PositiveThe New YorkerCan be dense with details, but when I read Murray B. Peppard’s Paths Through the Forest (1971), a more approachable biography of the Grimms, I found myself missing Schmiesing’s unrulier thickets of Prussian bureaucrats and long asides about German grammar. Hers is hearty German fare. It also presents findings that complicate the brothers’ image as ethnographic purists.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
PositiveThe New YorkerBrodesser-Akner is a keen observer of class aspiration as a survival method ... Writing about money is Brodesser-Akner’s bread and butter.
Claire Messud
PositiveThe New YorkerMessud lets the messiness of reality overflow the neatness of fiction ... Brims with details ... One could accuse Messud of treating her family’s history like a family heirloom, which is to say, over-delicately ... The Cassars cling to an idealized memory of Algeria that’s untroubled by reality, the tree of knowledge unshaken, the apple still intact, but Messud trusts her readers to bite down.
Sierra Greer
PanThe New YorkerGreer sounds a different alarm, warning that A.I. could conserve oppressive gender norms that we should be working to delete rather than uploading to the cloud ... Now that A.I. companions are real products rather than surrogates for exploited workers—and, in fact, are manufactured by those workers—Greer’s attempt at a feminist parable about A.I. short-circuits ... Miss[es] the mark by avoiding the market in which our romance with tech unfolds.
Molly Roden Winter
PanThe New YorkerRoden Winter is writing in unstinting detail about the mechanics of her marriage’s transition from monogamous to open (some sex on the side) to fully polyamorous (in which couples are allowed to have full-fledged concurrent relationships). She holds nothing back, even when she should ... Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of More is how closed-minded it feels about many things besides open marriage. Divorce, for instance ... While I appreciated her lack of shame about desire (including the desire for validation), I couldn’t help wishing that she possessed the same candor around the economics of her marriage ... The memoir takes a long time to finish, not unlike a bad Ashley Madison hookup, but not before Roden Winter offers closing remarks in defense of open marriage. She echoes the common refrain expressed by proponents of polyamory that the life style represents an abundance-oriented mind-set, whereas monogamy is a symptom of scarcity culture ... It’s worth remembering that revolutions don’t fail; they get co-opted—often by people who can afford co-ops.
Marie Ndiaye, trans. by Jordan Stump
RaveThe New YorkerA story of class conflict embedded within a psychological thriller, is scattered with interpretive hints, clues to the crimes of contemporary French society. Though it starts with a date on the calendar, the story works like a map ... In this elegantly layered tale of social stratification, NDiaye takes us through a maze of alleyways, backstreets, and elegant foyers, until we are dizzy from trying to chart the course of upward mobility and eager for a place to rest—a way out rather than in ... NDiaye treats politics and the material conditions it creates as forces that lead to unpredictable, idiosyncratic outcomes. She never lets her characters be flattened to make a point.
Jesmyn Ward
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThe depths of hell make up the very surface here, but all too often the novel comes across as just that: superficial. It aspires to the epic, but gets lost in a morass of allusions and strained metaphors, never living up to its promise to look deeply at our roots ... Language is an issue in this novel ... This novel felt like a draft, both overworked and under-edited.
J. M. Coetzee
RaveThe New Yorker[Gives] readers little in the way of escapist details about Barcelona. There are no gaudy mentions of Gaudi or knowing references to vermouth hour; the Circle takes Witold out for an Italian meal, not for tapas. Beatriz and the pianist converse briefly in stilted English, neither’s first choice of language. The incoherence is adjacent to silence, as Coetzee pushes his signature sparseness to the limits of intelligibility ... Coetzee muddies the waters of national purity with his trademark clarity ... The book approaches the politics of Polishness in true Coetzee fashion: with elegant elision, at such an angle as to be almost imperceptible ... What was absent in the original that could be found only in translation? The novel presents words and what we desire to say as two points on a map, as far apart as the poles. To confront the distance between them is daunting, but love pushes us along.
Emma Cline
RaveThe NationCline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat. It’s a novel driven by the suspense of what it takes to survive—a suspense that can take the pleasure out of anything, even a day at the beach ... Alex is a quiet heroine—almost like a mist of a person, barely there ... Cline does a pitch-perfect job of keeping Alex’s understanding of herself in sync with the reader’s. We are deprived of much of her backstory because Alex is someone who prefers not to dwell ... Cline avoids a simplistic eat-the-rich story on a number of levels ... Cline has written a beach read for the people who clean up once the party is over.
