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Sally Rooney

Positive Vulture Not her best work...though it is a marked improvement on Beautiful World, whose experiments with autofiction can feel dull and moralistic in the way that autofiction so often does ... A pleasant return to form: the free indirect style at which Rooney generally excels ... The drama is largely relational ... She is refusing to see the novel as an abstract quantity. She is insisting that it is a relationship between people. This may strike you as a surprisingly rosy account of mass consumption under capitalism, especially from a critic who keeps quoting Karl Marx. And it’s true: The fact that love consists of nothing but real relations between real people who all inhabit the same real world means that love, for a person or for a novel, will never be an escape from conventions or a relief from power. But this fact about love, what we might call its demoralizing specificity, is also the best evidence we have that love exists

Rachel Cusk

Pan Vulture Much of Parade reads like catalogue copy for an unseen art exhibit ... Inscrutable private language...has allowed her flatly essentialist views about gender to pass for the feminist avant-garde ... What Cusk really means is that women must make art about being mothers. If they refuse to do this, they are effectively neutering themselves ... Of feminism, Cusk knows very little, and she is eager to prove it ... Cusk, I’m afraid, is one of those rare writers whose genius exceeds the depth of her own experience. She has taken some fine observations about bourgeois motherhood under late capitalism and annealed them, through sheer intensity of talent, into empty aphorisms about the second sex. In so doing, she has wasted an enormous amount of energy on making the idea of female freedom unthinkable — an ironic choice for a writer who has achieved something like canonicity within her own lifetime.

Zadie Smith

Mixed Vulture A novel about novels ... The irony of Smith’s career is that she has never actually excelled at constructing the kind of sympathetic, all-too-human characters she advocates for ... Their studied ordinariness makes us long for Smith’s true strength, which lies not in character but in voice. We read her because she possesses that rare and precious gift of sounding always like herself ... For any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Pan Vulture Moshfegh’s own sacraments involve a different orifice, so you will forgive her if her search has led her up her own ass. Like the Hebrew holy of holies, the anal canal has two veils—an outer sphincter and an inner—and its interior is known in formal anatomy as a lumen, the Latin word for \'light.\' More than ever, Moshfegh wants to illuminate us. The question is if we’ll fit ... This is the pleasure of reading Moshfegh at her best: letting her plunge something sharp down your throat before you have a chance to gag ... At first glance, Lapvona is the most disgusting thing Moshfegh has ever written...Yet Moshfegh’s trusty razor can feel oddly blunted in Lapvona. In part, her characteristic incisiveness is dulled by her decision to forgo the first person, in favor of more than a dozen centers of consciousness. This diminishment is also a curious effect of Lapvona itself ... Lapvona is the clearest indication yet that the desired effect of Moshfegh’s fiction is not shock but sympathy. Like Hamlet, she must be cruel in order to be kind. Her protagonists are gross and abrasive because they have already begun to molt; peel back their blistering misanthropy and you will find lonely, sensitive people who are in this world but not of it, desperate to transform, ascend, escape ... This is the problem with writing to wake people up: Your ideal reader is inevitably asleep. Even if such readers exist, there is no reason to write books for them—not because novels are for the elite but because the first assumption of every novel must be that the reader will infinitely exceed it. Fear of the reader, not of God, is the beginning of literature. Deep down, Moshfegh knows this....Yet the novelist continues to write as if her readers are fundamentally beneath her; as if they, unlike her, have never stopped to consider that the world may be bullshit; as if they must be steered, tricked, or cajoled into knowledge by those whom the universe has seen fit to appoint as their shepherds ... It’s a shame. Moshfegh dirt is good dirt. But the author of Lapvona is not an iconoclast; she is a nun. Behind the carefully cultivated persona of arrogant genius, past the disgusting pleasures of her fiction and bland heresies of her politics, wedged just above her not inconsiderable talent, there sits a small, hardened lump of piety. She may truly be a great American novelist one day, if only she learns to be less important. Until then, Moshfegh remains a servant of the highest god there is: herself.

