About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jo Hamya
Rave The Atlantic Falls into the category of #MeToo novels, a label that presumes a perspective that Hamya plays with adroitly ... A brilliant litmus test of a novel, which doesn’t mean it’s indecisive or wavering ... Hamya successfully makes a muddle with The Hypocrite, and I mean that as high praise. Contemporary fiction too often seeks the relief of some imagined perfect morality, perhaps because so many readers now conflate the beliefs of characters and their creator. It’s a pleasure to read a 27-year-old writer who embraces the novel’s power to fog up certainties about \'bad men\'—and prods readers to join in.
Halle Butler
Positive The Atlantic The novel lives up to its name in a variety of ways, none of which make for a very pleasant reading experience—though that’s never seemed to be Butler’s goal ... What keeps Banal Nightmare nailed to reality is the fact that, underneath all of this emotional turmoil, we eventually learn that Moddie has suffered real, serious harm.
Tana French
Pan The Atlantic Without a protagonist who is invested in bare-knuckling it through the unscrupulous world of policing, her stories’ brilliantly rough edges have been shaved right down. Her detectives were our Charons, guiding us through hell; her new plots are set in an annoyingly amoral limbo ... This time, French pushes her plot into an even lumpier shape ... A body doesn’t appear until almost 300 pages deep (in a 450-ish-page novel) ... She’s shaken off far too many of the vital elements that make her novels boil and steam. This sort of fiction needs characters with passion, curiosity, and doggedness—she’s dispensed with all three.
Helen Humphreys
Positive The Atlantic Luscious ... Humphreys offers a fresh view of a philosopher thought of as a loner ... Humphreys closely bases her novel on Thoreau’s meticulous, 2-million-word journal.
Michael Cunningham
Positive The Los Angeles Times I always hate these sorts of plot summaries in reviews — a bunch of characters caught up in trivial-sounding minutiae: Who cares? But Cunningham beautifully pries apart the notion of what it means to have outgrown something, to be living in the liminal space between an earlier self and a future self ... In this novel that puzzles over the elasticity of all kinds of love — familial, parental, erotic, queer, fraternal, ambiguous — I yearned for Cunningham to forget his literary peers and stick with his own special talent ... When Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.
Susie Boyt
Rave The Atlantic \"Loved and Missed bottles up those fleeting, blissful moments of child-rearing and spritzes each page liberally with their scent. The happiness Boyt describes is so infectious that you want it to last, for your own sake; it isn’t often that readers of literary fiction float along in such placid waters ... it’s outrageous, really, how engrossing this novel can be even when its two main characters defy narrative convention and bask in their contentment ... Perhaps this isn’t what we need out of every book that depicts parents, a hit of rapture so potent that we might overdose. But Boyt, who has probably experienced her own share of family drama—she’s the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud, one of his 14 acknowledged children from at least six women—doesn’t subscribe to the notion that it all comes out in the wash. Regret and joy are an indivisible duo for any mother or father, and Boyt wisely mixes them into a beautifully humane chronicle. With this exquisite devotional of a novel, she has turned the ability to find contentment in the muck of parenthood into a courageous art form.\
Burkhard Bilger
Rave The Atlantic [Bilger] builds a narrative that admits to its holes, that doesn’t shy away from its incompleteness while it still makes an effort, with the materials at hand, to understand life in wartime and the kind of people whose actions occupy that gray zone of morality ... Bilger’s approach is satisfyingly holistic. Complicating the plot is part of his intent ... The categorical imperative at work in Holocaust literature, the need to define good actors versus bad actors, is understandable ... But what Bilger shows is how the forces moving against ordinary citizens—the threat of their own deportation, torture, or murder—could turn them into the most unimaginable of all war-battered Europeans, meek preservationists fighting individual wars for their own lives.
Eleanor Catton
Pan The Los Angeles Times After the splayed-legged reach of Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries, her new follow-up retracts in on itself — not just in size and scope, but in messiness too. The ragged edges are trimmed. The wonderful weirdness is flushed right out ... Catton writes him in big block letters: VILLAIN. And she narrates in a close third-person, explaining motivations down to the atom and shutting off any avenue of curiosity her characters might have about themselves ... Sure, by the end of Birnam Wood there are real, bloody consequences — a muddle of flesh and bone. It’s messy, at last, but not quite the mess a novel needs ... And what’s a critic to do with a melodramatic ending that can’t be spoiled but perfectly encapsulates the novel’s primary flaw? Let’s put it this way: If Birnam Wood were a film...its final minutes would feature a slo-mo crawl, a soaring score, a sacrifice for the greater good. Neat and tidy, as if someone took a stiff broom to the plot and swept out all the delightfully dirty corners.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Positive The Los Angeles Times The novel is diaphanous, celestial, disembodied — sometimes to its benefit, sometimes not ... The text swerves from breathy and adulatory to cutting and punky ... Schwartz’s snappiest lines would fit on coffee mugs prized by middle-age moms as tokens of unexplored rebellion. Nevertheless, I nodded along ... There is always an underclass of women, and I wonder about the Berthes who didn’t read Colette and couldn’t leave behind written documentation of their lives. They may be the fragments missing from Schwartz’s homage to Sappho — this elusive, at times joyful and enveloping not-quite-novel.
