Publishers Weekly - 06.04.2020

Review_FICTION

52 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020

Review_FICTION

and other notable figures. McPhee (Bright

Angel Time) sometimes labors too dili-

gently to follow the many threads and

family myths, and leans too hard on the

novelist-as-narrator frame. Still, her

ambitious tale occasionally captivates.

Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (June)

Love

Roddy Doyle. Viking, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-

984880-45-1

This witty, satisfying novel about male

friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle

(A Star Called Henry) dramatizes language’s

inadequacies when it comes to affairs of

the heart. “The words are letting me

down,” says Dubliner Joe to Davy, his old

friend visiting from England, while

telling him that he has left his wife for

another woman, Jessica, whom they both

briefly adored as young men. Over pints

at several pubs, the two 50-something

Irishmen get back into their old rhythms

and revive, or occasionally reinvent, the

past. Joe grasps for the right metaphors

or analogies with which to explain his

life-altering decision to Davy as much as

to himself,

“testing the

words” for how

they sound.

Davy, burdened

by his own

sense of guilt

with regard to

his rapidly

declining

father, is at

times intrigued,

bored, contemptuous, resentful, provoking,

or supportive of his friend as Joe circles

around his infidelity with an almost

Jamesian vagueness. Some readers may

chafe at Doyle’s leisurely unfolding of the

plot, though the two men are nothing if

not good company. By closing time,

Doyle has focused the novel’s rambling

energy into an elegiac and sobering

climax. This one is a winner. (June)

Echo on the Bay

Masatsugu Ono, trans. from the Japanese by

Angus Turvill. Two Lines, $16.95 trade paper

(160p) ISBN 978-1-949641-03-5

Ono’s deliriously captivating tale (after

Lion Cross Point) draws on the violent past

of a Japanese fishing village. The teenage

rowing existence in the American West.

Glenna leaves the girls with a settler

family in Miles City, Mont., while she

goes to frontier towns in search of

teaching work. After many vicissitudes,

the sisters separate as teenagers, and

Tommy makes it to New York, where she

borrows Katherine’s name and high

school diploma to becomes a nurse, while

Katherine takes the name Pat and moves

to California. After the newly named

Katherine marries into high society and

becomes a mother and grandmother to

four girls, she tells them stories about

their heritage, enhancing her dramatic

tales with fabrications, such as that they

are descendants of Mary, Queen of Scots,

An Elegant Woman

Martha McPhee. Scribner, $27 (416p)

ISBN 978-1-5011-7957-0

In McPhee’s ambitious if uneven latest,

a novelist recounts the twists and turns of

her grandmother’s life. While Isadora

helps her sisters and mother clean out her

grandmother’s house in New Jersey, she

declares, “If Grammy was our version of

Homer, I was Herodotus.” Combining

snippets of history with an admittedly

embellished narrative, Isadora begins in

1910. Her grandmother, then named
      Tommy, is taken at five years old with her
      three-year-old sister, Katherine, by their
      indomitable mother, Glenna, from their
      comfortable home in Ohio to begin a har-

Danny Adams

Paul Goat Allen

Vicki Borah Bloom

Leah Bobet

Maurice Boyer

Steve Bunche

Donis Casey

Sanina Clark

Oline H. Cogdill

Sue Corbett

Jessica Daitch

Eboni Dunbar

Kate Dunn

Erin Fry

Jazmen Greene

Sara Grochowski

Patricia Guy

Josephine L. Hao

Don Herron

Katrina Niidas Holm

Michael M. Jones

Rob Kirby

Pam Lambert

Nicholas Litchfield

Sally Lodge

Stephanie Madewell

Chloe Maveal

Sheri Melnick

Sarah Mirk

Elizabeth Morse

Dean Muscat

Julie Naughton

Bob Papinchek

Leonard Picker

Joe Sanders

Antonia Saxon

Martha Schulman

Erin Talbert

Marta Tandori

Matthew Turbeville

Wendy Werris

Kerine Wint

Eris Young

Our Reviewers

▲

★ Self Care

Leigh Stein. Penguin, $16 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-14-313519-7

I

n this sharp satire, Stein (The Fallback Plan) revels in

wellness culture gone toxic. Devin Avery and Maren

Gelb are cofounders of Richual, a Goop-like lifestyle

company seeking to “catalyze women to be global

changemakers through the simple act of self-care.” (That

the company doesn’t have a maternity leave policy is a

particularly juicy irony.) Richual uses sponsored content,

paid influencers, confessional blog postings, and mer-

chandise like “Believe Victims” beach towels to attract

and monetize its user base. Devin, rich and devoted to a

strenuous dietary and beauty regimen, is the face of the

company, while Maren, who got her start working for a

nonprofit feminist organization and has a mountain of student loan debt, ensures

Richual runs “like a well-moisturized machine.” That machine hits a rough patch

after a woman publishes an essay about the problematic sexual predilections of

Evan, a former Bachelorette contestant and prominent male investor in Richual,

threatening the company’s feminist bona fides and driving a wedge between its

cofounders. The plot flies by, but the real appeal lies in Stein’s merciless skewering

of startup culture, bloviating entrepreneurs, fatuous trends, and woker-than-thou

internet denizens, a vanity fair of 20-somethings who are at once conspicuously

privileged yet vulnerable, earnest yet hypocritical, navel-gazing yet engaged,

independent-minded yet tribal. Stein’s sharp writing separates her from the pack

in this exquisite, Machiavellian morality tale about the ethics of looking out for

oneself. Agent: Erin Hosier, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (July)