“There is no wealth but life,” wrote John Ruskin near the end of his 1860 book, Unto This Last. The unnamed narrator of Andrew Holleran’s doleful fourth novel, The Kingdom of Sand, cites Ruskin midway through, by which time readers know the reason this quotation is on his mind. A gay man in his 60s, the narrator is living alone in conservative North Florida, surrounded by dying neighbors and contemplating the harsh reality of impermanence.
A nonlinear, episodic novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Holleran’s thoughtful, poetic treatment makes this material deeply moving and an important contribution to the literature of mortality. It’s one of the most beautiful novels of the year.
Each of the book’s five chapters touches on aging and the adjustments a person must make as they get older. Among the characters are the narrator’s 84-year-old father, who sees no reason to avoid having “four fried eggs and a rasher of bacon every morning” while his wife lies paralyzed in a nursing home after a fall.
Now that the narrator is closer to the end of his life than to the beginning, he has found many ways to take his mind off the inevitable, from visiting a Gainesville boat ramp where men congregate for sex to watching gay porn on his laptop. A more meaningful connection is his friendship with Earl, 20 years the narrator’s senior. After decades of teaching accounting in South Florida, Earl moved north to a house big enough to hold his books and opera records. He and the narrator share a platonic friendship that revolves around meeting at Earl’s house to watch old movies, and as the years pass, the narrator becomes Earl’s caregiver.
The novel gains considerable power from its recognition that no attempt at immortality, whether through art or other means, guarantees success. Classical radio stations change their format to all-talk, azaleas and camellias eventually droop, and every life, no matter how privileged, comes to an end.
The Kingdom of Sand is not for readers interested in lighthearted fare, but it’s a stunning meditation on what happens, as the narrator says, “when old age gets its claws in you.” Around the same time he cites Ruskin, the narrator reads a book on dying that offers sobering advice: Live a good life, because you’re not going to have much control over your ending. This exquisite novel offers similar counsel: The final destination may be grim, but with luck and a good set of directions, one can at least enjoy the ride.
A nonlinear novel focused on the transient nature of life could have been depressing, but Andrew Holleran's thoughtful, poetic treatment makes The Kingdom of Sand one of the most beautiful novels of the year.
For all the depth of expression in Monique Roffey’s writing, The Mermaid of Black Conch never feels like it dwells too long in the realm of the intangible. Full of lean, elegant, evocative prose that never overstays its welcome or drifts too far from its narrative, this finely honed novel about belonging, alienation and the enduring power of stories moves with the breathtaking rush of an ocean wave.
Roffey’s eponymous character, Aycayia, was once a woman but is now cursed to live her life as a creature of the sea—until a fisherman named David lures her to the shore with his song, inadvertently drawing her into the clutches of a group of wealthy American tourists. To save Aycayia the pain of becoming a tourist attraction or worse, David takes her into his home, where she slowly begins to shift back into human form. What happens next reverberates throughout the entire community on the island of Black Conch.
Roffey’s tale alternates among different points of view with the lithe dexterity of a fishtail, revealing David’s perspective on the present as well as his reflections on the past, while giving voice to a local matriarch who learns the secret of the mermaid’s presence. We also hear from Aycayia herself, who speaks to the reader in raw, deeply emotional bursts of verse.
Like her title character, Roffey’s prose is a shape-shifting, living thing, moving through emotional highs and lows with an almost mercurial grace. Roffey achieves this flow state with astonishing economy, which enables her to linger on existential questions: Who are you if everyone who remembers you is gone? Who do you become if people choose to reshape you? Such questions—as well as the remarkable way Roffey explores them through the eyes of a compelling cast of characters—make The Mermaid of Black Conch, winner of the 2020 Costa Book of the Year Award, a gripping dark fairy tale that any fan of contemporary fantasy will happily swim through.
Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, winner of the 2020 Costa Book of the Year Award, is a gripping dark fairy tale that any fan of contemporary fantasy will happily swim through.
