Harvey Freedenberg

NonfictionMemoir

A master novelist’s homage to his parents

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In a four-decade career that includes a Pulitzer Prize and an impressive body of critically acclaimed novels and short stories, Richard Ford has never produced a work of nonfiction. With Between Them, a tender, deeply appreciative memoir of his parents, he impeccably remedies that gap in his résumé. What’s most extraordinary about these concise reminiscences—his mother’s written after her death of cancer in 1981 and his father’s some 55 years after the heart attack that killed him in 1960—is how Ford transmutes the utterly ordinary lives they describe into art.

When Arkansas natives Parker Carrol Ford and Edna Akin met in a Hot Springs, Arkansas, grocery store in 1927, perhaps they envisioned lives of excitement and great accomplishment. They certainly never anticipated the 16 years it would take their only child to arrive. They passed those 16 years in a pleasant, nomadic life; Parker was a traveling salesman for a laundry starch manufacturer in seven Southern states, and Edna was his traveling companion.

In recounting the quotidian details of his family’s life—the purchase of a new car or a first house in the suburbs—Ford makes little attempt to invest those events with any larger significance, but his gentle stories of his life in Jackson, Mississippi, are suffused with gratitude. “I was fortunate to have parents who loved each other and, out of the crucible of that great, almost unfathomable love, loved me,” he recalls. “The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task,” Ford writes. His parents would be proud of the honor he’s paid in this work to their humble, decent lives.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a four-decade career that includes a Pulitzer Prize and an impressive body of critically acclaimed novels and short stories, Richard Ford has never produced a work of nonfiction. With Between Them, a tender, deeply appreciative memoir of his parents, he impeccably remedies that gap in his résumé. What’s most extraordinary about these concise reminiscences—his mother’s written after her death of cancer in 1981 and his father’s some 55 years after the heart attack that killed him in 1960—is how Ford transmutes the utterly ordinary lives they describe into art.

FictionComic Fiction

A Passover gathering with a comic, murderous twist

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

If there were a shade of comedy darker than black, David Samuel Levinson’s novel Tell Me How This Ends Well would define it. The story of an ill-conceived murder plot hatched by three adult children to dispatch their psychologically abusive father, it’s a devilishly funny and yet painfully honest dissection of one Jewish family’s angst, set against the backdrop of a terrifying near-future America in which anti-Semitism has emerged with renewed vengeance.

On an April weekend in 2022, the Jacobson family gathers at the San Fernando Valley home of Moses Orenstein-Jacobson, a B-movie actor and the star of a cancelled reality show that also featured his wife and their five sons. They’re joined by his sister Edith and, from Berlin, his brother Jacob and Jacob’s German partner, Dietrich.

Over the course of the weekend, the Jacobson siblings—in the presence of their mother, Roz, the victim of a terminal lung disease—rehearse their lifelong litany of grievances against their “mean, viperous, and unpredictable” father, Julian, a man with an uncanny knack for seeking out and exploiting each child’s point of maximum emotional vulnerability. Julian’s verbal cruelty, past and present, easily qualifies him for membership in any hall of fame of literary villainy. The Jacobsons’ murderous scheme, climaxing on the evening of a televised Passover Seder at Moses’ home, unfolds with the lack of professionalism and bizarre humor one would expect from such a profoundly damaged trio.

Levinson’s vividly imagined America is home to some 4 million Israeli refugees, an influx of new immigrants that sparks a wave of anti-Jewish terror that includes suicide bombings on the Los Angeles freeways and attacks on Jewish day schools. The hostile environment, which seems eerily plausible, only exacerbates the Jacobson family’s insecurity, heightening the tension that surrounds their criminal designs.

Tell Me How This Ends Well takes the familiar tropes of family conflict and flashes them in a funhouse mirror. Yet somehow, they emerge from that process of distortion ever more clearly reflected in our own minds.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If there were a shade of comedy darker than black, David Samuel Levinson’s novel Tell Me How This Ends Well would define it. The story of an ill-conceived murder plot hatched by three adult children to dispatch their psychologically abusive father, it’s a devilishly funny and yet painfully honest dissection of one Jewish family’s angst, set against the backdrop of a terrifying near-future America in which anti-Semitism has emerged with renewed vengeance.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Boys to men

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

What does it really mean to be a good man? That’s the challenging question posed by Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs) in The Hearts of Men, an earnest exploration of the best and worst of male behavior, set against the backdrop of that quintessential laboratory for shaping it: the Boy Scouts.

