Last week, I read “Playground,” a timely, dazzlingly brilliant novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers. This week I read “Counting Miracles,” a Last week, I read “Playground,” a timely, dazzlingly brilliant novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers. This week I read “Counting Miracles,” a new romance novel by Nicholas Sparks. That sequence tasted like chasing a fine dish of lobster thermidor with an Almond Joy candy bar from last Valentine’s Day.
As a professional book reviewer, confessing how much I enjoyed “Counting Miracles” is almost more humiliation than I can bear, but what can I say? Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.
This is not news to Sparks’s fans, who have snatched up 130 million copies of his books since 1996 when “The Notebook” undammed an ocean of tears. Three decades later, in a world hotter, crazier and more confounding than ever, Sparks’s 24th novel offers all the calming comforts of a weighted blanket and a warm cup of caramel almond blossom tea.
“Counting Miracles” makes that offer of escape central to its plot. The hero is a former soldier in the Army’s elite Delta Force named Tanner Hughes, which also conveniently suggests his golden complexion. After his beloved grandmother passes away in Pensacola, Fla., Tanner plans to head back overseas to work a security job for USAID. But first, he wants to spend a few weeks looking around Asheboro, N.C., to see if he can find any information about the father he never knew.
It’s there in the parking lot of an Asheboro bar, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan and the Middle East, that Tanner’s life takes a hit from which he’ll never recover. A teenage girl named Casey backs her SUV into his spanking-new candy-apple red reproduction 1968 Shelby GT500KR. Tanner’s muscles are unbruised but his muscle car is crunched. Nonetheless, always the gentleman, he drives the girl and her barely scratched SUV back to her mom’s house.
If you’ve never watched the Hallmark channel, you’ll be shocked by what happens next: Casey’s mom has got it going on.
Reflecting on the glory of his new photobook, Donald Trump writes, “No other book compares to ‘Save America,’” which is an extraordinary claim from a Reflecting on the glory of his new photobook, Donald Trump writes, “No other book compares to ‘Save America,’” which is an extraordinary claim from a man who just a few months ago was hawking copies of the Bible.
But “Save America” is, indeed, a singular production — literally a steal at $99 (plus $11 for shipping). Many of the hundreds of photos were drawn from the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, a federally funded oxymoron.
Part retrospection, part revenge, part fantasy, “Save America” was released Tuesday by Winning Team, a right-wing publishing house founded by Sergio Gor and Donald Trump Jr. to promote books by Trump and other literary luminaries like Kari Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Arriving just two months before the presidential election, “Save America” would seem well-positioned to serve as a visual campaign biography. But rather than argue for returning Trump to the White House, the book’s captions — written in Trump’s enthusiastic style of capitalization, like a fascist Emily Dickinson — suggest that he never really left. Indeed, this is a volume too pure to be sullied by campaign details. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are barely mentioned. I only spotted JD Vance once and without identification or comment. Hannibal Lecter gets more ink.
Oh yes, there are passing references to a strong military; the need to stop illegal immigration, which is “WRONG”; the importance of domestic manufacturing; and a fanciful reference to America’s oil and gas lasting into the future for “HUNDREDS OF YEARS.” But the overwhelming visual evidence of the book implies that what will really save America is Donald Trump in a blue suit.
Over more than 350 lavish pages, Trump presents a breathless gallery of himself during and after his reign as the 45th president. There are many, many smiling images of Trump; there are Dirty Harry images of Trump; there are photos of Trump surrounded by adoring fans, conferring with heads of state and gazing over fields of worshipful supporters; and there are innumerable shots of Trump making....
“Where do all the words in the dictionary come from?”
A child at a Rhode Island elementary school once asked a visiting picture book writer that decept“Where do all the words in the dictionary come from?”
A child at a Rhode Island elementary school once asked a visiting picture book writer that deceptively simple question. Jumping over mountains of etymology, philology, semiotics and anthropology, the writer landed on a radical truth: “Words are just made up by people.”
To demonstrate that point, he pulled a pen out of his pocket and said, “We call it a pen, but it could have been called a . . . frindle.”
That little lesson on descriptive lexicography eventually inspired a beloved kids book. Published in 1996, “Frindle” — Andrew Clements’s first chapter book — went on to sell more than 10 million copies in 13 languages. It’s a quirky story about a fifth-grade boy named Nick Allen who disrupts his classroom and eventually the country with his campaign to invent a new word.
