Review by Booklist Review
As the remarkable latest release by acclaimed novelist and poet Jones (Palmaries, 2021) opens, Amanda Wordlaw is in Ibiza. She has been summoned away from her seemingly endless itinerary as a travel writer to stay with her friends, Catherine and Ernest, a volatile married couple. They have arrived on the island following the most recent of Catherine's many attempts to kill Ernest. Catherine is a renowned and celebrated visual artist, at work on the titular multimedia project and prone to sporadic violence against her long-suffering and deeply loyal husband. Amanda is a frequent companion, having joined them in the wake of Catherine's intermittent hospitalizations. The nuances and foibles of their multilayered friendship are detailed through Amanda's astute, conversational observations, along with reflections on their collective experiences as Black artists in creative spaces. Amanda, a character Jones introduced in The Healing (1998), is secretive with her friends, but her compelling backstory, told in alternating flashback chapters, is rife with explorations of marriage, motherhood, and identity. Jones' prose is captivating, at moments coolly observational and at others profoundly intimate; the delicate balance is the mark of a truly great storyteller. An intriguing, tightly crafted, and insightful meditation on creativity and complicated friendships.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jones continues her marvelous run after last year's Pulitzer finalist Palmares with the gloriously demented story of an artist who keeps trying to kill her husband. Amanda Wordlaw, an experimental novelist cum travel writer, accepts an invitation to join her friends Catherine and Ernest Shuger for an extended stay in Ibiza. She's a platonic third for the Shugers, though the locals all assume the three Black Americans are sleeping together. Catherine isn't allowed any sharp objects due to her history of trying to kill Ernest, which limits her sculpture practice--she's working on a mixed-media project called "The Birdcatcher"--and Ernest takes her to a mental hospital whenever she tries to kill him, like the time she snagged a bicycle spoke from a trash heap and attempted to stab him. There's no why, just the what ("You'd think we'd learn by now," Amanda narrates. "But somehow we keep the optimism"). As to the when, clues suggest the early 1980s, and every once in a while a character speaks in the decade's bald vulgarity ("Excuse me, I'm going over here and get a closer look at that piece of ass," a man says to a woman, about another woman, at a party--"It's talking to me"). The racism depicted in the art world is sadly timeless, such as the white artist who tells Catherine it's too bad her culture has no great literature. Jones, implicitly defiant, draws deeply from classic and global literature--a well-placed reference to Cervantes's windmills leaves the reader's head spinning. And like one of Amanda's inventive novels, this one ends on a surprising and playful turn. It ought to be required reading. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A drolly insinuating chamber piece about a trio of Black American expatriates. First published in Germany in 1986, this novel would be considered an anomaly for almost anybody except Jones, whose legendary stature among African American novelists was established almost 50 years ago by such provocative inquiries into Black women's psyches as Corregidora (1975) and Eva's Man (1976). Her new spate of publications that began last year with the historical epic Palmares continues with this predictably unpredictable first-person account by Amanda Wordlaw ("Wonderful name for a writer, isn't it?"), a lapsed author of racy novels like The Other Broad's Story who has forsaken writing fiction for travel books. As the novel opens, she is living on "the white-washed island of Ibiza" with her longtime friend Catherine Shuger, a prominent sculptor, and Catherine's husband, Ernest, who writes articles for popular science magazines. Amanda wastes no time telling you what's whack about two-thirds of this triad: Catherine keeps trying to kill Ernest, who in turns puts her into an asylum, from which she is released by Ernest, whom she tries to kill again. And again. It's all outrageous enough at the outset to make readers anticipate an absurdist-modernist slapstick farce. Yet the icy, deadpan tone of Amanda's leisurely narrative voice, though seasoned with sneaky wordplay and impish irony, helps make this a quirkier, more reflective kind of comedy. The repartee, as with the rest of the story, can drift and meld into side tangents and back, complete with literary references, art criticism, and coy innuendo. Jones' impulse to keep her readers alternately off balance and in the weeds threatens to upend the novel altogether, especially at the end, as shifts in tone and locale make you question almost everything that came before. Whether this was intended or not, its effect seems perfunctory, even abrupt. It may not be the most powerful or best realized of Jones' novels, but it may be the closest she's come to making us laugh as much as wince. Her vaunted blend of ambiguity and disquiet comes across here as a sly, even smirky dance. And her inquiries into how Black women live now are present throughout. Not just "present," in fact, but "prescient," as Amanda herself likely couldn't keep herself from saying. Jones' mercurial, often inscrutable body of work delivers yet another change-up to readers' expectations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
