‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Anna Motz

Rave The New Yorker Ignore the tacky title; the majority of the people Motz writes about are neither killers nor driven by an excess of love ... Distressing in the extreme ... None of its ten chapters, each of which gives a pseudonymous account of a patient, is easy to read, and some are excruciating.

Elizabeth Flock

Positive The New Yorker This sensitively reported book has an ambition similar to that of a Gloria Steinem talking circle ... The real versus the ideal, crops up again and again in Flock’s project ... There is a deep compassion in Flock’s account, but here and there you see her wrestle with her journalistic skepticism, wondering whether her subject is quite who she wishes to be.

Blake Butler

Rave The New Yorker \"Butler recounts, with horrifying immediacy, the horrifying immediacy of dealing with an abrupt and violent death, of being thrust, in a moment, into the chasm between the crowded world of the living—where procedures must be followed, questions answered, phone calls made—and the too-private, upside-down world of loss ... Gender operates in a fascinating way in Molly, as Butler, sensitized to the many pitfalls of male power, compensates for it to a fault ... One of the saddest strains of this powerfully sad book involves the decline of Butler’s parents, who each come to suffer from dementia; he is particularly close to his mother and, after she is widowed, becomes her primary caretaker. Molly, wary of Butler’s family bonds, tends to pull away when he is most in need of her. \'We didn’t need anybody but ourselves, I started thinking,\' Butler writes. That’s never true, but no one seems to be around to tell him so ... You can feel the flayed rawness of Butler’s quest; he seems, at times, to be writing from the emotional equivalent of hurricane conditions, skipping a word, repeating a phrase, sending long, lashing sentences into the wind. His new clarity can be profoundly painful ... That is a poisoned kind of sense-making, and one way to parse the worst of Molly’s behavior is as a grim attempt to prove her point by making herself indisputably irredeemable. But Butler does dispute it; his book is his proof. \'Stay alive,\' Molly told Butler, and that is what he wants the rest of us to do, too. Writers are often praised as \'fearless,\' but Butler is not. In Molly, he makes fear his companion. That is the only way to write, and to live.\

Dwight Garner

Rave The New Yorker Winning ... Garner is a good host; he doesn’t just talk about himself ... Memoir, thoughts about food, and literary criticism are stacked, in The Upstairs Delicatessen, like the bright layers of a Venetian cookie ... Garner’s literary cellar is vast, and he always has just the right quote or anecdote ready to decant.

Heidi Julavits

Mixed The New Yorker Julavits’s book is full of this kind of reported speech—hard, hammered sentences stripped of voice and styled like logic proofs—but to what end? Nobody talks this way in life ... Julavits doesn’t play the scene for laughs. The mood, here and throughout Directions to Myself, is anxious, ominous, tense ... Julavits is frequently funny on the level of the sentence...but she has lost her broader comic point of view. Comedy depends on a confidence in endings, a trust that all will be well ... As a moral matter, Julavits’s vigilance is admirable; she is trying not to prioritize personal love over collective responsibility. As a human one, it puts her in a double bind ... Julavits leans heavily on metaphor ... A steady refrain of harbors, storms, rowing, and guiding stars at first summons a parable-like rhetorical power but comes to erode her book’s finer observations.

