5 Book Reviews You Must Read This Week ‹ Literary Hub

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Our celebration of fabulous reviews this week includes Lovia Gyarkye on Danzy Senna’s Colour televisionBecca Rothfeld on Edwidge Danticats We are aloneMarc Weingarten on Katherine Bucknell’s Christopher Isherwood: Inside OutHannah Gold on Garth Greenwell’s Small rainand Laura Marsh about Rachel Kushner’s Lake of Creation.

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“Having corroded literary and political conventions from their hallowed forms, Senna examines them further in her new novel. Colour television. Representation remains an entry point (not a destination) through which she grapples with a whole world of societal expectations and habits of mind, many of which she has played with in previous books: What is the relationship between a writer and her work? How can she reconcile that work with the pressures of domestic responsibilities and economic constraints? Where do her loyalties lie when it comes to art and family? In Colour televisionThe experience of being mixed-race in America is crucial and pervasive, but Senna is also interested in the competing loyalties and difficult challenges that artists of all disciplines face.

Senna's choice of Hollywood as the setting for her latest social satire is understandable: where else has the fight for better, different, less kitschy representations of ethnic minorities, queer people, and other historically disadvantaged groups been as fierce as in Hollywood? … As Jane becomes ever more entangled in the business of selling authenticity, Senna presents increasingly caustic observations of Hollywood. The writing is crisp, the tone cutting, and, as is typical of a Senna novel, few people are spared … Observing and depicting reality is the job of every artist, and yet every medium comes with its own price. Just as there is no single method of selling out, there is no single art monster—only infinitely many possible versions of the frustrated creative self.”

–Lovia Gyarkye on Danzy Sennas Colour television (The Nation)

“I come from a place that constantly arouses nostalgia in people who have seen it, experienced it and loved it,” writes Danticat, who emigrated to America at the age of 12. Years later, as the author drove with her children through a flooded street full of floating garbage in the capital Port-au-Prince, she suppressed her desire to scream: “The country may never be pristine again.” But when We are alone shows, immaculate purity is not always a virtue. Danticat's essays are collages of associations and resonances, and are richer for it… Like the informal but spirited orators she idolized as a child, Danticat cultivates a style that is distracting and digressive. Her essays are not linear artifacts, but webs that revolve around ideas or phrases. As such, they are never about just one thing…

Although Danticat's reflections sometimes slip into clichés at the sentence level, their polyphonic richness is fresh and compelling. Haiti, too, has often been abandoned by the rest of the world (or worse), but its people are alone together and have managed to transform even the language of their colonizers into something colorfully new – Haitian Creole. This language, which still bears remnants of its origins, is no more 'pristine' than the rubble-strewn streets, but perhaps, Danticat suggests, there is something to be said for the ingenuity required to turn a disaster into something better.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Edwidge Danticats We are alone (The Washington Post)

“Christopher Isherwood is a great novelist, but I would argue that his diaries are even better. The British writer's thousands of diary entries span five decades and are among the most opaque and vivid literary diaries of the 20th century. Reading the three volumes, expertly edited and annotated by Katherine Bucknell, gives the reader the best source code for Isherwood's rich life as an icon of queer literature and spiritual seeker. Now we have Bucknell's attempt at a definitive Isherwood biography, which begs the question: is such an undertaking necessary? Bucknell thinks so, and it turns out she's right. In “Inside Out” by Christopher IsherwoodBucknell goes beyond the diaries and weaves together the many strands of the writer's private and public life to create a nuanced, masterful portrait of a brilliant, uncertain, charismatic seeker of artistic truth and personal freedom…

Bucknell's book addresses the conflict between Isherwood's desire for public recognition and social advancement on the one hand and the cultivation of his inner life on the other, particularly as Isherwood settled into life in LA in the '50s and '60s. As Bucknell writes, Isherwood never wanted to have to choose between contemplative isolation and the sensual pleasures offered as a famous writer, and so he settled for a solution. At the same time, he felt the early works that established his reputation were too outward-looking and unengaged with his own inner conflicts… As Bucknell's definitive widescreen biography shows us, Isherwood's struggles turned into lyrical fiction that never stopped questioning what it meant to be a man in the 20th century, and so his art became our gift.”

–Marc Weingarten on Katherine Bucknell Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out (The Boston Globe)

“…our narrator is determined to find his own meaning in this dire situation and in everything around him. Not just meaning, but a pinhole view of infinity, or at least a Whitman-esque 'multiplicity,' the kind of ecstatic, close reading he teaches his students and which he hopes, with varying intensities of belief, can in some way renew 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 in Greenwell's previous books, and it is one of the driving currents of the novel …

We couldn’t be further from the ingenious fatalism of people appearing on their fire escapes to clap for health workers, or the cynical breast-thumping of Covid deniers. Instead, these scenes suggest what our months in lockdown might have been transformative: not just the death and pain, but the possibility of turning away from despair to confront that death and pain together. It is outrageous to know that four years after the time in which this novel is set, this country is footing the bill for the systematic destruction of hospitals full of patients and health workers in Gaza. It is impossible to take these passages from Small rainwho delve so deeply into the intricacies of nursing care and do not view the bond between medical staff and patient as some kind of sacred trust that can be broken and repaired in any way imaginable.

In these pages, the hospital is a laboratory of giving and withholding—and of grace…the sentences retain the seductive style of Greenwell's earlier books, but the narrator's engagement with shaping his material feels new, or at least with a new intensity…Greenwell's best works suggest an overflowing vessel, an overflow of emotion and insight that is not wasted even though it has exceeded its limits. 'Little rain,' indeed; there is nothing humble about it. Even sentences as verbose as these cannot fully capture the fluid trajectories of these passions as they fall, or perhaps fly, toward their ordinary end.”

–Hannah Gold on Garth Greenwell Small rain (The Nation)

“Young women have a tendency to become semi-invisible, or in other words, the men around them do not see them beyond their mere outlines – a fact that Kushner's characters use to their advantage. The narrator of Lake of Creation simply takes this idea to the extreme… The acquisition of secret knowledge is one of the central pleasures of a spy novel, and Kushner incorporates several unusual variants of such knowledge into the novel's driving plot…

Like in a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carré, in Lake of Creation spying is not just about finding out what's happening, it's also about navigating your way through a world of ideas… One is not tempted to explain Sadie's actions as part of what the critic Parul Sehgal has called the 'trauma plot': the idea that characters, often women, are motivated primarily by some terrible moment in their past. Kushner gives no indication of what Sadie ever did or did not suffer. All we have is evidence of her lethal competence. There remains a refreshing motivation: that she did it because she could.”

–Laura Marsh on Rachel Kushner’s Lake of Creation (The New Republic)