Andrew Morton
Mixed Vulture The Queen, a grab bag of anodyne anecdotes and Wikipedia-deep chronologies, doesn’t want to pin her down anyway. Like its subject, it just wants to sell itself ... Morton fires off press-release prose that sounds as if it’s straight from the mouth of the Buckingham comms department ... Occasionally he finds some dirt, but usually acts stunned to hear it ... Morton cannot, or will not, survey the monarchy with the eye for absurdity that it deserves ... Morton twists himself in knots to excuse all but the most paltry defects of her character, a tactic that destroys any chance of his turning the flat image of the waving old lady into a person endowed with innate individuality ... Morton accepts at face value the most ludicrous system of government ... If a woman was this determined to hide herself, it’s the biographer’s job to at least try to rout her out.
Brigitta Olubas
Mixed The New Republic Olubas’s biography feels the drag of these early years; it too is pinned down until Hazzard begins writing ... [she] dedicates a chapter to the novel, but oddly shares very little about the process of its composition ... tender but unsparing.
Ling Ma
Positive The Los Angeles Times The stories of Bliss Montage keep the cover’s cheeky promise. They take place in little pockets removed from \'real\' life, whatever that means: inside a parallel world hidden behind a wardrobe; at a cultish festival in a fictional country; on a protracted vacation in a \'de-Americanized\' world; in an MFA workshop. The air has been sucked out of all these claustrophobic nowheres ... The pieces share a definite mood, and it’s lonely as hell ... Severance is a prototype for the best of Bliss Montage: surreal but rooted, watching at a remove while the world crumbles. Ghosts are the ultimate voyeurs — writers in their ectoplasmic state ... Ma rides a good concept when she finds one ... The later stories in Bliss Montage grow more fluid, as if the earliest ones are vocal warmups and the last are performances at Carnegie Hall. But the entire collection might as well have been written for Peking Duck and Office Hours, two powerhouses so absorbing that you’ll pray Ma spins them off into future novels.
Ottessa Moshfegh
Pan Los Angeles Times Having ratcheted her perversity up to an 11 in her fiction, Moshfegh cannot resist throwing everything she’s got at Lapvona ... Filth, famine, pillories, infection, crushed skulls, rape, hanging, self-flagellation, eyeballs detached, eyeballs replaced and a grape that makes its way from a rectum to another orifice. Also, murdered children all over the place. Yet somehow not an ounce of feeling ... As for plot, there’s plenty. It’s sprinkled on top, however, like the crumb on a cake, added for some crunch but ultimately not baked in ... What’s startling is how languidly Moshfegh can describe beauty when she wants to...But the balance tips so far toward darkness that even if we read this as a fallen paradise — salvation is the hope and prayer of every character, even the dimwit Villiam — it’s hard to see what message this world has for us except that life is hell. Lapvona is an endurance test, as if Moshfegh wants to break the reader to see if the novel can stretch beyond its audience ... I’m angry at the waste — not the ample human waste but the missed opportunities. Moshfegh is a brilliant chronicler of the absolute corruptibility of any small dose of power, and a medieval town on the brink of recognizing the violence inherent in the system (there are those Monty Python peasants again) is just the right place for her dispassionate wit.
Sandra Newman
Pan The Atlantic ... for this reader, paradise is boring. (There’s a reason we relish Dante’s Inferno so much more than his Paradiso.) The defining feature of The Men, a snappy premise in search of a novel, is the utterly flat reality it imagines for its women. Building an entirely new world order of this sort ought to puff up dramas great and small. But pfffffft. Why does the air seem to go right out of them?The Men launches women into positions of uncontested power but entirely underestimates their complexity. It makes you long, against all your better instincts, for the men to come back ... There’s a big, ugly problem built into the foundation of The Men ... the novel isn’t transphobic as much as sadly ill-considered and unoriginal. Newman’s world isn’t binary, but her mechanism is, and no amount of shoehorned asides can shore up that rotting mooring. The history of feminist utopias in literature is long and fitful, with squabbles among renowned novelists and calls for a more expansive view of gender identity, but The Men lazily fumbles back toward simplicity ... Art is not required to be moral—and shouldn’t strive to be—but good art is never this careless in its conception. Utopias are ripe for wild imagining. Why not reckon with the reality of gender, especially when decades past have already seen this sort of utopian premise time and again? It appears the answer is that the gender-war narrative is too convenient to give up ... Here is where the tension dry-rots. Rather than pivot toward the women, to the rush of possibility for a world full of ambitious, complex, at-odds women; rather than push sci-fi heurism to a new dimension by investigating the thrilling, unbearable prospect of a world now populated by the grieving, formerly oppressed class; rather than defy the cruel banality of a binary gender apocalypse, Newman gives men the narrative. She even gives them the title.
Hernan Diaz
Positive The Los Angeles Times ... a wily jackalope of a novel — tame but prickly, a different beast from every angle.
