5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
“Just as there is no single method of selling out, there is no single art monster.”
Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Lovia Gyarkye on Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, Becca Rothfeld on Edwidge Danticat’s We’re Alone, Marc Weingarten on Katherine Bucknell’s Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out, Hannah Gold on Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, and Laura Marsh on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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“Having gnawed away at literary and political conventions from within their hallowed forms, Senna continues to examine them in her new novel, Colored Television. Representation remains an entry point (not a destination) through which she takes on a whole world of social expectations and habits of mind, many of which she has toyed with in previous books: What is the relationship between a writer and her work? How can she balance that work with the pressures of domestic responsibility and economic constraints? Where do her loyalties lie when it comes to art and family? In Colored Television, the experience of being mixed-race in America is crucial and ever-present, but Senna is also interested in the competing loyalties and difficult challenges faced by artists in any discipline.
That Senna chooses Hollywood as the setting of her latest social satire makes sense: Where else has the struggle for better, different, less corny portrayals of ethnic minorities, queer folks, and other historically disenfranchised groups been more fraught than in Tinseltown? … As Jane becomes further entangled in the business of selling authenticity, Senna deploys increasingly lacerating observations of Hollywood. The writing is crisp, the tone cutting, and as is typical in a Senna novel, few people are spared … To observe and represent reality is every artist’s task, and yet each medium imposes its own costs. Just as there is no single method of selling out, there is no single art monster—only infinite possible versions of the frustrated creative self.”
–Lovia Gyarkye on Danzy Senna’s Colored Television (The Nation)
“’I am from a place that constantly evokes nostalgia in the people who have seen, lived, and loved it “before,”‘ writes Danticat, who emigrated to America when she was 12. Years later, when the writer and her children were driving through a flooded street full of floating trash in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, she suppressed her desire to shout, ‘The land might never be pristine again.’ But as We’re Alone demonstrates, pristine purity is not always a virtue. Danticat’s essays are collages of associations and resonances, and they are richer for it … Like the informal but spirited orators she grew up idolizing, Danticat cultivates a style that is diverting and digressive. Her essays are not linear artifacts but webs that spin around ideas or turns of phrase. As such, they are never about only one thing …
Although Danticat’s reflections sometimes give way to clichés at the level of sentences…their poly-vocal profusion is fresh and gripping … Haiti, too, has often been abandoned (or worse) by the rest of the world, but its inhabitants are alone together, and they have managed to transform even the language of their colonizers into something colorfully new—Haitian Creole. This tongue, which bears remnants of its rudiments, is no more ‘pristine’ than the streets strewn with detritus, but perhaps there is something to be said, Danticat suggests, for the inventiveness required to transform disaster into something brighter.”
–Becca Rothfeld on Edwidge Danticat’s We’re Alone (The Washington Post)
“Christopher Isherwood is a great novelist, but I would submit that his diaries are even better. The British writer’s thousands of journal entries span five decades and are among the dishiest and most vividly alive literary diaries of the 20th century; reading the three volumes, which have been expertly edited and annotated by Katherine Bucknell, provides the reader with the best source code for Isherwood’s abundant life as a queer literature icon and spiritual seeker. Now, we have Bucknell’s attempt at a definitive Isherwood biography, which raises the question: Is such an undertaking necessary? Bucknell thinks so, and it turns out she’s right. In Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, Bucknell goes beyond the diaries, gathering up the many strands of the writer’s personal and public lives to create a nuanced, masterful portrait of a brilliant, insecure, charismatic seeker of artistic truth and personal freedom …
Bucknell’s book homes in on the conflict between Isherwood’s thirst for public recognition and social climbing and the cultivation of his inner life, especially as Isherwood settled into his LA life in the ‘50s and ‘60s. As Bucknell writes, Isherwood never wanted to be forced to choose between contemplative isolation and the sensual pleasures afforded him as a famous writer, so he split the difference. At the same time, he came to regard the early works that made his reputation as too outward-directed, not engaged with his own interior conflicts … As Bucknell’s definitive wide-screen biography shows us, Isherwood’s struggles were transmuted into lyrical fiction that never stopped questioning what it meant to be a man in the 20th century, and thus his art became our gift.”
–Marc Weingarten on Katherine Bucknell’s Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out (The Boston Globe)
“…our narrator is determined to find his own kind of significance in this dire situation, and in everything around him. Not just meaning, but a pinhole view onto infinitude, or at least a Whitmanesque ‘multitude,’ the sort of ecstatic close reading that he teaches his students to practice and that he hopes, with varying intensities of belief, can renew in some small way our openness to one another in a socially distanced world. The democratic value of deep engagement—with a text, a trifle, another person—takes on more explicitly civic dimensions in Small Rain than it has in Greenwell’s previous books, and it is one of the novel’s driving currents …
We couldn’t be farther from the genial fatalism of people appearing on their fire escapes to clap for healthcare workers or the cynical chest-puffing of Covid deniers. Instead, these scenes gesture at what might have been transformational about our months in lockdown: not just the death and the pain, but the possibility of turning away from despair to face that death and pain together. It is enraging to know that, four years after the period in which this novel takes place, this country is footing the bill for the systematic destruction of hospitals full of patients and healthcare workers in Gaza. It is impossible to read these passages from Small Rain, which go into such raptures of detail on the intricacies of care work, and not think of the bond between medical worker and patient as a kind of sacred trust, subject to all manner of violation and redemption.
In these pages, the hospital is a laboratory of giving and withholding—and of grace … the sentences retain the alluring patter of Greenwell’s earlier books, but the narrator’s preoccupation with the framing of his material feels new, or at least raised to a new intensity … The best of Greenwell’s writing brings to mind an overflowing container, a surfeit of emotion and insight that is not wasted despite having exceeded its limit. ‘Small rain,’ indeed; there is nothing humble about it. Even sentences as expansive as these can’t entirely capture the fluid trajectories of these passions as they fall, or perhaps fly, toward their ordinary conclusions.”
–Hannah Gold on Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (The Nation)
“Youngish women have a tendency to become semi-invisible, or to put it a different way, the men around them don’t tend to see them beyond their barest outlines—a fact that Kushner’s characters turn to their advantage. The narrator of Creation Lake simply takes this notion to an extreme … The acquisition of secret knowledge is one of the central pleasures of the spy novel, and Kushner works several unusual varieties of such knowledge into the novel’s propulsive plot …
As in a Graham Greene or John le Carré novel, in Creation Lake the point of spying is not just to find out what is happening but how to pick one’s way through a world of ideas … There’s no temptation to explain Sadie’s actions as a part of what the critic Parul Sehgal has called the ‘trauma plot’: the idea that characters, frequently women, are motivated largely by some terrible moment in their past. Kushner gives no indication of what Sadie has ever suffered, or not. All we have is the evidence of her lethal competence. It leaves a refreshing motivation: that she did it because she could.”
–Laura Marsh on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (The New Republic)
