Ambitious and powerful—a remarkable novel.
C is lonely, ill, in debt, in danger, and on the verge of the most radical reinvention of all—total erasure.
In 2008, C was an up-and-coming fabric artist in Manhattan, married and hoping for a child. Then, “on the day the market crashed,” she underwent an emergency hysterectomy and awakened to what her lifelong friend Zo, a trader on Wall Street, described as an almost literal new world, one where “everyone [is] now in debt.” Three years later, C is still struggling to adjust to the normalcies of a life in constant crisis. Her medical debt is stubbornly eating away at the resources she needs to keep her arts and crafts store afloat, her marriage has ended, she has a nagging pain in her side and experiences unpredictable fainting spells, and she’s begun to be visited by the specter of a gnomelike little man in a navy three-piece suit with a gleeful penchant for expounding on systems theory. Add to this the ongoing urgency of the Occupy Wall Street movement—in this world, a collectivist effort that has grown in the years after the financial crisis rather than petered out—and the looming threat of GoodNite, an organization of “homegrown terrorists” bent on crashing the world’s electrical grid and taking down all of society with it, and it seems no wonder that all of C’s attempts to put her life in order seem to unravel into individual twists of wasted energy and ennui. And yet, C does go on, pouring herself into an artistic gesture that refigures the hopeless tangle of economic, biological, and climate systems as a generative act that embraces the nihilism embodied by GoodNite even as it makes something never before seen out of the fabric of the denuded world. Elements of the novel (particularly its exploration of cybernetics as a ubiquitous controller of domestic life) recall the work of such 20th-century greats as DeLillo or Sebald, but Stevens’ voice—which is meticulous, wide ranging, and moored in a different perspective from the 20th century’s predominantly white male hegemonies—makes her work particularly suited for the current century’s artistic needs.
Ambitious and powerful—a remarkable novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781913505707
Page Count: 288
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.
The adventures of a trio of genius kids united by their love of gaming and each other.
When Sam Masur recognizes Sadie Green in a crowded Boston subway station, midway through their college careers at Harvard and MIT, he shouts, “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!” This is a reference to the hundreds of hours—609 to be exact—the two spent playing “Oregon Trail” and other games when they met in the children’s ward of a hospital where Sam was slowly and incompletely recovering from a traumatic injury and where Sadie was secretly racking up community service hours by spending time with him, a fact which caused the rift that has separated them until now. They determine that they both still game, and before long they’re spending the summer writing a soon-to-be-famous game together in the apartment that belongs to Sam's roommate, the gorgeous, wealthy acting student Marx Watanabe. Marx becomes the third corner of their triangle, and decades of action ensue, much of it set in Los Angeles, some in the virtual realm, all of it riveting. A lifelong gamer herself, Zevin has written the book she was born to write, a love letter to every aspect of gaming. For example, here’s the passage introducing the professor Sadie is sleeping with and his graphic engine, both of which play a continuing role in the story: “The seminar was led by twenty-eight-year-old Dov Mizrah....It was said of Dov that he was like the two Johns (Carmack, Romero), the American boy geniuses who'd programmed and designed Commander Keen and Doom, rolled into one. Dov was famous for his mane of dark, curly hair, wearing tight leather pants to gaming conventions, and yes, a game called Dead Sea, an underwater zombie adventure, originally for PC, for which he had invented a groundbreaking graphics engine, Ulysses, to render photorealistic light and shadow in water.” Readers who recognize the references will enjoy them, and those who don't can look them up and/or simply absorb them. Zevin’s delight in her characters, their qualities, and their projects sprinkles a layer of fairy dust over the whole enterprise.
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32120-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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