5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our blitz of brilliant reviews this week includes Hillary Leichter on Chris Knapp’s States of Emergency, Alex Preston on Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Jess Row on Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, Becca Rothfeld on Lily Anolik’s Didion & Babitz, and Brian Dillon on Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“Public and private moments of upheaval are the catastrophes in Chris Knapp’s fantastically dense and omnivorous debut novel, States of Emergency. Climates both marital and global, existential terror and immediate terror, the dissolution of borders between countries and also people—such a list only simplifies the vertiginous simultaneity achieved in these pages. Knapp doesn’t just tighten the perceived distance between our inner lives and the world around us; he erases it. The result is a masterfully digressive story that moves across perspectives, time zones and time periods. Imagine a 24-hour news cycle that name-checks Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, the New York City water supply, the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges and Chris Martin’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show, and you’ll have something approximating the serious and often playful intellectual terrain of this novel. Knapp’s narrator is a flâneur with push notifications.

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States of Emergency constantly confronts the limits of its own project, fiction’s inability to adequately reckon with the ugliness of reality: ‘The trouble with narrative was that even when it made you feel bad it made you feel good.’ The narrator describes a ‘cluster of supercell thunderstorms’ tearing across America—’mobile homes were tossed high into the air, and school buses were turned into surreal, grotesque husks’—while he and his family eat cookies over Christmas in the Catskills. Being adjacent to suffering is perhaps insufficient. He cannot fully inhabit Ella’s pain. The world rushes in, one emergency after another, but some are nearer than others.

Our contemporary moment rushes in, too. Through limber, discursive prose, Knapp has made room not only for history and personal record, but also for reverberations of the present. On a hike with his father on that trip to the Catskills, wandering the ruins of an old hotel, the narrator has ‘a feeling that time had suddenly opened in both directions.’ We, too, have the strong sense ‘that the destruction of what’s gone before … anticipates the destruction that awaits.’”

–Hillary Leichter on Chris Knapp’s States of Emergency (The New York Times Book Review)

“There is something inescapably adolescent about the novels of Haruki Murakami. This is most obvious, perhaps, in his multimillion-selling Norwegian Wood, with its angst and melancholy. But it’s also there in the rest of his writing, whether in the mooning after lost loves (see 1Q84, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun) or the dreamlike, pseudo-spiritualism of novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader,’ Henry James said, and he wasn’t wrong.

The problem with Murakami’s dreamscapes are that they are so entirely unmoored from reality that nothing seems to matter; meaning is endlessly deferred. It feels as if his work, with its talking cats, mystical landscapes and drifting, nameless, middle-aged protagonists obsessed with their teenage years, has never moved on from a form of magical realism that was just about bearable in his short early novels. His books have not evolved—they have just got longer.

There is a sense of relief, at least, that The City and its Uncertain Walls, Murakami’s 15th novel, is several hundred pages shorter in English than it is in its Japanese original. More worryingly for those of us hoping that he might break new ground, it is presented as a companion piece to his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And it is explicitly the rewriting of an early short story of the same name. For a writer often accused—even by his fans—of repetition, the signs are not good. Murakami is now 75, but there is something almost pathological in the way his writing refuses to move on. Where the thirtysomething Murakami writing about teen sex was just about acceptable, there is real ick when his narrator encounters ‘a 16-year-old girl whose chest was swelling out beautifully, and put his arms around her lithe young body’ or speaks of the ‘explicit dreams’ he has in which he ends ‘up soiling my sheets.’

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“There is little here that passes for plot—dei ex machina abound in the form of ghosts who crop up to deliver important pieces of information to the reader. There is an endless central section set in a library in the ‘real’ world in which Boku befriends a lonely adolescent. Then we return to the unicorns. Murakami’s work is often described as fantasy, but there is none of the intricate world-building that we find in the classics of that genre. Bad magical realism lacks both magic and realism, and The City and its Uncertain Walls should take its place alongside Coelho’s The Alchemist, Fowles’s The Magus, Gibran’s The Prophet and any number of other books that you can just about be forgiven for admiring as a teenager but which, to an adult reader, offer little more than embarrassment”

–Alex Preston on Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (The Observer)

“Adam, who was a small child in the first volume, My Name Is Adam (2019), now appears as a teenager and young man in the second novel, Star of the Sea. The massacre Adam is referring to took place in 1948, inside what is now Israel. But this event is impossible to separate from today’s massacres in Gaza, or from the other crises—the mass expulsions, land thefts, imprisonment, historical appropriation and erasure—that constitute what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, or ‘catastrophe,’ of their existence under occupation and in exile. The massacre is also, Khoury insists, impossible to separate from the Holocaust, the pogroms and the history of Jewish suffering that led to the creation of Israel.

