Some of the most fascinating novels explore the tensions between traditional ways of life and the lure of more modern ways of being. This is what roils the plot in Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things. For at least two of its main characters, teenager Ẹniọlá and fledgling doctor Wuraọlá, the tension is all but intolerable.
The story begins in a southwestern state in present-day Nigeria, nearly a year before an election that will usher a corrupt (or even criminal) politician into the governorship. Schools are lousy; students, including Ẹniọlá and his sister, are flogged if their parents don’t pay their school fees. Hospitals are even worse; more than one patient dies in the hospital where Wuraọlá works because of a lack of simple antivirals. There is no safety net, and inequality is atrocious. Ẹniọlá, his mother and sister must beg in the street. The children’s father, fired from his job, is in such a state of despair that he won’t get out of bed. On the other hand, Wuraọlá’s family is well-off enough to pay for her education and throw a lavish party to celebrate her mother’s birthday.
Yet both impoverished Ẹniọlá and financially comfortable Wuraọlá feel hogtied by the traditions of the somewhat matriarchal society in which they were raised. Deference to elders and those in authority is so absolute that Ẹniọlá’s parents don’t even consider going to the school and insisting that the teachers stop beating their kids. Wuraọlá’s profession as a doctor isn’t what warms the cockles of her family’s hearts the most; it’s that she’s getting married before she’s 30.
Ẹniọlá and Wuraọlá are destined to meet, and they do so in the most innocent and pedestrian of ways. But after that first encounter, the events that follow reveal the profound irony of the novel’s title.
Adébáyọ̀ (Stay With Me) has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells. She captures the almost musical speech patterns of her characters and doesn’t trouble to translate snatches of Nigeria’s many languages. The novel’s cast is large, but each character is distinct; you won’t confuse Ẹniọlá’s mother with Wuraọlá’s, even though they’re quite alike. Both suffer, and so do their families.
A Spell of Good Things is a wonderfully written, tragic book.
Ayobami Adebayo has a sprightly writing style that’s pleasurably at odds with the devastating story she tells in A Spell of Good Things.
As Jennifer Savran Kelly’s debut novel, Endpapers, opens, main character Dawn Levit has stalled. She’s in her mid-20s, dissatisfied with her art (she designs, prints and binds handmade books) and unable to make anything new. She’s also feeling stuck in her relationship with Lukas, whom Dawn is pretty sure would love her more if she were a man. Dawn has been exploring her own gender and sexual identities since high school, taking tentative steps to find her way, but she’s still doubting her instincts and herself. Lately, she and Lukas have found comfort in “slipping back into the closet,” where neither has to worry about feeling accepted. But neither of them is content, either.
While at work in the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dawn finds a torn-off paperback cover bearing the title Turn Her About, which depicts a woman looking into a mirror and seeing a man’s face. On the back is a letter handwritten in German; the correspondents’ names (Gertrude and Marta) and Ich liebe dich (“I love you”) are the only words Dawn can understand. But this letter, apparently from the 1940s or ’50s, sends Dawn on a quest to learn more about the pulp novel, and about Gertrude and Marta.
Following Dawn through the spring of 2003, Endpapers depicts a New York City still shrouded in post-9/11 gloom, evoking an uneasy mood and underlining Dawn’s sense that even in early 21st-century New York, being different isn’t safe. Out at a bar one night, Dawn, Lukas and their friend Jae are harassed by two men, which leads to a hate crime that Dawn feels she incited.
Dawn’s introspection is at times painful; she’s young, self-absorbed and prone to missteps with her friends and co-workers. But as the story progresses, the mystery of Gertrude and Marta converges beautifully with the artwork that Dawn begins to conceive. Kelly is a bookbinder and book production editor, and the novel’s details of book and print restoration ground and add depth to Dawn’s story.
Endpapers is a coming-of-age story about growing as an artist and learning to trust and build relationships in a world that doesn’t want to make room for you. Despite its early 2000s setting, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.