Endurance isn’t always a desirable quality. When the goal is admirable—creating art that will survive for generations, or persevering to achieve a noble dream—fortitude is a strength worth demonstrating. But if the goal is deplorable, such as when reinforcing the continuance of racist behavior, the determination to triumph merits no such respect.
Many forms of endurance are at the center of Horse, Geraldine Brooks’ return to themes she explored so well in previous works, such as her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March, which chronicles many of the injustices that occurred during America’s Civil War. Loosely based on a true story, Horse involves a discarded painting and a dusty skeleton, both of which concern a foal widely considered “the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.”
Brooks shifts her narrative among three related stories in as many centuries. In 2019, Theo, a Nigerian American graduate student at Georgetown University whose thesis is on 19th-century American equestrian art, makes a felicitous discovery, albeit from an unfriendly source. A racist widow who lives across the street from his apartment allows him to pick through the unwanted items she has put out on the sidewalk. His choice: an oil painting of a bright bay colt with four white feet.
Coincidentally enough—and indeed, some readers may find that the events in Horse rely too heavily on coincidence—a young white Australian woman named Jess, who runs the Smithsonian Museum’s vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab, discovers the articulated skeleton of the horse depicted in Theo’s painting. Theo and Jess eventually meet, although it’s a mortifying moment for her: Jess intimates that Theo is stealing her bike, when in fact he’s unlocking his identical model. Together they investigate the history of the horse.
That history is detailed in sections set in Kentucky and Louisiana in the 1850s and ’60s. Paramount among characters from the past are Jarret, an enslaved Black man who becomes the groom for the horse; Thomas J. Scott, a white Pennsylvania man who has come to Kentucky to paint animals; and Richard Ten Broeck, a wealthy white man whose interest in the horse is more mercenary than sportsmanlike.
The book’s third sections, set in 1950s New York, involve Martha Jackson, a real-life art dealer and equestrian lover who gains possession of the famous painting. Her sections add little, but Horse is brilliant when Brooks focuses on the 19th century and dramatizes American prejudice and discrimination before, during and after the Civil War. Jarret is a particularly memorable character, especially in his scenes with the horse and the painter, as is the slippery Ten Broeck, whose motivations are brilliantly set up and whose actions will resonate with chilling familiarity.
Brooks’ novel is an audacious work that reinforces, with sobering immediacy, the sad fact that racism has a remarkable capacity to endure.
Geraldine Brooks returns to themes she explored so well in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March.
Conner Habib, host of the podcast “Against Everyone With Conner Habib,” brings his curiosity about psychology and philosophy to fiction with Hawk Mountain, his mesmerizing debut novel about the intricacies of the human psyche and the effect of destructive behavior on love.
Thirty-three-year-old Todd Nasca is sitting on a New England beach while his son, Anthony, plays nearby. A man approaches the boy. Todd recognizes him as Jack Gates, whom he hasn’t seen in 15 years. Back then, Jack tormented Todd. Now seemingly amiable, Jack inserts himself into Todd’s life, bonding with Anthony, confronting Todd’s estranged ex-wife and making himself welcome in Todd’s home, while Todd drowns in memories and trauma, self-doubt and confusion.
The narrative’s uneasy edginess is supplemented by flashbacks to Todd and Jack’s adolescence, including a transformative field trip to Hawk Mountain in their senior year of high school. Additional perspectives from other characters build backstory and ramp up the precariousness of Todd’s relationships and sense of reality. Tension spirals as Habib leads the reader to wonder what the truth really is, who is telling it and who is believing it.
Habib’s unique examination of his flawed and fascinating characters as the victims and sources of violence is both disturbing and insightful. His exploration of the tangled web of human desire, emotions and abuse, and how it becomes a legacy passed down through generations, is gritty and chilling. With haunting prose and deeply atmospheric descriptions, Hawk Mountain is a disturbing descent into the convulsions of the human mind and heart.
With haunting prose and deeply atmospheric descriptions, Conner Habib’s Hawk Mountain is a disturbing descent into the convulsions of the human mind and heart.