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“Children of the Ghetto is a picaresque, though one without comic intentions: Like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, Adam is an orphan and a rogue, a survivor and a trickster, even a bit of a romantic. It’s also about racial shape-shifting, appropriation and invisibility; you could put it on the same shelf with Passing and Invisible Man.

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“Children of the Ghetto lingers somewhere between fiction and fact. Khoury was a lifelong student of, and participant in, the cause of Palestinian liberation; as a 19-year-old he left his prosperous Christian Lebanese family and volunteered to join the fedayeen resistance fighters in Jordan, and later became an indefatigable defender of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. His best-known novel, Gate of the Sun, is based on the stories of those refugees, collected in the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut.

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“Having to continually recreate himself within Israeli society, Adam witnesses over and over the absurd contradictions of a state that can never divorce itself from the people and culture it tries to erase.

At the end of this second installment, Adam has embarked on yet another new life in Tel Aviv, as a supposedly Jewish Israeli journalist writing columns about Umm Kulthum, the beloved Egyptian singer. Later, we know, he’ll leave Israel for New York, to work in a falafel restaurant and write his own novel. I have the feeling that when the concluding volume of Children of the Ghetto appears in English, we’ll have in our hands one of the most indelible epics in 21st-century literature, a Palestinian story no reader will be able to forget.”

–Jess Row on Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea (The New York Times Book Review)

“Those in the market for a detached and measured work of journalism might not fully appreciate this delightful and uncategorizable book, though it does contain a great deal of careful reporting. It is both enormously informative and openly prurient, deliciously greedy for the details of Babitz’s and Didion’s private lives. At times, it is even gossipy.

“According to Koestenbaum, in these pieces, Killian was ‘doing a Sontag but without the severity.’ Though some of what he wrote is remarkably close to traditional print criticism, it comes with an engaging, eccentric reviewerly persona and an enthusiast or even activist remit on behalf of innovative fiction and (especially) poetry. He hymns the long poetic line of Jorie Graham, which moves ‘like a centipede on a tightrope’; he commends Ron Padgett’s biography of Joe Brainard, and Amy Gerstler’s poetry collection Ghost Girl. When reviewing more obvious or mainstream writers, Killian can sound oddly conventional, even banal.

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“And then, quite brilliantly, there are Killian’s reviews of sundry consumer products, unrelated to art or culture. (Reader, if you’re dithering over the six-hundred-plus pages and the hardback sticker price, these pieces are themselves alone worth the price of admission.) Once more according to Bellamy, Killian ‘rejoiced in the not-useful ratings his reviews received.’ Writing up the Wood Diner Birdhouse by Meadow Creek Trading, which is genuinely a birdhouse in the shape or guise of a diner, he comments: ‘The things you do for these birds, after all, you do for Saint Francis, who loved his feathered friends as he loved the moon and the sun.’

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“Are Killian’s reviews similarly crafted to make something supernatural happen to the machinery of capital? When he started writing them twenty years ago, Amazon was only a decade old: ubiquitous, yes, but not yet running our world alongside the other tech behemoths. It wasn’t yet obvious that, as selling stuff and social media meshed, we would all end up as low-level admin drudges, data-entry clerks doing unpaid work for fascist-adjacent billionaires. But here we are, and the dream of squatting inside the machine, or intruding funny, subversive, demotic ‘criticism’ or ‘poetry’ into the cracks in capital’s hulk, may now seem somewhat fanciful or beside the point. Still, Selected Amazon Reviews exists, and its pleasures as well as Killian’s acuteness seem rescued from the wreckage, like lewd graffiti on the walls at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Criticism, says Koestenbaum, ‘is not a parasitic art; it is a way of saving one’s own life.’ So it proved for Killian (his writing life, anyway), and the result is smart, scurrilous, humane.”

–Brian Dillon on Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews (4Columns)