Michael Magras

FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Only Here, Only Now

Review by Michael Magras

Teenage years are hard enough to get through as it is. Add a fractured family life, and the terrain gets even rockier. That’s the situation facing Cora Mowat, a Scottish girl growing up in a grimy post-industrial town along the Firth of Forth, in Only Here, Only Now, Tom Newlands’ uncompromising debut novel.

The book spans four years, from 1994 to 1998. Newlands has created a memorable character in Cora, who, at the outset, is 14 and lives alone with her mother, a wheelchair user, in Muircross, “a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget.” With that description, who could blame her for having her “heart set on skipping this housing estate and vanishing,” preferably to college in Glasgow?

As Cora and her mother wait for approval on an application for a better house in Abbotscraig, a school psychologist recommends that restless Cora be “checked for anxiety, and for being hyper.” Like Newlands, Cora has ADHD, which she describes by saying, “It’s like you’re always tired but you can never rest.”  

That’s just one of the hurdles Cora has to negotiate, all of which Newlands describes with memorably earthy phrases. Her mom’s new boyfriend is “a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker” who has a missing left eyeball yet is kind to her, unlike the other “kitten stranglers” her mom has brought home. After he moves in with them, however, Cora wonders what he’s doing with CDs, alarm clocks, vacuum-packed legs of lamb and other seemingly stolen merchandise in his room.

By year’s end, a sudden tragedy upends Cora’s life and expectations. Newlands dramatizes the resulting changes in the book’s subsequent sections, first in Abbotscraig in 1996, where Cora has a relationship with a young man who’s a troublemaker, and then in Glasgow in 1998, where she is forced to confront her choices of the past four years and decide what she wants to do next. 

The book sags a bit in its middle section, but the tension and distinctive characterizations return in the novel’s final third. Only Here, Only Now may be one among many coming-of-age stories, but this winning debut is distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters and the originality of his prose.

Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now is a winning coming-of-age story distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters, among them Scottish teen Cora, her wheelchair-using mother, and her mother’s shifty but kind boyfriend.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Entitlement

Review by Michael Magras

Boy, the sacrifices some people will make to get ahead. It’s understandable to see another person’s shiny baubles and desire similar luxuries—but at what cost? This conflict of ambition provides the dramatic impetus for Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.

Brooke Orr, the novel’s 33-year-old Black protagonist, is a born-and-raised New Yorker who rides the subway every day, even knowing that there is a “lunatic at large who was jabbing unsuspecting commuters with a hypodermic.” One of the adopted children of a white lawyer who runs an organization dedicated to reproductive justice, Brooke studied art history and spent several years teaching at a charter school but left it disillusioned because the school “only cared about STEM.” Brooke wants a more elegantly ornamented life. 

Then, a glimpse of a shiny bauble: In 2014, during the comparatively halcyon days of “Obama’s placid America,” she gets a job at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, dedicated to giving away 83-year-old Asher’s billions. Asher earned his money by taking over an uncle’s office supply store and then expanding into catalogs, real estate and malls. Asher comes to see Brooke as a protégé, in part because she reminds him of his daughter, Linda, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and was killed on 9/11.

Soon, Asher is seeking Brooke’s advice on everything from gifts for his wife to candidates to favor with his riches. And Brooke discovers that she likes riding in Asher’s Bentley and wearing fancy clothes. As one character remarks, however, “Nobody gets something for nothing,” and as Brooke makes more and more uncharacteristic decisions, she learns that lesson all too well.

Entitlement isn’t as deeply felt as Alam’s previous novel, the brilliant Leave the World Behind, but anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in this excellent work.

Anyone suspicious of the luster of capitalism and its promises will find much to mull over in Entitlement, Rumaan Alam’s slyly provocative fourth novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Small Rain

Review by Michael Magras

The early 2020s have been marked by affliction, from the tragedy of COVID-19, to racism and police brutality, to a broad insensitivity toward others’ suffering. On the hopeful side, there have also been demonstrations of considerable love and support. Put that contrast into a novel, and exciting literature is the result. An excellent example is Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel.

