Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes B. D. McClay on Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, Meghan O’Gieblyn on Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture, Parul Sehgal on Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, Carole V. Bell on Percival Everett’s Dr. No, and Megha Majumdar on Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit.
“We do not live in the golden age of plot, at least where literary fiction is concerned. Outside of what we might call high-genre books…it’s rare for a literary novel to take its plot seriously. Instead, contemporary literary fiction largely concerns itself with other things: moods, problems, situations. Few people would dream of writing a novel without characters, but a novel without a plot is practically normal. When you speak of what a novel is about, you speak thematically—it’s about surveillance, or displacement, or heterosexuality, or something along these lines … [Catton’s] interest in plot as something that arises from human choice, and not just from the context in which those choices take place, means that her own plots take a sideways approach … Unlike Donna Tartt, who uses plot as straightforwardly as Dickens, or Sally Rooney, who has remade the marriage plot for a post-marriage era, Catton lets her plots and their attendant stakes emerge from a general situation. Like her characters, we begin without a sense of what matters, and are often pointed in the wrong direction … Birnam Wood’s biggest twist is not so much a particular event as the realization that this is a book in which everything that people choose to do matters, albeit not in ways they may have anticipated. Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice, for most of us, is an act of self-definition … Congratulations, Catton seems to say, on being just smart enough to play yourself.”
–B. D. McClay on Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (The New Yorker)
“Involves an imaginative leap—across gender and profession—in its chosen protagonist, though it’s a credit to Riker’s virtuosity that I forgot this almost immediately. Abby is among the most convincing female narrators written by a man, largely because of how capacious she is, and how many voices she harbors within herself … The Guest Lecture evokes a choir within a single, immobile person … Dense with double meaning … Riker (thankfully) spares us hotel room prose, but he also discovers an imaginative means of reconciling realism to ideas. Instead of scrubbing his novel of characters, dialogue, and detail—or calling attention to their artifice through metafictional bulletins—he outsources the world-building to his protagonist. It is Abby, after all, who constructs the mnemonic house, piece by piece, with the poetic verve of a novelist. It is she who fractures her voice into multiple characters and sets them in dialogue with one another.”
–Meghan O’Gieblyn on Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture (The New York Review of Books)
“In Saving Time, with moss as muse, Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch … Odell approaches these matters with acute sensitivity and feeling. And yet a larger question persists. Why does a book so concerned with the looming issues of our day, and possessed of such an urgent authorial voice, feel like such a time sink? … Odell marches us along, gesturing to choppy outlines of the books she consults to piece together the story. Her own thinking feels curiously muted … Her collages produce not surprise or poignance but a sense of cutting and pasting, of breathless summary … Why is this book about time in such a hurry? … Perhaps her hope is to rush past the fact that so many of her observations are commonplaces … As I read, I told myself that some hidden seams would surely be discovered, fresh evidence brought forth, complacencies unravelled … Instead, we are led down a path of truisms to a well-padded account of how the capitalist logic of increase squeezes dignity from our days … A book of hectic history and dutiful structural analysis, every sentence turtled against the arrows of social critique … It is not an unusual experience to feel that one’s time has been misused by a book, but it is novel, and particularly vexing, to feel that one’s time has been misused by a passionate denunciation of the misuse of time … Very often, problems of style and pacing are actually problems of thinking, and here is where one difficulty of Saving Time lies. Odell is working with ideas that demand careful, persuasive articulation … Instead, we receive a relentless synthesis of other people’s work … The absence of original thought is striking, suggestive.”
–Parul Sehgal on Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (The New Yorker)
“Everett makes a myriad of compelling creative choices in crafting this satire, but a few crucial choices really elevate the game. First, both of its main characters are men of color, eschewing the determined whiteness at the center of most spy novels, and putting race in play in challenging and shockingly entertaining ways … while the abstract and empty nature of the philosophy to which this billionaire is committed is glaring, I found the style of storytelling the book’s most interesting trait. In contrast with the gravitas and dark gallows humor of Everett’s previous novel The Trees, Dr. No has a light touch, more concerned with the ironies of art, life and relationships than in tragedy, and full of comedy bits and pop cultural riffs … In combination these elements add up to a master class in satirical style, even if the substance of what’s conveyed doesn’t carry quite as much weight. How could it when the stakes are nothing?”
–Carole V. Bell on Percival Everett’s Dr. No (NPR)
“The novel compels us to look at the methods by which he pursues his art—enslaving, however reluctantly, a person to force her to pose for him and asks if it is ever possible to create something beautiful from the ugliest of moral transgressions. But at the center of all of these narratives, which overlap and meet one another’s undulations as pleasingly as waves at the shore, is Akuany. She is the beating heart and unbent backbone of this novel … One of the great pleasures of River Spirit is listening as the novel tells us how to read it. The pace is swift, galloping over momentous events, stating profound changes with unsettling directness. The text is ruthless when rendering moments of grief … At the end of the book, we are left with the weightiest of questions: What do we believe, and what are we willing to sacrifice for those beliefs? If we give up our convictions for safety, what is that safety worth? Where is our moral center, how close to the heart? Aboulela has written a novel of war, love, faith, womanhood and—crucially—the tussle over truthful public narratives. From 19th-century Sudan to present-day America, the questions, in their travel to us, grow only more pressing.”
–Megha Majumdar on Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit (The New York Times Book Review)
