of where the author might be located in this artistic dynamic. “Key to the Kingdom” invites the reader to see the protagonist as the author, though there’s always peril in doing so with this trickster. Now branded as F.X. Riley, he’s returned to his alma mater—where he was known as Frank—to give a reading, and he is given something of a celebrity’s welcome. “Not that he was a celebrity himself, or not especially—books were too obscure in this age to register to that degree on the social scale, especially literary books. Like his.” It’s a story that cuts close to the bone on themes of alcoholism, paternity, and academic suicide, making a strong case that its truth has nothing to do with how factual it might be. The title story doesn’t tempt the reader to confuse author and narrator, though it rings every bit as true and is very funny in the darkest sort of way, as complacency provides little protection in the face of “something like a billion and a half stinking people all hurtling toward the grave. Like everybody else in the world. Like her. Like him.” There’s a futurism running through much of the collection, whether it’s trying to avoid omnipresent facial recognition (“SCS 750”) or submitting to the tyranny of vehicles that take you where they want
you to go (“Asleep at the Wheel”), but it seems like we’ve already turned the corner into that future. A playful virtuoso with a deadly seriousness of purpose.
HAS ANYONE SEEN MY TOES?
Buckley, Christopher Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $26.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-9821-9804-6 Humorist Buckley looks at one man’s increasingly strange behavior during the pandemic. In a South Carolina coastal town, a screenwriter confronts the bathroom scale after a year of pandemic overeating. His belly blocks any view of his toes; thus the title. He tells his agent, “I’ve put on so much weight people are calling me Bubba the Hutt.” And when his prescribed appetite suppressants don’t keep him from ordering burger combos at the Hippo King takeout window, his doctor adds another pill. Soon he finds ideas starting to flow for a movie about a Nazi plot to kidnap FDR from Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate. At the same time, he somehow gets involved in the local election for coroner. He’s not sure how, because he has been easily distracted in recent days and slips into odd fantasies or down rabbit holes doing impulsive web research. And he’s starting to forget things. Buckley delights in exploring the intersections of plausible and absurd as they arise in an off-kilter mind that resembles the author’s for all its allusive gymnastics and silliness. The minisaga of his hero’s stumbling into local politics via the coroner’s election—it appears Putin is interfering in the race—resonates with memories of the movie The Russians Are Coming, while an ancient ruse of Hannibal’s becomes a stampede of flaming feral Hungarian pigs in the Nazi screenplay. All this brings our hero to a point where he is sitting on a beach, naked but for a string of sausages wrapped around his torso, “hoping that baby turtles don’t hatch and mistake our testicles for turtle num-nums.” This is Buckley at his comic, mischievous best.
THE HOUSE OF FORTUNE
Burton, Jessie Bloomsbury (304 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 30, 2022 978-1-63557-974-1
Hemmed in by long-kept silences and problematic histories, a complicated family in 18th-century Amsterdam struggles to find its future. Burton’s sequel to her bestselling debut, The Miniaturist (2014), picks up a generation later, in 1705, in a world riddled with secrets. Nella Brandt, the challenged wife of the previous book, now returns 10
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1 july 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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