The adage “two’s company, but three’s a crowd” rings awkwardly and painfully true in Ore Agbaje-Williams’ debut novel, The Three of Us, which examines the inner workings of both a friendship and a marriage. There’s hardly any unselfish love to be found in this triangle formed by a prickly husband, a chameleonic wife and a manipulative best friend. Be aware that the proverbial third wheel may not be who you’d expect.
In three distinct parts, each character describes their perspective on both the past and present moment. Over the course of a single day, the wife, husband and best friend drink up and face off, each presenting the truth as they each see it. Agbaje-Williams’ dark wit and wry observations keep it all interesting. She slowly and slyly builds the tension between her three characters until it fairly sparks off the page.
The novel’s trajectory is foreshadowed early on by the wife (who is never named) as she notes that a fight between her husband (also unnamed) and best friend Temi isn’t out of the ordinary: “Usually those moments occur when an exorbitant amount of alcohol has been consumed.” The wife and Temi share a complex history and intimacy, and they both roll their eyes and laugh at the husband in equal measure. But that afternoon, Temi’s discovery of a pregnancy test in a bathroom trash can causes her to overreact, first comically and then calculatedly. The novel unfolds almost like a play as Temi and the husband exchange passive-aggressive (or outright aggressive) barbs within the confines of a posh house in a posh neighborhood. Society and culture and their conventions get skewered right alongside the characters.
At fewer than 200 pages, The Three of Us makes for a quick and thought-provoking read that can elicit a cringe one minute and rueful laughter the next. The tightly wound plot drops a few revelations along the way, calling into question what the characters—and the reader—think they know. When two people vie for the attention of a third, who will win? How far will each go? Agbaje-Williams keeps readers wondering until the end.
At fewer than 200 pages, The Three of Us makes for a quick and thought-provoking read that can elicit a cringe one minute and rueful laughter the next.
The Roman Colosseum is full of wonders and history and secrets—and plants. Observing, cataloging and communicating with these plants is the heart of Katy Simpson Smith’s impressive novel, as the narrative connects two women across time who are both performing these archival acts. Set in 1854 and 2018, The Weeds moves between the voices of these two women, interlocking their lives as they document the presence of (or absence of) plants.
In 1854, a woman was caught stealing, and her misbehavior has led to her being indentured to English botanist Richard Deakin; he sends her into the Colosseum to catalog the flora and their uses. She also tells her own story and meditates on the ways that society impinges upon her selfhood. She speaks to her missing love, a woman who is off on a boat, now married to a man. In 2018, a woman has run from the entrapment of her life, but she finds herself newly hemmed in as she seeks the plants on Deakin’s list, makes notes, begrudges the presence of tourists and wonders what her next step might be. What will science, and her male adviser, allow?
The novel moves in quick (and often blurry) shifts between these centuries and women. They mirror parts of each other; they both encounter violence at many turns and scales, and each reacts to the ways their voices and choices are constrained in their societies. The plants around them produce their own forms of tension and elements of violence; they are undoubtedly characters in their own right.
Just as the plants in the Colosseum ask of the women, The Weeds requests the reader to observe and look for connections, to question structures and patterns, and to discover new ways of seeing. Each detail is carefully attuned and revealed, and each seed opens at the moment it needs to bloom and stretch. Patience is necessary, but close attention reveals infinite rewards.
At a reading in 2022, I heard poet Jane Wong describe her obsession with time-lapse videos of rotting fruit. Her poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is full of the physicality of food, informed by Wong’s research into the Great Leap Forward, which was a stage of Mao Zedong’s reforms that led to the starvation of 36 million Chinese people. Wong’s great-grandparents died during the Great Leap Forward, and several poems ring with their voices. In others, the speaker reckons with the contrast between the relative abundance in her life—the apples “rotting on the ground,” an egg thrown onto pavement just to hear the “sumptuous splat”—and the false promises of the American dream for herself and her parents. Lucky for me, and you, Wong has a memoir coming out this month, so you can pick up Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City when you finish her breathtaking book of poetry.
