Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, Rebecca Solnit’s Memoirs of My Nonexistence, Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8, and James S. Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
6 Rave • 6 Positive
“… exquisite, often nauseating … isn’t just fighting the infection; it’s tracing the pathogen back to its source, tracing its spread from unsuspecting woman to unsuspecting woman … simultaneously specific and universal … anatomizes most sharply the rip in time that keeps women replaying and relitigating their own culpability in their assaults, especially when those violations happen behind the walls of an institution that vows to protect them … Ultimately, what makes My Dark Vanessa so hypnotic is that it provides Vanessa with what so many abused women want—the chance to admit that they have desires too. Readers might hate her for what they see as her complicity, her refusal to take up the mantle of victimhood in a way they can easily sloganize. I don’t think she’d care.”
–Hillary Kelly (The Los Angeles Times)
2. Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth
9 Rave
“…insights into chicken civilization are scattered throughout Deb Olin Unferth’s kaleidoscopic sixth book … The architecture of this very real industry (which could stand as metaphor for any of the behemoth industries that seem to stork-drop products and services on demand) is sickening and overwhelming, yet Unferth never traffics in gratuitous shock. Instead, her sentences and constantly shifting point of view are embroidered with a great deal of unexpected tenderness and optimism … the inhabitants of Unferth’s Midwestern galaxy are compelling, frustrating and utterly, haplessly human in their ability to contradict themselves while falling into and out of breathless, befuddled love. Somehow, through a delightful conjuring … Though Barn 8 is a political novel punctuated with excellent, terrifying reporting from inside the belly of the American agricultural beast, it is not a diatribe; rather, it’s a call into the universe, a probing that asks: What if we the disconnected, we the too connected, we the individual data sets decided to do something, even if it felt like an impossible activist fantasy?”
–Leslie Pariseau (The Los Angeles Times)
=3. These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card
3 Rave • 6 Positive
“This is a wonderfully ambitious novel: It sprawls in time from the uncertain present to the horror of slavery on a Jamaican plantation, examining racism, colorism, and infidelity and how they obscure and fracture a lineage. A gifted storyteller with an eye for detail and compassion for all her flawed characters, Card ends the book with an unsettling ghost story about insatiable hunger … An intriguing debut with an inventive spin on the generational family saga.”
=3. Temporary by Hilary Leichter
3 Rave • 6 Positive
“… brisk, wildly imaginative … you can hear an old note, a note I’ve missed in American fiction, and am surprised to have noticed myself missing—for so long it seemed dominant to the point of imperishability. The violent, surreal, often cartoonish scenarios delivered deadpan that draw attention to the freakishness of ordinary life—from writers like Donald Barthelme, Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus … This novel could have easily sagged into dogma, but Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror.”
–Parul Sehgal (The New York Times)
5. New Waves by Kevin Nguyen
9 Positive
“Nguyen shepherds the growth of his sloppy protagonist, and the private, lonely life he leads as someone in mourning, with depth, understanding, and self-awareness … Nguyen’s work as a longtime editor…shines through in his writing, with storytelling kept close to the ground, an eye for detail that enhances and doesn’t overcrowd, and plotting that turns subtly enough to keep the prose moving … While dissecting racial transgressions and identity, Nguyen lets his characters grow in their self-awareness when it comes to overstepping or overlooking bias, consistently reinforcing the idea that it takes effort to recognize one’s innate prejudices, and that not everyone is equally aware … Nguyen’s ambitious debut is a mash-up of reflection, growth, and rumination on death. In a world that seems increasingly chaotic and divided, Nguyen offers a refuge with his humble, distinct take on race relations in America, and smart analysis of the ways technology shape our personal and public lives.”
–Eric Farwell (Ploughshares)
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1. Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit
4 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Solnit’s new book is a work of feminist solidarity, in which she chooses to write not from herself alone, but ‘for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival.’ Sliding frequently from the personal into the general, in a sense she’s found a new way to leave herself out. This frustrates some of the ordinary pleasures of memoir: the personal drama and psychological insight of The Faraway Nearby aren’t here. Yet as Solnit pushes the boundaries of the genre, she shows that it’s wide enough to contain at one end the willful oversharing of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and at another this cool meditation on creativity, home, and an elusive self … Solnit’s refusal to be separated from others can be limiting: the polemicist sometimes gets in the storyteller’s way. But that she’s like other women is also what she needs to tell us—because it’s a new source of strength for her, and because it’s true.”