Meghan O'Rourke
Positive The Los Angeles Times At times, I wondered if [O\'Rourke] ought to have assembled her story into such a clear, cohesive form; why not mimic the density and swirl of a decade spent in clueless flu-like miasma? O’Rourke is a devoted chronicler of each month spent in her corporeal purgatory, listing each new symptom and reliving every ache. I craved more mess, less linearity. But then again, who needs that? Sick people are befuddled enough and well people don’t need any more reasons to ignore them ... The book’s most significant feat is to be maddening without ever resorting to vitriol. If you didn’t already loathe the American healthcare system (a term that wrongly implies its disparate parts are connected), you will after reading The Invisible Kingdom ... While O’Rourke never lets on that she’s furious — perhaps fury requires more spunk than the perpetually exhausted can muster — she is meticulous about assigning blame to the negligent ... As a memoir The Invisible Kingdom can sometimes sink under its own misery, and as a close-up on autoimune diseases it wades too far into the cellular. But as a cultural history of “one of the most powerful contemporary Western delusions: namely, the idea that we can control the outcomes of our lives,” it’s profound and almost soothing. Medicine has conquered far less of the human body than it would ever let on ... Fellow sufferers will see The Invisible Kingdom as a helping hand in the dark.
Douglas Stuart
Rave The Los Angeles Times ... [a] bear hug of a new novel ... follows great cruelty with great tenderness ... has the same yeasty whiff of the autobiographical as the gorgeous Shuggie Bain, and the two share more than a little in common ... If you adored Shuggie Bain, in all its lively misery and lush detail, Young Mungo will please you on every page. If you didn’t, what’s wrong with you? ... Stuart oozes story. Mungo is alive. There is feeling under every word ... This novel cuts you and then bandages you back up. A few pages later — another slash. Yet Stuart doesn’t delight in misery the way writers such as Hanya Yanagihara seem to. Misery is just a necessary ingredient in his novels of sentimental education, the hit of salt that makes the sugar sing ... And oh, let’s not neglect the wide-armed pleasure.
Rax King
Mixed Vulture Dishy, memoirish ... King’s writing in this collection often feels impetuous and unpolished. Her sentences...embrace a kind of hyperbole reminiscent of the early aughts internet and its provocations against formality — a subject I wish King had written about. That tone is perfectly on pitch for essays about Degrassi and Hot Topic. It doesn’t work as well when she’s stretching her own thesis ... For King, the freedom to enjoy tackiness seems to go hand in hand with the freedom to be a slut and enjoy it. But much of the book is about habits of consumption, and when King includes blowjobs and threesomes in that, the connection isn’t always clear ... I’m delighted that King hasn’t grown out of her adoration for calorie-rich, nutrient-lite culture ... But I do wish Tacky cared about what tacky really is ... Though she sometimes digs beneath her pet topics to understand why they’re so scorned, she does seem to forget — or purposefully ignore — that \'the worst culture we have to offer\' slides up and down the spectrum of wealth.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Los Angeles Times Strout doesn’t dress language up in a tuxedo when a wool sweater will suffice. Other novelists must berate themselves when they see what Strout pulls off without any tacky pyrotechnics. Straightforward goes down so easy and feels so refreshing ... All of which makes reading Oh William! like coming home to a sensibility that is so smartly deployed it might go unnoticed ... Strout does very little here that is new, and that is a notion to celebrate ... Which isn’t to say Strout doesn’t have a cosmic point of view. Her novels are universal, though they aren’t big or broad or grasping, like the surfeit of literary fiction that needs to announce its own importance via page count or character sprawl. Read Oh William! for its suggestions about how the economics of our childhood never leave us ... Oh! And read it for the copious exclamation points. They’re the only ones in modern fiction I can stand.
Sally Rooney
Mixed Los Angeles Times The structure and plot are pure Rooney: Sentences so minimalist that they feel like literary versions of Donald Judd boxes; exquisite, tense sex scenes better than any moan-y porn; pint glasses clinking over conversation about who really constitutes the working class ... Her characters’ manic political declarations add an extra glaze of intellectual cred, and Rooney, nothing if not self-aware, knows it. Beautiful World is constantly trying to poke holes in itself to see if it will deflate. Sometimes it feels like a beta test in which the sales numbers and critical reception will decide which Rooney (the younger or the elder) makes an appearance in novel No. 4 ... For all the talk of Rooney as a groundbreaking voice of her generation, the new novel is an old-fashioned comedy of manners ... She writes every sentence as if it were a screenplay for an uncluttered film ... Clothes are simple and neat, floors are swept and tidy, no detritus is permitted in her syntax. This is the language of simple pleasures, easy to digest, satisfying. Rooney’s novels make great television shows because that’s what they already are ... All of which is to say that “Beautiful World” is a paradox. Sally Rooney seems to be done with the cult of Sally Rooney but beholden to her style, her proclivities. She won’t be able to shake them so easily; her premises aren’t resistible enough. Beautiful World tries new structural gambits, but these (especially a lame, inadvisable coda) feel painstakingly collaged — unsuccessful breaks for freedom. Rooney’s first two novels read like one long exhalation, but this one sometimes requires an inhaler.
