About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Melania Trump
Pan The Telegraph (UK) Those hoping for an intimate peek at the private lives of the Trumps will be disappointed. This book is deeply weird. It isn’t clear from Melania’s description of her family members that she has actually met them ... Even Melania’s pre-political memories are lifeless ... Melania is a profoundly sad document of a woman peering down on her own existence from the penthouse suite, unable to identify any of the figures half a kilometre below, but trying nonetheless to interpret what life might be like down there ... Beware: the desire to hunt for depths within women where they don’t exist is a holdover from past feminist interventions, a wish to humanise the scapegoats of the past.
Miranda July
Pan The Telegraph (UK) Call this a fictionalised memoir or a justification for breaking the usual bonds of matrimony, but it isn’t much of a novel. July quickly gives up on her plot and begins writing a guidebook to female liberation, which, according to her, is brought about through luxury bath-products, polyamory and expensive carpeting ... That’s how a book such as All Fours happens, I suppose: being surrounded by people who tell you how amazing you are ... It’s a shame that the novel falls apart the way it does, because there are some ecstatic sex-scenes and a few good jokes ... It’s no longer enough for our writers to be confessional or creative. They have to be lifestyle gurus, too. It’s what sells, after all.
Percival Everett
Rave The Telegraph (UK) Everett is playfully unfaithful and disloyal to Twain’s original text in a way that places James far from the contemporary trend of retelling classic works from the perspective of an alternative protagonist ... Everett mixes the sweet with the bitter and horror with hilarity.
Roxane Gay
Pan The Telegraph (UK) \"...amounts to a book-length shrug ... At least you can say there’s no false advertising. Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays is titled Opinions, after all, not Thoughts or Ideas. She gives us exactly what she promises: a series of opinions on various subjects, arranged haphazardly, adding up to nothing substantial at all ... It isn’t Gay’s fault that feminism became so devoid of meaning that our hard-won slogans were easily stripped from their context and used by bad actors to fight against abortion rights, to protest vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic, and to harass trans women. But Gay, in her anti-intellectual stance, became a kind of mother figure for those who would prefer to avoid thinking their way through cognitive dissonance, smoothing back their hair to coo, \'you’re already perfect, just the way you are\' ... It’s not an argument for acknowledging complexity, it’s an argument for not thinking. It’s an argument for focusing, first and foremost, on our own comfort ... Such tepid writing makes no intellectual, ideological or psychological demand of its reader. Working against ideology might look like a principled, sophisticated stance, one that values nuance and uncertainty, but instead it reveals a lack of rigour. If anything, you could say that \'comfort\' is her primary ideology, as she uses the word and its variations dozens of times throughout ... Readers see her waffling and confuse it for courage ... \'Extend your empathy\' is her instruction – as vague and thoughtless as an advertisement for a new moisturiser. This book is proof that the anti-fascist philosopher Simone Weil was right, when she wrote: \'There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.\'\
Sophie Mackintosh
Pan The Times (UK) It’s a story that is begging to be turned into a novel ... Sadly, Sophie Mackintosh doesn’t seem up to the task ... She fumbles the material ... The story is too big for her tight focus on Elodie and Violet to do anything but annoy and her world building suffers ... The real-life story will continue to be confusing and obscure enough to draw people in but, personally, if I survived an incident of mass hysteria potentially caused by intentional experimentation by a foreign intelligence agency and all I got in return was a dreamy sapphic romp, I’d be furious. Curious readers might be better served reading the Wikipedia page instead.
Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell
Mixed The Times (UK) There’s a low-key surreality to these stories, which use dream imagery and unconventional structure to keep things weird ... The other stories struggle to match the intensity of Breath. They are mostly quite short, flitting in and out without making much of an impression. Schweblin sets a scene and then ends it abruptly without resolution. It’s a bit like catching a glimpse of something unsettling in the window of a house as you are driving by, what looks like a woman putting a noose around her neck but is probably just a necklace. It’s compelling in the moment, but forgettable once you correct your misperception ... Schweblin’s strength is in the longform ... In her stories, Schweblin relies heavily on the quirky and off-centre image, like a woman burying a sugar bowl in the backyard or a man volunteering to be murdered by his wife, but they aren’t strong enough to survive the turning of the page. Worse still, excise Breath and the book is that most dreaded of descriptors: tasteful, something that would fit right in on a shelf whose books are arranged by colour. Give us the weird, Schweblin. We know you have it in you.
