Famous names abound on the book review circuit this week, and we begin with beloved thespian Alan Cumming, who, in his review of veteran humorist David Sedaris’ new book of essays, Calypso, writes “the brilliance of David Sedaris’s writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerizing us so that his logic becomes ours.” Across the pond at the London Review of Books, Priestdaddy author Patricia Lockwood compares the entrancing monologues of Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy to Stevie Nicks singing ‘Rhiannon.’ In his New York Times take on Pops, Michael Chabon’s meditation on fatherhood, Judd Apatow says that the book “feels like a late-night talk with a friend about how much we love our kids and how hopeful we are that we’re better dads than we fear.” We’ve also got Bethanne Patrick on Fuminori Nakamura’s disturbing and sexually explicit Tokyo-set thriller, Cult X, and Darryl Pinckney New York Review of Books essay on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ seminal We Were Eight Years in Power.
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“I have come to the conclusion that David Sedaris is not just some geeky Samuel Pepys, as I had assumed all these years. True, he may shed a revelatory light on the more extreme facets of our societal spectrum through his bizarre and pithy prism. Yes, his worldview—a fascinating hybrid of the curious, cranky and kooky—does indeed hold a mirror up to nature and show us as others see us. But make no mistake: He is not the Fool, he is Lear … This book allows us to observe not just the nimble-mouthed elf of his previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality. Calypso chronicles his latest attempts to come to terms with the slings and arrows of truly outrageous fortune that life has flung at him … For Lear the storm is the central metaphor … For Sedaris a snapping turtle with a partly missing foot and a tumor on its head becomes an unlikely leitmotif … The brilliance of David Sedaris’s writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerizing us so that his logic becomes ours … The geeks really do inherit the earth.”
–Alan Cumming on David Sedaris’ Calypso (The New York Times Book Review)
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“In unhappier compositions her metaphors pile up and sit at angles like jigsaw pieces, but in the Outline trilogy they are masterfully in hand. There is urgency, a wish to avoid unnecessary detours, for we have someplace to be … Her prose is not musical, exactly. It is what I would call ritualistic. The monologues in the Outline trilogy are controlled trances, like Stevie Nicks at the end of ‘Rhiannon’: you enter the speed and the artifice and the belief of it with her. They seem to have been written compulsively; they certainly read compulsively. There is a relentlessness to them, an onslaught that is like the onslaught of life. Occasionally you find yourself wishing for someone to get up and go to the bathroom, but most of the time you are transported … Writing about writers is supposed to be boring, but this, for my money, is the most fascinating thing Cusk has done. Also, a fake Knausgaard shows up halfway through, and it rules … The three novels blend together, and not to their detriment. Their of-a-wholeness is why they are so often referred to as ‘a project’. And the pleasure of this project is a rare one: it is the pleasure of a person figuring out exactly what she ought to be doing … What do we make of a writer who does not much care to be seen as moral, but who still writes in the voice of the law? She is judge and jury, we have fallen jarringly into a universe of her making, a friendly concession once in a while would help, but no. She never softens her judgments for our sake.”
–Patricia Lockwood on Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (The London Review of Books)
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“At every turn, Coates rejects interpretations of black culture as pathological. I am not broken … Coates is not looking for white allies or white sympathy. ‘Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.’ He has had it with ‘the great power of white innocence’ … He means that the best-intentioned of whites still perceive being black as a social handicap. He wants to tell his son that black people are in charge of their own destinies, that their fates are not determined by the antagonism of others. ‘White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it’s also a machine that generates meaning. This existential gift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power.’ That rather makes it sound like hypnosis, but maybe the basic unit of white supremacy is the lynch mob … A couple of decades later I was resenting my father speaking of my expatriate life as a black literary tradition, because I understood him to be saying that I wasn’t doing anything new and, by the way, there was no such thing as getting away from being black, or what others might pretend that meant. Black life is about the group, and even if we tell ourselves that we don’t care anymore that America glorifies the individual in order to disguise what is really happening, this remains a fundamental paradox in the organization of everyday life for a black person. Your head is not a safe space.”
–Darryl Pinckney on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power (The New York Review of Books)
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“Caveat lector: Some of the explicit sex scenes in Fuminori Nakamura’s new novel Cult X will disturb you. Whether that’s because they embarrass you or turn you on or both is very much beside the point … A doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo, led by a man named Shoko Asahara, planned and carried out the fatal attacks — in large part to prevent police investigations into their inner workings. No spoilers here as to what happened afterwards, especially as Nakamura imagines it differently — and that’s what makes Cult X worth reading … you’ll think about Nakamura’s questions long after you’ve closed his book’s covers. He uses the conventions of a genre to prop up a tent for big ideas about groupthink and individual responsibility. If you feel a few frissons along the way? Consider how easily you might be seduced into a cult, and then take a long, cold shower.”
–Bethanne Patrick on Fuminori Nakamura’s Cult X (NPR)
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“I noticed early in fatherhood that there aren’t many people you can open up to about this particular struggle. Chabon’s book feels like a late-night talk with a friend about how much we love our kids and how hopeful we are that we’re better dads than we fear … Chabon seems to understand the delicate nature of handling a child who is testing the waters of what could be a lifelong occupation or a passing fancy. One misplaced phrase or discouraging comment and something wonderful could suddenly vanish … at first glance I thought this book might just repackage Chabon’s magazine work, with no other reason for being. But then I read the final chapter and it all came together…In just a few pages I understood why Chabon found such meaning in fatherhood, making it such a priority in his own life.”
–Judd Apatow on Michael Chabon’s Pops (The New York Times Book Review)
