One contemporary titan reviewed another over at the New York Review of Books this week as Lorrie Moore took on Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, writing of the final part of Cusk’s Outline Trilogy: “It is like reading the best kind of philosophy—steely, searching, brisk.” Over at the New York Times, Boy Erased author Garrard Conley considers the labyrinthine pleasures of Jordy Rosenberg’s genre-bending debut, Confessions of the Fox. Nora Caplan-Bricker was mesmerized by the “electrifying power” of Samantha Hunt’s recently reissued 2004 novel, The Seas, a book which “dives deeper into the warped stories we tell about female sexuality, discovering unmappable hungers and powers—ones so violent yet familiar that they send shivers down the spine.” We’ve also got economic justice reporter Jessica Bruder on Beth Macy’s Dopesick, “a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency,” and Lauren Oyler’s intriguing Baffler essay on Deborah Levy’s hybrid work of memoir and feminist critique, The Cost of Living.
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“As in a negative-space drawing, the trilogy’s narrator—a writer named Faye (otherworldly as in fey; defiant as in fie)—is a silhouette, rapt and wrapped, her form determined by the purposeful chat of others, which hovers, adheres, and sculpts. She is the prompt and master of ceremonies for other narrators … That Cusk has constructed her novels in this radical manner seems both perverse and inventive and has caught the attention of many other writers. Despite comparisons, her work is not the autofiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti, whose own voices and personalities cram their pages; nor is it the meditative flâneurie of W.G. Sebald or Teju Cole; it is something more peculiar and thrilling and Cusk’s own … The concentrated, flinty nature of Cusk’s mind (a fellow admirer and I often refer to her, in pseudo-jazz-intimacy, simply as ‘Rachel,’ though we have never met her and haven’t the flimsiest intention of trying to do so) ensures that authorial intelligence is burned into the syntax of every line … What runs through her trilogy is a coolly abstracted consciousness organizing all the stories … It is like reading the best kind of philosophy—steely, searching, brisk.”
–Lorrie Moore on Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (The New York Review of Books)
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“Jack’s adventure may not be immediately accessible to all audiences. Voth informs the reader that his manuscript may only be decoded by someone…who has lived on the margins of society. Someone who also, I might add, enjoys queer theory, 18th-century frame narratives, prison abolition literature, Marxist historical readings, a surprisingly lengthy subplot involving a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and a running footnote hall of mirrors to rival Borges … Rosenberg’s chimeric prose prevents all of this from feeling too pedantic. His numerous stylistic influences…while jarring at first, cohere by the third act … [Rosenberg] is also very funny, a virtue that may persuade readers to persevere through some of the novel’s more theoretical sections … His satirical passages on academia and its unholy union with capitalism ring only too true. And in the novel’s final paragraphs, he offers one of the most trenchant calls for progressive action that I have read in a very long time. The climb may be steep, but the view from the top is grand.”
–Garrard Conley on Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (The New York Times Book Review)
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“[Hunt] is a ferally inventive writer about female sexuality, and The Seas is a book about a girl growing into her body and all the suffering that comes with it. Under the surface, however, this book is slipperier—and in some ways more subversive—than the viral fiction of the #MeToo era, which delivers cathartic affirmations that things are just as bad as we always suspected … Hunt’s work, on the other hand, has an otherworldliness not easily translated into social critique … The Seas is not a book about confronting the distortions imposed on teenage girls, and its narrator doesn’t stand to gain much from the truth. Instead, she dives deeper into the warped stories we tell about female sexuality, discovering unmappable hungers and powers—ones so violent yet familiar that they send shivers down the spine … Mermaid stories, in their classic form, are hardly celebrations of female sexuality. They’re more like warnings against being the wrong kind of girl—a temptress who lures heroes to wreck on the cliffs. Like most fairytales, they make women monsters to themselves. Hunt doesn’t shy away from the siren figure’s misogynist subtext, but her narrator still finds an electrifying power in playing out the ancient roles: siren, sea nymph, even mother.”
–Nora Caplan-Bricker on Samantha Hunt’s The Seas (The Baffler)
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“….a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency … a masterwork of narrative journalism, interlacing stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference … The further Macy wades into the wreckage of addiction, the more damning her indictment becomes … Macy introduces so many remarkable people that, midway through Dopesick, readers may find it challenging to keep track of them. (Imagine the writer as the literary equivalent of a triage doctor, with more patients to stabilize than she can linger on.) Taken as a whole, however, this gripping book is a feat of reporting, research and synthesis … While Macy offers some glimmers of hope—chief among them the will of parents and advocates to keep fighting—what echoes long after one closes this book are the unsettling words of Tess Henry’s mother about her daughter: ‘There is no love you can throw on them, no hug big enough that will change the power of that drug.’ ”
–Jessica Bruder on Beth Macy’s Dopesick (The New York Times Book Review)
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“Like the recently liberated Levy herself…many of the scenes and observations in The Cost of Living do a lot of work, mostly on behalf of feminist arguments … Levy’s project can be read as a kind of foil to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, which also takes the woman writer as its subject. Whereas Cusk subtracts her narrator, Levy adds more and more of hers, but both are concerned with devising new ways for women to work around the structures imposed on them, as narrators, writers, and people in the world … She’s a master of puns and pithy, surprising twists, often deployed at her own expense, though she finds it difficult to let funny accidents or coincidences be merely what they are … She’s taking what she’s got and going with it, as in her writing, which riffs on seemingly random images and ideas, creating connections that make these short books feel holistic and sweeping. She uses motifs, such as roses and footsteps, like landmarks on a map, which are useful signposts in her frequently disorienting story … It’s a testament to Levy’s light touch and originality elsewhere that her feminist epiphanies and extended metaphors—life is a tempest, a book or film in which she is trying to conceive of herself as a major character, and a journey—don’t immediately register as cliché … It’s often as if Levy is trying to become the writers she cites, using them as guides through the ‘black and bluish darkness,’ a phrase she uses as a chapter title and later reveals she’s borrowed from an interview with a Mexican woman who crossed the border into America alone, at night.”
–Lauren Oyler on Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living (The New Republic)
