Talk to Me

October 15, 2018
Kenney’s bittersweet, darkly funny latest (after Truth in Advertising) is equal parts family drama and commentary on communication and news consumption in the age of instant gratification. Fifty-nine-year-old New York anchorman Ted Grayson has been the beloved—and ruggedly handsome—face of the national evening news for 20 years. But a vicious epithet (which he immediately regrets) hurled at a young female hairstylist on a particularly bad day (and caught on video) proves to be his undoing. Additionally, Claire, his wife of 30 years, has fallen in love with someone else, and his daughter, Franny, won’t speak to him. When the video leaks, the retribution is swift and brutal: he’s skewered by the press, hounded by protesters, and eventually fired. When Franny, who writes for a sensationalist online rag and is thoroughly unsatisfied with her own life, asks him to do an interview, he accepts, but it has unintended consequences that force Franny to examine her own life and her fractured relationship with her father. Kenney is supremely gifted at creating flawed, vivid characters and capturing the wonder, ennui, and heartbreak of marriage and parenthood, and the seemingly small moments that make life precious. The conclusion, while satisfying, offers no easy solutions, but it does offer a healthy dose of hope. This is a fun, winning novel.

November 15, 2018
It's a case of death by internet when the fortunes of a beloved network news anchor take a nose dive after a shameful mistake on the set.Kenney (Truth in Advertising, 2013) opens his modern morality tale with a literal fall--a man jumping from a plane with no plans to open his parachute. As he plummets, he imagines the coverage: "Ted Grayson, the longtime anchor of the evening news, died today in an embarrassing skydiving accident on eastern Long Island. Sources say the disgraced former newsman may have taken his own life. He was fifty-nine." A few weeks earlier, Ted exploded at the young Polish hairstylist on the set, mistaking her smile of excitement for one of ridicule, shouting obscenities and repeatedly calling her a "Russian whore." Video of the incident, which the victim has on her phone, takes just a few days to make it from Facebook to the international news. Among those disturbed by Ted's bizarre, uncharacteristic meltdown are his estranged wife, Claire, who is already filing for divorce, and his even more alienated daughter, Frances. She, too, is a journalist of sorts, working at a site called "scheisse," where "hundreds of nearly identical-looking people in their twenties and thirties, from fine universities, posted...an endless feed of insipid online drivel, a kind of visual and verbal vomit, under the guise of journalism." When her boss asks for a piece on her dad, Frances' poison pen is ready to go. Kenney is able to portray all three of these selfish, damaged family members with depth and sympathy. While it would have been easy to make us hate them all, he achieves the opposite and saves a sweetly ironic twist for a redemptive ending.A powerful and moving rendition of a story we've been waiting to hear: what it's like to be the bad guy in this ripped-from-the-headlines situation.

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December 1, 2018
Old-school nightly news anchor Ted got caught on video calling an assistant, a young woman from Poland, a Russian whore. A minor miscommunication over hairspray provoked his out-of-character attack?which went viral, naturally?but it was the proverbial last straw. Ted's wife, Claire, just asked for a divorce; he's experiencing a disconcerting pain; and his only child, Franny, works for a cartoonishly corrupt news outlet called Scheisse and doesn't speak to him. When Franny agrees to her bad-boy boss' proposal that she profile Ted in his tailspin, Ted must ultimately accept that his decades as a reporter don't make up for his slip?or even correspond to what people want from the news anymore?and examine the ways he failed Claire and Franny. ?Kenney's (Truth in Advertising, 2013) timely satire succeeds with significant nuance. Ted did a bad thing and can't seem to stop fumbling, but it won't be hard for readers to find sympathy for the devil. Most winning, though, are Kenney's incisive considerations of parenthood, familial love, and what actually matters when all is seemingly lost.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)