A digressive, lyrical climate novel.
Dunnett’s speculative novel traces three Londoners through a slow apocalypse.
In London’s post–WWI Jewish East End, shopkeeper’s wife Bea minds her business. While her best friend, CeeCee, is organizing rent strikes and demonstrating against fascists, she’s more concerned with the unwanted advances of her husband’s pompous friend, Haich, and with the angel who appears to her periodically, bringing with it “a feeling of vague irritation, and a strong flavor of peace.” She records these otherworldly incursions in a thin red notebook, picked up three generations later by her great-granddaughter Kay, a temp worker who stumbles, perpetually hungover, through present-day London’s queer nightlife with her friends El and Cue. Kay sleeps in Cue’s bed and attends El’s experimental drag shows, but she doesn’t tell her compatriots about the time travelers she has imagined visiting her since childhood or her fixation on her great-grandmother’s diary. In a future London laid bare by mass poverty and climate collapse, Ess lives on the “unloved outskirts of the city,” gardening for a newly established branch of the Network, a left-aligned collective that her mother calls a cult. In accordance with the beliefs of the “Basin” that the world is in its “Last Human Chapter,” Ess has been voluntarily sterilized. While organizing the papers of her mother’s friend Mr. J, she comes across Bea’s notebook, passed down from Mr. J’s own great-grandparents and now faded to pink. She receives an invitation from another branch of the Network, who believe that through Ess’ circuitous connection to Kay’s London, they can—and are, in fact, morally obliged to—help her travel backward in time. Dunnett’s languorous prose evokes the beauty and unease of a slow-dying world. Kay sprints to the supermarket under a “blue, hard dusk”; Ess pulls up an unremarkable stone with “a tart, metallic look to it that made her think of the inside of a very rare steak.” These passages often overpower the diaphanous narrators that deliver them. Bea, Ess, and Kay are oddly dissociated from their interpersonal relationships, and as ambassadors of their time periods, they read as all but interchangeable. The meditations that move through them—on reproduction, queer kinship, climate grief, and the permeability of time—are nevertheless profound.
A digressive, lyrical climate novel.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781558613874
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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