Let’s get into it:

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (1990) — A postmodern look at the spirit of rebellion that marked the 1960s through the straight-laced lens of the 1980s, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) opens in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s reelection, in Northern California. Aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler jumps through a window, an annual act of insanity designed to guarantee a disability check, and tends to his pot farm. Meanwhile, his daughter, Prairie, serves slices at Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, at home in the teenage gig economy of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The narrative plows into the past to crystallize the present, providing insight into Prairie’s missing mother, Frenesi, and her relationship with government agent Brock Vond, who eventually reemerges on a mission in Vineland County.

Pynchon crafts a narrative voice that observes the novel’s characters with a combination of wry detachment and acute criticism (“Damn fool Zoyd. Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he’d forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.”). Zoyd and Prairie occupy opposite ends of a shared cultural pole, a dichotomy mirrored and heightened in the dynamic between Frenesi and Brock (“He [Brock] wore a pale suit, Frenesi loose bright pants and shirt and round wire-rims with ND-1 filters for lenses.”). But each character moves through the world with a state-enabled helping of hypocrisy. As Andy Beckett describes in his 2010 review for The Guardian: “Frenesi is still half in love with the counter-culture she is betraying. Zoyd, the anti-Reagan dissident, is dependent on regular government disability checks…Vineland reminds you that heroic and unheroic political eras, such as they exist at all, are always intertwined.”

Something to Do with Paying Attention by David Foster Wallace (2022) — This McNally Editions reissue presents a portion of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published final novel, The Pale King (2011), as a standalone novella. Something to Do with Paying Attention (2022) inhabits the first-person headspace of Chris Fogle, an accountant working at an IRS Regional Examination Center in Illinois. A single, unspooling school of thought with tangential narrative accents traces Chris’s journey toward the IRS, referred to with latent irony, a subtle sense of self-perceived heroism, as “the Service.”

Wallace architects a conversational narrative voice; through style, he illuminates the path to enlightenment through boredom. Chris’s train of thought drifts away from, then back toward, earlier ideas and memories, the book bereft of chapter breaks. His distinctive cadence and vocabulary — new paragraphs often opening with “Anyhow,” — cultivate verisimilitude, anchoring the reader through shifting streams of consciousness (“I’ve mentioned this mistaken final review already.”). Incisive insights pierce long, languorous sentences (“I remember almost none of early childhood, mostly just weird little isolated strobes…The worst part was then starting to hear my mother recount all these memories and anecdotes of my early childhood, and realizing that she actually remembered much more of my early childhood than I did, as though somehow she’d seized or confiscated memories and experiences that were technically mine.”). Observations overlay memory, converging to clarify the context around how Chris “came to be posted here in Examinations — the unexpected coincidences, changes in priorities and direction.”

Chris groups his generation together as a collective of “directionless wastoids,” refracting the nihilism of the 1970s through the prism of the American Midwest (“The same sort of dynamics were probably being played out in homes all over America — the child trying to sort of passively rebel while still financially tied to the parent, and all the typical psychological business that goes along with that.”). Political events mark the passage of time, personal milestones tied to flash points in the public consciousness (“My parents split up in February 1972, in the same week that Edmund Muskie cried in public on the campaign trail, and the TV had clips of him crying over and over.”). Wallace leverages humor to underscore the manmade absurdity of tax laws. For instance, at one point, a progressive sales tax — a fully fictional concept — gets introduced. People overrun the local grocery store, making multiple purchases under $5 to secure a 3.75% surge, a far cry from the 8% charge on orders over that amount. This moment renders tax laws real for Chris, a stepping stone toward eventual freedom from the “wastoid” void.

Wallace establishes an interplay between sacred and secular, parallel paths toward two types of meaning. Chris critiques his roommate’s girlfriend, the kind of woman who wears “pointy-toed leather cowboy boots decorated with flowers — that is, not cartoons of flowers or isolated floral designs but a rich, detailed, photorealist scene of some kind of meadow or garden in full bloom, so that the boots looked more like a calendar or greeting card.” She describes her conversion to Christianity, a moment of feeling seen by a sermon meant to appeal to the masses. He writes off her experience as absurd, individuated over-identification, then later sees how “her story was stupid and dishonest, but that doesn’t mean the experience she had in church that day didn’t happen, or that its effects on her weren’t real.” This perspectival shift stems from a secular iteration of the same awakening, a moment experienced in a DePaul accounting class that, at last, affords Chris meaning in the mundane (“To give oneself to the care of others’ money — this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor…My inner feelings about school and graduating had totally changed. It was a bit like the feeling of suddenly looking at your watch and realizing you’re late for an appointment, but on a much larger scale.”).

The Mystery Guest: A True Story by Grégoire Bouillier (2004) — Okay, first of all, hot tip! Once a week on Instagram, opens a call to claim leftover galleys of now-published books, which is how I came to acquire The Mystery Guest: A True Story (2004). Anyway!

This slim memoir opens in November of 1990, with Grégoire Bouillie receiving a call from his ex-girlfriend, a woman who left him five years earlier (“Even before I knew, I knew. It was her voice, her breath, practically her face, and with her face came a thousand happy moments: moments gilded into the sunbeams of the past, moments that had caressed my face and licked my hand, and that now hung, dead and dangling, at the end of a rope.”). She provides no explanation, no insight, and instead invites him to a birthday party for performance artist Sophie Calle, a complete stranger. “A dime-store Don Quixote looking for trouble,” Bouillie accepts and embarks on an odyssey through the depths of his heartbreak.

The prose moves as a meditation, residual romantic feeling dusting over a mountain of memories (“She didn’t appear as on the first day, sculpted in the light from the party, and we didn’t stand there looking at each other in silence, too moved to speak, while our eyes drank in what they had been missing for so long and the old magic stirred again and cast its web, and a single smile passed from her lips to mind like a kiss that had never come to an end. In actuality, nobody came to the door.”). Prospective meaning protrudes from every observation. For instance, Bouillie recalls: “Then suddenly it struck me that she’d called late on a Sunday afternoon and that it was also a Sunday when she left me, also in the middle of the afternoon, and this couldn’t be a coincidence.” The breach between past and present, memory and possibility, widens page after page. Truth punctures potential until the final act, when a set of strings comprising the web of fate fall into short-term, then long-range, view.

Famesick by Lena Dunham (2026) — As an eighteen-year-old college freshman in 2012, I remember gathering in a dark dorm with a group of soon-to-fade friends for a screening of HBO’s Girls (2012-2017) during New Student Orientation. I had just moved to New York, and the city still seemed daunting, the show divorced from my then-limited inner life and experiences. Four years later, each horrifying millennial mirror had come to feel like a friend, every episode a strange song that cracks open the feeling behind the words caught in your throat. In one episode, Hannah explains: “I want to write. I want to write stories that make people feel less alone than I did. I want to make people laugh about the things in life that are painful.” actualizes her fictional antiheroine’s ambition, first through Girls, now through Famesick (2026).

In its opening pages, Famesick plunges headfirst into an indie sleaze iteration of postgrad fog. Dunham and a friend rent a studio space from the Safdie brothers, circling Greta Gerwig in its halls. The infinite possibility of this period snowballs into concrete opportunity, first with the premiere of Dunham’s short film, Tiny Furniture (2010), at SXSW, then when Girls gets the green light from HBO. The dream gets disrupted as Dunham recounts the perils of production, from the never-ending pressure placed on her body to Adam Driver’s Marlon Brando-coded performance approach. When Girls wraps, the linear narrative splinters. It loops around Dunham’s struggles with endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), and Klonopin addiction — alongside the demise of her relationships with boyfriend Jack Antonoff and writing partner Jenni Konner — before landing her in London.

Famesick provides a clear-eyed, heart-led look at not only early fame and chronic illness, but also the shadow side of people pleasing. Early on, Dunham says “yes” to every photo, opportunity, and request; OCD-fueled fear of inflicting others’ disdain simmers beneath the surface of each choice. This mentality leads Dunham to dip into disordered eating, to battle through a Girls shoot with a broken arm, choices exacerbated by her relationship with Konner. OCD hyperfixates on uncertainty, seeking any semblance of a solution (“It seemed I was always wondering, trying to understand the position I occupied in someone’s life and making decisions based on my abstract findings.”). Konner operates in this grey area, calling Dunham her best friend one minute, ignoring her the next. To keep Konner on her team, Dunham rallies to a point of forced rest. A fissure forms as Dunham learns to listen to and advocate for her body, shedding the weight of others’ expectations in the process.

Stay tuned for the April Movie Review!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis (1998) — This postmodern satire from Bret Easton Ellis, his follow-up to American Psycho (1991), cultivates a surrealist time capsule splashed with deadpan dialogue. Where its predecessor skewers Wall Street, Glamorama (1998) pokes at the pretentiousness of the mid-90s modeling world. The novel follows Manhattan model Victor Ward through the impending opening of a downtown club, an aspiring hotspot on the precipice of its 15 minutes of fame. He cheats on his girlfriend, supermodel Chloe Byrnes, with Alison Poole, who dates his boss, Damien Ross. People perpetually insist on having seen Victor in certain places, creating confusion that crystallizes into a much darker plot.

Status and its pursuit propel each character. Victor calls everybody “baby” and name drops constantly, the fictional figures within and beyond his boredom-bred love square interspersed with mentions of and cameos from of-the-era celebrities (“She suddenly gets up, drops the robe, and lies back on the bed, spreading her legs, pushing me down onto a floor littered with random issues of WWD, my right knee crumpling a back-page photo of Alison and Damien and Chloe and me at Naomi Campbell’s birthday party.”). His long lists of household names present then-up-and-comers from Brooke Shields to Skeet Ulrich as peers. This attitude distills downtown’s “who’s who” attitude, as well as signals the skyrocketing millennium modeling world. Moving from the middle of both social scenes, Victor sees himself as the star of his own movie.

A film crew follows Victor through New York, then over an ocean liner [the QE2, of The Parent Trap (1998) fame] to Paris (“I’m standing at a pay phone on Houston Street, three blocks from Lauren’s apartment. Extras walk by, looking stiff and poorly directed.”). He sees and interacts with these followers, their corporeality still questionable. American Psycho and Glamorama alike present protagonists with overactive imaginations. Both cling to control through obsessive attention to detail, posing the possibility of Patrick’s bone-chilling crimes and Victor’s omnipresent film crew as fabricated figments. Narcissism bleeds from both men. Reflections on a funeral unspool from a sinuous sentence, a hallmark of Bret’s prose, at the end of Glamorama. A shortened observation, vanity as a form of distraction, follows this flash of fear around “car accidents, AIDS, murders, overdoses”; “I looked really great,” Victor thinks.

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (2025) — This debut historical fiction novel from British author Xenobe Purvis epitomizes its pitch of The Crucible (1953) meets The Virgin Suicides (1993). The epigraph quotes a real letter from Dr. John Friend, reading: “Last summer a great rumour spread to us that some young girls…in the Oxfordshire countryside had been seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.” Dr. Friend describes a 1701 case that becomes the basis for The Hounding (2025), Purvis’s meditation on the imagined threat inherent to uninhibited girlhood.

Luscious prose laps each page as Purvis drops the reader into the heat of the English countryside, “the season of strangeness” (“The Thames hemmed Little Nettlebed like a green silk ribbon.”). The river dries page after page, hysteria spreading with the waning of spring, the waxing of summer. The third-person narration clings close to the perspective of five villagers, each of which offers an oblique look at, a differing degree of separation from, the Mansfield sisters: Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Mary, and Grace. Despite the girls grouping together around and beyond the village, in its inhabitants’ consciousness, distinctive traits — from Anne’s severity to Grace’s shyness — establish their individualism. Raised by their near-blind grandfather, Joseph, one of the five narrators, the girls move as a liberated collective, with the kind of independence that brings him pride, the local men perceived peril. As rumors run rampant, Anne breaks down and declares: “It has nothing to do with the idea of us becoming dogs, and everything to do with the fact of us being girls.”

Gendered violence shapes the culture of the village, every narrator maintaining a different relationship to it. Pete Darling, Little Nettlebed’s ferryman, espouses constant sexism; he hates “anything weaker than himself — women, children, sometimes even animals.” For him, the girls necessitate perpetual self-soothing. Every interaction incites anxiety, Pete projecting warped perceptions without warrant (“Whatever power the girls had, an indefinable power — stemming from their manyness, their silent disdain — it held no sway here.”). Conversely, Robin, their neighbor, avoids the town alehouse, its environment tethered to toxic masculinity; one scene shows a badger getting beat to death, scarring Robin against a return. Each narrator’s feelings toward the girls, toward the village’s codified patriarchal culture, grips a specific spot on the spectrum of love to hate.

Uncertainty shapes the narration, a notion encapsulated by the girls’ grandfather, Joseph. The strength of his vision vacillates, teetering closer and closer to complete blindness. Guesswork becomes inherent to his interpretations (“At the far end of the orchard, he heard the sighing of skirts moving through long grass. He tried to guess which of the girls they belonged to.”). Necessity precipitates this imprecision, a quality rendered reckless by the villagers, enticing by Purvis as she pulls the narrative into a loose knot drenched in dread. She tells Write or Die Magazine: “I admire novels that nod to a conclusion, but leave the reader with a feeling of uneasiness. We know that there’s something waiting in the wings. I think Daphne du Maurier does this so effectively in ‘The Birds’…At the end of the story, the protagonist is holed up in his house with his family, and in the very final lines he lights up a cigarette, which we know to be his last one that he was saving. And he flicks on the silent wireless. I love the fiction of alrightness, for want of a better word, because meanwhile the birds are gathering at the windows.”

See you on Sunday!

xo,
Najet

Anyway! I started February with Allegro Pastel (2020), Leif Randt’s German answer to Normal People (2018); read Francis King’s A Domestic Animal (1970), a recent reissue, for ’s book club; and wrapped the month with Ariana Harwicz’s Unfit (2025), a Spanish novella in translation. (I am also halfway through Wuthering Heights (1847), but we will talk about that when I finish it.)

Now, let’s get into it:

Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt (2020) — Issued in the U.S. last year through Granta’s new-ish publishing imprint, Granta Magazine Editions, Allegro Pastel (2020) operates as a German answer to the soul-searching self-sabotage that shapes Sally Rooney’s oeuvre. Set between 2018 and 2019, it follows a long-distance situationship between web designer Jerome Daimler and novelist Tanja Arnheim set across Frankfurt and Berlin. Author Leif Randt, his prose translated from German to English by Peter Kuras, adopts a third-person perspective, with epistolary interludes of emails, text messages, and Instagram DMs splicing up the book’s three core sections. As Bryne Stole writes for The Berliner: “Randt has been compared to the hyperrealist pop of Bret Easton Ellis, Rainald Goetz, or Christian Kracht. But whereas those writers fixated on the minutiae in order to skewer it, Randt’s brilliance is in producing an uncanny reproduction of contemporary life (at least for my generation) under the numbing bright light of his prose and the excessive self-analysis of his characters.”

Allegro Pastel captures the uncertainty that underscores contemporary connection, indecision driven by option overload. Internal rumination ruins the relationship between Jerome and Tanja, as the pair constantly pits their feelings for each other against the possibility and reality of other people. Their outer selves come carefully curated, emblematic of internalized ideas (“It was important to how Jerome saw himself that he not carry grudges, so their reconciliation came quickly.”). Moral posturing takes precedence, and their words and actions hold a tenuous tether to internal truth. For instance, at one point, Jerome declares that he has maintained friendships with all his exes, then immediately feels the blatant falsehood of the statement. Drugs, always taken in controlled settings, often together, afford Jerome and Tanja the rare opportunity to access their feelings unfettered (“A good high, Tanja thought, was a state beyond instinct.”).

Overanalysis pairs with perpetual avoidance of pain to pin Jerome and Tanja in separate corners. As Berlin-based creative Julius Rueckert writes in a 2020 piece for Title Mag: “The challenge of preserving their affection while avoiding the pitfalls of a stale or painful existence remains a pressing concern for the couple.” For instance, fear of rejection drives Jerome to record voice notes three or four times until the cadence strikes the right chord. Careful curation kills the possibility of complete connection; the pair veers away from vulnerability and suffers as a result. Allegro Pastel concludes with a letter from Tanja to Jerome, a tardy gasp of emotional openness (“If I think over the last ten years — all of my affairs, flings, and flirtations — I have to confess that you’re number one. You’re the man I still want to know when he’s shrunken, bald, and senile”). Without spoiling specifics, this epistolary ending infuses the novel, a bespoke byproduct of the late 2010s, with a welcome tinge of timelessness.

A Domestic Animal by Francis King (1970) — This new reissue animates an obsessive love story told by forty-something novelist and Oxford professor Dick Thompson. It opens as follows: “‘I write a lume spento — the hours all seem dark.’ That was how, fourteen months ago, I began my first letter to Antonio when he had returned to Florence, his wife and his two children for the Easter vacation; and that is how I now begin this account after he has left England for good.” The narrative then shifts backward for a proper introduction to Antonio, the 34-year-old Italian philosophy professor who rents a room from Dick over the course of an academic year. Author Francis King presents the pair as diametric opposites (“For me parties are rarely fun; for Antonio they always are.”). What starts as situational friendship, aspirational admiration, folds into a one-sided romance driven by Dick.

A nuanced novel about queer longing, A Domestic Animal (1970) belongs in the canon of favorites from Call Me By Your Name (2007) to The Shards (2023). Desire distorts all three first-person interpretations, magnifying the object of its narrator’s affection. The smallest actions stretch to an outsized scope and gain a great deal of importance. Call Me By Your Name’s Elio fixates on Oliver’s horribly American habit of leaving with a blithe “later!,” while The Shards’s 17-year-old Bret shrouds new student Robert Mallory’s every move in suspicion. In A Domestic Animal, Dick examines interaction after interaction between Antonio and his mistress, Pam, in excruciating detail (“He had placed himself near her and even as he ate, sucking up the strands of tagliatelle and gulping them down like some famished Tuscan peasant, his free hand would stray to her thigh.”). But where André Aciman constructs a relationship ripe with reciprocal tenderness, Francis King foresees the compulsive quality of Bret Easton Ellis’ latest book.

Bret and Dick, identifying as writers, project narratives with a tenuous tie to the truth. For example, Dick imagines the experimentation that might have emerged in Antonio’s teen years, writing: “My novelist’s imagination then got to work.” He paints a portrait of Antonio infused with ambiguity, a bias that prefigures Bret’s projection of Robert. The dramatic effect of hindsight heightens both books. For example, in The Shards, Bret narrates: “She was standing across the street from a CVS pharmacy that used to be, decades ago, a New Wave roller-disco rink called Flipper’s, and on the way out to Palm Springs the sight of the woman caused me to remember the last time I had been to Flipper’s, in the spring of 1981, before Robert Mallory appeared that September and everything changed.” Dick similarly slips in references to what he “was soon to learn.” Details about the past drip off the page at a gradual pace as Ellis and King cultivate a psychosexual sense of anticipation.

Discussing Dinah Brooke’s Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (1971) in the December Book Review, I write: “Each character…communicates from behind a cultural barrier. The categorical confines of Englishwoman, American, and Italian constrain Miranda, Louis, and Oreste, respectively, creating an environment rife with misunderstanding and isolation.” A Domestic Animal stems from the same era and cultural context, its characters also emblematic of how emotional expression can differ across nationalities. Japanese visiting professor Masa finds affinity with Dick, a Brit, but operates as Italian Antonio’s opposite. He explains: “‘I feel close to the English, Mr. Thompson. I feel close to you. But Antonio — it is as though he belonged to another species…Our feelings are narrow and deep. And lasting. Like one of our mountain streams, with rocks on either side…But their feelings — it is like the estuary of a river. The estuary spreads everywhere, but there are only a few feet of water and the water is sluggish and — and muddy.’” This breach builds frustration and misunderstanding for Dick, ultimately fueling his fractured fixation with Antonio.

Unfit by Ariana Harwicz (2025) — Translated from Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer, Unfit (2025) inhabits the troubled first-person perspective of Lisa, a Jewish Argentine immigrant in rural France, the titular unfit mother. Confined to monthly supervised visits with her children, Lisa burns down her in-laws’ farmhouse, kidnaps her five-year-old twin sons, and sets out on a chaotic road trip as retribution (“I move through the house like a ghost, I pick up the lightest one and in the confusion of the flames I leave him in the back seat and run to find the second, rescuing bodies from an ambush by fanatics, and I take him and put him on top of his brother. In that instant their bodies don’t look recognizable anymore”). The narrative emerges on a set track, then splinters, Lisa’s train of thought cut up by dialogue, by italicized scenes divorced from time.

