5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Nicholas Allen on Calum McCann’s Twist, Robert Rubsam on Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome, Dwight Garner on Nell Zink’s Sister Europe, Lidija Haas on Katie Kitamura’s Audition, and Joumana Khatib on Annika Norlin’s The Colony.

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

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“Reading a Colum McCann novel can be like breathing at altitude, the thinness of the air inviting the brain to waking dream. Over a career now into its fourth decade, McCann has always been an explorer into the depth of things. His characters discover themselves in the distance they keep from the surface of life. Sometimes this is in the air, as with McCann’s fiction of the flight of Alcock and Brown from Newfoundland to Galway in TransAtlantic. Sometimes it is underground, as with the subway dwellers in This Side of Brightness, a novel that sharpened McCann’s eye for the lost and the overlooked. Always it introduces a kind of vertigo, the space between life and the dream a disputed territory of words and feelings. Twist plays this theme on a grand scale, its province the fraying infrastructure of a digitized world whose ties bind us all together.

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“McCann loves unlikely circumstances, which his novels treat as a function of the unpredictability of the world at large. The pace of his prose carries the reader along, as does the sweep of his settings as Twist follows a course from Dublin to Cape Town to the west coast of Africa and back to London, with a flourish to the Americas in passing. McCann has made this worldliness the substance of his writing. It gives the books a volume that few of his contemporaries have achieved, even if the fictions needed to achieve it can be curious.

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“The world, in McCann’s books, is a place of grand gestures, words buoyed up with emotions, the expression of which break the surface of the everyday. Twist is made of these moments, its oxygenated prose minutely alive to the smallest variations in pressure between place and character. This gives the novel a physiognomy that is its major grace, the prose humming with the pressure of the story, like so many small bones in a diver’s skull, deep underwater.”

–Nicholas Allen on Calum McCann’s Twist (The Irish Times)

“There’s a moment in J.D. Salinger’s short story ‘Teddy’ in which a boy watches his younger sister drink a glass of milk. He describes this vision as God ‘pouring God into God.’ Nell Zink’s new novel, Sister Europe, ends with a moment so lambent—but it takes one excruciating, tangled, exhilarating, humiliating night to get us there.

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“To stay out late in Zink’s world, loitering, is a pleasure. If you don’t know what her writing sounds like, the only word for it is Zinkish. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality—a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. If this doesn’t happen to be among her finest novels, well, it has strong consolations.

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“A main topic in Sister Europe is indeterminacy. All of us are between stages, this novel suggests, at every moment. Another main topic is Berlin and its discontents. Zink, who has lived in and around the city for many years, catalogs the ghosts that continue to haunt it.

A drawback of this short novel is that it introduces too many characters; none quite sink in. Sister Europe lacks the air of inevitability that a good novel has. It also lacks a sense of drama, not that the gifted Zink does not try to inject some.”

–Dwight Garner on Nell Zink’s Sister Europe (The New York Times)

“The author who writes after great catastrophe frequently assumes the angel’s position: Many historical novels float above history, bearing witness but drawing simple lessons, or casting dogmatic judgment, from the safe vantage of the present. In these books, the crises of earlier eras are held at a distance. By charting the course from then to now, these authors find comfort in the fact that time passes on, leaving the past safely in the past.

Yet for those surrounded by the debris, history remains a living thing. Over the course of her life, the Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima, who was born just after World War II and died in 2016, witnessed firsthand how a nation and a society can transform completely without ever losing the scars of its past. In Wildcat Dome, published in 2013 and newly translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, she narrates more than half a century of her country’s history, from wartime defeat and American occupation to the political and social upheavals of reconstruction. But rather than holding herself at a remove, Tsushima imbues these traumatic and transformative decades with a vivid and disturbing vitality, and uncovers in the process an unsettled zone where nothing is made whole, and not even the dead can rest.