John Le Carre
PositiveNew YorkerLe Carré corresponds with an eclectic array of recipients ... The correspondence that makes up A Private Spy is capacious in theme, but a steady through line is work. These are, for all intents and purposes, business letters. Even the personal ones are mostly to do with his career.
Percival Everett
RaveThe Atlantic... the latest zany masterpiece from the novelist Percival Everett ... our revenge seeker would seem to be both misguided and insincere. Over time, he degrades his sympathetic origin story by treating it as little more than plot filler, trauma that needs to be there to set up the kinds of melodramatic one-liners that we expect from our movie villains ... Over time, his motivations come to seem as hollow and empty as his weapon of choice ... No one understands the slippery nature of identity like a spy, and Everett relishes the devices of the spy thriller, wielding Bond tropes as if they were flame-throwing bagpipes or cigarettes laced with cyanide ... This is the fantasy of Black capitalism, and in Dr. No, Everett has given us an antagonist up to the task of representing its delusions—a villain who thinks he is a hero, a savior who shows up empty-handed.
Andrey Kurkov, trans. by Boris Dralyuk
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewKurkov’s translator, Boris Dralyuk, renders the warmth of Sergey’s inner voice from the original Russian without letting the earnestness creep into the saccharine ... In a novel about neutrality and so-called gray zones, the Russian characters in Grey Bees come off to me as eerily cold, almost monstrous...as if the actions of the Russian government were in some ways reflective of a deeper national character. It recalls Kurkov’s professed view of Russian and Ukrainian people as fundamentally different, each with a unique \'mentality\' ... Any suggestion of syncretism or co-influence feels tantamount to treason.
Vladimir Sorokin
RaveHarper\'sTelluria incorporates dramatically different literary styles...Alongside these more politically charged chapters, there is a fantasy tale involving drug-pushing dwarves and a rewriting of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl—\'I saw the worst minds of my generation torn out of black madness by tellurium\'...Sorokin’s interest in form becomes less about genre and more about registers of speech; he inserts elements of Old Church Slavonic to imbue the setting with its medieval atmosphere, but also to show a language that should hold the highest authority—a religious one—being mangled by political opportunists, warmongers, and the simply deranged...Telluria, in its formal eclecticism and beautiful strangeness, reads like a microcosm of Sorokin’s chaotic and genre-spanning career...His disorienting prose forces the mind to react—to focus, to sharpen—and urges us to be on guard against revered forms and the literary conventions of authority...His work reminds us that when people in power talk shit, it is the rest of us who have to eat it.
April White
PositiveThe New RepublicWhite’s history of the Sioux Falls divorce colony is narrated energetically; she draws extensively on press reports from the time, giving the book the gossipy feel and lurid spin characteristic of Gilded Age media. Reading this, you get the sense that Americans used to have more fun with the English language ... Yet White presents these women as revolutionaries only by default; their private desires and personal bank accounts thrust them into national debates about divorce and the public interest ... White focuses on four absurdly rich women whose marriages broke down in fittingly extravagant fashion ... Money is the primary subject of The Divorce Colony; gold-backed dollar bills practically fall out of the pages. In foregrounding excess, White is not being sensationalist but rather intellectually honest, because at its heart, this is a story about rent, and who could afford to pay it for 90 days in Sioux Falls. If The Divorce Colony is wealth porn, it is wealth porn on a mission. In detailing what money makes possible, White gestures at what the lack of money forces women to endure ... These wild stories of marital escape are a reminder, bright and sparkling for those who need it, that when endings are out of reach, so too are new beginnings.
Elif Batuman
PositiveAtlanticEither/Or shares none of the chastity of its predecessor ... It is as if Batuman set out to respond to her detractors and...couldn’t help overachieving in the process. But the sex is not gratuitous ... The novel meanders along as she experiments with sensualism. As Selin bounces from one experience...to the next, Either/Or never gets tied down to any one story line. Batuman is not about to concoct some equivalent to the marriage plot; an aesthetic life necessitates narratological promiscuity ... The sequel is a more explicit künstlerroman than its antecedent ... Either/Or could double as a syllabus. Batuman’s newest narrative is propelled by Selin’s encounters with various works of art ... With the raw sincerity and droll insight into the rarefied world of academia that readers will remember from Batuman’s previous books, Selin recounts her initial toe-dip into hedonism ... One of the criticisms levied at The Idiot was that Selin seemed to lack a political consciousness. However one comes down on the debate over whether literary fiction should be held to such a standard, Either/Or is enriched by Batuman’s decision to raise the stakes of the novel’s central theme ... As for what kind of life is worth reading about, some will no doubt be prompted to wonder just that after closing Either/Or ... Plenty of people might ask themselves why they should bother with a whole novel about an antic undergrad obsessed with the dilemmas of art-making. I confess I felt a tinge of the same vexation ... Perhaps it should be enough to say of reading Either/Or that I enjoyed the experience.
Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewZambra’s novel, the playfully titled Chilean Poet is a lighthearted study of the contemporary Chilean literary scene as its members try to come out from under the shadow of these figures while also clinging to their legacy ... How much you enjoy Chilean Poet will depend on the amount of patience you have for the trend of writer-protagonists, a symptom of the autofictional turn. The stream of poets, journalists and literary types in the novel had me wishing the veterinarian Vicente’s cat is taken to had a bigger story arc. Chilean Poet is most compelling when it situates the minor dramas of the Latin American literati within the broader politics of how that identity has been constructed in the first place ... Chilean Poet treats the thorny topic of collective identity not as tragedy, but as a familial comedy. Its laughs are forged across languages, in sibling-esque back-and-forth, so mutually constituted by both English and Spanish that one happily loses track of any original.
Sheila Heti
PositiveVultureWould it be déclassé to say this funny and moving novel, about a grieving daughter clinging to beauty to dull or even transcend the pain of loss, is both precious and practical, that it could help you? Maybe so, but—who cares? ... Every scene unfolds like a dream sequence. The tone is somber and meditative, appropriate for a book about death, but punctuated by Heti’s wry sense of humor so that it never becomes a dreary read. Quite the opposite ... Pure Colour is an almost incoherent novel, a story unfolding in a world at times illuminated only by Christmas lights. Its strangeness might tire readers used to Heti’s more grounded and linear fiction. The reward is that you could actually emerge feeling better ... Heti’s insistence on keeping utility and care at the forefront of her work—her defense of art as a therapeutic—is perhaps more radical than it gets credit for. It is okay to come to books feeling vulnerable, directionless, and in need of help, she says. Everyone is already doing that. They’re just doing it in secret.
Jennifer Egan
RaveThe New RepublicDense with characters, dizzying with subplots, The Candy House is like a Twitter timeline transposed onto the page, but self-consciously so—a meta novel about the metaverse. By bottling the vitality of the internet and letting it disrupt the flow of narrative, Egan puts on display just how much the internet has changed the way stories unfold in our lives, an exploration she began in Goon Squad. In a world where we know everyone forever, where old flames can be reignited and old wounds reopened with little more than a Facebook \'Memories\' notification, our narratives have lost any clear discernible end point. We have not only lost the plot; we have lost plot, period. Egan never despairs in this chaos; if anything, she revels in the limitlessness it breathes into life; we are all just one push alert away from our own sequels, second chances, redemption stories. As she re-creates the tantalizing disorder of the internet on the page, Egan displays the capaciousness of the novel as a form, making the case for old media in this era of new ... does not dwell on social media or its potentially ill effects long enough to produce anything like ham-fisted critique. Even the concerns about data collection are tinged with marvel that people would give over so much information about themselves simply to listen to a song. The internet-ness of the novel manifests more subtly ... I scribbled in the margin: This is what novels do!
Louise Erdrich
MixedVultureThe first half of the novel is signature Erdrich and then some: righteously funny, magically eclectic, and refreshing in its moral clarity. But then 2020 happened, swelling up the book’s back half with scenes inspired by the pandemic, from its most mundane, panic-shopping details to its twin inflection point: the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer. Erdrich’s treatment of these moments reads as undigested. It reveals an author who believed — as many wanted to — that some seismic shift in race relations could not help but be underway ... The word \'urgent\' is a favorite of book blurbers and reviewers. The Sentence has me rethinking its value ... Although Erdrich sometimes falls into saccharine narratives about people who love to read, she also gets to make some well-placed jokes about autofiction and give us a backdoor peek at herself, in critic mode ... Ultimately, the problem with The Sentence is not that it is set in 2020, but rather that it’s permeated by the false optimism that emerged in the face of multiracial protests, with feel-good resolutions and simplistic narratives about solidarity ... These letdowns are precisely what make The Sentence feel dated. I too wish that the sense of possibility palpable in the air last summer could come back and haunt us. Because the alternative is truly scary.