Clements’s wife, Becky, tells me, “For years people have been asking for a sequel.” But Andrew wouldn’t be rushed. He wanted to address the influence of computers and the difference between reading a book and scrolling a screen.
Just before he died in 2019, he completed a first draft of “The Frindle Files,” which has been released by Random House Books for Young Readers.
This is no frindy knockoff. More than 25 years later, it’s a fresh new story that brings back Nick Allen — now an adult — as an inspiring teacher with a fondness for E.B. White and an abiding suspicion of technology. When a computer-obsessed kid in his classroom decides to play a prank on him, their worlds get turned upside down. (In a sweet touch, Caldecott Medalist Brian Selznick, who designed the iconic cover of “Frindle,” has designed the cover of “The Frindle Files,” too.)
Once again, Clements demonstrates his uncanny ability to tackle complicated, serious issues in a story that’s warm, funny and accessible to middle-grade readers. While parents are trudging through Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” their grade-school kids will enjoy how “The Frindle Files” explores the challenges of the internet, including online addiction, e-book piracy, viral videos and privacy violations.
Near the end of “The Frindle Files,” Nick tells his sixth-grade students, “If I could, I would take away every screen from you and all your friends for at least another three years. I’m trying to....
It didn’t take a supercomputer to figure out we’d get another remarkable novel about artificial intelligence from Richard Powers.
In 1995, Powers publiIt didn’t take a supercomputer to figure out we’d get another remarkable novel about artificial intelligence from Richard Powers.
In 1995, Powers published “Galatea 2.2,” his Pygmalion tale about training a neural network called Helen to take a graduate exam on Western literature. At one point in that haunting story, after Helen has finished “reading” fiction and poetry, she’s given a CD-ROM containing recent news, human rights reports, political exposés and police bulletins. Overwhelmed by the horrors of human behavior, Helen announces, “I don’t want to play anymore.”
Well, almost three decades later — a millennium in computer time — Helen’s got her mojo back. Powers’s new novel, “Playground,” leaps across the circuits that enable large language models and delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence. The book won’t be officially released until Sept. 24, but it’s already been named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Although “Playground” is nowhere near as mammoth as the author’s Pulitzer-winning opus, “The Overstory,” it follows a similarly fragmented structure. But trust me, any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment.
The main narrator, Todd Keane, was once “a soldier for the digital revolution” and is now its king. He’s a world-famous tech genius who created an app called Playground. Part Facebook, part Reddit, Playground has hooked billions of daily users by gamifying engagement in a self-contained economy that runs on Playbucks. Closely shadowing the influence of social media, Playground affords Powers the opportunity to satirize and mourn the platforms that have colonized our lives.
Not much dust had settled on his old playbook when Donald Trump felt inspired last month to probe Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Like some prudent aNot much dust had settled on his old playbook when Donald Trump felt inspired last month to probe Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Like some prudent antebellum buyer, he wanted to understand what he was getting. “I don’t know,” Trump wondered aloud. “Is she Indian? Or is she black?”
To say we’ve been here before is an understatement. We’ve never left. The myth of racial purity lies at the heart of White supremacy, and keeping that poisonous ideology alive requires fixating on the ancestral “mysteries” of people of color, while assuming that Whiteness is undiluted, unsullied.
In 1998, a decade before America elected its first biracial president, Danzy Senna published a debut novel called “Caucasia” about two sisters who, like the author, have a Black father and a White mother. Since then, in witty fiction and nonfiction, Senna has continued to explore the lives of biracial people and to prick our crazy-making anxiety about racial ambiguity.
Now, on the short list of good things happening during this election season, you can put Senna’s sly new book, “Colored Television.” It has nothing to do with politics, except that it has everything to do with politics. It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it.
Senna’s shrewd comedy starts right there in the title with its discomfiting pun, but “Colored Television” quickly pushes even harder against the boundaries of genteel speech. The protagonist is a biracial woman named Jane Gibson, who’s hoping to earn tenure at a university where she delivers trigger warnings and assigns “only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors.” When the story opens, Jane is on sabbatical and has just finished her second novel, titled “Nusu Nusu,” Swahili for “partly-partly.” It began as a story inspired by the life of Carol Channing, the actress who didn’t publicly acknowledge her African American ancestry until late in life. Somewhere along the way, though, Jane’s manuscript mushroomed into a....