Hanya Yanagihara

Pan Vulture ... it is no crime to put your paid vacation into your novel. My point is simply that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, if not an unreconstructed one. She seems to sense that wealth can be tilted, like a stone, to reveal the wriggling muck beneath. In a few cases, she is even making a political point, as with her abiding interest in the colonization of Hawaii. But more often in these books, wealth’s rotten underbelly is purely psychological ... her sentimentality has begun weeping like a sore ... Regardless of Yanagihara’s private life, her work betrays a touristic kind of love for gay men. By exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack, she justifies a maternal posture of excessive protectiveness. This is not an act of dehumanization but the opposite ... the conspicuous absence of women in her fiction may well express Yanagihara’s tendency, as a writer, to hoard female subjectivity for herself ... even Yanagihara’s novels are not death camps; they are hospice centers. A Little Life, like life itself, goes on and on. Hundreds of pages into the novel, Jude openly wonders why he is still alive, the beloved of a lonely god. For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible. Charles loves David; David loves Edward; David loves Charles; Charlie loves Edward; Jude loves Willem; Hanya loves Jude; misery loves company.

Maggie Nelson

Pan Vulture Its lyrical subtitle is an overpromise; the chapters are \'songs\' exclusively in the sense that they have musical names...they are bits of straightforward academic criticism. They do not sing; they talk ... This is a fine, if unremarkable, thesis. But Maggie Nelson is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, the best-selling author of nine (now ten) books, the most recent of which earned her wide recognition outside both academia and letters. Maggie Nelson could etch sentences into a grain of rice if she wanted to. So why write an academic book? Why fill chapters with ponderous quotations from writers who are, at the end of the day, talking about something else? Why hide in the endnotes arguments that could have appeared out in the open? ... If it sounds like I’m saying Nelson writes best when she’s writing about her personal life, instead of writing essays, I suppose I am. No, the same isn’t true for many women writers, even most of them; but I do think it’s true for her. Fans of The Argonauts will find reproduced in On Freedom only that book’s inner graduate student, eager to show she has done the reading ... She does not often have ideas, only opinions. I don’t mean she is not an intelligent thinker and, sometimes, a formidable stylist; I mean that she does not advance new concepts, nor is she, by her own description, interested in doing so ... why should we listen to yet another emissary of Generation X complain about \'a world drunk on scapegoating, virtue signaling, and public humiliation\'? It simply doesn’t matter anymore whether complaints like this are legitimate. Maybe they are. But they are also boring ... disappointing is when a writer of stature and skill who genuinely wants us to think more carefully, as I believe Nelson does, manages not to extend that care beyond the limits of what she finds interesting, right, or true. The higher critical act, if we want to go in for that sort of thing, is not to position the subtlety of one’s own views against the crudeness of those who do not share them but to draw out like water from a rock the nuances that exist within the ideas one finds the most noxious, the most strident, the most difficult to dignify.

Tao Lin

Pan The New Yorker The first sentence of almost every chapter contains at least one number, often several, like a medical record: \'Thirty tabs of LSD arrived on day thirty-five.\' This kind of prose can be elegant; it can also feel like dieting ... But it’s most interesting to consider the book’s flat affect as a curious, sidewise effect of Li’s linguistic relationship to his parents ... There is a translated quality to this kind of writing, as if Lin were rendering Mandarin word for word; in fact, given Li’s propensity for audio recordings, this is likely exactly what happened ... the effect he’s created is a kind of fastidious plotlessness, one whose accuracy to life, affected or not, has the ambivalent virtue of being, like life itself, mostly boring. If you prefer, we can regard boringness as a perfectly neutral aesthetic category. Even so, it’s not a reason that most people read novels ... The prose is as sedate as ever ... not the first time Lin has relied on an autobiographical sex partner to inject narrative energy into his characteristically enervated novels ... Li’s relationship with Kay gives his novel not just an ending but a happy one: the pair decides to relocate to Hawaii, which counts as \'leaving society\' for two New Yorkers. The not-good news is that this ending neatly ties together the romantic notions of aboriginality and womanhood that have sustained Li’s belief in \'partnership\' throughout the book ... There is an astonishing naïveté here, on Li’s part, if not Lin’s; these sections of the book read like The Da Vinci Code. Li spends the entire novel learning to revere women as \'the ultimate metaphor for nature.\' No wonder he can’t help worrying that his girlfriend is a plot device ... It’s easier to leave society than to let your mother be a whole person, and not some infantile ideal. To anyone who would see in that relationship the cosmic echoes of a peaceful egalitarianism, I would simply say: call her.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Pan Jewish Currents This is a shame; if an author is just going to make things up, they might as well be interesting. Instead, the novel obeys what we might call the caterpillar effect: the principle that an apparently major change in the initial conditions of a complex system may, many iterations later, make almost no difference at all ... To call this speculative fiction would be an insult to that fine genre ... it imagines the world not differently but rather, with smug admiration for its subject, exactly as it always was. The resulting book is nothing but a large commemorative stamp, dependent wholly in use and function on the reader’s willingness to lick it ... This is, against all odds, the book’s single insight into Hillary Clinton: She knew nothing of power except that she wanted it.

