Harvey Freedenberg

Fiction

A Roth character considers life’s folly from beyond the grave

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Of how many writers can it be said that they're still producing some of their best work well into their 70s? With this, his 24th novel, Philip Roth proves beyond any dispute that he deserves to be counted in that select group.

Indignation opens in one of Roth's favorite settings: his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. The year is 1950, and 18-year-old Marcus Messner dutifully pursues his high school studies while working in his father's kosher butcher shop, awaiting the day when he can begin his higher education. But after only one year at a local college, he flees Newark to escape his father's obsessive concern for his well-being, transferring to Winesburg College, a small Ohio school he chooses based on a catalog photograph. There, he's driven to excel in his studies, both to earn his way into law school and to avoid the catastrophe of being drafted to serve in Korea, a specter that stalks him daily.

Strikingly, as we learn early in the novel, Marcus is hardly a typical narrator, telling his story after he has died a premature death (the grisly and ironic circumstances of which are disclosed only in the novel's concluding pages). From that vantage point, he's troubled by the banality of his afterlife, where he's apparently destined to "muck over a lifetime's minutiae," including his failed relationship with Olivia Hutton, the troubled girl who's responsible for his sexual initiation, or the bizarre chain of circumstances that lead to his demise.

The novel abounds with grimly funny set pieces, most prominently Marcus' confrontation with Dean Caudwell, who summons the young man to his office when he requests reassignment to a single room after disastrous encounters with two roommates. For some 20 pages, Marcus and the Dean conduct a spirited intellectual joust, until Marcus finally explodes, spouting the atheist creed of Bertrand Russell to give voice to his protest over the college's requirement that he suffer through 40 sessions of compulsory chapel in order to graduate. Another, the conversation in which Marcus' mother exacts a promise that he will abandon Olivia in return for her agreement not to initiate divorce proceedings against his father, is both absurd and painfully realistic.

Indignation reprises many of the themes that have marked Roth's career, among them religion, sexuality and death. Here he's chosen to depart dramatically from the subject matter of his recent novels, Everyman and Exit Ghost, with their focus on aging men in the throes of physical decay. Instead, echoes of his much earlier works, from Goodbye, Columbus to Portnoy's Complaint are threaded throughout the novel, and it's refreshing to see an accomplished author who's able to reimagine elements of those classic works so dynamically.

In the words of the Yiddish proverb, "Man plans, God laughs." Or, as Roth puts it, Marcus Messner's tragic tale educates us about how "the terrible, incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate results." However you choose to view it, Philip Roth is a masterful guide to this rueful fact of life.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

 

Of how many writers can it be said that they're still producing some of their best work well into their 70s? With this, his 24th novel, Philip Roth proves beyond any dispute that he deserves to be counted in that select group.

Indignation opens in one…

Fiction

The mysterious ties of matrimony

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Unlike Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe in their recent memoirs of marital love and loss, Rafael Yglesias has elected to tell his own similar tale in the form of a painfully honest and passionate autobiographical novel. Whatever the reason for that narrative choice, the novel is a moving exploration of the mysterious, often tenuous, bonds that hold men and women together in marriage.

Enrique Sabas, a precocious young writer, meets Margaret Cohen, an aspiring artist, in Greenwich Village in 1975. In chapters that alternate between those first, fresh days of the couple’s relationship and harrowing scenes of Margaret’s final weeks of life, Yglesias skillfully navigates the road the pair travels in their 29 years together. It’s anything but a smooth path: there are emotional and physical betrayals, the two drifting apart and coming together in an elaborate, complex dance. But by the time Margaret decides to surrender to her battle with cancer, we may grasp, in a way that’s nearly as revealing as our understanding of our own most intimate relationships, the strength of this couple’s connection.

Yglesias demonstrates impressive courage in exposing the raw details of Margaret’s final days with the honesty only a participant could bring to the grim account. He’s equally forthright in chronicling the searing pain experienced by the loving friends and family who surround her and must say goodbye. Most impressive is the way he probes Enrique and Margaret’s relationship, almost clinically and yet with compassion, seeking to “penetrate the mystery of how they had managed to live a life together while they were so different in their natures and in their expectations of one another.”