For millions of masked readers wringing their Purelled hands during the covid summer of 2020, Matt Haig’s novel “The Midnight Library” was an answer tFor millions of masked readers wringing their Purelled hands during the covid summer of 2020, Matt Haig’s novel “The Midnight Library” was an answer to a prayer. Dolly Parton kept it on her nightstand next to the Bible. Goodreads users voted it the year’s best work of fiction.
The appeal was obvious: Haig’s story describes a fantastical library that offers a suicidal young woman the chance to experience an infinite number of alternative lives. If Clarence, the second-class angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” had pursued a library degree instead of a pair of wings, he might have whipped up this carousel of possibilities.
Now, four years later, Haig is back with another therapeutic fantasy that tastes like a medicated cherry Popsicle. The heroine of “The Life Impossible” is a 72-year-old retired math teacher stuck brandishing the allegorical name Grace Winters. When the novel opens in England, Grace receives a letter from a depressed college kid who used to be one of her high school students. Things have not been going well: His girlfriend dumped him. His mother died. He lost his faith. He’s drinking too much. He’s overwhelmed with anxiety, hopelessness and self-hatred. “At times,” he writes, “I have found it very hard to carry on.”
Instead of encouraging this young man to talk or to find the professional care he so clearly needs, Grace describes her own salvation from a similar bout of depression in a 300-page email message. If she were still employed as a teacher, someone would be obliged to report her for psychological negligence.
“What I am about to tell you,” Grace begins, “is a story even I find hard to believe,” which makes two of us....
Forty thousand years too late, Neanderthals are finally getting a chance to stand erectus and take a bow. Apparently, our uni-browed cousins weren’t dForty thousand years too late, Neanderthals are finally getting a chance to stand erectus and take a bow. Apparently, our uni-browed cousins weren’t dumb jerks like your brother-in-law, dragging their hairy knuckles across the den. Not at all. According to “Kindred” (2020), a fascinating book by archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Neanderthals used tools, made clothes and may have told stories and honored their dead. “They were state-of-the-art humans,” Sykes writes, “just of a different sort.”
In the 19th century, it felt easy to look down on these genetic neighbors of a different sort. After all, as the result of prehistory’s greatest mano-a-manoish battle, we won the deed to planet Earth. But in the early 21st century, Homo sapiens have lost their swagger. For all the wonders of modern culture — driverless cars, CRISPR, Taylor Swift — many of us fear we’re on the cusp of burning ourselves up.
Could the humble Neanderthals, who still lurk in our DNA, hold the secret to a better life? For Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “Creation Lake,” that question is the woolly mammoth in the room.
Since her 2008 debut, “Telex from Cuba,” Kushner has proved to be one of America’s most intellectually curious novelists, capable of interrogating radical political and cultural ideas in strikingly original plots. Her terrific 2013 novel, “The Flamethrowers,” roared through the world of avant-garde art. And now, “Creation Lake” — longlisted for the Booker Prize — bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring.
The first satisfying surprise is that Kushner has designed this story as a spy thriller laced with a killer dose of deadpan wit. The narrator, currently using the nom de guerre Sadie Smith, is an agent of chaos. Fired from her job with U.S. intelligence, she’s now working for the highest bidder. “It was a relief to be in the private sector,” she says, “where there are no supervising officers, no logbooks, and no...
By now, we can all spot the symptoms: that little tickle in the front pages, some congestion along the dust jacket, a certain stiffness in the spine.
IBy now, we can all spot the symptoms: that little tickle in the front pages, some congestion along the dust jacket, a certain stiffness in the spine.
It’s already too late: You’ve got a full-blown covid novel.
There’s no cure except to spend the next three or four days in social isolation until it’s finished. But honestly, if it’s as good as Regina Porter’s “The Rich People Have Gone Away,” you won’t mind quarantining.
