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Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Parul Sehgal on Garth Greenwell’s Little rainMadeline Leung Coleman on Tony Tulathimutte’s RejectionTodd Shy on Jamie Quatro’s Two-step devilXan Brooks on Richard Powers’ Playgroundand Michael Dirda on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7.

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“Pain, it is said, is the great censor, the eater of words. Pain shatters language; it remains untranslatable—not merely anti-narrative but pre-narrative, calling us back to our first sounds. In the canon of illness writing there are those accounts… that observe carefully how pain shapes a life, how it exists both within and alongside the self as antagonist and intimate companion (Nietzsche called his chronic pain his dog). Usually, however, writers do not linger long with their pain; they concern themselves with the history, the social meanings of illness. Pain itself seems to have no plot; as Emily Dickinson wrote, it ‘has an element of emptiness’. Perhaps it is a great anatomist of pleasure who can fill in some of the gaps in the story of pain… His previous books were carefully observed minuets of pleasure, power, humiliation between lovers. Little rain a new account of the place of the narrator’s body, the body in the hands of strangers. The narrator becomes familiar with a new language—the language of the medical system—and a new vocabulary of touch. He learns whose hands are efficient and whose are clumsy, whose touch makes him a body, a problem, a person… This is the real setting of Greenwell’s fiction—not the hospital, the classroom, the Sofia nightclubs, but this space that exists within them, within ordinary life, a realm unlocked by those forked sentences, where time is slowed down and a deep, receptive kind of contact with the other, with the self, is allowed to flourish.

–Parul Sehgal on Garth Greenwell’s Little rain (The New Yorker)

“It would be easy to call Rejection an “incel novel”—especially since it begins with a man being denied sex by nearly every woman he pursues. That label would tell you how angry these characters are, how vain their efforts, how narrow their worldviews. It evokes their desire and guarantees their failure. But the seven interconnected stories in this book, Tony Tulathimutte’s second, go deeper and dirtier than inceldom. In Rejectionsexual failure is only the fruiting body; self-hatred, nihilism, and shame are the mycelium that makes the fungus grow… Described in this way, Rejection sounds unbearable, a human centipede of misery crossed with a brain worm that becomes an Ouroboros. And yet it works. And it’s funny. Tulathimutte has a gift for horrible imagery, for scratching a rock bottom until it bleeds… Rejection is a more mature work (than Private citizens). Even with all that cumming and crying. Tulathimutte seems ready to go all the way now; he doesn’t care if we feel sorry for these people anymore, so he lets us in on the joke… Not all the judgments in the book feel so intentional. This feels like the right time to mention the Asian-woman thing… You don’t have to squint to see the pattern, how these assumptions about the effortless sexual prowess of petite Asian women are smuggled in through the eyes of non-male characters and placed in stark contrast to the Asian men Tulathimutte writes about. In Tulathimutte’s writing, petite Asian women are the only ones anyone wants… You start to miss the horrible men, rubbing themselves to pieces. Thankfully, or not—your experience may vary—we’ll get back to it soon. And to so many other places, too, including a truly bravura description of a sexual fantasy… Turns out to be blue balls can kill a guy. They can make a really good story too.”

–Madeline Leung Coleman on Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (Vulture)

“The novel is not a sermon or a hymn. Even a novel as full of love and religious life as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) is a portrait of generational tension and a kind of miraculous blessing in the face of that tension. To read or write literary fiction as a believer is to put faith at risk, to subject it to pressures it may or may not be able to withstand. Without that risk, fiction becomes allegory, or perhaps honest sentiment—comfort food—but not, as Elie advocated, an account of our plight. … Quatro’s first two books thus explore in different ways the relationship between faith and desire, and there is nothing straightforward about her treatment of either. Her new novel, Two-step devilstretches her canvas much wider. The themes of family and faith are very present, and we become even more familiar with the Lookout Mountain region that has become Quatro’s postage stamp. Her ambition is great, and religious faith still frames that ambition … Quatro is never sentimental. One of the achievements of Two-step devil is the way the encounter with the young girl leads the Prophet forward, not entirely out of his delusions, but away from their dominance and toward a simpler sublime … She will not grant us the happy ending we might want. The words that close this morally difficult, emotionally devastating account of a young foster child sound like an accusation, but feel like a plea. “This is a story we all know,” Quatro writes, as we stumble where we hoped the story would not go. “Don’t you dare call it a crime.” There is something startling in that direct address, something moving in the assertion of collective ownership, collective responsibility. This is Quatro’s solution to the problem of depicting faith in literary fiction: relentless pressure constitutes a final, but never triumphant, redemptive release. But the pressure must be specific pressure, and the release specific release. This is the key, the only key, to writing that judges us and measures us through the lens of religious faith.”

–Todd Shy on Jamie Quatro’s Two-step devil (Remark)

“Themes of transformation, loss and regeneration abound in Richard Powers’ Booker-longlisted book. Playgrounda transcendentalist deep dive of a novel that at times nearly collapses under the weight of its ambitions. Ostensibly, it tells the story of Makatea, a Polynesian atoll that falls prey to a consortium of shady California investors who want to build modular components for enormous floating cities. But that’s just the surface story, a rocky outcrop to navigate. Playground refers freely to The storm with its setting of Makatea, an island ravaged by its past and ripe for exploitation, and quotes Arthur C Clarke, who said that the planet we live on should really be called Ocean. What we think of as Earth is ‘the marginal kingdom’, an adjunct to a main stage that covers 70% of the globe. The real story – the real treasure – is to be found in the water… What a lush, opaque world Powers conjures up for us here. Just as Evie Beaulieu yearns to interpret the ‘liquid text’ of the sea, so the reader must frequently reorient herself to keep up with the twisting currents of the plot. Playground is the American author’s 14th novel, though it bears tantalizing echoes of its immediate predecessors. Like the 2018 boom epic The Overstoryit is a book enchanted by the concept of intelligent alien life in our midst (trees there, fish here). Just like the dystopian Astonishmentit’s drawn to the virtual frontier of generative AI and its potential to both raise the dead and create an alternate present. If the story’s disparate strands (rituals of transition, sea adventure, environmental crime-de-coeur) never quite cohere, that’s probably as they should be. Playground works best as a fantastical exploration. It points out the sights, provides background, and poses open-ended questions. After that, we’re largely on our own.”

–Xan Brooks on Richard Powers’ Playground (The guard)

“Flanagan has produced a kind of philosophical fantasy, a highly original weaving of half a dozen essayistic stories about the sad, strange world we all live in… Flanagan’s father survived his ordeal only because the United States bombed Hiroshima. Had the Americans invaded Japan, he would have been killed immediately or used as a human shield. Flanagan himself would never have been born had it not been for an act that instantly vaporized some 60,000 civilians and left others to a slow, lingering death. Yet the bombing of Hiroshima, Flanagan is convinced, was a horrific, deeply immoral act—and it was brought about, he says, by a book … Flanagan was once visiting a friend’s house when the other boy’s weary, drunken father picked up a trumpet: ‘A lifetime of listening to music has been for me nothing more than an endlessly recurring attempt to relive those moments when a drunken miner bewitched me with his trumpet playing, a bright, joyful miracle that pierced and lifted the wounded world around him’ … In the short description of Question 7 Peter Carey, quoted above, ends with a surprisingly bold statement: ‘We are all competitive, of course, so this is not something you can easily say: but Question 7 “It is perhaps the most important Australian artwork of the last hundred years.” That may seem a bit of an exaggeration, but perhaps only a little.

–Michael Dirda on Richard Flanagans Question 7 (The Washington Post)

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