Death and Other Holidays

September 10, 2018
This uneven novel by poet Vogel (At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody) follows the life of April, a thoughtful young woman bemused by the world around her, as she chronicles her days over a year’s time. Mourning the loss of her mother’s second-husband, Wilson, she also grapples with her own father’s suicide. She reminisces about quasi-Jewish family gatherings, muses on advice given to her by her friend Libby, and falls for Libby’s fiance’s cousin Victor. She reads obituaries, is confused by the advice of a clairvoyant, and witnesses a baby bird as it’s struck by a clueless driver, page by page revealing the melancholy lens with which she views the world. The chapters, some less than half a page long, are elegiac, logging April’s responses to the lovely and the sad. Most everything is metaphor, from anchor screws to the beetles that arrive every summer—“an infestation of idiocy.” All these vignettes are meant to accrue meaning and result in something weighty, and for some readers they will. But for others, Vogel’s bijou collection of moments fails to add up. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in creating a portrait—if not an indictment—of the anxious times in which it was written.

September 15, 2018
A year in the life of a woman grieving for her stepfather.The narrator of this beautiful book is a 27-year-old woman named April, a curatorial assistant in California. The story starts in the spring, in the days after April's beloved stepfather, Wilson, has died. This is the second of her fathers to have died: The first killed himself when she was 16. In the months of April's mourning, she floats along, almost dissociative. She has short relationships with unsuitable men: Crash Man, who would always fall asleep while driving; Leaf Man, who grows marijuana plants in his spare bedroom closet; Math Man, who is a foot and a half taller than she is; Critic Man, who hates the layout of her apartment. Finally, in the fall, April falls for her best friend's husband's cousin, Victor, who himself suffers from depression--"the serious kind"--and her life begins to take shape once more. Vogel (At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, 2015) captures with acute accuracy the drifting sadness that lingers in the months after the death of a loved one--the way little moments serve as reminders and how every task feels just a little bit more difficult. The novella is broken up by season and then into brief chapters, as if to mirror the disjointed, distracted experience of trying to live after the people you love are dead. The prose is stunning: never overwrought for so intense a subject, flowing yet specific, quiet and lovely. In reference to the lists April makes to keep her life on track, she writes: "Life doesn't rest, though. It's always slipping into the future, right when I was all caught up. It's always bringing me back into the thick of it, and I don't want to be in the thick of it. I want everything done."A moving and graceful novella of overcoming sorrow.

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October 15, 2018
The inaugural winner of the Miami Book Fair's de Groot Prize, honoring novellas, poet Vogel's short but mighty fiction debut maintains a remarkable confluence of palpable mood, a capricious and shifting tone, and wise character studies. In the spring of 1998, 27-year-old April loses her beloved stepfather to a merciless cancer. Freshly devastated, April also dwells on the death of her first father, who killed himself when she was a child; at least cancer will be easier to explain. If this seems like a lot of darkness, the book, like its title, moves so quickly into the warm light of love, familial and romantic, and the comforting universality of life's losses and gains that readers will scarcely notice how they arrived there. Over the four seasons of the following year, Vogel's strongly voiced prose flows through narrator April as she is bolstered by her Jewish family, grows into a new kind of independence, and falls in love. An original and affecting tour of family, the calendar, and the days that bind us to both.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)