0

WINTER IS HERE Seasonal books from Ali

Smith and Karl Ove Knausgaard
‘THE PERFECT NANNY’ Leila Slimani’s
publishing sensation from France
FICTION by Isabel Allende, Nathaniel Rich,
Neel Mukherjee, Madeleine Thien

Philip
Roth Is
Still Here
By Charles McGrath
WITH THE DEATH of Richard Wilbur in October,
Philip Roth became the longest-serving mem-
ber in the literature department of the Ameri-
can Academy of Arts and Letters, that august
Hall of Fame on Audubon Terrace in northern
Manhattan, which is to the arts what Coo-
perstown is to baseball. He’s been a member
so long he can recall when the academy includ-
ed now all-but-forgotten figures like Malcolm
Cowley and Glenway Wescott — white-haired
luminaries from another era. Just recently
Roth joined William Faulkner, Henry James
and Jack London as one of very few Ameri-
cans to be included in the French Pleiades edi-
tions (the model for our own Library of Amer-
ica), and the Italian publisher Mondadori is
also bringing out his work in its Meridiani se-
ries of classic authors. All this late-life emi-
nence — which also includes the Spanish
Prince of Asturias Award in 2012 and being
named a commander in the Légion d’Honneur
of France in 2013 — seems both to gratify and
to amuse him. “Just look at this,” he said to me
last month, holding up the ornately bound
Mondadori volume, as thick as a Bible and
comprising titles like “Lamento di Portnoy”
and “Zuckerman Scatenato.” “Who reads
books like this?”
In 2012, as he approached 80, Roth famously
announced that he had retired from writing.
(He actually stopped two years earlier.) In the
years since, he has spent a certain amount of
time setting the record straight. He wrote a
lengthy and impassioned letter to Wikipedia,
PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES CONTINUED ON PAGE 16
0

Munich
Robert Harris
On the brink of global war—
One last chance to change history

From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland:

A story of treason and conscience, loyalty and betrayal

“A BRILLIANTLY “ANOTHER
CONSTRUCTED SUREFIRE
SPY NOVEL BEST-SELLER.
set amid the politicking A tautly constructed,
of Chamberlain’s last-ditch compellingly written story.”
negotiations with Hitler.” —Booklist
—The Guardian

“A TENSE
“A GRIPPING AND SUBTLE
THRILLER. NARRATIVE
a

2 S U N DAY , JA N UA RY 21, 2 018

0

Book Review JANUARY 21, 2018

NOW IN PAPERBACK
From the New York Times
Bestselling Author
Fiction 22 The Shortlist
Children’s Books

ADRIANA
Foreign Fiction
Reviewed by
Alison McCulloch

Nonfiction
8 THE YEARS
By Annie Ernaux
TRIGIANI
Reviewed by
Edmund White

7 Crime 14 THE LAST GIRL 18 Maria’s Picks:

By Marilyn Stasio My Story of Captivity, and For fledgling readers,
My Fight Against the chapter books with
9 KING ZENO Islamic State literary flair. of gold.”
er with a heart
By Maria Russo “A comedy writ ork Times
By Nathaniel Rich By Nadia Murad —NewY

Reviewed by Reviewed by

10
Chris Bachelder

GREEN
Anna Della Subin
Features iss
rlo
By Sam Graham-Felsen 1 Interview
Reviewed by Philip Roth Is Still Here
Jonathan Miles By Charles McGrath
A NO VE L

11 A STATE OF FREEDOM 6 By the Book

By Neel Mukherjee Simon Sebag Montefiore
Reviewed by
Michael Gorra

12 WINTER

a
Adr ian
By Ali Smith
Reviewed by Meg Wolitzer

r i g i a n i
15 OFF THE CHARTS
23 Sketchbook
The Power of Positive
Thinking
T author of
The Shoe
maker’s
Wife
bestselling
The Hidden Lives and New York
Times
By R. O. Blechman
Lessons of American Child
Prodigies
By Ann Hulbert
Reviewed by Etc. “TRIGIANI’S BOISTEROUS,
Amanda Ripley
4 New & Noteworthy MADDENING, DEVOTED
13 WINTER
17 DOGS AT THE PERIMETER 5 Letters Italian clan will have you wishing
By Madeleine Thien
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Reviewed by Reviewed by 19 Best-Seller Lists they’d adopt you too.” –People
Sarah Manguso Ligaya Mishan 19 Editors’ Choice
20 Inside the List
14 IN THE MIDST OF WINTER 20 Paperback Row
“DELIGHTFULLY RETRO. . . .
By Isabel Allende Kiss Carlo may be just what we need,
Reviewed by
Elizabeth Winkler
On the cover: Philip Roth,
a warmhearted romp that’s a
photographed at his home welcome escape.” –USA Today
on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan in January 2018.

More at hc.com
AdrianaTrigiani.com

TO SUBSCRIBE to the Book Review by mail, visit nytimes.com/getbookreview or call 1-800-631-2580