Though set in the early 2000s, Endpapers still feels timely, leading us to reflect on how far we’ve come in accepting differences and how far we still have to go.
Nazlı Koca’s debut novel, The Applicant, is a gut-wrenching story that will make you laugh but also question why and whether you should be laughing at all.
Immigrant and refugee experiences can be surreal and nightmarish, but for those lucky enough to reach their destinations, life can be filled with a sudden Kafkaesque dark humor. Such is the case for Koca’s protagonist, Leyla, a Turkish immigrant in Berlin. After failing out of university, Leyla tries to sue her way back into a student visa, while in the meantime working at an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-themed hotel.
As Leyla navigates Berlin’s nightlife, trying to find some sort of solace, she meets a right-wing Swedish tourist, and suddenly she has an in: She can stay in Germany if she accepts a traditional, conservative life, although it would mean giving up her career in art. Initially this bargain seems better than returning to Turkey to live with her mother and sister, but eventually Leyla begins to question what she is really searching for.
Written in diary form, The Applicant is bound to draw many comparisons to other works (I found it to be like an inversion of the German film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), but the most obvious is to Sylvia Plath’s poem by the same name. Both pieces play with the idea of conformity, and while Plath focuses on the commercialization of femininity, Koca takes a more racialized approach. Leyla experiences subtle racism from almost every character, and through these interactions, we witness the convergence of different ideologies of racial supremacy due to immigration, and how, with the presence of her Swedish lover, white supremacy holds punitive power over all of them. Through the diary format, we get an inside look at Leyla’s forced conformity in what is perhaps a response to the surreal, dehumanizing laundry list Plath wrote decades ago.
Despite these similarities, The Applicant is a truly unique book, particularly in its profound global scope. Leyla meets characters from all over the world who have come to Europe seeking a better life. Her romantic ideals of Berlin shatter early on, and she is left jaded and addicted to drugs, falling into the exact stereotype she idealized artistically. This underscores Koca’s greatest strength: her ability to find the tragedy, irony and humor in the immigrant experience, showing us how global power has warped our ability to find happiness and to even know what happiness is.
This is a powerful book that pinpoints exactly where our contradictions lie. It is so powerful, in fact, that it can do all this while still making you laugh.
Immigrant and refugee experiences can be surreal and nightmarish, but for those lucky enough to reach their destination, life can be filled with a sudden Kafkaesque dark humor. Such is the case for Nazlı Koca’s protagonist, Leyla.
Essayist, novelist and Seattle University professor Sonora Jha follows up her acclaimed memoir, How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021), with her second novel, The Laughter, a masterfully told, thrilling investigation of privilege, heritage and exoticisation set against the backdrop of the American college campus.
The novel centers on Dr. Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male professor at a liberal arts university in Seattle. Oliver is an accomplished academic, best known for his research into the early 20th-century English writer G.K. Chesterton. Oliver’s personal life, however, is solitary and unfulfilling. His strained relationship with his daughter is his only meaningful one.
Oliver becomes fixated on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim professor in the university’s law school and a political firestarter on campus. Ruhaba has recently taken in Adil Alam, her teenage nephew from France who is seeking to distance himself from some trouble back home. Oliver begins mentoring Adil in an effort to impress Ruhaba, through privately Oliver exhibits contempt for and mistrust of their Muslim heritage.
In addition to their personal entanglement, Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves on opposite sides of a political upheaval on campus, where an energized and diverse collective of students is attempting to seize power from privileged white faculty members who fear their own irrelevancy. These personal and political matters lead to a heartbreaking conclusion, one which readers have been warned is coming but is made no less shocking by its inevitability.
Deeply complex and meaningful yet still an enthralling read, The Laughter is an ambitious novel that explores American social dynamics while never being preachy or overbearing. Jha’s characters represent vastly disparate political ideas, but she handles each of them with great precision and care. With this novel, she offers us a creative window into the sociopolitical dynamics that continue to reinforce cultural divisions in this country. It’s a must-read for those seeking to understand today and dream of a better tomorrow.