Barbara Kingsolver
Pan The Telegraph (UK) The book is very faithful to its source material, going chapter by chapter and beat by beat to line up with Dickens’s original structure. In the abstract, it holds promise ... So on down the line, ticking boxes and changing names and circumstances ever so slightly, so that it begins to feel as if she pasted the text of David Copperfield and worked mostly through the Find + Replace function ... But one thing she apparently decided to Ctrl-X were all the funny bits, perhaps to cut the word count down by a couple of hundred pages. Beset by earnestness, Demon Copperhead breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode: you must show the reader a good time ... Demon Copperhead is only sad and glum, with every bad thing that happened in the original cranked up a bit ... This is less a novel, then, and more a political project, working hard to humanise a region where Kingsolver herself was born, and has lived for the past 20 years. But although she has tried to give a substantial weightiness to her characters by casting them in a classic work, all she has done is burden them with bloat.
Stephanie Lacava
Positive The Times (UK) The inability to feel pain becomes an (only slightly clunky) metaphor for the way money coddles its owners ... Much of what follows is predictable — drug use, bad sexual decisions, disordered eating — but it is funny in its grotesqueries and sharp in its observations, allowing LaCava to transcend the familiarity of her subject matter ... With a character who can’t feel pain, but also can’t learn, there can be no traditional plot, no arc, just disconnected misadventures. In another’s hands this might seem tedious, in LaCava’s, it grows in tension as the unfelt wounds cut deeper ... is at its best when it is focused not solely on Margot but on the machinery around her. LaCava has a keen understanding of what fame, acclaim, and respect will get you, and how sometimes these things overlap and at other times do not ... LaCava’s messy but anorexic prose can be stunning. There is no fussiness, just bones jutting from skin...But often the jarring flashbacks and jumps in time feel less like a stylistic choice and more an attempt to hide an unevenness in the work ... LaCava makes this desire to see the privileged bleed literal, but that doesn’t diminish its power. I Fear My Pain Interests You is slim but satisfying, with LaCava as our talented chef who won’t let us forget whose bones we’re gnawing on.
Sandra Newman
Pan The Times (UK) I just saved you the excruciating experience of reading Sandra Newman’s The Men, the most ill-conceived and badly executed novel of the year, if our God is a merciful one ... This is the kind of circular logic that drives The Men, and you think surely not, surely we’re not just going to spin endlessly around this one dumb idea until we puke from dizziness, but we are and we do ... A book that could be about how women would build a different world becomes a rumination on all the bad things men have done. Things happen, but we don’t see much of it ... \'The world would get better if only this one specific demographic could be eradicated from the face of the Earth\' is an extremely weird thought to have, and it’s even weirder not only to write it down but to prattle on about it for a couple of hundred pages. I guess we’re just lucky Newman decided to use \'men\' and not \'the Jews\' or whatever ... She is not a thoughtful writer and she stumbles over stereotypes and clichés. Here, she doesn’t just trip over the stereotype of men bad/women good, she builds a house with it as her foundation. She only makes it worse by trying to wokeify the text, sprinkling in mentions of trans and nonbinary people in the clumsiest way possible as if she remembered in the final draft that trans people existed and had to be accounted for in her scheme of damnation.
Lillian Fishman
Pan The Times (UK) Nathan’s unlifelikeness is unlikely to bother the expected reader for this kind of thing — heteropessimist stories about how men are bad — because it’s always going to be satisfying to read stories where a representative of the person driving you mad is humiliated, rejected, vanquished and pinned flat to the page. This is, I guess, why men mad at their wives made American postwar literature by writers such as Updike and Bellow a thing. If Fishman or any of her peers (like Raven Leilani and her much-hyped but also ultimately empty Luster) could write as well as those canonised misogynists on subjects like the spiritually deadening effects of the modern world, we too could overlook their inability to see the opposite sex as people. But, alas ... Rather than interrogating the self or society Fishman and co easily project deficiencies on some immoveable external structure, absolving their characters of all guilt ... If you are going to write fiction that offers lazy answers to age-old quandaries, at least have the decency to put it on the first page so we don’t have to wade through endless \'Oh, no! I desire a man. I am so abject\' nonsense. Or at least write some better sex scenes to keep us entertained along the way.