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“Tsushima writes in a fluid, ambiguous present tense that muddles the distance between past and present, self and other. The reader is always right there with the character, suspended in a static moment of thought or trapped within their recursive stream of consciousness, circling revelation without ever arriving there. As one character remarks, ‘The end of the world is here, now.’ And no matter how many times the world shuffles away from ruin, there is an absence of forward movement: Though Japan has emerged from the war apparently whole and strong, Fukushima is an eerie reminder of how close devastation really is. For Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko, things always feel like that, a permanent apocalypse they cannot escape.”

–Robert Rubsam on Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome (The Atlantic)

“A suspicion lurks in contemporary literary discourse that interiority is less interior than it used to be, that in place of a cast of ’round’ characters who develop through experience, recent fiction favors the solitary observer, a mind either constricted or diffused throughout the text (if there is no outside, there can be no inside). One thinks of depressive, overmedicated narrators in novels by Ottessa Moshfegh or Emma Cline, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, or the anglophone vogue for Sebaldian autofiction. But what Kitamura does is different. She is one of very few serious fiction writers who insist on not only describing but enacting the mirrored maze of impaired intimacy—the frustrating, unaccommodating realism we twenty-first-century dwellers deserve. She puts her readers outside the transitional, paradoxical arena of imaginative play that is fiction’s usual province, in which there’s no fretful obligation to locate a line between truth and invention. Always in control of her effects, she chooses not to offer the compensatory pleasures provided by other writers.

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“For me, Kitamura’s approach to character, notwithstanding its evident European influences, most strongly recalls what the theater and film scholar Shonni Enelow has identified as an ascendant strain in American movie acting: a resolutely contained, withholding style for an anxious, dissociated, hypermediated age of forever wars, prolonged socioeconomic crises, and numbing, relentless exploitation. A retreat from the more maximalist, keening-and-weeping approach that had been dominant in film for so long, this style (employed by the likes of Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence, and Oscar Isaac) resonates with audiences as a kind of antiperformance, signaling a new pessimism about the value of expression—and signaling, too, a form of stealth resistance, a refusal to yield up any remaining scraps of self to the meat grinder of ubiquitous surveillance and enforced display. It casts doubt, in ethical as well as aesthetic terms, on the whole hoary notion of psychological depth, whispering that we shouldn’t need, and have no right, to roam another person’s inner landscape.

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“More than any other contemporary anglophone novelist I can think of, Kitamura sets out to evoke the unbearable pressures on the mind and body of things we tolerate, don’t act on, and can’t allow ourselves to think about. Audition removes overt politics from this project, leaving an often mystifying study of just how much people willfully avoid knowing about the conditions of their lives.”

–Lidija Haas on Katie Kitamura’s Audition (Harper’s)

“Together they bring a staggering amount of violent history and psychological torment to this glorious mountain setting, where they fall into such a harmonious rhythm that they hardly need to speak. Their days are governed by work and they have almost no contact with outsiders, but there are plenty of foraged berries, roast perch from the nearby lake swabbed with butter and nights spent sleeping together under a sprawling, quasi-matriarchal tree they call Big Spruce. No wonder they take care to give thanks for everything they ingest, kill or saw down.

Depending on your perspective, this could be an Edenic laboratory of human cooperation—everyone occupying a role suited to their talents, their biological needs more or less met—or a band of vulnerable individuals in thrall to a manipulative despot, whose will is so strong it eclipses all prior conceptions of fairness, law and reason.

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“It is a delicate balancing act, designing the inner lives of eight distinct characters alongside their shared mythology. ‘The Colony was the vessel, and sometimes they could see in each other’s faces which way things were headed. Now the ship is about to capsize, someone must go stand on the other side, to restore balance,’ Norlin writes, summoning the collective mood and its hold on them. ‘One thing they often said to each other was how lucky they were, to live like this.’

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“Too often novels packed with this many ideas sacrifice emotion in favor of mounting a ponderous argument; Norlin instead writes visceral episodes that speak for themselves. (How to sever an umbilical cord in the forest? With your teeth.) The story’s open-ended questions—about the power of charisma and love and the boundaries between the individual and the greater good—arise organically, without forcing stale answers.”

–Joumana Khatib on Annika Norlin’s The Colony (The New York Times Book Review)