This week: Emma Donoghue's latest novel, plus GMOs and the threat to our food.
Kids of Appetite
Arnold (Mosquitoland) again showcases a memorable cast of outsiders carving out space for themselves. Bruno Victor “Vic” Benucci III, a 16-year-old Jersey kid born with a rare condition that leaves him unable to use most of his facial muscles, is reeling from his father’s death two years earlier. After his mother’s new boyfriend proposes to her, Vic bolts from the house with his father’s ashes. Vic’s destiny is changed when he meets 17-year-old Madeline “Mad” Falco, who is part of a gang of semihomeless kids who vow to help Vic decipher his father’s final note, which dictates various places to spread his ashes. Told through Vic and Mad’s alternating narratives, interspersed with police interviews centered around the murder of Mad’s abusive uncle, the story focuses on the unbreakable bonds of these forgotten, mistreated kids—who include two brothers born in the Congo and a brilliant, sharp-tongued 11-year-old—as well as Vic’s enduring loyalty to his father’s memory. Arnold writes with a Hinton-esque depth and rawness, building Mad and Vic’s stories with practiced patience.
Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story; How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War
Cliff brilliantly weaves together the politics, personalities, and pianism surrounding the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. This portrait of a Cold War moment focuses on two remarkable people. The first is Van Cliburn, the courtly, eager 23-year-old from Kilgore, Tex., who combined a winning American openness with a heartfelt love of Russian music. The second is Nikita Khrushchev, an eccentric peasants’ son who survived Stalin and went on to undo the worst of his oppressions. Riding high on the success of Sputnik and Soviet nuclear advances, Khrushchev saw the proposed music competition as a way to assert the U.S.S.R.’s cultural preeminence. The program was heavily weighted to Russian music, and many potential competitors felt that a foreigner would not be allowed to win. But Cliburn’s mother and teachers had instilled in him a love of Russian repertoire that Moscow audiences grasped from round one. Khrushchev railed against Stalin’s cult of personality but did not stand in the way of Cliburn’s. This is a well-researched, fascinating look at a special relationship between Van Cliburn and the U.S.S.R. that lasted through low points (the downed U-2, the Cuban missile crisis) and high ones, all the way up to the 1987 summit that resulted in eliminating most of the world’s strategic nuclear arsenal.
A Shadow Bright and Burning
Sixteen-year-old Henrietta Howel can start fires with a thought, but because women aren’t permitted to practice magic, she must keeps her power under wraps at the Brimthorn School for Girls, where she teaches in a magical version of Victorian London. After a sorcerer, Master Agrippa, visits the school, an attack by a “Familiar” of the (decidedly Lovecraftian) Ancients forces Henrietta’s hand. Agrippa believes that Henrietta is integral to fighting the Ancients, offering to train her for eventual commendation by a young Queen Victoria and a place among the royal sorcerers. She agrees, on the condition that her childhood friend Rook comes along. In a strong opening to the Kingdom on Fire trilogy, debut author Cluess makes the most of her setting, never shying from gritty details, such as the “burned and ravaged” London outside the wards that protect the sorcerers; the contentious history between sorcerers and magicians adds heft. Henrietta is pragmatic and bitingly funny, and she more than holds her own in a man’s world. Cluess gamely turns the chosen-one trope upside down in this smashing dark fantasy.
The Wonder
Donoghue demonstrates her versatility by dabbling in a wide range of literary styles in this latest novel. Set mostly in a small, spare room inside a shabby cabin in rural 1850s Ireland, the closely imagined, intricately drawn story possesses many of the same alluring qualities as her bestseller, Room. Lib, a widow and former nurse, is summoned from London to the peat-smelling village of Athlone for a fortnight to assess whether 11-year-old “living marvel” Anna O’Donnell has truly been able to survive without food for four months. It could be some sort of hoax perpetrated by the girl’s family or the village parish, and Lib confidently assumes that it’ll be an open-and-shut case. But as each day passes and Anna’s health suddenly begins to deteriorate, not only does Lib grow more attached to the earnest girl, but she also becomes convinced that Anna’s reasons for fasting—a recently deceased brother, devotion to God, her parents’ influence—run far deeper than Lib imagined. Donoghue’s engrossing novel is loaded with descriptions of period customs and 19th-century Catholic devotional objects and prayers.