Writers will tell you that their books are like their children: They nurture them, struggle with them and orient their whole lives around them. Elisa Albert plays with this trite analogy between artistic creation and parenthood in her third novel, Human Blues, the energetic tale of a singer-songwriter who wants to get pregnant but can’t.
Aviva’s infertility leads her and her husband, Sam, to consider the option of assisted reproductive technology. However, even though Aviva wants a child, she is terrified of these alternative methods. Her ambivalence fuels her music, giving her the perfect material for a breakthrough album. As she steps into her new position in the spotlight, she begins to wonder: Does she really want all that she says she wants? And who gets a say in what she really wants?
Spanning nine of Aviva’s menstrual cycles, Human Blues is filled with personality as Albert merges questions of fame and fertility into a thought-provoking exploration of agency and expression. Aviva’s musicianship gives Albert’s prose a distinct rhythm: It’s fast and sweet, with enough attitude to put Sleater-Kinney or even Lizzo to shame. Aviva’s characterization as a young bohemian fosters pop culture references aplenty, and this becomes a central aspect in the plot as her obsession with Amy Winehouse transforms from innocent worship to a near loss of self. As Aviva’s fame grows, she turns to her idol but is confronted with a grisly picture of stardom and womanhood gone sour. Whether she’s watching blockbuster movies or taking a yoga class, Aviva is confronted with the implications of her gender at every turn.
Aviva and Sam are unprepared for their biological processes to become subject to scrutiny, and they’re overwhelmed by philosophical questions about nature and nurture. In this way, the invasiveness of social media mirrors the invasiveness of the fertility industrial complex, and excerpts of Aviva’s online presence provide an all-too-relatable dimension to her physical and mental bombardment. But solace does come, and as the title implies, the result is an emotional, life-affirming howl into a wild world.
A singer-songwriter faces questions of fame and fertility in Elisa Albert’s novel, an emotional, life-affirming howl into a wild world.
At one point in Alice Elliott Dark’s marvelous second novel, a character says, “Howards End reminds me of Leeward Cottage.” Another character quickly responds: “I can see that. Except for the conflict about who will inherit it.” This short exchange wonderfully encapsulates the drama in Fellowship Point, whose intricate plot and precise prose sparkle like the waters off the Maine coast where the book is set.
The Fellowship Point peninsula hosts a handful of old-money summer cottages, including those owned by two wealthy matriarchs, lifelong friends Agnes Lee of Leeward Cottage and Polly Wister, who lives next door at Meadowlea. The tip of Fellowship Point contains 35 acres of undeveloped land known as the Sank (short for “sanctuary”), where an eager developer intends to build a resort. Therein lies the novel’s central conflict.
The cottage homeowners are part of a small association that manages the Sank, and Agnes has one goal before she dies: to dissolve the association and preserve the land forever. Polly would also like to see the land protected, but her eldest son is friends with the developer, so things get complicated.
Agnes and Polly could hardly be more different. Agnes, who never married, is the author of a successful series of children’s books and (anonymously) a series of popular adult novels. Polly has devoted her life to the happiness of her professor husband and now-grown children. Despite their differences, Polly and Agnes are united by their long lives together and the tragic losses they’ve experienced, which Dark gradually reveals.
As with old cottages, there is plenty of history to relate, and the story unfolds via alternating viewpoints from 2000 through 2008, with lengthy letters flashing back to the early 1960s. There’s also a host of well-drawn characters, including Maud, a young editor who’s urging the reluctant Agnes to write a memoir.
The contemporary conflict occurs during a time of millennial sea change, and Dark trains a sharp eye on the shifting tides of money, class, marriage and land ownership. She has created a phenomenal portrait of aging and the consequences of choices we’re forced to make. Along with these concrete, realistic details, Fellowship Point also has a sort of fairy-tale quality when ruminating on literature and the struggle to create it.