Beginning in 1962 and spanning 60 years, most of the action of Butler’s novel takes place at Camp Chippewa, a Boy Scout summer camp in Wisconsin’s north woods. In two generations, a world that emphasizes the value of knot-tying and compass reading gives way to the age of iPads and social media. Wilbur Whiteside is the autocratic Scoutmaster who leads the camp for decades until he’s succeeded by former camper Nelson Doughty, who is aware of the profound contrast between the generous and instructive Wilbur and his own abusive father.

When it comes to the Boy Scouts, Butler isn’t interested in exploring the controversy surrounding an organization one character dismisses as “a dogged fraternity of paramilitary Young Republicans desperately clinging to some nineteenth-century notion of goodness in a modern world,” but he does imply there’s an enduring benefit to its ethos. Several of the characters, including Wilbur and Nelson, fight in wars that range from World War I to Afghanistan, and whether their conduct is cowardly or heroic, Butler suggests that the experience profoundly shapes the way they live the rest of their lives. He’s perceptive enough to recognize that only a tiny minority of men will see combat, but that most will be tested in other ways that reveal character.

Novelist Jonathan Evison described Shotgun Lovesongs as a “good old-fashioned novel,” and that’s an equally fitting description of The Hearts of Men. Butler doesn’t make it hard to tell the admirable men from the ones who badly misbehave, but his role models aren’t lacking complexity or flaws. Writing without irony, in a style that brings to mind writers like Andre Dubus III and Tom Perrotta, Butler, who grew up and still lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, displays an intuitive feel for the values of his characters. He’s portrayed them with compassion in this kindhearted, affecting novel.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What does it really mean to be a good man? That’s the challenging question posed by Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs) in The Hearts of Men, an earnest exploration of the best and worst of male behavior, set against the backdrop of that quintessential laboratory for shaping it: the Boy Scouts.

FictionLiterary Fiction

An elegiac story of two odd, old friends

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In her new novel, the always intriguing Ali Smith portrays an odd friendship between a centenarian and the neighbor girl—now a young woman—he cared for in her childhood. Smith blends conventional realist narrative with passages that read almost like prose poems to create an elegiac story that’s decidedly more than the sum of its parts.

Daniel Gluck, once a songwriter and former “unofficial babysitter” to Elisabeth Demand, awaits his death in a nursing home. In the present, we penetrate Daniel’s consciousness to share some of his hallucinatory dreams, and through flashbacks, Smith gently reveals how this kindly, unassuming man served as a mentor to his young charge. Now in her early 30s, Elisabeth is a junior lecturer in art history, struggling with her doctoral thesis.

Drawing back from this intimate tableau, Autumn also offers a piercing view of an unsettled England in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote. “All across the country,” Smith writes in a terse chapter whose every sentence begins with those words, “there was misery and rejoicing,” echoing the opening passage of A Tale of Two Cities, quoted by Elisabeth in her bedside reading to Daniel.

Much of this novel’s pleasure flows from Smith’s supple prose. She indulges in word play with an almost Joycean zest (offering an homage to him in a brief allusion to his iconic Dubliners story, “The Dead”). Autumn is the first installment of a projected quartet of “seasonal” novels. Impressionistic in character, it’s a book to be read less for any conventional plot than for its skill in stimulating a reflective mood.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her new novel, the always intriguing Ali Smith portrays an odd friendship between a centenarian and the neighbor girl—now a young woman—he cared for in her childhood. Smith blends conventional realist narrative with passages that read almost like prose poems to create an elegiac story that’s decidedly more than the sum of its parts.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

A robust and revealing portrait of the American frontier

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There's a certain audacity involved in any attempt to extend the lives of characters in an American classic like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps that's why it's taken more than 130 years for an author of Robert Coover's stature to make that effort. While it's unlikely that Huck Out West will attain the status of its source material, Coover's novel is a stimulating companion to Twain's novel.

