Our smorgasbord of superior reviews this week includes Walter Mosley on Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, Ron Charles on Richard Russo’s Somebody’s Fool, Xan Brooks on Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars, Dwight Garner on Ann Beattie’s Onlookers, and Rachel Connolly on Max Porter’s Shy.
“Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods—1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976—Crook Manifesto gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people. This is a story of survival without redemption, where the next generation loses some of the well-honed instincts that have built this world … Whitehead bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny … At other times, Whitehead gives his characters the quiet and room to issue forth the sound of such deep regret and resignation: of being trapped, of all the odds stacked against them, even from within.”
–Walter Mosley on Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto (The New York Times Book Review)
“Russo has become our national priest of masculine despair and redemption. The gruff grace that he traffics in might seem sentimental next to the merciless interrogation of John Updike’s Rabbit series or the philosophical musings of Richard Ford’s novels about Frank Bascombe. But Russo understands the appeal, even the necessity, of those absurd affections that exceed all reason and make the travails of human life endurable … Donald Sullivan, whom everybody called Sully, is gone now, but his specter remains so prevalent in these pages that Somebody’s Fool is practically a ghost story. ‘He’s dead and gone,’ one character shouts in exasperation. ‘Does he have to haunt every single conversation we have?’ Yes, apparently. Sully’s old friends are still stumbling around in a reverie of fond memories and unhealed grief. I half expected them all to wear sport bracelets that ask, ‘WWSD?’ Their recollections and apostrophes are sweet, but they also freight the novel with an enormous burden of exposition. And if you haven’t read the previous two novels, you’re likely to feel as though you’re tagging along to your spouse’s college reunion. In trilogies, as in life, you had to be there.”
–Ron Charles on Richard Russo’s Somebody’s Fool (The Washington Post)
“Just as most hit TV shows plunder from material that has scored well in the past, so too does Chain-Gang All-Stars, which lifts freely from The Hunger Games and The Running Man, Rollerball and Battle Royale. Where it differs from more straightforward genre fare is in foregrounding what would normally remain as a political subtext. Adjei-Brenyah wants to highlight the factual springboards beneath his flights of fancy, providing footnotes to explain the intricacies of the 13th amendment, the psychological effects of solitary confinement and the 1944 state murder of 14-year-old George Stinney. Chain-Gang All-Stars, he stresses, isn’t fantasy at all. Instead, it’s a nightmarish burlesque about industrialised racism. The sheer weight of this supporting evidence—happily accommodated by the book’s maximalist style—frequently spins us off course. Alternating chapters roam far and wide, keeping tabs on a supporting cast of TV executives, ‘abolitionist’ protesters and a sceptical armchair critic who is slowly sucked in and converted. These cutaways give Chain-Gang All-Stars the bracing panoramic sweep of an old-school social novel in the vein of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, but the technique needs finessing. As it is, Adjei-Brenyah combines the winning confidence of a young artist who is unafraid to tackle an enormous canvas with the nervousness of a debutant who worries about leaving his reader with the same group of people for more than a few pages at a time. His plot is constantly interrupting itself to move us along and show us something new.”
–Xan Brooks on Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars (The Guardian)
“The Covid lockdown period already seems, as a subject, like a flattened corpse over which the whole of American culture and commentary has trampled. But it was only three years ago. Fiction is still catching up. A case in point is Onlookers, Ann Beattie’s new collection of stories, her best in more than two decades … The stories are about instability and shattered certainties … An almost comically wide cast of characters … The rap against Beattie, in sum, is that her work can be aimless, ‘twee,’ lacking in political and other convictions, plotless, a bit draggy. All feathers and no bird, marginalia in search of a thesis. She is too alert to the tender souls of the bolshy bourgeoisie, stirring groats on their Viking ranges. All these things are true at times, even in Onlookers. This book reminds you, more often, of why readers cared about her in the first place. She’s a dry yet earthy writer, in touch with moods and manners, with an eye for passing comedy … She takes notes on her species, as if she were a naturalist observing robins. She pries at the mystery of life. There’s a strong feeling of convergence in her best stories.”
–Dwight Garner on Ann Beattie’s Onlookers (The New York Times)
“This may sound like a story about how trauma begets dysfunction (a very well-trodden terrain for novels at present, as Parul Sehgal argued in “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”), but Porter does something fresher and more interesting than drawing a line between, say, a chaotic home life and bad behavior. There is nothing particularly (or even quite) bad in Shy’s memories of his upbringing at all. What Porter portrays instead is a pattern of slights and rejections, mostly caused by Shy’s social awkwardness and confusion about how to relate to other people … Shy’s backstory sits at odds with current trends in fiction and feels true to life in a way that the trauma plot often does not … Porter sets himself the challenge of rendering the least palatable of these children sympathetic: the kind of boy who has a lot going for him, a lot of privilege, and can’t seem to do anything but make a mess of it. Porter succeeds at this, in part because the distinctive fragmentary stream of consciousness style he has developed, first in Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, then in Lanny and The Death of Francis Bacon, fosters a close proximity between the reader and his characters and their emotional landscape. His technique of layering snatches of thought, memory, and feeling deftly, in a manner that feels instinctive, makes Shy’s perspective seem not only understandable but inevitable to the reader.”
–Rachel Connolly on Max Porter’s Shy (The New Republic)
