Publisher's Weekly Review
Langer (The Salinger Contract) brilliantly braids 1980s America with the Trump era in his inventive latest. In a 1982 Chicago high school, rumors swirl about the inappropriate sexual conduct of the magnetic and troubled Tyrus Densmore, 43, who is directing a production of The Diary of Anne Frank, but they are dismissed by teachers and students alike. Student Eileen Muldoon thinks she saw Tyrus performing oral sex with a teenage boy, but decides she was imagining things because "sex is everywhere" for her now, from the porn mags in Tyrus's office to TV sitcoms. Her classmate Judith Nagorsky also doesn't think there's anything abnormal about Tyrus, having observed "just about every member of the high school faculty 'engage in improper behavior.' " Judith is cast to play Anne Frank's mother and, in 2017, directs a revival of the play after allegations about Tyrus resurface and he abruptly resigns, while Eileen defends Tyrus and supports Trump ("It was one of those things you said in private, something that made you realize you had more power than people thought you did"). The novel handles Tyrus's abuses of power in thrilling and unexpected ways, but even more captivating is how Langer uses the story of Anne Frank to magnify cultural, political, and personal conflicts ("In the show, Peter and Anne are in love and want nothing more than to fuck each other's brains out," Tyrus says. "But they never will because they'll never get to be alone"). Readers will applaud Langer's outstanding performance. Agent: Stephanie Abou, Massie & McQuilkin. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
A troupe of teenage actors confronts Anne Frank's legacy. "We don't need the Nazis to destroy us; we're destroying ourselves." Langer takes Otto Frank's chilling remark as the epigraph for an ambitious novel that reminds readers that the social and political seeds of Nazism have not been obliterated. It's 1982, and in a suburban high school north of Chicago, 10 students are vying for a part in The Diary of Anne Frank, the annual spring play. Who will be chosen, and who will star, depends on the whims of their director, Tyrus Densmore. Abusive, predatory, and manipulative, Densmore is filled with shame and anger. Mired in an unhappy marriage, the father of a son with mental illness, and a failed actor himself, he knows that the power he wields over his vulnerable students "was inversely proportional to the power he had over his own life." The teenage characters include some predictable types--bully, nerd, slut, rebel, closeted gay; a few are arrogant and entitled, others are needy and wounded. Insecure about who they are, they perform for one another, not only on stage. As one boy later admits, he "often had trouble telling the difference between when he was feeling an emotion or just acting it out." Langer focuses each chapter on one character's role (Anne, Mr. Frank, Peter Van Daan), underscoring the novel's connection to the play, which becomes more overt when we meet up with the cast members in 2016. No longer angst-riddled teens, they are adults in their 50s who, it turns out, have been indelibly shaped by their performance in Anne Frank and, they painfully realize, by their interactions with Densmore. The drama of the second half of the novel recalls the persecution and victimization that led to Anne's tragic end and raises the novel's overarching question: What responsibility does each of us have to one another? A somber warning about the insidious consequences of hatred. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The Diary of Anne Frank is the final school play of 1982 at a high school just north of Chicago, and star Declan is certain he will get the role he wants. Instead the infamously volatile and lecherous drama teacher, Tyrus, chooses an outsider, setting off a series of quakes that rocks the zestfully portrayed and irresistible cast in Langer's fast-paced novel of appalling behavior, bad choices, and floundering attempts at redemption. After two entertaining, biblio-themed mysteries, Chicagoan Langer returns to his home turf and gift for creating intricate and resonant ensembles, as in Crossing California (2004). Here he dramatizes profound and silly quandaries for his young characters, then leaps forward to their adult lives in 2016, a time span in which Tyrus' sexual predation shifts from being tolerated as flattering or the price of success to being recognized as criminal except by his most loyal and conniving disciples. With families doting and dysfunctional, teens aspiring and despairing, and Anne Frank's story mirroring current humanitarian crises, Langer's cycloramic tale of dirty tricks, moral reasoning, and learning to love is smart, captivating, funny, appalling, and tender.
