5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Dwight Garner on Zach Williams’s Beautiful Days, Parul Sehgal on Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Sara Bhatia on Clara Bingham’s The Movement, and James Wood on Ed Simon’s Devil’s Contract.

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

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“Some of the stories in it are better than others! But two or three are so good that they announce a genuine young talent, one who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyches … Like Gabriel García Márquez and Stephen King, among others, Williams understands how unnervingly intense and unknowable children can be. Like J.G. Ballard, he savors postapocalyptic vistas. Like George Saunders, he gets cosmic mileage out of tour guides. Like Joshua Ferris, he micro-observes office life. As in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, sometimes there are weird men in his closets. He knows how ominous certain rental houses can feel. But he is his own writer. His sentences are smooth, clean and approachable. He pushes you slowly off into the night, then down long embankments. ‘Psychological horror’ is too neat a label for his work, but it fits loosely. He has a talent for unreliable narrators. He gets you on their side, then turns the tables, leaving you feeling complicit—and awful … Two or three very good stories might not sound like much. But if he can keep that percentage up for two or three more collections, we might be staring before long at the ‘Selected Stories of Zach Williams.’”

–Dwight Garner on Zach Williams’ Beautiful Days (The New York Times)

“Told in tight vignettes, gusts of fury, the novel is not so much the story of the slow implosion of a marriage over the years as it is the black box found amid its wreckage, a play-by-play accounting, from Jane’s point of view, of her own annihilation … Writers are often encouraged to find their voices, but it has always been Manguso’s silences that have felt distinctive—she is a sculptor of omission, distinguishing what has not been said from what cannot be said. Negative space is a key feature of her form… Liars seems, at first, like a departure from her aloof, even icy work of the past. Here the writing scalds and gives the appearance of holding nothing back. But key omissions are, in fact, central to its architecture. John’s version of events—his intentions and perspective—is entirely absent. Jane does not seem to entertain them, nor does Manguso. There is a strange lack of motive in the book … What is this vision of womanhood, of sexually indiscriminate infants running households? For all her subtlety, Manguso has always evinced a tendency to make broad, sometimes crude generalizations, to break the world into types …

Manguso’s secret weapon has always been the sudden, blunt moment of self-implication—her disappointment, for example, in her first memoir, when she realizes that her illness has not made her a better person but, rather, transformed her into a monster of entitlement. That book, however, was written after seven years of remission. Liars seems to have been written in the heat of the crisis. ‘The blood jet’ is what Sylvia Plath called her sudden outpouring of poetry after Ted Hughes left her for another woman. But novels require different fuel; among their essential ingredients are doubt and time. This book, in its blazing assurance, tells a thin and partial tale, frayed by silences that feel more like blind spots than like the canny omissions of old. A writer, lancing and fluent on what cannot be said, founders here in her inability to reckon with what she has yet to see.”

–Parul Sehgal on Sarah Manguso’s Liars (The New Yorker)

“As is typical of oral histories, The Movement incorporates minimal expository or analytical text, relying instead on the voices of the interviewees and news clippings to create a narrative. Bingham places her subjects in conversation with each other, documentary style. The effect is utterly engrossing. It is easy to forget that Bingham’s subjects are women in their 70s and 80s recalling events from more than a half century ago … The Movement includes all the principal architects of second-wave feminism. Bingham intertwines her own interviews with celebrated leaders like Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller with archive-sourced commentary from deceased luminaries like Friedan, Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm. But delightfully, the great majority of Bingham’s 120 interviewees will be unfamiliar to the average reader. These interviews make The Movement sparkle, and include congressional staffers, flight attendants, artists, athletes, office workers, labor organizers, academics, plaintiffs in precedent-setting court cases, and the ‘Janes,’ an underground network of women who trained one another to perform abortions … Bingham’s inclusion of lesser-known actors effectively evokes a largely grassroots movement that included thousands of activists in a vast array of professional fields, along with the millions fighting gender battles on the home front.”

–Sara Bhatia on Clara Bingham’s The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973 (Washington Monthly)

“Cornejo Villavicencio’s novel, then, is a meditation on an aspect of identity that is not a question of choice: nationality. It doesn’t matter that Catalina identifies as American rather than Ecuadoran. She could change any number of things about herself, but she can do nothing to alter the fact that she was born outside the arbitrary boundaries of the country she calls home … This collision between love and the law distinguishes Catalina from other recent campus novels, many of which struggle to find depth in the banal incidents of a student’s coming of age … Cornejo Villavicencio’s fluid, digressive prose shines brightest when Catalina’s theatrical self-presentation takes center stage …

Perhaps Cornejo Villavicencio is more astute than her protagonist. Perhaps this is a novel about a young woman so overwhelmed by American racism that she can’t help describing herself and her Latina friend as identical caricatures. Such is the paradox of identity in the contemporary United States: If marginalized people want to be seen—which is to say, recognized—they sometimes have to become stereotypical … After a flurry of events that feels rushed, almost as if it were the outline of a longer book, the novel suddenly ends. The documentary never gets finished. The grandfather’s predicament comes to an unexpected conclusion that leaves his granddaughter feeling bitter. The DREAM Act fails to pass. Catalina and Nathaniel never get married. It’s unsatisfying, even disappointing. But perhaps this abruptness is intentional. I choose to believe that Cornejo Villavicencio wants to leave the reader hanging. Until the United States recognizes undocumented Americans, there will be no rest for the likes of Catalina—or for the readers of her story.”

–Nicolás Medina Mora on Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina (The Atlantic)

“How many who piously lament the ‘disenchantment’ of the secular world would have been able to bear ordinary life in, say, seventeenth-century Europe? We are bereft, the elegy goes, because modern knowledge has stripped us of ancient magic. We can’t wander like our ancestors in the spirit-filled woods, or hear the music of the spheres, because the sacred spaces became concrete deserts. The cathedrals were displaced by malls. To ‘understand’ the solar system, the charge continues, is to be dead to it. No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and buttressed, marching efficiently through our merely material world, grim-faced assassins of mystery. But consider for a moment the nature of those early modern supernaturalisms …

These kinds of tales, as Ed Simon explores in his lively new book, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, existed as myths that enacted both resistance and control. A cowed culture flirted with the danger of freedom and blasphemous knowledge—literally, the danger of reading the wrong things—while the shape of the Faustian tale almost always enforced the proper religious and social punishment, in the form of Faust’s death and eternal damnation. Reading Simon, I was often put in mind of the English critic Tony Tanner’s observation that the nineteenth-century novel of adultery wrote judgment but dreamed transgression. The Faustian tale teased and consoled an earlier culture in similar ways. In these stories, knowledge itself functions a bit like the heroine’s extramarital affair in the novel of adultery. It’s the lure of freedom, the understandable temptation, the promise of a wider world.”

–James Wood on Ed Simon’s Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (The New Yorker)