In her review for The New Yorker, which I recommend reading in full, editor Jessica Winter describes Harwicz’s various novels as “spelunking missions into the cave of the unwell mind,” Unfit no exception. Its prose distills a dichotomy of hyperawareness and dissociation. For instance, while driving, Lisa fixates on the white lines that litter the road (“I drive without taking my eyes off the white lines on the road. One, two, three, infinite white lines taking us further and further away.”). The big picture — of her surroundings, of her choices — fades in favor of specific observations and sensations. Commas replace periods to connote stream of consciousness, entrapping the reader in a mutating mental cavern (“I have them with me, here they are, I feel euphoric, I’m out of control, that’s euphoria, isn’t it?”). Evocative visuals enhance this immediacy, while past bleeds into present in a hallucinatory haze. Winter points out that the novella’s Spanish title, Perder el Juicio, “carries the double meaning of losing one’s mind and losing one’s case.”

[This praise aside, had I come into Unfit with awareness of its author, I would have skipped it. I’m all for exposure to alternate perspectives, but not if it means funneling funds toward an individual whose values drastically diverge from my own. Per Winter: “To Harwicz, anti-Israel sentiment in the literary and academic world, if not a direct result of antisemitism, is a product of extortion — a thing people feel forced to do in exchange for not being called racist. ‘If they accuse you of being racist,’ she has said, ‘that means you’re thinking straight.’ She has named the Israeli novelist David Grossman, who recently stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, as a victim of extortion…In 2021, when the Tanzanian-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah, a critic of Israel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first Black or African writer to win in many years — Harwicz wrote that the win was the product of an ‘extortion operation,’ and characterized it as ‘humanitarian propaganda.’” Yikes! No, thank you!!]

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s edition of Sunday Snippets and the March newsletter!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — What a ride. Rebecca (1938) spent months on my to-read list after I picked up a UK edition in Rye over the summer. Near the start of January, I finally got around to reading the Gothic classic, and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest.

The psychological thriller famously opens with a dream, a memory, recounted by an unnamed narrator who has “come through…crisis, not unscathed, of course.” She recalls an abandoned country estate, “a jewel in the hollow of a hand,” “an empty shell” left to linger in her mind. She describes: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.” The story then loops backward as its narrator’s identity — or lack thereof — crystallizes. A woman in her early twenties, she travels alongside the acrid, older Mrs. Van Hopper — whose “sharp and staccato” voice “cut[s] the air like a saw” — as a lady’s companion. In Monte Carlo, the narrator meets and falls for mysterious widower Maxim de Winter. They marry and return to his famed home, Manderley; upon arrival, the enduring chokehold of the prior Mrs. de Winter, the novel’s namesake, emerges.

Rebecca prefigures the structure that forms contemporary favorites from The Shards (2023) to Playworld (2025) to Good Girl (2025). Much like Bret Easton Ellis’s Bret, Adam Ross’s Griffin, and Aria Aber’s Nila, the second Mrs. de Winter embodies adolescent naivety (“‘Put a ribbon round your hair and be Alice-in-Wonderland,’ said Maxim lightly; ‘you look like it now, with your finger in your mouth.’”). All four novels trace its slow incineration, recounted by an older iteration of its primary character. In the April Book Review, I write: “Ross compare[s]…this narrative framing to the experience of an aquarium visit. While the protagonist in the era of the primary action floats through life, their older self functions as a kind of tour guide by widening the aperture around particular moments.” Past innocence balances with current insight to shape each story. For instance, Mrs. de Winter narrates: “I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. Today, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one lightly and are soon forgotten.”

This structure serves the simultaneous purpose of cultivating suspense. Every few pages, Mrs. de Winter hints at forthcoming fractures (“When I look back at my first party at Manderley, my first and my last, I can remember little isolated things standing alone out of the vast blank canvas of the evening.”). Paranoia plagues her, perception morphing into an immovable imagined reality. She remains nameless from start to finish, her husband’s surname serving as her sole identifier. This choice from author Daphne du Maurier imbues the narrator with an amorphous sense of self that bleeds into Maxim’s identity and blurs under Rebecca’s legacy. Lucious prose laps each page as Mrs. de Winter grasps at memories in real-time moments; in its temporality, each one slips from her fingers, its shards prickling the edges of her emotional landscape (“I wanted to go back again, to recapture the moment that had gone, and then it came to be that if we did it would not be the same, even the sun would be changed in the sky, casting another shadow, and the peasant girl would trudge past us along the road in a different way, not waving this time, perhaps not even seeing us.”).

Much like Brideshead Revisited (1945), Rebecca operates as an ode to the cult of the British country house. As I write in my review of the former, Brideshead functions “above all, as a novel about place. The estate itself emerges as a site that bears witness to the changing tides of a family, of a country.” But where Evelyn Waugh writes from a post de facto perspective, du Maurier predicts a puncture in the prosperity of post-World War I England. Its forthcoming erosion finds a foreboding form in Maxim, in Manderley. Maxim begins the novel as a vacuous vessel synonymous with the beauty and grandeur of his home (“Suddenly, he began to talk about Manderley. He said nothing of his life there, no word about himself, but he told me how the sun set there, on a spring afternoon, leaving a glow upon the headland.”). Its secrets crystallize alongside his true character, both bodies under siege toward the story’s end, what The Guardian’s John Crace rightly calls a masterpiece molded by “several spectacular high-wire acts that many great writers wouldn’t attempt.”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) — This slim, epistolary novel by Anita Loos consists of diary entries from Lorelei Lee, a single New Yorker who travels abroad to “get educated” alongside her best friend, Dorothy Shaw. Edith Wharton lauded it as “the Great American Novel,” an encapsulation of flapper culture at the pinnacle of Prohibition overshadowed by contemporary counterpart The Great Gatsby (1925). In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), Lorelei receives a blank diary from Mr. Eisman, her “gentleman friend” and the Button King of Chicago, whose suggestion that her written thoughts could come to comprise a book incites the first entry (“It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress.”). She chronicles everyday adventures at and beyond every Ritz-Carlton from New York to London to Paris to “the Central of Europe” and back again, with Dorothy serving as her hard-boiled foil (“So I sent for Dorothy because Dorothy is not so good at intreeging a gentleman with money, but she ought to be full of ideas on how to get rid of one.”).

The relationship between Lorelei and Dorothy holds complex contours, the two emerging as diametric opposites beyond their obvious difference in hair color. Lorelei considers herself refined, Dorothy brash. But Dorothy’s bluntness swaddles a softer interior. Lorelei maintains that “American gentlemen are best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever,” while lamenting: “Dorothy is always getting to really like somebody and she will never learn how to act. I mean I always seem to think when a girl really enjoys being with a gentleman, it puts her to quite a disadvantage and no real good can come of it.” Despite the occasional below-the-belt barb (see: Dorothy saying Lorelei only has three expressions: “Joy, Sorrow, and Indigestion”), a foundation of mutual support seems to underscore the friendship (“I mean I was quite proud of Dorothy the way she stood up for my reputation. Because I really think that there is nothing so wonderful as two girls when they stand up for each other and help each other a lot.”).

Lorelei acts first, thinks second. A Vienna-set passage sees her paying a visit to “Dr. Froyd,” who considers her a medical marvel, undiagnosable due to her complete lack of inhibitions (“So then he seemed very very intreeged at a girl who always seemed to do everything she wanted to do…Dr. Froyd said that all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.”). At one point, she accepts a marriage proposal, then writes about needing to sort out whether to go through with it. Lorelei’s Little Rock, Arkansas origin story also includes her shooting a man (“It seems that I had the revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.”). The moment only emerges with a complete abdication of responsibility, the revolver acting on its own accord; again and again, she refers to how her “gentleman friend” Mr. Jennings “became shot.” Despite this free-flowing mentality, Lorelei knows how to calculate a plan when pressed, her intellectual prowess reaching a fever pitch in the Paris chapter.

The form of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes prefigures contemporary “for the girlies” fiction, from Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1997) to Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour (2020). Across all three novels, the present tense couples with a first-person point of view to cultivate immediacy and verisimilitude (see: Lorelei’s rampant typos). Each heroine carries a quiet intelligence, the kind that lurks beneath a free-wheeling facade, with Fielding and Granados acknowledging Loos’s Lorelei as the archetype’s origin. Fielding tells The Paris Review: “I did deliberately have her [Bridget] be a bit like Lorelei in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lorelei is both knowing and not-knowing, if you know what I mean? That’s the joke. So I’d have fun with that.” Meanwhile, Granados has repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on her life and work; in her introduction to its centennial edition, she writes: “Reading the novel helped contextualize my own mischief within a lineage of women.”

The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus (2025) — Novelists, as a category, sharpen societal understanding by placing fundamental truths on a fictional plane. That authorial act implies an abandonment of identity that Chris Kraus, as a disciple of French novelist Michel Houellebecq, resists. Kraus and Houellebecq hold a heightened awareness of their respective roles in contemporary life, heeding a startling self-awareness that shapes their work. In a 2013 interview with The Poetry Foundation, Kraus acknowledges: “I love Michel Houellebecq. I think he’s my favorite contemporary fiction writer. He captures the psychic state of the present so accurately. And not without longing.” Each novelist combines unlikely genres, inserting autobiographical avatars into their narratives.

Kraus catapulted onto the literary scene as a feminist favorite with the publication of I Love Dick (1997), her epistolary cult classic that blends cultural criticism with autobiography. Meanwhile, consider Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory (2005). Part portrait of an artist, part crime procedural, the novel centers on fictional artist Jed Martin and his dealings with Houellebecq. With The Four Spent the Day Together (2025), Kraus continues her trademark tradition of blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, this time through the prism of true crime. In a piece for The Paris Review, author Sophie Madeline Dess reflects on Kraus’s interest in “words that mislead,” noting how, “based on title alone, Kraus’s latest novel might suggest an image of four friends enjoying a luncheon on the grass followed by a charming trip to Brighton Beach. But in fact the novel is a fast-paced mystery told in three interconnected parts that culminate in a subtle reflection on class, power, and the banality of our brute instincts.”

Those interconnected parts follow the early family, then independent adult, life of Catt Greene — “author of I Love Dick” — from a third-person vantage point. The first third colors in Catt’s childhood; it inhabits 1950s and 1960s Milford, Connecticut, following the class struggle faced by her parents. This portion, to me, emerges as the most engrossing. The timeline then tilts toward the 2010s as the second section shows Catt looking for an escape from LA. She purchases a second home in Minnesota’s addiction-addled Iron Mountain Range, where a local headline about three teenagers who kill a twenty-something acquaintance after spending the day together fills her focus. The third part then thrusts Catt — and, by extension, the reader — into the criminal case. As she pores over archived text messages, the teenagers’ motivations remain opaque, an echo of how Kraus obscures Catt’s inner life. Per Dess: “Throughout the novel, we are provided only with the facts of Catt’s life and are left to infer the intensity of the emotions that correspond to them.”

I struggle a bit with semi-autobiographical novels that morph into metafiction. To me, the form’s effectiveness feels directly proportional to the author’s distance from the emotional scorn of its events. I would argue that the weakest components of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) crystallize in the character of Alice. A famous novelist navigating fame and flailing mental health, Alice serves as Rooney’s surrogate for her frustrations with the publishing industry, slipping into a constant state of anger that feels personal to the point of unprocessed. The second section of The Four Spent the Day Together adopts a similar tone and tenor, with Catt decrying her online cancellation for serving as an author and Arizona landlord alike. This detail, which dovetails with Kraus’s own experiences, feels like an out-of-left field insertion; here, Catt devolves into a one-note vehicle for the author’s annoyances, cultivating a subpar strand in an otherwise engrossing novel.

Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag (2021) — Translated from Kannada — a regional South Indian language — into English by Srinath Peru, Sakina’s Kiss (2021) marks one of the few McNally Editions reissues that comes without a foreword, a welcome omission for this particular pick. Vivek Shanbhag crafts a deft novel, praised by BOMB Magazine for being “as precise as it is capacious,” that defies categorization, infused with an eternal element of surprise that stands best before an unsuspecting reader. It initially bears hallmarks of an archetypal political thriller, then veers toward a seriocomic yet unsettling conclusion that substantiates author Suketu Mehta dubbing Shanbhag “an Indian Chekhov.”

Sakina’s Kiss inhabits the headspace of a middle-aged man peeking over a precipice, preoccupied with the possibility of a new world order. Anchored by conventional success, white collar IT worker Venkat lives an ordinary life in Bangalore alongside his wife, Viji, and college-aged daughter, Rehka. The prism of societal perception shapes his position in the world, an imagined audience critiquing each choice (“We believe our friends and relatives see us as successful. But no one spells out what exactly that means. They don’t need to. It’s common knowledge that the answers to a few simple questions give the measure of worldly progress…For people like us, people who have successfully passed those milestones, there comes the test of being evaluated by the conduct and achievements of our children. That is where we stand now.”). When two men show up looking for Rekha, Venkat’s vision of reality gets wrenched into a new realm.

A fissure forms between bona fide belief and idealized identity, drenching Venkat in delusions. He claims a progressive perspective, but maintains an inner monologue at odds with this sense of self (“As Rekha has grown up, it has become increasingly hard to keep her under control. I found the idea of handing over her responsibility to a husband strangely comforting.”). The narrative toggles between past and present, peeling back the familial ties to political resistance that color his conservative outlook. Meanwhile, Rehka embodies the opposite end of the sociopolitical spectrum, emerging as her father’s foil. Her activism couples with a quiet mother-daughter alliance to crack Venkat’s imagined iteration of his marriage, ultimately cementing his stringent sense of societal order (“What were mother and daughter whispering about in the afternoon yesterday?”). The ending operates as a precise psychological autopsy, unveiling the mental anatomy of a closeted contemporary conservative.

Crush by Ada Calhoun (2025) — A Gen X exploration of polyamory, Crush (2025) burrows into the first-person perspective of an unnamed female narrator. Her husband, Paul, pushes her toward an open marriage, then regrets it when she forms feelings for an old friend named David. The premise sounds promising enough, but this novel, to me, falters in its execution. As author Jo Hamya writes in her review for The New York Times: “I am all for badly behaved protagonists having morally questionable sex, but some of the mirth and much of the philosophical heft of Calhoun’s setup goes out the window when it’s presented as a Stendhal-quoting, mildly self-righteous treatise on finding yourself, written by a bored, middle-class woman with a functioning bank account and a capable brain who is needlessly complicating her mediocre marriage.”

For contrast, consider Sloane Crosley’s latest memoir, Grief Is for People (2024), an ode to her best friend and long-time mentor, Russell Perreault, who committed suicide in the summer of 2019. She reanimates Russell for the reader, from his penchant for creating catalogue accounts under his dogs’ names to his blunt barbs that somehow never cross into complete cruelty. In Crush, Calhoun relies on pop cultural references and intellectual exchanges (two things I typically love in fiction) as a substitute for specificity. The narrator and David email endlessly, seeped in their shared world shaped by references to Nietzsche’s conception of amor fati and the famous 12th-century affair between Abélard and Héloïse. This approach animates the ubiquitous high inherent to falling for someone, but sweeping statements about love and connection replace the cultivation of complete characters. Consequently, the narrator emerges as an archetypal urban woman, a rough sketch whose feelings flail around two equally amorphous outlines.

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Speaking of the name Rebecca, I am spending the listless space between Christmas and New Year’s locked into the last half of Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier, but we will talk about that in the January Book Review.

In the meantime, let’s get into it:

Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke (1971) — This deliciously dark novel from Dinah Brooke — the author behind another 2025 favorite read, Lord Jim at Home (1973) — subverts the stock trope of a foreign woman searching for fulfillment in Italy. Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (1971) slips into the headspace of Miranda, a young British mother married to an American actor named Louis, from a third-person vantage point (“Her profile was totally inexpressive; not exactly inexpressive, but still to him, after more than a year of marriage, impenetrable.”). The couple rents a cold, dark Italian villa alongside their infant (“If they ate in the dining room, it was difficult to distinguish between the sugar and grated parmesan, and if they ate outside wasps homed in on every mouthful.”). When Louis gets called away to a shoot, Oreste, his acquaintance from a nearby town, arrives at the villa and pulls Miranda into the undertow of sexual awakening, followed by perpetual paranoia.

Each character in Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady communicates from behind a cultural barrier. The categorical confines of Englishwoman, American, and Italian constrain Miranda, Louis, and Oreste, respectively, creating an environment rife with misunderstanding and isolation. For example, Miranda and Louis’s first date at Oxford reveals an affinity between Miranda and the waitress, both Brits who find frustration in his East Coast bravado (“He winked at Miranda, who laughed, and offered him her napkin, but she really identified with the waitress, and found herself thinking, you can smile all you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re a foreigner.”). Convinced of his own charm, Louis remains oblivious throughout the exchange. Meanwhile, Miranda becomes the outsider among Oreste’s family, referred to in the narration as “the Englishwoman” throughout long passages set in their home.

In her introduction to the new edition, Emma Cline — the author behind The Girls (2016), Daddy (2020), and The Guest (2023) — writes: “Dinah Brooke’s Miranda is a foreigner everywhere, even to herself.” Miranda maintains a compulsive fear of loneliness, her constant need for company concealing her partners’ values (“In the morning she woke up with a sense of doom, and couldn’t for a moment locate it. Then she remembered — I’m alone.”). Dissociation, followed by its dissolution, drives the narrative. She moves from detachment to awakening, her feelings undergoing “a violent reversal” and propelling the plot. The novel moves at a breakneck pace driven by dour doom, a quality comparable to The Guest. A sense of foreboding drips from each description. Brooke describes the movement of an arm as “slow as a wasp drowning in honey,” the heat of Italian summer as settling “down on top of them like hot irons clamped around their heads.”

Stay tuned for the December Movie Review and the January newsletter, aka: ~Content Corner Wrapped~!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (2025) — I want a word with whoever chose October as the publication timing for this summer-in-the-city ass novel. Minor Black Figures (2025) is best read in Sheep’s Meadow or on The Great Lawn, suffused in the sweat and humidity of an uptown summer, not in 50-degree fall weather. But, I digress!

Brandon Taylor’s first fictional work set outside the Midwest, Minor Black Figures follows Wyeth, a gay Black painter living on the Upper East Side, through the summer of 2022 as he researches forgotten artist Dell Woods and falls into an unexpected intimacy with former Jesuit priest Keating. The novel magnifies a specific sociopolitical moment in New York, a city fighting to forget COVID while dealing with the Supreme Court’s newly handed down Dobbs decision. Through an artists’ collective called MangoWave, it also satirizes the particular fixation with presenting a facade of poverty that propels the New York art scene, an empty cosplay analogous to the kind Zoe Dubno deconstructs in Happiness and Love (2025). Wyeth grapples with the realities of his present, our recent past, with how its public limits Black artistry and fuels creative futility (“Typically, Wyeth worked from cinema, transposing scenes and compositions from film and filling them with black people he had imagined, so that, say, two black women stood drinking apricot juice from champagne coupes in the gorgeous but mildly eccentric apartment in Rohmer’s Conte de printemps…What use was his work? Black people in scenes from French movies? Who cared?”). The intent behind Wyeth’s work sits outside the pressing parameters of the current moment, coalescing toward a standstill that incinerates his imagination.

The narrative moves at a mesmerizing pace that mimics the rhythm of those sweat-soaked months in Manhattan (“Something had punctured the humidity and thinned the air. He was relieved though anxious because the sudden drop in pressure made him think of a storm. Wyeth sat on a high rock formation, looking down as people played a game of softball at one end of the field and lay out in the other. The buildings loomed, peering like giants from some other world.”). Rich descriptions of Canal Street vendors and Central Park sunsets spackle the setting, absorbing the reader into the rhythms of Wyeth’s world and dilating the daily minutiae that comprises a life. At points, the novel burrows too deeply into ruminative detail for my personal liking, with page upon page spent exploring the implications of Keating washing his hands after greeting a homeless person. But, at the same time, this Austen-esque laser focus feels appropriately reflective of Wyeth’s inability to move beyond the self-contained bubble of his personal preoccupations — and sits in direct contrast to Keating’s settled, sweeping outlook.

In his Substack, sweater weather, Taylor decries the assumption of a shared values system in contemporary fiction, the tendency to “to erect free-standing social and civilizational edifices without any real thought or care as to the chain of events or values that brought them about.” In his piece, “living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding,” Taylor writes: “I see this most often in the treatment of religion in contemporary fiction where no one prays, no one has any sort of deference for the spiritual life except as practiced by artists (usually writers), and where no one believes anything.” His construction of Wyeth and Keating in Minor Black Figures feels like a direct response to this widespread crack in contemporary craft. The relationship between the two men marks a return to asymmetrical philosophical outlooks that rock 20th Century romances, 2022’s answer to Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte. Where Wyeth embodies religious indifference, Keating upholds Catholic values. This divergence creates an initial cloud of mystery around Keating before the pair’s opposing political prisms crystallize and cultivate tension.