Megha Majumdar’s debut was one of the most important social novels of 2020—highly political, furiously propulsive and ruthlessly unsparing—but if you, like so many readers, spent that year sticking to lighter fare, now is the time to go back and see what you missed, because A Burning still hits hard. In contemporary India, a young woman named Jivan unthinkingly voices criticism of the government in a Facebook post, and she is immediately labeled a terrorist and sent to prison, where she awaits her trial. Two other main characters provide additional perspectives on these events: the luminous wannabe Bollywood star Lovely, a transgender woman who was learning English from Jivan; and PT Sir, Jivan’s resentful former gym teacher who gets involved in nationalist politics. Each character is ambitious in their own way, but within this world marked by the tyrannies of rampant corruption, racism, poverty and inequality, their fates are often outside their control, and the few choices available to them are murky at best. This novel is a short shock that leaves a lasting burn.
Author Joanna Ho and illustrator Dung Ho each made their publishing debut in the first week of 2021 with Eyes That Kiss in the Corners,a radiant picture book that became an instant bestseller and launched both creators’ successful careers. To read it is to immediately understand why. Its first-person narrator is a girl who explores, via gorgeous, lyrical prose, how her eyes connect her to her mother, grandmother and little sister and to their shared heritage. Meanwhile, the book’s digital illustrations positively glow as every spread seems suffused with sunshine. Read this aloud to savor similes such as “my lashes curve like the swords of warriors”; then read it again and pay special attention to how the characters in every spread look at one another. You’ll see one of the most moving renderings of love made visible on the page that I’ve ever encountered.
Elizabeth Miki Brina’s form-bending memoir starts with her personal history—contending with her mother’s alcoholism as a child, feeling ashamed of her Japanese heritage in her predominately white hometown, expanding her horizons on the West Coast as a young adult—and spirals out to engulf not only her parents’ story bu also the history of Okinawa, the island in Japan where her mother grew up before meeting Brina’s father, a white American stationed there during the Vietnam War. After years of conflict with her mother, Brina found compassion as an adult for the trauma her mother experienced when she left her homeland for a culturally and linguistically isolated life in a hostile new country. As Brina spells out Okinawa’s past, from an independent land to a pawn in Chinese-Japanese-American relations, readers get a sense of the generational trauma that has shaped her and her mother’s lives as well. It’s a story that encompasses both the broad horrors of colonialism and racism and the deeply personal details of forgiveness and familial love.
Heartfelt and emotional, Samuel Park’s moving debut novel is a must-read for fans of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or the K-drama “Crash Landing on You.” Set in 1960s Korea, This Burns My Heart features a resourceful heroine torn between love and duty in the wake of partition. Soo-Ja meets Yul and immediately feels a connection to him—a confusing development, since she has just decided to marry another man. Unwilling to disgrace her family by going back on her promise, Soo-Ja rejects Yul to marry Min, a decision she will revisit and regret for the next 20 years. Yul and Soo-Ja see each other only periodically and usually by chance, but their fraught encounters are tense with the passion of unconsummated love. Full of poetic observations and memorable lines, This Burns My Heart will leave you pondering the “what ifs” in your own life.
—Trisha, Publisher
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! To celebrate, we’re shining a spotlight on some of our favorite stellar reads by Asian American authors.
Must-reads for May include the latest from bestselling historian David Grann and romance superstar Emily Henry, plus the long-awaited second novel from Abraham Verghese.
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Nonfiction
Our Migrant Souls is one of the most important pieces of Latino nonfiction in several decades. Turning the last page, you will feel the weight of history on your shoulders.
Abraham Verghese, probably the best doctor-writer since Anton Chekhov, upends all of our expectations again and again in his long awaited follow-up to Cutting for Stone.
David Grann’s narrative nonfiction masterpiece about an 18th-century man-of-war that ran aground in South America reveals humanity at its best and worst, from heroism to cannibalism.
Julia Lee’s piercing discussions of Asian American identity are likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, she even challenges her own views.
In her plucky, intimate memoir, Glory Edim, the creator of the Well-Read Black Girl book club, tethers the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery—it’s reader catnip.
Must-reads for May include the latest from bestselling historian David Grann and romance superstar Emily Henry, plus the long-awaited second novel from Abraham Verghese.
I approach a book as if it were a body. An object not only to shape through words but also to bring to life—activate!—using a collection of tools that go beyond hammer and nail. Though this method can apply to any project, it has felt more urgent to me in fiction that tackles the past as a subject; how do I convince readers that a distant time is not a grainy photograph but is fleshy and real? I feel a pressing responsibility to bring characters out of the realm of the theoretical and place them in moving forms—and, through careful research, to turn the framework of their narrative into a body too.