That’s a particularly astonishing accomplishment considering that just four years after the virus came to these shores, we’re already packing up the covid-19 pandemic in the memory chest that holds the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918. But Porter’s witty new novel, the follow-up to her 2019 debut, “The Travelers,” is bold enough to wave away the gathering fog of amnesia. She reminds us of madly wiping down the kitchen, walking along eerily silent streets, tensing up when someone joins us in an elevator, arguing with unmasked boors who did their own research, googling “where to find toilet paper,” hearing the word “intubation” for the first time and then learning that there aren’t enough ventilators.
Of course, if the only thing “The Rich People Have Gone Away” had to offer were a stroll past a line of refrigerated morgue trucks, I’d tell you to avoid it like the plague. But Porter is doing so much more in this surprisingly delightful and challenging novel. She holds the covid pandemic up to the light and uses it as a prism to separate the mingled wavelengths of American society. The virus itself may not have discriminated, but it was endured by different kinds of people in tragically different ways. You can see some of that illumination right in the title, which nods to the panic that sent moneyed folks scurrying away from cities. But she’s equally interested in the way covid interacted with a much older and more pernicious virus known as racism.
In the opening pages of “The Rich People Have Gone Away” — April 2020 — Theo Harper’s apartment building in Park Slope is so empty that he can enjoy having sex in doorways on the ninth floor. That’s a fair marker of the man’s brazenness and his liminal nature. Porter narrates in a bifurcated tone that channels Theo’s egotism while also holding him at the end of a pin. It’s a technique that renders him both fascinating and repugnant. He’s a. . . .
In a brief afterword to his new novel, Bret Anthony Johnston claims, “‘We Burn Daylight’ is not about David Koresh.” But the fact that his plot is setIn a brief afterword to his new novel, Bret Anthony Johnston claims, “‘We Burn Daylight’ is not about David Koresh.” But the fact that his plot is set around a millenarian compound besieged by federal agents in Waco is no less coincidental than Donald Trump’s decision to rally there last year. Although people have different motives for circling this mass grave, they all seek to warm their hands in that inferno.
Johnston, though, comes bearing an additional, even older tragedy. “We Burn Daylight” reimagines the conflict between the government and the Branch Davidians as a modern-day echo of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” His star-crossed lovers are a pair of teenagers whose ardor is doomed by an animosity far beyond their control. Roy is a lonely 14-year-old boy, the younger son of the McLennan County sheriff. Jaye is the angry daughter of a devoted member of the religious group holed up in Waco. In the Bard’s words, “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.”
Johnston, a native of Texas, captures this area with an appreciation for the rhythms and courtesies of rural life — neighbors who know who drinks too much and who keeps their fences mended. Church is the center of everyone’s week.
The novel comes to us in chapters narrated, alternately, by Roy and Jaye. She’s essentially a captive, acting out any way she can to irritate her mother and repel the cult’s leader. Roy, a high school freshman, occupies a strangely....
It was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature. His debut novel, “The Beautiful Things ThIt was obvious from the start that Dinaw Mengestu was adding something extraordinary to American literature. His debut novel, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” (2007), told the story of an immigrant who, like the author, had come to the United States from Ethiopia only to find himself haunting his new home and haunted by his homeland.
Accolades for the young author accrued quickly, including a Guardian First Book Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The National Book Foundation named Mengestu one of its “5 Under 35”; the New Yorker said he was one of the best 20 writers under 40. The MacArthur Foundation bestowed him its “genius” grant.
Over the past 17 years, that early praise has been confirmed by several inventive, introspective novels, including “How to Read the Air” and “All Our Names.” Forged from an alloy that defies the heat of the melting pot, Mengestu’s stories are an inimitable monument to the African immigrant experience. In book after book, this patron saint of longing has unraveled the twisted privileges and agonies of being here but not of here.
His new novel, “Someone Like Us,” teases the inclusive spirit of that title. Like all of Mengestu’s novels, it’s about the struggle to feel settled, to feel at peace, but once again he edges around that theme by a wholly unexpected route. Although the story takes place over a few days near the end of 2019, the festive tones of the holiday season never pierce the pervading gloom of these opening words: “I learned of Samuel’s death two days before Christmas.”
This is no procedural, but an evocative scent of mystery lingers over the novel. Who is Samuel? Why did he die? Why must we care? For the next 250 pages, these are the questions the narrator worries over as though his own life depends on the answers — because, in a sense, it does.
