notanotherbookreview

  Plum Sykes, the bestselling author of  Bergdorf  Blondes, The Debutant Divorcee,  and  P a rty Girls and Die in Pearls ( my favorite ), skewers the rich and ridiculous in her new novel WIVES LIKE US (Harper Collins, 5/14/24). The heroines are substantial women, the socially ambitious denizens of the hilly British Cotswolds. They command their hereditary estates, amid quaint hamlets,with an eye on the London press.. For these literally entitled British women, being a successful wife means going to fantastic lengths in a quests for excellence. "Keeping up with the Jonses" is a dire competition, where one's brand, a uniquely individual identity, must out-class all competitors. This very social contest pits the heroines of   WIVES LIKE US against the less tasteful or virtuous, yet equally ingenious and perhaps unscrupulous wives of other estates. Of course such expectations, fantastic or not, carry the frisson of risk-- failure and self undoing....

Called "one of the innovators of the short short story" by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches'  Whistler's Mother's Son and Other Curiosities (3/23, Pelekinesis) is a marvel of wit an ingenuity. In this collection of short works, over 100 pieces of prose, he veers from minimalism to satire, noir to children's tale, abstraction to surrealism. Cherches' imagination takes a variety of forms; parodies, standarized tests, nursery rhymes, conundrums, rescued cliches, misbegotten mysteries, dark Americana, existential misdemeanors, optimistic nihilism and more. Whistler's Mother's Son features material never before published, published in small magazines, and from his early  Condensed Book .   Here are beloved characters; Hamlet, Gertrude Stein, Amelia Earhart, Fred Flintstone, Mr. Mondrian--hard-boiled dicks, a man with two mustaches and even a confused Peter Cherches. Though I have read  Between a Dream and a Cup of Coffee,  Lift Your Right Arm  ...

The Paragon Hotel by Lindsay Faye (Putnam) and A Hairpiece Named Denial   (Pelekinesis) by S. Sal Hanna are very good novels with strange affect, where humor and identity take turns you can't anticipate. Stranger yet, both have heroines named Alice. As  The Paragon Hotel  opens, Alice, also known as Nobody, is a young flapper on the run from Prohibition Harlem's mafia gang wars. Wounded and bleeding heavily, she boards a train where Max, a concerned porter, spirits her to Portland's Paragon Hotel, the only hotel for African Americans in a white city. A very skilled African-American doctor saves her life but then Alice, who uses invisibility to survive,finds herself a prominent, unwanted guest. She has to convalesce and the hotel is a perfect hide-out, yet her presence generates outsize fear, unmitigated by the cash in her bag. Suspicious residents shun her until a protector emerges. The charismatic Blossom, a wordly caberet performer, invites her to her room, curious...