Andrew Sean Greer

Positive The New Yorker Freddy manages to douse his skepticism in the name of love, but this reader had a harder time. San Francisco is among the most expensive rental markets in the country; the man needs a MacArthur grant, not a magazine assignment ... typical of Greer’s best comic writing, with its exquisite attention to rhythm, repetition, and timing, the bright sentences tossed up like juggling balls to be caught in dazzling rotation ... Where Greer runs into trouble is in his attempt to use Less’s trip to gesture at the state of the Union writ large ... Critiquing the American experiment has become something of a trope in the current political climate, but, though Greer’s novel is set in the approximate present, his America is a land curiously devoid of politics. Less manages to drive three thousand miles without coming across so much as a single MAGA hat; there seems to have been no major public-health crisis since AIDS ... Greer, though, has a gentler sensibility. He wants to see the best in people, and that rare instinct puts him in a bind. How to confront the madness, let alone the viciousness, the violence, the cruelty, of the moment while maintaining the kind of comic equipoise that he prizes? ... These appliqué indictments have the awkward feel of authorial preëmption; it’s as if Greer felt the need to make a show of taking his character to task for being categorically \'problematic.\' Perhaps to compensate, he saddles Less with emotional baggage (a dead mother, a long-absent father) that hints at painful depths without really creating them. These are \'Swift\'-ian touches, and they work no better in Greer’s novel than they evidently did in Less’s ... That rawer, truer vein of feeling gives the novel back its heart. If Less Is Lost is, well, a lesser work than “Less,” there’s something sincerely winning in Greer’s undogmatic brand of small-c conservatism ... No one’s private world is shielded from national storms, but often enough the sun does shine there. We need some novels to remind us of that, and this is one.

Isaac Butler

Positive The New Yorker It’s a remarkable tale, and Butler, a writer and podcaster for Slate who also teaches theatre history, is well cast as narrator ... It is quite possible to read all three hundred and sixty-three pages of Butler’s book and still be unable to define exactly what the Method is. That’s not a dig. Just when you think you have the thing pinned down, it changes. A technique becomes an attitude; the attitude becomes an aura—or an affect.

Amia Srinivasan

Positive The New Yorker Srinivasan is clear about the need to do something about our desires but not about what, exactly, we should do ... Srinivasan’s essential counsel—to embrace ambivalence—might seem unlikely to cause offense. But it did. The disgruntled responses to the publication of \'Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?\' are the subject of a subsequent essay in Srinivasan’s book, \'Coda: The Politics of Desire.\' Reading these two pieces together is like chasing a glass of rosé with a shot of fire. In \'The Right to Sex,\' Srinivasan is temperate and scholarly, treading lightly as she builds her argument. In \'Coda,\' she is writing with the clarity of anger ... For each of her points...she can find a counterpoint. This must be what it means to \'dwell in ambivalence.\' Clearly, it’s not a comfortable place to be. But why should it be comfortable? ... Srinivasan is after liberation.

Deborah Levy

Rave The New Yorker [A] wonderful new book ... Levy, whose prose is at once declarative and concrete and touched with an almost oracular pithiness, has a gift for imbuing ordinary observations with the magic of metaphor ... The new volume, which follows the death of one version of the self, describes the uncertain birth of another ... She herself is not always a purely likable, or reliable, narrator of her own experience, and her book is the richer for it.

Dana Spiotta

Rave New Yorker [A] a comic, vital new novel ... Sam’s unprincipled pursuit of her confused principles gives the novel a loopy energy ... When a wife, not her husband, is the one to indulge a midlife crisis and abandon her family, her behavior is either derided as selfish or championed as subversive. A good novel shouldn’t ask us to choose between those readings, and Spiotta has written a very good novel ... If Wayward has competition in the category of best American novel devoted to the subject of perimenopause, I am not aware of it.

Katherine Angel

Positive The New Yorker Angel writes witheringly of \'confidence feminists,\' who object to female hesitance and uncertainty ... Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again is most exciting at the start and at the end, where Angel is boldest in her own ideas. In the middle chapters, she walks us through a lot of other people’s, mainly in the interest of throwing cold water on studies that purport to prove some objective truth about women and desire ... It’s good to see Angel pay attention to heterosexual men, to \'welcome them to vulnerability.\' They may be the group of people most in need of hearing what she has to say.

Patricia Lockwood

Rave The New Yorker Lockwood gets it right, mimicking the medium while shrewdly parodying its ethos ... The rampant political anxiety and grandstanding; the fear of judgment and social embarrassment (and the keen pleasure of doing the judging); above all, the unstable, seductive \'we\' with its exquisite promise of togetherness: Lockwood has it all down, and she is funny about it, too. God, is she funny! ... Lockwood’s conceit is smart, her prose original, hugely entertaining and witty ... Lockwood’s writing grows radiant, as if the depiction of this little creature gives her the profoundest joy. What is especially moving is that this is not some parable about a mother’s mystical devotion; it is a story, simply, about love, selfless and delighted ... it isn’t, either, a story with an easy moral for us to take home, How I Quit the Internet for Good. The same portal will be waiting for the protagonist when she’s ready to return to it; the difference will be private, internal, burrowed in the secret place where only novels go.