Sonora Jha’s characters represent vastly disparate political ideas, but she handles each of them with great precision and care. With this novel, she offers us a creative window into the sociopolitical dynamics that continue to reinforce cultural divisions in this country.
“A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself.”
And with this set of lines, author Geetanjali Shree drops us into the deep waters of her expansive stream-of-consciousness novel, Tomb of Sand. With echoes of James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Leo Tolstoy, it seems almost inevitable that this novel was destined to garner the lit-crit clique’s affection, and indeed it has already racked up the prestigious International Booker Prize, the first novel written in any Indian language to do so.
This is a novel that rewards patience and leisurely reading; after all, its main protagonist, 80-year-old Ma, doesn’t even get out of bed for the first quarter of the book. When she does get up, she goes on walkabout, leaving her son Bade’s home. Ultimately, after 13 hours—or days or weeks, according to the shape-shifting narrator—Ma decides to live with her journalist daughter, Beti, instead. Free from the overbearing nature of Bade’s oversight, Ma decides to undertake a trip to her native Pakistan (which, when she was born, was part of India).
At its heart, Tomb of Sand is a tale of borders—of politics, gender, religion, behavior and relationships—and one woman’s resolute unwillingness to accept them as a restriction. After Ma delivers a long soliloquy on the nature of borders to a Pakistani official, she concludes with some simple advice that is at once timely and transcendent: “Do not accept the border. Do not break yourself into bits with the border. There’s only us. If we don’t accept, this boundary won’t stay.”
Special notice should be given here to Shree’s American translator, Daisy Rockwell. While some critics have found her adherence to the original Hindi excessive—a point of view I am not capable of evaluating, since I don’t speak Hindi—she has an excellent ear for capturing the rhythm of Indian speech, as rendered here in Ma’s internal and external dialogue about getting up:
No, now I won’t get up: who was playing with the fear and death of that phrase? These mechanical words became magical, and Ma kept repeating them, but they were becoming something else, or already had.
An expression of true desire or the result of aimless play?
No, no, I won’t get up. Noooooo, I won’t rise nowwww. Nooo rising nyooww. Nyooo riiise nyoooo. Now rise new. Now, I’ll rise anew.
Tomb of Sand is not a simple, linear book. It requires attention, and unless you’re fluent in Hindi, you can expect to be Googling some passages. But if you can strap yourself in, you’ll find yourself taken for an enchanting ride.
Tomb of Sand is a tale of borders—of politics, gender, religion, behavior and relationships—and one woman’s resolute unwillingness to accept them as a restriction.
In Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez, the titular character, who’s a successful wedding planner, and her brother, Prieto, who’s a congressman, are both prominent members of their Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, New York. The two were brought up by their grandmother after their mother, Blanca, deserted them to become a political activist. Their lives are turned upside down when Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico and an unexpected family reunion ensues. Gonzalez enriches this funny, stirring story with themes of loyalty, honesty and forgiveness, and reading groups will find plenty to talk about in her provocative novel.
Kimberly Duffy’s remarkable mother-daughter tale, The Weight of Air, is set in the intriguing world of turn-of-the-century circus performers. It’s 1911, and Mabel MacGinnis, known as Europe’s strongest woman, is a member of the Manzo Brothers Circus. After the death of her father, Mabel decides to find her mother, an aerialist named Isabella Moreau. When the two finally meet, Isabella must come to terms with herself, even as she and Mabel adjust to their roles as mother and daughter. Past and present collide in Duffy’s fascinating chronicle of circus life.
In Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa, Anna, a middle-aged woman living in London, decides to find her father, whom she has never met. Anna comes across his diaries among the possessions of her late mother and learns that he pursued politics, becoming president of a tiny West African country. After discovering that he is still alive, Anna sets out to find him in what turns about to be the quest of a lifetime. Filled with humor and compassion, Onuzo’s novel is a rich exploration of race, identity and the nature of family.
