SEPTEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
Bill Andrew Quinn portrays this audiobook's protagonist in a halting style that fits an academic. His deliberate cadence pushes the action forward as the characters' lives unspool. The first-person narrator, Zach Wells, a geologist, is a man who shares chess moves and scientific data but has trouble with his feelings. His life is fraught, to say the least: His father committed suicide, as does a young colleague who didn't get tenure. Most dispiriting of all, his 12-year-old daughter is given a fatal diagnosis. It's little wonder Wells complains, "Some people are no good at being happy." Even an act of grace in the end comes too late and is too unclear to raise the dark clouds that hover over this novel. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
03/30/2020
Everett’s affecting if uneven latest (after the novel So Much Blue) is narrated by Zach Wells, a tenured “geologist-slash-paleobiologist” professor at a university in Los Angeles. Wells’s life is cushy yet dissatisfying—his marriage has stagnated, as has his passion for teaching. His sole source of joy comes from his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah, a precocious kid with a talent for chess. But soon Wells faces problems larger than his ennui: he is unsettled by a student’s infatuation, and a friendship with an “extremely young” assistant professor verges on romantic with an unexpected kiss. Back home, Sarah shows symptoms of epilepsy that are later diagnosed as symptoms of a rare terminal illness. While these plotlines alone would suffice for a novel, Everett throws in another, stranger twist. Wells discovers a slip of paper reading “Ayuadame” (help me in Spanish ) in the pocket of a jacket he’d ordered on eBay from a New Mexico merchant. Having decided to investigate, he uncovers a workshop staffed by kidnapped Mexican women and sets out to save them. The juggling act Everett must maintain to keep the book coherent leads to some unsatisfying and rushed conclusions, yet his greatest success is not in the story but in the portrait of a man pushed by grief toward irrationality. Despite its bumps, this is a spellbinding, heartbreaking tale. (May)
From the Publisher
Sometimes, almost indifferently, one of [Percival Everett’s] novels turns out to be truly exceptional and memorable, and confuses me in the best possible way. . . . Everett’s most recent novel, Telephone, is one of these standouts. . . . Everett pulls off a gently tremendous technical feat with the accumulated little slips out of the present situation. . . . For this reader, the reveries and exits accumulated such that the final and longest slide into the wilderness made the turn to the closing pages sad, affecting and marvelous.”—Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Book Review
“God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Like watching a skilled juggler execute a six-ball fountain, the experience of reading Telephone is astonishing.”—Los Angeles Times
“A spellbinding, heartbreaking tale.”—Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-10
A family tragedy inspires a professor to an act of heroism with strangers.
At the opening of the latest novel by the prolific, eclectic Everett (So Much Blue, 2017, etc.), first-person narrator Zach Wells doesn’t seem like someone who is likely to put himself on the line for others. He lives a very narrow life on automatic pilot, introducing himself as a man of “profound and yawning dullness.” He finds teaching to be rote; he considers his scientific research and publication to be all but pointless. His love for his daughter would appear to be the main thing holding his loveless marriage together. He initially deflects the pleas for support from a colleague making her tenure bid and the attentions of a student who seems to be flirting with him. “So often our stories begin at their ends,” he explains in the middle of establishing these plot details. “The truth was, I didn’t know which end was the beginning or whether the middle was in the true middle or nearer to that end or the other.” It's hard for the reader to find it interesting to be living inside Zach's head, since Zach doesn't find it very interesting. So, this is really a story about storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves, the way we shape them, and the way they shape our lives. Having introduced the elements of his plot, Zach sees the tenure case resolve itself in a shocking manner, and the flirtatious student simply disappears from the narrative. All of this feels somewhat arbitrary. The focus seems to narrow on the family, and the daughter in particular, who apparently starts to suffer from a rare disease that causes partial blindness, seizures, dementia, and death. It is “unusually progressive,” terminal, and there is no cure. It is hell in a world without God. Yet, in a plot device that might be called a deus ex machina, Zach receives a series of handwritten pleas for help in the pockets of clothing that he buys on eBay. Against his usual impulses, he acts on those pleas: “So that I might…redeem myself?” He doesn’t believe in redemption or a redeemer. But he has to do something.
This is a novel that doesn't really try to make you believe in it, or in much of anything, including cause and effect.
