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Summary
Summary
"Knight has the rare power to make a setting breathe. . . . Authentic and intense." -- The New York Times Book Review
In the spirit of Truman Capote's classic holiday book, A Christmas Memory , award-winning writer Michael Knight delivers a poignant meditation on loss, legacy, and love, at a particularly complicated time of year. In The Holiday Season , the Posey men are still figuring out how to be a family years after the death of the wife and mother who bound them together. As Thanksgiving nears, hairline fractures in the Poseys' relationships finally splinter and crack over what should be, but never is, a simple question: where to spend the holidays. Patriarch Jeff wants everything to remain how it was when his wife was alive, but his oldest son thinks it's time to move on and establish fresh traditions. Caught in the middle is younger son, Frank, a struggling actor who, as the conflict between his father and brother escalates, is finally forced to choose between them. The companion piece, Love at the End of the Year , is an intoxicating tale that weighs up love in its many forms over the course of a single, magical Alabama New Year's Eve.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In "The Holiday Season," the stronger of the two novellas with which Knight follows up Goodnight, Nobody, everyman narrator Frank Posey reminisces about the first winter of the new millennium. His father, Jeff, still struggling to regain a sense of normalcy after the death of his wife, refuses to spend Thanksgiving at the picture-perfect home of Frank's elder brother, Ted. As the story progresses from Thanksgiving dinner to Christmastime, Frank humorously struggles with his sense of self while attempting to mediate between the two men, both of whom who consider him a disappointment. The collection then segues to the second novella and New Year's Eve, where a series of interrelated characters ruminate movingly on love and loss. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
In two novellas that somehow manage to be both precious and dull, Knight (Goodnight, Nobody, 2003, etc.) offers scenes of mildly dysfunctional domesticity. The first novella, The Holiday Season, is set in Alabama in the 1990s. The Posey men--Dad, Frank, Ted--are floundering. Mom's died, and they're witless. Dad nurses the wound of his failed run for Congress while starting his drinking earlier each day. Frank shrugs off dreams of stardom by settling for journeyman work in Shakespeare Express, a Bard's "Greatest Hits" package that tours schools. Only Ted seems to thrive, with beautiful wife Marcy, twin daughters and suburban bliss. And Frank's eaten up by unacknowledged, condescending envy. When the twins get dream gifts for Christmas, he chafes: "I kept feeling one stop removed from everything or like maybe all this was a set, the ponies and the girls and Ted." The story brings the family, predictably, more misery as they stagnate in a bog of ambivalence-about-life. Dad is tempted by the French neighbor next door; Frank fantasizes about Marcy; Ted longs for Dad's approval (even though he's not sure it's withheld). The brothers attempt strained conversation. And on and on it goes. The second novella, Love at the End of the Year, is somewhat better, mainly because its families are more colorfully creepy, what with 12-year-old Evan Butter "masturbating pretty much nonstop" and Mom threatening Dad with divorce while they're getting lost on their way to a New Year's party. Whether it's Kevin and Urqhardt, the obligatory gay couple, teenaged Lulu Fountain, love struck by an older, callous boy, Ike Tiptoe, or sad-eyed Stella, mooning after her ex-husband Boyd, the characters are simultaneously whimsical and too-literary. Family life is dicey. Tolstoy turned that truism into opera; Knight makes it Muzak. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
The tensions that underlie Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve get-togethers. BY 2003, at the age of 33, the Alabama-born writer Michael Knight had written, and seen published, two collections of stories and a short novel. It was a promising start. Knight's understated prose presented a quietly volatile world of tight Southern communities and families, a world defined by festering resentments, fumbling relationships, affairs, divorces, sudden furies. For all its dark insight into human entanglements, Knight's fiction also contained surprising jolts of humor. His new book, "The Holiday Season," comprises two novellas that deepen his concern with the fraught dynamics of intimate life. The title novella takes place during the first Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays of the new millennium, as the Posey family of Mobile attempts to celebrate. The younger son, Frank, a sometime actor in his early 30s, finds himself playing the role of family middleman, hoping to bring his older brother, Ted, and their widowed father together. The father, a former city councilman "still bewildered by the loose ends of his retirement" and his grief, cannot bring himself to leave the city to join Ted's family for dinner in the suburbs. He wants the family to gather in the home they grew up in. "I don't want to stop loving your mother," he explains. Ted, a prosperous lawyer with twin daughters, is provoked by his father's position and "refused to bend." The situation strikes Frank as wildly ominous: "I couldn't help imagining my father and my brother faced off across Mobile Bay like distant nations on the brink of war." If the ensuing events are a war, it is a cold one, full of negotiation, posturing, name-calling, even familial shuttle diplomacy as Frank moves between his father's and brother's homes, delivering messages, taking stock, seeking harmony. He spends Thanksgiving with his father, thinking about his brother, and Christmas with his brother, checking on his father by phone. As a member of the family always wanting to be elsewhere, as a middling actor yearning for roles to play, Frank is fully adrift, lacking a center. His story is a moving account of loneliness: "It seems to me sometimes that life is little more than a long string of missed opportunities and connections." Isolated, desperate, Frank feels "pleased, secretly, shamefully, to be caught up in the middle of all this." The book's second novella, "Love at the End of the Year," lacks the immediacy of "The Holiday Season." It is told in a more distant, third-person voice from the viewpoints of nine characters during one New Year's Eve in a small Alabama community. Several characters attend the same party; others act out while their parents attend the party; still others remain on the fringes of both activities. Unhappy couples, both straight and gay, edgy neighbors or colleagues, friends whose connections have frayed or weakened, runaway children - the novella is packed with people brought into uncomfortable proximity on a night traditionally given over to optimism. Most share the sense of being "washed with a nervous, untethered feeling" of being "alone in a roomful of people." But the large cast is afforded too little time or space to emerge as individuals. They seem like figures in a sketch as the night's heightened dramas play out, and several characters learn "that the world was a perilous and random place, that life could go sour without warning." There is a long tradition of fiction using holiday gatherings as a vehicle for examining relationships under stress. Richard Bausch recently used Thanksgiving this way; Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas all used Christmas. Michael Knight's "Holiday Season" joins this crowded table and, especially in its title piece, makes itself at home. Floyd Skloot's most recent novel is "Patient 002." His "Selected Poems" will be published in the spring.
Library Journal Review
The introduction for these two novellas is a quote from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale: "A sad tale's best for winter." And true enough, both of these stories by an award-winning author (Divining Rod) are tinged with small tragedies. In "The Holiday Season," Frank is visiting his father, once a vibrant local politician who has become increasingly distant since Frank's mother died three years ago. A vivacious French neighbor may help change that, if Frank can get his father out of the house. "Love at the End of the Year" follows a motley cast of characters on New Year's Eve, from Internet porn-obsessed teen Evan to unhappy wife Katie to unfulfilled serial dater Esmerelda. Not your typical holiday fare, this well-written volume would do well in larger fiction collections or where literary fiction is popular. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
