5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our fist of furiously good reviews this week includes Ryan Ruby on Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, Ron Charles on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft, Amy Bloom on Lauren Christensen’s Firstborn, Grace Byron on Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance, and Sophia Stewart on Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice.

“Despite its setting, the novel is more of an update to Georges Perec’s critiques of 1960s-era consumer culture than a replay of Henry James’s Gilded Age cosmopolite dramas. With ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads, a class and subculture made possible by the innovations of American tech and media conglomerates and policymakers in Brussels.

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“The strength of Perfection is that it never succumbs to the temptation of ridiculing its protagonists. Whether or not they live in Berlin, many of its readers will belong to the same class and generation as they do, and bald contempt is generally less effective at inducing the discomforts of recognition than keen, tactful observation. Part of what happens to Anna and Tom is simply the damage done to youthful aspirations and illusions by the passage of time; part of it is what happens to even the relatively privileged pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control.

Yet, all told, Perfection remains an insider’s critique: a young, left-wing European’s view of what was probably the high-water mark of European cultural integration. Far from perfect, the tasteful, urbane life Anna and Tom lead is nonetheless not without its charms. In many ways, it represents an ideal, however illusory. To this day, the capital of Germany trades on its century-old image as a city of exiles, libertines and artists, while in campaign speeches its politicians treat its current expatriates as boogeymen in a populist Kulturkampf whose real targets are the more vulnerable immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. From a future vantage point, Latronico’s subtle satire of Anna and Tom’s Berlin may appear like another lost paradise.”

–Ryan Ruby on Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (The New York Times Book Review)

“In his acceptance speech for the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah extolled storytelling that sees what ‘the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others.’ Such writing, the Zanzibari novelist said, requires a way of looking that ‘makes room for frailty and weakness, for tenderness amid cruelty, and for a capacity for kindness in unlooked-for sources.’

“There are two fierce, fragile fighters in Firstborn, Lauren Christensen’s touching memoir about the life and death of her tiny daughter, Simone, who was stillborn 22 weeks into Christensen’s pregnancy. The great accomplishment of this book is that I feel I have gotten to know and care for both tenacious people—perhaps Simone a little more than her mother, through her mother’s book.

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“It is in the painful, detailed events of Simone’s death in her mother’s womb and the wrenching decision to terminate the pregnancy—along with the politics of that choice, and the urgency to ensure the mother survives even though the baby will not and cannot—that Christensen’s spare, sometimes glancing style serves so well. Every moment, every transition, from first doctor’s meeting to Simone’s last heartbeat to the final hugs from the mostly excellent and caring nurses, is given to us.

The title Firstborn is plainly a reference to Simone, but in this memoir of mothers and daughters it is equally a reference to Christensen herself. There is the thread throughout of Christensen’s reunion with her mother, a hard-working businesswoman whose frequent absences during Christensen’s childhood are mentioned many times, and forgiven many times, until there are no complaints and no need to forgive. There is just love, and the care a mother gives her daughter, no matter what; and finally and always the love this mother, Lauren Christensen, gave her daughter, Simone, in this life and beyond.”

–Amy Bloom on Lauren Christensen’s Firstborn (The New York Times Book Review)

“Peters’s new book chronicles a grittier aesthetic milieu. The titular story, the book’s longest, is a western set entirely before our modern conception of transness. The other three pieces run the genre gamut from romance to dystopian sci-fi. Notably, Peters seems to intentionally avoid writing into the ‘trans experience.’ She examines the messy underbelly of DIY trans culture, diving into the cringier aspects of queer growing pains. The stories, jagged tales of sissies, losers, and assholes, showcase a more expansive palette and are written with sharp prose that crackles with transgressive glee. Her collection asks the question, What if some people knew they were trans but refused to transition?

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“By setting ‘Stag Dance’ in a world long before the internet, Peters explores the chasm between what her narrator wants and what he actually has access to. The narrator frets over his looks even though ‘no mirror had ever befriended’ him. As soon as he pins the triangle to his crotch, he becomes a target. Shrugging off debates over the idea of trans ancestors, Peters explores the untenable, crunchy feelings that arise in a society organized by masculinity. Options are limited for our tender lumberjack. He must make do with being a secret, living as an unacknowledged lover for the head of the pack. Without resorting to modern terminology, Peters is just as adept at looking at how those without access to trans identity explore gender.

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“Across Stag Dance, Peters refuses to play into the modern, overly determined motivations of contemporary fiction, instead harnessing a technique she calls ‘strategic opacity’ as a way to access characterization not dependent on Psychology 101. The term originally refers to a lack of obvious motive in certain Shakespearean characters like Hamlet and Iago. Some actions cannot be reduced to simplistic internal incentives. Detransition, Baby’s Reese wants to be a mother just because she does. A lumberjack wants to be a woman just because he does. Gender, like art, Peters argues, is not always explicable. The choices we make on a whim can sometimes say more about us than our most calculated attempts at coherence.”

–Grace Byron on Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance (Vulture)

“Theory & Practice is sly, spiky, and brilliant: an intellectual coming-of-age story that accounts for all that can’t be learned in the academy—or in books. The novel’s meta structure bears this out: The first few pages belong to what appears to be an entirely different book, ostensibly written and abruptly scrapped by the narrator. The writing has ‘stalled’ because, she says, ‘I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,’ which she finds deceptive in their tidiness. With this observation, the line between author and narrator blurs: Aspects of the book are clearly lifted from de Kretser’s own life—the novel’s Australian cover even bears a picture of a college-aged de Kretser—yet it warns against drawing any neat conclusions. The story that follows flits confidently between modes: memoir and novel, personal and political, fact and fiction. Essayistic asides commingle with tender memories; heady emotions intrude on serious philosophizing. The aim, the narrator says, is to capture a sense of ‘formlessness and mess’—in other words, real life.

De Kretser’s attraction to chaos and contradiction made sense to me; I myself have struggled to make my disparate thoughts and desires cohere. It was only when I began reading about the formless, messy lives of various feminists in biographies and memoirs—rather than, say, their works of polemic or philosophy—that I no longer felt like a failure. Their mistakes, their resentments, and their embarrassing, often unenlightened feelings were so much like my own. I realized that this painful gap between who one is and who one wishes to be is universal—and no amount of knowledge can assuage it.”

–Sophia Stewart on Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice (The Atlantic)