Greenwell’s unnamed protagonist, a 40-ish gay poet, has had fraught relationships with family members, among them his estranged father, a lawyer who became rich through medical malpractice cases. But the narrator has found happiness with his partner, L, a university instructor with whom he lives in Iowa.

L and the narrator kept to themselves throughout the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That plan is forced to change when the narrator develops stomach pain so agonizing that “on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” After initial reluctance, he goes to urgent care, where he hopes to receive a quick diagnosis and return home.

To his horror, they send him to the emergency room for imaging. When a doctor tells him, “I thought I was going to send you home with some antibiotics but you are much more interesting than that,” it’s only the beginning of a long hospital stay that includes invasive tests, endless IV bags and no certain diagnosis.

As in his previous novels Cleanness and What Belongs to You, Greenwell writes in long, discursive paragraphs that digress with philosophical asides. This book is ostensibly about the narrator’s ailment, but that’s really a construct that allows Greenwell to observe both the ills and the positive aspects of modern society, from insensitive nurses who belatedly answer the narrator’s distress call with “We do have other patients,” to the myopia that patriotism and religion can produce, to welcome gifts of generosity, most notably from a young nurse who treats the narrator as a person rather than a case study. At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work.

Garth Greenwell’s moving yet unsentimental third novel, Small Rain, follows a poet’s terrifying stay in the ICU, exploring the need for empathy in a fragile world.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Someone Like Us

Review by Michael Magras

One of the many challenges of being an immigrant is how, as your perception adjusts to life in a new land, it can begin to feel like you’ve lost touch with your homeland. Dinaw Mengestu plays with this dynamic in Someone Like Us, his subtle, brilliant new novel about family secrets.

The book’s protagonist is Mamush, a novelist and journalist of Ethiopian heritage who was born and raised in the U.S. He has become well-known for writing articles about “struggling but ultimately tenacious immigrants in America” and other weighty topics such as border conflicts, refugee crises and a militia leader in eastern Congo. He now lives north of Paris with his photographer wife (the book includes some of her photographs) and their 2-year-old son.

Mamush returns to the U.S. for the first time in years when he receives word from his mother, now living in a northern Virginia community “popular with retired middle-class immigrants like her,” that Samuel, a man Mamush knew as a close family friend, has died. He learns that Samuel may, or may not, have been his father.

That’s only the start of the mysteries Mengestu explores. Always the journalist, Mamush travels to Chicago to investigate Samuel’s past, including time spent in jail and a scheme for “building a cab company for people trapped in the wrong place.” And Mengestu adds an additional, beguiling wrinkle: While Mamush conducts his inquiries, he has imagined conversations with the deceased Samuel, a fabulist touch that allows for philosophical discussions on the desire to belong and the power of storytelling.

That’s the great achievement of this book. Aside from being a wonderful read, it’s a tribute to the majesty of storytelling and its ability to help one make sense of the world. A decade has passed since Mengestu’s last novel, the equally exceptional All Our Names. Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.

A decade after Dinaw Mengestu’s equally exceptional All Our Names, Someone Like Us is the welcome return of a vitally important voice in modern American literature.
FictionLiterary Fiction

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer

Review by Michael Magras

Emergency rooms often resemble war zones, with patients who have ghastly injuries and medical personnel needing to make quick decisions. Joseph should know: An employee at an understaffed trauma center in Philadelphia—or, as he calls it, a “northeastern middling city”—he’s also an Iraq War veteran. And he has a complicated family life with its own set of distresses, including a series of ex-lovers and a mother who once asked him to kill her boyfriend. The memoirist Joseph Earl Thomas (Sink) integrates all of these elements in his dazzling debut novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.

Yes, that Otis Spunkmeyer, the purveyor of cookies and muffins. Pastries play a supporting role in this work, both as junk food Joseph and fellow soldiers enjoyed in Iraq, “the only good thing we got for free besides tinnitus,” and as snacks proffered to emergency room patients. The treats provide comfort of a sort to ease the pain of the challenges Joseph, his patients, his family and his colleagues have to face.