Set in Quebec, Joanna Goodman’s The Home for Unwanted Girls is a moving portrayal of family dynamics in the 1950s. When English-speaking Maggie Hughes falls for a French-speaking boy and becomes pregnant, her parents insist that she give up the child: a girl named Elodie. Although she comes of age in a miserable orphanage, Elodie’s spirit and intelligence blossom. Maggie eventually marries, and when she decides to locate Elodie, her life is changed forever. Discussion topics such as motherhood and the meaning of home make Goodman’s novel a great choice for book clubs.
These unforgettable novels explore the drama and devotion bound up with family ties.
“It’s important for me to transgress. It’s important for me to be subversive,” says novelist, essayist and professor Sonora Jha (How to Raise a Feminist Son) during a video call to her home in Seattle, Washington. “For those of us on the margins, I think having our agency and transgressing like crazy will better everything.”
The Laughter is subversive in its approach, form and content. As an authentic and nuanced character study, it demands that readers grapple with issues of race, sexuality, power, tradition and academia. It carefully and systematically explores how conflicts over privilege and control are enacted on our minds and bodies.
The story centers on Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male English professor at a liberal arts college in Seattle. Oliver is a decorated academic whose personal and professional identity is wrapped up in the focus of his research, the early 20th-century British writer G.K. Chesterton. Divorced from his wife, his relationship with his daughter strained, Oliver turns his focus on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim law professor at the university. Ruhaba is dealing with the reality of being a woman of color on a predominately white campus while building a relationship with Adil Alam, her nephew who recently emigrated from France after getting into some trouble.
Both Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves caught up in social upheaval on campus, as a multicultural student movement demanding progressive transformations draws ire of aging white faculty. This mixture of personal and political turmoil makes for a contemplative yet thrilling and ultimately devastating read.
While certainly a work of fiction, The Laughter pulls from Jha’s journalistic background, her experiences as a faculty member at Seattle University and her life as an American immigrant. (She grew up in Mumbai, India.) The seeds of the book were planted in 2016, after Jha learned that French towns were beginning to ban burkinis, swimwear that covers both the head and body to align with Muslim values. The bans appeared after a terrorist attack in Nice and reflected forced Muslim assimilation into French secular culture. This attempt to regulate Muslim identity prompted her to consider the visceral impact of both anti-Muslim conditioning and cultural marginalization in general, both central themes in The Laughter. “I definitely wanted to build a story around them. And I kept visualizing this image of this boy watching his mother being asked to take off her hijab,” she says.
Jha explains that Oliver is the type of man who obsessively fights for control, both in his personal life and in society at large. He’s seemingly at odds with himself, and due to his own personal failings, he lives a lonely life. Despite this, he exhibits an intense sense of entitlement and a need for authority over both Ruhaba and the on-campus protests.
Men like Oliver, says Jha, “are all around us. They’re in academia. They’re our friends. I have felt that sense of control [from them], especially the moments in which they feel like they are losing that control or handing it over to someone else. This happens even if they were encouraging you all along. I’ve had experiences where mentors of mine, when I finally came into my power, were like, ‘Wait, you’re supposed to be grateful. You’re supposed to take up just enough space as I give to you.’ . . . It’s almost like they will mentor you and give you just enough, but they want to still be in charge.”
“It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.”
A reader could wonder how Jha, a woman of Indian descent, was able to provide such a richly authentic first-person portrayal of a privileged middle-aged white man. She notes that she first attempted to write the novel in third person, but almost in an instinctive way, the first-person voice began to take over her writing. She believes that it emerged, forcefully, out of a lifetime of engaging with Western literature.
“This white male voice is so dominant in my imagination because this is who we read when I was growing up in India,” she says. “It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.” To further capture the voice, she immersed herself in the white male literary canon. “As the rest of the world was starting to read more women of color, I was reading the likes of John Updike and Saul Bellow,” she quips.
