5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Mark O’Connell on Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, Anthony Lane on Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, Walton Muyumba on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, Jack McCordick on Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, and Dwight Garner on Helen Garner’s How to End a Story.

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

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“Lalami’s dystopian premise here will be familiar to anyone who has read Philip K. Dick’s novella The Minority Report(or seen the 2002 Spielberg adaptation), set in a future where people are incarcerated for offenses they have yet to commit. The Dream Hotel shares some of this dystopian DNA, but the forebear it nods most knowingly toward is Kafka.

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“Despite the influence of Kafka and Dick, the novel’s most obvious reference points are in the American present. One long and vivid sequence takes place against the backdrop of a Los Angeles consumed by wildfire. And anyone who has had the misfortune to find themselves snarled in the gears of Customs and Border Protection at a U.S. airport might read the extended account of Sara’s initial detention with sweaty palms and a racing heart. Though not much is explicitly made of it, Sara shares with her creator a Moroccan background; the notion of people being punished for the perceived likelihood of committing a crime might seem less speculative to readers of Middle Eastern heritage.

Lalami’s social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction The Dream Hotel often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara’s situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it.

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“Still, the novel’s central vision—a world in which the most private aspects of people’s inner lives are extracted and sold—retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.”

–Mark O’Connell on Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (The New York Times Book Review)

“There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower. If you’re lucky enough to have an Agave americana on your land, wary enough to stay clear of its sharp-toothed leaves, and patient enough to hang around for anything from eight to thirty years, you will be rewarded, at last, with the sight of its butter-yellow blossoms. Likewise, if a copy of The Underground Man, a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly, it’s a book in full bloom.

The cause of that flowering is not hard to find. You hear a hint of it in the opening sentences: ‘A rattle of leaves woke me some time before dawn. A hot wind was breathing in at the bedroom window.’ At once, we are on our guard; since when did the weather become an intruder, stalking us while we sleep?

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“On a map, Marlowe’s hunting grounds abut or overlap with Archer’s, yet the moods of their investigations are quite distinct. Chandler haunts you and makes you laugh; Macdonald keeps you posted, although his Californian evocations are not without a quick lyrical toughness of their own. Through the medium of Archer, he tells us how the skin of the landscape rises, falls, and smells; how it looks through the windshield of a car (‘the leaping road, the blue sky streaming backward’) or from the window of a plane; and, most indelible of all, thanks to The Underground Man, how it burns.

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“If you approached a family in Altadena, as they stood in front of their scorched home, and informed them that a guy called Ross Macdonald saw it all coming, they would quite rightly tell you to go to the place where the fires are never snuffed out. Nonetheless, there is something creepy and compelling in the prophetic strength that is harbored, and slowly revealed, by particular books. (Or by a particular author: in Kafka’s case, the foresight is terrifying.) What is caught most acutely in The Underground Man, and what came to mind as I watched the footage from L.A., is the sheer velocity with which such catastrophes can unfold. Hell comes on fast.

–Anthony Lane on Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man (The New Yorker)

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brand of realism has always depended on dreamy characters dreaming of, say, exuberant sexual pleasures or the protections of extended family relations or the new freedoms arising from political revolution.

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“There’s power and promise throughout Dream Count. Adichie reminds readers that she’s a massively talented prose stylist and storyteller … The novel’s formal arrangement bears some resemblance to Nina Simone’s ‘Four Women’ or, better, ‘Four African Women’ by the Rwandan-Ugandan-American singer-songwriter Somi. Adichie may have also been inspired by Somi’s stunning ode, ‘Kadiatou the Beautiful,’ as she shaped Kadiatou’s story. Unfortunately, Dream Countdoesn’t match the daring musicality of those jazz idiom performers. One instance of trouble: Adichie’s omniscient third person renderings of Zikora and Kadiatou flatten those characters rather than enlivening them. Though the sentences have momentum, their stories only run in place.

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“The lockdown allows these newly middle-aged, cosmopolitan, Nigerian women to finally grieve for their failed, youthful dreams. Though Adichie claims that gender ‘prescribes how we should be’ rather than freeing us to be ‘our true individual selves,’ strangely, Dream Count does not fully release its Nigerian characters from gender’s strictures. Adichie glances toward an alternative, never fully embracing it. Maybe that’s another novel.”

–Walton Muyumba on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (The Boston Globe)

“…if The Technological Republic is Karp’s contribution to the battle of ideas for Western civilization, it amounts to little more than a gussied-up exercise in industry P.R. What really makes America great, the book claims, is not so much its system of government, nor its vaunted ideals and values, but its software industry. And, wouldn’t you know it: The most important software companies are the ones whose products, as Karp has put it, ‘power the West to its obvious, innate superiority’ and ‘bring violence and death to our enemies.’

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“This tonal seesawing—for every Karpian truth-bomb, a lawyerly qualification; for each saber rattled, a pitch-deck cliché—is symptomatic of this book’s generic incoherence. Karp and Zamiska describe The Technological Republic as existing in the ‘interstitial but we hope to think rich space between political, business, and academic treatise.’ That’s one way of putting it. Another is that it reads as though you asked an AI chatbot to write a set of Gladwellian think pieces in defense of American techno-militarism, with as many smart-sounding yet ultimately vacuous quotes as possible.

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“Much of the book’s citational extravagance amounts to Karp and Zamiska rummaging through their library to prettify an otherwise banal point. In a section on the secrets to Palantir’s business success, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s counsel to ‘leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee’ propels Karp and Zamiska to the observation that they ‘count ourselves among those who have repeatedly fled, abandoning failed projects within days of a lack of progress being surfaced and deconstructing dysfunctional teams.’ Deconstructing dysfunctional teams! Reading those lines, I envisioned the soil around a certain Concord, Massachusetts, graveyard plot churning in anguish.

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“This, apparently, is the future we are rushing toward: one where a $200 billion tech company enacts violence in the name of Western civilization while waxing poetic about how building lethal software is just like making great art.”

–Jack McCordick on Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic (The New Republic)

“The Australian writer Helen Garner’s fiction has long been prized by people whose taste I trust. Yet when I’ve picked up her novels, I’ve bounced off them, like a spacecraft that has botched re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. Every reader must have a writer or two like this, ones they sense they should like but do not. Garner’s work has seemed, in my brief encounters with it, thin and in want of polish. Now comes How to End a Story, a barbell-weight book that collects three volumes of her diaries from 1978 to 1998, beginning in her mid-30s. At more than 800 pages, this is a lot of Garner (no relation). I almost put this one down, too, because it gets off to a tentative and makeshift start. Book critics, like people who work in publishing, are always looking for an excuse to stop reading. But after a while I began to sync with her voice. By a quarter of the way in, I was utterly in her hands. Mea maxima culpa.

This is one for the introverts—the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner.

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“Writers have kept diaries for myriad reasons. Anaïs Nin wished to taste life twice. Patricia Highsmith longed to clarify ‘items that might otherwise drift in my head.’ Anne Frank wanted to go on living after her death. Sheila Heti felt that if she didn’t look at her life closely she was abandoning an important task. These are Garner’s instincts, too. But she also says, charmingly: ‘Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was 10.’

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“Work is her salvation and her bridge to the world. My plan is to return to her other books, and to wade in, this time, further than my ankles.”

–Dwight Garner on Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 (The New York Times)