“Even though I’d known for years that Samuel was my father, neither he nor my mother had ever expected me to treat him as such,” the narrator explains. “Whatever friendship they’d had in Ethiopia had evolved into something far more guarded and yet protective.” After coming to America, Samuel remained an avuncular figure in an erratic orbit around their lives....
I’ll never forget the moment in Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad” when subterranean train tracks first appear stretching off into a I’ll never forget the moment in Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad” when subterranean train tracks first appear stretching off into a dark tunnel. That 19th-century metaphor pounded into iron in the forge of Whitehead’s mind powers one of the best novels of the 21st century.
Mateo Askaripour attempts a similar maneuver in his new novel, “This Great Hemisphere.” Inspired by the central conceit of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Askaripour imagines a future world in which the people of a repressed racial minority are literally see-through.
After a brief, tantalizing prologue set in modern-day New York, Askaripour plunges us into a richly imagined dystopia set in the year 2529. Having emerged from a series of planet-wrecking catastrophes, human society and human biology have been radically reconstituted. In this strict apartheid system, members of the Dominant Population — DPs — exercise total control over all aspects of life by wielding advanced technology and highly prejudicial interpretations of the Bible.
Meanwhile, a physically transparent race of people known as Invisibles subsists as best they can in the forest. Many of them paint their skin “in whatever colors conformed to their mood, the latest trends, or the longing to be something they were not.” A few wear clothes in a misguided effort to curry respectability, but some Invisibles move about naked as mere ripples in the light. They identify each other by their “scentprints” and their “rumoyas,” a kind of “cell spirit” unique. . . . .
Let’s get this out of the way up front, so to speak: The title of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, “Long Island Compromise,” is a reference to anal Let’s get this out of the way up front, so to speak: The title of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, “Long Island Compromise,” is a reference to anal sex. That says something about the story’s subtlety.
Not that anybody’s turning to Brodesser-Akner for subtlety. Her previous novel, the spectacular debut “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” crashed onto the scene with klaxons blaring. That tale of a marriage collapsing was a dazzling explosion of comic brilliance that proved the New York Times profile writer could be even more outrageously engaging when she made up her own characters.
But following up after a great debut carries the mixed blessings of inherited wealth, which, as it happens, is the heavy-handed subject of “Long Island Compromise.” It’s a story about the children of a rich family who struggle to fulfill the promise of their wildly successful parents.
The Fletchers of Middle Rock, Long Island, are the very embodiment of the Jewish American Dream. With all the curdled envy that Brodesser-Akner can channel so hilariously, the gossipy narrator tells us, “They were the pinnacle.” They are at once fiercely defensive of their heritage and determined to pursue all the trappings (and plastic surgeries) of assimilation. Eat your heart out, Jay Gatsby: The Fletchers live in the largest house “on a block of extremely robbable homes” with a deck that extends out over the Long Island Sound like it “was their own personal swimming pool.”
Their origin story has been retold and polished like a book of the Torah: Grandpa Zelig escaped the Nazis and made it to the United States with nothing but the clothes on his back and the formula for a revolutionary packaging compound called Styrofoam. A few decades later....
In 2019, Julia Phillips published a celebrated novel called “Disappearing Earth,” set on a remote Russian peninsula called Kamchatka.
It’s not a place In 2019, Julia Phillips published a celebrated novel called “Disappearing Earth,” set on a remote Russian peninsula called Kamchatka.
It’s not a place many Western readers were likely to have heard of before. Indeed, a travel story in The Washington Post noted, “You come to Kamchatka for two reasons: bears and volcanoes.”
Now, for her second novel, Phillips has returned to America, but she’s still showing a penchant for far-flung, disconnected places. This time, it’s San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington state. And at least one of those ursine creatures has come lumbering back with her.
A grizzly haunts the pages of “Bear.” It’s hard to identify at first, and so unlikely that everyone’s giddy with excitement, but there it is: a bear swimming in the San Juan Channel, where they’d never seen one. Folks on the ferry take pictures and call out to the animal. Later, the sheriff’s deputy suggests it could have been a deer. Please. It was no deer.
But what those hundreds of pounds of muscle and fur might mean is challenging to see through the dark woods of this intense novel, which begins with an epigraph from the Brothers Grimm. For almost 300 pages, Phillips wends along the vague barrier that separates pasture from forest, reason from madness....
