5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our selection of great criticism this week includes Alexandra Jacobs on Liza Minnelli’s Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!, Laura Miller on Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch, Dwight Garner on Saba Sams’ Gunk, Sam Sacks on Karan Mahajan’s The Complex, and Emma Alpern on Andrew Martin’s Down Time.

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

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“It’s Liza with a zzz.

After candid, sprawling memoirs from her contemporaries — Barbra; Cher (we await Volume II!) — America’s sequined sweetheart, Liza Minnelli, is ringing in with something more compact and circumspect.

Twelve years in the making but readable in an afternoon or two, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!” has been plucked, buffed and powder-puffed within an inch of its long life.

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Still, there are moments in this mostly anodyne recap when Liza — who turns 80 on March 12 and has fought a litany of health problems — lets loose.

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The tired-looking smiley face under the dust jacket says as much as the 400-plus over-polished pages inside. She survived, sparkled and still shimmies; that’s enough. Kids, let this plucky Hollywood princess pick up some royalties.”

–Alexandra Jacobs on Liza Minnelli’s Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! (The New York Times)

“The possibility of changing the course of the war runs through Francis Spufford’s radiant new novel Nonesuch, set in London leading up to and during the Blitz.

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This is a book interested more in people and place than in plot, and Iris—one of the most perceptively written women ever produced by a male novelist—shares main-character status with London itself. Spufford, a vivid stylist, wants the reader to feel and smell and hear what it was like to live in the city during wartime.

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You could say that Nonesuch integrates the peril of history-altering magic into the fabric of everyday life, only Iris’ life is anything but ordinary. She and Geoff take the magic in stride the way they take the war in stride, with its nightly bombardments, the omnipresent threat of annihilation or utter loss, the possibility of their homeland’s being invaded and hideously transformed—all of this is nearly as surreal as the magical elements of the story: incorporeal beings, animated statues, and pathways to a place outside time.

Nonesuch ends not with a cliff-hanger, exactly, but with a transformation that necessitates a follow-up. (A sequel will be released next year.) Most time-travel novels, because they mess with the sequence of cause and effect, have intricate, puzzlelike storylines that tend to shortchange their characters. Nonesuch, by contrast, suggests a new use for this by-now-familiar plot device—not simply as a thought experiment about the course of history, but as a more intimate crucible.”

–Laura Miller on Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch (Slate)

“The title refers to the name of a grotty bar, with sticky floors and port-a-loos out back. The title also refers, in a fond way, to the pasty white substance that can cling along with blood to a baby’s scalp just after its birth. These two meanings of “gunk” define this novel’s polarities.

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She writes about social class, and about young women on the verge of stepping into either adolescence or adulthood. These women (girls, sometimes) are often sexually attracted to other women, when they’re not falling into bed with louts.

Sams’s fiction is quietly radical in that her young characters often have, or long to have, children of their own. (She has written about how she became a mother in her early 20s.) Among the questions her fiction asks is: Can punks be homebodies? Can they be hunker-downers?

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Jules is an unreliable narrator. It takes the reader so long to understand this that, to use a technical phrase, it blows your mind to realize how you’ve subtly misread her. Stringing us along so deftly is part of Sams’s achievement. It’s also why I am loath to deliver any more in the way of plot summary. The book is heartbreaking (and coolly frightening) in ways one does not see coming.

What I will say is that Sams is alive at her typewriter.

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I don’t want to oversell Gunk. It’s a young person’s book, and its range is limited. Yet limited mostly in a propulsive way.”

–Dwight Garner on Saba Sams’ Gunk (The New York Times)

“The historian who writes about decline and fall will dwell on the misdeeds of statesmen; the novelist focuses on family. In The Complex, the architect of the Chopras’ ruin is S.P.’s son Laxman, a coarse, grasping status seeker who, at the end of his life, becomes a rabble-rousing Hindu nationalist in the BJP, the political party of the current prime minister, Narendra Modi.

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The challenge of basing a long novel on a villain appears to have bedeviled Mr. Mahajan. He refuses to characterize Laxman as a seductive antihero, perhaps on the moral grounds of not wanting to make such a man seem attractive. But he has also done little to humanize Laxman’s sins. The novel is narrated by Karishma’s embittered son Mohit decades after the events, and his attitude toward most of the family is cynical and contemptuous. In Mohit’s telling, Laxman seems merely grubby and small-minded. Karishma is so desperately lonely that she finds solace in his company, but no one else can stand him. Like a lot of the Chopras, I began to dread the prospect of his appearance.

The dourness of The Complex is, I think, supposed to indicate the book’s serious intentions. It marks an extreme tonal departure from Mr. Mahajan’s previous novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), which brilliantly dramatizes the fallout of a New Delhi terrorist attack.

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Mr. Mahajan has disarmed himself of the use of irony for the The Complex, a lengthy and earnest family saga modeled on the Russian classics, especially the novels of Tolstoy … The book has ample scene-setting and multiple secondary plots, the biggest following the fortunes of Gita and her kind but overworked husband, Sachin, in the Michigan suburbs. Mr. Mahajan is good on the freedoms and anxieties of expatriation, and there is intriguing material here…but ultimately it is overshadowed by the tawdry business with Laxman.”

–Sam Sacks on Karan Mahajan’s The Complex (The Wall Street Journal)

“Despite the steady stream of novels set in the beginning of the pandemic, I’m not sure if we’ve found our Samuel Pepys yet. Not that it’s exactly the authors’ fault. Dredging up all that daily life can feel like pulling a limp fabric mask, the kind we quickly learned offers little protection, out from the back of your coat closet. An object like that isn’t significant; it’s just clutter. In a few decades, you could show it to your grandkids, but for now, it’s depressing to see, a reminder of our many minor miscalculations.

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As the pandemic advances, the characters lock down in various ways, disoriented and stressed out. Their anxieties take over the page. They all seem a little ashamed that they can’t make meaning out of the situation they’re in.

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Martin writes novels of manners, which work best when they’re describing a social type … When it lands, the description clicks into place like a puzzle piece, providing a satisfying jolt of recognition. There is still some of that here, but a lot of Martin’s light-touch meanness is drowned out by his insistence on describing his characters within the context of early COVID — pulling out those masks from the closet.

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Unfortunately, rather than overheard gossip, much of the book reads like a transcript of a hundred conversations you might have had in late 2020 and probably never want to have again.”

–Emma Alpern on Andrew Martin’s Down Time (Vulture)