Review by Booklist Review
Hunt has a penchant for the mysterious, as evident in her imaginative novels, most recently Mr. Splitfoot (2016). In her first nonfiction work she is equally inventive and evocative even as her fascination with the inexplicable is matched by a fervent earthiness. These deeply personal and electrifying essays are infused with her passion for family and books and grief over losing her father. Together they form an ardent investigation into life, love, death, and creativity, and each is rendered in exceptionally honed, often ravishing prose spiked with hilarious or stunning candor. A professor, writer, and mother (early on of three daughters under three: twins!), Hunt is enthralled by W. G. Sebald, Octavia Butler, and, in unabashed synchronicity with her daughters, the boy band One Direction. Hunt's questing essays are webbed with surprising connections as she reflects on growing up in a Hudson Valley house built in 1765, rural life, wildlife, madness, addiction, and besieged and proud womanhood. These vibrant inquiries are interleaved with an unfinished novel (pegged with her piquant footnotes) written by her father, an editor for Reader's Digest, about a magazine editor who gets entangled with the CIA. Hunt believes in feelings, hauntings, the body, the planet, words, and forthrightness, all coalescing in a literary performance of uncommon perception, vitality, daring, and heart.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Hunt (The Dark Dark) scours literature for "alphabets and signs" of the dead in her stirring nonfiction debut. As she writes, "The dead leave clues, and life is a puzzle of trying to read and understand these mysterious hints before the game is over." Her investigation centers on an unfinished novel written by her late father, Walter, parts of which (as well as her annotations of it) are mixed in with her thoughts on what it means to be human. As she considers the novel (about a magazine editor confronted by a society of people who believe dreams can spill over into reality), Hunt reflects on her relationship with her father, including his alcoholism and the love of stories they shared. Like her father, Hunt thinks of books as waypoints: "In books we can find our ways back to the worlds we thought were lost, the world of childhood, the world of the dead." Hunt writes in touching detail and with heartfelt prose: "There is exquisite beauty and storytelling in the smallness. Reading life and death like a book." Both intimate and incisive, this genre-melding collection will make readers want to hold their loved ones close. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The latest work by novelist Hunt (The Invention of Everything Else) is not easily classified or described. The general premise is an exploration of the significance of books that are never written or never finished because life and death rob people of time and space to take on their projects. However, the moment this book begins to settle comfortably onto one path, it suddenly veers off in a completely different direction. Throughout the work, Hunt shares pieces of a novel her late father worked on for many years but never finished. These pieces leave readers pondering the writing process and the possible routes the work could have taken. Hunt adds her own notes and thoughts to her father's incomplete work, focusing on his life and writing process. Interspersed with these pieces of someone else's unfinished fiction are vignettes from Hunt's own life. Grappling with death is a theme throughout Hunt's work; the natures of reality and the paranormal are also common motifs. VERDICT Without an overarching narrative to hold the many fragments of this work together, it can be challenging to stay invested in the book, despite Hunt's beautiful writing. But anyone seeking an exceptionally unusual, thought-provoking reading experience will find it here.--Sarah Schroeder
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A series of meditations on grief, art, desire, memory, and the spirit world, centered around an unfinished novel written by the author's father. An award-winning fiction writer best known for her explorations of the macabre and the unreal, Hunt plumbs the depths of human experience in this assemblage of reflections on life's sweet mystery. "Most of our lives are spent shrinking," she writes, "eroding into bits and decaying. What if we celebrated that decay and championed the infinitesimal?" Although her gaze ranges widely--from her love of One Direction and W.G. Sebald to her grandmother's stamp collection and the time she "bathed" in more than 200,000 volts of electricity--Hunt returns again and again to the unfinished manuscript she discovered in her father's desk drawer after his death. The "unwritten book" itself--three chapters of which are interspersed throughout the text--can lag a bit, as Hunt herself acknowledges in her annotations. "Apologies if this is boring you," she writes. "I promise you things are about to get juicy for our narrator." Some other sections of the larger book feel cobbled together--e.g., ruminations on policing and safety, reflections on the pandemic, the author's attempts to fill the silences of her family history. But Hunt more than compensates for these minor quibbles with her engaging style, vulnerability, and earnest engagement with death and grief, ghosts and art, fear and the unknown--and perhaps the book's shagginess is merely a reflection of life itself. As Hunt writes in a description of her mother's hoarding, she "has a drawerful of nail polishes beside a toy turtle beside a pink pillow beside an expired jar of my dad's cancer drugs beside a golden statuette of the Virgin. I make it make sense. I plot these points and create a chalk line around the ghost, all that's missing." A vulnerable, wide-ranging, and at times deeply affecting patchwork of ruminations on the unknown. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