Minor Black Figures, above all, operates as a portrait of the artist at a crossroads. Keating and Dell stoke, then restore, Wyeth’s stuttering sense of purpose. As a result of their influence, Wyeth comes to create a new piece that confronts the contours of contemporary Black artistry — and recaptures conviction in his craft.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (1984) — As you might recall, in October, I read Zoe Dubno’s new novel, Happiness and Love (2025), constructed in conversation with Thomas Berhard’s Woodcutters (1984). The 2020s Dimes Square-set debut inspired me to seek out its inspiration, which deconstructs an analogous strain of Viennese artistic society in the 1980s, one similarly shaped by what Bernhard calls a “shabby-genteel” aesthetic.

Much like its contemporary companion, Woodcutters opens with an unnamed narrator drudging through the depths of a dull dinner party, the cocktail hour on the verge of its crescendo, hosted at the home of the Auersbergers, a singer-and-composer husband-wife duo. After avoiding the couple since the 1950s, “the very mention of the name Auersberger…[bringing] on third-degree nausea,” the narrator finds himself dragooned an an invitation after the suicide of a shared friend, Joana. Following her funeral, the guests now await the arrival of an actor from the Burgtheater, Vienna’s on-stage equivalent of Hollywood in the prism of prestige. Watching from a winged chair, the narrator reflects on the vapidity of Vienna after returning from London, “plunged…into profound despair and utter hopelessness.” The narrative unspools from a single paragraph, a story shaped by stream of consciousness that finds firmer external form when the guest of honor arrives.

The Burgtheater actor brings with him a critical outside perspective; much like the Hollywood actress in Zoe Dubno’s update, he begins in opposition with the narrator, then comes to mirror the same mental clarity (“That night…the Burgtheater actor…[transformed] himself from a gargoyle into a philosophically minded human being, if not from a driveler into a philosopher.”). Toward the start of the story, the narrator laments: “The dreadful city of Vienna, I thought, having plunged me yet again into profound despair and utter hopelessness, has suddenly become the motor that enables my mind to function again as a living mind and my body as a living body.” The actor voices similar feelings about the city; he describes Vienna as “an art mill, the biggest art mill in the world, in which the arts and artists are ground down and pulverized year in, year out,” how “whatever the art or whatever the artists, the Viennese art mill grinds them all to powder…and…all these people jump into this art mill entirely of their own volition.” Both see — and seek to avoid — the dangerous leap from genuine artistic interest to empty imitation, with the actor cutting into one character’s transition “from her Virginia Woolf fixation to her Virginia Woolf posture.”

Through Woodcutters, Bernhard captures the disorientation of returning to a city that calcifies into a place of impediment, to a set of people whose meaning morphs through maturation (“Thirty years ago, I thought, I used to love this music room, which I always described as the most beautiful Josephine room I had ever seen. But later I realized that it was simply too beautiful, too perfectly furnished, and hence unbearable.”).

Chess by Stefan Zweig (1942) — For fans of Intermezzo (2024)! This slim novella from Austrian writer Stefan Zweig takes place aboard a ship setting sail from New York toward Buenos Aires. Its narrator observes the entrance of world famous chess champion Mirko Czentovic, who gets challenged to a string of games by a crew of passengers (“The idea that here on this ship, in the middle of the ocean, the palm of victory might be snatched from the chess champion — a record that would be flashed all over the world by telegraph offices — fascinated us in the most provocative way.”). An anonymous voice emerges from the crowd and guides the group toward a draw, the precursor to a David-and-Goliath-style with a surprise ending tinged by trauma.

I sought out this story thanks to a craft research recommendation from a friend, and it didn’t disappoint. Save for one overly lengthy monologue, Chess (1942) maintains a tight, clear narrative structure, its prose particular in the picture it paints. The environment unravels in the first two opening sentences, the first-person “I” of the speaker introduced immediately afterward. When Mirko initially appears, the narrator’s confusion about his identity mirrors the reader’s, cultivating a vicarious sense of discovery. Zweig varies his sentence structure, opting for simple language to communicate lofty learnings. Chess crystallizes as a means of mental freedom through fixed focus, infinity through constriction, “a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth.”

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

I’m also halfway through Brandon Taylor’s new novel, Minor Black Figures (2025), but we’ll talk about that in the November Book Review.

Now, let’s get into it:

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno (2025) — Happiness and Love (2025) siphons its form and subject matter from Woodcutters (1984), transplanting Thomas Bernhard’s comparable critique of the art world from 1980s Vienna to 2020s New York. Zoe Dubno’s debut opens in the middle of a downtown dinner party. Its unnamed narrator sits at the end of a white couch. From this perch, she observes the surrounding social swirl, reflecting on her recent return to the city after a five-year stint in London (“Sitting in the corner seat of the sofa at Eugene and Nicole’s apartment, I realized that I had once again been ensnared by the comfortable and chic furnishings that this couple had habitually trapped me in, after all that I had done to extract myself from their influence I was once again surrounded by their spare sumptuousness”). Past, present, and future conflate. Stream of consciousness shapes the novel, a story stripped of chapter breaks and told in a single paragraph, as four core characters crystallize over the course of cocktail hour: the evening’s hosts, Eugene and Nicole; performative male novelist Alexander; and once-aspiring actress, now-deceased actress Rebecca.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), set against the backdrop of aughts-era artistic excess, feels like a forebear to Happiness and Love. Both books skewer the cultural elite through satire, driven by an unnamed narrator drowning in disillusionment. Entitlement emerges in each story, revealing unchanged contours of the city over two plus decades. The absurdity of the art world, however, has an individuated impact on each narrator; it enables scattered ennui for Moshfegh’s, cultivates quiet rage in Dubno’s. Eugene and Nicole spark the sharpest corners of the latter’s anger, emerging as the embodiment of contemporary artistic artifice (“They…made me believe when I was nineteen that their world was a wonderful place where people exchanged ideas and created things together, for a public, for each other, with a purpose. I had believed them, and I thought that when they were cruel to others it was for the greater benefit of the higher ideal that was art.”). A couple caught in a fraught marriage, stuck in the straitjacket of its social trappings, Nicole and Eugene architect these evenings to signal status and exercise control. Instead of fostering a free exchange of ideas, they “listen…to everything…in order to transform…[others’] thoughts and ideas into commercial artwork.”

Specific cultural observations punctuate the prose, the aggregate of which clarify the signifiers that shape each character. Nicole gets described as a “chunky-minimalist-silver-jewelry rich…[person], not layered-gold-necklaces rich…[person],” “an important distinction” the narrator wishes she could unlearn. Alexander lacks self awareness, viewing himself above gossip and small talk. As the narrator explains: “In his mind the reason that he attended dinner parties was to engage in political discourse. The main problem with this was the fact that Alexander knew practically nothing about politics, history, or what went on in the world aside from gossip.” These pinprick particular descriptions not only ice pleasurable, page-long sentences with humor, but also form the complete picture of a scene, a web of social contracts connected by a fixation with art for signifier’s sake. Artifice constructs this cultural community, a reality the narrator acknowledges internally; over the course of the evening, its faulty foundation crumbles externally too. The guest of honor — an unnamed Hollywood actress who Nicole, Eugene, and their guests consider her socially superior, but intellectually inferior — facilitates that public fracture.

Happiness and Love reaches its denouement as the actress, a harbinger of West Coast culture, pops a hole in the social order of this specific East Coast set. She skewers the smug sense of superiority shaping the evening, lamenting: “People who believe that by reading Proust they’re geniuses…actually lock people out of having life-changing aesthetic experiences by acting like those things are harder to understand than they really are…I mean, why did you invite me here tonight to your cultural evening, as I think you described it on the invitation, when it’s been one of the most culture-less evenings of my life, when all I’ve heard conversation about is travel itineraries and gossip and clothing and wine? …I came to discuss ideas but instead I feel like a pilgrim who has walked for weeks only to find his holy site littered with trash and covered in graffiti.” The narrator sits in silence throughout the night. Initially, she clocks the guest of honor as an enemy, frustrated by the collective focus on her arrival after Rebecca’s funeral that morning (“Of course Rebecca was practically nothing to them while the actress was exactly the kind of person that they were desperate to know.”). A conflation of all art across the spectrum of commercial value also marks a philosophical point of departure, feeding into that fissure. But, with time, the actress comes to vocalize what the narrator feels, catalyzing the clever catharsis that closes the novel.

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (1959) — This midcentury British novel, which recently got the reissue treatment from McNally Editions, paints a portrait of delusional writer Daniel Skipton. Fueled by frustration with the London literary scene, he scrounges for cash across Bruges by swindling local tourists and far-off acquaintances through “a regimen of blackmail, bullying, and native charm,” as the publisher describes. While working on his latest manuscript, Skipton ingratiates himself into a group of British tourists: playwright Dorothy Merlin; her bookseller husband, Cosmo Hines; and their friends, drunken Duncan Moss and posh Matthew Pryor. Poetic prose, punctuated with subtle strikes of alliteration, forms vivid visuals across each page (“Next day the weather broke. Tantrums of rain burst across the Grand’s Palace, wild wields, stiffened by the sea, scolded the café blinds and slapped the skirts of women over their legs.”). Narrated from a close third-person vantage point, The Unspeakable Skipton constructs what Pamela Hansford Johnson herself calls “a study of an artist’s paranoia…a state which is, of course, not true of all artists, and very rarely of the greatest: but…true of a certain number…[a] special sub-branch of artistic life.”

In his foreword to the new edition, Michael Dirda, The Washington Post’s book critic, compares Hansford Johnson to Muriel Spark, her contemporary whose novel from the same year, Memento Mori (1959), I discussed back in November of 2023. Both books carry an acute understanding of the individuated idiosyncrasies, the minute moments, that comprise the human condition. For instance, Johnson narrates: “Daniel took out the silver case and offered the dentist’s cigarettes. Cosmo took a quick look at it, and by a scarcely perceptible twitch of the brows indicated that Matthew should observe it also.” A similar British behavioral subtlety shapes Spark’s work (“Without shifting her posture she raised the hem of her skirt at one side until the top of her stocking and the tip of her garter were visible. Then she went on knitting and watching the television screen. Godfrey gazed up at the stocking-top and the glittering steel of the garter-tip for the space of two minutes’ silence.”).

Each novelist assembles a strange cast of characters, underscoring their true-to-life oddities. But where Spark opts for a proper ensemble in Memento Mori, Johnson jolts Skipton to the forefront — and dials up the delusion. To me, he emerges as a midcentury successor to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, who believes in his imagined knighthood enough to wield swords at windmills. For Skipton though, narcissistic cruelty replaces clueless chivalry — a different means to the same seriocomic conclusion (“He himself, inwardly raging was reduced to silence; the playwriting vulture was taking it upon herself to silence the greatest writer of the age, who, though recognized by few at the moment would one day come into his own with such effect that nobody would ever again conceive of the idea of getting a word in edgeways once he chose to open his marvellous lips.”).

Stay tuned for the November newsletter tomorrow! It should be a fun one.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana (2015) — Last summer, I had the honor of seeing Gary Indiana vape at McNally Jackson Seaport for an event celebrating the paperback publication of his memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love (2015). Just over a year since that event, just under a year since his death, I finally picked up the book.

In its epilogue, Indiana writes: “I let go of any pretense of documenting reality, and kept instead the evocation of things happening to a person for the first time, of being young and completely unprepared for life.” This spirit of youthful confusion shapes I Can Give You Anything But Love, which floats through Indiana’s formative experiences from New Hampshire to San Francisco to New York to LA to Havana. The narrative structure abandons notions of beginning, middle, and end. Indiana writes: “I like places where nothing happens, the time between events. I am wary of events. I do not welcome them.” Those in-between times become the story’s scaffolding while melodic prose punctuates each page, coupling heartfelt humor with incisive societal commentary. He describes a crush as wearing “the ruffled shirts and satin trousers of a Carnaby Street dandy, his hair an unraveling Brillo Pad”; the tenants in The Bryson as having “a trailer park greasiness…associated with Charles Manson.”

Indiana’s relationship with AIDS activist Ferd Eggan weaves a thread across the various chapters. At one point, Eggan tells Indiana: “There aren’t going to be any more highs.” This moment sparks the sense of 70s-era ennui that molds the memoir. Indiana also maintains an unnerved understanding of class stratification. One of my favorite sections recounts his time living in Watts and working at Westland Twins, an art house movie theater that sat two blocks from Westwood Boulevard until its 1984 closure. Movie stars from Natalie Wood to Anthony Perkins to Anjelica Houston flocked from Brentwood and Bel Air to grace its lobby, cultivating Indiana’s acute awareness of the socioeconomic breach between Watts and Westwood. He writes: “Three nights a week, the freeway system became an umbilicus between the shittiest ghetto in America and the country’s richest suburb. The surreal contrast between the two places formed my entire world view, which hasn’t altered much since.”

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987) — What a novel! The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) first published as a serial in Rolling Stone a la In Cold Blood (1965) with The New Yorker before getting edited and reissued as a standalone book. Clocking nearly 700 pages, the finished product paints a sprawling picture of the social, political, and racial tensions lurking beneath the opulent veneer of Reagan-era New York — “the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening.” A rare instance of literary fiction with luscious prose and commercial appeal, the novel filled subway car after subway car in its heyday.

Tom Wolfe’s close third-person lens flickers across a broad cast of characters, presenting each person through multiple vantage points. But the narrative focuses most frequently on Wall Street bond trader Sherman McCoy, a self-described “Master of the Universe” with a “Yale chin,” as it traces his fall from grace. Sherman lives with his wife, Judy, and six-year-old daughter, Campbell, in a full-floor Park Avenue apartment while working at Pierce & Pierce, the fictional firm that also employs Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (1991) (“Pierce & Pierce was the power, and he was wired into the power, and the power hummed and surged in his very innards.”). After a wrong turn into the Bronx, where Sherman and his mistress, Maria, hit a young Black boy named Henry Lamb, that bubble of white privilege bursts.

The Lamb case becomes a political lightning rod, a reflection of rightful rage around the socioeconomic inequity bubbling just below the sheen of the city. Two characters exploit that tension: Bronx District Attorney Abe Weiss and City Light reporter Peter Fallow. Weiss wants reelection. He skewers Sherman to procure political capital with Black voters, any moral overtures serving as a means toward an end (“‘We’re not here to handle cases. We’re here to create hope.’”). A Brit abroad, Fallow observes New York’s social stratification from a cool remove (“It made Fallow’s flesh crawl, this American penchant for the personal and the sentimental. The Yanks couldn’t even let the dead depart with dignity.”). He embodies the tabloid culture of the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, architecting an image of the case and its characters fractured from fact (“Like most journalists who have been handed a story, Fallow was eager to persuade himself that he had discovered and breathed life into the clay himself.”). For instance, Fallow frames Henry as an “honor student” when, in reality, he merely keeps out of trouble; to underscore this illusion, Wolfe, at one point, substitutes the journalist’s name with “the creator of the honor student” in a dialogue tag.

Perception overpowers reality, a point particularly pronounced in Wolfe’s party scenes. People pack into penthouses populated by “men and women…arranged in clusters, conversational bouquets, so to speak…no solitary figures, no strays.” Remaining contained to the cluster becomes paramount; Sherman descends into a state of anxiety whenever he breaks from a conversational bouquet. Wolfe presents Sherman and Judy’s wealth as precarious, a lifestyle of luxury riding on a high paycheck and an even higher debt ceiling on the precipice of imploding. The word “society” appears with a capital S, and that enigma becomes the engine powering each person across racial, social, and economic lines. Abe pursues justice not for justice’s sake, but to secure the Black vote needed for his reelection. Sherman adores his daughter, Campbell, and even that connection, arguably the most innocent in the novel, gets shaped — and, ultimately, sullied — by Society. A hand-in-hand walk to the bus stop — a space surrounded by other parents — marks their only regular ritual (“Sherman liked to have his fatherhood observed.”).

Wolfe captures and satirizes the penchant for ethnic categorization that distinguishes the East Coast mentality. For example, in a cab, Sherman struggles to discern the ethnic background of his driver, a detail that has no bearing on his day (“The driver was…a Turk? An Armenian? Sherman tried to make out his name on the card in the frame on the dashboard.”). He resents relying on anyone other than fellow WASPs for favors, prickled by particularities as minor as the improper pronunciation of certain words by his defense attorney, Tom Killian (“Like a lot of other old-line, well-fixed Protestant families in Manhattan, the McCoys had always made sure that only other Protestants ministered to their private affairs and their bodies.”). This perspective spans beyond Sherman. Killian refers to one character as “your basic hardcore New York Hell’s Kitchen Irishman,” while, at one point, Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer reflects: “I’m still Jewish…but not in this room. All the cops turned Irish, the Jewish cops like Goldberg, but also the Italian cops, the Latin cops, and the Black cops…Everybody moving up in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office was Jewish or Italian. And yet the Irish stamp was on the Police Department and on the Homicide Bureau of the D.A.’s Office, and it would probably be there forever.”

Everyone sticks to their segregated social, economic, and racial spheres, alternate iterations of New York lurking alongside the version each character occupies. The Lamb case fractures these firewalls. When Sherman visits Killian’s office for the first time, Wolfe writes: “In all the years he had lived in New York and worked downtown, Sherman had never noticed the Criminal Courts Building, even though it was one of the biggest and grandest buildings in the City Hall area.” His awareness expands, greater geographic consciousness generated through forced circumstance. One of the most striking scenes shows Sherman shut up in his Park Avenue apartment, a protest playing out in front of his building (“The sight of the perfect yellow spring tulips of Park Avenue falling before the mob paralyzed him with fear”). To me, that particular image — pristine Park Avenue tulips pressed up against an unruly crowd — epitomizes the cultural collision at the core of The Bonfire of the Vanities.

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Pan by Michael Clune (2025) — This new novel from White Out (2013) author Michael Clune inhabits the headspace of Nick, a 15-year-old boy plagued by panic attacks, from the first-person vantage point of his older self. He lives with his father in Chariot Courts, “a small subdivision of town houses surrounded by empty land waiting to be developed…a battleground between the idea of home and the armies of impermanence.” With the narrative set in 1990, Nick struggles to find the language for his ever-growing anxiety and settles in on the notion of Pan, the god of nature and rustic music in Greek mythology, as synonymous with it, a force threatening escape from the bowls of his brain (“Panic was loose — it was loose — Pan was loose in the room…I felt panic alive in my head like a swarm of flies.”).

Clune captures the feeling of consciousness made immediate by Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, with the reality of the novel as epistolary artifact clarifying in its final pages (“I believe now that the instances of ‘prophecy’ littered throughout the preceding report are in reality not visions of the future, but mere sensations, registrations of the brute fact that everything has already happened.”). He takes a tailored approach to engaging with cultural touchstones, imbuing each one with a bespoke meaning. Certain songs — from “Everybody Plays the Fool” (1972) to “More Than a Feeling” (1976) — get introduced in the context of particular mental moments, within the confines of specific relationships. Through repeated references, those pop cultural pieces transform into a kind of shorthand, a language shared between Nick and the reader.

In his drug memoir, White Out (2013), which I discuss in the October 2024 Book Review, Clune reflects the rupture of memory that accompanies addiction through his prose. In Pan (2025), his fixation with the porous quality of consciousness emerges in the realm of anxiety. The notion of addiction as a “memory disease” recurs across White Out, while, in Pan, Nick and his friends fixate on what it means to have a “Sound Mind.” Across both books, small details like the quality of certain sounds and lights become uncanny through magnification. For instance, looking at his friend, Ty, Nick narrates: “The whites of his eyes seemed swallowed up by swelling color. His eyes looked like…like doors, I thought, the panic rising a little more now. Like stones. Like real stones.” These sensory observations culminate to create a warped sense of the surrounding world, magnified fiction as true as fact.

I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava (2022) — This slim novel from Stephanie LaCava inhabits the first-person headspace of Margot Highsmith, the daughter of divorced punk musicians. It opens on a plane, with Margot fleeing New York for Montana on the heels of a breakup, “the same story heard over and over again, but in reverse…girl leaves small town for the big city.” The narrative then loops backward to trace Margot’s fame-infused upbringing set against a simple premise: her inability to feel physical pain. Much like Pan, I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022) distills the elliptical quality of consciousness. As Tao Lin writes in her New York Times review: “LaCava’s taut, sheared prose often seems like lines of poetry collapsed into paragraphs. This quality is enhanced by recurring words, images and ideas — cows and trains, CDs and backpacks, blood and ancientness, pain and confusion, the number 57 — and references to past scenes.” As Margot meditates on her childhood, past and present bleed into a blend of memory.