Missouri Williams
Mixed The Times (UK) The book doesn’t really have a plot, although the characters do indulge in the familiar post-apocalyptic activities of scavenging for supplies and growing food. Rather it wallows in the horror of this human urge to dominate and spread and destroy ... There is a real disgust with humankind working in The Doloriad. Williams uses a lot of insect language to describe her characters, comparing them to maggots, cockroaches and moths. They are an invasive species, worming their way around the earth. There is no epiphany about hope, no memory of what was good about people and civilisation. The question is whether Williams’s corrective to the cosy apocalyptic trend is good enough to stand on its own merits rather than as simply a reaction to a trend. The answer is, sadly, no. The novel is more interesting than successful and doesn’t hold together well enough to make sense of its author’s more idiosyncratic choices ... There is the odd provocative moment, some memorable prose and a refreshingly abrasive tone, but it doesn’t cohere. It aspires to be darker than it is. The body horror is ultimately more Human Centipede than the pure abjection of Clarice Lispector, who supplies the epigraph ... even if all The Doloriad ultimately does is show the naivety and silliness of all of the other dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction on the market, I’m still glad it exists.
Ben Lerner
Pan The Baffler Before long the novel reveals itself: It’s not a book set in Kansas, but against it. It is not a book that a Kansan would want to read, it is a book for New Yorkers who want to think they understand the red states ... This Kansas is instantly identifiable as red state culture, an easy mix of stereotypes of the uneducated, the working class, and the bigoted. What Lerner eliminates are the inconvenient details ... Darren is not allowed to narrate his own thoughts; somehow, despite being mostly illiterate, the narration of his sections sounds a lot like Adam’s ... But how could someone like Darren speak for himself? He is only a representative of the horde. He is not an individual but a tragic archetype running headlong into his red-capped fate ... With his novel and his media positioning, Lerner was well-placed to deliver up red state culture as source material for the entertainment of the cultural elite, which he then legitimated with extra-novel commentary. What was lost was any sense that there might be a market for artistic work that comes from and speaks to fly-over country.
Rebecca Traister
Pan The Baffler Neither book considers the possibility, even for the length of a sentence fragment, that one thing making some women angry might have been the insistence by a certain segment of elite women leaders that Hillary Clinton was the feminist choice despite her having made the lives of an entirely other segment of women unlivable ... Neither book tells us what to do with our anger ... Nor does either Good and Mad or Rage Becomes Her come to terms with the often selfish and self-righteous nature of anger ... I wonder how long we’re going to have books like this for women, books in which we sing only a song of our own oppression and tell ourselves we are special and brave for having suffered for so long ... Those good girls who want to sell books that insist women have the right to be angry right now ironically erase those of us who have been here, absolutely fucking incandescent, the whole time.
Soraya Chemaly
Pan The Baffler Real anger, the kind that contorts the face and bends the body, still makes women as ugly as it ever did. But someone figured out there would be a market for books telling the kind of women who knitted pink hats for the Women’s March, posted a couple Facebook entries about their experience, and then went back to their cozy suburban lives that they were brave to do all of that ... another example of the classic publishing trend of market pandering, or else there is literally an algorithm that creates books like these, desperate to speak to a moment but not of a moment. Perhaps it simply lets writers enter in a topic and then spits out all of the studies, statistics, uplifting quotations, and anecdotes they could need to fill 300 pages ... [this book does not consider] the possibility, even for the length of a sentence fragment, that one thing making some women angry might have been the insistence by a certain segment of elite women leaders that Hillary Clinton was the feminist choice despite her having made the lives of an entirely other segment of women unlivable ... Chemaly would never guess that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016. When a woman is angry in these tracts, she is Elizabeth Warren, not Marine Le Pen ... I wonder how long we’re going to have books like this for women, books in which we sing only a song of our own oppression and tell ourselves we are special and brave for having suffered for so long.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The Guardian LaRose is excellent. It is heartbreaking; it is nuanced; the prose is as strong and stark as the wintry western landscape it describes. The story is both simple and incredibly complex ... Erdrich has tapped into contemporary American culture, from the disappearance of the middle class, to the senseless deaths of children by gunfire, and to the way a personal trauma can reverberate through a community for generations.