In Coover's lively account, Huck's decision to "light out for the Territory" to avoid the attempt to "sivilize" him lands him a world that's about as far from civilization as one could find in 19th-century America. Whether Huck is riding for the Pony Express, scouting for both sides in the Civil War or simply trying to survive in the grimly named town of Deadwood Gulch at the start of the Black Hills Gold Rush in the mid-1870s, he demonstrates an engaging ability to live by his wits and a wryly observant eye about the often bizarre events he witnesses.

Coover packs his story with nearly nonstop, highly cinematic action that includes hangings, explosions and even a beheading. He remains cleverly true to Twain's use of the vernacular as Huck finds himself feeling "meloncholical" or describes another character as "start-naked." Much of the frank fun of the novel lies in trying to sort out the truth from the often exaggerated version of it Huck presents in one of his "stretchers."

Fans of Twain's novel will be pleased that Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Jim make appearances, though Huck, as the title suggests, remains the star of the story. Through Huck's friendship with a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe named Eeteh, Coover also doesn't flinch from exposing the cruel treatment of the region's native inhabitants, much of it inflicted here by a murderous George Custer who becomes Huck’s nemesis, earning him the nickname "General Hard Ass."

Whether it's read as a companion to Twain's iconic novel or as a standalone work, Huck Out West is a robust and revealing portrait of the American frontier in a time of dramatic and often wrenching transition.

There's a certain audacity involved in any attempt to extend the lives of characters in an American classic like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps that's why it's taken more than 130 years for an author of Robert Coover's stature to make that effort.
FictionLiterary Fiction

An insightful novelist looks at life in the newsroom

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s a pleasure to report that at age 81, Ward Just is still turning out penetrating studies of mature adults wrestling with life’s profound challenges, often in the public arena. His latest, the story of a lifelong newspaperman whose career takes him from small-town Indiana to Washington, D.C., is a strong addition to that consistently excellent body of work.

The Eastern Shore’s episodic narrative traverses the life of Ned Ayres, whose eagerness to pursue a career in journalism impels him to forgo college to take a job with the Herman, Indiana, Press-Gazette. During his tenure as city editor, the paper’s debate over whether to expose a respected local businessman’s criminal past reminds Ned of both journalism’s propensity for the “discovering of secrets with little attention paid to the consequences,” and of the fact that “the first version was always wrong, if only slightly.” 

After intermediate stops in Indianapolis and Chicago, Ned arrives in Washington in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, eventually rising to the position of editor-in-chief of a newspaper that calls to mind the Washington Post. When his career ends in 2005, he retires to a decaying manor house on the Chesapeake Bay, where he struggles to write a memoir that will do justice to the profession to which he’s devoted himself so single-mindedly. The house once hosted a senator’s sparkling dinner parties, gatherings that Ned attended. Now it brings to mind his beloved newspaper business, “still handsome, but no longer stately.” 

In its depiction of the claustrophobia of life in a town “like so many in Middle America with an absence of commotion,” The Eastern Shore evokes the spirit of works like William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Just’s portrait of the contemporary newspaper business and of the machinations of Washington’s political class is as realistic as today’s headlines. The languid pacing won’t appeal to readers hungry for dramatic action and frequent plot twists, but Just’s finely calibrated appreciation of the flaws of human character and his talent for gazing without blinking into the darkest corners of the human heart continue to distinguish him as a writer of keen intellect and insight.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a pleasure to report that at age 81, Ward Just is still turning out penetrating studies of mature adults wrestling with life’s profound challenges, often in the public arena. His latest, the story of a lifelong newspaperman whose career takes him from small-town Indiana to Washington, D.C., is a strong addition to that consistently excellent body of work.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A Gonzo-styled coming-of-age story

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a title less likely to attract readers than the one attached to Nell Zink’s third novel. But anyone put off by it will miss out on a quirky and consistently engaging story about the millennial generation’s circuitous journey to find its way in the world.

The “Nicotine” of the novel’s title is a decrepit house in a “heroin-type neighborhood” of Jersey City that was the childhood home of Norman Baker, an “animist drug freak” whose medical clinic in Brazil attracted a group of passionate followers. When Norman’s devoted daughter, Penny, is evicted from his Upper West Side apartment after his death, she decides to explore the possibility of taking up residence at Nicotine, and arrives to find the house has been occupied by a group of activists united only by their passion for tobacco products. Soon the romantic lives of these characters entangle with those of Penny and her much older stepbrother, Matt, in ways that would make the term “it’s complicated” an understatement.

