A disturbing page-turner and a powerful look at American racism.
Vietnamese Americans are sent to concentration camps in this all-too-plausible novel.
The second novel from journalist Nguyen—following New Waves (2020)—starts with an account of Bà Nội, a woman who guides her family out of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, winding up in the U.S., where her descendants now live. Four of those are the focus of this novel: Jen and Duncan and their older half-siblings, Ursula and Alvin, all of whom share the same absent father. They’re typical young Americans: Jen is an NYU student and Duncan is a teenage football player, while Ursula is a journalist for a BuzzFeed-like news and entertainment site and Alvin is a new Google hire. Their lives are thrown into disarray when a series of airport bombings rocks America; when the people arrested turn out to have Vietnamese surnames, the siblings realize their lives might get much more complicated. The government reacts to the bombings by imprisoning Vietnamese Americans in concentration camps (or “assembly centers,” as the government euphemizes them); Jen and Duncan are taken to one, but Ursula and Alvin get an exemption, possibly because their mother is white. Jen joins an underground resistance movement in the camp, feeding information to Ursula, who gains notice in the journalism world for her reports. This also puts Ursula at odds with some of her colleagues, one of whom writes a breezy “article” titled “These People Are Review-Bombing Detention Camps on Google Maps—And It’s Giving Us Life.” Nguyen’s hand is a bit heavy here, but it’s hard to argue with his pessimistic, and completely justified, view of the American government as a racist oligarchy deeply influenced by nefarious corporations. His narrative pacing is perfect, his dialogue and character development a bit less so; still, this is a compelling read.
A disturbing page-turner and a powerful look at American racism.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593731680
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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