Mona Awad
Mixed Los Angeles Times I found myself in the first half of All’s Well praying for some Eradica to turn down the volume on Miranda’s pity party ... If the author is stage-managing us, she pushes a bit too far. Then she pulls us back. Awad has a penchant for mixing dark humor and dark magic ... I must confess a distaste for the continual onslaught of novels that position a woman as either supernaturally charged or dangerously unhinged, so while Awad’s writing turns as cacklingly weird as I know it can be, I wish she’d embraced Shakespeare’s ethos and just cranked up the witchcraft without any ambiguity ... Ultimately, All’s Well might have landed with more heft if it had abandoned the middle ground of the problem play and worn more boldly the smirking mask of comedy.
Rachel Yoder
Rave The New Yorker In Rachel Yoder’s wily and unrestrained début novel, Nightbitch, a mother’s body begins to betray her, or so it appears ... At first, Nightbitch presents as a novel about whether mothers can handle their lot ... The DNA of Nightbitch, it turns out, is more Angela Carter than Rachel Cusk ... This is Mary Shelley territory—mother as inadvertent creator of monstrosity. While Dr. Frankenstein transfers his longings into his innominate monster, and inadvertently sets it loose to prowl the woods and learn about the goodness of the Lord, the mommy monster of Nightbitch licks the blood off her new fangs with satisfaction ... With its endorsement of a magical text as more cathartic than any mommy memoir, Nightbitch makes the case for itself, and for fiction that expands motherhood into new, surreal dimensions ... Yoder sees a new way into the baser kinks of our animal selves, the ineffable bodily transformation of a woman into a mother. What is fiction for, if not blowing life up into the freakish myth it appears to be?
Rachel Cusk
Rave Los Angeles Times Though Lawrence is the inspiration, it isn’t his energy that dominates Second Place. Instead I sensed the residue of Anita Brookner’s weary protagonists: bright, cultured women who know what they’re missing out on and resent those who keep it from them ... As Cusk hits all the high notes of indignant rage, this book snaps and steams ... the mere existence of Second Place makes me wonder if she found the Outline trilogy as cleansing as so many of us did ... Cusk’s open experimentation is refreshing, as is her belief that a writer must keep moving forward, forging a rough chain.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
Pan Los Angeles Times \'Memoir or fiction?\' the back cover asks. \'The reader decides\'...The real question is: Does the reader care? Each story is like the greenery filler in a grocery store bouquet: stiff and charmless, background fodder, indistinct organic matter. They’re like copies of copies of copies of Murakami’s older work; all the specificity and vivacity is blurred out. The women are rubbed down into featureless nubs, the men deflated caricatures — popped balloons. The only appeal left to make to the reader is the brand name on the cover ... Murakami has never been the recluse of popular repute, but First Person Singular, his fifth story collection and 22nd book, arrives as he seems more willing than ever to commodify his bigger-than-cult status ... The eight stories in First Person Singular share a deadening lack of curiosity ... Unlike the best of Murakami, in which strange coincidences subsume the characters’ lives, pulling them into vast underground conspiracies that reorient their (and our) relationship with the \'normal\' world, First Person Singular butts up against oddities and then walks away, slightly bewildered ... But sheer snooziness isn’t the collection’s worst offense. Murakami’s treatment of women is abhorrent. He disregards women as interchangeable and unremarkable for anything other than their looks: of all the women in these eight stories, only one has a name ... Namelessness, especially in a collection that plays with notions of authorial identity, isn’t such a grievous offense on its own. But the collection on the whole is dismissive of women as creatures of intellect and agency, and so bent on spotlighting its own ignorance that it feels less like a stylistic move than a simple refusal to see women in three dimensions. After writing a long string of hypersexualized teen girls, Murakami ought to hope we read all these as fiction and pretend that the \'is-it-memoir\' question is merely a literary stunt.
Susan Conley
Positive The New York Times Book Review Deterioration marks every aspect of Landslide, which is enveloping and warm, if slightly undercooked and sometimes flat-footed ... Conley’s writing can be uneven, but there’s a lot of heart in it—a compliment that sounds treacly but is meant earnestly. She has a gift for writing tiny, meaningful interactions ... Conley isn’t afraid to inject a little hope that these creatures will find their way back home.
Patricia Lockwood
Mixed The Los Angeles Times ... either a work of genius or an exasperating endurance trial. Never before has a novel left me so internally polarized. Should I revel in its cathartic eventual escape from social media, or pan it for wallowing so, so long in the very online? I am, as a famously wounded suitor once put it, half agony, half hope ... You read it the way you scan social media, hopping from one thought to another; if Lockwood could have delivered her manuscript in a scrolling format, I think she might have ... in part a micro-history of mid-2010s Twitter ... [Lockwood] succeeds brilliantly in reflecting the online experience, but at a cost: The anecdotes that start out as wry or clever eventually turn overly punchy, like a friend who forgot to drink water between shots. If this is what she wants, it’s effective but annoying. If I’m in a novel, I want to be in a novel, I kept thinking, not in a Twitter simulation ... Instead of raising new ideas about what constitutes a novel, No One Is Talking About This evokes dread of its long-predicted death ... It’s a shame — to jam all that richness and revelation into the one place a critic dare not spoil, never mind how exquisitely it fits against the narrator’s internet-scrambled psyche ... If No One Is Talking About This is an experiment in form, it’s one that can only be redeemed by conceding its own failure, admitting that it needs at least some of the structure and heart of the traditional novel to dig beneath glib artifice.