“A book’s body should be lovely, should move with vigor and should be convincing down to its beating heart, its sturdy bones.”
First the skeleton: Who were these people, what was their philosophy about faith and love and sin, how did their culture conceive of itself? This demands highbrow research, the investment in archives and thick history texts. Then the muscles: What pushes these people through space? What are the events ordering their lives, the goals driving them, the particular bends of their relationships? Historical studies help here too, but we begin to drift toward areas the internet excels at. (“What happened on this date in 891?”) Finally the skin, the hair, the eyes. What did this world look like? Here the internet with its gift for trivia takes over (“how to tie a toga”; “recipe for 18th-century cornbread”; “minerals used in Renaissance paint”). By the end of this construction process, a book’s body should be lovely, should move with vigor and should be convincing down to its beating heart, its sturdy bones.
Having written several historical novels, I thought I had a pretty good feel for this research strategy. I knew what to read, where to turn. But then I decided to write a novel about plants. What lessons could I carry over to a field in which I was a neophyte? How could I build the bones, the muscle and the skin not for a young woman but for a violet? I structured The Weeds as a botanical flora, using 19th-century botanist Richard Deakin’s list of plants growing in the Roman Colosseum (420 species!) as a framework to tell a story. Each entry describes a plant while pushing the human narrators along their arcs; each entry shows how flower and human intersect. The point of The Weeds is that women and unwanted plants have an uncomfortable amount in common, so I set out with the same approach: to find first the highbrow, foundational sources that would give me a holistic sense of this kingdom of flora to which I had devoted a narrative.
Onoclea sensibilis, sensitive fern
What is the philosophy of a flower? The closest I came to an answer was in the research room of the New York Botanical Garden’s library, where an archivist laid out the lusciously illustrated floras of past centuries. These folios, composed in Latin or French or Italian, were as large as atlases; exotic flowers bloomed on vellum. I handled a first edition of Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome and paged through Giorgio Bonelli’s massive 18th-century Hortus Romanus, Antonio Sebastiani’s 1815 catalog of the Colosseum and Domenico Panaroli’s fragile 1643 flora. The illustrations ranged from simple black engravings to full watercolors of a grapevine’s brown tuberous roots, the crimson berries of a butcher’s broom, hot-pink caper blossoms. One might think an illustration of a plant, unlike a photograph, can only be an approximation; it’s not true, one might say. But consider Rembrandt’s self-portrait at age 53; how much more do those blue-gray lines creasing the artist’s eyebrows tell us about his stance than a photograph would? Art, I must remember as I turn the heavy pages of the flora, can evoke something much rounder than fact. From the dusty manuscripts, I gleaned that even the mildest plants explode in beauty, and they demand a painstaking attention from their human witnesses.
How do you put the characters of plants in motion? I had some gardening knowledge inherited from my mother, a basic sense of what plants grow best in sun, which weeds taste good, how to make a snapdragon talk. But many of the plants in Deakin’s flora were unfamiliar to me, and what Deakin was interested in—their botanical structure but also their medical uses and mythological meanings—were subjects I too needed to understand. More importantly, I was using the essence of each species as a springboard for a narrative moment. The unusual umbels of a candytuft, shaped like a rabbit’s paw prints, trigger a memory of a narrator’s childhood bunny. The worldwide antipathy toward chickweed prompts a narrator to consider the abuse suffered by women in academia. Where could I learn these details about flowers? As a historian, I told my students to look beyond Wikipedia. As a novelist searching for the muscles of a book, Wikipedia was my lodestone. There I discovered the Grand Duke of Wurttemberg’s 1671 edict against grass pea flour; the presence of a 1,600-year-old olive tree on a Croatian island; the particular osmotic pressure at which a squirting cucumber can eject its seeds. (On the equally democratic and chaotic YouTube, you can find erotic videos of this phenomenon in slow-mo.) Wikipedia is in some ways a flora unto itself: scientific, cultural, idiosyncratic. A page on Bellis perennis, the common daisy, includes sections on its botanical description, etymology, distribution, cultivation, uses and the fact that Daisy is “a nickname for girls named Margaret.” These are the muscles that begin sending the plants into my story-world, into action.