Dark (Think of England) intended for this epic saga to resemble a classic 19th-century novel featuring female landowners instead of men, and it took her nearly 20 years to write. Such a long rollout seems appropriate for a story of this nature, and her exquisite craftsmanship shines throughout. (Dark is also the author of two story collections, and her tale “In the Gloaming” is included in the Best American Stories of the Century and was adapted into an HBO film.)
Reading this novel is a transportive experience, similar to spending a long, luxurious summer on the shores of a picturesque Maine peninsula. It’s full of memorable adventures, tense moments of family drama and opportunities for restorative contemplation. Through it all, Fellowship Point harkens back to one of Howards End‘s big messages: “Only connect.”
Reading Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, Fellowship Point, is a transportive experience, similar to spending several long, luxurious summers on the shores of a picturesque Maine peninsula.
Call it prayer, call it intention or manifestation, call it “throwing it out into the universe to see what we get back.” At some point, we all have had a fundamentally unanswerable question whose solution we hoped to find somewhere in the great “out there.” In Cult Classic, the second novel from bestselling author and two-time Thurber Prize finalist Sloane Crosley, former psychology magazine editor Clive Glenn has reinvented himself as a New Age guru with a side of tech entrepreneur. He’s like L. Ron Hubbard by way of Gwyneth Paltrow, with a dash of Elon Musk.
Clive’s project, the Golconda, promises to “put your past into a cohesive whole in an abbreviated time frame, thereby setting an actual course correction for closure.” The Golconda’s Classic package arranges meet cutes with a user’s former paramours, followed by a debrief on a device that’s like a cross between a polygraph and the Scientology E-meter.
Clive’s former staffer Lola wants to confront her ex-lovers to discover why things blew up and maybe get a handle on where to go—if anywhere—with her fiancé, a laid-back glass artist called Boots. The source of Lola’s agita is not uncommon with folks tying the knot for the first time; fans of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity will recognize it straightaway. Is settling down the same thing as settling for less? And might we be more compatible with one of our exes than with the bird in the hand, if we’d known then what we know now? As Lola begins to uncover answers through the Classic package, she is also confronted with some troubling questions, both about her current relationship and about the Golconda project itself.
Through Lola, Crosley wields language like a rapier, slicing off layers of self-delusion and self-doubt to find even more layers underneath. Lola needs to make some hard decisions about her spouse-to-be-or-not-to-be, but in order to do that, she must uncover the secret at the heart of her guru’s creation. Does Golconda, like Lola’s checkered past with men, carry within it the seeds of its own destruction? If it implodes, can she withstand the fallout? And will the universe call her back before it’s too late?
In her second novel, Cult Classic, Sloane Crosley wields language like a rapier, slicing off onion layers of self-delusion and self-doubt to find even more layers underneath.
Joseph Han’s beautifully strange debut novel, Nuclear Family, is full of ghosts and spirits, real and metaphorical. At first it seems to be a relatively straightforward intergenerational saga about a Korean family in Hawaii, but soon the inventiveness of Han’s storytelling becomes apparent, and readers are submerged in a world where nothing is quite as it seems.
Hoping for a fresh start away from his family, 20-something Jacob Cho takes a job teaching English in Seoul. Not long after his arrival, he attempts to cross the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and is taken into custody. Back in Hawaii, his family is consumed with worry. His parents are struggling to keep their restaurant in business, while his sister, Grace, spends more and more of her time getting high.
None of them know that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his dead grandfather, Tae-woo, who is desperate to get across the DMZ to reunite with the family he left behind during the war. In Jacob, Tae-woo sees his best chance to get across the wall that has kept him—and countless others—separated from those they love, even in death.
Through this literal possession of a young man by a sly and grieving grandfather, Han tells a moving and specific story about more symbolic possessions—how violence possesses bodies, how history possesses the present and how a person’s stories remain alive in their descendants, even if those stories go unspoken.
Events unfold through a dizzying array of voices: Jacob, Grace and their parents; Tae-woo and his fellow ghosts; Jacob’s other grandparents; and a kind of Greek chorus of local Hawaiians, both Native and immigrant families. Han zooms in and out, moving between perspectives, times and places. These quick shifts in tone and voice can be disorienting, but they also give the novel its momentum.
