RaveBookforumA resurrection animated by loss and its affects, from shock to grief, anger to guilt. As a text, it is promiscuously digressive, polyvocal, and sort of messy, calling on those who encounter it to ask: How should a grief memoir be? ... I’ve tried to meet it first as a text, which is to say, as a knot of language I am, at least in part, tasked with undoing. But I also respect its work as the testament of a fellow sufferer, someone whose dignity and grief should and must command my attention ... Molly isn’t, and could never be, the “truth” of Molly Brodak. It’s Butler’s truth: one among many ... Brodak’s story leaks beyond the bounds of Molly.
Annie Ernaux, trans. Alison L. Strayer
RaveBookforumA romance on its face, The Young Man gathers singularity and texture as an account of manifold transits: between youth and age, living and dying, in and out of passion, passing through menopause, and from Ernaux’s impoverished beginnings through her ascension into the literary bourgeoisie ... Ernaux, in turn, intermixes these ensouled sediments with the specters of the personal—her memories, the stuff of one woman’s experience.
Rachel Ingalls
PositiveThe BafflerIn Helen’s malaise, I cannot help but hear echoes of Betty Friedan’s famous diagnosis of the American housewife’s \"problem with no name\" ... In Ingalls’s free-market take on Bluebeard, the fruit of female knowledge is neither damnation nor self-determination, but leverage ... As sharp as this particular line of critique is, the narrative refuses neat closures.
Lucy Ives
RaveBookforumA stream-of-consciousness indictment of the academy—conversant with #MeToo-era sexual politics—isn’t unrecognizable in the contemporary literary field. In fact, Ives’s previous novel, Loudermilk, lampooned MFA programs and the kooks who people them. But she’s doing something stranger here. After its first forty pages, Life Is Everywhere turns heel ... The novel we thought we’d been reading—#MeToo scandal rocks university!—disassembles itself, becomes something else, and something else again ... Life Is Everywhere formally literalizes Le Guin’s carrier bag: texts cite further referents, self-divide, replicate, and undercut one another. The narrative recursively dehisces itself ... What fascinates about Ives’s maneuvering is these interstices and echoic functions are where the psychic and narrative excesses of trauma—its \'untellable too muchness—are reckoned with ... Trauma is a haunting that exceeds the horizons of storytelling; rape severs the subject from her body, disorients temporality. Ives represents this as a formal problem, attempting to narrativize trauma again and again, allowing these attempts to be messy, to falter, to fail.
Annie Ernaux, trans. by Alison L. Strayer
RaveThe BafflerTo read Ernaux often feels this way: in her exhaustive reckonings with her own life, one finds a search for lost time that exposes the unstable bounds and incoherencies of meaning in our own narratives of its passing. In a moment, as Ernaux has written, when technology and socio-digital media have rendered the \'obscurity of previous centuries\' obsolete and made it so that those of us still living are beginning to be \'resurrected ahead of time,\' her meticulous campaign of recording a \'total novel\' of life imagines narrative beyond the vicissitudes of temporality, deliberately attendant to the unreliable, stuttering nature of remembrance. Ernaux imparts on her reader a sense that memory, like any other knowledge system, is an infinitely changeable field, one given astonishing density by, but not reducible to, the individual experience ... This is the disarming closeness one encounters when brushing up against her work. Though oriented through the needle’s eye of her particular world, her nearly sociological sensibility and investment in generating collective feeling dress her accounts of one woman’s life in uncanny familiarity ... The scope of Getting Lost is narrow, utterly transfixed by events of an intimate order. These intimacies become a kind of mythos, hyper-saturated, as if passion were being presented to Ernaux in Technicolor for the very first time ... From these humble beginnings, then, Ernaux’s unabashed delight in her own corporeality and the decadent descriptions of her pleasure in Getting Lost appear as insurgent thrills ... That we again face an era when the gains of feminist and sexual liberationist movements are being reactionarily regressed, Ernaux’s erotic manifesto—and her radical exhortation of the value of foregrounding women’s personal narratives in a public and political context—has perhaps never been more essential in relation to ongoing demands for bodily integrity and autonomy.