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
Pop-culture commentator Doyle launches a ruthlessly funny, smart, and relentlessly on-point takedown of modern misogyny in this feminist anatomy of celebrity “trainwrecks” and the “appetite for specifically female ruin and suffering” that fuels entire venues of popular entertainment. Contemplating her subjects’ crimes (having sex, having needs, having opinions) and her subjects’ options (self-destruct, disappear, or risk the continual public fury to which a woman who refuses to be shamed, silenced, or stopped is exposed), Doyle compiles portraits including those of historical figures such as Charlotte Brontë and midcentury icons such as Billie Holiday and Sylvia Plath to such contemporary subjects of spectacle as Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, and Britney Spears. She surmises that the train wreck earns hatred for violating the rules of “good” behavior. But in her profiles of non-self-immolating women such as Harriet Jacobs, Hillary Clinton, and the French revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, Doyle suggests that the revulsion is stirred not by the train wreck’s questionable behavior but by the fact of her being a visible, vocal female. Doyle’s book is really an exposé of persistent cultural pathologies about women and sex, a “200-year-old problem” of enforcing myths about good behavior that essentially prevent women from being the subjects of their own lives. With compassion for its subjects and a vibrantly satirical tone, Doyle’s debut book places her on the A-list of contemporary feminist writers.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
In his first work of long-form nonfiction in over 20 years, celebrated novelist Ghosh (Flood of Fire) addresses “perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture”: how can writers, scholars, and policy makers combat the collective inability to grasp the dangers of today’s climate crisis? Ghosh’s choice of genre is hardly incidental; among the chief sources of the “imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis,” he argues, is the resistance of modern linguistic and narrative traditions—particularly the 20th-century novel—to events so cataclysmic and heretofore improbable that they exceed the purview of serious literary fiction. Ghosh ascribes this “Great Derangement” not only to modernity’s emphasis on this “calculus of probability” but also to notions of empire, capitalism, and democratic freedom. Asia in particular is “conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming,” Ghosh attests, outlining the continent’s role in engendering, conceptualizing, and mitigating ecological disasters in language that both thoroughly convinces the reader and runs refreshingly counter to prevailing Eurocentric climate discourse. In this concise and utterly enlightening volume, Ghosh urges the public to find new artistic and political frameworks to understand and reduce the effects of human-caused climate change, sharing his own visionary perspective as a novelist, scholar, and citizen of our imperiled world.
Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs
Kanigel (The Man Who Knew Infinity) captures the life and character of Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), a stubborn, principled activist and the doyenne of urban planning. Jacobs—best known for her highly influential and heralded book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which attacked efficiency-focused midcentury urban planning policies and called for livable, diverse, and pedestrian-friendly cities—led an intellectually and socially rich life from start to finish. She enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Scranton, Pa., and got her first big break in 1935 at age 19, writing about Manhattan’s fur district forVogue. She fell in love with the lively West Village upon exiting the Christopher Street subway station for the first time. Kanigel turns Jacobs’s life into a fascinating narrative with an endearing, obstinate, brilliant protagonist. Readers familiar with Jacobs’s work will enjoy reading the behind-the-scenes anecdotes from her career—at her first lecture at Harvard, which was a smashing success, she was only filling in at the last minute for her boss and was so nervous she memorized her speech beforehand—and those who are learning about her for the first time will want to immediately pick up one (or all seven) of the books she wrote.
Looking for ‘The Stranger’: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
Kaplan (Dreaming in French), a professor of French at Yale, persuasively retells the story of writer Albert Camus and his classic first novel, The Stranger. She explores Camus’s inspirations and influences (including James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice), themes, and distinctive writing style. She also charts the feedback he received from mentors and from literary lions such as André Malraux. The road to publication was made difficult by WWII, which created impediments such as a shortage of quality paper and German-imposed censorship. However, Camus was bolstered by the support of the French intellectual and publishing elite, who were intrigued by the emergence of a new talent from a poor neighborhood in Algiers. Most fascinating are the chapters recounting the years after The Stranger’s 1942 publication, as the novel’s popularity took it well beyond Camus’s grasp. Kaplan provides fascinating tidbits of information, such as why the novel is called The Outsider in the U.K., and explains how this seemingly simple story became a prime example of French literature to be examined, dissected, and loved by readers, students, and teachers for generations.
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature
In this insightful personal narrative, Lanham, an ornithologist and professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, recalls his childhood in rural South Carolina and how it led him into such an overwhelmingly white field. Lanham grew up in the boondocks among pine trees and wild turkeys. His parents planted and sold “watermelon, cantaloupe, butter beans, purple-hull peas, and an array of other crops” to city and suburban folks to supplement their schoolteacher salaries. A curious and avid reader, Lanham pored over encyclopedias and saw field guides as “treasure troves of information: pictures joyously stacked side by side with brief descriptions of what, where, and when.” When Lanham began bird-watching years later, he seldom encountered other African-Americans in the field carrying binoculars, and eventually realized how atypical a pastime it was for a black man. He was himself “the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for [his] different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water.” He would like to see this incongruity eliminated. Encouraging readers to pay closer attention to nature, Lanham gathers the disparate elements that have shaped him into a nostalgic and fervent examination of home, family, nature, and community.