Chang-Rae Lee

Positive The New Yorker When Chang-rae Lee was young, he was drawn to old souls ... Now Lee is fifty-five, and his sixth novel, My Year Abroad, brims with youth ... now, in My Year Abroad, Lee writes like a man released from a cage. His prose unfurls like a scarf pulled from a magician’s mouth, one bright, brash clause after another ... Lee is revelling in his return to freedom. He is having fun ... The trouble is that Lee will not modulate his antic music. The novel starts loud and only gets louder, its language soon cracking under the strain of supporting so much insistent vitality. The goofy jargon that’s meant to telegraph Tiller’s youth comes to seem old, outdated ... It’s not hard to indulge Lee in some of this awkward, enthusiastic grasping ... It’s the literary equivalent of a dad who chaperones his kid to a punk show and winds up happily thrashing in the mosh pit ... The more I read of My Year Abroad, the more I came to feel that I was trapped in a novelistic Netflix, one stuffed episode blurring into the next ... What it cannot usurp is the unsettled private domain, the interior—the very space that Lee has explored, in the past, with such sympathetic, acute intelligence, and that he now seems willing to chuck for the sake of making the pages turn faster. Alas, they don’t.

Raven Leilani

Positive The New Yorker [Leilani] loves catching her reader off guard by tweaking a sentence midway through, switching up speeds, like a pitcher, so that a passage that begins modestly suddenly gathers momentum, shooting forward in long, arcing phrases that stay improbably in flight ... There’s a \'look what I can do\' joy in Leilani’s prose that delights in the rapture it describes, capped, in that surrender to \'yes,\' by a nod to Molly Bloom, who knows a thing or two herself about the erotics of a breathless run-on ... It’s daring of Leilani to launch such a hilarious salvo on the publishing industry from within, and her timing turns out to be spot on ... a highly pleasurable interrogation of pleasure ... Leilani thrives in this hyperconscious register; this is the sincere comedy of a powerfully observant mind spinning its gears as thought rushes far ahead of action ... Leilani, a commendably patient novelist, comfortably dwells in such inscrutability. She sometimes falters when she tries to be overly legible, or pushes her vivid sensibility a measure too far ... Although people do work at morgues, and clowns must come from somewhere, these garish touches, in a novel already highly attuned to the everyday surreal, lack the subtle weight that makes invented things seem true. Rebecca’s job, in particular, functions as unneeded shorthand for parsing her character, and Leilani does something similar with Edie’s penchant for pain ... too clear a tethering line is drawn from Edie’s sorrowful childhood to the masochistic streak that emerges in her relationship with Eric ... In a sense, such stumbles are the flip side of the novel’s successes; both stem from Leilani’s hunger to pack so much of what she knows about the world into one deceptively narrow drama.

Mary Gaitskill

Rave The New Yorker ...one of the great American novels of the past decade ... Veronica has a surfeit of experience and feeling, and, if she seems pathetic in the way that she grasps for connection with the person least likely to offer it, that hint of sentimentality is offset by the fierce majesty of her refusal to suppress it—though it takes a certain keenness of perception to see it that way.

Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake

Rave The New Yorker ... remarkable ... There’s no way to know, of course, if all this happened as Gilot says it did. (Lake said that she had \'total recall,\' a claim that tends to raise rather than allay suspicions.) She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute. The bigger mystery is Gilot; the self in her self-portrait can be hard to see behind the lacquered irony and reserve ... Her dissent is withering and sarcastic rather than furious; like other women of her generation who pointedly overlooked the bad behavior of their husbands, she is concerned with preserving her own dignity ... Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free. But it is also a love story, and a traditional one. The contradiction is right there in the book.