Nuclear Family is about the trauma of living with invented borders, about dispossession and exile, and about the unhealed wounds of war that are felt across generations. Han’s characters—both dead and alive—are haunted by the past, even as they seek to escape it. Darkly funny, delightfully surprising and with a sprinkling of unusual formatting that reveals hidden subplots, Han’s debut bears witness to the brutal realities of war and imperialism while honoring the many kinds of magic that exist in the world.
Darkly funny and delightfully surprising, Joseph Han's debut novel, Nuclear Family, explores the trauma of invented borders through the possession of a young man by the ghost of his sly and grieving grandfather.
Longtime fans of Nina LaCour’s teen novels will be enchanted by the quietly powerful Yerba Buena, her first book for adult readers. It unfolds without any fanfare through a series of intimate and brilliantly observed details about growing up and into yourself. From one seemingly ordinary scene to the next, the relentless momentum of our imperfect, chaotic lives pulses through LaCour’s prose.
At 16, Sara is desperate to flee her small hometown on Northern California’s Russian River and get far away from her difficult childhood, her drug-dealing father and memories of her dead mother. When her girlfriend dies suddenly, Sara seizes the first opportunity to run. Pushing aside the traumas of her past, she begins to make a life for herself in Los Angeles.
Emilie is an LA native struggling with more nebulous challenges. She’s not sure what she wants, so she flits from major to major in college, and then from job to job. She doesn’t feel at ease in her family, as she’s still grieving the loss of the closeness she used to share with her sister.
Emilie and Sara meet at a restaurant where Sara tends bar and Emilie arranges flowers. They spend one meaningful night together, but it’s a long time before they connect again.
Yerba Buena is not a simple romance. It’s a layered story about the process of learning to love yourself, of holding onto and letting go of painful history, and of building your own home. Along the way, LaCour captures all the aches and hurts and betrayals and sensual delights of being in your 20s. Emilie and Sara get tangled in messy relationships—romantic, platonic and familial. They make impulsive choices as well as smart ones. They yearn for each other, but they aren’t ready for each other, and so they return, again and again, to their own lives, tumbling forward, muddling through, making mistakes and starting again.
LaCour’s prose has a soft, flowing quality and a lushness that readers of her previous books will recognize. She’s adept at describing the things that matter most to her protagonists: the colors of a flower arrangement, the quality of light on a wooden floor, a facial expression, the taste of a beloved gumbo recipe. She’s even better at describing tumultuous emotional landscapes. Sara and Emilie are such fully realized characters that by the end of the novel, you will feel as though you’ve spent time with cherished friends.
Bursting with emotionally resonant moments and vivid details of LA neighborhoods, Yerba Buena is a remarkable story of queer love and childhood trauma, addiction and forgiveness, family legacies and new beginnings.
In her first novel for adult readers, Nina LaCour captures all the aches and hurts and betrayals and sensual delights of being in your 20s.
There are many pieces of fiction that attempt to capture and explore our collective fascination with true crime, but while those stories manage to convey at least some of the truths surrounding that obsession, few ever reach its emotional core. Katie Gutierrez’s debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, joins those select ranks, as this elegant, evocative tale of suspense burrows straight to the heart of our cultural true crime fixation through an intense emotional dance between two seemingly different women.
Cassie Bowman is a true crime blogger who dreams of more. After years of trafficking in the seediest corners of the genre, she wants to take her journalism prowess to new heights and prove that she has something to say about the ways people hurt each other. When she stumbles upon the story of Dolores “Lore” Rivera—a banker whose double life led to one of her husbands murdering the other in 1985—Cassie thinks she might have finally found a tale worth telling. When the two women finally meet, though, the tension between their personalities kicks off a series of conversations that reveals the truth about both of their pasts.
Told across two time periods set decades apart and narrated through both Cassie’s and Lore’s perspectives, More Than You’ll Ever Know has all the ingredients necessary for a good thriller. Gutierrez writes with an instinctive understanding of the scaffolding necessary to keep readers turning the pages, and the narrative flies by as the dramatic and emotional tensions in both women’s lives ratchet up.