So Say the Fallen
In Edgar-finalist Neville’s excellent sequel to 2015’sThose We Left Behind, Det. Chief Insp. Serena Flanagan of the Belfast police investigates the apparent suicide of Henry Garrick, who was bedridden while slowly and painfully recovering from a serious car accident. It seems that his wife, Roberta, and a family friend, Rev. Peter McKay, gave him his evening medication of a packet of morphine granules mixed into a tub of yogurt, but after they left, he added an additional 10 packets and died during the night. But Roberta and McKay share a dreadful secret that eats at the reverend until he can barely contain it. Flanagan, who’s trying to focus on work despite serious family problems, suspects something is not as it seems, but he has no evidence and is constrained to accept the death as a suicide. The case is officially closed, but Flanagan can’t help following the remaining loose ends until something approaching justice is done in this complex and compassionate study of the human condition.
The Best Man
Markedly more contemporary than many of Peck’s previous novels, this drolly narrated coming-of-age story traces milestones in Archer Magill’s life from first to sixth grade while deftly addressing a variety of social issues. The first scene—depicting a “train wreck” of a wedding in which six-year-old Archer performs ring bearer duties in a pair of muddy, too-tight shorts that have split open in the back—sets the stage for other hilarious mishaps. Whenever Archer flounders, there are people (usually the influential men he “wanted to be”) ready to help: his father, as good at fixing problems as he is at restoring vintage cars; his stylish Uncle Paul; and his dignified grandfather Magill. In fifth grade, Archer finds he can depend on someone new: his student-teacher Mr. McLeod, who accidentally causes a lockdown when he shows up at school in his National Guard uniform. Archer gains some wisdom on his own (after befriending a visiting student from England, he concludes: “We thought he was weird. He thought we were weird. It was great. It was what multiculturalism ought to be”), but the most profound lessons about prejudice, conflict resolution, and gay rights are taught by his mentors, all-too-human heroes, whom readers will come to admire as much as Archer does. It’s an indelible portrait of what it looks like to grow up in an age of viral videos and media frenzies, undergirded by the same powerful sense of family that characterizes so much of Peck’s work.
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
Poet and translator Phillips (Elegy for a Broken Machine) employs his considerable writing skills to chronicle the racism that held Forsyth County, Ga., in its grip for three quarters of the 20th century. In 1912, an unknown person or persons raped two white women in Forsyth County, one of whom died of her injuries. As a result, a black man was beaten to death by a white mob, and two other black men, their guilt unclear, were convicted of the crime and hanged in a public execution. Forsyth’s white residents decided the executions were not sufficient retribution, and they subjected the county’s 1,100 African-American residents to a reign of terror that forced all of them to abandon their homes. The deeply embedded racism of a county functionally immune from law was sufficiently powerful to keep Forsyth County completely white for 75 years. On Jan. 17, 1987, a civil rights march 20,000 strong in the county seat, Cumming, brought the scourge of unmitigated white power to national attention, forcing the beginnings of integration. Phillips enhances his exposé of this violent and shameful history through interviews with descendants of the white families who brazenly exiled the county’s black community as well as the descendants of those forced to leave. This is a gripping, timely, and important examination of American racism, and Phillips tells it with rare clarity and power.
The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984–1985
In the second volume of an acclaimed five-part graphic memoir, originally published in France, cartoonist Sattouf captures the discomfiting and occasionally humorous details of his first year in school in a Syria that is casually anti-Semitic and not particularly kind to anyone. Minor infractions against social norms are met with violence, and major infractions are met with much, much worse. Because everything filters through a six-year-old boy’s point of view, the more disturbing moments that Sattouf recounts aren’t bleak so much as confusing, surreal, and sad. The humor is pitch-black, the characters vivid: Nidal, a young boy who sits by his father’s grave and, because of a nervous tic, can’t stop laughing like Woody Woodpecker; a devout schoolteacher with a kindly face who takes particular delight in meting out corporal punishment. Sattouf is a master of visual storytelling, capable of compressing a great deal of human emotion and contradictions within a few panels. He creates a searing depiction of growing up poor in a country ruled by corruption and religious zealotry.
Modified: GMOs and the Threat to Our Food, Our Land, Our Future
In this alarming journalistic work, Shetterly (Made for You and Me) investigates genetically modified organisms, their associated pesticides, and the biotech megacorporations that produce and sell them. Shetterly begins by detailing her own debilitating but undiagnosed illness, which only abated after an allergist suggested that she had “developed a reaction to genetically modified corn” and she followed his advice to eliminate corn from her diet. This work, a follow-up to Shetterly’s piece for Elle magazine describing that experience, is structured around visits to a few people on both sides of the issue of the use of genetically modified crops as well as her additional research to understand more about GMOs and what is at stake. That turns out to be billions of dollars, and, more broadly, public health. For example, many genetically modified crops are created to be “Roundup Ready” so that they will survive the application of the Roundup pesticide, which by no coincidence is also sold by Monsanto, the producer of the seeds. This troubling conflict of interest is exacerbated by a complete lack of transparency; the biotech giants conducting the studies that claim their products are safe don’t make that research publicly available. Shetterly’s accessible, well-researched, and damning work brings clarity to an often fuzzy debate.
