{"id":1031,"date":"2018-12-31T15:19:32","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:19:32","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:19:32","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-107","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1031","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n
\n

OWEN EGERTON<\/span> is the author of two other novels, The Book of Harold<\/span> and Everyone Says That at the End of the World,<\/span> and one story collection, How Best to Avoid Dying.<\/span> He\u2019s also the writer\/director of the psychological horror film Follow.<\/span> As a screenwriter, Egerton has written for Fox, Disney, and Warner Brothers. His pieces have appeared in The Huffington Post<\/span> and Salon.<\/span> He cowrote the creative writing guide This Word Now<\/span> with his wife, the poet Jodi Egerton. Egerton also hosts NPR\u2019s \u201cThe Write Up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

LITERARY FICTION<\/p>\n

Owen Egerton<\/span><\/p>\n

Hollow: A Novel<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Soft Skull Press<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-6190-2940-8, (also available as an e-book), 240 pgs., $26.00<\/p>\n

July 11, 2017<\/p>\n

Oliver Bonds has come undone, losing everything after his arrest<\/span> in the matter of the death of his toddler son, Miles. His wife has divorced him; he lives in a shack (currently padlocked from the outside) behind Jenny\u2019s Beauty Salon in south Austin; the university (hasn\u2019t officially, but has) suspended him from his position as a History of Religion professor; formerly a volunteer at the Agape soup kitchen, now he goes to eat breakfast, pick up a bus pass, and check his email\u2014he gets missives from God; he no longer believes in the fairness and goodwill of the universe, which unmoors him. Oliver is vulnerable when he meets Lyle, conspiracy theorist, devotee of crackpot science, and member of the Hollow Earth Society of Central Texas. \u201cThe concept of the Hollow Earth was something better than factual; it was applicable. I was myself a hollow shell,\u201d Oliver explains, \u201cwith nothing but a question at my core.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hollow: A Novel<\/span> is the latest from Austin novelist and screenwriter Owen Egerton.<\/span> Hollow<\/span> grabs you, startlingly, with the poetry of its first sentence (\u201cThe moment [Miles was] born, the room smelled of warm soil and blood\u201d), and follows up with sardonic wit (\u201cThis has remained the key to our friendship. [Lyle] is full of opinions and I don\u2019t value his opinions\u201d) and an existential quest (\u201cI was blank and newly uncertain of the nature of everything\u201d). Hollow<\/span> is off-beat, poignant, ultimately beguiling literary fiction.<\/p>\n

Oliver\u2019s first-person account of his devolution is complex and disturbing, regularly administering a shot to the gut. Guilt and grief have rendered him unstable, living a \u201clife unsustainable.\u201d The pace is smooth, minimally interrupted by flashbacks. There\u2019s little high-impact action in Hollow, but where it occurs it is swift and unexpected.<\/p>\n

Egerton\u2019s descriptions are frequently crisp: Oliver worried that his paycheck \u201cstretched over our expenses like a queen sheet on a king-sized bed\u201d; Sixth Street in daylight is \u201cgaudy as a Christmas tree come January.\u201d Sometimes they\u2019re lyrical: the landlord\u2019s Irish accent is \u201cbarely bruised by twenty years in Texas\u201d; when a woman frowns, \u201cone thin line stretched across her young forehead like a fault line, narrow and unalarming, but promising some distant future quake.\u201d Occasionally they\u2019re beautiful: When his wife was in labor in the shower, \u201cShe rested her arms on my shoulders and we swayed, like teenagers slow dancing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hollow<\/span> uses the Everyman to address grand concepts and big questions, exploring happiness, privilege, suffering, and the utopian chimera. Egerton challenges the just-world hypothesis, which holds that life is fair: good things happen for good people; bad people are punished. He uses an academic discussion between Oliver and a student to explore the biblical tale of Job. Characters at the soup kitchen and a friend in hospice care offer further opportunities to confront the question: What is your sin? Oliver needs to know what he\u2019s done to deserve his fate.<\/p>\n

Charmingly designed, quoting portions of text and reproducing whimsical maps from nineteenth-century adventure novels, Hollow<\/span> ends elegantly, even hopefully, with a touch of Thelma and Louise.<\/span> The biggest question of Hollow<\/span> is: Does Oliver want to live?<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}