Amia Srinivasan
RaveThe New RepublicSrinivasan covers a lot of ground: pornography, sex work, Title IX, #MeToo, the racial politics of desirability, the incel movement, student-teacher relationships, carceral feminism ... If the collection has any through line, it is dissatisfaction ... This all might sound dizzying, even overwhelming, but Srinivasan lays out the stakes of these questions with an urgency that forces you to stay with her, to live in the difficulty of the politically inconvenient ... Some readers of The Right to Sex [might] feel unsated, hungry for clearer choices about how to live a feminist life. Well, that is the point ... Each individual essay in this collection is complex, requiring an exegesis beyond what the scope of a single book review can handle, but certain moments stand out to me as impossible not to highlight ... I felt that Srinivasan was careful to disentangle ideas from action, and laid out some startling information about the unequal policing of pornography and sex work ... On any given page, Srinivasan will leave you feeling convinced she has found a way out, only to pull the rug out from under you; whenever she says \'but,\' one wants to duck. Though far from exasperation, I felt relieved—even hopeful—that someone is asking the hard questions in public without asking for anything as absurd as a single answer.
Andrew D. Kaufman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewKaufman recounts Anna’s agony in scenes as gut-wrenching as any we might encounter in her husband’s novels, and even Dostoyevsky’s most ardent fans will find themselves asking if the relationship, despite making it possible for him to finish some of his most celebrated works, was worth it ... Dostoyevsky was ferociously antisemitic, as Kaufman, refreshingly, makes no attempt to downplay ... Kaufman is sympathetic to both his subjects. He does not want to judge Anna for her choices, especially because women then had so few. (Russian women would not be able to secure divorces easily until the Bolshevik Revolution.) He affirms that being the partner of a great Russian writer would have been meaningful to her in multiple ways, including as a patriot. Perhaps we should regard Anna’s life itself as an X-ray, a high-energy beam that illuminates a stark truth: that for a woman marriage — then and even now — is always a bit of a gamble.
Sally Rooney
MixedThe New Republic... decidedly less readable novel than we are used to from Rooney. If her first novel, Conversations With Friends, and Normal People could be gobbled up in a single sitting, Beautiful World, Where Are You actively resists the politics of easy consumption, perhaps seeking some kind of moral victory in what some might consider artistic defeat ... a certain concreteness to the discussions of labor that unfold between characters ... This point about culture is an important one, as the depiction of working-class culture is one way in which this novel disappoints considerably, though perhaps not surprisingly. Across Rooney’s body of work, working-class characters rise up through society by showcasing their strong interpretive powers, as they engage astutely with classic works of fiction or the fine arts ... This moment with Felix and dog is, however, a rare instance of \'love and care\' in the novel that felt convincing to me. The other couples come across like a thought experiment in class relations that got rushed into production because Eileen and Alice were anxious about turning 30. As the heroines capitulate to genre expectations, so, too, does the novel, leaving us with a conventional bourgeois story that wants us to know it considered the alternatives, but decided to go with something a little more, well—marketable.
Alexandra Kleeman
RaveVultureKleeman takes the water wars of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and updates them for our era of severe droughts and unending wildfires, giving us a slick neo-noir where the central crime is neither murder nor blackmail but climate change ... As global warming makes a mockery of our timescales for dystopia, this novel is a reminder that, pretty soon, we will not have a choice between real things and whatever approximations of them will exist on a ruined planet. While Kleeman’s dark humor makes this pill a little easier to swallow, you are still left wondering: What was that I just drank? ... Few writers are more committed to exposing the ridiculousness of everyday consumption ... As the secrets surrounding the liquid start to unravel, the mystery element of the novel begins to feel a bit … damp. In the end, the story behind the conspiracy is surprisingly mundane, especially given the book’s hyperreality and intricate imagery. This mundanity also seems to be Kleeman’s point. Is there really such a thing as a shocking twist under capitalism?
