Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The wild and quirky debut novel from Barrodale (You Are Having a Good Time, a story collection) ranges across two continents and the afterlife to tell the story of a mother and son's failure to connect. Sandra, a career-driven PBS correspondent, arranges with her ex-husband to place their autistic 15-year-old son, Trip, in a treatment center before flying to Nepal to cover a conference on dying. There, Sandra dies from a freak accident and is guided into a Tibetan Buddhist version of the afterlife by one of the conference attendees, who reads out loud from a religious text on his phone ("Do not be attached to your surroundings. Instead, look forward to a greater endeavor"). Meanwhile, Trip has run away from the treatment center and, while hitchhiking, is picked up by an unstable man named Anthony, who drives them to a party on a hurricane-stricken island off the coast of Georgia. After the pair get into a misadventure involving a stolen boat, Sandra desperately attempts to enter another body in order to save Trip. The story lines never quite converge, beyond providing a frame for Sandra to contend with her regret over neglecting Trip. Still, Trip's adventure story is great fun, and Barrodale's depiction of the afterlife is amusing and wonderfully surreal. It's a hoot. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A mother and son undergo simultaneous odysseys in the realms of the living and the dead in this hallucinatory debut novel. Sandra, a divorced documentary news producer, is about to fly out to cover a "Death and Denouement" conference when her ex-husband, Vic, throws a wrench in the works: He isn't up to solo parenting their autistic teenage son, Trip, during her monthlong absence. When Trip's therapist proposes that they address their son's behavioral issues by sending him to a summer intensive at a facility called the Center, Sandra reluctantly agrees and heads off to Nepal. There, amid a peculiar mix of scholars focused on dying and the afterlife, Sandra dies unexpectedly and begins experiencing the liminal, pre-reincarnation period described in theTibetan Book of the Dead. As she drifts through time and place, Sandra discovers that Trip is in the middle of his own misadventure, having hitchhiked away from the Center with Anthony, a recovering addict headed to the Florida Keys in advance of a hurricane. There are few topics more emotionally rousing than the endurance of love beyond the grave, which makes the novel's flatness all the more curious. Neither Sandra nor Trip demonstrate much narrative agency and Barrodale's prose relies heavily on short visual descriptions (i.e., "The man looked like a Nepali David Cross") and litanies of physical action, denying characters interiority and readers lyricism. Barrodale has clearly taken great care with the novel's metaphysics (there are footnotes attributing ideas to real-life Buddhist practitioners throughout), but the quotes seldom contribute to clarity or propulsion--as Sandra herself responds to one, "He was making sense, but hard to understand." There are two spectacular, disquieting sections near the start of the novel--Sandra's death and a visit to a Nepalese shrine--and the resolution has a bittersweet profundity, but the middle is a muddle. A maternal meditation on life and death that can't quite live up to its cosmic ambitions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