Beyond the novel’s well-executed, suspenseful structure, Gutierrez also clearly understands her characters, where they’ve come from and what they want and need. Both women are searching for something, longing for understanding in a world full of mysteries that are never solved. Whether it’s Lore’s emotional journey or Cassie’s deep dive into her chosen journalistic genre, Gutierrez has crafted detailed, vulnerable portraits of women searching for clues to their own survival. In the process, she unearths some truly compelling insights about our cultural obsession with true crime.
Katie Gutierrez’s debut novel burrows straight to the heart of our true crime fixation through an intense emotional dance between two seemingly different women.
Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is a delightful invitation to reunite with Selin by picking up her adventures where we left off in The Idiot. Now a sophomore at Harvard University, Selin continues to explore, meander and wonder throughout the autumn of 1996, the spring of ’97 and the summer that follows.
Selin’s voice is notably more mature, more reflective and perhaps more droll, and yet she’s still true to herself as she tries to figure out who, exactly, that self is and can be. She attempts to make sense of the previous summer—her travels in Hungary, her time with her crush, Ivan, and his strangeness and distance, and all the many experiences she’s lived but doesn’t yet understand—and searches for guidance through the works assigned for her literature class, including The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard and more.
As Either/Or moves through the year, Selin begins to live actively rather than reflexively; she develops agency, and her choices have power. As she shows an increasing awareness of and engagement with the world, she starts to move out of her novels and into her own self.
Readers will find the tensions of history and present-day politics difficult to miss while reading Either/Or: Russian literature is a strong influence in Selin’s life, and her on-campus job is at the Ukrainian Research Institute. The 1990s technology is a throwback and a joy, and it’s fascinating to consider the ways that email and the internet have changed and shaped everything in our world, from relationships to travel. There’s humor in the lived experiences of parties, classes, alcohol and sex, and Batuman’s balancing of all these elements is remarkable.
Our present moment will change, and technology will continue to evolve, but undoubtedly Selin’s voice will remain a gem.
Selin, hero of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, returns with a voice that is more mature, reflective and droll as she starts to move out of her novels and into her own self.
It’s rare for a novelist to read their own audiobook. Most authors who step up to the mic are recording nonfiction, with fiction audiobooks typically being performed by a voice actor or full cast. But Booker Prize finalist Mohsin Hamid possesses transportive powers as an audiobook narrator, and with new recordings of his first two novels, Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist(4.5 hours), he has now narrated all five of his books.
Told in a first-person monologue by a Pakistani man named Changez to an unnamed American at a cafe in Lahore not long after 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes for an especially powerful listening experience as, over the course of one evening, a sense of dread builds and demands a reckoning. For his first ever interview on his work as a narrator, Hamid took a video call at his home in Pakistan to discuss this “one-man play.”
When writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist, how much did you think about what it would be like to step into the role of author-narrator-character? I sort of wrote all of my books as audiobooks. I didn’t realize this until years later, but I really do think of literature or fiction as something we absorb through our aural circuitry more than our visual circuitry. Many of us read books with our eyes—some people read with their fingers or with their ears, as with audiobooks—but so many of us grew up reading with our eyes, so it’s a very visual experience, and the way things look should be important. But I tend to feel that the circuitry involved is still very much the circuitry of sound and language and rhythm and cadence.
One of the formative moments for me as a writer was taking a creative writing workshop with Toni Morrison back in 1993 spring in college. . . . And one thing she did in her class is that she would read our work aloud back to us. She could make a Corn Flakes box sound like poetry. She was the greatest reader I ever encountered, and when she would read . . . I thought, “Wow, I can really write! I’ve got it!”