Who knows, in the end, what makes love flourish and grow? Who but the participants can unknot the tangled strands of compromises, deceptions, generosity and selfishness that nurture or threaten a relationship from day to day? There are as many answers as there are marriages. In its ironically titled candor, A Happy Marriage proposes some intriguing ones for our consideration.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Unlike Joan Didion and Anne Roiphe in their recent memoirs of marital love and loss, Rafael Yglesias has elected to tell his own similar tale in the form of a painfully honest and passionate autobiographical novel. Whatever the reason for that narrative choice, the novel…

FictionFamily Drama

More Than I Love My Life

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Award-winning Israeli writer David Grossman’s More Than I Love My Life is a complex novel about the secrets that scar three generations of women for a lifetime.

Upon her 90th birthday, family matriarch Vera Novak reunites with her daughter, Nina, after five years of separation. Both Vera and Nina have committed the almost unpardonable act of abandoning young daughters—Vera when Nina was 6, and Nina when her own daughter, Gili, was even younger. The circumstances surrounding Vera’s and Nina’s departures are complex, slowly revealed and come to dominate all three women’s emotional lives.

When Nina, who has spent several years on a tiny island between Lapland and the North Pole, announces that she’s in the early stages of dementia, she asks Gili, a writer and filmmaker now approaching her 40s, and Gili’s father, Rafael, formerly a film director himself, to record Vera’s story. The novel reaches its climax when the foursome journeys to the island of Goli Otok, off the coast of Croatia, once home to a notorious labor camp and reeducation center for opponents of the Tito regime in the former Yugoslavia. Vera was sent there after the death of her husband under circumstances she’s withheld from Nina all her life. 

In harrowing passages that alternate with the present action, Vera recalls two months of her nearly three-year imprisonment when she was marched daily to a cliff top and forced to stand in the blazing sun, her only companion a sapling she shaded with her body.

Vera, Nina and Gili are memorable characters, each suffering in different but equally profound ways. Grossman effectively inhabits the consciousnesses of these women and doesn’t spare the reader any of their considerable emotional pain. He’s a sympathetic if unfailingly honest chronicler of their anguish. A reader doesn’t have to identify with the particulars of the women’s stories to appreciate how the consequences of fateful choices can reverberate down through the generations.

David Grossman is a sympathetic if unfailingly honest chronicler of the anguish of three generations of women.
FictionLiterary Fiction

All’s Well

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Miranda Fitch, the protagonist of Mona Awad’s third novel, All’s Well, might best be described—to borrow the title of the 1988 Pedro Almodóvar film—as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A professor of theater studies at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, she’s laboring mightily to stage a student production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which she thinks of as a “problem play,” one that’s “neither a tragedy nor a comedy. Both, always both.”

Apart from a rebellious cast, Miranda’s primary obstacle is unremitting pain from an injury she sustained when she tumbled from a stage during her promising but brief acting career. The resulting hip injury led to serious back problems unrelieved by the ministrations of a string of doctors and physical therapists, transforming Miranda, divorced and not yet 40 years old, into a pill-gobbling automaton who has abandoned all hope of her own happy ending.

All’s Well quickly leaves behind this depressingly naturalistic scenario to veer into the realm of fabulism when Miranda encounters three mysterious men in a local pub. The trio, who inexplicably have intimate knowledge of her life and struggles, grace her with what seems like a miracle cure. But as she discovers, even healing can come at a price.

Awad efficiently portrays both Miranda’s confrontation with chronic pain and the slowly evaporating patience of the people in her orbit (her ex-husband, Paul; colleague and friend Grace; and Mark, the last in a chain of physical therapists) with her lack of improvement. Anyone who’s been similarly afflicted or knows someone who has will recognize this scenario. Awad leaves it to the reader to assess how much of Miranda’s mental turmoil is the product of an inexplicable but desperately welcome truce in her battle with pain, and how much flows from her encounter with supernatural forces. It’s a wild, at times over-the-top ride, but like Shakespeare’s eponymous work, there’s both pathos and humor in this story of how we suffer and the ways in which we’re healed.