Joseph shares custody of his children with an ex-spouse but has to pay child support. His father, who abandoned his family long ago, is so unfamiliar to Joseph that he and his mother have to look up his father’s mugshot online to recall what he looks like. And there’s Joseph’s mother, who was addicted to cocaine when he was young and who is often incarcerated, “most prominently for drug possession, prostitution, and then assault.”

Thomas expertly employs a stream-of-consciousness style, rapidly toggling between encounters with family, the patients who come through the ER, and Joseph’s coworkers, among them Ray, who wants to be an artist and served beside Joseph overseas. The style seamlessly shifts as well, blending dialogue and slang into formal, literary prose. Graphic material—detailed depictions of injuries and of sex—is handled beautifully and feels true to the characters.

The result is a kaleidoscopic tour through Joseph’s eventful life. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is an intricate and brave debut that readers will savor.

God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a kaleidoscopic tour through the eventful life of an ER worker, father and Iraq War veteran by memoirist Joseph Earl Thomas (Sink).
FictionLiterary Fiction

Godwin

Review by Michael Magras

Soccer, like life, may be a beautiful game, but as in life, part of the beauty relies upon a key ingredient: cooperation. Introduce disharmony and the luster is tarnished. Readers will find plenty of corrosion in Godwin, Joseph O’Neill’s intellectually challenging new novel centered, at least ostensibly, around the world of football.

Godwin shifts between two narrators. The first is Lakesha Williams, one of the co-founders of the Group, a Pittsburgh cooperative for science and medical writers who want to be self-employed without the insecurity of freelancing. She’s dealing with an HR issue regarding writer Mark Wolfe, who got into a scuffle with a security guard and gave too-honest feedback to a client who didn’t receive a grant. Mark is a misanthrope who fantasizes about a future “when our kind no longer roams Earth and we shall at last have some peace.”

Mark is also our other narrator. In his private life, he lives with his wife, Sushila, and has a half brother named Geoff, a slippery character and aspiring sports agent who lives overseas. Geoff contacts Mark with an unusual request: He wants Mark to come to England and help him find Godwin, a “special prospect” from somewhere in Africa whom Geoff wants to sign.

These two seemingly disparate stories converge in satisfying ways and include characters who may at first seem secondary but take on greater significance, among them a French scout who may know where Godwin is; Mark’s mother, who he feels robbed him of an inheritance; and a Group member who ingratiates herself into a position to affect the collective’s operations.

Netherland, O’Neill’s brilliant 2008 book, was not just a story about a Dutch expat protagonist’s incipient passion for cricket but, more than that, a commentary on postcolonialism. Similarly, while the search for a soccer player is the engine of Godwin’s plot, the book is really about power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it. O’Neill’s excellent novel builds to a cynical ending that may not comfort, but it’s an undeniably appropriate finish to a story of what can happen when idealism snags on the lure of capitalism.

The search for a soccer player is the engine of the plot, but what Godwin is really about is power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Blue Ruin

Review by Michael Magras

A well-stocked bookstore would have no trouble filling an entire section with novels about art and artists, from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. Even connoisseurs of art-themed fiction, however, are unlikely to have encountered a protagonist like Jay Gates, the down-on-his-luck artist at the center of Hari Kunzru’s brilliant new novel, Blue Ruin. For anyone who has tried their hand at creating art, Blue Ruin offers satisfying criticisms of the capricious industry’s spotty record of anointing winners and losers.

Jay is a British man of Jamaican ancestry in his 40s, who was once a promising art student. At the start of the novel, he’s a COVID-19 survivor and undocumented immigrant in upstate New York, sleeping in his beat-up car and eking out a living by delivering groceries.

On one delivery to a craftsman cottage overlooking a lake at the end of a mile-long driveway, the masked person awaiting his arrival turns out to be Alice, a woman who was briefly Jay’s girlfriend in art school. Alice left Jay for his best friend, Rob, and Alice and Rob have now been married for 15 years. After Jay collapses from fatigue, Alice invites him to stay in a barn on the property until he recovers. Also isolating there are Marshal, Rob’s gallerist, who espouses conspiracy theories and calls COVID-19 “a Chinese bioweapon”; and Nicole, Marshal’s 20-something “trophy girlfriend.”