Lena Andersson Trans. by Saskia Vogel

Positive The New Yorker What makes these simple stories of unrequited passion so unusual and gripping is Ester ... she is Andersson’s lab rat, infected with ardor and left to wander through the novels’ maze, bashing blindly into its obstacles. Those obstacles can be delightfully basic ... Her style is blunt, pragmatic, dogged ... Andersson’s critique of the modern order is particularly sharp when it touches on ghosting, that torture by technology ... Like most sequels, Acts of Infidelity isn’t flattered by a comparison with its predecessor. Its rhythms are already familiar; it seems baggy, overlong. (The translation, by Saskia Vogel, is stodgier, too.) ... You can sometimes feel like tearing your hair out watching Ester repeat her painful errors ... Her honesty, usually disconcerting, is also brave; she refuses to suffer with quiet propriety. Yet what’s most touching is that uncharacteristic ellipsis, marking a place that not even words can reach.

Olivia Laing

Rave The New Yorker There is a delightfully comic, head-in-the-sand logic at work here ... Processing reality through fiction is part of what good art helps us do, and Laing’s novel does it more explicitly than most ... That exuberance shows in the novel’s sentences, which rush by, fleet and frenetic, nearly tripping over the speed bumps of their own commas ... Laing has not entirely given up her biographer’s taste for burrowing inside other people’s skins, however. If Kathy is Laing’s alter ego, she is also an homage to Kathy Acker ... Acker herself was a first-rate stealer of other people’s writing, and Laing’s theft pays tribute in kind ... The risk of prose that tries to capture the sentiments of the immediate present is that it tends to take on the rubbery chew of an op-ed. Fortunately, Laing’s novel is too headlong for that. There is no sense of slowing the mad dash of the present to make it more comprehensible to some hypothetical future reader. For that reason, Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt ... Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is.

Sheila Heti

Mixed The New Yorker \"Motherhood is a novel, or so its publisher claims, though even that loose and accommodating category doesn’t convey the weird originality of this sometimes exasperating, sometimes illuminating work ... Heti isn’t an orphan in any literal sense—both her parents are still alive—and there is something bratty about publicly stamping her foot and declaring her need for attention. But she feels like a neglected baby, and so she acts like one. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that her mother friends, stuck at home, overextended and underslept, may feel neglected by her, too.\

Meg Wolitzer

Mixed The New Yorker Refreshing though it is to encounter a literary model of genuine female mentorship and encouragement, her tale of a millennial woman’s feminist awakening comes to seem blinkered and strangely incurious ... The risk for a novel that tries to capture the Zeitgeist is that the Zeitgeist is liable to shift at any moment. Indeed, the timeliness of Wolitzer’s subject, initially such a boon to the novel, ultimately deals it a major blow. The events of the past few months, and the fierce discussions about feminism that they have engendered, have proved to be far more electrifying and complex than anything that Wolitzer depicts here. Surpassed by the present that it aims to depict, the novel feels amiable and mild by comparison, already quaintly out of date.

Alan Hollinghurst

Mixed The New Yorker Hollinghurst wonderfully conveys the subtle, charged atmosphere of ordinary life rumbling along under extraordinary circumstances ... we don’t really find out what David Sparsholt has to say about his gay son, or what the son has to say about his father. It is almost as if Hollinghurst, sympathetic to Johnny’s introverted awkwardness and wanting him to flourish on his own terms, believes the question to be impolite. As David and his cohort recede from view, Johnny becomes the novel’s protagonist, though he has the provisional feel of a secondary character nudged from the wings into the spotlight ... Hollinghurst has further handicapped himself by limiting Johnny’s ability with words. He is dyslexic, and not much of a talker, though in place of verbal gifts he has visual ones ... considering the effects of the past is not just the responsibility of a novel about eight decades of gay history; it is the responsibility of a novel about family, and the disappointment of The Sparsholt Affair is that Hollinghurst lets Johnny slip the knot of his father’s life with barely a second thought, escaping easily into the safety of his own.

