Bookforum.com

print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2020

One Pill Makes You Smaller

Hari Kunzru and the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel • Christian Lorentzen

WHAT ARE THESE RED PILLS AND WHERE DO YOU GET ONE? They seem more potent than most non-metaphorical drugs. Just a single dose and you’ll never see the world the same way again. The term comes from The Matrix. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) presents Neo (Keanu Reeves) with a choice of two pills, a blue one that will allow him to live complacently within the illusion he’s used to (a fake life as a regular Joe with a family and an office job), or a red one (it looks like a Robitussin tablet) that will show him “the truth” (he’s really in a pod hooked up to a tube that sucks out his life force—the

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print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2020

Pictures from an Institution

Brandon Taylor’s debut dissects the inequities and petty cruelty of academic life • Claire Jarvis

HOW DO YOU WRITE A POLITICAL NOVEL IN 2020? How do you not write a political novel in 2020? It is impossible to imagine a contemporary writer presenting a version of the world that is not marked in some way by Trumpism, the threat of ecological catastrophe, the deepening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, the spectacle of racist police brutality. Yet the process of digesting the various horrors of the present into prose isn’t always noble. There is a way to use the novel as a balm to soothe the tempers of people who see themselves as opposed to cruelty, to violence, to climate disaster.

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print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2020

Playing Depart

The restless fiction of Joseph Roth • Becca Rothfeld

“I PAINT THE PORTRAIT OF THE AGE,” the Austrian writer Joseph Roth proclaimed in a 1926 letter to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung. “I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist,” he continued. “I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.”

In the English-speaking world, Roth is most often canonized as a novelist. He is known primarily as the author of The Radetzky March, a 1932 saga about an Austrian dynasty rendered tragic—and ridiculous—by the collapse of the dual monarchy. During his own lifetime, however, Roth was better known as a writer of feuilletons, and even his longer works are rich with

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print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2020

Passing Through

Sigrid Nunez’s novel of death, friendship, and the writing life • Christine Smallwood

THE NARRATOR OF SIGRID NUNEZ’S NEW NOVEL, What Are You Going Through, is an unmarried female writer who seems to be between sixty and seventy years old. She has a friend, another unmarried female writer of the same age, who is dying of cancer. (The friend prefers the word fatal to the word terminal—“Terminal makes me think of bus stations, which makes me think of exhaust fumes and creepy men prowling for runaways,” she says.) After the last round of treatment fails, the friend—no one is named, which works well in the novel but is already cumbersome in a review—invites the narrator to accompany

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print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2020

Signs and Symbols

Kate Zambreno’s recursive new novel • Rumaan Alam

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts, the unnamed narrator notices a butternut squash. It makes her think of a detail in a Dürer engraving. Later, in a restaurant, she spots a decorative squash. “There appears to be a vast referentiality everywhere,” she tells us. It’s true that patterns exist—or, anyway, that we’re constantly finding them. It’s less true, I think, that there’s meaning in this fact. It’s only a game we while our lives away playing.

Drifts has place (New York) and players (the narrator’s friends; her partner, John; a neighbor; her dog, Genet), but not much in the

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review • July 23, 2020

Benjamin Nugent’s new story collection exposes the complex emotions of fraternity life

Andrew Ridker

Greek life is enough of a pop-culture staple that it’s easy to forget how little attention fraternities and sororities have received from writers of literary fiction. The campus novel has been with us since the early 1950s, and while the genre has grown capacious enough to include such disparate works as Possession and Dear Committee Members, The Groves of Academe and Giles Goat-Boy, most tend to focus on faculty—specifically, a certain strain of libidinous professor who bemoans the benighted state of his department. Novels about college students—The Secret History, The Marriage Plot, The Idiot

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review • July 23, 2020

In Julianne Pachico’s new novel, a woman returns to her haunted home city

Victoria Baena

Julianne Pachico’s The Anthill is a story of homecoming and return in urban postwar Medellín. Yet like many protagonists in the “return of the native” trope throughout the history of the novel, from Thomas Hardy’s Clym Yeobright to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the book’s heroine, Maria Carolina, can’t quite go home again. Set in the wake of the 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and FARC militias, The Anthill documents a city in which the twin missiles of tourism and development have begun to wreck the landscape. Within this context, Lina has come back to her home city from England

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review • July 14, 2020

In Andrew Martin’s fiction, dissatisfaction reigns supreme

Lizzy Harding

In Andrew Martin’s new story collection, we’re with the critics, who are also writers, who often don’t write anything at all. Like Derek, who peaks hate-skimming a novel by the sometime-boyfriend of Violet, a member of his War and Peace reading group: “First paragraph: way too long. How many clauses did one man need? Last sentence: something about a Carolyn ‘emerging carelessly’ from a car. Indeed.” Derek throws the book in the trash, feels something. He is lashing out, having “been proven wrong in his interpretations of the text at every turn” over eight months of Tolstoy, and all in front of

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review • June 17, 2020

In This Town Sleeps, Dennis E. Staples reckons with violence, identity, and history in a small town

Eric Newman

“I don’t know why I keep coming back here,” muses Marion Lafournier, the gay Ojibwe man at the center of Dennis E. Staples’s debut novel, This Town Sleeps. He’s talking about Geshig, a small town at the center of the Languille Lake reservation in northern Minnesota. Despite feeling like an outsider as the town’s only openly gay resident, Marion cannot resist the pull to return home. “The first chance I had to move out of Geshig and off the Languille Lake reservation, I took it,” Marion explains. “I moved to the Twin Cities for college. And then as a few years passed, and after a disastrous

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print • Summer 2020

Good as Hell

The intoxicating gloom of Philippa Gregory’s historical fiction • Johanna Fateman

THE TUDOR ROSE ON THE JACKET OF THE MIRROR & THE LIGHT—the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which I’ve looked forward to reading for five long years—has watched me like a cyclops eye since the novel’s publication in March. Or, more likely, I first noticed the emblem’s monstrous quality in early April, when nights in New York grew more cinematically wretched and scary: sleepless, ambulance sirens nonstop. I did, at one point, open the book and read the first page, standing in the kitchen. “Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away,” Mantel starts, putting us at the

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print • Summer 2020

For Goodness’ Sake

The self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction • Lauren Oyler

WHAT MAKES A PERSON GOOD? We can create a profile using social media and essays published in popular magazines. First and foremost, a good person possesses a deep understanding of power structures and her relative place in them. She has a sense of humor that never “punches down.” She doesn’t subtweet, buy stuff on Amazon, or fly on too many planes. She has children in order to fend off narcissism—a bad quality—and develop a stake in the future of planet Earth, but she would never presume to judge another woman’s choice. And though she occasionally makes mistakes—cheats on her boyfriend, offends

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print • Summer 2020

God’s Neon

Listening to the unruly fellowship of Denis Johnson’s Already Dead • Sasha Frere-Jones

PEOPLE LOVE TALKING ABOUT DENIS JOHNSON, but they do not love talking about his fifth novel, Already Dead. Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review tagged the book in August 1997, and it has yet to be untagged. She wrote that Already Dead was “a virtually unreadable book that manages to be simultaneously pretentious, sentimental, bubble-headed and gratuitously violent.” Kakutani got flagrant with the kicker, calling Already Dead an “inept, repugnant novel.” David Gates was more generous in the Sunday Book Review, though not enough to overwrite Kakutani. Few writers fell for the book when it

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