Coincidence is a dangerous narrative tool to mess around with, but Kunzru pulls it off in Blue Ruin thanks to the subtle characterizations and intricate layers with which he expands his premise. Buried resentments and jettisoned ambitions come to the fore as Kunzru explores themes of racism, opportunism and the inequities of privilege and hardship. The result is an exceptional work that finds new variations on the familiar chestnut that people aren’t always what they seem.

For anyone who has tried their hand at creating art, Hari Kunzru’s brilliant new novel, Blue Ruin, offers satisfying criticisms of the capricious industry’s spotty record of anointing winners and losers.
FictionPoetry

A Year of Last Things

Review by Michael Magras

Forgiveness, memory, loss and the vicissitudes of love are among the recurring themes of A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje’s exceptional new collection of poetry. More than a decade has passed since Ondaatje, who shared the 1992 Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, published a book of poems. The return is welcome, as he demonstrates yet again that he is a master of the genre.

Most of the poems that appear here are in free verse, with a few others written wholly or in part as prose poems. Each piece displays not only Ondaatje’s gift for the lyrical phrase but also his peripatetic nature, as the collection travels across various countries, most notably Italy, England and his native Sri Lanka. The book is divided into several sections, with the first centering on forgiveness and memory. It’s difficult to single out highlights when every poem is so accomplished, but particularly moving is “5 A.M.,” a tender piece on the restorative beauty of memories and the way they return unexpectedly, “like a gift / from forgetfulness, / as a desire can wake you.”

Later sections include ruminations on unfulfilled lives, such as “The Then,” in which Ondaatje writes of being struck by the urge “to erase this life, and desire what I might have known / in photographs of you before we met.” There is also a group of erudite love poems, including the witty “Leg Glance,” in which he employs a cricket metaphor referring to “not bothering to move / from the path of the dangerous ball,” to parallel one’s behavior in the midst of a love affair.

Set in museums and piazzas across several continents, with references to painters, novelists, playwrights, jazz musicians and even W.G. Sebald’s technique of incorporating photographs into the text, A Year of Last Things brilliantly explores its themes.

 

Set in museums and piazzas across several continents, Michael Ondaatje’s poetry collection A Year of Last Things brilliantly explores its themes, reminding us that he is a master of the genre.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The Morningside

Review by Michael Magras

Téa Obreht’s satisfyingly unsettling new novel, The Morningside, takes place in the near future, in an East Coast city that resembles New York. Eleven-year-old Silvia and her mother have traveled to Island City after their home was destroyed by flooding. They move into a 100-year-old building called the Morningside, that, like Island City, has seen better days. Silvia and other refuge-seekers have been brought in by the federal Repopulation Program to help revitalize the place.

The building superintendent is Silvia’s Aunt Ena, a woman who is “short, loud, and incredibly ill-practiced at speaking to eleven-year-old nieces.” A marvelous character, Ena has an unfortunate tendency to share details about the farm the family once lived on, details that Silvia’s mother would prefer to keep secret. She also fills Silvia in on Bezi Duras, the mysterious resident of the 33rd floor penthouse. Silvia begins to suspect that Bezi is not just an eccentric painter with an elaborate orchard but also a Vila, a vindictive mountain spirit. Her suspicions grow when light bulbs spontaneously burst and water pipes begin “spurting sulfurously” after a curious Silvia tries to break into Bezi’s apartment.

That’s just the start of the strange dealings. With finely calibrated assurance, Obreht develops a sense of unease that is compounded by an underground radio transmission known as the Drowned City Dispatch, large animals rumored to be “men during the day and dogs at night,” a friend who lures Silvia into nighttime escapades, and the possibility that a killer may be in their midst.

The ending is too neat, but The Morningside soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own. Whether or not they ever face forcible displacement in their life, everyone at some point must confront their past. Obreht addresses this truism with startling freshness in this entertaining work.

Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Wandering Stars

Review by Michael Magras

“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest. Tommy Orange demonstrates the veracity of that line in Wandering Stars, his follow-up to There There, the 2018 debut novel for which he was a Pulitzer finalist. Few literary debuts are as chillingly of-the-moment as There There, which spanned a huge cast of Native American characters and culminated in a tragedy at an Oakland powwow. Orange further explores the lives of some of those characters in this assured continuation.