Katie Kitamura
PositiveThe New RepublicA reader who has never interpreted professionally before might find the passages about the \'great chasms lying beneath words\' glamorous and intriguing, but anyone who has had the pleasure will find themselves terrified by the stakes that Kitamura sets up here ... a series of disquieting moments of intimacy ... As the narrator tries to parse the meanings of intimacy in the realms of international politics and European colonialism, she also does so in her personal life, and indeed, one of the most fascinating qualities of the novel is Kitamura’s insistence that everything—from the war on terror to gentrification in the Hague to extramarital affairs—is somehow connected ... Kitamura is still writing about what it means to separate, and comes close here at times to suggesting that, given the destructiveness of human nature, there might be greater harm in proximity than distance. Yet, our narrator knows, as perhaps only an interpreter can, just how impossible it is to break things apart, to regard people and words as islands.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveThe AtlanticThe murky distinction between legality and illegality sits at the core of Harlem Shuffle … Can theft really be a crime, the novel asks us, in a country built on it? … Frustratingly, Ray...remains a pragmatist, never fully disavowing the charms of the Black bourgeoisie—a choice that is of course his right, just as it is Whitehead’s to write a novel devoid of prescriptions. In fact, his refusal might even be considered radical at a moment when readers are turning to Black writers for answers rather than for art. Whitehead follows in a long tradition of Black writers who employ crime fiction subversively, using the genre against itself to expose the hypocrisies of the justice system … Some readers may find the absence of a real police presence in the novel a missed opportunity for social commentary, but others—I’m among them—can appreciate that Whitehead’s omission allows the people in his book to savor the delight that transgression bring … Few of his crooks get off entirely free (the gangsters and the businessmen they represent eventually come knocking). Still, many are given a brief moment to revel in the high of the heist, which is close enough.
Amanda Montell
PositiveThe New RepublicAn empathetic listener, Montell takes careful note of the empty words that cult members turn to for solace. Though written in punchy and fun prose style, Cultish is more than a fascinating guide to the workings of cults; it’s also an infuriating window into just how starved people have been made to feel for community and structures of collective care.
Yan Lianke tr. Carlos Rojas
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... dizzyingly allusive. Yan peppers the text with phrases cribbed from Mao-era songs and slogans, weaving them seamlessly into the text without attribution ... Yan writes in a quasi-absurdist style he calls \'mythorealism,\' wherein the link between cause and effect is disrupted so the characters’ actions at times seem to come out of nowhere — and maybe such is life. The result for many of his works, including Hard Like Water, is a kind of ecstatic, jumpy prose. It is never really clear what draws Aijun and Hongmei to each other ... the relationship between Aijun and Hongmei feels like the union of two horny teenagers. That might be appealing when you are in the thick of such a thing in real life, but on the page it falls a bit flat. Perhaps it explains how this novel slipped past the censor.
Brandon Taylor
PositiveThe NationTaylor writes with incredible clarity and precision about the lives of people in small university towns, and how they are never as quaint or idyllic as those on the outside might imagine ... the cast of characters in the collection...are lonely, uncertain, and looking for a way out of the various cages they find themselves in. They also, at times, prove to be the predator as well as the prey. As the characters try to betray their way out of relationships, sabotage their careers, or attempt to end their lives, we are reminded that freeing oneself can often be a violent process ... Neither Real Life nor Filthy Animals could be described exactly as being Internet fiction, though each depicts a world that Black and queer online spaces could offer refuge from. His characters (especially Wallace and Lionel) are undeniably isolated, surrounded by people who make demands of them both to be things they are not and to not be things they are—and to read these people’s minds about when it’s the proper time for each. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Taylor’s writing, from his fiction to his Twitter page to his newsletter, has created precisely that space for readers now: a refuge from the beastly terrors of marginalization—an untamed, unruly, ecstatic wilderness.
Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveThe NationA quietly bracing work of fiction ... If Whereabouts is intended to mark Lahiri’s freedom from her vexed relationship to language and identity, one wonders why it is also such a sad and lonely story ... Though Lahiri’s prose has always been elegantly understated, the language in Whereabouts is pared down further still. Perhaps this is born out of a forced economy of expression, but the result is refreshing—the kind of exactitude that comes when you use only the words you need. The language feels not thin but reserved and mature, like that of someone who has grown tired of small talk ... perhaps this novel is best read as a rumination on the consequences of such a fantasy.
