Our fivesome of fabulous reviews this week includes Naomi Fry on Melania Trump’s Melania, Adam Sternbergh on Charles Baxter’s Blood Test, Andrea Long Chu on Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger, Parul Sehgal on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message, and Gabriel Bump on Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
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“As a rule, she has existed in the collective imagination not so much as real-life woman, with her own interests and idiosyncrasies, but as a glossy 2-D image, largely known through the mediating scrim of magazine coverage, which has tended to present her as one luxury object among others in her mogul husband’s arsenal … Even after Trump became President, Melania remained an essentially unknowable text. Of course, all actors in the political arena depend on some level of obfuscation, and an attempt to figure out what a public figure really thinks tends to be a fool’s errand. And yet, historically, the role of First Lady has depended on a kind of approachable legibility—a cheerful, open-bookish willingness to soften the hard edges that the role of President demands, through displays of helpmeet-like keenness. Melania, with her pronounced Cold War accent, snugly streamlined outfits, and reluctance to discuss personal matters, seemed more sexy Bond spy than traditional First Lady…
Her new memoir, Melania, the former First Lady proposes, is a ‘deeply personal and reflective’ corrective to the mainstream media’s unfair and malicious misreading of her actions, intentions, and very character. ‘As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation, I feel a responsibility to set the record straight and to provide the actual account of my experiences,’ she writes, in the book’s opening note. And yet, despite this scintillating promise to draw back the drapery and expose ‘the woman behind the public persona,’ Melania is one of the flattest, most abstract, and least revealing accounts of a life that I’ve probably ever read…
I realize that the above makes some fascinating and exceptional episodes seem quite dull, but what if I told you that Melania’s much lengthier account adds almost nothing of note or interest to the bare bones of this précis? The writing is riddled with generalities and clichés, at a level I haven’t seen since teaching college-freshman comp in the early twenty-tens.”
–Naomi Fry on Melania Trump’s Melania (The New Yorker)
Blood Test proves to be a deft comedy—one with echoes of Charlie Kaufman and George Saunders—but it’s more than that, much more. I keep circling back to the phrase ‘minor classic’— maybe ‘quiet masterpiece’?—though I’m not sure why I need the qualifiers. Maybe it’s the book’s brevity (a svelte 209 pages) or the fact that, at first glance, the setup seems a tad familiar, maybe purposefully so. As with any successful knockout punch, part of its force is that you don’t see it coming…
The genius of Blood Test is how adroitly Baxter takes the measure of our moment, in all its insanity and perplexing depravity. While Blood Test is apolitical, it feels firmly anchored in the tumult of 2024. Brock’s ex-wife, Cheryl, and her troll-ish beau, Burt, are immersed in a cult called R/Q Dynamics that’s part Q-Anon, part Church of Scientology. Burt is the kind of man who ‘if you were to ask him where Italy is located on the globe, he wouldn’t know but would despise you for asking,’ which perfectly captures a certain species of modern apoplectic online combatant…
There’s even room for a moment of transcendent beauty and grace, delivered in a dream by a dead mother from the afterlife. If Brock is the frog being boiled alive, Baxter is the scientist who expertly dissects that frog for our benefit.
By announcing itself a comedy, Blood Test isn’t wrong, but it undersells itself. It is a profound and unsettling—and, yes, frequently funny—snapshot of our current tribulations, cast in relief against the stubborn peculiarities of the American character.”
–Adam Sternbergh on Charles Baxter’s Blood Test (The New York Times Book Review)
“Dramatic irony—that pressure gradient of ignorance and knowledge that can be so pleasurable in fiction and so distressing in real life—is not just a theme of Recognizing the Stranger. It is the book’s essential condition. A simple note informs us that Hammad’s lecture was originally delivered on September 28, 2023—in other words, nine days before the Qassam Brigades broke through the fence around Gaza and killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel, taking another 251 hostage.
It is impossible to read Recognizing the Stranger without being haunted by what Hammad does not yet know: that, in the year separating the lecture from its publication, Israeli forces would kill 42,000 people in Gaza and injure almost 100,000 more; that Israel’s remorseless demolition of homes, schools, and hospitals would leave 2 million Palestinians displaced and at risk of starvation and disease, including polio; that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with another blank check of support from the United States, would order a ground invasion of Lebanon and risk all-out war with Iran. Nor could Hammad have known that the site of her lecture, Columbia University, would become a national symbol of the vibrant student protests for Palestinian liberation as well as their violent repression. ‘As I write this, a ceasefire has still not been called,’ Hammad notes in her afterword, written in early 2024. ‘I wonder what reality you now live in.’ We know the answer.
