A richly textured saga that brilliantly captures the fraying social fabric of contemporary life.
A gay man navigates the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on a hellish mass-transit system in Townsend’s fraught picaresque novel.
It’s the summer of 2021, and Todd Tillotson, a 60-year-old ex-Mormon, commutes to his job as a supermarket cashier on Seattle’s municipal buses and light-rail lines. In addition to the ordinary travails of slow travel times and erratic schedules, he gets in tussles over masking rules—“Do you need some help keeping your mask up?” he asks a woman with a brazenly uncovered nose—and has other conflicts with obstreperous passengers. He feels lonely since the death of his husband, Brigham, who was hit by a car while they were marching in a Black Lives Matter protest, and he thinks that his heavy physique, due to the effects of AIDS and diabetes, will keep him from ever finding a new love. Todd finally takes steps to get out of his rut: He loses some weight, makes efforts to attract men (sporting a T-shirt reading “Consenting Adult” and “Just Say Yes”), and enjoys casual but gratifying hookups followed by a serious relationship with a bus driver named Carson. Then he’s blindsided by a shocking outbreak of violence. Townsend offers a marvelously detailed portrait of a big-city transit system, with bleary-eyed working stiffs, ranting inebriates, people carrying all their worldly belongings in garbage bags, anti-vaccination protesters, conspiracy theorists, and rushes of elation and despair. Todd is shown to be raptly observing all this, with his White liberal guilt making him painfully aware of his privilege; his unease is only heightened by pandemic paranoia and a freak heat wave with a portent of climate catastrophe. Townsend’s writing delivers deadpan humor, sharp characterizations, and vivid evocations of down-and-out Seattle. But despite all these apocalyptic imaginings, the author also points out how Todd manages to focus on small, steady tasks—“I simply tried to pay attention, be willing to reevaluate, accept correction and do a tiny bit better the next day”—that add up to a triumph of humane sensibility.
A richly textured saga that brilliantly captures the fraying social fabric of contemporary life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64719-938-8
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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