“Cleanness,” by Garth
Greenwell
“Stranger Faces,” by Namwali
Serpell
In an age
of totalizing theories, it’s nice to watch someone expertly pull a single idea
through a needle’s eye. “Stranger Faces,” by Namwali Serpell, is one such
exercise. The book’s catalytic inquiry—“what counts as a face and why?”—means
to undermine the face, the way its expressive capabilities give it the cast of
truth. We seek meaning in a shallow arrangement of eyes, nose, cheeks, and
mouth, despite how often faces lie, or how often they cloak the world-ordering
phenomena of race, gender, and class. Rather than depress or shame readers with
these facts, Serpell delights in them. Unencumbered by truth, the face becomes
interesting, motile—a work of art. (“Unruly faces” are especially intriguing,
according to Serpell, because they invite viewers to sever ties with the
placidity of an ideal.) Serpell, a Harvard professor and critic capable of
close-reading people just as well as novels or films, includes a dancing range
of examples. Her first essay considers the moniker given to Joseph Merrick, the
Elephant Man, whose features aren’t, in fact, so elephantine; another essay, on
Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” becomes a study of Keanu Reeves’s himbo appeal.
Serpell can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright,
brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question.
—Lauren Michele Jackson
“Want,” by Lynn Steger
Strong
New
Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
New York
novels are as various as the city they describe. But “Want,” a subtly glorious
new entry in the genre by Lynn Steger Strong, is set in a town whose
qualities—unaffordable, unrelenting, unquittable—many readers will recognize.
The book’s narrator is a writer who lives with her husband and two young
daughters in a cramped Brooklyn apartment; to keep them in it, she teaches at a
charter school by day and in an M.F.A. writing program by evening, though her
half-hearted hustling doesn’t stop the family from capsizing into bankruptcy.
(The husband quit a job in finance to become an artisanal carpenter, a phrase
that would fit nicely on a Green-Wood Cemetery tombstone.) The virtue of this
life is its being defiantly chosen. To counteract the claustrophobic privacy of
subway commutes, and the slights of rubbing up against the city’s rich and
oblivious, we get sticky memories of Florida, where the narrator grew up in a
repressive, bourgeois household. There, her closest friend was Sasha, a
beautiful, daring girl a year older, whose fate has been uncomfortably linked
with hers ever since. Strong uses the friendship as a tether, returning to it
to mark time’s passing; her technique is so sophisticated that the murk of the
present and the sharply remembered past hold seamlessly together. Her biggest
triumph is the transmission of consciousness. I loved the tense pleasure of staying
pressed close to her narrator’s mind, with its beguiling lucidity of thought
and rawness of feeling. There is much anxiety and ache to be found here—but
also, when it is most needed, radiance, humor, love, and joy. —Alexandra
Schwartz
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“On Anger,” edited by Agnes
Callard
Unless
you’re dealing with a hard-line Stoic, most philosophers tend to consider anger
a morally justifiable response to being wronged—though too much anger,
for too long, they might say, could start to hurt you or your community.
In the explosive essay that kicks off this anthology, the philosopher Agnes
Callard writes that such caveats defang the very point of anger. If anger is a
valid response to being wronged, she argues, and if none of the ways we hold
people accountable for wronging us—apologies, restitution, etc.—actually erase
the original act, doesn’t it follow that “once you have a reason to be angry,
you have a reason to be angry forever”? Cue the clamor of a dozen-plus
philosophers debating the cause, function, and value of our most jagged
emotion. There’s Myisha Cherry, whose work is always so marvelously elegant, on
the irrelevance of virtue to the anger that fuels the anti-racist struggle—an
anger she describes as “Lordean rage,” after the poet and writer Audre Lorde.