Daucus carota, Queen Anne’s lace
How do you put a final, sensory skin on vegetation? What does a plant really look like, beyond its pinnate leaves and hollow stems? This research turned out to be internal, spiritual, and it took me to my own childhood memories in my mother’s wild garden. I saw her clambering roses as houses that could hide my body; her pansies were the faces of friends; the wild oxalis dotting the lawn was a sour snack. Everything in her garden taught me that plants were vibrantly alive—neither remote nor static but endlessly growing, always responsive to my young imagination. They filled my world with scent and color and taste, but they also needed my tending: My mother paid me a penny for every spent bloom I cut. So I had no fear when it came to writing a book dominated by plants; I had long ago seen how they could become characters in their own right.
Still, I believed writing about weeds would demand a new research strategy—that what I had learned as a trained historian would fall short. (Would I need a doctorate in botany too?) But a novel is still a novel; a book still requires a body. And from 17th-century watercolors to 21st-century internet encyclopedias to my own tactile attachment to an elm’s raspy leaf, the material was already at hand. I merely had to foreground these plants not as decor but as protagonists. They too needed bones, muscles, the beautiful yellow eyes at the center of forget-me-nots. Like any element of fiction, they needed to come alive.
Photo of Katy Simpson Smith by Elise L. Smith. Illustrations from The Weeds by Kathy Schermer-Gramm. Used with permission from FSG.
In the latest novel from acclaimed, bestselling author Katy Simpson Smith, two women in different time periods are tasked with cataloging the plants that grow in the Roman Colosseum. But how can unnoticed little weeds hold up the weight of a story?
Deborah Levy’s slender, enchanted novel August Blue has all the piercing detail and bewildering movement of a midafternoon dream.
In August, at a flea market in Athens, Greece, Elsa M. Anderson encounters a woman she comes to believe is her double. Perhaps to taunt Elsa, the woman purchases the very objects Elsa planned to buy for herself. “I felt she had stolen something from me, something that I would miss in my life,” Elsa thinks. She pursues her double, and the woman drops her black felt trilby hat, which Elsa retrieves and wears until the following August, when the story ends.
Elsa, we learn, is 34 years old, a musical prodigy who has apparently, quite suddenly, lost her gift. Her recent performance in Vienna came to a jarring halt when her “fingers refused to bend for Rachmaninov and [she] began to play something else.” Orphaned at birth, she was adopted by a family in rural England, and when her musical talents became evident, was taken under the wing of Arthur Goldstein, her teacher and promoter. Her teacher is now old and ailing. Elsa eventually goes to visit him in Sardinia, where she resists his offer to see the adoption documents that would reveal her parentage.
In the meantime, she travels to teach piano to the disenchanted and unseen children of the elite. She has fraught, fleeting encounters with her double and carries on an internal dialogue with the woman throughout her journey. People recognize Elsa, photograph her and wonder about her.
Sergei Rachmaninov, the feel and weight of his music, is certainly a motif in August Blue. So too are the works of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. Beneath the novel’s surface thrum questions and observations about civilization, culture, identity, the self and the many forms of love. The narrative, such as it is, unfolds until an encounter in Paris resolves some of Elsa’s questions.
In addition to being a novelist, Levy is also a poet. Her storytelling moves to its own music. Her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward. The novel offers the reader a dazzling gaze at the conundrums of existence.
Deborah Levy’s storytelling moves to its own music. In August Blue, her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward.
Have you ever read a book that you could dance along to, as if it were a song? Nicole Cuffy’s engaging novel, Dances, is one of those books. The author (and her 22-year-old protagonist, Celine “Cece” Cordell) loves terms like grand plié, grand battement, dégagé, double saut de basque, entrechat six and chassé développé. If you’ve been to the ballet, you’ve seen these avian, gravity-defying moves, even if you don’t know what they’re called. Perfectly executed, they take your breath away.
Here’s the rub: The human body wasn’t meant to move like this, at least not regularly. Ballet dancers know this, and some seem to revel in the pain their art causes them. According to author and former ballerina Alice Robb, for some dancers that first bleeding toenail caused by their pointe shoe is a rite of passage. And to keep a tortured body fighting fit, you can’t even eat like a normal human being.
