Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION HYN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
One Man, one day, and a novel bursting with drama, comedy, and humanity.
Kevin Quinn is a standard-variety American male: middle-aged, liberal-leaning, self-centered, emotionally damaged, generally determined to avoid both pain and responsibility. As his relationship with his girlfriend approaches a turning point, and his career seems increasingly pointless, he decides to secretly fly to a job interview in Austin, Texas. Aboard the plane, Kevin is simultaneously attracted to the young woman in the seat next to him and panicked by a new wave of terrorism in Europe and the UK. He lands safely with neuroses intact and full of hope that the job, the expansive city, and the girl from the plane might yet be his chance for reinvention. His next eight hours make up this novel, a tour-de-force of mordant humor, brilliant observation, and page-turning storytelling.
Author Notes
Writer James Hynes loves cats and has worked them into several of his publications, including his collection of three novellas entitled Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. A combination of horror story and academic satire, Publish and Perish was the result of Hynes yearning to create horror stories in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe and M.R. James. Hynes first gained national attention in 1990 with the publication of The Wild Colonial Boy. In addition, his essays on television criticism have appeared in Mother Jones and Utne Reader.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this funny, surprising, and sobering novel, Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space) follows Kevin Quinn, who has flown to Austin, Tex., for a job interview at the height of a terrorism scare. Kevin, an editor at the University of Michigan, has grown as frustrated by academic politics as he is by his relationship with his shallow girlfriend. On the flight, he sits next to Kelly, a beautiful and enigmatic young woman who reminds him of a great lost love of his youth. With time to kill before his interview, Kevin spends the first half of the novel surreptitiously following Kelly around Austin while reminiscing about his misspent youth and failed relationships. The casual but persistent self-absorption of Kevin's reveries is both funny and off-putting, and when contrasted with the threat of terrorism and his shadowing of the young woman, gives the novel a creepy energy that fully kicks in after Kevin is knocked unconscious, and Hynes pushes the plot into unchartered territory. The final 50 pages are unlike anything in the recent literature of our response to terrorism-a tour de force of people ennobled in the face of random horror. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Propelled by a crisis in his relationship with a live-in lover and his frustration with his university publishing job, 50-year-old Michigander Kevin Quinn boards a plane for Austin, Texas, headed to a job interview. His wild hopes for a new life in a new city vie with his ever-burgeoning neuroses, which are triggered by his fear of flying, compounded by his fear of terrorists, and further complicated by his attraction to the young Asian American girl sitting next to him on the plane. Once in Austin, he proceeds to stalk his seatmate, becomes injured in a fall, and trades intimate secrets with a stranger. Amid all the fumbling action, he obsessively catalogs his past relationships, minutely dissecting every rejection, sexual thrill, and breakup. Kevin's wickedly funny rants about academic politics and air disasters alternate with his painful (and sometimes painfully tedious) cataloging of romantic humiliation, all leading up to a shocking finale that is hinted at but never telegraphed. Through his neurotic Everyman, Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space, 2004) offers provocative insights into the troubling times in which we live.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
James Hynes's protagonist hopes to break out of his midlife rut. WE'VE all met Kevin Quinn, the 50-year-old protagonist of James Hynes's fourth novel, "Next"; indeed, a fair number of us actually are Kevin Quinn, caught at midlife somewhere between jaunty and defeated, living with one foot in the present and one foot firmly in the past. In some ultimately perilous way, as we should be warned by the novel's title, Kevin isn't very good at thinking about what's next. An engaging near-relation of Hynes's earlier protagonists, Kevin is a trapped, beleaguered office worker who hovers on the periphery of academia: he has been for 20 years "an editor at the Publications Program for the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, the last eight as the Pubs Program's executive editor." His ex, Beth, left him four years before, to have children with another man; and he is in an exuberant but uneasy relationship with the somewhat histrionic Stella, who, although she bills herself as 29, is in fact 35 and alarmingly eager for progeny. Funny, worn down, struggling to see the point of it all, Kevin has taken off from work and quit his native Ann Arbor for the day - the novel's span is a mere eight hours - for a job interview in Austin, Tex. Kevin hasn't told anyone about the trip, least of all Stella (who is herself in Chicago on business), because he is contemplating ditching her, uprooting his deeply rooted life and beginning again. As he wryly puts it, he has "a choice between two equally risible clichés: Count Your Blessings, or Follow Your Dreams." Hynes, whose dark satires of academic life ("Publish and Perish") and surreal send-ups of middle America ("Kings of Infinite Space") have earned him a devoted following, delivers many sharp and delicious aperçus from Kevin's middle-aged fed-up liberal point of view. Of Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club" he observes, "He's seen the movie ... and mainly what he remembers is a series of yuppie young women whining about their jobs and their boyfriends, until they're flattened by their no-nonsense immigrant mothers, who say things like, hey, you think you got it bad, back in China I had to drown my baby." Kevin recalls the Ann Arbor of his youth, where "within two minutes' walk of each other were three world-class record stores ... and the original, independent, prelapsarian Borders, whose clerks had to pass a book test to get the job and afterward strutted the carpeted aisles as arrogant as Jesuits." He rebels against an exhortation at the entrance to the natural foods market Gaia (a barely disguised Whole Foods) to "Love Where You Shop": "Or what? thinks Kevin. ... They've taken everything that was both special and obnoxious about the Ann Arbor Kevin used to love - the food, the politics and the attitude - and they've packaged it, art-directed it and marketed it to Kevin at three times the price he used to pay at the Packard Food Co-op. It's just like Wal-Mart crushing small-town pharmacies and hardware stores, only it's worse, because the stores that Gaia is exterminating weren't like the mom-and-pop grocery stores that never knew what hit them, no, Gaia's victims actually had a political analysis of consumer culture, and now here's this national, centralized, corporate simulacrum of everything co-opers held dear and it's successfully wooing away the co-op's clientele on the same principle as Office Max or Home Depot. ... The gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive." Most of the time, however, Kevin is thinking about women. He watches with vague sexual longing the women who cross his path: his young neighbor on the morning airplane ("She's long-waisted and slim-hipped, and she sways up the jetway. ... The abbreviated hem of her top reveals the matching dimples at the small of her back and the small tattoo of a green apple between them"); a businesswoman buying coffee ("a Republican, maybe, but a fun Republican, a Sexy Republican"); a doctor who helps him when he falls down ("Linda Hamilton, yeah, sort of crossed with that Latina actress he likes - not Jennifer Lopez, but the one who used to be in those John Sayles movies"). And chiefly he reflects upon and reminisces about the romantic attachments in his life thus far: Stella, whom he keeps telling himself he doesn't love, although she is much in his thoughts - "Stella's epic fellation on the first evening of their acquaintance, the one that emptied his brain of all common sense, is still a high point of their relationship"; Beth, with whom he spent 13 years of his adulthood and who wounded his pride; and the figures of fantasy from his youth, Lynda, with whom Kevin enjoyed his freest sexual encounters, and a woman known only as "the Philosopher's Daughter," important because she refused him ("She said, 'I don't think you're capable of tenderness and passion'"). Interspersed with Kevin's erotic musings are the practical minutiae of his day - a visit to Starbucks, a wander by the river, a few mishaps, then lunch and an effort to fix things up - and a vague but obsessive return to the day's news, involving orchestrated terrorist attacks around the globe and a Scottish jihadist also named Kevin. Kevin, like many of us, is intently afraid in the airplane, afraid at the airport. But as the day proceeds, he grows less guarded, less attentive to his fear, replaying his memory's film of himself and Lynda copulating on a porch rather than listening to the taxicab radio's ominous announcement about "significant casualties." By the time he reaches his job interview, the culmination of the day and of the book, Kevin confronts what by then we know he must, a series of events that will give meaning to all that has come before. Hynes's novel contains many memorable passages and comic riffs; and his decision to shape the book around its high-stakes ending (50 pages of riveting, vivid and unstoppable reading) does, ultimately, justify and define the whole. But much of any day, even in the mind of a pretty funny guy, is fairly dull, and with more than 300 pages of narrative, Hynes cannot fully overcome this challenge. Although the book's great drama lies in its conclusion, that conclusion feels far less contrived than what leads up to it. Kevin's interior ramblings are not primarily the problem. The difficulty lies in the book's innumerable neat descriptive vignettes of glimpsed strangers, cumulatively repetitive and shallow: "a rotund young woman with a buzz cut works up a sweat changing out the trash bins," "a portly young guy with an unkempt black beard and a distended black T-shirt sits on a bench smoking, while a plump, liver-and-white springer spaniel pants at his feet." Above all, the book is compromised by Hynes's novelistic need to have a few things happen before Things Happen. The bulk of "Next" is written wholly in service to its climax (indeed, to what will happen next), and hence exists as a deferral of, a preamble to, the short story Hynes really wants to tell. This structural challenge - the formation of a work around its deus ex machina - exposes deeper questions about what art is and what it's for, and left this reader, at least, impressed but finally unsatisfied. Interspersed with Kevin's erotic musings are the details of his day and his fixation on recent terrorist attacks. Claire Messud is the author, most recently, of "The Emperor's Children."
Library Journal Review
At 55, Kevin Quinn is the kind of excessively worried man who makes women of a certain age grind their teeth. He is so averse to relationship commitment that he secretly flies from Ann Arbor, MI, to Austin, TX, for a job interview while his (sort of) live-in (sort of) girlfriend is out of town on business. Solipsistic to a fault, he rigidly judges any female he runs into by her physical attributes, no matter how casual the encounter. His one-day visit to Austin does not go well. Battling the crippling heat, he finds himself stalking the beautiful (of course) young woman who sat next to him on the plane, until he is injured in an encounter with a dog on a leash. A beautiful (of course) thoracic surgeon briefly comes to his rescue. Throughout all these misadventures, Kevin replays several intimate scenarios with past lovers. Hynes (The Lecturer's Tale) has an ability to evoke sounds, smells, and contempt that lures his readers to a place they don't see coming. VERDICT Fans of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge will embrace Hynes's distasteful albeit oddly likable protagonist, and the shock value of the ending will cause considerable buzz. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/09.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