Salamishah Tillet
MixedThe New RepublicTillet, who is a professor of African-American studies and creative writing at Rutgers University and a contributing critic at The New York Times, offers up a history of The Color Purple, from novel to film to Broadway musical, with an emphasis on how sexism within the Black community—and the white establishment’s preference to frame racial injustice in terms of concerns facing Black men—stood between The Color Purple and recognition as \'an American masterpiece.\' For Tillet, Walker’s novel strikes a personal chord ... Tillet powerfully puts forward The Color Purple controversy as an example of how Black women have been asked to silence their own pain to supposedly serve the greater cause of racial uplift. Threaded throughout these attacks on The Color Purple is the idea that the danger of reinforcing stereotypes about Black male sexuality is too great to allow room for Black women to have justice ... Unlike Tillet, however, I am not convinced that the alternative would produce a chorus of people claiming The Color Purple a \'masterpiece.\' For my part, I find it aesthetically awkward, and many of the relationships, particularly the friendships between women, still feel to me like they were shoehorned into second-wave feminist narratives about solidarity. That such a conversation—about the art itself—feels marginal to The Color Purple and its place within literary history is just another frustrating example of how little room the world gives Black women not just to succeed but also to fail—artistically and morally.
George Saunders
PanBookforum[A] flat, uncomplicated, and depoliticized background as essential to understanding the fundamentals of the craft of storytelling ... A Swim in a Pond in the Rain might catch readers looking for traditional literary criticism by surprise. As Saunders explains, it is actually more of a \'workbook\' for creative writers, based on a course he’s taught at Syracuse University ... This matter of not passing judgment seems to be the primary life lesson Saunders wants readers to draw from nineteenth-century Russian literature. That these writers held quite passionate and critical views of certain human behavior or social types often gets cast aside, as Saunders tries to squeeze them into what I think of as the Empathy Industrial Complex ... I kept reading to understand why \'the Russians\' are uniquely poised to offer guidance on how to be more empathetic by virtue of being \'the Russians.\' The closest we get to a culturally specific lesson on craft is in Saunders’s fascination with the Russian literary device skaz ... Are we supposed to read Gogol and suddenly realize that the people shouting \'Build That Wall\' are not racists, but just have a \'skaz loop\' playing in their heads? This might be what Saunders is getting at ... We are already bombarded by the narrative that white racists are actually downtrodden victims subject to the whims of uppity people of color; surely there is no need to encourage aspiring creative writers to imagine more of the same. At the very least, it is a cliché. This anecdote confirmed my worst suspicions of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Leslie Brody
PositiveThe New Republic... a study that reveals the quiet subversiveness of Harriet the Spy and adds sharp political potency to the book’s seemingly innocent play with questions of secrecy and surveillance ... Where Sometimes You Have to Lie falls short is that it often presents Harriet the Spy as singular in its radicalism for the time ... It is true that none of these books had the commercial reach of Harriet the Spy. And if the true measure of a spy is how deeply they can infiltrate, then perhaps Harriet the Spy deserves the leftist bona fides that Brody bestows on it.
Bob Blaisdell
PositiveThe New RepublicThe work of a Tolstoy superfan rather than a Tolstoy scholar per se, Creating Anna Karenina is an informal and chatty effort to understand what Tolstoy was up to in the four years he spent composing the novel ... his book is more of a playful experiment than a strict study. In its study of the comings and goings of the Tolstoy household at the time of the novel’s composition ... asks if one of the world’s greatest novels was in fact just as much a product of everyday minutia—like who stops by for a visit with what kind of gossip to tell—as it was the culmination of long-simmering ideas about morality and desire. The result is a work in many ways more instructive about the creative process than about Anna Karenina specifically, a consideration of how distractions, familial interference, and side projects resulted in Tolstoy writing one of the world’s greatest novels ... a view of Tolstoy’s life that makes the writing of Anna Karenina feel almost inevitable ... Perhaps Blaisdell has simply fallen for Tolstoy’s tricks, his feats of realism that make you forget you are reading a deeply plotted and contrived work of fiction.
Yaa Gyasi
PositiveThe New RepublicThe question here is how we bear witness to shared realities while avoiding the traps of stereotype. Animated by this wariness, Transcendent Kingdom is less a search for origins than it is a study of origin stories and the ways they can be wielded against people, particularly ones who grew up poor and Black ... Transcendent Kingdom exudes a bone-deep exhaustion with having to explain one’s background. Sad origin stories seem to Gifty little more than grist for fitting one’s life into a neat arc for others’ consumption ... Despite a change in scope, in Transcendent Kingdom Gyasi is still plumbing the questions that guided Homegoing. Gyasi has returned to her roots, and they run deeper now.