One thing we learn about Cece is that she doesn’t valorize pain, whether physical or emotional. She’ll accept the former to become the first Black female principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. She grew up with the latter thanks to her fractured family: her withholding mother, her neglectful father and, most of all, her brother, Paul. Indeed, Paul is the source of her greatest pain. A talented artist who introduced her to ballet and paid for her lessons when her mother wouldn’t or couldn’t, Paul vanished into drugs and despair as Cece rose to the heights.
While Cuffy captures the inevitable politics of the ballet world, they affect Cece lightly. Blessed with a snarky sense of humor, she’s smart, humble and kindhearted. Most people wish Cece well, and more than a few love her, including her Russian-born mentor, Kazimir Volkov. Cece is sort of the Suzanne Farrell to his George Balanchine. Kaz’s wife dislikes Cece, but only because she thinks they’re having an affair. (They’re not.)
Cece has fans, companies want her endorsement, and glossy magazines want to interview her. Besides her mother’s, the only voices of doubt in Cece’s life are the ones she hears in her own head. It’s true that most ballerinas don’t look like her, and the art form wasn’t created for bodies as curvy and powerful as hers. But in the end, her thoughts always return to Paul. When she forces her body to perform and ignores the pain, she does it for him, wherever he is. And when she dances, we want to dance with her. There’s no higher praise for a book like Dances.
When Nicole Cuffy’s heroine dances, we want to dance with her. There’s no higher praise for a book like Dances.
Starting with its title, My Murder, Katie Williams sets up her second novel after Tell the Machine Goodnight with a handful of classic crime fiction questions: Whose murder? And who knows what? But readers will discover a subversive twist within.
Lou, the young mother and wife who narrates the novel, is back from the dead. As part of a government project, she and other victims of a serial killer have been resurrected with cloning technology and placed back into their homes, marriages and jobs. Yet things don’t quite fit for Lou: She can’t remember the days surrounding her murder, can’t connect with her child in the same way and feels distant from her husband. Lou’s confusion and curiosity guide the reader’s experience; she’s figuring things out just as we are, and the revelations of certain details, intentionally paced by Williams, are fresh and surprising. As Lou investigates unexplained moments from her previous life, it’s apparent that she won’t find peace until she makes some sense of them.
My Murder engages with a violent subject without gore, and probes how technology infuses our days and engages our attention, often without our awareness. The plot is certainly rich and appealing, but Williams’ layered considerations are even more compelling and yet never heavy-handed. What happened to Lou? Is she who she was? What makes humans who they are, and how does technology impact these definitions? With a singular voice and a winning narrative that will stay with you for days, My Murder speaks to the construction of the self and the filters we apply. It’s about what it means to survive, to be reborn and, ultimately, to live.
With a singular voice and a winning narrative that will stay with you for days, My Murder speaks to the construction of the self.
Alex has found herself alone, without a home and penniless on the wealthy East End of Long Island. She walks along aimlessly in the hot sun, everything she owns in a small bag. When a couple pedal past her on their beach cruisers, Alex wonders idly about their story: “What sort of day lay ahead of them? Some easy waste of the afternoon. What possible worries would they have?”
It wasn’t always like this for Alex. Just a week earlier, she was the summer houseguest of Simon, who showered Alex with expensive jewelry, luxurious clothes and a buttery soft purse. All Alex had to do in return was pretend to be a demure young woman contemplating grad school and conceal her true identity: a desperate escort hiding from an unhinged ex from whom she stole a significant amount of money and drugs.
But as much as she tried to be a perfect guest, “every once in a while, Alex took one of Simon’s painkillers to stitch the looser hours together.” When she drinks too much at a party and jumps in the pool with the host’s much younger husband, Simon tells her it’s time for her to go. For the rest of this eerily heartbreaking novel, we follow Alex as she finds ways to survive until she can earn Simon’s forgiveness.
Author Emma Cline’s bestselling, award-winning debut novel, The Girls, was based loosely on the story of the Manson family murders, and she followed it up with a popular story collection, Daddy. The Guest is a worthy and unforgettable next step for Cline, whose style is spare yet beautiful. And while her main character is deeply flawed, Cline treats Alex with a gentleness that makes her situation all the more striking.
