‹ 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week Bookmarks

Our mix of great reviews this week includes Andrea Long Chu on Sally Rooney’s IntermezzoRon Charles on Richard Powers’ PlaygroundKevin Lozano on Emily Witt’s Health and safetyJia Tolentino on Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejectionand Lincoln Michel on Jesse Ball’s The repeat room.

Article continues after advertisement

“In this criticism – that Rooney writes about love because readers like that sort of thing – we find an important, if largely unconscious, observation about the intersection of literature and capitalism: that the new form and the commodity form are dialectically interwoven, to the point that the literary qualities of a given novel are impossible to distinguish from its economic ones. The funny thing is that this is precisely what Rooney writes novels about. Her young lovers are painfully aware that love, like the novel itself, can traffic in stock characters and exhausted tropes; that love, like the novel, can easily be reduced to a source of private profit within a penal system of exploitation and domination. Again and again, Rooney’s characters place their faith in love as a way to escape the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; once they have achieved this, they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status, and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism, but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product, one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence and, behind it all, by man himself… For Austen, sexual desire was the inexpressible beyond their intricate social conventions, while Rooney’s characters, young and modern, nowhere feel the pressure of conventionality more acutely than in their sex lives…

She refuses to see the novel as an abstract quantity. She insists that it is a relationship between people. This may strike you as a surprisingly rosy account of mass consumption under capitalism, especially from a critic who keeps quoting Karl Marx. And it is true: the fact that love consists only of real relationships between real people all inhabiting the same real world means that love, for a person or a novel, will never be an escape from convention or a relief from power. But this fact about love, what we might call its demoralizing specificity, is also the best evidence we have that love exists.”

–Andrea Long Chu on Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Vulture)

“Jumps over the circuits that make large language models possible and delivers a startling reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reimagined by artificial intelligence… While Playground is not nearly as gigantic as the author’s Pulitzer-winning work, The Overstoryit follows a similarly fragmented structure. But trust me, any disorientation will eventually turn to wonder… Unfortunately, perhaps the most fantastic element of this speculative novel is Todd’s thoughtful, plaintive voice, which has no equal among real-life social media moguls…

Powers’ previous novel, Astonishmentdealt with similar themes of environmental destruction, but sentimentality built up in that book like nitrogen in a small pond. Here he writes, thankfully, without a drop of sentimentality, about guilt and grief and the sadness inherent in caring about the natural world… even with the belief that the parts would eventually come together, I was not prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers offers. In the now vast library of fiction and nonfiction books that remind us of the planet’s imperiled state, I can think of no other novel that addresses the Earth’s plight with such a sweeping and disorienting vision. Ultimately, Playground is unspeakably strange. Powers intertwines our desire for friendship, paradise, and immortality with the algorithms of artificial intelligence that defy all understanding.”

–Ron Charles on Richard Powers’ Playground (The Washington Post)

“Capturing in words a world of largely wordless interactions is the challenge Witt takes on in Health and safetyThrough memoir, sociology and a kind of club ethnography, she attempts to capture the many meanings and embodied states of a night out, while also situating them within an evolving subculture… Health and safety poses a risky proposition: What are the costs – intellectual, social – of infecting what fulfills you outside of your work with the most insidious of all things, journalism? …

For Witt, clubbing, raving, and dancing were all forms of community, a way of finding not just oneself but others. There may be an infinite combination of pleasurable sounds you can create on a computer, but Witt is interested in the infinite combination of feelings you can have on the dance floor: the ways in which the club must model an almost shared subjectivity, in which a good time is felt not just on a personal level but pulses through the crowd itself… Many have tried to capture what electronic music – particularly techno, in all its pointillism and angular beauty – can give a potential listener, and Witt’s particular rendering of the genre’s richness and strangeness gave me a new appreciation for what it was capable of…

This may sound utopian or far-fetched, but Witt’s descriptions are compelling. Her enthusiasm for capturing the experience is also grounded in her sociological and historical observations about dance music’s enduring yet marginalized place in American cultural life … even the most personal passages here can be the most moving because they are so sincere in their attempts to confront these limits and to grapple with the conundrums of being a writer: How do you gather the disparate threads of yourself to make sense of a moment so much larger than yourself? How do you write about an historical era from the limited vantage point of one?”

–Kevin Lozano on Emily Witts Health and safety (The nation)

“It wasn’t until I bought Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection I realized how much fun it can be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. It sucks for them, the clumsy, lonely, self-absorbed, self-important, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it’s a thrill for the sick among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own sleazy carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project—his own and his characters’—with diagnostic, all-encompassing hyper-precision; watching his parade of market failure and personal pathology, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you might possibly muster. So you just surrender to the sick pleasure of watching degraded people degrade themselves…

One of the pleasures of Tulathimutte’s book is its revival of some old-fashioned formal pleasures: the theatrically ironic, O. Henry-esque surprise ending, the collection of short stories linked together. (Here, revelations of the various ways in which the book’s characters know each other creep in like waves of nausea, setting in painful relief the fact that the people who figure most prominently in our secret shames and desires have probably barely given us a thought.)

His characters are so relatable, achingly millennial, because their individuality is so clearly mediated by the internet; their instincts inextricably linked to their upbringing in an online ecosystem that seizes on each individual’s desires and vulnerabilities as fodder for profit and exploitation.”

–Jia Tolentino on Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (The New Yorker)

“The premise plays out as a reversal of Franz Kafka’s The processin which we navigate a similarly nightmarish, Byzantine legal system through the eyes of the juror rather than the accused… Ball’s future is a cold one, with human connection in short supply… The speculative elements are minimally sketched, but effectively evoke a dystopia of despair and dehumanization…

The second half of The Repeat Room presents a shift in character, setting and style. Ball’s stripped-down surrealism gives way to stream-of-consciousness prose poetry from the accused’s point of view… The back cover describes The Repeat Roomprecise, like ‘Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos.’ If the first half remixes The processthe second is reminiscent of elements from Lanthimos’ breakthrough film Dogtooth. Both halves are expertly written, and the second is visceral and moving. But do the halves form a whole? The accused is so far removed from Abel’s world that the story could be set in another time and place. As for Abel’s society, what does it mean for a state to go to such absurd lengths to select jurors? How would the empathy technology of the repeat room change society? The book chooses not to explore this, leaving the dystopia ambiguous compared to other fictional totalitarian states. Perhaps this is a trade-off of Ball’s compositional process. Ball has said that he writes all of his books in just a day, and rarely in a week, hoping to “catch a firefly in a glass.” Ball has certainly caught something here. The Repeat Room is compelling, creepy and dreamy, even though the parts, like in a dream, do not quite hang together.”

–Lincoln Michel on Jesse Ball’s The Repeat Room (The New York Times Book Review)

Related