Ottessa Moshfegh
RaveThe ObserverMoshfegh is one of our most thrilling chroniclers of the abject—she is a delighted documentarian of all the excrescences and defilements of the body which force us to reckon with our inevitable decay, or what the French philosopher Julia Kristeva might term our future-deadness. Perhaps the great evolution at hand in Moshfegh’s ongoing corpus is the fact of Lapvona’s rather full-throated politicism. This is at heart a fable of haves and have nots, of the ways violent psychologies and apparatuses of exploitation—of the poor, of resources, of women’s bodies, of the land and earth itself—constitute a significant stratum, if not the very bedrock, of the human condition ... This is in its way Moshfegh’s comedy of errors: boundaries of class, gender, physical ability, and faith between subjects are tested by the plot’s rapid-paced orchestration of narrative musical chairs, revealing such divisions to have always been, if not materially illusory, certainly not a matter of metaphysical substance. The particularity of any given human in Lapvona is null; even Villiam is in the end poisoned by a richer lord, with Marek installed in turn in his place ... A cynical conclusion for cynical times, perhaps. Preparing for this review, I confess I found unanticipated sympathy with the haters, in rationale if not in feeling. Crowded into the same basket, the novels all together do seem hostile, do have a certain smug encounter with the reader who looks to fiction for pleasure or beauty, do engineer an encompassing philosophy that at the very least pals about with nihilism. Moshfegh’s characters and narratives insist, in the end, that humans are, at base, a rotten, self-involved sort, handmaids to our own annihilation because we are unable (or worse yet, do not care) to parse the interests of the individual from the wellbeing of the collective...Hers is surely a hard-eyed view. But the fact of her cynicism is not reason alone to dismiss her sly achievements, the revelations wriggling beneath the rock of her fictional hells ... Lapvona is a witty, vicious novel, frothing at the mouth at the opportunity to indict all the worst habits and orientations of our contemporary ... allows Moshfegh to sidestep the imaginative failures which have scarred so many present-tense literary “political” novels. It instead refracts its representations of class inequality, climate catastrophe, reproductive rights, and #metoo through ever-so-slightly defamiliarized shapes. Our terrible modernity looks back at us as if from the face of a convex mirror: recognizable but not dated from the jump, not beholden to the inverse politics of the reactionary or the cringe-purveyor, not cloyingly obligated to the logic and language of social media ... Moshfegh isn’t rooting about in her bag of tricks to reveal a lighter touch; her fairy tale hews nearer the horrors of the Grimm than the moralities of the Anderson lineage. Most fascinating is that, as Moshfegh yet refuses to adjust her set, the world seems finally to have caught up with her darkness ... It isn’t, Moshfegh insists, that we can’t do anything to reverse our imminent doom; it’s simply that we are too fucking monstrous to try.
Yuko Tsushima, trans. by Geraldine Harcourt
PositiveBookforumIn its attentiveness to the labor and tangible costs of child-rearing, Woman Running elides sentimental fantasies of motherhood. Tsushima instead treats maternity as an economic and social institution—that is, as a material rather than a philosophical condition. Exhaustively indexing the cost of a stay on the delivery ward, of a studio apartment, of a medical procedure, of baby formula and nurseries—or of taxis taken to and from jobs that don’t pay the bills—reflects a delicately politicized fixation on quantifiable data. The novel’s blow-by-blow account of Takiko’s accumulation of debt renders unignorable the insidiousness and unnavigability of the system for single working mothers ... Tsushima meticulously builds the novel’s dualisms—urban and wild, social and solitary, mind and body—only to complicate or entirely unravel the logic of opposition that binds them.
Edith Schloss ed. Mary Venturini
PositiveVulture... an intricate micro-history of an unprecedentedly energized and interconnected artistic community: that of New York’s postwar loft scene, where Schloss too found herself living, working, and family-making for nearly two decades ... Archiving the past is melancholic by nature, but Schloss was no sad sack. The Loft Generation is fast-paced and deeply funny ... The book begins in medias res, tossing the reader into the postwar mêlée of a rapidly shapeshifting New York. The city was and remains the sort of place a girl might sever herself from her past, if she desires. And Schloss is strategic, cagey almost, about which intimacies she exposes. The book is punctured by gaps and elisions; often our sense of her gathers texture from what is left out ... Perhaps there are also stories we no longer tell ourselves in order to live. The moment illuminates one of The Loft Generation’s broader sensibilities: that some privacies are better left alone; some narratives are not to be granted eternity in the written word.
Marlowe Granados
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThrough her portrait of Isa and Gala and the crowd that swirls around them, Granados broadly satirizes the cultural class of model-artists, fuckboy bartenders, hip gallerists, and secretly wealthy layabouts of Brooklyn and Manhattan ... With finger-licking delight, she reveals the hollowness at the center of the matryoshka doll that is the city’s social networking apparatus. And in unknotting and taxonomizing the navigational rules of this labyrinthine apparatus...the author makes the classic novel of manners our cocaine contemporary, revising its narratives to insinuate that, in matters of social (if not economic and structural) power, there is, in large part, no there there ... Bracingly bridling at our expectations, it revels in an erotics of excess, while never losing its shrewd observational eye ... like Babitz, Granados understands that the power of an effective writer lies in her capacity to \'change the boundaries of heaven.\' And like any seasoned party girl, Isa knows that half the pleasure of the party is in the retelling.
Kate Zambreno
PositiveThe NationZambreno fluently interrogates how the traumatic specificities of the individually ill body signal and converse with a broader illness in the body politic. Her examination of the consequences of structural violence in our intimate lives—powerfully punctuated by recursive anxieties about living as an uninsured or otherwise politically \'dispensable\' person in a world that will handily divest itself of responsibility for such people and bodies—stresses (in a phrase lately recited ad infinitum) that the cruelty is the point ... What sets To Write apart from her past work might be the urgency with which it is rendered, knitting Guibert’s plague years into our immediate and actionable present ... Despite the righteous rage that suffuses the text, it would be a mistake to call To Write a polemic; rather, it is a kind of culmination that Zambreno’s writing has been working toward. Her treatment of two plagues and the racial justice protests of summer 2020, as well as an account of pregnancy and child care under medicalized and economic duress, finds Zambreno at her most political—as well as perhaps her most hopeful.