Elena Ferrante
PositiveThe NationIn Ferrante’s most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults , we are pulled yet again into the story with the tale of a missing woman, Aunt Vittoria ... Extramarital affairs abound, and it is tempting at first to think that the lies of the novel’s title are those relating to romantic betrayal. But we soon realize that the lies that dominate the story are the ones people tell—often to themselves—about how they relate to class. As the working-class characters toggle back and forth between feeling proud and ashamed of their background, and as the ones with means rush to identify themselves with the working class, Ferrante disentangles class from class identity, showing how the latter is far more subject to lies and self-deception and constitutes a slipperier, more unstable and contradictory form of experience. At a time when class is often framed as a common denominator with the greatest potential to unify people across different identities, The Lying Life of Adults is a bracing reminder of the complexity of class and of the variegated ways in which human beings process what they lack and decide to fill that void.
Ilze Hugo
PositiveThe New RepublicA novel that explores the shaky foundations of public trust—and the sham remedies, conspiracy theories, and noncompliance that flourish in these conditions—The Down Days is a reminder that our current moment has been here all along ... the plot of the novel begins to go a little off the rails, and it starts to feel like two books—one about a laughing pandemic, one about spiritual possession and social panic, with not enough always connecting the two ... does not feel especially tied to questions of race or how South Africa’s unique historical traumas have manifested anew in a laughter-ridden Sick City. Likewise, with the city’s wealthy white population gone or in hiding, so, too, do the kinds of racial inequities accentuated by a pandemic feel largely missing from the novel. It is a disappointing blind spot in an otherwise eerily astute and energetic work of fiction ... It is a strange thing to have a dystopian work of science fiction suddenly read like a realist novel in the vein of Balzac, but that is what makes The Down Days such a bizarre (but wildly addictive) book. It has the telltale formal qualities of genre fiction: rapid but ethically dubious advances in medicine, dystopian limits on freedom of movement, rapid depletion of resources. But its content could hardly be called dystopian—since its publication date has rendered it familiar, mundane ... promises an opportunity to see what our response to this moment might have been like if we had never seen it coming, and yet ultimately refuses to give us that satisfaction. Any fiction that accurately captures our so-called new normal, this novel shows, will have to grapple with the old one.
Rebecca Solnit
MixedThe New RepublicThe memoir...feels perhaps too familiar, a book so focused on existing conversations, so tightly structured around relatable insights, that it feels—dare I say it—designed to do little more than resonate online ... One of the strengths of the book is the way Solnit manages to think through nonexistence as both a weapon and a shield ... Recollections of My Nonexistence is often closer to a work of cultural criticism than memoir—though in combining the two, it asks us to think about how much our sense of self-worth and social value is shaped by the cues we get from films, books, and television ... It is hard to disagree with anything Solnit says here, but one wonders if that is a shortcoming ... I kept waiting for this book to spin out more, to think, for instance, about how nonexistence functions under capitalism through the erasure of women’s labor, or what it means when women become not invisible but indeed hypervisible as justifications for military intervention ... There is a distinct lack of politics as policy here, perhaps because a truly feminist political vision might make some of Solnit’s white and upper-middle-class readers uncomfortable.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ed. by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy
PositiveThe New Republic... offers an eclectic mix of Nabokov’s nonfiction ... an expansive record of Nabokov’s worldview and aesthetic philosophy, but one particularly fascinating element of Think, Write, Speak is the insight it gives us into how Nabokov, staunchly opposed to the politicization of literature, navigated being a public explainer of Russian arts and letters in the midst of the Cold War.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
PositiveThe New Republic... in its attention to the most unsuspecting of bystanders—children—is arguably a guide to all of Alexievich’s writing ... In Alexievich’s books, people retreat inward to survive and anything outside of the most intimate of spaces distorts into indiscernibility ... a bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium ... is at its most bracing when it captures the minds of children struggling to adjust to their new realities ... revise[s] the idealized vision of a patriotic childhood that permeates post-Soviet nostalgia to this day. The book presents a generation of young people whose experiences of the war were not defined by ideology or national pride, but rather through personal loss and family trauma.
Maxim Osipov, Trans. by Alex Fleming and Anne Marie Jackson
RaveThe New Republic... an ironically glitzy English language debut for an unassuming middle-aged writer who lives outside of Russia’s glamorous capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg ... readers from any part of the world that is facing a healthcare crisis (including the United States) will recognize the dynamics he portrays. As access to care becomes increasingly restricted by rising costs, insurance bureaucracy, and hospital deserts, the stories show what that we lose not just information about our health. We lose someone to talk to ... gestures deeper than simply documenting the struggles people face in finding convenient and reliable healthcare. It explores the narrative function of medicine and the storytelling potential that exists in the doctor-patient relationship ... With this new beautiful and heartbreaking collection of stories, Maxim Osipov, doctor, writer, resident of Tarusa, never lets us forget that our lives are special, and they will never come again.