Zink’s fast-paced chronicle of the couplings and uncouplings that ensue amid a group that includes women named Sorry and Jazz and a self-avowed asexual bicycle activist is smart and never predictable. Though she was born a generation earlier than most of her characters, Zink is keenly attuned to the emotional weather that swirls around them. Based on the trials of Penny and her friends, she gives us reason to be optimistic about the millenials’ maturation, even as they seem destined to encounter a unique brand of stumbles along the way.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a title less likely to attract readers than the one attached to Nell Zink’s third novel. But anyone put off by it will miss out on a quirky and consistently engaging story about the millennial generation’s circuitous journey to find its way in the world.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A womb with a view

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In novels like Atonement and Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has enjoyed playing tricks with questions of his narrator’s identity. His devilishly clever and darkly humorous novel Nutshell takes another step in that direction, revealing the arc of a bizarre murder plot from the point of view of the ultimate unreliable narrator: a child in utero, two weeks away from birth.

McEwan’s startlingly precocious protagonist lodges uneasily in the womb of Trudy Cairncross, who is separated from her husband John—an uninspired poet and owner of a modest poetry publishing house—and living in the decaying Georgian mansion in an upscale London neighborhood that was John’s childhood home. Trudy and her lover, Claude, a property developer who happens to be John’s younger brother, appear to have in common only their mutual lust (whose manifestations the narrator rather graphically describes from his own intimate perspective) and a shared desire to see John dead. 

Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that Trudy and Claude’s scheme unfolds with all the deftness one would expect from a pair of amateur killers. Apart from his terror at the prospect of his father’s demise, the narrator has a dawning fear that he’s little more than an inconvenient afterthought in the conspirators’ minds. His own future may include spending some of his early days in prison and the rest of his childhood in a “brutal tower block.”

Whether it’s a “joyous, blushful Pinot Noir” or a “gooseberried Sauvignon,” the sense-deprived but enthusiastic narrator is given to precise cataloging of his mother’s wine consumption—clearly excessive for a woman in her third trimester, but understandable for one hoping to obliterate her consciousness of the terrible deed she and her lover are about to commit. He’s also a cheeky and surprisingly well-informed commentator on the problems of the world (owing, perhaps, to the podcasts his mother devours). For all that, he hungers to enter that world, imagining himself someday as an octogenarian ringing in the 22nd century: “Healthy desire or mere greed,” he muses, “I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness.”

In Nutshell, McEwan cleverly pulls off what might be little more than a gimmick in the hands of a lesser novelist. That he persuades us to suspend our disbelief so readily here is a testament to his consummate skill.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In novels like Atonement and Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has enjoyed playing tricks with questions of his narrator’s identity. His devilishly clever and darkly humorous novel Nutshell takes another step in that direction, revealing the arc of a bizarre murder plot from the point of view of the ultimate unreliable narrator: a child in utero, two weeks away from birth.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Off to Anchorage

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The protagonist of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is hardly a model of parental rectitude: She abandons her home and dental practice in Ohio to traverse Alaska in a rickety RV with her two children. Starting from this dubious premise, Eggers weaves an engaging story of second chances and the fierce beauty of maternal love.

Approaching age 40, Josie is haunted by a malpractice case filed by a former patient whose litigious son-in-law claims she missed evidence of an oral cancer in a routine dental examination. Her guilt over that incident is surpassed only by the anguish she feels over the death of another patient, a young Marine who was killed in Afghanistan. 

While Josie’s tenuous hold on rationality propels the novel, Eggers gives her a pair of appealing traveling companions. Her 8-year-old son, Peter, is “far more reasonable and kind and wise than his mother,” personality traits that come in handy for dealing with his 5-year-old sister, Ana, who’s “tuned to a different galactic frequency.” Both children demonstrate remarkable resilience, resigning themselves to the fact that there’s “no longer any logical pattern to their lives.”

This tiny crew navigates a craft north from Anchorage, on Alaska’s highways and back roads. Along the way, they take in a magic show on a cruise ship, meet a veteran of one of America’s lesser-known conflicts—the invasion of Grenada—and live in a cottage on the site of an abandoned silver mine. Eggers captures the essential weirdness of this journey while firmly anchoring it to Josie’s emotional crisis.

