Among the most interesting critical takes of the week, Stephanie Powell Watts writes that Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage “gives us a quiet, revolutionary statement about black innocence”; Hadley Freeman thinks the rage in Rose McGowan’s memoir burns so hot that it threatens to engulf the whole book; and Parul Sehgal feels her senses being honed by Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry.
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“Eclectic in her tastes, centrifugal in her style, Smith as an essayist loves to stretch her frame. Moving from wit towards wisdom, she explores the rolling hinterland behind our fads and trends … Her bracing pluralism mandates respect for the art of freedom that crosses borders and, fearlessly, creates all sorts of other people … the category of ‘classic English essayist’ — in the vein of Hazlitt and Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter — may well look as quaint to the digital natives she strives to understand as that of, say, ‘leading Byzantine silversmith.’ No matter. Beyond doubt, she has joined their company.”
-Boyd Tonkin on Zadie Smith’s Feel Free (The Financial Times)
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“It is a lament for what a broken immigration system does to families, and its final third is a riveting, heartbreaking exploration of one such case … His lyrical asides about the border, from the history of its creation to quotations of poets who’ve written about it, are passionately delivered and speak to his urge to give nameless migrants an identity. But he spends less time scrutinizing the institutions that create the namelessness. His discussion of the Mexican government’s bloody escalation of the war against the cartels only glancingly mentions the U.S. government’s implication in it or the way border crackdowns only made crossing the border more expensive and risky. The imperfection of Cantú’s approach, though, mirrors the messiness of the crisis he’s facing.
-Mark Athitakis on Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River (The Los Angeles Times)
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“…[a] wise and compassionate novel … It is beautifully written, with many allusions to black music and culture — including the everyday poetry of the African-American community that begs to be heard … While Jones keeps her gaze on the personal, this intimate story of a relationship cannot be divorced from its racial context. The black body in America can’t escape the scrutiny of the political lens, not entirely. The characters feel lucky that Roy is still alive — as Celestial says, there is ‘no appealing a cop’s bullet.’ While not a polemic, the novel gives us a quiet, revolutionary statement about black innocence, which Celestial defines as ‘having no way to predict the pain of the future.'”
-Stephanie Powell Watts on Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage (The New York Times Book Review)
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“McGowan’s book will not be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it may be the most visceral. Anger burns from every page … But the problem with burning everything down is that it all becomes an indistinguishable pile of ash. The misogyny of gossip blogger Perez Hilton is a worthy target for McGowan; that actors occasionally have to perform wedding scenes is not … This reads like a book written by a woman driven to near derangement by decades of abuse and gaslighting. At times I wished McGowan could filter her anger, highlighting the real abuses as opposed to folding them in among the generalised sexist garbage. But if she had been able do that she probably wouldn’t have written this book: self-control isn’t helpful when you are kicking down doors. McGowan set out to write a book that examines abuse, and she has done just that. She has also, inadvertently, shown how much damage abuse can wreak in even the toughest of women.”
-Hadley Freeman on Rose McGowan’s Brave (The Guardian)
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“…a scorchingly intelligent first novel … The two stories never explicitly intersect. A third section, a radio interview with Ezra, hints at the link between them, but the game — and real pleasure — for the reader is to trace deeper resonances. What does it mean that these lives coexist? … this book is musical, not architectural in structure; themes don’t build on each other as much as chime and rhyme, repeat and harmonize, so what we receive is less a series of thesis statements than a shimmering web of associations; in short, the world as we know it … On every page, you interrogate every detail: What are you doing here? Why do you matter? Asymmetry is not complicated, but it cannot be read complacently. Like it or not, it will make you a better reader, a more active noticer. It hones your senses.”
-Parul Sehgal on Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (The New York Times)