emily m. danforth
Rave Los Angeles Times ...there are times when a reader wants nothing more, and nothing less, than an exquisitely plotted, winkingly crafted romp. Plain Bad Heroines, a queer historical meta-novel by Emily Danforth with at least a dozen layers of formal flourish, is joyfully and delightfully middlebrow; I say this with reverence in my tone and adoration in my heart. It’s 600 pages you can read in a weekend, a supersized Slurpee that will satiate you and leave behind a sugar high ... There are direct asides to the dear reader, George Eliot-esque epigraphs and even ink sketches of bustle-skirted ladies in distress. It’s also — to use a word rarely employed in high praise — fun ... There is no literary embellishment in which Danforth won’t indulge. Her narrator winks at us from the footnotes ... In less dexterous hands, this sort of high-camp homage — which pops up perennially from novelists as varied as Susanna Clarke, Marisha Pessl and Reif Larsen — could fail spectacularly ... She’s gifted at braiding characterization, suspenseful plotting and frequent injections of flat-out terror. And she knows that piling it on past the breaking point is a formal innovation all its own ... What’s more, Danforth writes potent women ... The sheer queerness of it all is exhilarating. No stock lesbians, and no coyness. Every major character is a queer woman — every last one — and each of them wears her sexuality differently, an idea that shouldn’t feel revelatory in 2020 but annoyingly doe ... It’s successfully played on and inverted the myth of a book as a haunted object, and at the same time made us afraid that even closing the book won’t prevent a zealous little insect from crawling out of its pages.
Don Delillo
Pan Vulture DeLillo’s The Silence is downright skinny, only 116 pages, with typeface and margins a middle-schooler might use to pad his term paper ... The Silence digresses, and I mean this quite literally, into a series of overlapping, stream-of-consciousness monologues ... What makes The Silence such a letdown is that if the future is coming for us — and it is — it’s DeLillo who I most expected to nail the tenor of how that feels ... DeLillo is so obsessed with what his characters might theorize about the disconnecting world that he forgets they might feel some things, too. They’re malfunctioning holograms, sputtering their lines, supposed avatars from the future who fail to pass themselves off as human.
Rumaan Alam
Rave The New Yorker ... enthralling ... Leave the World Behind is a coy little thing: a disaster novel without the disaster ... In most literature of this ilk, the disaster, whether rising seas or a virus, is a force of narrative tension: the reader is keen to learn how humans move from a time of upheaval to one of stability. Alam never gets there; upheaval is all his characters have. His achievement is to see that his genre’s traditional arc, which relies on the idea of aftermath, no longer makes sense.
Martin Amis
Pan Vulture Amis has written a novel so interested in Amis that its cover—a black-and-white portrait of, you guessed it, Amis—feels less like a postmodern joke and more like a warning sign ... admittedly, Amis’s life has been rather eventful. He flits about from topic to topic ... much of Inside Story is regurgitated from Amis’s other work, especially his memoir Experience ... But if you thought that Amis, now 73, might look over his wild life with fresh eyes, you’d be laughably wrong. He especially hasn’t evolved when it comes to recognizing that women, too, might have brains and creative talent ... Amis is still able to charm (when he isn’t calling an old girlfriend \'tits on a stick\'), but that charm is his only weapon, and the shine’s gone off over the past 40 years ... [one of those] lazy books, born of...novelists trotting out diluted versions of their greatest hits.
Susanna Clarke
Rave Los Angeles Times ... a little imp of a book that packs a punch several times its (relatively) meager page count. I’d worried that, all these years later, Clarke might have grown timid, seeking a breather from all the grand historical world-building. Instead, she creates a dazzling world of infinite fascination inside the musings of one very simple man ... The world of Piranesi is built entirely from scratch, at first as devoid of life as an Escher sketch but gradually filled in until it’s as rich as a second universe ... Piranesi is a portrait of us as young readers, swept into a story and happy to stay there. \'Keep it up!\' the novel seems to murmur in our ears, \'read, read, read!\' ... In Clarke’s world, we are more than an observer. If we’re reading Piranesi’s words, then we must be subject to the magic as well.