Lauren Wilkinson
PositiveThe NationIn a sweeping and action-packed story that stretches from Harlem to Martinique and Ouagadougou, the novel never strays too far from the two opposing forces in Marie’s life: her identity as a black American and her consequently vexed relationship with the history of the institutions she serves ... There are shadows of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness throughout the novel that suggest provocative parallels between spycraft and black life in America. As such, Wilkinson does not graft the matter of race onto the spy novel but rather asks us to think about how being a minority is, in a sense, an act of espionage, a precarious state marked by shifting identities, competing loyalties, and a constant threat of violence ... The literary references throughout the novel are in many ways reflective of one of Wilkinson’s larger ambitions in American Spy: to redefine the spy fiction canon by thinking more expansively about what counts as an espionage novel. Though the novels of Ian Fleming and John le Carré certainly make their appearance, Wilkinson is writing as much in the tradition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Nella Larsen’s Passing ... At its heart, American Spy is a refreshing take on identity that utilizes the tool kit of spy fiction to remind us of how wily a thing it is—for spies but for the rest of us, too.
Susan Orlean
PositiveThe Nation\"The Library Book, like the city in which it is set, does sprawl, but in the best possible way, touching on everything from the politics of book burning to the physics of combustion to the future of brick-and-mortar libraries in a digital world. [Orlean] never fully resolves the mystery behind the arson, or whether Harry Peak did or did not commit it. Yet she does uncover many other stories along the way ... If the The Library Book does not draw conclusions about Peak or the Central Library fire, what makes it compelling is that, while it is ostensibly a book about ambition, desperation, and loss, it is also about a city and a public institution teeming with life, humor, and wild personalities.\
Sarah Weinman
MixedThe Nation... an admirable, if at times unsuccessful, mission. While Weinman’s refusal to read Lolita on Nabokov’s terms is refreshing, her book can also feel hostile to the very nature of literary fiction—which is always attempting to draw both from the world and beyond it—and uninterested in the political capacities of stories that aren’t true ... Weinman crafts The Real Lolita like a detective story, tracking down clues that indicate when Nabokov discovered the Horner case, how much he knew about it, and \'his efforts to disguise that knowledge.\' Whether you find these parts of The Real Lolita convincing or not, the remainder of the book, which focuses on Horner, is compelling and forcefully narrated. Deeply researched and rich in detail, these sections provide a vivid glimpse into the way that crimes against women were reported on and investigated in postwar America. However, when Weinman shifts her attention to Nabokov, The Real Lolita wades into murkier waters, finding true crime in what arguably should be creative license ... the alleged similarities between Lolita and the Horner case are largely unconvincing ... one finds it hard not to feel that Weinman has perhaps overindulged the true-crime framework and found a transgression where most readers would not.
Keith Gessen
RaveThe New RepublicA Terrible Country is decidedly well-timed, arriving at a moment when complex, critical stories that connect Russia and the United States are in short supply ... Gessen is careful never to reduce any group of people to a caricature ... Despite the seeming intensity and sobriety of the debates that suffuse the novel—neoliberalism, aging relatives, careerist Westerners—A Terrible Country is filled with moments of levity. It never takes its subjects, even the ones it presents as heroes, too seriously ... Gessen’s novel, peppered with references to Russian literature throughout, is both an homage to the great writers of his home country and a sad reflection on how little value they command in a market driven society ... Tolstoy, who by the end of his life opposed private property, renounced the copyright to his literary works, and started a school for peasants, would probably like it.
Claude McKay
RaveThe AtlanticThis debate about the value of communist internationalism over black nationalism is at the core of Amiable With Big Teeth. Written at a time when most scholars thought that black cultural production had come to a grinding halt as a result of the Great Depression (and the consequent dip in arts patronage), Amiable With Big Teeth provides unparalleled insight into this relatively understudied moment in black American history ... As a creative work and a historical document, Amiable With Big Teeth is nothing short of a master key into a world where the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the novel itself. The story offers a front-row seat to the polemics that drove (and stymied) black radical organizing in the 1930s ... for today’s audience, McKay’s last novel should make for fascinating and timely reading as Americans enter an era in which solidarity-building across racial identities and national borders feels more necessary, and perhaps more difficult to achieve, than ever.