Orange pulls off a neat sleight of hand in Wandering Stars: He limits the scope by focusing on only a few characters, yet he also expands his narrative by rewinding to the 19th and early 20th centuries to tell the story of ancestors of the Red Feather family.

The book begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when the U.S. Army attacked Cheyenne and Arapaho people in present-day Colorado. As Orange puts it, “seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons,” and killed hundreds of Native Americans—a prolongation of “America’s longest war.”

One of the survivors was Jude Star, a mute man sent by train as a prisoner of war to a fortress in St. Augustine, Florida. The man the army chose to run the prison was Richard Henry Pratt. Years later, Pratt founded the Carlisle School, to which Native American parents were forced to send their children to be “taught that everything about being Indian was wrong.” Jude’s son, Charles Star, is enrolled there. By the early 1900s, Charles develops an addiction to laudanum and tries to interview an aging Pratt to learn about his father.

The novel then shifts to 2018, when Orvil Red Feather, a survivor of the tragedy in There There, is trying to overcome his injuries and emotional trauma. Like Charles, he turns to drugs, in his case with the help of his friend Sean, whose father sets up a basement lab and starts his own pharmacopeia. He also tries to piece together the story of his Cheyenne family history, although Opal, the great-aunt with whom he and his younger brothers live, isn’t forthcoming about their heritage.

The style of the first part of the book is different from the second, more modern half. If the result feels like two separate books, there’s still much to recommend Wandering Stars, from Orange’s sensitive depiction of Orvil’s path to recovery to the chronicling of important, overlooked moments in the brutal history of America’s treatment of its Indigenous people. As Opal laments, Native Americans have been “consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions.” Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of that marginalization.

Read Tommy Orange’s essay on the writing of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars sensitively depicts Orvil Red Feather’s path to recovery after the tragedy in There, There, as well as chronicling important, overlooked moments in the history of America’s brutal treatment of its Indigenous people.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Acts of Forgiveness

Review by Michael Magras

The concept of reparations has been a component of conflict resolutions since the days of ancient Carthage. In America today, the issue most often comes up in reference to offering restitution to Black citizens for the ills of slavery. That topic, and the backlash from those against monetary redress, is the animating force in Acts of Forgiveness, Maura Cheeks’ debut novel.

When Senator Elizabeth Johnson ran for president, a pillar of her campaign was her championing of the Forgiveness Act, which would provide $175,000 to every Black citizen over 18 who could prove they had an enslaved ancestor. Now, as America’s first female president, she announces her intention to carry out that promise. This is hopeful news for Black Philadelphia native Willie Revel, the 33-year-old single mother of a gifted daughter. Willie once dreamed of becoming a journalist. But after her father, who owns a construction company, had a heart attack, Willie abandoned her dreams and returned to Philly to take over the business.

Cheeks does a nice job of dramatizing Willie’s conflict and is equally adept at demonstrating not only the need for financial restitution but also its specific importance to Willie’s family. Willie could use the money for the family business, which struggles to stay afloat. One lifeline her father insists upon is a contract with Soteria, a company that hired their firm to build a recycling complex. Willie is revolted by working with Soteria because the owner, like a lot of conservatives, vehemently opposes the Forgiveness Act.

That’s just one of many issues Willie contends with as she researches her family history to prove their eligibility for reparations. Others include her lack of career fulfillment and her daughter’s difficulties at school and attempts to write a play—an ambition that resembles the one Willie had to give up.

Cheeks doesn’t fully demonstrate the skill of distinguishing necessary information from superfluous detail, but Acts of Forgiveness movingly highlights a litany of injustices, from casual racism to the pressure on women to sacrifice their ambitions. Willie’s mother tells her that “sometimes you have to go where you’re not wanted in order to change people’s minds.” This novel highlights the soundness of that advice, as well as the perils of being brave enough to follow it.

Maura Cheeks’ debut novel follows the impact of a reparations bill on Black Philly native Willie Revel, as she struggles to keep her family’s construction business afloat.
FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Bird Life

Review by Michael Magras

Grief is a devastating stimulus. The manifestations of mental anguish form the subject of Bird Life, Anna Smaill’s elliptical, poetic follow-up to her Booker Prize-longlisted 2015 debut The Chimes.

The story centers on two very different women, Dinah and Yasuko. Dinah, a New Zealander, is in Tokyo on a work visa to teach English to engineering and science undergraduates. She’s mourning her twin brother, Michael, a promising classical pianist who died under circumstances Smaill leaves vague until late in the book. Shortly after her arrival, Dinah begins seeing Michael everywhere, first in reflections of darkened car windows, then in the apartment she lives in.

Yasuko, an older woman with a college-aged son, Jun, is one of Dinah’s colleagues at the university. Yasuko “came into her powers” at 13 when a cat spoke to her. Soon, trees spoke to her, too, and she could even hear people’s thoughts. Over the years, her abilities abandoned her, but they return when Jun moves out—“I need some space,” he explains in a message—and she hopes to use them to bring him back.

Much of the novel focuses on the friendship that develops between Dinah and Yasuko as they help one another deal with their respective traumas. Particularly memorable are scenes in which Yasuko reconnects with her powers, such as when carp break the surface of a pond and quote the I Ching to her, or when birds land in Yasuko’s cupped hands to offer helpful advice.

Some scenes contain extraneous dialogue and go on too long, but Bird Life is nevertheless an evocative and sensitive depiction of mental distress and the importance of perseverance. Yasuko’s father, a crystallographer, keeps a photo of the first X-ray image of DNA on his pin board because it reminds him “that there is more in the world than I can easily understand” and “that I always need to keep looking.” That’s the key message of this subtle book: Though it might be difficult to detect them during times of hardship, glimmers of hope are always visible if one knows where to look.

Bird Life is an evocative and sensitive depiction of mental distress that argues that, though it might be difficult to detect them during times of hardship, glimmers of hope are always visible if one knows where to look.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Tremor

Review by Michael Magras

Most people eventually think about the concept of permanence—how one could live on after inevitable death. Some are drawn to photography for what has been, at least until recently, incontrovertible proof of what once existed. But attempts to secure a permanent place in history are often complicated by changes in technology, the prejudices of others, or, in the case of art, the purloining of treasured works. Conflicts like these animate Teju Cole’s dazzling novel of ideas Tremor, his first novel since 2011’s Open City.

Fans of Cole’s work know he is a photographer as well as a writer. His moving, introspective 2017 book of images, Blind Spot, features photos from his worldwide travels. Cole draws from those experiences in Tremor, in which Tunde, the protagonist who, like Cole, is a Harvard professor raised in Nigeria, perpetually examines the tensions of life as a Black man in a white-dominated country where he is never seen as belonging anywhere.

Tremor is split into eight exploratory chapters in which Cole addresses injustices both personal and global. During a talk Tunde gives at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which forms the fifth chapter of the book, he describes the circumstances under which many of their paintings and plaques came into their possession, from the Nazis’ cultural genocide to Britain’s 18-day massacre in Benin in 1897 that led to the expropriation of 4,000 artworks. He ends with “a plea to take restitution seriously, a plea to reimagine the future of the museum.”

In a brilliant extended sequence in the sixth chapter, Cole includes the first-person perspectives of numerous people Tunde interviews during a trip to Nigeria to depict the complexities and struggles of life in that country. Other sections address colonialism and the reluctance of many in the United States to “change their essential faith in American superiority.” Hanging over these discussions is the specter of impending death. A Harvard colleague is diagnosed with colon cancer, and Tunde fears, even in his 40s, signs of his own inevitable decline.

A lesser writer would have turned this into a depressing jeremiad, but Cole makes it a thrilling and important work. During Tunde’s Nigeria visit, one interviewee says, “We have to know how to forget the past in order to make progress into the future.” As Tunde does in his talk, Tremor issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.

In this dazzling novel of ideas, Teju Cole addresses injustices both personal and global, and issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.

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