Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club, Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin, Rachel Cusk’s Parade, and Ann Powers’ Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell all feature among June’s best reviewed books.
1. Godwin by Joseph O’Neill
(Pantheon)
10 Rave • 4 Mixed
“O’Neill’s storytelling here has an enthralling fireside quality, ushering us with deceptive simplicity into a labyrinth of motive and desire, breathtaking betrayals and artfully twined threads. A book to sink into, in other words, and one not to be missed.”
–Anthony Cummins (The Guardian)
2. Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
(Mariner)
8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Absorbing and affecting … Thanks to the economical grace and emotional force of Ms. Perry’s writing, we are also held fast by other crises, inserted like tiny detonators in her narrative. Death and desolation, though all too familiar, are freshly affecting … A novel of ideas, however, as well as one of emotion … It is hard to think of another modern novelist who portrays religious faith with such intelligent sympathy.”
–Anna Mundow (The Wall Street Journal)
3. Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
(W. W. Norton)
5 Rave • 6 Positive • 6 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Caledonian Road here
“Halfway through Caledonian Road the deaths start to occur and the tone, so far lightly satirical, with the odd epigrammatic flourish, darkens in turn … Wildly readable, brimming with energy and filled with enjoyable contemporary detail. Brash, prating characters stalk its pages, demanding attention and understanding; yet, in Andrew O’Hagan’s redistributive narrative justice, the most heartfelt, and heart-rending, moments tend to involve those whose fate is to lurk on the periphery.”
–Suzi Feay (Times Literary Supplement)
4. Parade by Rachel Cusk
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
6 Rave • 8 Positive • 6 Mixed • 3 Pan
“An icy thought experiment … Intellectually, these thoughts can be exhilarating. Instead of plot or character development, Cusk offers a gimlet-eyed analysis of what it is to be the creator of a world in which nobody really exists … This Cuskian narrator’s voice – cold, detached, judgmental, excoriating – emerges as a dominant and distinctive energy, an individual … This deepening of chaos is Cusk’s artistic project here, and she delivers it coldly. No doubt she’s pausing now to observe our pain.”
–Lucy Atkins (The Guardian)
5. Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
(Tin House Books)
5 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an interview with Morgan Talty here
“Works wonderfully well. At once a touching narrative about family and a gritty story about alcoholism, dementia, and longing, Fire Exit is a novel in which past and present are constantly on the page as we follow a man’s life—while it also entertains what that life could have been … Talty is an outstanding new voice with a lot to say.”
–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)
**
1. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne
(Penguin)
7 Rave • 7 Positive
Read an interview with Griffin Dunne here
“Dunne largely bears…slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, conscious, perhaps, that in retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke. He gets terrific mileage from his own bad luck … What makes these unimaginable events so readable, and allows Dunne to find a kind of grace even amid tragedy, are his unshakable black humor and unfailing nose for a good story.”
–Charles Arrowsmith (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
(Day Street Books)
8 Rave • 3 Positive
“Remarkably insightful … Keeping a distance pays great dividends here. Powers proves an adroit codebreaker for the uniquely complex cross-pollination of romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism that characterizes the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise … Astute … It is a great compliment to Powers’s ebullient style that her accruing sense of fatigue and wonder around her subject never reads as less than fascinating. Visceral prose, pure fusion.”
–Elizabeth Nelson (The Washington Post)
3. The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
(W. W. Norton & Company)
6 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Laing maps the ghosts of gardens and sacred spaces destroyed through war … What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing’s insistence on Jarman’s idea that ‘paradise haunts gardens.'”
–Lauren LeBlanc (The Boston Globe)
4. Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
(Random House)
5 Rave • 5 Positive
“The book gives us glimpses into the fraught production of these shows, their divided receptions, and the melancholy biographies of some of the thousands of people who have appeared on these shows … Nussbaum, as always, makes her case for the seriousness of her subject simply by taking it seriously. Attentive not just to the cultural footprint of the reality show but to its ticky-tacky specificity, Cue the Sun! provides a sometimes grim, occasionally gleeful account of the way that television can not just mirror but also create real life … Nussbaum sees these human moments as screen moments and describes them with the same care she might otherwise apply to a prestige drama series.”
–Phillip Maciak (The New Republic)
5. Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen
(St. Martin’s)
5 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Splendid … Revelatory scholarship that gives full measure to this artist who despite obstacles and setbacks (some self-inflicted) is an exalted figure in the comedy pantheon, a distinct voice whose outlier creative life Courogen captures through original research, archival material and scores of interviews … Like its subject, contains multitudes, and it captures the complexities and contradictions of the fiendishly funny and fiercely independent artist.”
–Donald Liebenson (The Washington Post)
