Game recognized game in the pages of the New York Times Book Review earlier this week as horror master Stephen King raved about crime writer extraordinaire Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake: “What makes this book special, even extraordinary, is that the crossword puzzle aspect is secondary. Lippman, who is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell, is after bigger game.”
Over at the Barnes & Noble Review, Walton Muyumba penned a fascinating piece on the power and necessity of Colson Whitehead’s harrowing new novel, The Nickel Boys. “Our most essential writers help ensure that we don’t escape or evade these traumas,” wrote Muyumba. “From its opening lines through the novel’s elegant, heartbreaking closing, Whitehead’s lucid, sparkling, storytelling incites readers to bear witness.”
Meanwhile, the Guardian‘s Colin Grant considered the impact, ten years on from its US publication, of Michelle Alexander’s seminal text on the mass incarceration of black men in America, The New Jim Crow: “…this distressing book offers important lessons for all societies that claim colour-blindness but enact policies that scapegoat marginalised groups.”
We also take a closer look at Ann Hulbert’s Atlantic review of Susan Steinberg’s subversive and disorienting debut novel, Machine (“Steinberg’s daring experiments with style and perspective make clear that such stock suspense isn’t the point”), as well as FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi’s New Yorker essay on Tony Faber’s Faber & Faber: The Untold Story (“The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat”).
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“What makes this book special, even extraordinary, is that the crossword puzzle aspect is secondary. Lippman, who is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell, is after bigger game … Lippman’s point—which takes this book far beyond the works of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, although Lippman does not fail to honor her genre roots — is that Maddie also pays, and in blood … Lippman walks a fine line, balancing a cracking good mystery with the story of a not always admirable woman working to stand on her own. Lippman never loses sight of Maddie’s options and her obstacles … she never loses touch with the twin mysteries at the center of her story … Lippman answers all outstanding questions with a totally cool double twist that your reviewer—a veteran reader of mysteries—never saw coming.”
–Stephen King on Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake (The New York Times Book Review)
“At this moment in 2019, The Nickel Boys is an especially necessary novel. Here, Whitehead writes about black American children experiencing and surviving sustained injustice. The cost of survival is high: but even more expensive, Whitehead suggests, is the cost for betraying American moral and political ideals. And, as his fiction details, that degradation resounds across generations, dehumanizing perpetrators and victimized alike … I find Whitehead’s Baldwin reference fascinating because it illustrates both the character’s developing political intelligence and demonstrates the author’s engagement with the various ideological debates held among black intellectuals and literary artists about how to achieve American equality, how to define blackness, and whether or not hope can be the force that sustains the Freedom Struggle. Though readers already know that Elwood will eventually land in Nickel, reading him imagining his own youthful radicality and justice warrior gallantry lets us hope—even if for an instant—that he might escape his fate … Whitehead’s novel also reminds me that African American writers often center black teenage protagonists to express political ideas and philosophical claims. Those characters compel our attention because they have very little room for error; their public and personal mistakes can be final and fatal … Our most essential writers help ensure that we don’t escape or evade these traumas, either. From its opening lines through the novel’s elegant, heartbreaking closing, Whitehead’s lucid, sparkling, storytelling incites readers to bear witness for these children (real and imagined), teaches us to speak to survivors and for the dead, and implores us to say their names and demand justice.”
–Walton Muyumba on Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (The Barnes & Noble Review)
“Her clear-eyed assessment, published in the UK almost a decade after it first stunned America, is an indictment of a society that, since the 1980s, has been complicit in the explosion of its prison population from around 300,000 to more than 2 million … In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonise the black population so that ‘black’ and ‘crime’ became interchangeable. It was a war—not on drugs—but on black people … Notwithstanding improvements to the US judicial system, this distressing book offers important lessons for all societies that claim colour-blindness but enact policies that scapegoat marginalised groups. Colour-blindness leads to denial, believes Alexander; better to strive for colour-consciousness.”
–Colin Grant on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (The Guardian)
“Fiction writers, Susan Steinberg has always told her students, shouldn’t feel they have to produce a novel. The author of three unconventional story collections, she vowed she never would. She has now broken this rule and, in the process, many others, too—not that she needs to apologize. Her slim narrative of adolescent crisis is as propulsive as it is disorienting, subverting expectations at every turn … Steinberg’s daring experiments with style and perspective make clear that such stock suspense isn’t the point. The narrator’s real quest is to discover whether a soul—hers, if it exists—can be saved. She often speaks as a ‘we,’ bound in corrosive intimacy to another girl as they navigate the predatory peer scene. When the ‘I’ detaches herself, her voice is by turns incantatory, meditative, vengeful—lyrical yet bitter. Summer uplift, this is not: The epiphany she fears is that the soul is just ‘some scared thing that leaves the body when the body needs it most.’ ”
–Ann Hulbert on Susan Steinberg’s Machine (The Atlantic)
“What The Untold Story makes clear are the ways in which editorial sensibility and independence—renewed and reasserted at key points in the firm’s history—have combined with sheer luck, over the course of nearly a century, to sustain an operation that might very well have gone under more than once … The Faber story certainly speaks volumes about the mix of passion, shrewdness, and luck that it takes to keep such an operation afloat; it also raises the question of who, ultimately, a publishing house like Faber & Faber really belongs to. Is it the stockholders, whose involvement in the day-to-day life of the company is sometimes remote? Is it the staff—publishers, editors, and others—who set the tone and direction during their tenure? Or is it the writers, whose work is the company’s real raison d’être and lifeblood? Faber authors have always had a proprietary feeling about the place, thanks in part, no doubt, to having been welcomed into Eliot’s Club. There’s a kind of poetic justice in the fact that it’s the work, in more than one sense, of T. S. Eliot that both helped establish the temper of the eccentric entity that is Faber & Faber and has kept it alive for close to a century. Toby Faber can be pardoned for betraying a hint of smugness about the company’s ongoing vigor, even if it’s thanks to a musical. Eliot would have been delighted.”
–Jonathan Galassi on Tony Faber’s Faber & Faber: The Untold Story (The New Yorker)