–Julie Phillips (4Columns)
2. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future by James S. Shapiro
3 Rave • 4 Positive
“.. wonderfully vivid … a formidable challenge but [Shapiro] meets it with tremendous narrative skill and analytic power. That he does so in 300 entirely accessible and compulsively readable pages is little short of miraculous … The book works so well because Shapiro does not attempt a continuous history. He applies the method of his previous books, which is to focus on single moments and pursue their meanings with forensic archival rigour and brilliant critical close reading. But here there is an added layer of contemporary urgency: Shapiro does not hide his distress at the current plight of American politics and culture … a colourful and dynamic kaleidoscope of American divisions. This is superb theatre history but it is also an outstanding work of history, full stop. Shapiro shows us that Shakespeare is a cracked mirror in which the US continually glimpses its divided selves. It is hard to imagine anyone better able to discern what it reflects.”
–Fintan O’Toole (The Irish Times)
3. First, Catch: Study of a Spring Meal by Thom Eagle
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“In our digital age, recipes in their thousands—usually impersonal, briefly written formulas—can be found online within seconds. First, Catch—which does contain recipes, albeit in a different form to those ‘neat little lists’—is a kind of riposte to this approach, reacquainting readers with the serious business of cooking and eating by dedicating 200-odd pages to one meal alone … Eschewing fuss and frills, Eagle’s focus is on ingredients cooked well, without overt showiness, yet with intelligence and technique, using human skills rather than modern technology. The zeitgeist is palpable … The result is an intriguing story that touches on such esoteric subjects … Literary references are equally wide-ranging … What grounds the book, though, is Eagle’s deep, practical understanding of cooking, acquired through many years in countless kitchens, and his cheerfully greedy love of eating … The physicality of cooking gives a satisfying weight to his prose … Appropriately, Thom Eagle’s prose requires the reader to pay close attention to his words in order to appreciate the digressive, nuanced points he makes. The result is a book as rich and rewarding as the rabbit stew he spends so many chapters making.”
–Jenny Linford (Times Literary Supplement)
4. The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe
3 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Anyone familiar with Ms. Roiphe’s work will be unsurprised by her desire to wrest a story of strength from an experience that others might describe with words like ‘trauma’ or ‘victim’ … With her new book, Ms. Roiphe takes another tack in telling her own stories, and the effect is quietly revelatory. About her affair with the rabbi, for example, she is more candid about its ‘not okayness.’ She recognizes that her efforts to ‘control and tame’ this narrative by making it a tale of empowerment were not exactly lies, per se, but wishes … This, clearly, is a different sort of book for Ms. Roiphe, who typically writes and picks fights with an unapologetic swagger. Here she shows the tender underbelly of her thoughts about sex, power and womanhood, and reveals her doubts, shifts and contradictions … There is glamour in these stories, and plenty of wine and champagne (Ms. Roiphe runs with a fairly posh crowd), but there are also quite a few frank admissions of loneliness, neediness and fragility … The effect is powerful, perhaps because her admitted contradictions feel more authentic, and more persuasive, than her polemics. Although Ms. Roiphe seems to be exposing her vulnerabilities here, she is actually, once again, demonstrating her unique brand of fearlessness.”
–Emily Bobrow (The Wall Street Journal)
5. Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Hochschild writes movingly about an unlikely pair who also served as a potent symbol … Hochschild is a superb writer who makes light work of heavy subjects … Where information is scant or nonexistent, he deploys elegant workarounds that evoke a vivid sense of time and place … Hochschild’s book shows us what a radical movement looked like from the inside, with all of its high-flown idealism and personal intrigues. Whatever protections we take for granted once seemed unfathomable before they became real.”
–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)