Elsewhere, we get Judith Butler on anger as a medium: “[W]e view rage as an
uncontrollable impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people
craft rage, they cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft
their rage. Artists craft rage all the time.” I’m resistant to the idea that
moral philosophy is just self-help dressed in tweed, but as this year lurched
from one outrage to the next, and as I found myself becoming hoarse
(metaphorically, but often literally) from what felt like shouting into a void,
this collection became something of a workbook: a tool for parsing the more
unwieldy parts of myself, and my loved ones, and the world. —Helen Rosner
“Mexican Gothic,” by Silvia
Moreno-Garcia
In the
fall, I cracked open Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Mexican Gothic” in the bath and
found myself reading until the water turned cold. “Mexican Gothic” is
Moreno-Garcia’s sixth novel but the first to break through as a major hit. (It
has already been optioned for television.) This is a function both of its
timing and of its addictive prose, which is as easy to slurp down as a poisoned
cordial. The book follows a glamorous young socialite with champagne taste
named Noemí Taboada, who lives in Mexico City, in the nineteen-fifties, when
women were not yet able to vote. Noemí intends to study at university, but her
father has other plans: he wants her to check up on a distant cousin, Catalina,
who’s living in a crumbling manse with a British man, in a small village,
called El Triunfo, where the family operates a silver mine. Catalina has
written a distressing note claiming that the house is suffocating her; the
family assumes that she’s hysterical, but Noemí is meant to investigate the
situation. What she finds is more shocking than she ever expected—the house is
an entropic catastrophe, where something sinister (that I won’t spoil here) is
literally growing under the baseboards. What makes “Mexican Gothic” so fresh is
not only its cramped, crawly ambience—comparisons to “Jane Eyre” are not too
generous—but also the fact that it’s steeped in a deep colonial history that
haunts the narrative. Is the house in El Triunfo really sick? Or is it just
tainted by colonizers who want to strip the land down to its bones?
Moreno-Garcia deftly raises these questions and then brings them all together
in a gory, monstrous, and utterly satisfying twist. —Rachel Syme
“Blindness,” by José
Saramago
José
Saramago’s “Blindness” came by mail, last winter, one month after COVID
came to the U.S. It arrived in a box, with a half-dozen other books, including
Camus’s “The Plague” and Defoe’s “Journal of a Plague Year,”
about the literature of infection, for an assignment. I
read the Saramago in a cabin in the woods, a sugarhouse, while tending a fire,
boiling sap. I’d get lost in the story of a plague of blindness and then put
the book down to throw another log in the fire. The pages of the paperback got hot
in my hands. I started to sweat, reading about the blindness that fell upon
everyone, so that they could see only white, and then I’d stare into the flames
and at the sap, bubbling, and the steam, rising, a cloud of white. I took one
last trip after that, to Rutgers, the first week of March. I remember being
worried about the virus on the train, wearing winter gloves and a scarf,
thinking I should have cancelled. I gave a lecture and went out to dinner with
a dozen people, professors of English and history. We sat at a long table by a
fire, a last supper, and I happened to ask if anyone had ever read “Blindness,”
and, weirdly, everyone had. So we went around the table, sacramentally, talking
about our favorite lines, characters, moments: the doctor’s wife, the story of
the dog, how the infected escape, blindly, from the lunatic asylum where
they’ve been quarantined, and the part where they find soap and, finally, wash
themselves, naked, on a balcony, with buckets of rainwater. And then, it was
all over. —Jill Lepore
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“Children of Ash and Elm: A History of
the Vikings,” by Neil Price
Reading
the archeologist Neil Price’s beguiling book feels a little like time
travel—and who, in 2020, didn’t feel tempted to drop into another epoch? Price
achieves this feat with an accumulation of sensory detail, along with a
grounded but game approach to conjuring the inner worlds of people whose
cosmology, for starters, is utterly different from our own. (As he writes,
we’ll never really know what it might have felt like “if you truly believed—in
fact, knew—that the man living up the valley could turn into a wolf
under certain circumstances.”) Not the least of Price’s achievement is to
rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious
lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for
the Vikings—theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrifice and
slavery, as Price makes abundantly clear—but by restoring their rich and
strange particularity. As seafarers who travelled and traded widely, Vikings
were, almost by definition, multiethnic. “There was never any such thing as a
‘pure Nordic’ bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by
the very notion,” Price writes. The book is full of such insights, but what has
stuck with me are Price’s descriptions of a world enamored with beauty.
Surfaces, including those of the body, were intricately decorated, tendrilled
over with runic inscriptions and tiny pictures. (Vikings do not seem to have
been the unkempt beasts of pop culture legend—the archeological record is heavy
on, of all things, combs.) I’ll long remember Price’s evocation of the
wafer-thin squares of gold, stamped with images of otherworldly beings, that
adorned the great halls where visitors drank and fought and recited poetry.
Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something
similar here. —Margaret Talbot
“Rodham,” by Curtis
Sittenfeld
I have
always been amazed by the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s talent for selecting
people who we think we already know and convincing us that they are far more
complicated and interesting than we ever dreamed. Before I read “American Wife,” I had a
basic smug liberal contempt for Laura Bush, who I perceived as her husband’s
mute appendage. But in Sittenfeld’s telling, the former first lady—or someone
quite like her—was a shy but sharp bibliophile with seething guilt and
compelling self-doubt. Now I kind of love her. Similarly, a Republican friend
told me that reading Sittenfeld’s latest, “Rodham,” caused her to question
everything she’d believed about Hillary Rodham Clinton. We were both riveted by
Sittenfeld’s brave, passionate, and diligent heroine navigating lust, ambition,
Arkansas, the Ivy League, and, of course, Washington. Sittenfeld’s writing is
so fine, her characters so vivid, her empathy so profound that she manages to
absorb the reader on a level that transcends partisanship. In 2020, that was a
remarkable achievement and an enormous gift to her readers. —Ariel Levy
“The Art of Doing Science and
Engineering: Learning to Learn,” by Richard Hamming
Richard
W. Hamming was a mathematician by training, but he cut his teeth as a
researcher working at Los Alamos, programming the I.B.M. computers that
physicists used to solve equations as they worked on the atomic bomb. After the
war, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he remained for thirty years.
This was when big corporations such as I.B.M. and Bell led the charge of
technological innovation, and Hamming’s fingerprints were all over the period’s
advances. He invented so-called Hamming codes, now basic to digital processing,
and co-created an early programming language, L2. After retiring, he taught at
the Naval Postgraduate School, in California, giving courses in not just how to
do things but how to think like a scientist and conduct a fruitful creative
career. (He called it “style.”) In the mid-nineties, a few years before his
death, Hamming turned his lecture notes into a book, “The Art of Doing Science
and Engineering: Learning to Learn,” which has been republished by Stripe
Press—a young publishing house, created by the eponymous payment-software
company, that brings out interesting left-brained books in beautiful,
right-brain-friendly editions. Parts of “The Art” get technical enough to
include equations, but Hamming is interested mostly in the big picture, and his
subjects range from the limits of mathematics (and of language) to the
slipperiness of data (“You cannot gather a really large amount of data
accurately. It is a known fact which is constantly ignored”). “The Art” would
be a great gift for a young scientist-to-be, yet I also loved it as someone on
the fuzzy side of things, who always enjoyed science but lost daily touch with
it when I left school. His chapter on “creativity,” which draws not just from
his field but from history and art, is both stirring and humane. “My duty as a
professor is to increase the probability that you will be a significant
contributor to our society,” he writes. He was one of the last geniuses who
believed in innovation as a shared public project, and, when he imagined the
future for which he was preparing students, he looked to the year 2020. He’d be
pleased to find his lessons are still urgent here today. —Nathan Heller
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“Balzac’s Lives,” by Peter
Brooks
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Honoré de
Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine,” grand
in both ambition and scope, comprises approximately ninety titles, over whose
course the occasionally intersecting stories of nearly two thousand five
hundred characters form a portrait of France in the first half of the
nineteenth century. In “Balzac’s Lives,” Peter Brooks—a professor emeritus of
comparative literature at Yale—turns to nine of these characters to explore the
author’s writerly obsessions with money and power, love and desire. To treat
fictional characters as so-called real people, with their own lives and
behavioral patterns, Brooks notes, has been considered a naïve, even gauche
critical approach—at least since the time of the Russian Formalists, who
encouraged us to analyze characters for their function as literary devices,
rather than for their adherence to the rules that might govern flesh-and-blood
individuals. But for Brooks, Balzac’s energetic, almost fevered attitude toward
his characters—evident in their emergence and reëmergence over the course of
many books, and in their dizzyingly varied social backgrounds, from courtesan
to banker, baron to pauper—demands a closer critical look. As I read the book,
I enjoyed Brooks’s sharp insights, which suggest the ways in which Balzac’s
proto-modern world is not so different from our own. But I also felt a more
basic, visceral pleasure. Though I consider myself a Balzac fan, I’ve read only
a fraction of the author’s works, and so to be able to discover—or, in some
cases, recall—what fates befall certain characters reminded me of the not
unprimitive joy of tearing into a juicy morsel of gossip. In this case, it’s
the kind that sends you on a mission to find out more—which means picking up a
Balzac novel. —Naomi Fry
“The Year of the French,” by
Thomas Flanagan
I’m not a
recreational reader. I need a reason—usually, it’s something I’m writing—to
read a book. But the semi-lockdown last spring seemed to me, as it did to many
people, a reason to read a book for no reason, other than pleasure or
distraction. So I pulled one off the shelf: “The Year of the French,” by Thomas
Flanagan. The novel, published in 1979, is about the invasion of Ireland by the
French in 1798. France was revolutionary France, and Ireland was effectively a
colony of Britain. The French were hoping to combine forces with an Irish
insurrection and liberate the island in the name of liberté, fraternité, and
égalité. It didn’t quite work out. I was lucky that I knew nothing about this
invasion, not even that it had happened, because Flanagan’s method is to plunge
the reader into a strange, wild, poetic, cruel, and finally hopeless world of
Irish peasants, absentee British landlords, revolutionary terrorists, and men
and women trying to hold on to what they have in a universe threatening to turn
upside down. You have to make your own way through this landscape, so the
stranger everything is for you, the more adventurous the experience. The story
Flanagan tells makes our own dark times seem eminently manageable. I wanted to
be taken somewhere else by a book, and I was. And there: I’ve written about it,
too! —Louis Menand
“So Long, See You Tomorrow,”
by William Maxwell
During
these long months of hiding out at home—of being thrown back upon recollections
of the past, in place of new experience—I’ve been thinking about how to make
literary use of memory. How might one capture the way that images or encounters
lodge in the imagination and become, over time, layered with meaning? The title
of William Maxwell’s short, stunning novel, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” is a
phrase that is said lightly but that comes to be freighted with tragedy; the
book itself, which was published in 1980 after being serialized in The New
Yorker, is a virtuosic blend of memoir and fiction. Maxwell, who was a
fiction editor at this magazine for some four decades, and who died in 2000 at
the age of ninety-one, drew in this book, as in a number of others, upon
recollections of his hometown of Lincoln, Illinois. In part, it is a true-crime
narrative: a jealous husband murders his wife’s lover, who is also his best
friend. But the book is also about how that crime stays alive in the narrator’s
memory, and how it becomes a means for him to explore his own experience of
loss and of guilt. This is a book filled with passages that I wanted to
transcribe in a hedge against the failings of my own memory, among them this
pronouncement, about midway through: “If any part of the following mixture of
truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to
disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.” As
well as encountering Maxwell on the page, I recommend listening to the
audiobook, which was recorded in 1995. It’s beautifully read by the author,
whose voice a listener can hear cracking with emotion upon reaching the novel’s
final, breathtaking sentence. —Rebecca Mead
