Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Joanna Kavenna’s Zed, Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, and Javier Cercas’ Lord of All the Dead all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
9 Rave • 5 Positive
“Three of these nine stories have appeared in the New Yorker— and almost all of them are extraordinary. Although the form is smaller, the scope is broader, and the overall effect even more impressive than his novel. Greenwell’s style remains as elegant as ever, but here it’s perfectly subordinated to a fuller palette of events and themes … Greenwell is repeatedly drawn to precarious moments of emotional transition, particularly in regards to romantic attachment and erotic compulsion … The intimate physical detail of this disturbing story will exceed some readers’ tolerance, but that’s entirely Greenwell’s point … But Cleanness is not unrelentingly bleak. Indeed, the range in these stories is part of their triumph and part of what makes their existential sorrow so profound … incomparably bittersweet … Fortunately, it almost feels too late or at least superfluous to celebrate the fact that this remarkable collection will not be shunted away to a back shelf for ‘Gay & Lesbian Literature’ … brilliant.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
Read an essay on Garth Greenwell’s revolutionary erotics here
2. Zed by Joanna Kavenna
5 Rave • 7 Positive
“In terms of its stylistic innovations, Zed is a tour de force … works on the level of syntax, as language, grammar and meaning are compromised by the machines and their human controllers. [Kavenna] creates almost a poetics of tautology … a nuanced, metatextual novel; an investigation into the erasure of language and agency in which the numerous literary reference … There is a Dickensian quality to it … There is a giddying quality to the prose, as the reader is steered through a maze of reproductions, seeking the unique … a novel that takes our strange, hall-of-mirrors times very seriously indeed. It is a work of delirious genius.”
–Anthony Cummins (The Observer)
Read an interview with Joanna Kavenna here
3. Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas
6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“It’s not surprising that it’s an extremely dark book; it is surprising, however, that it’s one of the funniest novels in recent years … It takes a special kind of audacity to write a comic novel about teenagers with eating disorders, but Thomas executes it brilliantly. She doesn’t use the girls as punchlines; it’s the adults, clueless and casually cruel, who she sets in her sights … By contrast, Thomas describes the girls’ bruised psyches with a real gentleness that never turns patronizing … understated, deeply sad moments, contrasted with the novel’s bizarre plot and gleefully dark humor, turn the book into something special, multi-faceted; it certainly feels like something that hasn’t really been attempted before … And it’s Thomas’ boldness, as well as her writing—every sentence seems painstakingly constructed—that make Oligarchy such a remarkable novel. It’s brash, bizarre and original, an unflinching look at a group of young women who have become ‘hungry ghosts, flickering on the edge of this world.'”
–Michael Schaub (NPR)
4. Followers by Megan Angelo
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“Angelo masterfully intertwines the lives of Orla, Floss, and Marlow while reflecting a painfully accurate picture of our current fame-driven, tech-obsessed society and its possible destruction. Her writing is crisp and the familiarity of the characters is refreshing. Angelo also weaves in a perspective on contemporary political decisions and the effect they could have on us all in the not-so-distant future. This is an intricate and brave story of friendship, ambition, and love and the lengths people will go to protect it all.”
–LaParis Hawkins (Booklist)
5. Little Gods by Meng Jin
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“…spectacular and emotionally polyphonic … In a particularly brilliant act of alchemy, the novel finds new ways to dissect the geopolitical significance of China’s explosive 1980s through the complicated nature of the story’s relationships … Su Lan is a difficult and singular character of immense depth. What makes Little Gods extraordinary is the way it examines not only the trajectory of its characters’ lives but also their emotional motivations … an awesome achievement.”
–Omar El Akkad (BookPage)
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1. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
4 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed
“… a different sort of Silicon Valley narrative, a literary-minded outsider’s insider account of an insulated world that isn’t as insular or distinctive as it and we assume. Wiener is our guide to a realm whose denizens have been as in thrall to a dizzying sense of momentum as consumers have been … Complicity is Wiener’s theme, and her method: She’s an acute observer of tech’s shortcomings, but she’s especially good at conveying the mind of a subject whose chief desire is to not know too much. Through her story, we begin to perceive how much tech owes its power, and the problems that come with it, to contented ignorance … For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society … Wiener is wittily merciless in portraying how susceptible she was to ‘the sense of ownership and belonging, the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation’ that start-up culture promotes … Her real feat is exposing her own persistent failure to register the big picture.”
–Ismail Muhammad (The Atlantic)
Read a profile of Anna Wiener here
2. Lord of All the Dead by Javier Cercas, trans. by Anne McLean
3 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed
“… a magnificent reconciliation … Visiting the village and carefully enticing some of the skittish elders who had lived through the war to speak with him, the author clearly illustrates the deep divisions that plagued Spanish society during that tumultuous period. Cercas is a marvelous writer, and his character studies of the elusive Mena are masterly. Ultimately, grappling with the enormously nuanced, continuing story of sacrifice, passion, and dishonor allowed for significant forgiveness and release … A beautiful, moving story that must have been extremely difficult for the author to write. Thankfully for readers, he persisted.”
Read an excerpt from Lord of All the Dead here
3. Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War by Steve Inskeep
4 Rave • 5 Positive
“.. absorbing … Inskeep…deftly traces how the marriage mirrored the era’s ferment … Vibrant and propulsive, Imperfect Union is by far Inskeep’s strongest book, reminiscent of work by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham. Inskeep re-creates the darker currents beneath Manifest Destiny while rescuing John and Jessie from the margins of history, seeing them as precursors to the epic struggles ahead … a pure delight to read, but beneath Inskeep’s stylish sentences lurk astute insights, illuminating the outsized role celebrity plays in our culture, the outward triumphs and quiet pain it inflicted on two lives that left an indelible, if neglected, mark on our politics.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Read an interview with Steve Inskeep here
4. Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe by Rory MacLean
4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… gripping … MacLean is an accomplished writer; his immersive prose crackles with wit and wry humour, and captures scenes and personalities with aplomb. As a narrator, he is frank about his own liberal beliefs and unabashedly partisan in his thumping of reactionaries, ethno-nationalists and xenophobes. But if his colourful encounters with Europeans from alt-right Polish executives to German neo-fascists offer a fascinating and grim portrait of our current predicament, how compelling is MacLean’s explanation of how we got here? … There is a great deal of truth to his account. But illiberalism, ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism are deeply embedded in European culture—they are not confections of recent politics.”
–Daniel Beer (The Guardian)
5. Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
2 Rave • 4 Positive
“The authors’ affection for Yamhill is the heartbeat of the book … Tightrope avoids a problem common among books about places authors have ‘escaped.’ Yamhill is not reflected through a rearview mirror, distorted by a removed author’s guilt, resentment or nostalgia. Rather, it is conveyed up close by way of detailed reporting on living people—intimate access achieved because the authors, while outliers with respect to their professional status and home on the opposite coast, are also of the place … Together, their first-person ‘we’ has the refreshing effect of fogging the authorial ‘I’ and keeping the spotlight on those they’ve interviewed or memorialized … catches what many analyses miss about struggling communities across color lines: an undercurrent of self-hatred, in which people blame themselves for bad outcomes and are loath to ask for a ‘handout’ … Tightrope’s greatest strength is its exaltation of the common person’s voice, bearing expert witness to troubles that selfish power has wrought.”
–Sarah Smarsh (The New York Times Book Review)