From Oliver’s perspective, we witness his insidious exoticization, shown most prominently through his sexual attraction to Ruhaba and his suspicions of Adil. Oliver fixes his sexual gaze on the parts of Ruhaba’s appearance that are nonwhite; he has both a figurative and literal fetish for her Indian-ness. At the same time, he responds to her nonphysical differences with confusion and disgust. Similarly, Oliver perceives Adil’s identity as a dangerous “otherness” that needs to be surveilled, tested and controlled.
Jha explains that this two-faced response is a common conflict that immigrants face in their interpersonal relationships. “You have to be exotic enough for me to fetishize you, but not so much that it’s a whole other thing that I have to deal with,” she says. “I will provide for you, and I will protect you from your own kind who are not good for you, but to be in my protection, you have to be a little bit more like me.”
“That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community.”
Despite Oliver’s control over the narrative, Ruhaba emerges as a deeply complicated character full of internal conflicts. As a Muslim immigrant woman, she exhibits a seemingly naive hope about the possibilities of American life that’s at odds with the fetishizing, distrust and exclusion that is enacted upon her. She also wears a hijab despite her complicated feelings about her Muslim heritage.
Author Sonora Jha
“For immigrant women, I think there’s the excitement of coming to a place that promises all kinds of freedoms, but there’s also the pressure to conform to a certain sort of cultural performance, because we need community,” Jha says. “That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community. We crave belonging and community, but we don’t want it to be prescribed for us. So Ruhaba’s relationship with the hijab is a way to control her own appearance and her own relationships with people, on campus or otherwise.”
Adil is also a beautifully crafted character who exhibits a level of complexity that we rarely see in depictions of young men of color. A teenage boy who is as sensitive as he is intelligent, Adil is willing to be open about his hopes and his fears. At the same time, his urge to protect is what upends his life on multiple occasions. In the spirit of How to Raise a Feminist Son, Jha uses Adil’s character to explore and challenge constructions of masculinity. “When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?” Jha asks. “I wanted Adil to have that tenderness, and even a refusal of that kind of masculinity.”
“When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?”
The college campus is very much a character in the novel as well. It is a force with its own nuances and actions, and competing groups of social actors seek to harness this energy to execute their own visions of the future. Political dialogue is often reduced to simply right versus left, but Jha’s depiction of campus life complicates this, showing how political conflicts are often rooted in issues of power and privilege. Innovative graduate students are attempting to transform the campus into a more inclusive and progressive space. Meanwhile, white middle-aged tenured professors, who once considered themselves progressive, are actively resisting this change. This results in a series of microaggressions and racist commentaries that undermine the college’s purported liberalism.
“I think what’s happening with white folks in academia is a sense of displacement, the worry that fun can be had without them, that there’s a lot of brilliance that is ‘not of my kind,’” Jha says. “BIPOC folks and other folks are redefining culture. So we keep hearing these white academics say, ‘We worked hard’ or ‘There are more restrictions for us’ or ‘We played by the rules,’ because any kind of displacement is going to cause discomfort, even in the life of the mind.”
“Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”
Despite the rampant personal and political turmoil, The Laughter is not a nihilistic story, due to a throughline of hope from the student body. They channel a transformative energy. “I advise the newspaper on my campus, and the kids truly believe in something, and they truly care about change,” Jha says. The novel’s students display unapologetic ideological independence and an unflinching courage to stand up for themselves, which means sometimes standing against faculty and administration.
To BIPOC people working in academia and other white-dominated spaces, Jha offers a sharp final word of advice: “Find your own people and have your own agency, and let’s see what [we] do,” she says. “Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”
Photos of Sonora Jha by Josiane Faubert.
The author of How to Raise a Feminist Son sharpens the campus obsession novel into a brilliant indictment of exoticization.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. If you’re looking for quiet desperation in modern-day America, you’d be hard-pressed for a better place to find it than the “dubiously named” Oasis Mobile Estates in Riverside County, California, the setting of Asale Angel-Ajani’s debut novel, A Country You Can Leave.