On its surface, The Guest is about a lost soul, a drifter who has no plan and no safety net. But this deeply felt novel also raises provocative questions about how our society treats young women. How can Alex be virtually invisible, wandering through a wealthy beach town without garnering a single second glance? She is like a ghost—never settled, never seen.
The Guest is a worthy and unforgettable next step for Emma Cline, whose style is spare yet beautiful.
Much like his first novel, Real Life, Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans follows a loosely knit circle of lovers and friends in and around a university in Iowa as they badger, seduce and provoke one another over the span of an academic year. Financial, class and racial divisions are at the core of many of their interactions, as are disputes over the value of art rooted in trauma and concerns about selling out.
The Late Americans lacks a central character; instead, the story flows from one character or pair to the next, leaving the reader to make connections and hold onto each person’s secrets and dreams. The novel opens with a blistering portrayal of a poetry workshop where Seamus is verbally attacked for critiquing a peer’s work, then later he has sex with an older Iowan visiting the hospice facility where Seamus is a cook. From there, the novel switches focus to Goran, Timo and Ivan, all of whom gave up music or dance to pursue business or finance degrees. Noah, who is still studying dance, befriends another dancer in the program, Fatima, who supports herself by working in a cafe and contemplates leaving school after she is assaulted by another student. The novel ends in early summer, when the cast gathers at a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains to bid their former lives goodbye and move into the unknown.
Taylor has previously written stories about ballet, and his plotting and style mirror the art form. In dance, our focus moves from performer to performer, now watching a pas de deux, now a solo. His novel functions similarly, seamlessly shifting our gaze from the individual to the duo, to the group and back again until, almost magically, the story is told and the piece comes to a close. A thought-provoking and lyrical novel about a group of people on the precipice of change, The Late Americans is a perceptive look at passion, sacrifice and intimacy among friends.
A thought-provoking and lyrical story about a group of people on the precipice of change, The Late Americans is a perceptive look at passion, sacrifice and intimacy among friends.
In her essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf complains that English literature has failed to find words for the experience of a headache. “English,” she writes, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” I thought of her essay often when I was pregnant for the first time and after labor, when I found myself reflecting that the problem she described still persists, and no more so, perhaps, than when it comes to childbirth.
My own experience of pregnancy was not easy. The most important fact, for me, about the years I spent pregnant is that they produced two wished-for and miraculous babies. But I will also be reckoning, for a long time, with the aftershocks of their physical realities. I was pregnant four times in four years and gave birth to two babies. There were also miscarriages and hemorrhages; migraines and months of crippling nausea; four surgeries and hundreds of blood draws; a neural puncture and a proliferation of tumors.
During those years, I looked to novels to help me understand and to give me company, as I had through so many other phases of life—falling in love and out, getting married and getting divorced. Time and time again, however, as I turned through the pages of the novels I loved, I was struck by the shortage of attempts to represent the experience of giving birth. There are, of course, exceptions. In my search for literary company, I found a tradition of novels describing labor from the perspective of a male character, from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. In these depictions, the experiences range from comic to frightening, but we always see the woman undergoing it. We laugh at her and fear for her rather than inhabit her experience.
“How can other people know what they are asking of us, what we endure in the course of childbirth, if there are no words to describe it?”
There is a labor scene in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that is often described as horrifying, but it, too, is narrated from the perspective of someone other than Janine, the woman giving birth. Janine’s experience is held at a remove while our narrator and the other handmaids gather around her, hold hands, whisper among themselves and drink grape juice. It is a horrifying scene, but not because we are given to feel what Janine is feeling; it’s horrifying, instead, precisely because Janine’s experience is set off to the side. What she endures is not the main event—not while she’s giving birth and her individual experience is transformed into a collective ceremony, and not after, when her baby is handed off to the wife of a commander.
In novels that do describe the experience from the perspective of the person giving birth, the experience is often startlingly short. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe gives birth over the course of a page. Her water breaks, she has a contraction, the head comes out, the afterbirth follows. In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante dispatches the experience even more quickly. Lenu’s first childbirth is summarized in a sentence: “I had atrocious labor pains but they didn’t last long.” The second childbirth gets two: “Everything went smoothly. The pain was excruciating, but in a few hours I had another girl.” In Yuko Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains, a book about what it means to give birth to a child, labor is skipped over entirely. On one page the protagonist is nine months pregnant; on the next, five days later, she’s in the hospital and her baby has been born. All three of these novels are breathtakingly granular about other aspects of their protagonists’ physical and psychological lives. They are novels by writers I’ve turned to time and time again to clarify other modes of existence. And yet, when it comes to labor—or the pregnancy that precedes it—they seem to turn away.
Why would this be the case? Part of the challenge in describing pregnancy and childbirth must be that it involves so much pain and sickness, and as Woolf describes it in “On Being Ill,” those states are notoriously hard to describe. “Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor,” she writes in a sentence that must resonate for anyone who has ever been to a doctor, “and language at once runs dry.” Elaine Scarry expands on this point in The Body in Pain, her seminal monograph on the subject, which establishes first the inexpressibility of pain and second the political complications that arise as a result. Pain, she says, is defined by the fact that it cannot be expressed. “When physical pain is transformed into an objectified state,” she writes, “it (or at least some of its aversiveness) is eliminated.”
But why, in that case, don’t more writers try? If pain is eliminated by the act of expressing it, why wouldn’t more people who have given birth write about labor? Perhaps another part of the problem is how conditioned we are to focus on the aftermath of pregnancy—the miraculous child born as a result—as opposed to what we risk and endure, as though to give voice to the pain involved in giving birth is to unnaturally or ungenerously deflect from the miracle of the new life that follows. This conditioning both produces a shortage of language for the experience and is reinforced by the same shortage. How can other people know what they are asking of us, what we endure in the course of childbirth, if there are no words to describe it? And if they don’t know, how can they work to change our culture’s refusal to acknowledge the price of pregnancy?
“I wanted to write a pregnancy book of my own, a labor book of my own, that fully embodied the pain and the sickness involved and held it side by side with the sweetness of a new baby.”
For some of us, pregnancy is a happy state. For many of us, however, pregnancy and labor involve not only sickness and pain, but sickness and pain that last for a very long time. They involve season upon season of an experience that longs to be expressed and can’t, and therefore confines the person experiencing it to a long state of transforming loneliness. Trapped in that state, as I felt myself to be when I was pregnant, I wished for examples of the kind of language that would transform pain into something else, but as I moved through the books on my shelves, the only example I could find that approached the length and intensity of what I was experiencing was the example of the creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which, as Victor Frankenstein describes it, takes season upon season to unfold, requires superhuman efforts from the body of the creator, and leaves him so sick that it takes months for his fiancée to nurse him back to health.
This “labor,” as he repeatedly calls it, is grueling and long, not only for Victor but also for the reader, who must wade through seven remarkably repetitive pages about bodily unraveling—the process involves “charnel bones,” “eyeballs . . . starting from their sockets,” “the unhallowed damps of the grave,” “a slow fever” and nerves aggravated to a “most painful degree”—in order to get to the moment when new life arrives. The language, in its brutal repetitions of grotesquerie, seems to be attempting to approximate the feeling of what it represents.
At the same time, however, Victor insists that he is incapable of expressing the physical sensations involved in his labor. “No one can conceive of the variety of feeling which bore me onwards,” he says in one paragraph; in the next paragraph he asks, “who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil?” The painful and isolating fear that he will not be able to accurately communicate his agony is there, but so is the desire that the reader should feel it as a “conception,” as their own process of painfully creating life. The hope, then, is that language could so fully embody a pain that it could transmit it to the reader.
Reading these pages, I felt I had finally found it: the labor scene I was looking for. And yet, of course, the person laboring is a man, and what he makes isn’t a baby. Did Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein after two labors of her own, one of which produced a child who died after two weeks, feel that the only way she could include a labor scene in literature was to make it a man’s? Did she feel that her readers would be unwilling to conceive of such pain if they imagined it took place in a woman’s body? Did she feel that the only way to allow her character the luxury of dwelling on pain long enough to describe it was to remove the idea of a miraculous baby?
These were the questions I asked myself when I began to write Reproduction. I wanted to write a pregnancy book of my own, a labor book of my own, that fully embodied the pain and the sickness involved and held it side by side with the sweetness of a new baby. I wanted to find a language not only for the headaches and the shivers but also for the contractions and the nausea, a language that attempted, at least, to transmit my experience of pregnancy.