“Netherland” may not have revived cricket in the United States, but it sparked a craze for Joseph O’Neill. His third novel, about a Dutchman who becom“Netherland” may not have revived cricket in the United States, but it sparked a craze for Joseph O’Neill. His third novel, about a Dutchman who becomes a cricket enthusiast in New York, earned comparisons to “The Great Gatsby” and won the PEN/Faulkner Award. There was a time when every book club in America seemed to be talking about “that cricket book,” though readers quickly discovered it was actually a story about longing and loneliness in the wake of 9/11.
O’Neill is back on the field again with a new novel called “Godwin.” But the sport this time is soccer — “football,” for fans across the pond. As before, while your eye follows the ball, the real action plays out among the forces shaping the global economy, the flow of immigrants and the nature of work.
Nobody else’s fiction tears up the ground quite like O’Neill’s profoundly introspective novels. But I worry that they’re essentially review proof. They can sound, in summary, either too static to be interesting, like “The Dog,” or too convoluted to be intelligible, like this new one. And yet in their careful braiding of anxiety and aspiration, his stories are marvels of narrative magic and stylistic panache.
“Godwin” plays out along two separate tracks that remain mysteriously askew until the very end. The book begins as an arch office satire set in Pittsburgh. An African American woman named Lakesha is an irresistibly odd narrator — so intentional about establishing a community and yet so utterly alone. She’s the co-leader of a co-op for technical writers. “A collective like the Group is attractive to someone who wants to stay self-employed but doesn’t want the risk, hassle, and isolation associated with being a sole trader or freelancer,” Lakesha explains. Naturally, the story that develops is one of risk, hassle and isolation.
O’Neill has such a well-tuned ear for the comedy of office politics, particularly as gassed up by left-wing ideals. “We were not ideological,” Lakesha claims, but she admits that the members of the Group “had our own ideas about what constitutes value.” The business that Lakesha has co-founded sports “a strongly horizontal ethos.” In the weirdly modulated voice of an HR cultist, she declares, “We....
Don’t be misled by the weary tone of the title “Same As It Ever Was.” This is a big novel, engaging enough to entertain you through the summer and thoDon’t be misled by the weary tone of the title “Same As It Ever Was.” This is a big novel, engaging enough to entertain you through the summer and thoughtful enough to justify its considerable heft. While many novels are too long, “Same As It Ever Was” takes full advantage of its 500 pages to traverse the whole life of Julia Ames, a woman who makes peace with motherhood slowly and haphazardly.
The story comes to us in two twisted strands, a double helix of past and present. As the wife of an adoring husband and the mother of a bright preschooler, Julia should be enjoying languid days of maternal bliss. But instead, Lombardo writes, “she felt entirely unmoored, brooding, usually while staring pensively into the middle distance like a disenfranchised Victorian nursemaid.” There’s no use complaining, of course, not when her husband, Mark, has to work so hard. “Mark was more vocally allowed to rue his responsibilities; that was just the way the world worked.” Julia, meanwhile, must uncomplainingly endure “the loneliness of motherhood; the deadly ennui of the day-in-day-out.”
This is, indeed, the same as it ever was, but Lombardo’s witty, sympathetic take on motherhood exudes the sharp scent of fermented apple juice and a full diaper. “It was a cliché to be this person,” Julia realizes, which only makes her self-pity sting more. “She got. . . .
The multitalented artist Miranda July has written a wildly sexual book about a woman approaching menopause, so of course it’s time for a square old maThe multitalented artist Miranda July has written a wildly sexual book about a woman approaching menopause, so of course it’s time for a square old man to pass judgment.
At your service.
But first, is it getting hot in here?
I’ve never reviewed such an explicit novel before. I felt so self-conscious reading “All Fours” on the subway that I tore off the cover. July, 50, seems determined to cure the inhibitions of middle age by stripping away every censorial impulse and plunging us into a bubble bath of erotic candor.
Although such a description may invoke the spirit of Anaïs Nin, July is too funny for that association. In these pages, she’s outrageous and outrageously hilarious. With “All Fours,” perimenopausal readers finally have their own “Portnoy’s Complaint.” But even that comparison doesn’t capture the immediacy of July’s prose, its infallible timing, its palpable sense of performance. Indeed, several unforgettable (and unquotable) sections have the snap and swoop of a transgressive stand-up routine.
