Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Anahid Nersessian on Aria Aber’s Good Girl, Ron Charles on Karen Russell’s The Antidote, Hugh Ryan on Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance, Beverly Gage on Clay Risen’s Red Scare, and Charles Finch on Alissa Wilkinson’s We Tell Ourselves Stories.
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“Good Girl is a bildungsroman, a novel about personal development or, if you like, growing up. It shares unexpected and gratifying parallels with various classics of the genre, including Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, about a young man who falls in with a troupe of circus performers, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Like these novels, Aber’s book is episodic and capacious, brimming with secondary characters who each contribute, in their small way, to the main character’s evolution. And, like them, it is about an outsider who wants in.
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“The arc of the bildungsroman bends toward adaptation, if not always assimilation, as the protagonist’s rough edges are smoothed by experience and she acquires an instinct for who can and cannot be trusted, who should and should not be loved. The bildungsroman takes for granted the idea that a person ought to want to belong, even to a tiny platoon of fellow-exiles or weirdos. Aber offers a decidedly contemporary twist on this assumption by asking: What does it mean to want to belong to a society that not only doesn’t accept you but might actively wish you harm?
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“What makes Good Girl so powerful as a novel of development or bildungsroman is that it respects self-destruction as an effective tool of self-discovery. Nila thinks of herself as emotionally fragile—she once jumped out a window, she tells us, in a fit of preteen despair—but by exposing herself to a wide variety of abuses (drugs, rough sex, domestic violence) she learns that she is tougher than she feels. Her worst decisions give her a sense, however fleeting or delusory, of being in charge of her own life. More to the point, by recklessly pursuing the path of the broken, bad, and ruined girl, she becomes increasingly comfortable with the possibility of social rejection, of being scorned by the people whose love she wants most.”
–Anahid Nersessian on Aria Aber’s Good Girl (The New Yorker)
“The question of possibilities both forgotten and denied snakes through Russell’s second novel, a tempest of a tale called The Antidote. Her signature conceits gather again in these pages—a determined girl, a tincture of wizardry, a slash of violence—but this story is dazzlingly original and ambitious. Hovering in the atmosphere somewhere between Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Antidote is a historical novel pumped full of just enough magic to make it rise without bursting the bubble of our credulity.
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“Russell may be writing about a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but the scale here is large. Into this book she’s packed a whiff of Steinbeck’s grandeur, a murder mystery, the legacy of genocide, a young woman’s coming of age, a Dickensian story of a missing baby, a warning about climate change and even a talking cat. With all these strange, momentous incidents, The Antidote rises into a western epic that grasps for the whole history of White settlement. In the lives of this eccentric cast of characters, her story illuminates how the abuse of the Native peoples and destruction of the environment are intricately woven together in the deadly charade known as Manifest Destiny.
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“Across the vast canvas of this novel, Russell aims for nothing less than a consideration of the role that intentional amnesia plays in American history and American life. To embark on the adventure of reading The Antidote is to place yourself under the enchanting and challenging care of a writer who is guilty of actual witchcraft.”
–Ron Charles on Karen Russell’s The Antidote (The Washington Post)
“In an 1817 letter to his brothers, the poet John Keats defined the concept of negative capability as ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ This is a quintessential trait of a great writer, who must know everything but create characters who know nothing, or only the wrong things, or different things on different pages. In her discomforting new collection, Stag Dance, Torrey Peters excels at this particular kind of unknowing. Hopscotching through genres and decades, Peters, across three short stories and a novella, summons up characters whose ideas about sex, gender and sexuality exist beyond (or before, or to the side of) our current orthodoxies.
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“Peters excels at plumbing the murky hearts of queer people. Her characters betray one another and themselves, and occasionally end the world in their desire for revenge. They embrace feelings they’re not supposed to have. Frequently they’re tormented by external manifestations of aspects of themselves that they have yet to admit, define or find a way to love.
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“The collection will likely make readers of all genders uncomfortable. That’s on purpose. Peters’s characters are complicated, in pain, angry and unsure of their own identities or desires. Her award-winning first novel, 2021’s Detransition, Baby, also courted controversy, by centering a character whose gender was messy, unclear and still evolving. Peters is not interested in ‘positive’ representation; she’s interested in authenticity. She wants to show that every part of the queer experience, even the disturbing parts, or the parts we don’t understand, are worthy of being made into art. That includes jealousy, doubt and negative capability.
A great Torrey Peters story feels like punching yourself in the face, laughing at the bleeding bitch in the mirror and then shamefacedly realizing you’re aroused by the blood on your lips. The four pieces in Stag Dance will leave you bruised, broken and wanting more.”
–Hugh Ryan on Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance (The New York Times Book Review)
“For much of the country, the Cold War ended quite some time ago. But the far right has always nurtured a counternarrative in which hard-core Marxists are forever pushing the nation down the road to serfdom. After Joseph McCarthy’s Senate censure, in 1954, right-wing organizations and self-proclaimed McCarthyites vowed to keep the flame alive against a corrupt, treacherous, and deluded liberal establishment. And it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to get from then to now. McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, famously served as one of Trump’s early mentors, a tutor in the ideological and practical workings of American politics.
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“As a scholarly subject, the Red Scare has never quite experienced its moment of glory. During the second half of the twentieth century, the topic was too combustible to make for great history: you were either for or against Joe McCarthy, for or against Alger Hiss, for or against the Rosenbergs. The end of the Cold War produced a rush of work seeking to assess new political, archival, and conceptual openings. For the first time, it became possible for non-Marxist historians to write admiringly about the Communist Party’s civil-rights and antifascist activism without needing to denounce Stalin on every page. Historians examined classified materials opened by U.S. intelligence agencies and even, briefly, by the post-Soviet government, seeking to get to the bottom of decades-old mysteries.
Then the outpouring of interest and energy largely stopped. The political and academic Zeitgeist moved on to questions deemed more pressing and relevant for the twenty-first century. Even academics who described themselves as Marxists expressed little interest in, say, the operations of America’s Communist underground during the height of the McCarthy era. Partly as a result, younger generations often find it hard to grasp what everyone was so worked up about. Risen wants to remedy that.
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“Risen’s book usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets. It also describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end.”
–Beverly Gage on Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (The New Yorker)
“We Tell Ourselves Stories has lots of excellent details like this for the dedicated Didion fan. But its strongest sections are the ones that question rather than venerate her. Wilkinson is superb at dissecting the overlap of film and politics in Didion’s worldview.
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“Conservatism is the shadow side of romanticism; the ideal is in the past, rather than the future, but they share an aspirational unreality. Didion was too shrewd to keep believing in movies or the G.O.P. very far into adulthood: John Wayne was a phony tough guy and a John Bircher. But she never got over her heartbreak about the loss of those entwined beliefs. When they merged, in the Reagans, she was horrified, in Wilkinson’s words, at their ‘vapidity, a fixation on image to the exclusion of anything else.’ Even then, she started calling herself a libertarian.
Wilkinson seems to start out adulating Didion before moving uneasily into a more realistic diagnosis of her, as a rattled declinist. ‘Didion had been trafficking in some kind of nostalgia all her life,’ she writes late in the book, in the tone of a realization. It’s a disquieting trait to find in a great writer, especially when camouflaged, like Hemingway’s sentimentality, behind acerbic rigor.
Yet it’s also probably why Didion keeps growing larger in our minds: Her fatalism seems prescient, not melodramatic. Have you checked in on the center lately? Is it holding? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This searching, conscientious book leaves us with the question of what happens when everyone stops believing them at once.”
–Charles Finch on Alissa Wilkinson’s We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (The New York Times Book Review)