Lara Williams

Positive The New York Times Book Review ...the concept never fully caramelizes. The women’s transgressions don’t quite graduate from what we might call the indie-movie school of emotional growth: spontaneous dance parties, impromptu drug use, spur-of-the-moment vandalism ... This is one of Williams’s strengths: an exquisite patience with the emerging texture of an emotion. As a stylist, she is subtle and superbly attentive, though her approach does leave a few darlings unkilled ... But where Williams truly shines is, if you’ll forgive me, in the kitchen. The food in this book eats you. (It literally changed my dinner plans) ... These interludes perfume the narrative, like aromatics in a stock, imparting a depth of flavor that resurfaces stylishly when you least expect it.

Bret Easton Ellis

Pan Bookforum ...a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts ... [a] deeply needless book ... a rambling mess of cultural commentary and self-aggrandizement ... Even the title White is a provocation, designed to simultaneously anticipate, incur, and mock accusations of white privilege ... The thesis of White is that American culture has entered a period of steep, perhaps irreversible decline, and social media and millennials are to blame. This is ridiculous, not because social media hasn’t changed things tremendously, but because such claims are invariably rooted in a childish nostalgia ... It is perfectly acceptable to bitch and moan about how the mean people didn’t like your good tweets, but there is a time and a place for such behavior, and it is not the offices of Alfred A. Knopf, publisher ... Ellis refers to millennials as Generation Wuss, which sounds like something your dad made up. Lots of White is given to this kind of feeble bullying ... The prose in White is shapeless, roving, and aggressively unedited. One waits in vain for an arresting image ... one cannot read White as anything but a book about being rich and bored ... [Ellis is] an angry, uninteresting man who has just written a very needy book.

Jill Soloway

Pan affidavit ...just south of worth purchasing at the airport ... it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless ... The nicest thing that can be said of this oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human ... Evidently no one at Random House could be bothered to crack open the old Wheelock ... self-importance alone could never guarantee writing this atrocious ... Soloway introduces deep-sounding quotes from other authors like a middle-schooler phoning in a Kate Chopin paper ... Throughout She Wants It, Soloway alternates, confusingly, between contradictory sites of gender enunciation ... Soloway certainly makes it easy to believe the longstanding charge that she sees trans people as creative oil to be fracked ... But nothing is more cringeworthy than Soloway’s account of the #MeToo movement ... Our author often appears to believe she can take history’s pulse by glancing at her own Fitbit ... The only conclusion to be drawn from this very bad book, which puts the \'self\' in \'self-aware,\' is that Jill Soloway has an unstoppable, pathological urge to tell on herself.

Lexi Freiman

Rave Bookforum This is satire, but it is not sarcasm. A lesser novel than Inappropriation would pick on what the book’s jacket copy calls \'PC culture,\' a fruit that hangs so low it might as well be a vegetable. It is easy, and always flattering, to condemn performative wokeness. It is harder, and smarter, to ask if politics ever transcends adolescent fantasy. Ziggy uses the political as an excuse for belonging. Are you telling me you don’t? Freiman suspects you do, and she has the same thick, buttermilky compassion for her readers as she does for her characters, sour and full of saggy lumps. She burlesques them—and you—but only because she identifies. The results are darkly funny. It’s always nice to read a book with the right number of Holocaust jokes ... Freiman’s style, meanwhile, is nimble and pert, parkouring disrespectfully across the suburban mall of the English language with little regard for its more bipedal shoppers ... The author has a particular love of verbing, and she tucks her coinages into paragraphs like tiny, spiky gifts. A lit joint \'jewels\'; pubic mounds \'cauliflower\'; a tiny boy \'turtles\' from his ill-fitting formal wear. For a moment, your eyes are teenagers again, groping inexpertly at the sentence’s bra clasp. Reading rebecomes gawky. The eye trips. The mind chrysanthemums.

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December 16 – 20, 2024