I have thought many times in these past 12 months about the role of the literary critic in a time of war—an event that shatters any idea we may have of literature as existing separately from the world at large. Indeed, we might say the kind of dramatic irony that hovers over Recognizing the Stranger is a constitutive quality of all textuality, if rarely on so brutal a scale: That is, all texts are blind to their own fate, even as, like Oedipus, they are drawn inexorably toward it….
Indeed, one marvels at how often the protesters for Palestine have been treated like the freshman reader of Lolita who, lacking the niceties of the contemplative attitude, objects to all that business with the pedophile. Of course, I hope that English students will learn the difficult pleasures of interpretation; as Hammad reminds us, Said himself was first and foremost a humanist with a deep love of the novel.
But I also find great wisdom in the untrained response that blithely fails to distinguish the text from the world—it is something to be cultivated, not stamped out. Especially in a time of war, we should be bad readers: not because we must abjure curiosity or knowledge but because we in the US should refuse to view the war as if it were a novel—that is, a text that exists in a universe of its own, fenced off from the world where we, the readers, live. I generally try to be modest about the rewards of criticism, but if we are to stop treating the world like a novel, we might begin by learning how to treat novels less like novels. This way, when something comes along that demands more than reading, we may be more prepared.”
–Andrea Long Chu on Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: Palestine and Narrative (Vulture)
“For a year, Palestinians have live-streamed their own annihilation: parents mourning children, children mourning parents, amputations and C-sections performed without anesthesia, a NICU filled with the dead bodies of Palestinian infants. How, the reader wonders, will Coates use his talents now, his moral clarity, his reporting; how will he use his celebrity, and whatever platform or protection it implies? Is there something that only he can see, something that only he can say? …
George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ provides an epigraph for The Message: ‘In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.’ It is an unsettling omen, this sentiment so uncharacteristic of Coates, who has always insisted that he is an artist, not an activist. He will no longer resist the role he has been assigned. He will be conscripted by the great emergencies of his age, a superhero reluctantly donning his mask, stepping into his destiny.
And there he is, doing the press rounds, sharing statements of support for Palestinian rights and Palestinian liberation that are forceful, clear, compelling, and still relatively rare in mainstream media. But the book he is promoting feels strangely out of step, slipshod and assembled in haste. The Message is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement. It is a public offering seemingly designed for private ends, an artifact of deep shame and surprising vanity which reads as if it had been conjured to settle its author’s soul. The precepts on craft and narrative gather underfoot, tangled and unheeded.”
–Parul Sehgal on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message (The New Yorker)
“The semantic tension between ‘running from hell’ and ‘racing toward paradise’ informs much of The Black Utopians. It’s a book about trying, about failed experiments. Robertson uses his family history as an entry point to the broader idea of utopia. He starts with his grandfather’s birthplace, a so-called blacktown in Tennessee named Promise Land, founded in 1870, ‘when some of the earliest experiments in black self-rule were beginning.’ Not ‘Promised’ Land. The tense difference offering, perhaps, more room for aspiration. Letters from Robertson’s ex-convict father, Dorian, philosophically and emotionally moving, transition us between sections and give this history intimate urgency. Dorian spent 10 years in prison for armed robbery while Robertson was growing up; Robertson asked him to ‘replace’ the letters he had sent during that time, which had since been lost…
Robertson’s empathy and love for his people, in Tennessee, Detroit and elsewhere, guarantee that every idea is taken seriously, no matter how far-fetched … Unlike many other sweeping narratives of Black life in America, Robertson’s is concerned with life on the fringes, the less-explored but no less important avenues of survival. Its protagonists operated outside the mainstream as true radicals…
In one particularly profound chapter, Robertson focuses on Cleage Jr.’s attempt to establish an urban Black kibbutz at the Shrine. Influenced by Israeli kibbutzim, the project forces us, in our war-torn present day, to reflect on the inherent cruelties of nation building. In the late 1960s, Zionist advocacy groups and the Israeli government started sponsoring kibbutz tours for Black Americans. Robertson explains these cultural exchanges as ‘attempts to earn the sympathies of an influential minority group amid Israel’s conflicts with Arab countries, particularly the Six-Day War in 1967.’
–Gabriel Bump on Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians (The Washington Post)
