What if you were God, going about your godly business—arbitrarily bestowing blessings and havoc upon humanity’s billions and enjoying the glorious handiwork of your cosmos—when, quite literally out of the blue, you started paying closer attention to a lanky geneticist named Daphne who works in a provincial Italian city? Well, of course you would have to write about it. Unfortunately, no language can ever adequately express God’s quandary of having fallen head-over-incorporeal-heels in love with a human. Therefore, the whole literary enterprise is a bust from the get-go. It’s a delightful, strikingly current, infectiously readable bust.

The irrational pull of erotic love has never had a funnier incarnation than the one in I Am God, the latest novel by satirical Italian author Giacomo Sartori. The deity’s infatuation with Daphne drives him crazier and crazier, until he must—no, I won’t spoil it for you. Besides, it’s just too embarrassing for poor ol’ God, as it never was for that serial sexual predator Zeus.

In composing Sono Dio (the original title sounds so much better), Sartori pulls out all the stops in a long tradition of first-person confessions by the Creator, beginning with the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. In the radical spirit of those biblical pronouncements, the words coming out of this God’s invisible mouth are altogether unnerving and explicitly reproachful to any belief system, whether orthodox or atheistic. Transcending mere blasphemy, Sartori refuses to take the Lord’s name in vain. Every little chapter of I Am God forces the reader to decide whether laughter or outrage is the proper response.

There’s a grand tradition of Italian artists (Dante, Michelangelo, Verdi) who shock us with their new and unsettling images of God. In his modest and profound way, Sartori belongs in this terrific company.

What’s a guru to do when he loses control of his own inspirational movement?

This question drives Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it.

If ever there lived an accidental messiah, it’s Hark Morner. His original goal—in one of Lipsyte’s many sly commentaries—was to be a stand-up comic. He wasn’t all that good, but a club owner booked him to perform his act on “the pitfalls of office life” at corporate gatherings. Hark quickly began to take his own words seriously. He had found his calling.

Hark calls his method “mental archery,” or “a few tricks, or tips, to help people focus,” which include everything from yoga and New Age speak to literal bows and arrows. It’s not long before he attracts adherents, who are feverishly devoted to Hark’s vision. Among them are Fraz Penzig, an unhappily married father of twins who is “rich in nutrients, solid from the gym,” yet perpetually feeling “on the verge of the verge of death”; Kate Rumpler, a young heiress who funds the nascent Harkist institute; and Teal Baker-Cassini, former Fulbright scholar and erstwhile embezzler, who now handles the group’s marketing.

Give the world a popular movement, and mercenaries are sure to follow. That’s what happens here, as social media tycoons and others try to monetize Hark’s movement, leaving the former comic to wonder what sort of joke he has unleashed on the world.

Oddly enough for a novel about the power of focus, Hark sometimes strays from its central story. But Lipsyte lands plenty of jabs at his targets, from internet trolls and conspiracy theorists to the desire for quick fixes to complicated problems.

If acidic satire helps you fend off life’s challenges, then put Hark in your quiver.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the age of YouTube: An embarrassing video of a celebrity goes viral, obliterating a reputation with the speed and thoroughgoing devastation of an F5 tornado. In Talk to Me, his sly second novel, John Kenney (author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014) dives into the muck of one such scandal, exploring its human toll while raising troubling questions about what it means to produce and consume news today.

The anchor of a highly rated network news show for two decades, Ted Grayson looks like he’s on top of his game. But when his ire at a young immigrant woman leads to a meltdown that’s captured on video, he’s launched on a downward spiral that threatens his career and causes him to question everything he thought he knew about being a journalist. Compounding Ted’s crisis is an impending divorce and the fact that his daughter, Franny, works as a reporter at the bottom-feeding website scheisse.com, run by a young German billionaire whose motto is “NO RULES. JUST CLICKS,” and who’s only too happy to capitalize on Ted’s sudden fall.

Kenney takes the reader inside the maelstrom of the 24/7 news cycle, as an increasingly bewildered Ted watches his world collapse around him, helpless to counteract the forces fueling his destruction. In Ted, Kenney has created a sympathetic and fully realized protagonist who’s haunted by the price he’s paid for a success that now seems hollow, by the decay of his marriage to a woman he still loves and by an estrangement from his daughter that’s deep enough to allow her to become complicit in his downfall.

For all the fast-paced and knowing entertainment it provides, Talk to Me may also serve as a useful antidote to rushed judgment when the next celebrity scandal erupts.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poor Jason Fitger. In Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s hilarious 2014 novel, Fitger is a tenured professor of English at the second-rate Payne University, where he has a dingy office by the bathroom, writes sardonic letters of recommendation and gripes about the school’s political in-fighting.

Life isn’t much better in The Shakespeare Requirement, Schumacher’s entertaining follow-up. Fitger is now the department chair, to the faculty’s dismay. That’s not his only problem: The university has renovated Willard Hall, but only for the Economics department, which now enjoys hot-and-cold water fountains and an espresso bar. English is stuck in the dilapidated lower floors, where Fitger has a “barbarically hot” office with “fossilized apple cores” under his desk and wasps in the windows.

That isn’t indignity enough for Roland Gladwell, the Economics chair. He wants to get rid of the English department entirely, so he convinces Phil Hinckler, dean of the university and Fitger’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, to let him chair a quality-assessment program that he hopes will help achieve his goal.

One of the ways English can survive is by submitting an acceptable Statement of Vision. This, too, poses problems, as the proposed statement eliminates the requirement that all students take a Shakespeare course, a change that infuriates the department’s Shakespeare scholar and becomes a cause célèbre among the student body.

The novel includes many colorful characters, among them Fitger’s assistant, Fran, who’d much rather be an animal behavior consultant, and Angela Vackray, a freshman who gets into trouble with a boy from her Bible study.

Schumacher’s humor can be broad—a centenary celebration is called “One Hundred Years of Payne”—but the book has more laugh-out-loud lines than most novels, and she wields cutting remarks that are as sharp as ever. The Shakespeare Requirement is a bitter delight, perhaps, but a delight nonetheless.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There’s no shortage of recent nonfiction works lamenting that our obsession with digital devices could turn our world into one where most human connection is a distant memory. For all the science proferred to support that thesis, leave it to a work of fiction—Courtney Maum’s razor-sharp Touch—to bring this vexing issue into focus with compassion and wit.

Sloane Jacobsen is a brilliant trend forecaster who’s been hired by consumer electronics company Mammoth (think Apple meets Amazon) to help develop a line of products aimed at childless couples. Instead of stimulating Sloane’s predictive gift, that assignment brings to light the state of her rapidly cooling domestic relationship with Roman Bellard, a self-styled public intellectual who’s taken to wearing a bizarre full-body outfit that makes Sloane think of him as a “Lycra-suited zombie.” It doesn’t help that Sloane’s vision of a world in which “touch could come back to people’s lives” clashes with Roman’s enthusiasm for a virtual “post-sexual world,” a pronouncement that goes viral with the publication of a New York Times op-ed.

Maum deftly manipulates this tantalizing setup to raise provocative questions about why so many of us seem to be happier tapping and swiping than we are in encounters with real human beings and what it might take to change that behavior. It’s premature to predict whether our world will evolve toward more intimate interactions or greater absorption with our ever more sophisticated smart phones and tablets. Whatever may happen, Touch provides an entertaining frame for what will continue to be a lively debate.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What is it about books set at elite schools? The grosgrain ribbon belt-bedecked cover of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. The anxiety-filled Princeton offices in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission. The bittersweet final days of college in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. These stories somehow manage to intrigue even those of us who’ve never set foot in a prep school, let alone an Ivy League college.

It’s no surprise, of course, that Amy Poeppel—author of the deliciously smart Small Admissions—went to Wellesley College and worked in admissions for what her book jacket calls “a prestigious independent school.” Her razor-sharp observations of families desperate to place their darlings in the best Manhattan schools can only come from someone who’s lived in that world.

Kate Pearson was on track to become an academic, applying to grad schools in her chosen field of anthropology. She had a gorgeous if caddish boyfriend, Robert, who was “so ridiculously French, which was somehow an asset and a defect at the same time,” Poeppel writes. 

When Robert ditches her as soon as she lands in Paris to live with him, Kate abandons her carefully planned life and takes up residence on her New York couch. Her friend Chloe, who is Robert’s cousin and introduced the pair, feels guilty. Her sister worries for Kate’s mental health and connects her with the admissions director at Hudson Day School, who is desperate to fill an admissions counselor position before the rush. Despite a catastrophically bad interview, Kate gets the job. Slowly, slowly, she reclaims her life, her friendships and her way.

Poeppel nails the naked ambition of New York power moms for whom placing their children in a prep school is as important as securing the newest Birkin bag. Small Admissions is a laugh-out-loud funny look at status and rejection in all its forms, from the classroom to the bedroom.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, November 2016

In the United States, good journalists are muckrakers, rabble-rousers, sometimes even troublemakers—their job is to rock the boat. In this sense, newly naturalized U.S. citizen Feng Danlin, the hero of Ha Jin’s page-turning but profound new novel, The Boat Rocker, is a true American. A columnist for a Chinese-language newspaper operated out of New York City, Danlin knows that some of his columns make it into China despite the country’s outside-media freeze, and he takes that responsibility seriously.

When we meet him, Danlin is chasing a new obsession: a story about his ex-wife, Yan Haili, who left him for another man and went on to write a romance novel starring idealized versions of herself and her new husband. Adding insult to personal injury, the Chinese government has positioned itself firmly behind Haili’s book, hailing it as an example of improving relations between the U.S. and China. When Danlin discovers that reports of American excitement over the book (including a huge movie deal and English-language translation) are lies, he makes exposing them his focus.

Danlin is self-righteous about his hatred of the book, and he’s tireless in attacking both it and his ex-wife. Initially, his pursuit of such a seemingly silly story in which he has an obvious personal stake makes the reader question his credibility and judgment. We find ourselves wishing Danlin would drop his personal vendetta. But eventually we start to see the point: When a government begins to manipulate art, even romance novels, it signals a determination to root out individuality and liberty wherever it grows.

Haili’s betrayal of Danlin echoes the bigger betrayal of Danlin by China itself, a home that has been closed off to him. His divorce lets him finally access the pain of being rejected by a country that attacks his sense of justice, his right to question authority and even his right to seek truth and fulfillment in his own life and work. The twists and turns of Danlin’s fight with Haili make The Boat Rocker a compelling read, but Jin’s insight into nationalism, patriotism and the true cost of freedom of the press gives the novel depth and brilliance.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The latest book from Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, Razor Girl, has a plot that gets pretty crazy, out-of-control and hilariously cockamamie. Then again, it’s set in Florida. For all we know, the inspiration could have come off the Herald’s front page. 

When talent agent Lane Coolman’s rented car gets rear-ended 27 miles out of Key West, it’s not so much an accident as an on-purpose. The causative agent is a stunning young redhead who claims to have been distracted while performing some personal grooming that should not be undertaken with a straight razor in a car at all, let alone while driving. As a consequence, Coolman never makes it to the onstage performance of his client, faux-redneck reality star Buck Nance (né Matthew Romberg), and as a consequence, said gig goes sideways in extravagant fashion. 

Nance narrowly manages to escape the mayhem he caused at The Parched Pirate, but then he drops off the grid entirely, setting his agency’s honchos alight with what passes for concern in Hollywood. And when they realize that perhaps Buck’s disappearance might be good for his show, “Bayou Brethren,” they set in motion a chain of events that leads to kidnapping, manslaughter, redemption and an ever-evolving set of deal memos.

This, of course, is only one through-line in the novel, whose disparate strands end up woven tighter than a macramé lanyard by story’s end. Along the way we meet a detective who’s been busted down to vermin inspector; a Mafia don nicknamed Big Noogie; a grifter who schemes to import sand from Cuba; a class-action shyster; a Syrian immigrant whose vacation cruise takes a deadly turn; a cross-section of the “Nance” clan, who fuse Honey Boo-Boo’s low-rent splendor with the Kardashians’ relentless drive for self-promotion . . . and of course, the Razor Girl herself.

Only a skilled verbal stunt pilot like Hiaasen could bring this flight of fancy in for a safe landing, but there’s definitely some turbulence along the way, so you’ll want to keep those seat belts fastened.

RELATED CONTENT: Read an interview with Carl Hiaasen about Razor Girl.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, some triumphalists in the West expected something unlikely. They expected Russia to play nice. It hasn’t turned out that way, and they blame Vladimir Putin. But imagine Russia’s surly and enigmatic leader once he has fallen from power. Imagine him with his faculties less than intact. This is the premise of The Senility of Vladimir P., the ingenious second novel from former surgeon Michael Honig. 

The five-term president, two-term prime minister and de facto czar suffers from hallucinations. An imagined Chechen torments him, so he treats the mirage to his well-known judo skills. In more lucid moments, he raves about his own cunning and watches TV footage of his exploits. Putin’s long-suffering, long-term nurse, Sheremetev, considers himself the last incorruptible Russian. Then his nephew Pasha goes to jail, and Sheremetev takes to pawning Putin’s vast collection of luxury watches to set Pasha free. 

Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Honig’s novel is the farce to Russia’s genuine tragedy. The dacha where Putin convalesces comes to symbolize post-Soviet Russia as a whole, and the novel betrays a serious anguish at what has befallen the country. It delights in showing its architect as a destructive megalomaniac. Today, Putin likes to appear shirtless to show his virility. Honig suggests instead that the emperor wears no clothes.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.