Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time.
Scathing, darkly humorous exploration of the impact of VR, IRL.
Up until 16 months ago, Kayleigh was a content moderator at Hexa, a company contracted by an unnamed social media platform to review user posts for inappropriate content. Kayleigh and her co-workers must view hundreds of disturbing posts and videos per day and accurately categorize and flag videos for removal according to company guidelines. The guidelines are often counterintuitive, with more attention to preventing litigation than preventing harm. As Kayleigh and her co-workers begin to internalize the horrors they see each day, the line between the virtual and the physical world, truth and bot chatter, grows fuzzy. Co-workers mistake a roof repairman for a jumper, try to contact users who livestream self-harm, and join flat-earther cults. In this twist on the workplace drama, Bervoets masterfully captures our contemporary moment without devolving into national politics or soapbox rhetoric. Think Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation but with characters who have aged a few years and started full-time jobs. The psychological toll inherent to today’s workforce, big tech ethics, and viral misinformation—each are examined in turn by Kayleigh’s wonderfully snarky, unreliable narration and Bervoets’ intimate portrayals of a well-imagined and diverse cast of characters. Look out for a sucker-punch ending as Kayleigh searches for one of her flagged influencers in person. At first it’s infuriating—over-the-top, out of character, and abrupt. But on further consideration, this controversial conclusion has the reader experience Kayleigh's emotional process after reviewing each post: shocked back into reality and left to wonder how to live with what she's seen.
Bervoets just gets it. This is, unironically, a novel for our time.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-62236-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?
McBride follows up his hit novel Deacon King Kong (2020) with another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.
It's June 1972, and the Pennsylvania State Police have some questions concerning a skeleton found at the bottom of an old well in the ramshackle Chicken Hill section of Pottstown that’s been marked for redevelopment. But Hurricane Agnes intervenes by washing away the skeleton and all other physical evidence of a series of extraordinary events that began more than 40 years earlier, when Jewish and African American citizens shared lives, hopes, and heartbreak in that same neighborhood. At the literal and figurative heart of these events is Chona Ludlow, the forbearing, compassionate Jewish proprietor of the novel’s eponymous grocery store, whose instinctive kindness and fairness toward the Black families of Chicken Hill exceed even that of her husband, Moshe, who, with Chona’s encouragement, desegregates his theater to allow his Black neighbors to fully enjoy acts like Chick Webb’s swing orchestra. Many local White Christians frown upon the easygoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, especially Doc Roberts, Pottstown’s leading physician, who marches every year in the local Ku Klux Klan parade. The ties binding the Ludlows to their Black neighbors become even stronger over the years, but that bond is tested most stringently and perilously when Chona helps Nate Timblin, a taciturn Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of his community, conceal and protect a young orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing in an explosion. He isn’t at all “feeble-minded,” but the government wants to put him in an institution promising little care and much abuse. The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters. It’s possible to draw a clear, straight line from McBride’s breakthrough memoir, The Color of Water (1996), to the themes of this latest work.
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422946
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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