Russian-born single mom Yevgenia Borislava and her Afro-Cuban daughter, Lara, have alighted on this repository of broken dreams, the latest in a string of temporary addresses the two have occupied for all of Lara’s life. At 16, Lara finds herself on the awkward cusp of adulthood, a situation that’s difficult enough without her strained relationship with Yevgenia and her yearning for a long-absent father whom she knows only through her mother’s possibly unreliable stories.
On top of that, Lara’s economic situation is brought into high relief due to a zoning mistake that lands her in a high school intended for the nearby gated community that, economically speaking, might as well be on another planet. At school, Lara surrounds herself with a small diverse group that includes a gay Black aspiring poet named Charles and a compulsive white shoplifter named Julie, both of whom find Yevgenia more fascinating—or at least less embarrassing—than Lara does.
For most of the novel, readers are treated to the passive-aggressive back-and-forth between a mother and daughter who haven’t quite learned a healthy way to express their devotion to one another, until a violent altercation with an outsider becomes the crucible in which their relationship will either be forged or splinter irrevocably.
Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of this hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop. A Country You Can Leave gives voice to a group of star-crossed characters struggling to transcend Thoreau’s trap.
Asale Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of a hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop.
In Act 1 of Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth questions his plan to commit regicide against King Duncan, saying, “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’other.” Vaulting ambition and the willful blindness that can accompany it form the tragedy of Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s third novel and the follow-up to her 2013 Booker Prize winner, The Luminaries.
The Birnam Wood of the title refers not to the Scottish town of the play but to an activist collective in New Zealand whose members harvest crops planted “without permission on public or unattended lands.” The group’s founder, Mira Bunting, has an idealistic goal: “radical, widespread, and lasting social change” that shows “how arbitrary and absurdly prejudicial the entire concept of land ownership” is. But there’s a problem: The collective has trouble breaking even.
A possible solution arrives in the form of a natural disaster, when earthquakes lead to a landslide, causing the closure of the Korowai Pass and cutting off the small fictional town of Thorndike. Not far from the site of the landslide is a farm owned by the soon-to-be-knighted Owen Darvish. Paradoxically, Owen’s pest control service has partnered with American tech corporation Autonomo on a conservation project to rescue endemic species from extinction. Mira’s plan: buy the farm for Birnam Wood.
In both of her novels, Catton has shown that she’s an expert at building tension from an intricate plot. One of the complicating factors in Birnam Wood is Autonomo co-founder Robert Lemoine, “a serial entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and, apparently, a billionaire.” He wants to build a bunker on the farm and store precious cargo that would make him, “by several orders of magnitude, the richest person who had ever lived.” When he catches Mira on the property, he suggests they join forces, but in true Shakespearean fashion, Robert’s intent may not be what he claims.
Catton brilliantly weaves other characters and plot elements into the mix, among them Tony Gallo, a former collective member and would-be journalist who rails against capitalism, wants to write “a searing indictment of the super-rich” and is keen to expose Robert for who he is. Tony is too broadly drawn, and Catton sometimes over-explains the plot, but Birnam Wood is still a powerful portrait of the uncomfortable relationship between capitalism and idealism, and the compromises and trade-offs one might accept in pursuit of a goal. As some of Catton’s characters learn, vaulting ambition can be admirable, but if one o’erleaps and falls, the landing is anything but smooth.
Correction, March 7, 2023: This article has been updated to reflect that Birnam Wood is Catton’s third novel and The Luminaries is her second.
Vaulting ambition and the willful blindness that can accompany it form the tragedy of Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s third novel and the follow-up to her 2013 Booker Prize winner, The Luminaries.
No doubt you’ve read a good number of books in which you know the protagonist is in trouble, even though they sort of don’t. They may be with the wrong person, or in the wrong place, or working for the wrong people in the wrong business. Rafael Frumkin’s second novel, Confidence, is not only one of those books but also features all of the above.
When the novel opens, Ezra Green is in prison for being a flimflam man, but he’s still peddling the same snake oil as he was on the outside. The only difference is that now he’s doing it for cigarettes and ramen noodles as opposed to millions, nay, billions of dollars.