The premise has the potential to fall into the trap of the trauma plot, but Margot’s reflections bend toward quiet acceptance in place of dramatized victimhood. This evasion, while welcome, breeds another issue; LaCava struggles to clarify the nihilism of the novel from that of the narrator. This conflation strips the story of its stakes. In her review for The Guardian, British novelist Daisy Hildyard writes: “Relationships are explicated before they arise (‘In time, I would see that his was the pathology of disconnection’), or long after they have ended (‘Her love for me was the same as her love for my father, which had been either all in or all out’), but they rarely come to life on the page.” To me, I Fear My Pain Interests You would function better as a short story, one infused with greater discernment between the emotional qualities of its narrator and the narrative at large; the final quarter — when Margot meets a trauma surgeon who discerns her condition — contains the arc that could serve as its scaffolding.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the September newsletter and a Peter Bogdanovich-centered August Movie Review.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Rattlebone by Maxine Clair (1994) — Through a decentralized narrative and precise prose, Rattlebone (1994) reveals the sociopolitical landscape of a small, predominantly Black enclave in Kansas City. Against the backdrop of the 1950s, the then-recent Brown v. Board of Education ruling looms over the novel, one told through stories a la Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). The various vignettes often refract through the individuated lens of Irene Wilson, a young girl who comes of age over the course of the book (“With her back to the door, she was a naked brown sheath of curves. They were a twist of fudge and caramel.”). It opens with the arrival of October Brown, a new schoolteacher who captures the attention of Irene and her peers. This subtle shift reorders Irene’s world, the full scope of its impact reemerging with an accent in the final chapter. As adulthood slowly eclipses adolescence, a series of events large and small, societal and individual, punctuate her progression.

Each story has the capacity to function on its own, but inherits a richer texture in the context of the collection; taken as a whole, Rattlebone weaves a tapestry of an imagined place and a bygone time. Maxine Clair summons small details that coalesce to create a visceral sense of Rattlebone (“The low street of Dorla Wooten’s house left a gash in the view. Electric lines stretched like a web that periodically discharged flashes of electricity as the trolleys moved up and down Fifth Street.”). As W. Ralph Eubanks writes in the winter 2023 issue of The Sewanee Review: “In her New York Times review, Veronica Chambers said Clair’s collection had ‘magic dust sprinkled over each and every page’ — words I wish I had written to describe this book.” Smells, shapes, and songs entwine the visual and emotional to cultivate an immediacy drenched in nostalgia (“Geraldine and I liked anything by the Platters. She and I swooned together about the present spectacular season, the most romantic of all, Indian Summer. It summoned us to the outdoors like a narcotic and absorbed us in its steady blaze.”).

See you at the end of the month!

xo,
Najet

Anyway, in June, I read two novels inspired by the temporary breakdown of the Didion-Dunne marriage: A Book of Common Prayer (1977) and Vegas (1974). I also relished in poet Rob Franklin’s debut novel, Great Black Hope (2025), and found myself disappointed by Barbara Trapido’s fifth work of fiction, The Travelling Hornplayer (1998).

Let’s get into it:

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion (1977) — Throughout her life, Joan Didion maintained a well-documented fascination with Patty Hearst, the Northern California nepo baby who took up arms with the Symbionese Liberation Army after her 1974 kidnapping. In South and West (2017), Didion discusses why the case bewitched her — and why she held off on writing about it until her California essay collection, Where I Was From (2003). She first explores tinges of the trial, however, in A Book of Common Prayer (1977), projecting it on a fictional plane (“She could not give the FBI a recent photograph of Marin because any photograph useful to them would show Marin’s eyes, and then Marin’s eyes would stare back at her from newspapers and television screens, and she was not yet ready to deliver her child to history.”).

A Book of Common Prayer begins with an overview of the life of Charlotte Douglas; two marriages, two lost children, then death. This opening takes a page from John Williams’s Stoner (1965), which encapsulates the whole of a man’s life into a brief paragraph before fleshing out its finer details. Didion’s first-person narrator announces herself as Grace Strasser-Mendana, an American expat married into one of the most prominent families in the fictional country of Boca Grande. She chooses to speak about Charlotte, her philosophical opposite (“I will be her witness…Charlotte would call her story one of passion. I believe I would call it one of delusion.”). Where Grace deals in some form of fact, Charlotte wrenches reality to fit her vision (“We all live in cinderblock houses. Charlotte wanted color.”). The novel explores how that delusion becomes her downfall.

A love triangle lingers between Charlotte and her first and second husbands, Warren Bogart and Leonard Douglas. Warren operates as an avatar for Noah Parmentel Jr., while Leonard serves as a stand-in John Gregory Dunne. As I write in my review of Didion and Babitz (2024): “Joan’s first great love [and] her initial literary advocate, Parmentel pushes for the publication of her debut novel, Run River (1963)…He ultimately introduces her to John Gregory Dunne, a man who offers the kind of stability he lacks, as well as a heightened version of the support to which Joan had grown accustomed (Per Parmentel: “‘He’d be at the breakfast table every morning, something I’d never be. And he’d edit her line by line.’”)…Parmentel remains a close friend of the Didion-Dunnes until Joan excises him in her third novel [as Warren].”

The defection of Warren and Charlotte’s daughter — Marin, a Bay area debutante-turned-Marxist radical — looms over the trio (“The hair Charlotte pulled from her brush was dry and wiry and faded. When Marin was small she had played a game with Charlotte’s hair and called it gold.”). Certain images — for instance, Marin as a child, wearing a straw hat on Easter — repeat, governing Charlotte’s projected vision of her daughter. Meanwhile, Marin remembers Charlotte as perennially in a tennis dress, an outfit worn once for a mother-daughter fashion show. Grace narrates: “You were both wrong but it’s all the same in the end. We all remember what we need to remember. Marin remembered Charlotte in a tennis dress and Charlotte remembered Marin in a straw hat for Easter.” A Book of Common Prayer operates as a meditation on the power of memory; when mother and daughter disappear from each other’s lives, these images, no matter how outdated or imagined, become eternal signifiers in absentia.

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (2025) — With Great Black Hope (2025), Rob Franklin delivers that rare literary fiction novel capable of balancing poetic prose with a propulsive plot. It operates in the continuum of Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), of Aria Aber’s Good Girl (2025). Told in a close third person, Franklin’s debut opens with an arrest in Southampton at the end of summer, the detention of David Smith for cocaine possession. A Stanford graduate, Smith — referred to almost exclusively by his surname — inhabits a world of figures who flit through the upper crust of downtown Manhattan society “at bars, brunches, birthdays, holiday soirees in which black tie was optional — and, before New York, in freshman seminars and frat parties, and, before that, on teen tours or tennis camps, where they’d been acne spotted, their original forms intact.” The sudden death of his close friend and roommate, socialite Elle England, further rattles the cage of respectability politics that governs a certain kind of Black bourgeoisie, a notion diced and dissected as the novel’s narrative aperture widens.

The novel draws its name from an October 1995 Vanity Fair feature on Colin Powell. Titled “The Great Black Hope” and disorientingly placed beside a Ralph Lauren ad, the piece has a subhead that reads: “War hero, political outsider, racial healer — Colin Powell appears to be a dream presidential candidate, beating out [incumbent Bill] Clinton in the polls. Since his service as the first African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his life and image have become potent symbols. But is the real Powell any match for his legend?” The looming threat of “legend,” the breach between expected and actualized achievement, haunts Smith throughout Great Black Hope; race and class shape his existence, a twin set of spindles that spin a story centered on the inherent privilege that belies transgression (“Carolyn’s face, leaned against the metal door, was obscured. But from her quivering back, he could tell she was crying; the only logical conclusion to the chaos she’d been determined to create…Hers was a problem of substances, yes, and of pride, but also of something that was not her own. The passes she would always be given. And for that, Smith envied her with an ardor for which he had no words…her rock bottoms would always seem romantic in retrospect.”).

The narrative establishes an early triangulation, what Franklin refers to in a Culture Mag interview as a “Venn diagram,” between Smith, Elle, and their friend, Carolyn. Elle, the LA daughter of a once-famed soul singer, and Carolyn, a blonde WASP from a wealthy family of New York artists, occupy opposite poles of coastal wealth. This shared symbiosis bonds them beyond Smith, whose queerness and origins in the precarious social position of Atlanta’s Black upper crust render him distinctive. But Smith and Elle stay connected through their shared racial identity, a joint understanding of how white liberalism wields multiculturalism as a kind of accessory (“They were at the bottom of the second bottle and Carolyn was in the midst of a deliciously scandalous story about a secret affair conducted on a sailing trip with the youngest son of a family friend when Elle caught Smith’s eye — a spare, sidelong look, probably meant to convey no more than affection, though as Smith glanced back at Carolyn and saw the dissolve of a wounded expression, he realized it had been read as an insult, a private joke at her expense, and despite himself, he took some pleasure in her hurt.”).

Great Black Hope shares similarities with Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) in its exploration of how death can beget a certain kind of dissociation against the backdrop of New York; when Elle dies, a breach of understanding emerges between Smith and Carolyn, leaving both to process their grief in a vacuum rather than together. It also operates in the tradition of nightlife novels from The Great Gatsby (1925) to Less Than Zero (1985). Smith moves through the New York downtown set, maintaining a calculated distance comparable to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway (“Even in the dark, it was evident that the furniture was stained, both recently and long ago, everyone’s general attitude being that this place should be honored by their presence, so a drink spilled or a cigarette ashed directly onto the carpet was not just permissible but the whole point of being here.”). Great Black Hope reaches a crescendo as Smith goes from party to party looking for one of his friends, observing a series of increasingly odd scenes comparable to the disturbing denouement of Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel. But where Gatsby and Less Than Zero end in numbness, Franklin closes Great Black Hope with a tinge of optimism, the sense of community that comes with shedding the social shackles of your twenties in favor of friends who carry deeper commonalities.

Vegas by John Gregory Dunne (1974) — Toward the beginning of “In the Islands,” one of the essays in The White Album (1979), Joan Didion writes: “My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window…We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” The piece writes around a more difficult moment in her marriage to John Gregory Dunne. Meanwhile, Vegas (1974) functions as Dunne’s testimony, a stunningly stylized scream from the silent partner in a famous relationship. This Gonzo journalism-inspired pseudo memoir recently got the reissue treatment from McNally Editions, featuring a new introduction from Sweetbitter (2016) author Stephanie Danler. In her foreword, Danler characterizes absence as the trick of the book. It operates as a meditation on marriage, with Didion emerging only in its margins; she haunts the whole of Vegas despite speaking only once (“At home it was the familiar season of discontent I sometimes had the feeling we went from crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town, every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.”).

Not unlike Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays (1970), Dunne burns time cruising across Sunset Boulevard in a gray Firebird convertible. A sign on La Brea Avenue, “a picture of an enormous roulette wheel and a gold-letter legend…with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP,” pulls him out of Los Angeles. Driven by a compulsive fear of death, he “anesthetizes” his own problems by befriending the byproducts of those seedy subcultures flourishing from the center of 1970s Las Vegas — from aging showgirls to oft-arrested escorts to coked-up comedians (“The center of social activity at the Royal Polynesian was the swimming pool. Every afternoon it was full of aging show girls, their looks and figures still fairly intact, women without men, careful not to let their hair get wet in the pool.”). The most compelling chapters in this diamond of a book, to me, center on Dunne’s relationship with religion; Catholic guilt couples with an uneasy understanding of sexuality to color his acerbic excision of Clark County at the onset of a corporatized sea change.

The Travelling Hornplayer by Barbara Trapido (1998) — The British answer to Laurie Colwin, Barbara Trapido carves comforting fiction from the cruelty of life. Her debut, Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982), while very much a product of its time, remains one of the most enjoyable works of literary fiction I’ve found in the past few years. As I write in the November 2023 newsletter: “This cozy, lesser known coming-of-age novel centers on eighteen-year-old Katherine as her philosophy professor, Jacob Goldman, welcomes her into the fold of his eccentric family. When romantic tensions with his two sons start to bubble, Katherine finds herself embarking on an unforeseen odyssey from England to Italy and back again. Trapido brings rom-com vibes without compromising quality prose, with…author Maria Semple describing…[it] as ‘Brideshead Revisited meets Sabrina in bohemian 80s London.’”

Trapido crafts The Travelling Hornplayer (1998) with the same punchy prose as its predecessor (“Sonia is quite knowledgeable in a lumpen sort of way. That is to say she knows a little about a wide range of things and she will spread this knowledge confidently among a great multitude. Fine Art is an area she has begun to colonize quite recently.”). But an overabundance of plot pairs with an erratic grasp on perspective to deflate her fifth novel.

The narrative traces a wide cast of characters, many of which reappear from Brother of the More Famous Jack, as their stories intersect toward a careful crescendo. The death of student Lydia Dent in London ties together The Travelling Hornplayer’s simultaneous plot points. (The back cover bills it as a ghost story, but, in reality, the narrative stays stripped of the speculative.) The novel hums along like a well-conducted orchestra — its major characters well-crafted, their connections deftly revealed. But instead of leaning into Lydia’s death, which offers sufficient plot to propel the story, Trapido steps on the soap operatic land mine of melodrama, stuffing everything from surprise pregnancies to HIV diagnoses into 255 pages.

The novel dips into multiple characters’ first-person points of view, with a close third often creating a kaleidoscopic lens. Each chapter vacillates between these two registers at random. Trapido also resists free indirect style in the third person, cluttering those passages with “, (insert character) thought” — despite having inhabited that individual’s first-person headspace in the prior paragraph. Consequently, her narrative registers come across as disorganized. For instance, one first-person excerpt reads: “I lie obligingly still for him among the muddle and crushed beer cans, my long orange hair spilling over the pillow, my bloodless whiteness in the blue light like the corpse of a drowned Ophelia.” To me, this sumptuous description elicits an aerial view outside the character’s visual range and, as such, would read more strongly in the third person; this muddied sense of perspective recurs page after page, sapping the prose of its power.

Okay, stay tuned for the (extremely brief) June Movie Review!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

The Seas by Samantha Hunt (2004) — MacAdam/Cage first published this gem of a debut novel back in 2004. When the San Francisco-based publishing house folded, The Seas (2004) went out of print until 2018, when Tin House reissued it with a new introduction by Maggie Nelson, drawing in a new following of fans. To mark the book’s 20th anniversary, I had the pleasure of attending a Q&A hosted on The South Street Seaport Museum’s 1885 Tall Ship Wavertree by McNally Jackson. The Seas author Samantha Hunt spoke alongside writer and actress Alexandra Auder, with Belletrist’s Karah Preiss moderating the conversation.

As McNally Jackson points out on its site, The Seas prefigures the wave of surrealist literary fiction that broke over the last decade, serving as a forbearer to works from authors like Melissa Broder and Marie-Helene Bertino. Hunt’s novel inhabits the headspace of a 19-year-old girl living in a dead-end coastal town (“We have the highest rate of alcoholism in the country, and this fact is repeated so often I thought we should put it on the Chamber of Commerce sign at the town line that welcomes tourists. More alcoholics per capita! Enjoy your visit!”). With her father either having disappeared or died, she lives with her mother and grandfather, while harboring a hyperfixation with Jude, an Iraq war veteran years her senior. The narrator sees herself as a mermaid, a perspective that pricks the blurred border between truth and insanity.

Precise prose shapes The Seas. Hunt began working on the novel by writing brief vignettes every morning about the color blue, a visual anchor translates to a holistic aesthetic vision of the narrator’s inner and outer worlds (“I watch as the blue rises up like a tidal wave so quickly that I am certain it will catch up with us soon…‘At first, I thought it was a bunch of cop cars chasing us with their lights on but now I can see that it is the ocean…I don’t think we can outrun the ocean but I’ll try for your sake.’”). Spare language animates the story without unnecessary ornamentation, wrenching the reader into its narrator’s resolute point of view; her conviction becomes infectious, the question of reliability ever-present and tenuous at the same time.

Despite its more speculative elements, The Seas operates as a fever dream of its time, set against the backdrop of post-9/11 America. The Iraq War permeates each page, its impact felt most acutely through shifts in Jude’s outlook (“‘I looked under my shirt thinking well maybe I was Superman and all I had to do was duck into this tollbooth, but all that was there underneath my clothes was a white cotton government-issue undershirt.’”). The novel opens in the midst of a kind of car chase, with the narrator outrunning the ocean or the police, the exact reality unclear. It then jolts backward before returning to that moment. Within the narrative loop, Jude’s overseas experience marks a tonal before and after. He returns to their seaside town shell-shocked, his loss of innocence ricocheting through the narrator as she navigates her own coming of age, relationship with her mother, and sense of reality simultaneously.

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan (2024) — The Hearing Test (2024) animates the rare and devastating disruption of unexpected sensory loss at an adult age, creating an evocative vicarious experience for readers. This lyrical debut novel from Eliza Barry Callahan inhabits the first-person headspace of an eponymous narrator experiencing sudden deafness, “the sincerest strain of quiet.” It opens with Eliza getting tested after hearing a “distorted and distant” sound, its results “beautiful and clean…not a good sign.” With no preexisting approach in place, her treatment operates as a kind of “improvisation.” Surrounded by defunct doctors, Eliza watches her auditory world become monochromatic as color slowly drains from her surroundings (“As we drove on, the San Gabriel Mountains appeared flat against the horizon — like they belonged to painting, not sculpture.”).

In her review for The New Yorker, staff writer Katy Waldman compares The Hearing Test to Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014). Novelist Brandon Taylor discusses Outline as part of his Substack essay, “against character vapor.” He traces a line from Virginia Woolf through to Cusk, identifying a shared interest in “character…[not as] some stable, outward projection of the self…instead…the quivering, false, ever shifting notional perception of oneself.” Taylor critiques how, in contemporary fiction, this accelerated inward focus erodes the richness of certain characters and their surrounding worlds. Callahan writes in this tradition. As Waldman observes: “Like a lot of autofiction, the book monitors the daily routine of a solitary narrator in an urban milieu.” But the saturation of interiority that shapes The Hearing Test fulfills a stylistic and narrative function; as Eliza’s outer world flattens, the cocoon of her inner life sharpens (“But I could hear my voice more clearly now, and even when I wasn’t speaking my thoughts somehow felt louder. I had become nearer to myself.”).

The Pilgrimage by John Broderick (1961) — This McNally Editions reissue steeps the form of a classic French farce in Catholic guilt, transports it to the claustrophobic gossip mill of a small Irish town. Narrated in the third person, The Pilgrimage (1961) inhabits the paranoid headspace of Julia Glynn, a 35-year-old woman married to Michael, the richest man in town. Chronically ill and secretly gay, Michael remains bedridden, and a pilgrimage to Lourdes for some kind of miracle cure looms in the near future. In the meantime, Julia has the freedom to do as she pleases; the opening chapter reveals an ongoing affair with her nephew through marriage, Jim (“She watched the tail-light disappear down the avenue. Then she went upstairs to the bedroom where her nephew was already waiting for her.”). The threat of its reveal fuels the story’s tension as Julia begins receiving anonymous erotic letters, detailed depictions of her secret sex life (“It was like a passage copied from a badly written pornographic novel, except that, as Julia realized with a thrill of horror, she was one of the characters.”).

The Pilgrimage contains two layers — official narrative and internal truth — that seldom, if ever, intersect, cracking the veneer of piety that shapes conservative Irish Catholic culture. The opening passage sets this precedent as Michael and Julia’s servant, Stephen, serves the local priest, Father Victor, a drink. Broderick writes: “There was a polite fiction maintained that he [Father Victor] did not see the arrival of the whisky, and refused to recognize its existence until it was handed to him in a glass with just the right amount of water added.” A Chekhovian structure shapes the story, the dialogue laced with double meanings. Julia rarely betrays emotional reality “on her smooth, beautiful face.” Secret sexuality, inner anxiety, lurks beneath a facade of propriety (“It was intoxicating to know, while she [Julia] sat pouring whisky and listening to the three men talk, that underneath her thick woollen dress so correct, so respectable, she was naked.”). Exposure operates as the ultimate fear, an array of actions excusable so long as they go unacknowledged (“She had committed the unforgivable sin: she had been found out.”).