She said things like, “You want to keep your reader a sort of half-heartbeat ahead of the action, so that what comes next can be a surprise, but it should feel like it was inevitable.” . . . One of the ways we do that in cinema, for example, is through the soundtrack, which suggests movements and motions and directions even while the visuals are doing something else. In written fiction, cadence and sound and rhythm can begin to establish these sorts of movements and directions, so that you have the chance of this feeling of inevitability.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist wasn’t originally conceived as a 9/11 novel. You finished its first draft prior to that day, but as the world changed, so did your book. Now we have the opportunity to revisit your 9/11 novel with the gift of hindsight. What do you think is its place in our current reading environment? It’s hard for me to answer that. I remember once being at this literary festival in Mantua, Italy. And as I say this, I should make clear that my life is not spent at literary festivals in Mantua, Italy. It was as exotic for me to be there as it is to say it to you now, but there I was under some clock tower in the open air, the stars above us, and Russell Banks was there. . . . I knew that a book of his had come out recently, and I had asked him if he was happy with how it had done and, you know, the usual chitchat you try to make with some literary icon when you’re this young kid who’s written a book or two. And he said something that stuck with me.
He said, “You know, it’s too soon to say. . . . It’s not until about 10 years after a book comes out that you begin to have a sense of what it’s doing. And the reasons why people are still reading it 10 years on are probably what you actually did. That’s what people got from it.” This is the kind of thing you go to literary festivals for, so that some much more experienced writer can unload this wisdom on you. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is now 15 years old, so it’s past the Russell Banks 10-year law, and I think people still seem to be reading it.
I wrote that book very much with the idea of the reader as a kind of character. Not that the novel is addressed to you, necessarily, but the book is a kind of half novel. We never hear half of the story; we never hear Changez’s interlocutor really say anything. Even more than most novels—or all novels, by virtue of being pieces of ink printed on paper that require a transmutation by the reader that makes them come alive—this book, because so much of it is missing, [forces the reader] to try and restabilize this narrative. The book was intended as a way for the reader to encounter how they feel about the story. What are the instincts that it provokes in them? What are their inclinations? Who do you think is threatening whom? Why? And it leads you, in a sense, to a position that isn’t quite resolved, and so you have to figure out either how to resolve it or what that unresolved state makes you feel. And I think it still does that, I imagine.
The form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is this dramatic monologue, is really akin to a one-man play. So in doing an audiobook, I was performing that one-man play. I’d always imagined it as this almost stage story, and suddenly I was on this stage, and it felt oddly like coming full circle.
That dramatic monologue is so effective as an audiobook. The listener is called upon in a very different way than with other novels. We feel like we’re being addressed. That’s good to hear. It is a very direct form of address. It has to be. And in that book in particular, voice is so important because Changez, we learn, is ostensibly Muslim. But he doesn’t pray, he drinks, he has sex, he doesn’t quote the Quran or think about the doings of the Prophet. . . . His Islam appears to be a sort of tribal [affiliation]. It’s sort of “these are my people, I belong to something,” much more than it is an operating system, you know, like MacOS.
Some people might imagine that Islam has a kind of . . . rigidity or formality, that it has a kind of, you know, menace. I think these sorts of perceptions that many people do have about Islam—who are not Muslims or don’t know very many Muslims, particularly in that post-9/11 environment—the novel doesn’t give those attributes to Changez, but it does use a voice that can invoke those attributes. So you can end up believing things about this guy, not because he thinks in a certain way or even does anything, but just because it sounds like he might.
And so the reading of that book was very interesting and actually fun because Changez speaks in this very formal, kind of anachronistic way, and that formality is also a distancing, and it builds to what feels like a kind of menace because, you know, so often we assume that a more colloquial, friendly form of address is not threatening, but Changez’s quite formal address [makes us wonder,] “Why is he keeping me at a distance? What does he intend to do to me? What kind of person speaks in this way? Why does he think like this?”
I used to talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a thriller in which nothing really happens. And I think that sense of thrill comes from the fact that we are already frightened of each other. There’s a preexisting thrill in the reader—whether it’s a reader who sympathizes with Changez and is frightened of the American, or sympathizes with the American and is frightened of Changez—and the novel tries to invoke within the reader a feeling of that discomfort that we were all encouraged to have in those years, that we belonged to these different groups and that we had to be in conflict.