Heroes of the Frontier seems at first an ironic description of this tiny band. But what Eggers shows so convincingly is that there’s a certain heroism in trading a disastrous life for the vague glimpse of a new one. It’s a vote for the optimistic notion that tomorrow has the potential to be better than today.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The protagonist of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is hardly a model of parental rectitude: She abandons her home and dental practice in Ohio to traverse Alaska in a rickety RV with her two children. Starting from this dubious premise, Eggers weaves an engaging story of second chances and the fierce beauty of maternal love.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A charming, witty reimagining of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In the year in which we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler joins a distinguished group of writers that includes Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson in reinterpreting the bard’s works for Hogarth Press. Vinegar Girl transports The Taming of the Shrew from Padua to Tyler’s beloved Baltimore, and the product is a witty novel that reveals both the durability of Shakespeare’s themes and Tyler’s talent for creating pleasantly eccentric characters and engaging portraits of contemporary domestic life.

As someone who hates small children, Kate Battista couldn’t be more ill-suited for her work as a preschool teacher’s assistant. Her unfailing candor has put her job in jeopardy, and at 29 she is still living with her father, a fumbling, self-absorbed microbiology researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and a sullen sister half her age. Given Kate’s severely circumscribed prospects, it’s hardly surprising when her father seizes on the idea of having her wed his Russian research assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose visa is about to expire, saving him from deportation.

As preposterous as that union may seem, Tyler gives Kate a credible interior life, permitting her to wrestle with the absurdity of participating in what she thinks of as “human trafficking,” weighed against her fear that she’ll live out her days as the “old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father.” When her sister pleads with her to call off the wedding, Kate’s plaintive cry that “This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny,” resonates with real emotional force.

With the characteristic light touch of her 20 previous novels, Tyler plausibly depicts the halting evolution of Kate and Pyotr’s relationship as her family and friends look on with attitudes that range from bemusement to alarm. As befits such a genial comedy, the roadblocks that separate the couple from the altar are predictably mild, but Tyler deploys them to illuminate character, not garner unearned laughs. Vinegar Girl is a bittersweet novel that both honors and extends its source material.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the year in which we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler joins a distinguished group of writers that includes Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson in reinterpreting the bard’s works for Hogarth Press. Vinegar Girl transports The Taming of the Shrew from Padua to Tyler’s beloved Baltimore, and the product is a witty novel that reveals both the durability of Shakespeare’s themes and Tyler’s talent for creating pleasantly eccentric characters and engaging portraits of contemporary domestic life.
FictionComic Fiction

English do-gooders take on the world

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The name Jesse Armstrong may not be familiar to you, but when you learn he was a co-writer of the British Iraq War satire In the Loop and has written for the HBO series “Veep,” you’ll have a good idea of the darkly comic sensibility that infuses his droll first novel, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals. 

In the summer of 1994, a group of eight young English men and women who dub themselves the Peace Play Partnership pile into a diesel van and set off for war-ravaged Sarajevo, Bosnia. They plan to spread the message of peace through the art of theater and somehow “extend the evolution of humanity to a new continuum.” Andrew, a sometime construction worker and the novel’s narrator, wangles his way into the van by falsely claiming fluency in Serbo-Croatian, but his main goal is to ingratiate himself with Penny, an African-born beauty who’s the adopted daughter of a well-connected British politico. As the group makes its way into ever more dangerous territory of the ironically named U.N. Safe Areas, the sexual tension is as thick as the humid Bosnian air.

Armstrong trains his dry wit like a laser on the fumbling progress of the English do-gooders, whose sincerity is equaled only by their naïveté. Andrew’s bathroom stop in what may be a minefield and his trip to a military commander’s headquarters to deliver a briefcase he fears contains a bomb are just two of many scenes that showcase Armstrong’s comic gift. But in his realistic depictions of sniper attacks, artillery shelling, encounters with ragtag militias and mercenaries and even a hanging, he ensures that the reality of conflict is never far from the center of an otherwise amusing story.