In his Substack piece, “living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding,” Brandon Taylor urges contemporary authors to construct their fiction against more textured narrative reliefs. He discusses the role of religion in driving tension, how it creates claustrophobic frameworks that have the power to chain characters — and create compelling fiction as a result. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), which I discussed last summer, exemplifies this principle at work. In the back half of the novel, Julia Flyte builds a hidden life with Charles Ryder, then, confined by her beliefs, breaks away from it in favor of an official narrative that aligns with the presiding moral order. The Pilgrimage explores what happens when that moment never arrives — when the illusion of propriety rots, but still reigns.

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947) — A perfect literary thriller, In a Lonely Place (1947) inhabits the headspace of World War II veteran Dix Steele from the remove of a third-person perspective. It captures the atmospheric chill of Southern California, the sense of danger lurking beneath the bougainvillea (“He was slightly chilled; there was a definite hint of autumn, if only in the mildness of California autumn, in the air tonight.”). The novel opens on the California Incline, with Dix surrounded by fog. He follows a woman down the slope of the hill, toward the beach, bewitched by her resemblance to someone he once knew. The aperture of Dix’s world then broadens to reveal the texture and scope of his Los Angeles.

A New Jersey native, Dix struggles to adjust to his new reality (“He didn’t get a chance to build a dream.”). His social world stays constricted, confined to his old war buddy-turned-detective, Brub Nicolai, and Brub’s wife, Sylvia. A series of strangulations, one woman per month, haunts Brub and casts a fear over the whole of the city. Privilege plays an analogous role as in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series, as well as more contemporary media like Penn Badgley’s Netflix hit, You. White and skilled at appearing well off, Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and You’s Joe Goldberg present as normal — average to the point of unmemorable. This careful camouflage allows them to slip from the grasp of suspicion. Dix manages a comparable evasion, while the Beverly Hills police, headed by Brub, circle a lower socioeconomic stratum (“The Santa Monica police were rounding up beach bums. There was a lot of questioning going on and no answers.”).

With In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes subverts the traditional tropes of the detective novel, a historically male-dominated genre. As crime writer Megan Abbott points out in her afterword to the NYRB edition, Sylvia occupies the genre’s “good girl” archetype, while Dix’s neighbor, Laurel Gray, emerges as the femme fatale. But their behavior cracks the confines of those categories as the narrative throttles toward its conclusion, a reversal fueled by Hughes’s female authorial gaze.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015) — This Obama-era bestseller, which made Paul Beatty the first American author to win the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize, comments on U.S. racial politics through the prism of a fictional, predominantly Black LA County farming town called Dickens. It opens with the novel’s first-person narrator, Bonbon, stoned, preparing to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court. The offense? When Dickens disappears off the map, the result of creeping gentrification, Bonbon brings back segregation and slavery to assert the legitimacy of his hometown (“Most folks who didn’t know me mistook me for a performance artist or a crazy person. I was cool with the latter designation.”). The ensuing 200+ pages dissect what constitutes community, critique the notion of a “correct” engagement with race, and expose breach between bureaucracy in theory and in action.

In speaking with FSG, Beatty names “Richard Pryor, Steve Cannon, my mom, my neighborhood…sumo wrestling on Channel 18, Kobayashi’s trilogy The Human Condition, early-Taco Bell/pre-the chalupa and all the goddamn sour cream,” and more as inspirations. He refracts California culture through the particular prism of Bonbon’s perspective, capturing a comedic quality comparable to the tone and tenor of Charles Bukowski’s Pulp (1994). For instance, Bonbon explains: “The waves were shit [at Zuma]. Crowded. Except that every now and then I’d see another surfer of color. As opposed to Hermosa, Redondo, and Newport, which were much closer to Dickens, but the breaks were dominated by straight-edge Jesus freaks who kissed their crucifixes before every set and listened to conservative talk radio after the sessions.”

But The Sellout (2015) carries a mournful quality as well. As poet, professor, essayist, and editor Kevin Young puts it in his 2015 New York Times review: “Beneath the proliferating references to the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello lurks another book: one about California itself. This is, we’re regularly reminded, a California story, one of prospecting and migration and pain, set in that place old maps once depicted as cut off from the mainland.” In Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), Didion writes: “My own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour…If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California.” Beatty acknowledges Didion as a direct influence, and this nostalgia for a glorified past that functions as fiction drives Bonbon as he reflects: “I don’t know what I expected from trying to restore Dickens to a glory that never existed.”

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the June newsletter and May Movie Review.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş (2024) — This lyrical novel from Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş adopts the first-person perspective of Asya, an expat living in an unspecified foreign city with her husband, Manu. Asya and Manu come from two different cultures, the specifics of their backgrounds abstracted. They form a shared life, a mutual language, on neutral ground, far away from their families. The narrative inhabits Asya and Manu’s bubble, drawing its meaning from minutiae. It traces the mundanity of their days, from drinking beer with their friend, Ravi, to reading poetry with their elderly upstairs neighbor, Tereza. Asya and Manu’s hunt for a to-purchase apartment occurs in the background, punctuating this particular phase as a waning one.

Savaş conceives of her chapters as rhythmic vignettes, coalescing to create the same kind of structure that shapes Sarah Manguso’s in Very Cold People (2022). In the chapters titled “In the Park,” Savaş breaks from Asya’s first-person point of view and instead inhabits the perspectives of locals. Throughout the narrative, Asya, a filmmaker, develops a documentary about their local green space; these sections remove her as an experiential mediator. Toward the end of The Anthropologists (2024), Asya’s interviews appear together, a constellation designed to capture a local color in a specialized shade.

In Savaş’s world, biological family witnesses your life through a keyhole, one predicated on a heightened construction (“She [Tereza] was even more animated than usual, with her daughter to witness the gathering.”). Asya and Manu witness visits between their beloved upstairs neighbor, Tereza, and her daughter. She views her mother, first and foremost, as an elderly woman, whereas Asya and Manu see Tereza’s artistic sensibility above all else. Meanwhile, Asya reflects on a visit from her father, stating: “Even after several visits, he didn’t really know how we lived: he had never been to the market where we shopped on weekends, the cafes we frequented, the tree-flanked square where we went to read on weekend mornings.”

Asya and Manu consider their home, a tiny rented apartment, less concrete than the structured relief of their families (“There was our life in the city and there were all our lives elsewhere, floating in and out of the present.”). For example, on Manu’s birthday, the couple spends the entire afternoon on calls with relatives, Asya wracked with guilt about the small scope of their day. But her preoccupation stems from perception as opposed to reality. She explains: “On Manu’s birthday, I woke up feeling sad that I was all he had for a celebration…Or rather, I felt it might appear that way from the vantage point of our families, who woke up on our birthdays and imagined us all alone in the city…The next day was more cheerful, without the worry that we were making our families sad on happy days.” Their life feels real, but an outsider’s view slackens its shape.

Notions of biological versus found family permeate the narrative. When chosen connections splinter, the fragility of youth gets laid bare. In turn, The Anthropologists emerges as a novel about recognizing and mourning transience.

Good Girl by Aria Aber (2025) — This debut novel from poet Aria Aber easily goes down as one of my favorite reads of 2025 so far. Set in the summer of 2010, Good Girl (2025) centers on Nila, an 19-year-old Afghan girl born and raised in Berlin to immigrant parents. At a bunker-turned-club, she meets Marlowe, an American novelist twenty years her senior (“I usually liked my men blond and severe or dark and tar, but Marlowe was neither, somewhere smack in the middle, with a square jaw and dimpled chin, the nose of an emperor…He was a prince who moved through rooms as if they belonged to him, surrounded by a large group of friends, among them his blond girlfriend, who in my memory always wore a Sonic Youth shirt.”). A fraught artistic and sexual connection emerges, catalyzing Nila’s public and private exploration of identity (“Marlowe and I had been ignoring each other — we danced through the cosmos of parties, but the moment he came too close to me, I would move in the opposite direction.”).

Raised in Germany by Afghan parents, Aber writes in English, her third language. She cites James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Rhys as influences, while praising the contemporary work of Raven Leilani and Garth Greenwell. Speaking with American author Kyle Dillon Hertz for Interview Magazine, Aber explains: “I really love her [Rhys’s] take on the stream of consciousness and the kind of deranged exilic woman stumbling through a city.” Good Girl operates as a 21st century enactment of that literary tradition, capturing the post-9/11 Arab and Persian experience through the particular prism of Berlin. Hertz praises Good Girl as a “poet’s novel,” a fitting description for a novel with language as its crown jewel. For instance, describing the connection Nila feels to Marlowe, Aber writes: “The eros…drew strings between us sometimes so taut they produced a sweet and secret sound. But the friction was frail — it was never meant to make real music, just to suggest its existence, like a violin encased in glass at a museum, so old and brittle it would fall apart if you tried to play it.”

Told from an intimate first-person point of view, Good Girl bears structural similarities to Adam Ross’s Playworld (2025) and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards (2023). All three novels trace a transformative year in the lives of their respective protagonists, recounted by an older iteration of that individual. Speaking at McNally Jackson Seaport in January, Ross compared this narrative framing to the experience of an aquarium visit. While the protagonist in the era of the primary action floats through life, their older self functions as a kind of tour guide by widening the aperture around particular moments. Good Girl thrives on immediacy, its character and setting synonymous with the present moment. But this narrative tool injects the novel with necessary moments of insight, contextualizing this year in the broader scope of Nila’s development as an individual and as a photographer (“I had the idiocy of the very inexperienced, which made me believe in my own greatness.”).

The option of ethnic ambiguity propels dramatic tension. Nila passes as Greek, as a whole host of backgrounds other than Afghan, to evade the discrimination that accompanies her real identity. The possibility of discovery drives her anxiety, its stakes heightened by the setting of Berlin — a city “particular and historical and shattering.” Discrimination in all its forms — from islamophobia to antisemitism — lurks, then creeps to the foreground. At one point, Nila attends an event that emerges as a fundraiser for Afghan dogs. She narrates: “‘Greece,’ I said. ‘My parents are Greek.’ The group started cooing like a bunch of birds, and I was happy they wouldn’t know my real heritage — they would’ve probably asked me to give a toast to these Afghan dogs…There was not a single immigrant in sight, not even the servers…I didn’t belong to the people in that [Qurbani] bakery, but I didn’t belong to these people either.” Alienation, the perpetual liminality that can fester in the children of immigrant parents, bubbles beneath her every experience.

In one scene, Nila sits in the front of a cab, while Marlowe zones out in the backseat with their friends. The driver reveals himself as Tigray and engages Nila in a conversation about the political history of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt. She longs to reveal how “the vivacious story of the Tigray guerrilla fighters resemble[s]…the myriad stories of Afghanistan and its freedom fighters,” but stays quiet. Marlowe goes on to scoff, “Cab drivers are always so damn depressing.” Nila narrates, “I felt terribly sad and alone, altogether much closer to the cab driver than I was to Marlowe.” This moment couples with the sequence at the fundraiser to distill the reality of what it means to pass as an ethnicity other than your own. Physical ambiguity coaxes people into revealing their prejudices, blinded by the illusion of unmixed company.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011) — This oft-discussed book functions as the first of the Neapolitan Novels, a four-part series dedicated to exploring the friendship between Elena “Lenù” Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, two girls growing up outside Naples in the aftermath of World War II. Told in the first person from Lenù’s point of view, My Brilliant Friend (2011) opens in 2011. Lila’s son, Rino, calls Lenù to inform her of — and ask for intel around — his mother’s sudden disappearance. The narrative then moves backward to the 1950s, with this first book tracing Lenù and Lila’s shared childhood and adolescence.

Yin and yang, Lenù and Lila exist in relation to each other. Tough and outspoken, Lila borders on abrasive (“More effectively than she [Lila] had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”). Meanwhile, Lenù has a porous identity. Her understanding of self emerges through opposition. The lens of others’ perception colors her as “good,” Lila as “bad,” a balance that brings internal order. On its own accord, personal experience becomes sapped of meaning (“I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important.”). For example, Lenù finds success through academics over the course of the novel. When Lila’s interest in school wanes, Lenù struggles to maintain focus without an undercurrent of competition, reflecting a toxic texture of female friendship.

Elena Ferrante enlivens the people, places, and cultural customs that shape the girls’ neighborhood. In turn, it molds them, even as Lenù travels beyond the borders to school, to Ischia. Dramas small and large, from the disappearance of their favorite dolls to the murder of a feared neighbor, become the brushstrokes that color Lenù and Lila’s world. Tension stems from the socioeconomic dynamics shackling their community. Lila longs for upward mobility, a dream she makes manifest as a teenager, while Lenù, the better off of the two from the outset, dreams of intellectual impact. These divergent priorities reach a crescendo in the novel’s final pages as Lenù experiences the heartbreak, Lila the fear, of walking through the woods with a friend, then choosing opposite paths (“I was ashamed of myself, but I was no longer able to trace a coherent design in the division of our fates. The concreteness of that date made concrete the crossroads that would separate our lives.”)

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the May newsletter.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (1939) — Before Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis, Los Angeles had Nathaniel West, the original literary scribe of LA culture. When The Day of the Locust (1939) first published, Kirkus Reviews wrote: “The author of Miss Lonely Hearts has written in this new novel, as pointless and inane a book as I have encountered for some time. The story, if such it can be called, consists of flashes of Hollywood’s lunatic fringe who careen around, sometimes drunk, sometimes sex driven, sometimes just screwball. There is no plot — merely scenes here and there showing up Hollywood nuts and freaks, rather than glamor girls.” So true, and I loved every minute of it.

A West Coast answer to The Great Gatsby (1925), The Day of the Locust traces a cast of characters who inhabit the fringes of the entertainment industry at its advent, with Yale alum Tod Hackett at its center. A painter, Tod arrives in Los Angeles to decorate sets while working on his magnum opus: a painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” An omniscient third-person narrator announces the fact of the piece’s completion; then, the ensuing narrative colors in the events that fuel its final image (“Yet, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And ‘The Burning of Los Angeles,’ a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent.”).

From prose to characters, West distills the mood and atmosphere that have shaped Southern California, unsettling artists from Raymond Chandler to David Lynch, for decades (“He reached the end of Vine Street and began the climb into Pinyon Canyon. Night had started to fall. The edges of the trees burned with a pale violet light and their centers gradually turned from deep purple to black.”). He establishes the outline for what have become stock LA archetypes; the escaped Easterner, the aspiring actress. Homer Simpson (no, not that Homer Simpson) abandons Wayneville, Iowa after “his doctor advise[s] him to go to California for a rest.” His social anxiety and Midwestern morals grate against the city’s culture. He emerges as the embodiment of the kind of person who “come[s] to California to die,” who, “once there…discover[s] that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure.”

The novel blurs the line between truth and artifice. It opens with an “army of cavalry” passing Tod, a collective that clarifies into a group of actors. This ironic insertion establishes tone from the outset, reflecting Hollywood as a false replica of reality. Aspiring actress Faye Greener embodies this notion, her persona pure artifice. West writes: “Had any other girl been so affected, he [Tod] would have thought her intolerable. Faye’s affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found them charming. Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed.”

Darkness burns at the perimeter of paradise, pulling West’s characters close to, then over, the edge. The Day of the Locust critiques the collective, dissects the dangers of mob mentality (“New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a change come over them as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious.”). West describes the crowd as a character in and of itself, writing: “Another spasm in the mob and he [Tod] was carried toward the curb.” For West, “the mob” in its various forms operates as a singular entity with the power to push people, its members and others, toward their breaking points.

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke (1973) — This deliciously dark McNally Editions reissue from British author Dinah Brooke begins as a fairy tale; “at the rosewood desk, the Queen is writing letters…One is to that famous newspaper the Times, asking them to find her the very best nurse for her expected child.” The Prince enters into the world, swaddled in the darkness of corrupt characters. Written in the third person, the novel drifts into various perspectives, including that of the infant Prince, Giles Trenchard (“He cannot see the dark old man unless he turns his head uncomfortably sideways and backwards. He practises the movement while keeping his eyes fixed on the sky. His mother’s face looms over him like a brown and pink cloud.”). Giles grows into a lonely man, stumbling through boarding school, then the navy, then adult life.

Maritime imagery dominates the second third of Lord Jim at Home (1973); Brooke’s novel draws its title from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), which traces the career of a British seamen (“The sea looks different when you are on it. The horizon is circular. The sun rises up on your left hand and goes down on your right. The stars surround you in the middle watch, poised above the waves. The colours are the same, but your relationship with them is different”). This naval interlude reveals the narrator’s identity. Interjections of first person singular and plural, as well as second person, personalize the prose and hint toward a treacherous outcome (“They nickname Giles ‘the Lord,’ because of his posh accent…The blokes were a bit wary of him at first, but he was a decent lad…Stayed on the lower deck all through the time he was in the navy. At least he certainly did all the years we were together in the old Palusan…as I told them when I wrote to the papers when he had his trouble.”).

Lord Jim at Home builds toward a scathing critique of upper class culture, dissecting the psychological impact of privilege without accountability. Giles’s parents provide him with minimal contact and care, abundant access and resources. Brooke richly replicates the trappings of a British upper middle class home, then universe (“In the dining room is an oval mahogany table polished so that it reflects, like a camera obscura, the blue of the sky and muted green of the lawn. A soft, blurred pyramid of light in the dark room, smelling of meat.”). The book’s aperture broadens, publicizing the private. The concept of home functions as a nebulous notion, an idea without meaning, for Giles. For instance, during his time at boarding school, the narrator explains: “To the Prince the weekends are like black telegraph poles seen from a train, regularly waiting to stun him.” An emotional void surfaces and widens into a hidden, then visible, valley.

American Bulk by Emily Mester (2024) — I adored American Bulk (2024). This new nonfiction collection from Iowa MFA grad Emily Mester addresses the reality of American consumerism through a combination of history, data, and memoir. It consists of nine essays, with stories about her beloved grandmother, a conservative keyboard warrior and notorious hoarder, punctuating its beginning, middle, and end. Mester explores different types of excess, from bulk buying to overeating to compulsive shopping. Her individual experiences — from spending a high school summer at fat camp to wandering around an Iowa mall during a tornado warning — personalize each piece.

My favorite essay, “Al Forno,” dissects the elusive draw of Olive Garden (“Chain restaurants are soothing because they are the same everywhere, like hymns.”). Mester uses it as a touchpoint to discuss the cultivation of taste, the maturation of her palette eclipsing her love of the chain with time (“Had learning the pleasure of more rarified flavors genuinely inured me to the pleasure of simple ones? Or had my critical brain become so convinced of the Olive Garden’s mediocrity that it eventually tricked my animal brain into following suit?”). She repositions Times Square, synonymous with New York for a certain out of towner, as a suburban spectacle in the midst of a city, a kind of mall that soothes tourists by reflecting a funhouse version of familiarity.

A daughter of the Midwest, Mester writes about “the hot American urgency of 7-Eleven” and Sunday trips to Costco with the intimacy of an insider (“We were nominally Catholic, nobody ever went to church. Costco was our mass.”). Sharp observations rooted in empathy shape her work. For instance, she notes how the East Coast considers certain tiers of taste synonymous with class. Meanwhile, in the Midwest, quantity signifies wealth; everyone shops at the same stores, eats at the same restaurants, with quantity proportional to financial comfort. Through research and reflection, Mester paints an incisive portrait of American consumer culture, blending the personal and sociological into a supersize cocktail.

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (2024) — This new collection from Tony Tulathimutte traces seven tales of rejection, comprising a cast of chronically online characters — from a dejected incel to a reluctant sadist to a professional internet troll — whose arcs cross over from one story to the next. As Rebecca Liu writes in her review for The Guardian, “Rejection (2024) feels like being inside the internet. At times, it mimics the language of twenty-something online spaces (of a disappointing man: “we hate him now yes? typical venus in sag”). More broadly, the stories capture the spirit of our doomscrolling age: the paranoia, the dread, the defensiveness and resentment that has curdled into political death spirals everywhere.”

The first three pieces embody a comparable arc; an outcast airs grievances, then, as Madeline Leung Coleman puts it in her Vulture review, “scratch[es] a low point till it bleeds.” The narrator gradually comes apart at the seams, unveiling a hidden ugliness. Each chapter interweaves Reddit posts, group chats, and other emblems of contemporary culture. The second story and my personal favorite, “Pics,” includes a text thread linking women who rarely interact IRL. It begins as a space for punchy platitudes — until the facade of friendship erodes. Tulathimutte zeroes in on the unspoken rules that shape these support vehicles, dissects how these kinds of online communities go sideways (“As much as she appreciates their support, their sudden volte-face about Neil’s worthiness implies some dishonesty in either their current or earlier support, or both.”).

