Telephone A novel

"When moments are weighted, the most insignificant details become meaningful." Everett (So Much Blue, 2017), the author of biting satirical comedy, dark thrillers, and literary reworkings of Greek myth, gifts us with his most heartfelt, nakedly emotional story yet. Geology professor Zach Wells leads a stable but rather humdrum existence. He's mentoring an underachieving junior colleague and fending off advances from a student. He's happily (more or less) married to poetry professor Meg, and father of beautiful, brilliant 12-year-old Sarah. Two unrelated events fling his life into chaos: He finds several anonymous messages crying for help folded into shirts he receives in the mail, and Sarah suddenly and inexplicable descends into a serious illness. As Sarah's condition deteriorates, Zach's marriage becomes fraught, and several campus crises escalate. He desperately seeks control over his rapidly unraveling life by attempting to solve the mystery of the notes and perhaps find some kind of redemption. Everett has created an exquisite portrait of grief and one man's search for meaning in the face of unimaginable loss.

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)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.