class in women's relationships, heightened by its brilliant opera-world setting.
An aspiring soprano is thrown off course by a tempestuous affair with a wealthy, mysterious older man.
To support herself as she studies on scholarship at a prestigious conservatory in London, hardworking, anxious Anna works as a jazz singer in the hotel nightclub where her uninhibited, popular best friend, Laurie, an aspiring writer, is a waitress. At first the women live in a hovel run by live-in landlords who measure the level of their bathwater and spy on them relentlessly; later they move into an “experiment in communal feminist living” where dinner topics include whether pornography is inherently misogynistic and why straight White men don't care about climate change. As the book opens, Anna meets an older customer named Max, whose teasing, hard-to-read response to her charms gets hooks into her fast. Crimp’s enthralling debut plunges forward from that night, Anna's confession tumbling out as if on waves of breath, dialogue recounted without quotation marks adding to the effect. At first, she is able to balance her fixation on Max, who is both exceedingly generous and frustratingly withholding, with her commitment to her voice (“the voice,” as this crowd thinks of it). She adores her mentor, Angela, a well-known soprano who is preparing her with the utmost rigor for the demands of a cutthroat profession. A big break comes when the woman who is singing Manon gets laryngitis on closing night and Anna, her understudy, gets to show what she can do. In several wonderful passages, Crimp takes us inside Anna’s head as she performs, singing her way through the emotional trail markers of the libretto—inevitably suggesting certain resonances with her own affair. As Anna summarizes the classical opera plot: “He did x to me. He did y to me. I never got over it.” Did he, though? Cleverly, Crimp never pins down exactly what Max did and what Anna projected; you can read things two ways right through the end.
A Rooney-esque exploration of power and class in women's relationships, heightened by its brilliant opera-world setting.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-79277-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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