In an interview with Leah Abrams for Interview Magazine, Tulathimutte explains: “Transformation…in the wake of one or several rejections is the general approach for at least the first three stories. But I would actually disagree that it hardened the characters. I would say that it tenderizes them…I’ve noticed that, implicitly at least, a lot of fiction is about empathy. It’s about the presumption that the more you get to know somebody, the more you’ll find in common with them and relate to them and feel for them and so on.” Rejection explores the opposite notion, the idea of increased information as fuel for alienation. From the fourth story onward, Tulathimutte adopts more experimental forms: “The first three stories sort of form a trilogy. They’re written in a similar style — present tense, third person. So I felt like I needed to pivot…I wanted to go into a fourth dimension, so I made a story that was form-driven. It’s a Reddit post in the first person, and it’s about somebody who never faces rejection.”

The collection takes a turn toward metafiction in its final pages. Tulathimutte gets introduced as a character in the penultimate story, and the book ends with a rejection letter to the author from a fictional publisher (“So we pass over it to conclude at this letter, “Re: Rejection,” a ventriloquist act where you voice your misgivings about the book through a fictional jury of scowling publishers. This to us, for obvious reasons, seemed the most bizarre and pointless flourish of all: arriving shortly after a novella that ends with a metafictional self-commentary implicating the author, we hardly need more of the same. The only thing more boring, exhausted, and self-indulgent than breaking the fourth wall at the end of a story is pointing it out.”). In Interview, Tulathimutte acknowledges this insertion as intentionally “navel-gazy,” an attempt to cannibalize criticism, to avoid rejection, through self-awareness. While in keeping with the tone of the collection, this final twist failed to land for me personally.

Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed (1966) — This McNally Editions reissue brings back a gem of a novel from Wilfrid Sheed, a story that captures the ever-present political nuances of office culture.

The 1960s-set narrative centers on George Wren, a recent-ish college graduate thrust into a job at left-leaning culture magazine The Outsider. After seeing a junior editor listing, George leaves his post at CBS for a new position at half the salary — and office half the size. English expat Gilbert Twining serves as executive editor, with sharks circling around his post in the form of strung-out office furniture Brian Fine (“white and sluggish from years in that terrible office…Brian Fine was the third stage of an editor’s life cycle”) and scheming social climber Fritz Tyler. When Twining travels out West, George, appointed as his boss’s eyes and ears, quickly learns that a smaller fishbowl brings tensions to a quicker boil (“CBS politics had been played on too large a playing field, so you couldn’t see the players at the far end. This stadium was just the right size.”).

A novel of manners for the mid-20th century, Office Politics (1966) unpacks the kinds of parlor games that build and destroy intra-office alliances. It inhabits the world of editorial, but teases out the kinds of dynamics that can fester in any professional environment. Deflection defines each interaction, as workers seek to suss out others’ alliances before revealing their respective cards. For instance, a lunch between Brian and Fritz brings about the following exchange: [Brian:] “We could dictate things: we could have a voice. I think I know how you feel about Twining.” [Fritz:] “You do? How do I feel about Twining?”…[Brian:] “Some people find Twining very arrogant…I must say I’ve been lucky in that respect. He’s never really given me the treatment.” Brian presents his own complaints about Twining as emerging elsewhere, maintaining plausible deniability until Fritz’s stance crystallizes.

Sheed dips into his players’ perspectives, maintaining a third-person prose that satirizes and reveals the psyche of each male office worker. He peppers it with military language, underscoring the outsized gravity each primary employee places on his job. Twining considers George his “lieutenant,” “cauterizes” a writer’s essay, while Brian debates “commandeering” someone’s desk. Low-level frustration lurks, with Brian and Fritz maintaining the conviction that they could run the magazine better than Twining. Their boss’s trip out West, however, proves otherwise. Brian publishes an issue that proves indistinguishable from prior iterations, underscoring the uniformity of thought that can accompany perpetual employment under the same supervisor. Twining’s underlings resent him, but adopt his perspective entirely (“The new issue had just come back, and he [George] sat in his cubicle staring at it. It was uncanny. You would never guess from it that Twining had been away.”…“Anyone can talk about ‘years of excellence,’ but bringing out a good issue next week is something rather more difficult.”).

Taken in totality, Office Politics unpacks the futile hamster wheel of certain workplaces. George and Twining experience their apotheoses in the forms of quarter- and mid-life crises. Thoughts of death dominate George’s psyche, extend to envelop his newborn son, while California changes Twining. Toward the end of the novel, Sheed narrates: “He [Twining] looked around him at the pictures, the wallpaper. He had changed all right; he was looking at things differently. He wanted to talk about the flowers on the table, and about the flowers in California, and so forth. He didn’t want to talk about the magazine.”

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (2011) — An inventive office sex comedy from the author of The Last Samurai (2000) and The English Understand Wool (2022), Lightning Rods (2011) opens with encyclopedia-turned-vacuum salesman Joe on his last leg. Met with an oversaturated marketplace after a Florida hurricane, Joe fails to fulfill his Electrolux sales quota and copes by concocting the perfect masturbation fantasy in his abundant spare time. A whitespace in the corporate marketplace emerges, what Joe views as an innovative way to curb the rampant problem of sexual harassment. As American author Garth Risk Hallberg writes in his 2011 review for The Millions: “Joe’s particular insight is to…not only bring it to life but monetize it. I wouldn’t want to spoil for you the pleasure of discovering that fantasy yourself. Nor would I want to give away exactly how — with the help of a future Supreme Court justice, an adjustable-height toilet, several pairs of PVC undergarments, and a dwarf named Ian — Joe manages to realize it. Suffice it to say, the genius is in the details.”

Written and set before the turn of the millennium, published a decade plus later, Lightning Rods satirizes the specificities of mass corporate culture, an earlier iteration of it filled with faxes and frustrations around the introduction of blue M&Ms. Helen DeWitt takes the wry satire that Wilfrid Sheed introduces in Office Politics (1966) and enhances its scale, cultivating comedic commentary on the veneer of start-up culture, on the workplace as a microcosm of global sexual politics. Joe repeats the same vacuous phrases, empty sales speak designed to confuse prospective clients and disgruntled employees into satisfaction. He repeatedly references “looking for that one woman in a thousand” for his project — mocks, then adopts, “the Big K” as shorthand for Kansas City. Joe says and does what he needs to skate through the moment, tripping toward accidental success (“He started singing the Kansas City song from Oklahoma! and Joe joined right in, because you should never pass up an opportunity to bond with the client.”).

DeWitt creates a sense of propulsiveness through her prose by interweaving teasers about the outcome of Joe’s project, pointing toward imminent disaster (“Joe had no way of knowing that installation had been seen by someone who shouldn’t have known about it. He had no way of knowing how far-reaching the repercussions of that breach of security would eventually be.”). Above all though, her language creates moments of comedy that coalesce to form a top-tier screwball story. Hallberg characterizes it as “not so much ‘a book with jokes in it’ as that rarer thing, the laughing-so-hard-other-people-on-the-subway-are-starting-to-wonder-if-you-require-psychiatric-attention book.” Meanwhile, New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai elaborates: “To find fault in DeWitt’s broad strokes, in the novel’s brusque disregard for any depth of feeling, would be like denouncing Mel Brooks for having made The Producers instead of The Pawnbroker.”

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the Content Corner Oscars Guide and more in the days ahead.

xo,
Najet

Anyway, I started January with My Heavenly Favorite (2024), an early aughts retelling of Lolita (1955) through the lens of an agriculture farmer obsessed with a nonbinary child. Then, I read I Am Alien to Life (2024), a collection of Djuna Barnes short stories from McNally Editions edited by Merve Emre, as well as two wonderful new coming-of-age novels set in 1980s New York: Adam Ross’s Playworld (2025) and Cynthia Weiner’s A Gorgeous Excitement (2025).

Let’s get into it:

My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld (2024) — As journalist Francesca Peacock writes in her LARB review: “It’s surreal to review a book that made you feel physically sick. It’s even more surreal to give a book that made you feel that way a good review, to say that the nausea was somehow positive or warranted. But that’s the bind when writing about Lucas Rijneveld’s horrifying and brilliant sophomore novel, My Heavenly Favorite (2024).”

Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, My Heavenly Favorite takes the form of a 330-page confessional. Told in the second person, it adopts the perspective of “Kurt,” an agricultural veterinarian who operates as an early-aughts answer to Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. Kurt works for a family haunted by loss, by a missing matriarch and deceased child, the latter a hole at the hands of a hit and run. Its remaining members include the farmer, his late teenage son, and his 14-year-old daughter, all unnamed. Kurt forms a fixation with and begins to groom the unnamed girl, with the novel itself taking the form of a letter to her, to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, after he faces conviction.

Stylistically, My Heavenly Favorite operates as a direct descendent of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Both novels inhabit the headspace of a sick narrator, a sexually stunted predator, through the prism of stunning prose. But Rijneveld takes Nabokov’s narration a step further by eliminating paragraph breaks and periods a la Vigdis Hjorth. As I write in my review of Hjorth’s Will and Testament (2016), “commas substitute periods, shaping the looping hyper-fixation that comes to define of [narrator] Bergljot’s stream of consciousness (‘I tried to open my mind towards Lars so that his harmless dreams could flow into mine, I tried to suck the dreams out of his sleeping body, but it didn’t work, there was no way in, I was trapped inside myself.’).” The same characterization applies to Kurt’s narration in My Heavenly Favorite, with the sentences that shape his “looping hyper-fixation” double the length by comparison.

Rijneveld’s references span the biblical to the cultural, with the novel’s primary action transpiring over the summer of 2005. Peacock explains: “This is a world of the censorious Reformed church…Rijneveld’s prose is peppered with snatches from psalms, italicized and gruesome-sounding, estranged as they are from their original, spiritual context. When the vet describes his wife Camillia’s reaction to the child apologizing for her relationship with him, he quotes Psalm 137.” Meanwhile, the girl worships the work of Roald Dahl, listens to blink-182 and Kate Bush, and nicknames the narrator after Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. She maintains the fear that she caused 9/11, the conviction that her shared birthday with Adolf Hitler, April 20th, conceals an unknown evil. Kurt narrates:

“…you told me you had flown there that tragic September day and you’d heard the people’s screams beneath you, the sirens, and as you flew, office papers streaming out of the towers became doves of peace and you saw people launching. themselves out of windows, you heard the dull thuds of the landing bodies like bags of milk powder, and then a second plane pinned itself to the second building of the Twin Towers an you wondered whether it was a plane or whether you had flown into that building, first with your head, your torso, and then the rest of your body, your feet, you thought it was all your fault, and I saw the tears welling behind your eyes and I thought, man, you were only ten then, but I let you tell me about how you often fantasized that a plane would crash into De Hulst farm and you’d hear the walls fall down, the glass shatter, and you saw your dad lying under the right-hand wing even though they’ been aiming at you, you said…”

Disembodiment defines the girl; she has little sense of her physical self, within and beyond the confines of a gender binary. Kurt takes advantage of this dysphoria. His manipulations stem from his promise of more knowledge of, more access to, the male body. (She never explicitly identifies as male or nonbinary, hence why I’ve continued to use she/her pronouns throughout this review.) For instance, he coaxes her into their first sexual encounter by promising it will deliver on her desire to grow a penis. Her confusion clouds the reality of their relationship until summer draws to a close, and the fact of his abuse calcifies.

Kurt addresses his musings to not only her, but also the jury that has sentenced him to two years in prison. She grows up to become a singer, and the courts use not only her diary, but also her first record, entitled Kurt12 “after the case number,” as evidence. As Peacock writes toward the end of her review: “The music, the case — none of it allows the girl to move on…My Heavenly Favorite remains mired in horror…toying with memory, with history, with the idea that writing or producing art can ever possibly change anything.”

Playworld by Adam Ross (2025) — An absolute time capsule of a novel from Sewanee Review Editor Adam Ross, Playworld (2025) follows a year in the life of Griffin Hurt, a child actor growing up on the Upper West Side. It begins with a prologue that starts: “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” As Helen Schulman writes in her Air Mail review, that opening sets the tone for the 500 plus pages ahead as “Griffin experiences a lifetime of damage and blind endurance crammed into one extremely long, harrowing year. At 14, he is a successful actor by accident, having lucked into an enormous native talent he shrugs off as a combo of filial duty (his father is also a performer), a propensity for de-personalization, and a survival skill.”

As the sun sets on the Carter administration and rises on the Reagan era, Griffin balances his role as Peter Proton on hit TV show The Nuclear Family with wrestling, his course load at Trinity avatar Boyd Prep, and the world of adults that presses up against his latchkey childhood (“Adults were the ocean in which I swam.”). The adults that swirl through his view include “his narcissistic father, Shel, who struggles to support the rest of the family by doing voice-overs and jingles of the household-product variety while craving meatier roles,” per Schulman; his mother, Lily, a perennially honest professional dancer-turned-Pilates instructor with an Master’s degree in Literature; predatory wrestling coach Kepplemen; and, of course, Naomi, who perpetually retreats and reemerges over the course of the narrative. As Schulman also notes: “All four Hurts — there is a loyal younger brother, Oren, with built-in street smarts and no over-obvious aptitudes — see the same therapist, who is also Shel’s best friend, Elliot.” (“In our house, Elliot was referred to so often it was a bit like belonging to a cult.”)

Much like Bret Easton Ellis’s latest book, The Shards (2023), Playworld gets narrated from the first-person perspective of its primary character — but an older version of him. Ross more or less maintains a child’s perspective, zooming out on occasion for the sake of contextualization; this vacillation affords a welcome balance of innocence and insight (“It was all more Apollonian than Dionysian, and it was exemplified by the distinctly Neverland quality to how we partied. As was the case with Gwyneth, spending all night out at Studio 54, we were impersonating the adults it seemed we only knew from afar.”). Speaking at McNally Jackson Seaport, Ross likened the novel to an aquarium. While 14-year-old Griffin floats through his life, certain scenes sharpen into the forefront, his older self serving as a kind of tour guide.

Similarities between The Shards and Playworld span beyond their narrative structures. Ross describes his new novel as “rhyming” with his life, a notion that equally applies to Bret’s serial killer-infused reanimation of his senior year. Both narratives deal in dense doses of nostalgia, something that, for me, feeds their compulsive readability. Bret enlivens Los Angeles circa 1981, from The Sherman Oaks Galleria on a fall afternoon to Mulholland Drive at midnight. Ross captures comparable corners of New York (“Fall in full swing now, the trees in Lincoln Towers’ green space shed their leaves; beneath awnings, the heat lamps shined on passing pedestrians and conferred on them an orange rotisserie glow.”). He describes Playworld as a map of a “lost city,” what Bret would call the last gasps of American empire.

Like The Shards, Playworld has a loose shape that becomes one of its distinguishing factors, imbues it with the texture of life. As New York Times Book Review critic Alexandra Jacobs points out, Playworld “is detailed, digressive, densely populated, dull at times (as life is) and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather. It is the young and the restless, edging into the bold and the beautiful.” She explains:

It’s not the play that’s the thing in Playworld — a gorgeous cat’s cradle of a book that sometimes unravels into shaggy-dog stories — but the lines, in every sense of the word. The marketing taglines that bear the same force and resonance as elders’ aphorisms: 1010 WINS, American Express, Calgon. The lines between juveniles and adults blurring and being crossed. And Ross’s own refined lines, his powers of observation and ironclad resistance to cliché yielding perfect descriptions again and again. A crowd of Nightingale-Bamford girls makes “a sound between laughter and slaughter, as if the school itself were shouting.” Central Park is “that mood ring in the middle of Manhattan.” By the grace of Ross’s language, even a seasick sailor’s trail of vomit descending off a warship into the ocean takes on — I swear it — a certain crystalline beauty.

I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories by Djuna Barnes (2024) — This new collection from McNally Editions, edited by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre, aggregates a series of short stories from modernist writer Djuna Barnes. Per McNally Editions, “Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood (1936), her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.”

I Am Alien to Life (2024) deals with love and loss of innocence, its stories often ending in death. Acute flashes of emotion create consistency across the narratives, and subtle humor belies each piece; as Emre points out in her foreword, “Dr. Silverstaff is a fantastic name for a gynecologist.” As she goes on to describe, “most of the stories are told in the third person by a narrator who possesses a profound understanding of the human condition, an understanding that is hinted at, but never revealed.” The third-person pieces tease out pastoral nightmares, vignettes of people realizing the terror of the countryside; tales of immigrants losing their innocence; and doomed, often queer, love stories. The remaining narratives take the form of what Emre calls “first-person soliloquies…their compulsion to narrate…borne of the desire to remember a past that everyone else would rather forget…Plot is not Barnes’s strength, although it is difficult to know whether its construction fails to hold her interest or because, in the end, all plots — all lives — dead-end in the same revelations, the same drives.”

Barnes’s prose adopts a strange syntax, designed to reflect her characters’ alienation (“There in the corner sat Freda’s mother with her cats. She always sat in corners, and she always sat with cats. And there as the rest of the cast — cousins, nephews, uncles, aunts.”). The people she enlivens occupy certain categorical types that recur across the collection: the wealthy woman grappling with an ill-fated love; the child pressing up against the edges of the adult world; the man who has “an odor about him of the rather recent cult of the ‘terribly good,’” his opposite “who can turn the country, with a single gesture, into a brothel.” Per Emre, Barnes’s “characters may be alien to life, but they are alive — spectacularly, grotesquely alive, and preserved by their illicit desires and obscene thoughts.” Her work excavates the rotten core of the human condition, exemplifies the modernist preoccupation with capturing moral ambiguity.

As Constance Higgins writes in her Telegraph review: “To read I Am Alien to Life is to feel like you’re peering into the doll’s house of a particularly nasty child. Each story is a room; each room is filled with languishing figurines struck by some horrid twist of fate. Admittedly, to study this collection carefully is to notice that the child has a weakness for certain plots; this isn’t Barnes at her most various, and scenes, words and images recur…Assessed individually, though, each story manages to blaze. ‘It was all very sad and puzzling, and rather nice too,’ the narrator of ‘No Man’s Mare’ remarks of a rotting corpse. It’s a paradox that throbs throughout the book, and becomes its neatest summation too.”

A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner (2025) — As a recent Chapin grad, Cynthia Weiner spent the summer of 1986 exploring the city by day, drinking at Dorrian’s Red Hand — the go-to bar for the uptown teen circuit — by night. One member of her broader circle? Robert Chambers, the cute guy who had gotten kicked out of a string of schools and, as a result, knew practically everyone. A kind of Dr. Jekyll, Chambers had the capacity to help a stoned-out-of-her-mind Weiner into a cab outside the American Museum of Natural History — and scream at her for tossing an unfinished joint out her parents’ window.

On August 26, 1986, the safe insulation of Weiner’s world cracked. News broke of a body found in the park — with a Dorrian’s matchbook in the pocket. 18-year-old Jennifer Levin had died at the hands of Chambers, a murder he tried to pass off as a mistake. The case became tabloid bait, with Chambers’s attorney using as many public forums as possible, including a New York Magazine cover story, to blame Levin for her own death. Weiner tells Air Mail: “The story always stayed with me…I pictured her in those moments before he strangled her…She was probably feeling really sexy. She was with this guy she’s got a big crush on, feeling free, and just those moments when he put his hands — what that must have been like…I related to her a lot, and that was one of the reasons it haunted me.”

A coming-of-age story a la Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016), A Gorgeous Excitement (2025) — which draws its name from Sigmund Freud’s description of the sensation spurred by cocaine — follows 18-year-old Nina Jacobs through the summer of 1986. Nina recently graduated from her all-girls private school and has one primary plan before leaving for Vanderbilt: losing her virginity to Gardner Reed. Nights at Flanagan’s — a fictionalized iteration of Dorrian’s — serve as the backdrop for her pursuit, a welcome counterbalance to the bore brought on by her daytime temp jobs. She toggles between her friendships with Leigh and Meredith, childhood relics and part of the Flanagan’s crew, and Stephanie, a Long Island born-and-bred newcomer with a coke habit, all while managing her mentally ill mother.

From its first pages, A Gorgeous Excitement introduces the brutality of its denouement. The novel opens with: “It was the summer of 1986 when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum — half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.” Weiner then goes on to infuse the book with violence subtle and overt, a sense of foreboding. For example, visiting a sex shop in Times Square, Nina and Stephanie meet a sadistic cashier who confronts them with a particularly violent porn magazine page. Weiner narrates: “Stephanie took off her shoes again, but Nina was too disheartened to police her…The absurdity of thinking she’d gotten even with the guy by swiping a couple of dumb plastic bracelets. He got the last word without saying a word: she was just a subhuman sex toy, a hanging carcass in the window of a butcher shop.”