Charlotte McConaghy
Positive The Los Angeles Times ... this is a climate novel, a species of fiction that is too-little-loved (perhaps because it’s too frequently patronizing) but by no means endangered in 2020. And yet this is a unique specimen: If worry is the staple emotion that most climate fiction evokes in its readers, Migrations — the novelistic equivalent of an energizing cold plunge — flutters off into more expansive territory ... McConaghy has a gift for sketching out enveloping, memorable characters using only the smallest of strokes, which makes Franny’s time with the crew of the Saghani the novel’s strongest and most vibrant thread ... References to Moby Dick offer up Migrations as a kind of bookend to that early American industrial-era parable. What better way to demonstrate the logical endpoint of mankind’s rapaciousness than to cast out little reminders of Ahab’s crew spearing and stripping scores of whales for profit and pleasure? ... McConaghy can’t stop heaping on steaming piles of sadness, as if without an overstuffed grab-bag of tragedy a character has no basis for her pain ... This is a novel that doles out heartbreaking events as twists (like the will-she-won’t-she of her planned suicide), but Migrations doesn’t need them; it has so much else to offer ... The specter of the wilderness haunts this novel ... McConaghy has an eye for the webs of connectivity that humans have ditched in favor of their own supposed development, and Migrations, rather than struggle to convince readers of some plan of environmental action, instead puts humans in their place.
Elena Ferrante
Mixed Los Angeles Times ... bizarrely, rather run-of-the-mill, like her take on an after-school special ... You need to understand a bit about Naples for The Lying Life of Adults to really make sense ... The quest for total honesty is one only a teenager could pursue with a straight face ... There’s no facet of teenage rebellion that Ferrante leaves unnarrated...At some middle point, the story picks up steam...And here Ferrante’s rigorous, undaunted prose comes to the fore, culminating in a Sebaldian two-page-long rant of a sentence that comes falling out of Giovanna’s father’s mouth ... The Lying Life of Adults can’t sit still, and Giovanna wriggles through so many abrupt reversals that while Ferrante captures the flightiness of adolescence, her narrative sometimes sputters and stumbles ... I’m delighted by the idea of a bildungsroman that doesn’t automatically launch its protagonist into an adult life of wisdom and serenity. What makes Giovanna so special is the way she deems grownups no smarter or more emotionally adaptable than the most hormonally motivated teens. But at the end of The Lying Life of Adults, there’s little to indicate whether even Giovanna has taken notice of who she herself is ... Ferrante is still Ferrante — her characters have wide-spanned souls and so does Naples, exuding the smells of the sea and gasoline and baking crust. But without a counterbalance, her own brilliant friend, poor Giovanna drifts. I wanted to see her tethered to something, anything, even if it was her own unsteadiness. Perhaps Ferrante is saving that for a sequel.
Natasha Trethewey
Rave Los Angeles Times ...transcendent ... She couldn’t save her mother, but she could reanimate her memory and welcome her spirit back into her life ... There is a twinning of documentary evidence and personal memory in much of Trethewey’s poetry, as in Memorial Drive ... Memorial Drive is a monument with a name ... Memorial Drive essentially consists of three parts, dotted with small inflection points and snippets of dreams. It bears the contours of tortured memory: natural detours and unexpected chasms, vivid flashes and black holes ... The book eschews the common memoiristic route of picking apart the aftermath of trauma ... the closing chapters of Memorial Drive are almost entirely in Gwendolyn’s words; the grace and polish of the poet’s voice recedes to reveal a monument with an iron core ... It’s an astonishing decision — to cede the stage to her mother’s words, unedited and practically bleeding on the page. It’s an act of preservation and a reckoning.
Lynn Steger Strong
Rave Vulture ... a defining novel of our age of left-behind families ... By the time of its publication this July, four months into unemployment numbers so obscene that they’ll be meaningless, Want doesn’t feel so far off from the lives many Americans have been living every day ... an ideal sample of how to produce fiction that is timely and timeless ... It’s appeal right now may have something to do with the ways it thoughtfully plays with autofiction, darting in with details from Strong’s real life, then knowingly inflating and reshaping plot points, a wise reimagining of what we can do with our own stories ... But it’s also due to the prose — liquid, tender, fluttering — which keeps this story easy, perhaps too easy, to read. It’s an odd pleasure — a difficult story that is winningly told. You’ll feel guilty for enjoying it as much as you do.
Stephanie Danler
Mixed The New York Times Book Review In her carefully concocted but unfermented new memoir...the ensuing portrait Danler composes of herself resembles a Cubist Picasso, broken into bits and incongruously reassembled ... a literary It Girl...[Danler\'s] success story barely figures into Stray, despite the fact that the book is primarily occupied with her mind-set in those post-book-deal years. Danler never explicitly refutes the charmed image; she simply dips us in and out of enough familial screaming matches and self-destructive decisions that any previous assumptions about her blessedness melt away ... \'I’m a ruthless performer of likability,\' she writes at one point. \'I come from a long line of charismatic liars,\' she cheerfully admits at another. But she doesn’t go far beyond mere acknowledgment. Where, I kept wondering, is the moment that takes this story from recollection to something she has disassembled and futzed with and zealously turned over in her mind, until it has eventually taken on a brand-new shape? It’s such a thrill to watch a writer open up her greediest thoughts, to slice open little pockets of her skin and root around underneath her flesh. But disclosure is not revelation. She needn’t stitch herself back up...but it’s best to make sure that the blood lost will be worth it.