Awad's follow up to the acclaimed Bunny is a wild, at times over-the-top ride, but like Shakespeare’s eponymous work, there’s both pathos and humor.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

King Richard

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Though it’s been eclipsed in the minds of many Americans by the turmoil surrounding Donald Trump’s dual impeachments, the Watergate scandal continues to reverberate in the nation’s political consciousness nearly five decades later. Michael Dobbs’ King Richard: Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy is a balanced but frank account of a critical period in Richard Nixon’s downfall and a valuable addition to the literature of this dramatic era in American political history.

Dobbs draws extensively on material from the infamous White House taping system, not fully made public until 2013, and focuses on the 100-day period between Nixon’s second inauguration—following his reelection in one of the greatest landslides in American political history—and the end of April 1973. That turbulent interval, which Dobbs meticulously documents on an almost day-by-day basis, featured frantic, failing efforts to hide the roles Nixon and his inner circle played in the illegal political intelligence operation that surfaced with the arrest of the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972. It culminated in the departure of Nixon’s most powerful aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, which signaled the collapse of the cover-up that ultimately resulted in Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974.

Nixon was a complex figure, and Dobbs offers a relatively sympathetic portrait here, summing him up as a “self-made man with a loner’s disposition” who was “personally responsible for both his rise and fall.” There are no heroes in this story of lawlessness and corruption, but it’s clear that White House counsel John Dean’s decision to cooperate with prosecutors, if only out of a savvy instinct for self-preservation, was indispensable in finally exposing the cover-up, “an edifice of lies, evasions, and half-truths incapable of sustaining serious challenge.”

Whether readers share Dobbs’ view that “only the most hard-hearted of critics will fail to feel any empathy for the pain of a man whose dreams turned to nightmares as a result of his own mistakes” may depend on their political ideology. Whatever their conclusion, it will be better informed after reading this engrossing book.

King Richard is an engrossing account of Richard Nixon’s downfall and a valuable addition to the literature of this dramatic era in American political history.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Hot Stew

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Fiona Mozley’s Hot Stew couldn’t be more distinct from her first novel, Elmet, a finalist for the 2017 Booker Prize. But this lively story of class conflict in contemporary London offers more evidence of Mozley’s talent and versatility, marking her as a writer whose work promises both thoughtful entertainment and surprises.

At the heart of the novel is the city’s Soho neighborhood, where most of the ensemble cast’s members live and work. Agatha Howard, whose sizable inheritance supports the adage about all great fortunes arising from great crimes, has decided to renovate one of her extensive real estate holdings. But the neighborhood has long been home to London’s sex trade, so Agatha’s plan sparks a clash with a determined group of sex workers based there, led by Nigerian-born Precious and her older companion, Tabitha.

While Agatha deploys her wealth and connections to enlist a politically ambitious police officer in her plan, the women take to the streets to summon popular support for their cause, even as they recognize they’re “hardly going to get Bob Geldof and Bono fighting in [their] corner.” Mozley subtly wires these characters and others, including a semiretired mob enforcer, a modestly successful actor and an ex-drug addict whose disappearance heightens police pressure on the district, into a complex network of unpredictable and intriguing connections. 

Whether the scene is a déclassé Mayfair men’s club or a fetid cellar that affords refuge for a collection of homeless people, Mozley brings her diverse settings to life, as well as the clashing desires and ambitions of her colorful characters. Hot Stew’s title is an apt one, as Mozley consistently stirs in tasty ingredients and exciting spices, and keeps raising the temperature all the way to its startling climax. 

Hot Stew’s title is an apt one, as Fiona Mozley consistently stirs in tasty ingredients and keeps raising the temperature all the way to its startling climax.
FictionComic Fiction

Early Morning Riser

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

If a handful of characters were transported from Anne Tyler’s Baltimore to tiny Boyne City, Michigan, they might act a bit like the ones Katherine Heiny has gathered in Early Morning Riser. But Heiny’s gentle exploration of how we tiptoe and often stumble through the minefield of love is both fresh and consistently entertaining.

When second grade teacher Jane Wilkes meets Duncan Ryfield, they quickly fall in lust. But Jane’s attraction to Duncan, a handsome and capable woodworker who’s more skilled at starting projects than he is at finishing them, is complicated by the discovery that he is, as a friend politely puts it, “extremely . . . social”—meaning he’s slept with most of the available women in this part of rural Michigan. In particular, Duncan has a puzzlingly close relationship with his ex-wife, an aggressive, opinionated real estate agent, even though it’s been many years since their divorce and her remarriage.

Heiny’s novel navigates nearly 20 years of small-town life, with weddings—one canceled and two consummated—children and a con man’s shocking scheme. Some of these events combine to upend Jane and Duncan’s life when they become responsible for the care of Jimmy Jellico, a developmentally disabled man who works as a helper in Duncan’s shop. This unique relationship, and others among this novel's cast of characters, raises intriguing questions about the definition of family and how the families we inhabit from birth differ from those we create.

Though she mostly goes easy on her quirky creations, Heiny is unfailingly honest and never at a loss for a witty observation, as when she describes the run-up to Christmas in the early days of Jane and Duncan’s relationship as “sort of like the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of escalating tension.” Early Morning Riser is an amiable and observant novel with perfect pitch and plenty of grace notes along the way.

Katherine Heiny’s gentle exploration of how we tiptoe and often stumble through the minefield of love is both fresh and consistently entertaining.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Blow Your House Down

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, Frangello’s raw, eloquent account of the demise of her marriage, is an exemplar of self-reflection, tinged with optimism about the power to recover one’s life from the depth of suffering.

Long before she reached her 18th wedding anniversary in 2011, Frangello was acutely aware of “the signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes.” And so she began a long-distance emotional affair with a writer and rock musician whose novel she was publishing, culminating in a full-blown relationship she concealed from her husband for nearly three years.

Like many divorces, Frangello’s mutated from the early hope of relative amicability to the ugly reality of bitter conflict, as a husband who had trouble curbing his public displays of anger even in happier times set out to inflict maximum pain for her transgression. As the warfare escalated, Frangello faced the task of caring for her aging parents and underwent seven months of treatment for breast cancer.

Amid this account of Job-like affliction, Frangello never shirks responsibility for the breakup. Still, casting her ordeal in the form of a trial, she makes a passionate case from an ardently feminist perspective for the rightness of her decision to abandon her husband for “the man who rewired my heart” and pleads that her effort to rebuild her children’s trust be “judged by the courts of distance and hindsight.”

For all her undeniable current happiness, Frangello resists the urge to affix a happy ending to her story. Instead, she offers only a “vow to continue unfolding for as long as I breathe.” Considering all the heartbreak she has endured and the uncertainty of life she knows all too well, that modest hope seems entirely fitting.

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello.
NonfictionMemoir

Plunder

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Menachem Kaiser never knew the grandfather for whom he’s named, a Polish Holocaust survivor. His curiosity about his ancestor led him on the fascinating but often frustrating journey he describes in Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure.

In 2010, Kaiser embarked on an effort he admits was “sentimental and unpragmatic”—to reclaim an apartment building owned by his family before World War II in the Polish city of Sosnowiec. Represented by a lawyer in her 80s nicknamed “the Killer,” he first needed to accomplish what should have been a simple task: proving that his grandfather and other relatives with ties to the building, all of whom either died in the Holocaust or were born well over 100 years ago, are dead.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Menachem Kaiser shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his astonishing memoir, Plunder.

But as Kaiser enters the maze of the Polish legal system, his story takes an unexpected turn. He discovers that his grandfather’s cousin, fellow Holocaust survivor Abraham Kajzer, was the author of a well-known memoir of his experiences in the Gross-Rosen network of concentration camps in Poland’s Silesia region. Those camps provided the forced labor for the Nazis’ Project Riese, a complex of underground sites that purportedly housed the legendary gold train, repository of a trove of looted gold and other treasure.

As Kaiser uses Kajzer’s book to explore the story of his newly found relative, he journeys deep into the shadowy realm of Nazi treasure hunters. Some of these enthusiasts are simple loot seekers, while others resemble Civil War reenactors. In this netherworld, conspiracy theories about German antigravity technology and flying saucers are common fare, a “particularly noxious form of revisionism” that trivializes the slaughter of 6 million Jews to serve a more compelling narrative, “usually one with a technological or occult arc.” 

Kaiser is a sober, responsible narrator, concerned with the moral implications of his quest and the persistent challenges of separating fact from fiction. Though it only illuminates a small portion of the enormity that was the Nazi genocide, Plunder is an account that’s undeniably worthy of its subject.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

As Menachem Kaiser searches for the story of his Polish Holocaust survivor relatives, he wanders deep into the shadowy realm of Nazi treasure hunters.
FictionLiterary Fiction

How Beautiful We Were

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In 2017, Imbolo Mbue won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Behold the Dreamers, but it’s taken 17 years for the novel she began before that one, How Beautiful We Were, to reach publication. Readers who enjoyed Behold the Dreamers will be pleased that Mbue persisted to tell this powerful story of the fateful clash between an American oil company and the tiny African village forced to live with the consequences of its environmental destruction.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: The cast audiobook of How Beautiful We Were is exquisite. Read our starred review.

Set in an unnamed country that Mbue says bears some resemblance to her native Cameroon, the novel chronicles more than four decades in Kosawa, the only one of eight “sibling villages” that must live with the “curse that came from living on land beneath which oil sat.” As the deaths of their children mount and the damage to their agriculture becomes more catastrophic, the villagers’ frustration turns to desperation. They kidnap several oil company representatives, which initiates a series of events that brings both disaster and hope to the community.

Mbue narrates her story through the voices of five members of Kosawa’s Nangi family—Thula, a young woman who evolves into an activist; her mother, Sahel; grandmother Yaya; uncle Bongo; and brother Juba—along with a collective of Thula’s contemporaries she calls the Children. While there are clear villains and heroes, the political and ethical questions faced by Mbue’s characters are never presented in black-and-white terms, even when Mbue describes Kosawa’s response to the oil company’s intransigence. Mbue devotes considerable attention to issues like patriarchy and the beauty and role of myth and magic in the lives of Kosawa’s villagers, deepening and contextualizing the novel’s tragic elements.

How Beautiful We Were proceeds at a deliberate pace that’s appropriate for the moral gravity of the story and the fateful choices—wise and unwise, but always undeniably human—made by Mbue’s characters. To those disinclined to question the role that economic exploitation plays in supporting our modern lifestyle, reading this novel may prove an unsettling experience.

Readers who enjoyed Behold the Dreamers will be pleased that Mbue persisted to tell this powerful story of the fateful clash between an American oil company and the tiny African village forced to live with the consequences of its environmental destruction.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Chatter

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In Buddhism it’s referred to as “monkey mind”—that cascade of often critical and judgmental self-talk that runs in a ceaseless loop in our heads. In Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, experimental psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Kross provides a useful introduction to some of the intriguing research on this phenomenon and offers a toolbox full of constructive techniques for quieting our persistent inner voice or, better yet, turning it in a positive direction.

When he received an anonymous threatening letter several years ago, Kross, who directs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, first turned inward to investigate how our default biological state creates an “inescapable tension of the inner voice as both helpful superpower and destructive kryptonite.” Any attempt to silence that voice, he explains, is doomed, but through a process of trial and error, most people can find some method of transforming it from foe to friend.

Relying on a host of laboratory studies and compelling anecdotal evidence—like the story of major league pitcher Rick Ankiel, who suddenly lost the ability to control a baseball but reinvented himself as an outfielder—Kross is an amiable guide through this fascinating and complex territory. He illustrates the value of the simple act of distancing—visualizing oneself as a third-party observer or invoking mental time travel—to gain perspective on how a momentary crisis might appear to a neutral party or with the benefit of hindsight. In one experiment, something as simple as a temporary shift from negative “I-talk” to referring to oneself in the second or third person provided dramatic benefits. And in one revealing chapter, Kross explains how placebos and rituals can help tame the worst aspects of the inner voice.