The prose carries tinges of death and decay. For instance, Weiner describes a girl finishing “her (fourth? fifth?) Negroni in two quick gulps, her eyes already at half mast.” Taking a personality quiz with her friends at Flanagan’s, Nina gets asked to pick her favorite body of water and writes “‘bath,’ even though there was nothing viler than sitting in a swamp of your own dead skin.” She also wears “a new purple lipstick, Violet Kiss, which she initially misread as Violent Kiss when she tried it on at Saks.” As Johanna Berkman writes in her Air Mail review: “Weiner’s absorbing prose, combined with her detailed evocation of 1980s New York — the era of Area and the Quilted Giraffe, Tab, and SlimFast — will keep you reading and, if you’re of a certain generation, reminiscing.”

Weiner captures the contours of a bygone era, the dark mania that defined Manhattan during Reagan’s reign. Sharing her playlist for the novel with Largehearted Boy, Weiner explains: “Music in the 1980s was unabashedly over-the-top — synthesizers, hard-driving guitar riffs, propulsive drum fills — both mirroring and perhaps contributing to the manic energy of the time.” The novel’s pop cultural accouterments couple with the near-constant presence of coke, with a weeks-long manic episode from Nina’s mother, to create a mood of invincibility laced with fragility. Per Kirkus Reviews: “Weiner’s recreation of the period and the milieu — the headlines, the music, the products — is like a perfect pointillist painting, all the tiny details adding up to a richly textured, authentic impression of the city as it was in that decade…Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.”

That’s all for now!

I will once again have a round-up of all the Best Picture nominations to you all in a few weeks as we get closer to Oscar Sunday. Stay tuned!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (2022) — The fourth novel from Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead (2022) adopts the first-person perspective of Johanna. As Susie Mesure describes in her review for The Guardian: “Once a promising law student, [Johanna] abandoned her marriage, her family and her country almost 30 years ago to pursue love and a new vocation as an artist after falling for the American artist who taught her watercolour evening class. From her new base in Utah she is a success but her paintings, which explore motherhood, humiliate her parents. After Johanna fails to return to Norway for her father’s funeral, even the cursory text messages from her sister cease.” Now, the 50-something painter returns to her native Oslo for a retrospective exhibition of her work following the death of her husband, Mark.

Much like how I characterize Hjorth’s second novel, Will and Testament (2016) in my review, in Is Mother Dead, “time flattens, mimicking the conflation of past and present that often accompanies complex PTSD.” Johanna’s surroundings spur memories of childhood. She ruminates on her father’s death and sister’s character, but her mother absorbs her thoughts, the ultimate enigma. As Johanna revisits certain scenes, reality grows amorphous, and curiosity turns toward obsession. Mesure goes on: “The question of what children owe their parents and vice versa lies at the heart of this raw novel, which returns to many of the themes in Will and Testament. ‘If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would ever dare have children,’ writes Hjorth.”

Translated into English by Charlotte Barslund, Is Mother Dead not only addresses similar themes as Will and Testament, but also maintains an analogous elliptical structure. Both books open with an arresting first line. Will and Testament narrator Bergljot states: “Dad died five months ago, which was either great timing or terrible, depending on your point of view.” Meanwhile, Is Mother Dead starts with Johanna asking: “She would contact me if Mum died. She has to, hasn’t she?” Where Bergljot’s father pulls focus in Will and Testament, Johanna’s mother dominates Is Mother Dead. Each opening statement forms the basis for a fixation, emerging as a thread that “unspools and shapes the narrative over the course of the next 300 plus pages,” as I put it in the 2023 November Book Review.

I go on to characterize Will and Testament as “a chilling meditation on not only poisoned families, but also on the relationship between perpetrator and injured party, on the nebulous notion of who has the right to claim the position of victim.” In Is Mother Dead, this line becomes especially blurred. Reviewing Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), I write: “Her careful use of a close third-person perspective establishes a sense of unwanted emotional intimacy that defies logical thought; she leaves the reader rooting for the novel’s sociopathic titular character without real reason, a high-wire act that underscores the unnerving subjectivity of morality.” Using a first person perspective, Hjorth accomplishes a comparable feat, burrowing so deeply into Johanna’s mindset that her actions become subjectively conscionable despite their objective insanity.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024) — As I wrote back in September: “While I loved Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) struck me as one-note autofiction primarily propelled by Rooney’s perpetual sense of global doom (valid) and irritation with the mechanics of the publishing world, an annoyance distilled and personified through the character of Alice.” Disappointed by Sally Rooney’s third novel, I approached Intermezzo (2024) with cautious optimism and found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

The novel centers on the Koubek brothers — Peter, a 32-year-old barrister, and Ivan, a 22-year-old chess prodigy — as they navigate their relationships with women and each other in the wake of their father’s death. As Brandon Taylor writes in his Bookforum review: “Peter is patronizing in the way older brothers can be, and Ivan has the reactionary arrogance of the younger brother who abhors being condescended to by someone older but less intelligent. Peter gives the eulogy at the funeral in Kildare, which we later discover really irritates Ivan, who has always felt that Peter disliked their father and didn’t know him very well. After the funeral, the brothers decamp to Dublin and return to their separate lives, a branching that gives the novel its structural gambit and what might be called its plot.” Peter vacillates between broke college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend, Sylvia, while Ivan falls in love with Margaret, an arts administrator 14 years his senior.

On paper, Peter appears stable, respectable, whereas external perceptions color Ivan as socially inept and mentally scattered. Through a third-person perspective, Rooney delves into both brothers’ headspaces, revealing a reversal in the reality of their thought processes. Ivan strings together coherent thoughts, reflections, whereas stabs of emotion, abrupt observations, shape Peter’s mental monologue. Consider these excerpts as examples:

[Ivan] Now and then Ivan will repeat to Margaret a particular anecdote he has already told, prefaced with the remark: I know I said this before, but anyway. Sometimes, he has found something more interesting and revealing in the anecdote the second time around, and sometimes it seems he just wants to tell it again in exactly the same way, perhaps to relieve some of the pressure of keeping all these stories inside himself all the time.

[Peter] Past the old bank now towards Thomas Street and Sylvia’s reply vibrates in his pocket, against his hip. Used to have a different ringtone for her messages, didn’t he. In the old days. Dublin in the rare, etc. Can’t remember now how it sounded.

I initially found the style of Peter’s sections irritating, layering additional confusion on top of Rooney’s characteristic quotation mark-less dialogue. But, as I continued with the novel, the function behind this form came into view, and I developed an appreciation for it.

As Taylor writes, “the novel rises and falls on the beat of consciousness, like a subtly remixed modernist patter, part Susan Taubes, part Virginia Woolf, all millennial deadpan…This new style sometimes attains a gorgeous, rhythmic effect that blurs emotion, physicality, and interiority: ‘The sky a glass bowl struck and resounding. The old life, here. Carrying on without him always. Young people with books in their arms, laughing. First taste from the world’s full cup.’ Such a passage echoes Mrs. Dalloway, in which Woolf describes the sound of Big Ben: ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.’”

This modernist linguistic structure appears most prominently in Peter’s sections, but Taylor argues that a stronger iteration of the novel would have eradicated the elder Koubek brother. He writes: “One might be tempted to justify Peter’s presence in the novel by gesturing to Levin in Anna Karenina (1878) and the chapters of scything and meditations on land management, but I disagree. Levin’s direct analogue in Intermezzo is in fact Ivan. Peter is more an anxious retread of Nick from Conversations with Friends but given the interiority of Septimus Smith from Mrs. Dalloway (1925).” Yes, Ivan fulfills the archetype of a modern day Levin, but, if we consider the relationships in Intermezzo exclusively in correlation to Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Peter operates as Anna (Margaret as Kitty, Sylvia as Karenin, Naomi as a Gen Z Vronsky with an OnlyFans), hardly making him tangential to the narrative.

The problem with Peter, from my perspective, stems from Sylvia. Rooney spends extensive time tracking the thought processes of Peter and Ivan, which build toward a thematic thrust of the novel. The brothers’ distinctive ways of thinking underscore the breach between external presentation and internal reality; Ivan and Peter present as the opposite of their innermost selves. Consequently, their connections that bridge that gap, the breach between what others see and what is, emerge as all the more significant. While Rooney dips into Margaret’s mindset as well, Naomi vocalizes her thoughts and feelings throughout scenes with Peter, then Ivan. Meanwhile, Sylvia remains voiceless, a vague sketch of a character. She suffers from a nameless, quintessentially Rooney-esque disease characterized by chronic pain from vaginal penetration, a watered down fantasy version of Frances’s endometriosis in Conversations. This lack of specificity renders Sylvia the incomplete outline of a skinny, suffering Karenin, bursting the believability of — and stakes in — Peter’s love triangle.

But Rooney captures fundamental truths about connection, loneliness, and loss that transcend the novel’s flaws, from my perspective. Taylor critiques Rooney’s grasp of the present tense, writing: “It’s always bothered me that Rooney deploys present progressive when she should deploy simple present…Just popping the book open randomly, you find ‘she is looking down at the soles of her feet, crossed on the mattress’ and ‘Ivan is standing on his own in the corner, while the men from the chess club move chairs and tables around.’ The present progressive, those “-ing” verbs, are anesthetizing because they sap energy from the line of action.” +1!! But, where Taylor attributes this stylistic choice to lack of awareness, of a graduate degree, I consider her MFA-less status tangential to the point. (I learned to largely eliminate “be” verbs from my writing in eighth grade; you don’t need to go to Iowa for that lesson.) The passivity propagated by Rooney’s sentence structure, this “anesthetizing” present progressive that “sap[s] energy from the line of action,” functions as a tonal signature, one perhaps carefully cultivated. It diffuses a specific feeling of listlessness, that sense of modern melancholy that Rooney magnifies across her work.

Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler (2024) — Per Jia Tolentino: “In its ability to induce paralyzing existential depression, the fiction of Halle Butler is perhaps matched only by those Black Friday news stories in which grandmothers get trampled in front of stacks of fifty-five-inch TVs.” Deemed “the feel bad novel of the year” by Electric Lit’s Marisa Wright, Banal Nightmare (2024) — the third novel from Halle Butler, the author of Jillian (2015) and The New Me (2019) — thrusts its characters into the pit of ennui that defines the thirty-something millennial existential crisis. Its narrator, Moddie, moves back to her Midwestern hometown of X after a breakup in Chicago. She reconnects with old classmates, a web of tenuous connections that underscore the isolation of the contemporary condition.

Set in 2018, Banal Nightmare satirizes the shockwaves of the first Trump administration, pokes the air out of those then-dominant flavors of white feminism and low-effort liberalism (“When Moddie thought about listening to Pam talk, hearing her catchphrases from the internet, ‘men are going through a reckoning,’ etc., it was like a faucet turning off.”). As Wright explains, Moddie’s return “is marked by a series of confrontations with her past, making clear how a re-evaluation of exploitative sexual interactions has impacted her,” a reconsideration that occurs against the backdrop of the Kavanaugh hearings. The people around Moddie often present monolithic notions of how to engage with the #MeToo moment, theoretical ideals that sideline her lived experiences (“You have to watch the news, Moddie,” said Pam. “This is major.” “I watch the news. I watched it for a second. I got what I needed.”).

Butler fuses culture high and low, references new and old, moments mundane and divine, in her prose. For instance, she writes: “Moddie put her phone back in her pocket and walked toward the counter to eat from the large pile of cheese and examine the magnets and photos on the massive steel refrigerator. One of the pictures was of the pussy-hat march on Washington, which Moddie thought looked like Christ’s Entry into Brussels.” She also distills the kind of overly-therapized language that has become ripe for weaponization in recent years. For instance, in an email, one character writes: “Maybe we have different friendship style, but I still feel owed an apology or some kind of reparations in order for me to feel comfortable moving forward. I hope this falls on open ears.”

As the narrative follows its web of interwoven people, X serves as both framework and character. Stylistically, Butler, like Sally Rooney in Intermezzo, takes a page from Virginia Woolf. Her close third-person perspective floats through the town, through various points of view, in a modernist manner. Consider how Woolf approaches London and its inhabitants in Mrs. Dalloway (1925):

It was precisely twelve o’clock by Big Ben; whose smoke was wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other clocks, mixed in an ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smokes, and died up there among the seagulls — twelve o’clock struck as Clarissa Dalloway laid her green dress on her bed, and the Warren Smiths walked down Harley Street. Probably, Rezia thought, that was Sir William Bradshaw’s house with the grey motor car in front of it. The leaden circles dissolved into the air. Indeed it was — Sir William Bradshaw’s motor car.

Comparably, in one chapter, Butler weaves through various scenes using similar moments of linkage. She traverses through the town over a more extended period of time, culminating in the following conclusion:

A flock of geese flew by, honking. An outdoor cat ran across a major intersection. Traffic lights changed. A man filled up his SUV with gas. Someone smoked weed behind the bowling alley and thought they saw something moving in the bushes. Someone’s mom lay awake in bed having a sexual fantasy about a colleague. Crickets chirped. More geese. Moonlight.

Banal Nightmare’s climax comes in the form of a party scene. Moddie returns to her house triumphant, casting off the shackles of her depression as she moves toward connection, revealing the narrative as one of recovery. But, then, in the final pages, Butler widens the aperture of her authorial lens, infusing new context into the novel. Without spoiling specifics, this final-15-pages twist prods notions of narrator reliability, creating an unnecessary jolt of capital-p Plot that weakens an otherwise singular book.

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

From there, I took a break from murdery vibes and moved on to Jay McInerney’s iconic time capsule of 1980s downtown Manhattan, Bright Lights, Big City (1984).

Let’s get into it:

The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1980) — Definitely the weakest novel in the Ripley series, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. (I would be sat for a Ripley novel simply consisting of Tom putzing about his house all day, but I digress.) The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) quintessentially opens with Tom Ripley at Belle Ombre, his home in the French countryside; as per usual, Tom is Minding His Own Business, gardening and practicing the harpsichord with his wife, Heloise, when a stranger shows up to disrupt his peace. This time, said intruder comes in the form of Billy, an American teenager working as a gardener for one of his neighbors.

In each iteration of the series, Tom occupies a new position. For instance, as I discuss in the September Book Review, Ripley’s Game (1974) shows him adopting the role of friend through an unconventional lens. The Boy Who Followed Ripley pushes its titular sociopath into the position of pseudo-father, resulting in one of the darker, more tender narrative threads in the series (“He [Tom] looked at Heloise steadily now. It had been strange to try to steer a young life like that.”). It also marks, as I see it, the most nuanced exploration of Tom’s sexuality. Lou Reed’s Transformer album, a celebration of sexual fluidity, shapes the soundtrack of the novel; Heloise perpetually plays the record at Belle Ombre, while Tom references it repeatedly. The climax thrusts Tom in the underworld of Berlin, dresses him in drag to complete a mission, cultivating a surprising sense of comfort (“Tom felt exhilarated and stronger, as if he were having a workout in a gym. No wonder Berliners liked disguises! One could feel free, and in a sense like oneself in a disguise.”).

The problem with the book, from my perspective, stems from its lack of tension. Without spoiling specifics, time rapidly reveals the impetus for Billy’s departure from the States, diffusing the sense of mystery that shapes the other Ripley novels. In his 2012-era blog Existential Ennui, comic writer Nick Jones lays out an in-depth overview of the series and, regarding The Boy Who Followed Ripley, rightly notes: “What the rest of the novel lacks is any real sense of existential danger for Tom. Where in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970) and even, to an extent, Ripley's Game, Tom had to fight for his very survival — which is to say his liberty and his idle, comfortable way of life (in Ripley’s Game, his own actions lead directly to an assault on his rural French home, Belle Ombre) — in The Boy Who Followed Ripley…he's preoccupied for the most part with saving…[the boy] from himself.”

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (1991) — We are so back! After a weaker fourth installment, the fifth and final Ripley book marks a return to form. In Ripley Under Water (1991), the loose ends that fray from the first four books tie into a tenuous knot, one on the brink of unraveling — and taking Tom’s lifestyle with it.

Once again, Tom is Minding His Own Business, gardening and practicing the harpsichord with his wife, Heloise, at his country estate, Belle Ombre, when something disrupts his peace. This time, the intrusion comes in the form of two strangers instead of one, David and Janice Pritchard, an American couple recently relocated to Villeperce who Tom nicknames “the Odd Pair.” Their arrival coincides with a series of strange phone calls haunting Belle Ombre, repeated impersonations of Dickie Greenleaf and Thomas Murchison, Tom’s first two kills from The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and Ripley Under Ground (1970), respectively. Here, Patricia Highsmith regains the sense of suspense that shapes the series’ earlier iterations as Tom travels from Tangier to London to Paris in pursuit of protecting not only his lifestyle, but also those people closest to him.

As Nick Jones writes for Existential Ennui: “The presence of an existential threat for Tom makes for a welcome change from the previous book in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), in which Tom's role was often quite passive…Tom does display some of his more admirable qualities in the book as well. His relationship with Heloise is never more touching than it is here: he twice tells her he loves her — an unusually forthright declaration from the normally reticent Ripley — and a postcard from her makes ‘his heart jump.’ (The only hint of his latent homosexuality this time comes courtesy of his reading a biography of Oscar Wilde…but even there, that was the book Highsmith herself was reading whilst writing Under Water.) Meanwhile, his loyalty to Ed and Jeff [of The Buckmaster Gallery in London], and theirs to him, seems to go beyond simple self-preservation.” +1! Ripley Under Water shows Tom at his most fully realized while retaining a sense of suspense, capping off the series with a satisfying conclusion.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950) — Patricia Highsmith at her stylistic height, Strangers on a Train (1950) opens on a train tracking toward Texas, where, as the title implies, two strangers, architect Guy Haines and psychotic nepo baby Charles Anthony Bruno, cross paths. As the pair dines at Bruno’s behest, Guy gradually opens up about his desire to divorce his unfaithful wife, Miriam, and marry his current love, Anne Faulkner. In turn, Bruno lays out his idea for the perfect murder: an exchange of acts that would have Bruno end Miriam, Guy kill Bruno’s father. Guy decries the idea immediately (“Guy looked at him in disgust. Bruno seemed to be growing indefinite at the edges, as if by some process of deliquescence. He seemed only a voice and a spirit now, the spirit of evil.”). Bruno, however, persists — with fatal consequences.

As I write in the September Book Review, in Ripley’s Game (1970), Tom Ripley pulls working class British picture framer Jonathan Trevanny into the dark underbelly of his existence, prompting “the two men [to] move from opposite ends of the moral spectrum toward its center as the novel’s narrative accelerates toward its devastating conclusion.” In Strangers on a Train, Highsmith cultivates a similar duality, albeit one in its nascent stages. Where Tom occupies a moral gray area as his “contempt toward Jonathan…alchemizes into camaraderie,” Bruno looms firm in black and white from start to finish. Meanwhile, Guy and Jonathan undergo analogous journeys; Bruno and Tom bleed into, then break, each man’s resoluteness, and the more they “stew…the more…[their] moral fiber begins to fray.”

Highsmith adopts a close third person, dipping into the viewpoints of Bruno and Guy in alternation. As I write in my review of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), this perspectival choice “establishes a sense of unwanted emotional intimacy…a high-wire act that underscores the unnerving subjectivity of morality.” Her prose reaches its sharpest zenith in Strangers on a Train, imbuing the narrative with an added sense of dread. For instance, as Guy hops off the train, Highsmith writes: “The more organic air, weighted with nightfall, struck him like a smothering pillow.” Death drips from each description, replicating for the reader the kind of atmospheric pressure that comes to consume Guy.

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984) — Days of Abandonment (2002) for men, Bright Lights, Big City (1984) inhabits the headspace of a 24-year-old fact checker at a prestigious magazine, a fictional iteration of The New Yorker drawn from author Jay McInerney’s early 1980s experience at the publication (“In fact, you don’t want to be in Fact. You’d much rather be in Fiction.”). His wife, Amanda, a Kansas City country bumpkin baptized by the Manhattan modeling world, has left him and moved to Paris. Grief clouds the narrator as he struggles to hold onto his job and snorts his way through late nights at The Odeon (“It is worse than you expected, stepping out into the morning. The glare is like a mother’s reproach.”).

Per Air Mail: “Bright Lights, Big City made McInerney, then an M.F.A. student at Syracuse University, famous…It’s written in the second person, a point of view McInerney chose because ‘that is how you speak to yourself.’” The prose maintains a rhythmic musicality, a sense of immediacy cultivated by its author’s chosen perspective — and his use of present tense. For instance, the narrator observes: “Tad introduces them as Elaine and Theresa. Elaine, the model, has a punk high-fashion look: short, razor-cut dark hair, high cheekbones, eyebrows plucked straight. Metallic and masculine are the adjectives that come to mind. Both M words. Theresa is blond, too short and busty to model. Elaine looks you over as if you were an impulse purchase that she might return to the department store.”