“Everything is complicated. Everything is simple. It depends how far away you stand, I suppose,” says Andrew. That’s an apt summing up of the tragedy of the savage war in Bosnia. Armstrong’s novel is an admirable contribution to the literature of that conflict, its mordant humor effectively balanced by a keen appreciation of the futility and irrationality of war.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The name Jesse Armstrong may not be familiar to you, but when you learn he was a co-writer of the British Iraq War satire In the Loop and has written for the HBO series “Veep,” you’ll have a good idea of the darkly comic sensibility that infuses his droll first novel, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A tragicomic take on the human condition

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Twenty-three years after creating the benighted town of North Bath, New York in his novel Nobody's Fool, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls) invites readers back to find that while the lot of most of the town's inhabitants hasn't improved much, their lives and loves provide ample fodder for a fresh tragicomic encounter with the human condition.

Everybody's Fool unfolds over a steamy Memorial Day weekend that begins with the funeral of Judge Barton Flatt—an event that's marred by police chief Douglas Raymer's tumble into the open grave—and includes murder, savage beatings, the escape of poisonous snakes, lightning strikes and a couple of nervous breakdowns.

As in its predecessor, in the heart of this chaos is the roguish Donald "Sully" Sullivan, whose fortunes have improved after he inherits the home of the town's former eighth grade English teacher, but who still spends most of his days at a local lunch counter or at one of North Bath's downmarket taverns. Sharing center stage with him this time is Chief Raymer, still in mourning over the death of his wife a year earlier in a bizarre accident on the day she planned to leave him for her lover. The return of Roy Purdy, a recidivist burglar and thug who is the ex-son-in-law of Sully's former lover Ruth, darkens the story and generates most of the action that drives it forward.

For all of Russo's deft comic sensibility and the occasionally antic quality of the novel's plot, he successfully sidesteps the trap of slapstick humor. Instead, whether it's Chief Raymer's obsession with a garage door opener he believes will reveal the identity of his wife's lover, or Sully's encounter with mortality as he realizes the two years he's been given by a VA cardiologist are "probably closer to one," Russo is more intent on placing the interior lives of these characters under a microscope than he is in making sport of their obvious flaws. And with all its frustrated dreams of development, Russo makes it clear that foul-smelling North Bath, like hundreds of small towns across America, is destined for a sad fate.

Everybody's Fool is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of that word, inviting readers to slip comfortably between its covers knowing they're in the hands of a writer who understands the foibles of human nature and can plumb its dark corners with empathy, understanding and wit.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Richard Russo about Everybody's Fool. 

 

 

Twenty-three years after creating the benighted town of North Bath, New York in his novel Nobody's Fool, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls) invites readers back.
NonfictionAging

A baby boomer’s outlook on aging

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In 1993, then-42-year-old Michael Kinsley was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Now, through the lens of that experience, the former editor of The New Republic, serving as a “scout from my generation,” offers his 79 million fellow baby boomers a clear-eyed glimpse of the decline that may lie ahead, while urging them to take stock of what they’ll leave behind when life’s clock inevitably runs out. 

Despite the bad fortune of its early onset, Kinsley’s Parkinson’s has been relatively mild. It wasn’t until 2002 that he publicly disclosed his disease, seven years after he left his position as co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” He underwent a deep-brain stimulation procedure in 2006 that has slowed the advance of his symptoms. But as he reveals in his wry account of a recent battery of cognitive tests, his decline, however measured, is perceptible.

Citing the estimated 28 million baby boomers who are expected to develop Alzheimer’s disease or a related disorder, Kinsley points to the “tsunami of dementia” about to afflict this cohort. For a generation that will be remembered for its ambition and competitiveness, he argues, this slowly dawning, frightening knowledge is likely to spark a round of “competitive cognition,” where “whoever dies with more of their marbles” is considered the ultimate victor in the game of life.

Kinsley concludes Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide with a plea to his fellow boomers to make a grand gesture that would be the moral equivalent of the Greatest Generation’s triumph over Hitler: a self-imposed tax on the massive transfer of wealth they’re currently enjoying to help whittle down America’s mountain of debt. It’s a bold, if not entirely realistic, proposal from someone who understands, and has communicated here with candor and characteristic wit, the daunting challenge facing his contemporaries as they contemplate life’s final act.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1993, then-42-year-old Michael Kinsley was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Now, through the lens of that experience, the former editor of The New Republic, serving as a “scout from my generation,” offers his 79 million fellow baby boomers a clear-eyed glimpse of the decline that may lie ahead, while urging them to take stock of what they’ll leave behind when life’s clock inevitably runs out.

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