Rufi Thorpe
Positive The Los Angeles Times ... full of verve and sketched in colors as vibrant as a Tilt-A-Whirl David Hockney landscape ... Thorpe inverts the more common tale of an impoverished sufferer who is momentarily saved or mourned by a richer, more stable friend. The result is revelatory ... Can a 30-something white female author really nail the intricacies of a 16-year-old queer teen?...This 30-something white female critic can’t decide, though I know charismatic, empathetic writing when I see it. What undoubtedly works here is Thorpe’s portrait of teenage ostracism ... Thorpe writes convincingly about the intricacies of teenage hierarchy and the endless varieties of torture that the young can inflict on one other. She illustrates the performativity of status cleverly.
Lily King
Rave The Los Angeles Times Yes, both of the love interests are writers, but this smooth, deliberate chronicle of creation keeps the men in their place and Casey firmly rooted at the center of her own story. Instead of casting her as a woman torn between archetypes of male creativity, Writers & Lovers portrays her as a woman in thrall to her own generative processes, a devotee to the art of (her own) attention ... This isn’t an exploration of what it means to be a writer; it’s an exploration of what it means to write. And King’s prose, simple, clear and accretive, mimics in form what she’s conveying — that art is an accumulation of details and that, in the IRL present, close attention is slipping away from us with every swipe of the screen ... What’s most refreshing is that after a spate of novels and memoirs that fix a female creator in reference to a great man, Casey emerges as a woman who builds her literary identity out of parts all her own ... while describing the intense effort of putting words in order, feels effortless, or at least like an unconscious natural process. King’s sentences are like layers of silt and pebbles condensed into sedimentary rock — distinct from one another but fitted into an indestructible whole. And she pulls off a considerable trick: she convinces us that the miracle of attention, that coveted capability we all imagine slipped from our grasps as the new millennium dawned, must still lie somewhere inside writers, even if their fingers are swiping as often as typing. After all, in the year 2020, she’s produced this, a classic bildungsroman for struggling artists everywhere.
Jenny Offill
Positive Vulture Formally, Weather is closer to Dept. of Speculation, Offill’s second novel and the break-out critical hit she published in 2014. Both novels intersperse narrative momentum with anecdotes, quotes, lists, and, in the case of Weather, a series of email Q&As. It abandons traditional storytelling just as the arc of humanity is hitting its denouement ... Weather isn’t a piece of climate propaganda or the equivalent of a proselytizing nutter come knocking on your door ... despite increasingly dire climate news, the worry is a restricted emotion, kept closeted as if contagious. Weather asks the question, what if we all just let it spill out, and revelled in the relief that comes with acceptance?
Kate Elizabeth Russell
Positive Los Angeles Times ... exquisite, often nauseating ... isn’t just fighting the infection; it’s tracing the pathogen back to its source, tracing its spread from unsuspecting woman to unsuspecting woman ... simultaneously specific and universal ... anatomizes most sharply the rip in time that keeps women replaying and relitigating their own culpability in their assaults, especially when those violations happen behind the walls of an institution that vows to protect them ... Ultimately, what makes My Dark Vanessa so hypnotic is that it provides Vanessa with what so many abused women want — the chance to admit that they have desires too. Readers might hate her for what they see as her complicity, her refusal to take up the mantle of victimhood in a way they can easily sloganize. I don’t think she’d care.
Rick Moody
Pan The New York Times Book Review Rick Moody wants you to know that he knows. He knows that he has a reputation as \'out of control and somewhat mentally ill.\' He knows that in his first marriage he \'reproduced many of the features of the bad writerly marriages\' he knew about \'from reading all the biographies.\' He knows that he has spent a good portion of his adult life on \'a spree of self-centeredness, moral fuzziness and destructive sexual abandon.\' Alas, what Rick Moody doesn’t know is that his self-awareness is all too limited, that in this memoir he has relayed a story so devoid of insight and full of ego it’s essentially mummified ... It’s true that Moody...had a tumultuous year, that the pain he endured sounds heavy. But The Long Accomplishment seems likely to prove most interesting only to Rick Moody, since it is largely interested only in Rick Moody, despite the fact that the calamities he discusses largely happen to the women around him ... In this memoir about his own suffering, Moody often dwells on the experiences of women who aren’t allowed to have their own say. His own stake in these difficulties and tragedies isn’t enough to help this rambling monologue achieve liftoff ... It’s wonderful that he got all this out of his system and onto the page, but it’s a shame he felt the need to share it with the rest of us.
Lara Williams
Positive Vulture If you’ve ever had to suffer through a woman talking about how she’s being \'so bad\' for eating a chocolate-chip cookie, Lara Williams’s debut will leave you panting and ravenous ... In its unselfconscious splendor, the supper club (and the book) tackles age-old questions about the female form with a delightfully 21st-century voice.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Pan Vulture \"Vivian, who begins the novel as a naïve, silly 19-year-old and ends it a slightly wiser octogenarian, is a blank, a TV turned to static—fuzzy, mildly distracting, and ultimately an annoyance. Why an accomplished novelist like Gilbert would so blithely expose the hole where her protagonist’s personality ought to be, I don’t know. But Vivian is dull, and, what’s worse, there is nothing intriguing about her dullness ... Vivian is all feathers and glitter—a sparkly story stitched onto a formless narrative garment that forgets all the lessons Gilbert has learned (and imparted) about the so-called plight of single, sexually voracious women ... [The book offers] a glimpse into the inner workings of the mid-century New York theater world that is as engaging as all the sequined gowns might suggest. But City of Girls then skips willy-nilly through the rest of Vivian’s life, compressing decades into sentences and lingering on like a comatose patient without a living will. She has sex, makes friends, sews a bit, walks the city, and remains shut off to her own interiority all the while ... The problem here is that Gilbert writes as if having a ton of sex...is a replacement for a personality ... This novel is simply an idea walking around pretending to be a fleshed-out character study ... This sex is as meaningless for the reader as it is for Vivian.
Philippe Besson, trans. by Molly Ringwald
Positive Vulture Is it autofiction? ... Whatever it is, the story — imbued with the sprightliness of youth, the nostalgia of age, the deep internal echoes of regret — is all true, even if it’s not true ... this synopsis reeks of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name... where Aciman’s novel flashes in the heat and salt of summer, Besson’s is soaked in heavy, sodden gray ... Lie With Me unpeels like a springy orange ... Lie With Me is single-minded in its focus, spare but lucid in its descriptions ... The intimacy is ripe on the page; this is a novel is horny for itself ... somewhere shy of the halfway point, Lie With Me veers sharply into the nether lands of ironic quasi-autobiography. In direct asides, Besson press-gangs the reader into the role of confessional priest ... Besson is never as transparent as Rachel Cusk or Catherine Millet. Lie With Me is closer on the metafiction scale to far more playful works like Pale Fire ... By concealing the line between artifice and truth, Besson preserves it ... Ultimately, these games are not a distraction from the romance and nostalgia but very much the point. Think about it: How much of our own teenage years do we invent? ... Besson’s method sucks you in as an accomplice to this kind of necessary self-delusion, and offers a tantalizing third way of considering our own pasts ... moving and graceful.
Michael Knight
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Knight doesn’t use all those tightly corralled, hormonal bodies to stir up narrative tension. Instead, Briarwood is low-key, even placid; it floats from event to event without ever raising its pulse ... Knight unfortunately diverts our attention with two in loco parentis adults ... Both are given plenty of space for their own musings and worries, but their presence smothers the story’s low-burning flame. A bildungsroman — even a spare one — needs to give its heroine a wide berth so readers can watch her unfold ... In a small novel packed with side plots, I was greedy for more of Lenore and Eugenia.
Katharine Smyth
Positive Vulture \"All the Lives could have read as gush; instead, Smyth reaffirms the value of novels as existential guideposts ... Smyth’s beautiful debut is more tightly strung together than you’d imagine a memoir-cum-literary-requiem could be. It is innovative, like Woolf, in its power of association and its ability to transform the intangible nature of grief into a warm, graspable, fleshy mass ... Where All the Lives We Ever Lived really makes its mark is in its living embodiment of an author and her work.\
Leila Slimani Trans. by Sam Taylor
Pan Vulture \" [The book is] a thriller only if you consider dozens of unsatisfying sexual trysts conducted with all the titillation of a Chia Pet commercial thrilling. Adèle is, at best, an oxymoronically sex-filled dud. At worst, it’s offensively oblivious to the idea that female characters in novels have, in fact, had sex before ... I’ve never been so bored by kinky descriptions of cunnilingus or thrusting hips ... Still worse, Slimani’s prose is a parade of the flat and predictable; nothing is artfully concealed or circumspect.\
Megan Abbott
Rave Slate ...[a] fiery new novel ... Give Me Your Hand could have been a standard-issue peek into the secret lives of American teenagers—the usual chaos and drama and hormones, just with higher stakes and body counts. But it’s much more than that. By springing forward into Kit and Diane’s adult lives and fleshing out the messy psychological ramifications of decade-plus-old traumas, she digs into the gravitas of adolescent emotional wounds ... Abbott’s earlier novels are mostly structured as typical whodunits. But in Give Me Your Hand, we know both the crime and the perpetrator early on. There’s nothing to solve. Instead, it’s a slower-paced Match Point–esque anxiety fest, a caustic nightmare about our youthful bad decisions.
Barbara Kingsolver
Pan The New Republic The fate of the monarchs is at the center of Flight Behavior’s narrative; they create, for Dellarobia, a newfound awareness of the world, and also pitch her into existential and metaphysical turmoil. For all Dellarobia’s anguish, however, Flight Behavior too often eschews the psychological in favor of the political. Each twist of the plot—which is mostly a series of near-catastrophes concerning the butterflies—feels designed to convince readers of our planet’s impending doom. This is not a frivolous mission, and there is no reason why a piece of literature cannot also serve a political need. But a subtle hand is required to stitch together literature and politics. Kingsolver’s needle is blunt.
Allison Amend
Positive The New York Times Book Review This isn’t yet another novel about a woman 'finding herself' in the wild; it’s an endearing chronicle of female friendship and evolution in the early 20th century...Amend displays her talent for making solitary humans the most alluring animals among blue-footed boobies, great frigatebirds and the rest of Darwin’s magnificent crew. On an island bursting with nature’s most remarkable creatures, humanity’s depthless ­capacity for loneliness crows most keenly.