Humor punctuates, helps shape, the narrative. In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), advertisements for Les Miserables litter Manhattan; the then-musical of the moment recurs as set dressing, an emblem of the consumerist monoculture shaping the city. In Bright Lights, Big City, The New York Post plays an analogous role (“She might get picked up by a Sex Killer. Any Post reader will tell you it’s possible. Happens every day.”). The narrator maintains a low-level obsession with the tabloid, explaining: “The Post is the most shameful of your several addictions. You hate to support this kind of trash with your thirty cents, but you are a secret fan of Killer Bees, Hero Cops, Sex Fiends, Lottery Winners, Teenage Terrorists, Liz Taylor, Tough Tots, Sicko Creeps, Living Nightmares, Life on Other Planets, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Miracle Diets and Coma Babies. The Coma Baby is on page two: COMA BABY SIS PLEADS: SAVE MY LITTLE BROTHER.” McInerney tells Air Mail: “There was a sense that I was writing absolutely up to the minute and delivering this news about the city and the underground and the culture.”

Pulling from his own life, McInerney curates a particular picture of his narrator’s depression, of its causes, before widening the aperture of his authorial lens. This shift reframes the reality of the novel in its final pages, establishing the second-person perspective as a form of dissociation. In a 2016 piece for The Guardian, McInerney reflects: “The story was informed by the pain and misery of the events of the previous year, and yet somehow that voice gave it a kind of comic lift, a wry perspective on the protagonist’s downward spiral. The narrator’s falling apart, but he’s watching himself do so, and commenting upon it with some degree of objectivity.”

That’s all for now! In the upcoming December Book Review, I’ll finally be sharing my thoughts on Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024). Stay tuned!

xo,
Najet

Instead of resorting to Am*zon, please consider ordering from Bookshop.org, emailing the team at Three Lives & Company in the West Village (which gift wraps and ships across the U.S.) at info@threelives.com, combing through eBay, or heading to your local independent bookstore.

Now, let’s get into it. Here’s what I’d suggest getting for…

The True Crime Fanatic

Penance by Eliza Clark (2023) — As I wrote last November, Penance (2023) “takes the form of a faux true crime tell-all centered on the Brexit-era murder of a teenage girl in a sleepy, coastal British town at the hands of her three classmates. A Tumblr-inspired homage to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Penance challenges traditional notions of novelistic structure. Forging an inventive stylistic path, Clark blurs the line between factual and emotional truth — and, in doing so, calls into question the distinction between those notions.”

Additional Suggestions: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950), Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (2024), In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966), Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith (1970)

The Religious Relative

The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr (2020) — Written by American historian Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2020) traces the roots of women’s subjugation in contemporary evangelical Christianity. Barr examines how patriarchal forces influenced translations of the Bible over time, ultimately altering its meaning to serve a sociopolitical end. She also still identifies as a Christian, making it an easier sell-in for that religious relative who might feel reticent reading this kind of deconstruction from a “non-believer.”

While the text obviously focuses on Christianity specifically, the overarching idea it proves — the notion of man’s intervention in what becomes considered religious fact — applies to organized religion across the board.

Additional Suggestions: Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette (2021)

Your Bestie Who May or May Not be a Big Reader

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929) — Written at the height of the Jazz Age, this novel from Ursula Parrott reads like contemporary fiction. Parrott’s heroine, twenty-something divorcée Patricia, goes on dates at Dante on MacDougal and traipses around the city with her bestie and roommate, Lucia.

One of my favorite sequences in Ex-Wife (1929) shows Patricia and Lucia dining at the Waldorf Astoria on a summer night, a kind of last supper on the eve of Lucia’s departure for Europe. In it, Patricia narrates: “At the Waldorf, I wanted to tell her [Lucia] that I loved sharing an apartment with her, and that I liked her better than any woman I had ever known — but Lucia and I were inarticulate with each other about things like that. So we talked of places Lucia and Sam would visit, and things I wanted her to get me in Paris, and ate tomato en gelée, and lobster, and alligator pears — the preposterous sort of meal women order when they are dining together. Warm summer dusk deepened along the Avenue outside.” A novel for the girlies!

Additional Suggestion: Everything I Know about Love by Dolly Alderton (2018)

Your Friend with the TikTok Attention Span

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt (2022) — Published by New Directions, this novella physically appears as a children’s storybook, a Trojan horse that masks a slippery exploration of morality.

Told in first person, The English Understand Wool (2022) focuses on a 17-year-old whose French mother and English father have raised her to avoid “mauvais ton,” or bad taste. Per the publisher: “One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests…All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?”

Additional Suggestions: Intimations by Zadie Smith (2020), Love by Hanne Ørstavik (2018)

The Man in Finance

The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein (2018) — Per last year’s October Book Review:

As author Andrew Lipstein said in reviewing his own novel on Goodreads: “One of the best, if not THE best, book about veganism and and high finance out.” So true.

Per The New York Times: “Like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Vegan (2018) features young marrieds mulling conception and living in a highly desirable part of New York City — then, a four-room apartment in a Victorian building on the West Side of Manhattan; now, a brick townhouse in Cobble Hill— and a dinner party where a guest is effectively roofied. Only here the perpetrator is the protagonist, one Herschel Caine (which, were you to consult a naming dictionary, translates roughly to “deer killer”): partner at a quantitative hedge fund, with $2.8 million in his bank account, growing qualms about his line of work and a keep-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety about his neighbors, one of whom is a Guggenheim.”

When drugging his wife’s friend, Birdie, with a ZzzQuil cocktail births unintended consequences, Herschel becomes wracked with with guilt. His mental state starts to slip, and a strong, almost supernatural kinship with animals emerges. Toeing the line between magic and realism (“This was the power of my imagination, I reminded myself, this was only a punishment inflicted by one part of me on the rest.”), Lipstein constructs a brilliant social satire fueled by a Brooklynite Patrick Bateman with a conscience (“I signed in to my computer and checked the market. The S&P was up 0.71%, the Dow 0.63%, the NASDAQ 0.66%. This was no longer relevant to my work but it was an old habit, a score I checked like the Knicks…Continuing my sign-in ritual I checked my bank accounts — $2.8 million, all combined.”).

Additional Suggestions: Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi (1985), American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

The Party Girl

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados (2020) — Per the May newsletter, “an ode to the pursuit of pleasure, Marlowe Granados’s debut follows 21-year-old Isa and her best friend, Gala, as they party and penny pinch their way from Bed-Stuy to the Upper East Side and back again. Set in the summer of 2013 and written in the form of diary entries from Isa, the novel captures the glamour of girlhood, the endless possibility of youth. As author Alexandra Kleeman puts it: ‘Reading Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour feels like eating a shimmering, intoxicating slice of the best summer of your life, a sort of Proustian cookie that transports you back not to your childhood but to the time when you looked best in cut-off shorts and felt like your heart was made of rubber.’”

Additional Suggestion: Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (1977), The Guest by Emma Cline (2023), My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018), Black Swans by Eve Babitz (1993)

Your Childhood Bestie

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida (2021) — Through this novel, Vendela Vida captures the flavor of female friendship that often shapes the dusk of childhood. As I write in the April newsletter, “We Run the Tides (2021) opens in 1980s San Francisco, a period bookended and muted by the reigns of Haight-Ashbury hippies and Steve Jobs-worshipping SAAS founders, and traces the coming-of-age journey of its eighth grade narrator, Eulabee. At the story’s start, Eulabee and her best friend, Maria Fabiola, dominate the oceanside neighborhood of Sea Cliff (“We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beach, which are cold, windswept, and full of fishermen and freaks.”). But the fault lines in their friendship begin to emerge, leading to an abrupt falling out, then Maria Fabiola’s disappearance, cracking open the contours of Eulabee’s reality.”

Additional Suggestion: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore (1994)

The Person Who Hasn’t Read a Book Since The Cultural Reset of Gone Girl (2012)

In the Cut by Susanna Moore (2021) — As I’ve discussed over multiple newsletters, “the rare literary fiction novel with a commercial plot, In the Cut (1995) follows Frannie Avery, an NYU English teacher studying street vernacular for her upcoming book. In the opening scene, she stumbles upon a redhead giving a tattooed mystery man a blowjob in the back of a Greenwich Village bar. When said redhead turns up dead, Frannie finds herself at the investigation’s center. Moore crafts a nuanced thriller that explores the thin line between sex and violence, as well as the casual racism of the NYPD, against the backdrop of Giuliani-era New York.” Building toward a Gone Girl (2012)-esque twist, In the Cut closes with perspectival reframing narratively distinctive from, but tonally reminiscent of, Amy Dunne cruising behind the wheel of her car.

Additional Suggestions: Here in the Dark by Alexis Soloski (2023), Animal by Lisa Taddeo (2021)

Your Mother-in-Law

Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin (1988) — The ultimate comfort read with the added benefit of bringing new recipes to the metaphorical and literal table.

As I write in last October’s newsletter, “before her untimely death of an aortic aneurysm at age 48, Laurie Colwin regularly contributed to Gourmet magazine. Home Cooking (1988) collects her best essays, which interweave recipes with personal anecdotes. The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme said it best: ‘Colwin spoke, first and foremost, to harried middle-class cooks, assuring them that their inner ‘domestic sensualist’ was within reach: you could be both a hedonist and a pragmatist if you mastered a few basic techniques, and splurged on a few not so basic ingredients. Through her writing, at once bossy and intimate, Colwin barged into kitchens and made herself at home, the kind of cook who grabs the spoon and starts mixing the batter her way…Competence was one of her goals, but confidence was the real point.’”

Additional Suggestions: A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis (2022), Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown (2017)

The Francophile

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954) — This slim French novel, published by Françoise Sagan at age 18, inhabits the headspace of 17-year-old Cécile as she spends the summer on the French Riviera with her father, Raymond, and his girlfriend, Elsa. When her deceased mother’s friend, Anne, arrives on the Côte d'Azur, the idle simplicity of their shared existence gets thrown fatally off kilter.

As Rachel Cusk writes in her 2019 review for The New Yorker, “The hedonism and amorality of Bonjour Tristesse (1954) is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense, Sagan is far more of a classicist than others of her existentialist brethren, such as [Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Albert] Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioral norms, but in Bonjour Tristesse those norms are as much psychic as they are societal.”

Additional Suggestions: Chéri and the Last of Chéri by Colette (1920); The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine (2020); Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956); Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (1939)

The Foodie

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton (2011) — This memoir from chef Gabrielle Hamilton traces her early life in a food-focused household on through to the opening of her East Village restaurant, Prune, which closed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Frank Bruni writes in his 2011 review for The New York Times: “There are rhapsodic passages aplenty about eating and cooking, and while such reveries can easily seem forced or trite, hers ring sweetly true. She’s recounting actual rapture, not contriving its facsimile on cue. You can feel her amazement as her father roasts whole lambs on a spit and her awe at the dexterity with which the chef André Soltner pulls off a perfect omelet, using only a fork.” The book reads like fiction, pulling the reader into the sensory experience of Hamilton’s personal and professional journeys in parallel.

Additional Suggestion: Sweetbitter by Stephane Danler (2016)

The History Buff

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir (1954) — So, you have a friend who only reads World War II biographies. We’ve all been there. Get them to branch out with Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 novel about the fallout from the Nazi occupation of France, The Mandarins.

The book zeroes in on a group of leftist intellectuals, tracing their lives from the waning days of the war through the mid-1950s. Per Kirkus Reviews: “The goal is to tell how these men and women, united during the war in the Resistance and by the common, necessary action involved, reacted and divided in peace. The story is told in alternating chapters — half in the third person about Henri Perron, writer and editor of an underground newspaper, half in the first person by Anne Dubreuilk, a psychiatrist (de Beauvoir herself)…The book offers more than space permits in detail: political discussion, graphic sex, sharp pen portraits of types and individuals in the literary scene, some travel writing, even a few-episodes of straight action. Despite all this, the novel is not a hedgepodge; its parts are well integrated with the central theme.”

Additional Suggestions: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2020), The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff (2021)

The Colleen Hoover Stan

Elvis and Me by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley (1985) — My exposure to Colleen Hoover has remained (intentionally) minimal, but, from what I gather via Blake Lively press tour TikToks, Priscilla Presley’s memoir teases out the same themes that define Hoover’s body of work. Elvis and Me (1985) traces Priscilla’s relationship with Elvis Presley from inception through to dissolution, culminating in Elvis asking whether he’s lost her to another man, to which she replies: “It’s not that you’ve lost me to another man, you’ve lost be to a life of my own.”

Additional Suggestions: The Big Love by Mrs. Florence Aadland (1961), My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (2020)

Your Friend Who Only Reads Non-Fiction

A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (2021) — Per the June newsletter:

Taking its title from Josephine Baker’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington (“I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America too.”), this nonfiction essay collection from American poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib traces a history of Black performance and its impact on the United States’s artistic landscape. Abdurraqib’s essays “brim with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves,” examining moments ranging from Merry Clayton’s voice punctuating The Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter” to Beyonce breaking the 2016 Super Bowl.

Discussing giants from Aretha Franklin to Whitney Houston to Sammy Davis Jr., Abdurraqib peppers his prose with moments of memoir (“I first learned to code-switch through the musical movements of my people, and done among my people in this way, it didn’t feel like a shameful burden. It felt like a generosity — a celebration of the many modes we could all fit into.”). Reviewing the book for the Ploughshares blog, writer and editor Julia Shiota observes: “His [Abdurraqib’s] approach to blending research and memoir imbues the lives of historical figures with a genuine warmth and care that is often missing from other approaches to reportage and history. No rigor is lost because of this love; in fact, Abdurraqib is even more incisive than critics who may have a bone to pick with the object of criticism. It’s through his love that he is able to reveal insights into the artists and performers themselves, as well as the way that history links to the present — both in his own life and in the wider world.”

Additional Suggestions: On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (2021), Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal by Robert Shaplen (1954), Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil (1996)

The Film Fan

The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin (1976) — This lesser known book from James Baldwin marks his foray into film criticism. In it, Baldwin “examines representations of the Black experience in Western cinema, unpacks how American delusion seeps into the kind of media we consume. Divided into three sections, The Devil Finds Work (1976) opens with a memoir-like look back at James Balwin’s childhood, at how a schoolteacher and mentor first brought him into the bewitching world of film. He then analyzes mid-century representations of race relations, with a special focus on Sidney Poitier, before delving into his doomed adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) for the big screen,” as I write in the July Book Review.

Additional Suggestions: Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (2022), Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter (2024)

The Millennial in Your Life Whose Core Personality Trait is Travel

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich (1970) — As I write in the August Book Review, “translated to English by Howard Curtis for the first time in 2021, this Italian novel distills a kind of midcentury listlessness that has prompted comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951)…Last Summer in the City (1970) follows its narrator, Leo, as he meanders through Rome, in and out of love, jobs, and friendships. As Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman puts it in his introduction for the new edition: ‘All Leo does is draft — as Arianna, his love interest, drifts; as Graziano, his drunken friend, drifts; as Fellini’s Marcello drifts. People don’t amble or stroll in Rome, they meander, and stray from the Spanish Steps to Piazza Navona, to Campo de’ Fiori, over and across Ponte Sisto to Trastevere, then back across the river to Piazza del Popolo, Via Frattina, and finally once again to Piazza di Spagna and Trinità dei Monti. Places spill into one another, by turns splendid and beautiful, then ordinary and drab, mirroring Calligarich’s masterful prose style, which frequently jolts the highly elegiac with the brutally colloquial.’”

Additional Suggestions: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin (2016), A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964), The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson (1998)

Your Friend Who’s Always Asking Why Everything You Read is Sad/Dark

Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin (1978) — Laurie Colwin is perfect for your friend who only wants happy reads. Family Happiness (1984) marks my favorite of her novels, but Happy All the Time (1978) undoubtedly checks the “no stressful vibes” box best. Reading like novelized Nora Ephron, it focuses on two sets of couples: “the happy marriage of Guido and Holly and the pseudo-harrowing courtship of Misty Berkowitz by Vincent Cardworthy (Guido's cousin),” as Kirkus Reviews describes.

The review goes on: “These folks have what you'd have to call minor-league problems. Very romantic Guido (who oversees the family arts foundation) has to learn to accept that picture-perfect Holly sometimes needs to go off and be alone; she's afraid of getting too used to everything being so wonderful. Even more romantic Vincent (who is the Board of Planning's expert on garbage) has to cut through language-expert Misty's Jew-among-Gentiles hang-up and her anti-romantic, serf-protective (and rather tedious) snarlings. Through most of the problematic festivities — Misty's jealousy, Holly's pregnancy — it’s a pleasurable relief to find the business of contemporary relationships being tossed around so blithely and reaching such cheerful resolutions.”

Additional Suggestions: Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin (1984), A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin (1993), Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido (1982)

Your Friend Who Has Read Everything

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik (2008) — This slim, lesser known book consists of a series of brief obituaries, odes to people who influenced its author, Marion Winik. Per the publisher, it “presents snapshot portraits of The Jeweler, The Driving Instructor, The Bad Influence, The Queen of New Jersey — and roughly fifty others who have touched Winik’s life, from her son’s second grade teacher to Keith Haring…these losses form not only an autobiography but a story of our time, delivering a lyrical journey that ultimately raises the spirits.”

Additional Suggestions: The Travelers by Regina Porter (2019), By Myself and Then Some by Lauren Bacall (2005), Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer (1958), Stoner by John Williams (1965)

Happy shopping!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin by Michael Clune (2013) — In her nonfiction book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), Maggie Nelson, in one of my favorite reads of the past few years, unpacks freedom through the lens of four categories: art, sex, drugs, and climate. In the chapter dedicated to drugs, she writes:

Despite the legend of immediacy that so often attends drug writing (as in the tale of a speed-addled Jack Kerouac typing On the Road (1957) at 100 words per minute on a 120-foot-long scroll), drug experience is notoriously difficult to represent, either in the moment or in retrospect (“I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was,” Arthur Koestler once quipped about a mushroom trip). As Michael Clune, literary scholar and author of one of the best dope memoirs I've read, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013), explains (in Writing Against Time), “The literary interest in the description of the striking effects of addictive substances is familiar. Less often noted is the curious divergence of these descriptions from empirical studies of the experiences of addicts, for whom a dulling and deadening of perception is a characteristic of narcotic and alcohol addiction on the sensorium.” In other words, to be “good literature,” drug writing needs to be enlivening, surprising, and gripping, whereas the experiences being narrated are often characterized by monotony, inattentiveness, and vacancy.

With White Out, Clune crafts an immersive memoir that feels like fiction — “enlivening, surprising, and gripping.” He opens by explaining: “My past is infected. I have a memory disease. It grips me through what I can remember. For example, seven years ago in Baltimore, Cat wakes me up to kiss me on her way to work. I’m about to fall back asleep when I remember about Dominic. I remember how fun he can be. I sit up in bed and think about it.” These opening lines collapse linear time, establish the poetic flatness that goes on to shape the book. For instance, one of the most memorable sequences traces Clune’s childhood search for a real-life Candy Land, a pursuit lyrically wrenched into the memory of his first time using. Traditional notions of past and present shatter, and all the stories swirl into one.

Repetition of moments and phrases punctuate a singular narrative continuum. As Clune writes: “Language is a total luxury in a white out. A full sentence is like a Rolex.” Some images, some sequences, sharpen to a point of clarity, while others stay in a state of perpetual refraction, replicating that “dulling and deadening of perception” Clune identifies. In his 2013 review for The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes: “The book is itself a sketchy map of a blanched aurora borealis. There is a narrative, but it swims murkily, the way Clune himself ‘floated like an astronaut in the white world.’” This stylistic kaleidoscope animates the high of that initial hit, how it warps time by creating what Clune describes as a “rip [that] goes deep, right down to the bone, to the very first time.”

Abandoning moral overtures, Clune captures the nebulousness of recovery and who latches onto it. Lewis-Kraus goes on: “In a sense, the addiction memoir is the simplest form of self-accounting, a grossly distended version of the curve of many people’s lives: I sinned, I sinned repeatedly, my sinning felt beyond my control, I hit something that felt like rock bottom, I realized I wanted to be redeemed, with the help of divine or earthly love I was redeemed, and now I’m here to declare not only that I’m still around but that I’m better than ever, as proven by the existence of this book…The unusual risk taken by Clune’s unusually good addiction memoir is its enduring lyrical reverence for heroin. The heroin is so close you can see the white. It hasn’t been relegated to the past. It has an honest and dangerous smile. It’s right here, whitely licking its chops.”

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet