NOVELISTS ARE LUCKY. Not only is their “I” a fiction—even or especially when the veil is of the gossamer kind—but when they need some space to say what can only be said when “I” is another they can always switch to third person. The critic tends to get stuck in first. So I find myself in a waiting room, just as he does. I am in New York and he—Tunde, a photographer, writer, professor and sometimes narrator in Teju Cole’s novel Tremor—is in Boston. His friend and colleague Emily has cancer. The tests or treatments she is undergoing might give

WHEN A NOVELIST’S sophomore novel is narrated by a novelist bemoaning the New York Times review of her first novel, even the most auto-skeptical critic might be forgiven for pulling up a search window. Turns out that the Times review of Lexi Freiman’s Inappropriation (2018) is nothing like the “cancellation” her character, Anna, undergoes in The Book of Ayn. However, the review does begin by declaring that “Satire is a difficult genre to neatly define,” followed immediately by a definition that is roughly what you’d get by googling “satire definition.” You can hardly blame Freiman if reading these words in

REMEMBER WHEN THE worst thing was death? AIDS, cancer, COVID—a horror for the people who died (are still dying) and a massive source of anxiety for the rest of us. And yet as my daughter and I waited out lockdown—fwiw, my daughter in this context represents the zeitgeist—she never once worried about us dying from COVID. Nope, she’d already assimilated death anxiety into her shelf of bedtime reading, the old standards. Instead, her fear had stepped up and out on a ledge overlooking apocalypse. Climate change. The end of everything. Extinction. 

THE DREAM OF AN ARTWORK that encompasses the whole world; of a novel that tells everybody’s story; of characters who feel and act and speak for us all; of the image that nobody doesn’t recognize. Yet it is the world and characters and images and stories themselves that stand in the way of that dream. They are too real and too small, too specific and too discrete to be for all. A person personifying history is still a person, history warped by and warping a personality. A dramatic narrative consists of speeches, acts, events. A consciousness is marred by the

I WAS SEVENTEEN AND IN MY THIRD YEAR OF FRENCH when I learned the phrase la petite mort: “the little death.” The boy in class I had a crush on—what was it he called himself? Roland, Jean-Pierre, Henri?—informed me, whispering so Madame Chrétien wouldn’t overhear us, that it was meant to describe an orgasm, or rather (I discovered later, after experiencing more than the panicked fumbling of high school trysts), the untenanted feeling that comes after having had one. Of course, I thought, of course, great sex would be something like an annihilation of the self. In my diary, I

THE DUBLIN-BORN NOVELIST PAUL MURRAY, who entered adulthood during Ireland’s rapid modernization in the 1990s, writes fiction about the problems that modernity everywhere has failed to solve. His characters come up against cruelty and abuse, inequality, grief, terrible loneliness, death—but generally their problems boil down to one of two sources, their families or their money. Murray’s 2010 boarding school–set bestseller, Skippy Dies—with its fucked-up children of sick or divorcing parents, its neatly bidirectional line between the traumas of childhood and the disappointments of adulthood—tilts toward the former, resulting in a warmly humane novel with an occasional YA-ish texture. In 2015,

LORRIE MOORE’S NEW NOVEL STARTS TWICE. The first chapter is a letter from one sister to another, an old one, probably, because who writes letters anymore and I don’t even know what a “desk cartonnier” is but it sounds old. I can’t quite place the year or state but the period and region are clear: the Reconstruction South. “I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks,” our narrator, an innkeeper named Elizabeth, writes, as if to say, There will be no Confederate relics in my lodge. Canadian coins, oddly enough, circulate, but one senses that

IT WAS THE FALL of the Berlin Wall that prompted Jenny Erpenbeck to become a writer, as if the beliefs and structures guiding her life that had, almost overnight, been rendered obsolete, could be recuperated by language. But Erpenbeck, born steps from the Wall in 1967, wasn’t interested in memoir or commemoration. She preferred tricks of self-effacement, recursion, deferral, anything that lent “freedom from the compulsion of realism.” Her debut, The Old Child (1999), is a parable of a loser’s triumph: a young woman posing as a fourteen-year-old goes to live in a children’s home, turning life into a game