Photo of Louisa Hall by William Callahan.
After being pregnant and giving birth, novelist and poet Louisa Hall found herself reflecting on the dearth of fiction describing the experience—but why? Why is it so hard to write about? With help from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hall found the inspiration to craft her own work of fiction to embody the experience of labor and pregnancy.
Lorrie Moore’s fiction has always defied easy categorization, but it’s consistently smart, witty and thought-provoking. Her fourth novel—and her first in 14 years—touches all those bases. I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home is an unusual but surprisingly affecting story about life and death and the liminal space that separates them.
Moore’s protagonist, Finn, is a young high school teacher who teaches what he calls “Alt-Consensus History,” an attempt to “reclaim the term conspiracy theory” on subjects such as whether the first moon landing ever happened. He’s been placed on a paid leave for either his curricular choices or rebuffing the advances of the headmaster’s wife. His older brother, Max, is dying in a Bronx hospice, and they pass the time by watching the 2016 World Series, which ended with the Chicago Cubs winning their first title in more than a century. As the teams compete in game after game, in what feels like a potentially infinite duration, Finn feels as if his brother is “rooting for both teams to go on forever so he wouldn’t die.”
Amid his deepening sadness over his brother’s imminent passing, Finn receives an urgent call to return home to deal with a crisis involving his “mad and maddening” ex-girlfriend Lily. She’s a bright but unstable woman who provides “laugh therapy” as a clown to brighten the lives of her clients, mostly children. Finn seems as reluctant to abandon his attachment to her as he is to bid farewell to his brother.
At the heart of the novel is Finn and Lily’s road trip through an autumnal American heartland, one of the stranger journeys in recent fiction. As they drive along roads that feel like “an unfurling ribbon without a gift,” they dissect the reasons for their relationship’s demise and spar—sometimes seriously, other times with the dry, often black humor that’s a characteristic of Moore’s writing—over subjects such as the inscription on Finn’s headstone. (He wants one that includes his phone number and the words “ATTENTION: UNDERLYING CONDITIONS.”) “Jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life,” Lily observes. “They are the exit signs in a very dark room.”
Interspersed with the account of their travels are letters from a woman named Elizabeth, who runs a boardinghouse in the years immediately following the Civil War, to her sister. While their relationship to Finn and Lily’s story isn’t immediately apparent, Moore deftly ties them together before the end.
Moore’s ambitions in this brief novel are modest, even as the subjects she tackles are among the most profound facing human beings. If there’s a book that earns the description tragicomic, it’s certainly this one.
If there’s a book that earns the description tragicomic, the long-awaited fourth novel from acclaimed writer Lorrie Moore is it.
Louisa Hall’s fourth book, Reproduction, brings together many threads—the COVID-19 pandemic, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, friendship, pregnancy, miscarriage and birthing trauma—within a novel about trying to create a novel, about literary and scientific discovery and, most importantly, about a woman trying to write her way back to herself.
Hall’s unnamed narrator sets out to write a novel about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein with the intention of engaging with the book’s literary history. During the research process, she discovers how miscarriage and pregnancy haunted Shelley and her novel. As our narrator navigates her own crises surrounding pregnancy—her experiences with it as well as her feelings about it amid the political, societal, health and climate challenges of our day—she realizes that perhaps this is not the novel she needs to write. Instead, she borrows the frame structure of Frankenstein to launch and linger in a tale of herself and her newly reappeared friend Anna, a scientist who works in a lab, wants to have a child and is willing to explore genetic modification and all the questions, ethics, opportunities and challenges that come with it.
Amid these large and lofty questions, Hall’s prose is taut, each word impactful, each short chapter a meditation on what could be. Throughout this slim novel, she continually returns to the evolving conversation between art and science, and to the enduring truth that no action or reaction exists in a vacuum.
Hall doesn’t always provide reasons for what happens in Reproduction. Instead, the novel is a series of what-ifs, possibilities, surprises and moments of wonder. These short chapters build a complex web of interconnectivity, showing the ways that our actions are shaped by the threats of pandemic and climate change as well as the politics, bounds and potential of scientific inquiry.
Throughout her slim fourth novel, Louisa Hall continually returns to the conversation between art and science, and to the enduring truth that no action or reaction exists in a vacuum.
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