Ezra, the son of working-class parents, is larcenous from an early age. Small in stature, with terrible eyesight, teenage Ezra is sent (on scholarship) to a boot camp usually attended by rich bad boys. There he meets and falls in love with handsome, smooth-talking and completely amoral Orson Ortman. He is the train wreck you want to warn Ezra against, the miscreant who makes all the red flags start waving. It may be a bit on the nose, but Ezra’s blind spots aren’t limited to his vision.
Once out of the camp, the boys quickly learn how to separate rich and gullible people, especially women, from their money. They start small and end up concocting the mother of all scams: NuLife, a fake spiritual healing company that’s facilitated by the Bliss-Mini, a machine with bright lights that you clamp on your head. How it works is anyone’s guess, but it makes Ezra and Orson multimillionaires in their 20s and transforms Orson into a cult leader. All the while, Ezra pines for him with pitiable desperation.
Author of The Comedown, Frumkin is superb at dissecting all manner of malfeasance and corruption. Ezra doesn’t blink when he has his assistants cook the books, default on loans (Deutsche Bank, anyone?), defraud customers and shareholders and slime those who threaten to out the company as a boondoggle. In one hilariously ghastly scene, a man whose idea was stolen by Orson shows up in NuLife’s boardroom, threatening to sue like the Winklevoss twins but “dressed in the hoodie and jeans of the Zuckerbergian douchebag.” Even a military coup in South America doesn’t bother Ezra, as long as the bucks keep coming in and Orson is happy.
In a world where well-heeled heels are arrested for cryptocurrency scams, squillionaires gleefully trash their own vanity projects and masters of the universe disgrace themselves over and over, Confidence’s arrival is beyond timely.
In a world where well-heeled heels are arrested for cryptocurrency scams, squillionaires gleefully trash their own vanity projects and masters of the universe disgrace themselves over and over, Confidence's arrival is beyond timely.
In Rebecca Makkai’s engrossing novel I Have Some Questions for You, a successful podcaster and film critic takes a job at a New Hampshire boarding school where, 23 years ago, a white female student named Thalia Keith was murdered. The school’s athletic trainer, a Black man named Omar Evans, was convicted of the crime and has been imprisoned for decades.
Bodie Kane sees the invitation to teach a course on podcasting at the Granby School as an opportunity to give back to her alma mater. It’s also a chance to investigate the murder of Thalia, who was Bodie’s classmate; with her interest in true crime, Bodie has had lots of time to think about how poorly the case was initially handled. Bodie suggests to her class that revisiting the case would make a good podcast, and two of the students begin what evolves into a groundbreaking inquiry. Meanwhile, a major #MeToo scandal involving Bodie’s ex-husband, a well-known visual artist, threatens her reputation, veracity and livelihood.
Back at Granby and surrounded by the familiar landscape, classrooms and even some of the old faculty, Bodie is overwhelmed by memories of her trauma-filled childhood and wonders how those experiences might have shaped her high school years. She also starts to question her impressions of the school’s music teacher, Denny Bloch, whom she thinks may have been involved in a sexual relationship with Thalia. Bodie cannot help but subtly shape the students’ investigation, and the more time she spends at the school, the more she questions the motives of her classmates, her professors and even herself.
Makkai places the fictional murder of Thalia Keith and imprisonment of Omar Evans in the wider context of violence against women and institutional racism. If the book has any faults, it’s that we never hear from Omar himself, and his experiences only come to Bodie second-hand. But I Have Some Questions for You is Bodie’s story, a well-plotted indictment of systemic racism and misogyny craftily disguised as a thriller and beautifully constructed to make its points.
I Have Some Questions for You is a well-plotted indictment of systemic racism and misogyny craftily disguised as a thriller and beautifully constructed to make its points.