And as audiobook listeners, we’re even more vulnerable to what the story wants to invoke in us. We’re passive receivers; we’re not even moving our eyes across the page. Weirdly enough, it’s closer to the experience of Changez’s interlocutor in the book itself. The confined space of this conversation, where somebody is forced to listen to somebody else for hours, is more akin to an audiobook experience, where you’re sort of sitting there and this person is coming at you with their voice.
Are you a frequent audiobook listener? I tend to feel that the inbound-information-to-my-eyes thing is a little bit overloaded. Either I’m reading stuff online or I’m actually reading a book or I’m writing something, and then when I’m not, there’s a complex series of advertisements directed at me and my kids’ devices, and I think that I long to just have my eyes be free. And that’s when the idea of just listening to something becomes so attractive. My daughter does the exact same thing, but she listens to music for hours every day, and she’s dancing in her room by herself, and she has that relationship with music that teens and preteens sort of have had from time immemorial. It’s just ears. It’s ears and your body in space.
You know, I’m now reminded of this thing that Philip Gourevitch once said to me when he was editor of TheParis Review. He said, “It’s strange, but we get more short story submissions than we have subscribers.” . . . I feel a little bit like that, where I’ve recorded this handful of audiobooks these last few years, but how many have I listened to? I think I’m like the Paris Review submitter of audiobooks. I talk a good game, but I don’t really walk the walk as far as listening is concerned. So it’s a bit shameful, but anyway, I’m a writer, so I make the things. I don’t listen that much.
Photo of Mohsin Hamid by Jillian Edelstein
Fifteen years after its initial publication, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets a haunting new audiobook recorded by its author.
G.K. Chesterton once said that he had “searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.” In Michelle Huneven’s fifth novel, Search, we can begin to see why Chesterton’s hunt proved so fruitless.
Pastor Tom Fox has been dialing it in lately, and his Southern Californian congregation is becoming restless. Some of the church’s executive committee members approach a fellow congregant, restaurant critic and food writer Dana Potowski, with the suggestion that she take him to lunch and have a come-to-Jesus chat about the situation. Well, not exactly come-to-Jesus; the Unitarian Universalists don’t work that way.
For readers unfamiliar with it, the Unitarian Universalist Association is a spiritual organization that’s open to theists, atheists, agnostics and believers of all stripes, formed from the union of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. “I could go into some detail about the theological and class differences between the two groups,” says narrator Dana, “but suffice it to say that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian and P. T. Barnum a Universalist.”
When Pastor Fox cops to his critics’ appraisal and lets it slip that he’s planning to retire from ministry, this sets into motion a replacement search committee, which Dana semireluctantly joins. Previous committee meetings had taken place over potluck dinners, so Dana persuades herself to take the plunge by planning to get her next project—The Search Committee Cookbook—out of it.
Whiting Award winner Huneven is uniquely suited to undertake a novel like this; not only did she study at the Methodist Claremont School of Theology and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but she’s also a James Beard Award-winning food journalist. She gleefully digs into the sausagemaking of a New-Agey church committee trying to reach consensus. They go on retreat. They hold meetings. They undergo anti-oppression training “to promote inclusivity and discourage undue discrimination in the search process.” And they talk—with one another, over one another, behind one another’s backs, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes lovingly, sometimes angrily. By the time the process winds down, all eight committee members have vetted not only the replacement candidates but also each other.
They also consume a great deal of food. If it’s true (as Napoleon may have said) that an army marches on its stomach, then a church committee bears some resemblance to a platoon. Here Huneven sparkles, with chop-licking descriptions of their potluck delectables, and as a bonus, she includes a baker’s dozen recipes as appendices.
But there’s also a profoundly spiritual dimension to Search. It raises difficult questions about living one’s beliefs in a faith-based community and doesn’t flinch when principles and practice come into conflict. Like a challenging sermon or a great restaurant’s tasting menu, Search leaves the reader hungry for more.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.