The unnamed narrator — “a woman who had success in several mediums” — is a close approximation of July, who’s published books; directed, written and acted on stage and in films; and currently has a solo art show in Milan. Although “All Fours” is labeled a novel, the space between the author’s life and the story’s protagonist is often no wider than a bra strap.
At its heart, the story here is one of domestic despair. A 13-year-old New Yorker named Jolie starts to listen to a bootleg copy of Prince’s “The SecoAt its heart, the story here is one of domestic despair. A 13-year-old New Yorker named Jolie starts to listen to a bootleg copy of Prince’s “The Second Coming” when she accidentally drops her iPhone on the subway tracks. Before anyone can stop her, she climbs down to retrieve it. But as the next train approaches, Jolie considers the whole dismal ordeal of her life. “All she had to do to change that was to stay here with the calm,” the narrator says, “to close her eyes and still the grasshopper mind and see her research through to what now seemed its logical conclusion: that even a nothing was preferable to this something.”
Fortunately, a bystander pulls her up and out of the way of the subway car at the last second. Her mother wants to imagine that this near-fatal encounter was merely a lapse of judgment — Teenagers and their phones! — but we know Jolie has been drinking and feeling dangerously depressed. Those are conditions well understood by her estranged father, Ethan — “the lord of misrule” — who’s been trying to rebuild his life in California. When he hears of his daughter’s troubles, he recognizes the symptoms of his own drug addiction and self-destruction. Though he hasn’t seen Jolie for several years, he becomes convinced that he can finally help her, that he can prove to her that life is worth the struggle. “Certain kinds of hopelessness,” he claims, “are almost a precondition for a second act.”
Warmed by that naive resurgence of fatherly concern, Ethan comes to New York and — without his ex-wife’s permission — takes Jolie on a Thanksgiving trip so that they can reconnect with each other and his roots in Maryland. As divorced-dad adventures go, this is a madcap opera of dysfunction set in the key of an Amber Alert. Jolie has grown so angry and depressed that she refuses to speak the entire time, and nothing goes as hoped. But the journey provides lots of opportunities for Ethan to reflect on his upbringing, his precipitous slide into addiction and his. . . .
Death has not appreciably slowed Michael Crichton’s publication schedule. Since he passed away in 2008, several of his manuscripts caught in the amberDeath has not appreciably slowed Michael Crichton’s publication schedule. Since he passed away in 2008, several of his manuscripts caught in the amber of time have been zapped to life and set free to stomp around the world alongside “The Andromeda Strain,” “Jurassic Park,” “Congo” and his many other best-selling novels.
Still, one story that Crichton had worked on for 20 years remained dormant on his hard drive. In a recent statement, Crichton’s wife, Sherri, described discovering the unfinished draft: “When I came to the abrupt end, it was the ultimate cliffhanger — though, for the first time, not one that Michael had meticulously planned.”
This fragment might never have seen the rising sun, but when enough money is involved, life finds a way. So now, trailing thunderous clouds of publicity, the summer’s ultimate literary mashup arrives June 3: “Eruption,” a Crichton manuscript completed by James Patterson. As author partnerships go, this is Godzilla’s head grafted onto King Kong’s body. Of course, Hollywood is already buzzing around it, and why not? Together, these two authors — or their brands — have sold an estimated 675 million copies, one for every year since the Neoproterozoic era.
“Eruption” opens with a prologue set in Hawaii at the Hilo Botanical Gardens. Rachel, a park biologist, “just couldn’t believe her eyes”: Three banyan trees have died and turned black. “Rachel had never seen or read about anything like this. . . . This was something else. Something dark, maybe even dangerous.” An old friend tells her, “Don’t panic,” but “she was scared.”
This is an opening sure to leave amateur gardeners on the edge of their Adirondack chairs. The rest of us will have to take it on faith that even greater horrors than a few withered trees lie ahead.
Sure enough, nine years later, when the action picks up again, 36-year-old John “Mac” MacGregor hears a deep rumbling and feels the beach shaking. As director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Mac understands what that means. “He’d always known this day would come.” Steam is already wafting up from the top of Mauna Loa, the planet’s biggest active volcano, a colossus that rises almost six miles off the ocean floor. “The eruption was only....
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