“The challenge isn’t to avoid negative states altogether,” he concludes. “It’s to not let them consume you.” Anyone seeking help along that road will find Chatter a useful traveling companion.

In Chatter, experimental psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Kross offers a toolbox full of constructive techniques for quieting our persistent inner voice or, better yet, turning it in a positive direction.
NonfictionSelf-HelpAging

The New Long Life

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World, London Business School economist Andrew J. Scott and his colleague, psychologist Lynda Gratton, offer a lively, thought-provoking survey of a world in which life and work will be fundamentally altered by increasing longevity and rapidly changing technology.

Building their discussion around composite characters they call “everybodies”—like Tom, a 40-year-old truck driver from Texas who ponders the impact of autonomous vehicles on his employment, or Radhika, a single college graduate in her late 20s working as a professional freelancer in Mumbai—Scott and Gratton focus on the transition from a traditional “three-stage life” (education, work, retirement) to a multistage one that will present both individuals and institutions with new opportunities and challenges.

As they explain, relying on examples drawn principally from developed societies around the world, individuals will be living longer as the future progresses and having relatively good health for more of those added years. This will require them to become “social pioneers,” “looking forward, building insight, facing truths, and unflinchingly looking at what is and what could be” in both their personal and working lives. In concrete terms, Gratton and Scott explain how the careers of the future won’t simply involve ascending a corporate ladder with experience and seniority, or perhaps shifting to a different company within an established industry. Instead, workers will likely find themselves alternating periods of employment with time out of the workforce, with some of that hiatus used to acquire skills that will enable them to cope with evolving technologies.

Pointing to the “malleability of age” in this world of expanding longevity, Scott and Gratton are ardent critics of biases that consign workers to obsolescence based solely on chronological age. They also offer thoughtful proposals for how corporations and governments might respond to these new realities. With the world confronting an economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, it’s refreshing to encounter two original thinkers who can envision a brighter future, albeit one with its own daunting problems.

London Business School economist Andrew J. Scott and his colleague, psychologist Lynda Gratton, offer a lively, thought-provoking survey of a world in which life and work will be fundamentally altered by increasing longevity and rapidly changing technology.

FictionLiterary Fiction

What Are You Going Through

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Don’t be deceived by the brevity of Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, What Are You Going Through. Like its National Book Award-winning predecessor, The Friend, this exquisite portrait of female friendship, aging and loss packs more insight into its barely 200 pages than many serious novels twice that length.

The novel’s unnamed narrator is a writer whose middle-aged friend, dying of cancer (“fatal,” as she prefers to say instead of “terminal”), asks her to serve as a companion in the New England rental house where she plans to end her life with a “euthanasia drug”—even as she confesses that “you weren’t my first choice” for this challenging assignment. Over the course of the succeeding weeks, with a “new intimacy that made secrets and lies intolerable,” and that at various moments is touching, profound and even wryly humorous, the women bond over shared stories of their lives, old movies, music and fairy tales, in something the narrator’s ex-partner observes “does sound a little like a sitcom. Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia.”

Borrowing the opening line of Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier—“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”—Nunez confronts the reality of death without succumbing to despair. Whether she’s summarizing the improbable plot of a serial killer potboiler or recounting a conversation between the narrator and a “once beautiful woman” at the gym, she’s an economical, graceful storyteller. She also touches lightly but provocatively on subjects like climate change, the #MeToo movement and the malign influence of Fox News on one elderly woman’s psyche, then eases her story along almost before we realize it.

Sooner than she would like, the narrator faces the reality that what she’s come to think of as a “fairy tale” will end, and that, paradoxically, “the saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass. And I’ll be alone.” It’s a good bet that most readers will share that same wistful feeling when they reach the novel’s final page.

Don’t be deceived by the brevity of Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, What Are You Going Through. Like its National Book Award-winning predecessor, The Friend, this exquisite portrait of female friendship, aging and loss packs more insight into its barely 200 pages than many serious novels twice that length.

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