SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM
LAURA WARRELL
Pantheon Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now
Trade Paperback Edition $17.00|available July 25, 2023
$1.99 on Kindle for a limited time.
LONGLISTED for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!
One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus.
Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation, in answer to the age-old question: how do we find belonging when love is unrequited?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: It depresses me to say this, but this book was...despite truly, deeply impressive writing...
The girl may have been the end for him....lovely and fully sensory-universe-planted but, and this is the crux of the matter for me, it's about a man.
That the wind shifted and sent a chill across her freshly cleaned skin so that she sensed her own solitude in a way that no longer frightened her as she walked bare and unhindered toward what was new.
A group of women have different relationships with one man.
Ground-breaking stuff, no? Never read anything like it before! Except about half the Western canon. Women circle Circus, whose name suggested to me clownishness that I found ample evidence for. They *keep* circling Circus no matter what. And, folks, if there ever was a man whose actions and inactions invalidated his Manhood Card℠, it's Circus. He never met a responsibility he didn't shirk.
But his Art! is usually the rallying cry I hear. His art my lily-white one. He's a bog-standard self-absorbed arrested adolescent, probably a libertarian and a religious nut although those are my own interpolations, with a good line of patter and some skills in sexual gratification.
He is, bluntly, the kind of person I look down on and the kind of character I am deeply sickened to see recrudescing on best-of lists and getting all sorts of happy talk said about it. He's a serial cheater, an emotional abuser, and an unworthy object of our cultural attention because his brothers are teeming like maggots on a shit-pile, exuding their spurious shine that so many seem to see as attractive when it's actually the slime they secrete to slip out of any kind or sort of commitment that inconveniences, annoys, or bores them.
Yuck.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I FEAR MY PAIN INTERESTS YOU
STEPHANIE LaCAVA
Verso Fiction
$19.95 trade paper, available now
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A punky, raw novel of millenial disaffection, trauma and 1960s cinema
Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to to the Pacific Northwest. She's seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.
A genre-bending, atmospheric and emotionally honest account of a young woman's investigation into her past and the complex reactions of her body.
At once an analysis of the abandoned 1968 Cannes Film Festival and a literary take on cinema du corp, Stephanie LaCava's new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving exploration of culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: ...and now for something marginally different...
Screwed-up child of famous parents is failing at Life because Trauma and she's got these awful habits that substitute for character and her whole head...this is a récit, not really a novel because the whole point is that we don't leave the lady's head and are reminded of it...is stuffed with shards of images and sounds and they all sort of coalesce into an image of...
...I have no way to finish that sentence. I didn't get an image from Margot's chaotic maunderings.
Yet again there are men at the center of her trauma. Men: Don't have relationships with women. It doesn't go anywhere good. You'll end up blamed for something and quite possibly sued.
That's my main take-away from this mishegas. There's no way for me to pluck a piece of the text out for your perusal because they all rely on each other, in a cumulative-effect way, for their power. I will say that, as little as I enjoyed the story I was quite interested in the way the author assembled the shards into an effective mosaic. Brightness, shadows, saturated colors; a vague grey smog of dissociation surrounding it, getting between the bright moments, eclipsing some of them. It's an interesting effect.
But the problem is it's telling me an oft-told tale of poor-little-rich-girl and I'm just not interested. Handed a life of family connections and a modicum of talent? Use 'em or reject 'em, but wallowing along in the gutter next to the highway and under the sidewalk is a choice for people like Margot. So I don't see the point of empathizing with her. "Make a different choice" is the callous, dismissive response Margot elicits from me.
Yet I read the whole book....
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