"Oh, the magic and music Randall Kenan brings to the page. He is a beautiful writer, full of surprises, and his latest masterful collection, If I Had Two Wings, is a mesmerizing showcase of his many talents. He can make poetry of pigs feet, deliver brilliant social commentary, illuminate the ghosts of a time and place, and leave you aching for childhood memories of comfort and longing."
"This is a riveting collection of stories with a vibrant cast of characters, both corporeal and fantastical, and a stunning sense of place. Stories—comic, tragic, and human; with themes of faith, fury, chicanery, miracles, and weather—swirl out from Down East North Carolina, touch down gently around the world, and come home to the magnetic center of Tims Creek. It was a pleasure to live in this book."
★ 09/01/2020
After three decades, the multi-award-winning Kenan (Let the Dead Bury Their Dead) returns to fiction with a collection again featuring the Black community of Tims Creek, NC. In the opening story, a plumber visiting New York for the National Baptist convention retains his dignity in an exchange with a slick white pop star, then later reflects on the star's presumptuous video while recalling his grandfather singing. Elsewhere, a pastor finally whups his cheating wife's lover, and a son who's abandoned high finance to become a chef is startled to learn that Howard Hughes once asked his mother to cook for him. In one emotionally complex standout, the protagonist reflects on his relationship, both professional and personal, with shining-star architect Jacson Ribeiro while wresting with his dying uncle about the key issue of inherited land. VERDICT Keen portraiture, incisive language (one character has "all the delicacy of a damaged bull when discussing personal matters"), and fully developed stories; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/4/20.]
★ 2020-07-27
Boars, monkeys, adulterers, charlatans, and ghosts all chase the characters gathered here.
The slyly soulful Kenan takes his time between books. Now he rewards readers who have waited almost three decades for a return to his fictional Tims Creek, North Carolina, home to the novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and the story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead(1992)—though this new collection opens with a smile by starting “When We All Get to Heaven” in New York City. A 58-year-old plumber from Tims Creek explores midtown and is improbably swept up into Billy Idol’s entourage. Ed Phelps finds the music silly but the day full, and as he drifts off to sleep, he hears his grandfather’s voice singing. This pitch-perfect ending is evocative of the thin, beckoning veil between the seen and unseen, the quotidian and the preposterous, that Kenan hangs throughout his fiction. Yet appetite—carnal and gustatory—also fuels these stories. In “I Thought I Heard the Shuffle of Angels’ Feet,” the narrator introduces his lover: “Six foot six inches of beige, Portuguese-accented brawn, the Brazilian wunderkind. He moved like a dancer, he spoke like a poet—and Americans are such suckers for accents.” He tops that poem with 15 words to sum up their union: “Ten tumultuous years. It had not been bliss, but mostly happy, usually fun, always interesting.” As this story ends, something new has begun and something old is set right. “The Eternal Glory That Is Ham Hocks” ladles the historical Howard Hughes into its fictional stew, delivering a nice kick. A Tims Creek diner—“The eggs are still greasy, the ham tough as shoe leather, the coffee fit for removing toilet clogs”—serves as backdrop. But do not imagine this a book of grits and honey. In the complex, mesmerizing “Resurrection Hardware; or, Lard & Promises,” the speaker shares the author’s first name inside a tale of ghosts, strivers, and roasted goose, “succulent, flavorful, the fat a thing of pure joy.” It is a feast.
Ten artful stories conjure contemporary North Carolina, mouthwatering and matter-of-factly haunted.