Sally Rooney

Rave The New Yorker \"Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons. As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk ... Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with, though how exactly to resist capitalism, when it has sunk its teeth so deep into the human condition, remains an open question ... one wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge ... She writes with a rare, thrilling confidence, in a lucid and exacting style uncluttered with the sort of steroidal imagery and strobe flashes of figurative language that so many dutifully literary novelists employ ... But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.\

Zadie Smith

Mixed The Nation In style, voice and the interplay of influences, NW is a perplexing creation. Long before the book’s larger structure becomes apparent, the story has an ominous tone. The texture of the prose is still distinctly Smith’s, but its color has changed, a familiar, bright picture seen through smudged and darkened glass. Sentences are curt and clipped, meted out in stingy servings of nouns and verbs denied the luxury of richer grammar … [Smith’s] control over the proceedings has slipped. Her hasty solution is worse than hollow; it’s without sense, a sacrifice of character to some principle of structure whose purpose remains obscure.

Katie Kitamura

Positive The New Yorker Kitamura is a writer with a visionary, visual imagination—she’s an art critic, too—and a bold symbolist streak. The mood she likes best is menace ... In A Separation, Kitamura has made consciousness her territory. The book is all mind, and an observant, taut, astringent mind it is, though there is something almost unhinged about so much rationality in the face of such duress ... As is so often the case in adultery-themed novels, there is a strong echo here of Anna Karenina, but, unusually, it is Alexei Karenin, not Anna, whom our narrator resembles ... The equation of emotionality with female weakness pervades Kitamura’s novel. It is the narrator’s obsession, a fate to avoid above all else ... Absence is the novel’s great motif, the subject of its ruminative investigation. The word is used so often that it becomes a kind of totem. On page after page, we hear that Christopher was all surface, no substance, a vain, vanished man ... These are stirring questions, pointing toward a deep, buried sorrow and regret, and yet the novel itself seems as repulsed by such emotions as its narrator is.

Zadie Smith

Positive The New Yorker Smith’s most affecting novel in a decade, one that brings a piercing focus to her favorite theme: the struggle to weave disparate threads of experience into a coherent story of a self ... As the book progresses, she interleaves chapters set in the present with ones that deal with memories of college, of home, of Tracey. It is a graceful technique, this metronomic swinging back and forth in time...The novel’s structure feels true to the effect of memory, the way we use the past as ballast for the present.

Emily Witt

Positive The New Yorker ...[a] gutsy ... Witt’s account of the [BDSM] scene is terrifically done, an oddly sweet exercise in descriptive economy and dry comic timing ... itt is a sharp observer of the behavior and the motivations of others, a wry, affectionate portraitist of idealistic people and the increasingly surreal place they belong to. Among other things, Future Sex offers a superb account of the absurdities of San Francisco in the first half of this decade.

Emma Donoghue

Positive The New Yorker Donoghue has developed something of a specialty in putting children in situations of harrowing confinement ... She enjoys doing her research, and it shows. The difficulty, as with any work of historical fiction, is in getting the facts to hum and resonate in our contemporary minds, to illuminate our own mysteries. Perhaps that’s why the explanation for Anna’s fast, when it finally comes, is given in terms of trauma at last dredged up...It’s a revelation that accounts for everything and, for that reason, feels unsatisfying, minimizing of the unfathomable nature of Anna’s feat. History’s anomalies are clipped to fit our own diagnostic sense of the world.

Karan Mahajan

Positive The New Yorker Historical and sociological and political explanations, necessary as they are to making sense of terror, don’t capture the tiny, intimate urgencies that power the life of a person caught in their web. Mahajan can’t explain the grand structures of violence any better than the rest of us can. But he brings us close enough to feel the blast.

Mary Gaitskill

Positive The New Yorker [Gaitskill] keeps clear of the self-justifying temptations of fiction embedded with memoir by structuring The Mare as a series of short chapters delivered in the first person, slicing deftly among her characters’ various points of view. Paul and Silvia have a say, but the leading roles are Ginger’s and Velvet’s—a risky strategy, since it requires a kid’s voice that can match an adult’s in lifelike tone and psychological depth. Velvet, fortunately, is that most wonderful of fictional creations: a convincing child who manages to be a captivating and perceptive narrator.

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December 17, 2024