There is no word in the English language for someone who has lost their child. We have orphan for children who have lost their parents and widow or widower for a person who has lost a spouse, but we dare not give a name to the tragedy of losing a child. However, in his debut novel, Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámano Cordova attempts to describe this nameless grief, not by giving it a name but by showing how resisting it can destroy us.
The novel begins with Magos, a grieving mother who cuts out a piece of lung from the body of her deceased 11-year-old son, Santiago. When Magos returns to her childhood home in Mexico City, she discovers that the piece of lung can be fed, and she slowly nurtures it into something new. When this creature becomes the titular Monstrilio and begins to resemble her dead son, Magos and her husband, Joseph, try their best to care for it. However, Monstrilio’s innate, destructive impulses jeopardize their son’s second chance at life, and the characters are forced further down the path of grief toward something like acceptance.
Sámano Cordova’s writing is piercing and intimate. Whether describing Monstrilio’s first, vicious moments of life or the subtle, strained romance between Magos and her childhood friend Lena, Sámano Cordova keeps readers breathless. By splitting the book into four parts, narrated by Magos, Lena, Joseph, and Monstrilio himself, Cordova allows us to see the different sides of this tragic story; combined, they are more than the sum of their parts.
Some of the novel’s best moments are the flashbacks, when Magos, Joseph and Santiago share loving moments together, seek a method of healing for the boy and reckon with the fragility of life. When we see the monster that Santiago’s lung becomes, complex and grotesque and pitiful as it is, it troubles these tender moments, showing how grief often fixates on pain, trapping us in an interminable cycle. Sámano Cordova doesn’t attempt to break the cycle; rather, his novel seeks to embody it, making this nameless, eternal pain something we can speak to and hold.
In his debut novel, Gerardo Sámano Córdova attempts to describe the nameless grief of losing a child by showing how resisting it can destroy us.
Donal Ryan may not be as well known outside of Ireland as some of his contemporaries, but his sixth novel, The Queen of Dirt Island, adds to an impressive body of work that should garner him wider recognition. This story of four generations of Irish women fractiously sharing their village home in modern-day County Tipperary has a gentle heart and a spine of steel, its appeal enhanced by Ryan’s understated yet evocative prose.
Only a few days after her birth, Saoirse Aylward loses her father in a car crash, leaving her mother, Eileen, with the task of raising the girl. Eileen is assisted by her opinionated mother-in-law, Mary, who moves into the family home from the nearby farm managed by her two surviving sons, one of whom is arrested for storing guns and explosives for the Irish Republican Army. Ryan elides most of Saoirse’s childhood until, prior to her 18th birthday, a drunken encounter with a singer in a local rock band produces a daughter, Pearl.
Then Saoirse’s “stupid accidental life” is upended again by the return of the town’s prodigal son, Joshua Elmwood, with his girlfriend, Honey Bartlett. After Honey departs for a filmmaking project, romance blossoms between Saoirse and Josh. It’s an unlikely and rocky pairing, but one that moves Saoirse farther down the path of maturity. This isn’t the story’s only fraught relationship, as Eileen and her brother also war over the humble piece of land that provides the novel’s title.
Whether Ryan is exploring the shifting dynamics of the Aylward women’s often intense interactions or following the contours of Saoirse and Josh’s tempestuous love affair, he does so with sensitivity and grace. In an unusual technique, each of the book’s chapters comprises two pages, some of them functioning almost as self-contained short stories, others seamlessly moving the plot forward. Ryan is adept at fashioning arresting images to enliven his storytelling, among them Eileen’s “utterances flung around like fistfuls of confetti.”
There is emotional and physical violence in The Queen of Dirt Island, along with tender and deeply felt moments. The novel’s predominant tone is pastoral, consistent with the beautiful Irish landscape Ryan evokes with subtle brushstrokes, and capable of leaving an imprint on the reader’s mind and heart.
This story of four generations of Irish women fractiously sharing their village home in modern-day County Tipperary has a gentle heart and a spine of steel, its appeal enhanced by Donal Ryan’s understated yet evocative prose.
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