There’s Going to Be Trouble

The incisive if somewhat overstuffed latest from Silverman (We Play Ourselves) fuses two disparate narratives of contemporary Paris and 1960s Harvard with themes of protest and romance. In 2018, Minerva “Minnow” Hunter is fired from her high school teaching job in a tight-knit, conservative town, somewhere in the U.S., for reasons that are gradually revealed. She then moves to Paris, where she takes up a position in the English department of an unnamed university and falls in with the gilets jaunes protest movement against president Emmanuel Macron’s elitist policies. In a parallel narrative set in 1968, a grad student named Keen works at Harvard in a lab that makes napalm for U.S. forces in Vietnam. Each day, he and his colleagues listen to the shouts of protesters from outside their door. His eventual decision to join the protestors results in violent consequences. Silverman takes a lot on, and not all of it sticks. (The formulaic romance between Minnow and a French protester is a particular letdown: “The curve of his shoulder. The jut of his jaw.... She imagined him naked”). Still, Silverman manages to build suspense as they gradually connect the dots between the parallel stories. There’s plenty of intrigue bubbling beneath the surface of this surprisingly complex novel. Agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary. (Apr.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to the author.