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“Corregidora,” by Gayl Jones
Think Like a Monk
-Jay Shetty
When Toni
Morrison first read the manuscript for what would become Gayl Jones’s début
novel, “Corregidora,” she immediately heralded it as a turning point for
fiction. “No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this,”
Morrison, then an editor at Random House, wrote. “Corregidora” was published in
1975. Set primarily in the late nineteen-forties, the novel follows Ursa
Corregidora, a twenty-five-year-old Black blues singer from Bracktown,
Kentucky. Ursa navigates tumultuous, occasionally violent relationships and
works to carve out a place for herself as an artist. Following an unwanted
hysterectomy, she also confronts her ancestors’ entreaty to “make generations,”
which is key to continuing an oral tradition that can preserve, undiluted, the
realities of slavery. (Her family carries the name of the Portuguese slave
owner who fathered both Ursa’s mother and grandmother.) Storytelling, in this
mode, becomes an intergenerational act—a way of maintaining evidence of
violence, incest, and erasure. Jones’s writing resists self-conscious
ornamentation in favor of casual, knowing vernacular, and her structure is
unconventional but tightly controlled. Dialogue is often interrupted by memory
or fantasy, and time turns in on itself. On a visit to Bracktown, Ursa’s mother
offers an elliptical, bracing account of her own mother’s sexual abuse by
Corregidora; later in the novel, which closes in the late nineteen-sixties,
Ursa moves closer to reconciling with what has gone unsaid. And yet, despite
this panorama, the novel’s actual spaces are intimate—relationships play out in
bedrooms, kitchens, bars. Jones’s great achievement is to reckon with both
history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them. —Anna
Wiener
“Something New Under the Sun: An
Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World,” by J. R.
McNeill
J. R.
McNeill’s “Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World” came out in 2000, but it’s just as relevant now as it
was when it first appeared. It’s one of those rare books that’s both sweeping
and specific, scholarly and readable. McNeill looks at how humans have, over
the past hundred years, altered the atmosphere, the biosphere, and what he
calls the “hydrosphere.” What makes the book stand out is its wealth of
historical detail. The changes we have wrought, McNeill argues, have mostly
been the unintentional side effects of economic growth. They’ve ushered in “a
regime of perpetual ecological disturbance,” which will strain many species’
ability to adapt. How people will deal with this new “regime” will determine
what the world looks like not just a century from now but for millennia. —Elizabeth
Kolbert
“The Known World,” by Edward
P. Jones
One Arranged Murder
-by Chetan Bhagat
My
reading life in 2020 was mostly distinguished by how hard it was for me to
read. But my skittering stopped sometime this spring, when I opened “The Known
World,” Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from 2003. Reading it
was like dropping anchor. My brain stabilized, and it felt like the only thing
I could do, for a change, was focus in. This was the work of a genius. The
clarity of Jones’s lines, the beauty of his descriptions, the mesmerizing
character sketches: all of them were a function of the extreme specificity and
intricacy of the world he had created. In a way, he’s a kind of cartographer.
The book’s title is a reference to a map: “a browned and yellowed woodcut of
some eight feet by six feet” that hangs behind the desk of a sheriff in
antebellum Virginia. The seller of the woodcut—a Russian “with a white beard
down to his stomach”—claimed it was the first time the word “America” had
appeared on a map. The novel, which tells the story of a Black slave owner and
his family, is also an account of territory—that marked out by the institution
of slavery, which extends into the brains, bones, and souls of everyone it
touches. After reading, I immediately picked up Jones’s other two books, both
story collections, and raced through the more recent one, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.”
I didn’t think it was possible for me to like a book as much as “The Known
World,” but I began to think that I liked these stories even more. Now, the
other collection, “Lost in the City,” is on my
bedside table—a down payment on my next escape. —Jonathan Blitzer
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