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 3

0

“Anschutz’s heroes were the business leaders who built

the American West and his book, “Out Where the West
Begins,” pays them homage in a series of easily digestible
profiles…. to this extraordinary collection of individuals
we owe the West as it is today. This is a book to stoke
New
the imagination of any young person wondering where
economic opportunity is to be found and how it is to be
pursued. Hint: It’s not in the halls of government.”
- Wall Street Journal, May 2015 (Volume 1) SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE By
Ijeoma Oluo. (Seal Press, $27.) Oluo
takes on the thorniest questions
surrounding race, from police brutal-
ity to who can use the “N” word. One
OUT WHERE THE WEST BEGINS chapter even has this intriguing
heading: “I Just Got Called a Racist,
What Do I Do Now?” ANGELITOS By
VOLUME 1 VOLUME 2 Ilan Stavans and Santiago Cohen.
(Mad Creek Books, $17.95.) This
graphic novel has a simple, gritty style. It tells the story of Padre
Chinchachoma, a Catholic priest known on the streets of Mexico
City as a protector of homeless children who raised the ire of the
local police and was suspected of sexual abuse. CULTURE AS WEAPON
By Nato Thompson. (Melville House, $24.99.) Thompson is an
art curator and activist who has a problem with the way that
corporations have co-opted the realm of culture to ensure profits,
shape public opinion and control dissent. IT OCCURS TO ME THAT I AM
AMERICA Edited by Jonathan Santlofer. (Touchstone, $30.) Timed
to the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, this
collection packs in an impressive array of fiction writers and
illustrators. The likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman and Art
Spiegelman assert their own visions for a democratic society.
NIKOLAI GOGOL By Vladimir Nabokov.
(New Directions, $16.95.) In Nabo-
kov’s classic biography of the Rus-
sian novelist, newly reissued, he
begins with Gogol’s death and
works back to his birth. Nabokov is
particularly good at capturing the
humorist in Gogol, a writer often
misinterpreted as a kind of Russian
Dickens.

“When ma-
chines even-
“In the second volume, released on Sept. 8, Anschutz expands & Noteworthy tually think
and feel, can
his vision to include 100 people who played significant roles in
we still own
“creating and civilizing the American west.”
them? And if we can, is it then logical that we can enslave people
too? A new novel by Annalee Newitz, AUTONOMOUS, tracks the
These include policy makers, military and American Indian eventual collision of a mercenary, who is falling for his killer
leaders, legislators, religious figures, black entrepreneurs, robot, and a murdering pharma-copyright pirate, who is falling
suffragists, writers, artists, explorers, mountain men, physicians, for a rescued slave. Much of the book is taken up with a scary
architects and inventors, among others. They are some of the men plot about drug copyright, which turns out to be about who owns
and women who helped the wobbly new republic — which was by our chemical brains. But the larger
no means certain to survive — rise to its feet, take tentative steps point about living in this world — life
after ‘the slow-motion disaster of capi-
and then run westward to the Pacific shores.” talism converting every living thing and
- The Oklahoman, August 2017 (Volume 2) idea into property’ — means it has
become impossible to recognize the
difference between coercion and free-
dom. It’s normal to read about charac-
AVAILABLE NOW FROM YOUR ters who are mystified about why they
can’t connect. It’s much scarier to read
LOCAL BOOKSELLER AND about people who can’t recognize that
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FAVORITE ONLINE RETAILERS! — CHOIRE SICHA , ST YLES EDITOR,
ON WHAT HE’S READING.
Cloud Camp Press and The University of Oklahoma Press www.oupress.com

4 SUNDAY, JAN UARY 21, 2 018

0
LETTERS
Holy Days
TO THE EDITOR:
Studies have shown that our
world is becoming less religious
and that more people no longer
believe in God. Your Dec. 24
issue reviewed books concerning
various aspects of religion, but
there was no representation of
the shift toward a secular society.
Atheists have little faith in the
supernatural, but we would hate
to think our faith in The New
York Times is in peril.
DENNIS B. APPLETON
MADISON, WIS.
Vietnam
TO THE EDITOR:
Jeff Shesol’s review of “Playing
With Fire,” by Lawrence O’Don-
nell (Jan. 7), speculates that
Senator Eugene McCarthy’s
quest for the 1968 presidential
nomination may have prolonged
the conflict in Vietnam by wid-
ening divisions in the Democrat-
ic Party and thereby helped elect
Richard Nixon, who escalated
OUR BACK PAGES
In this week’s issue, Charles McGrath interviews Philip Roth about
his career and America’s strange political moment. In 1959, William
Peden reviewed “Goodbye, Columbus,” Roth’s first book and the one
that would establish the young writer from Newark.
Some years ago, in the vanguard
of the Southern literary rena-
scence, Ellen Glasgow com-
mented that what the South
needed was “blood and irony.”
The same might be said of some
recent writers who have con-
cerned themselves with depict-
ing the role of the Jew in Ameri-
can society, which is the subject
of Philip Roth’s collection of
short stories and a novella. An
English instructor at the Univer-
sity of Chicago, 26-year-old Mr.
Roth has published fiction in
Harper’s, The Paris Review, The
New Yorker and other peri-
odicals. “Goodbye, Columbus,” a
Houghton Mifflin Literary Fel-
lowship Award, is his first book,
and an impressive one. There is
blood here and vigor, love and
hate, irony and compassion.
Mr. Roth’s novella is a some-
what incongruous mingling of
conventional boy-meets-girl
the American military inter-
vention in Southeast Asia.
While accurate about Nixon’s
escalation strategy, Shesol
overlooks or ignores the fact
that the vice president and
Democratic nominee, Hubert
Humphrey, had supported
military escalation in Vietnam
for years and thus in all likeli-
hood would have prolonged the
war as well. One of the reasons
Humphrey’s presidential cam-
paign faltered was that young
voters did not trust him on the
war issue.
LARRY D. WOODS
NASHVILLE
Holiday Handel
TO THE EDITOR:
Readers of Leon Botstein’s
review of Jonathan Keates’s
“Messiah” (Dec. 24) should
know that Handel doesn’t need
to be appreciated only on
Christmas or Easter. “See the
Conquering Hero,” from his
oratorio “Judas Maccabaeus,”
is now a Hanukkah song for
material and portrait-of-the-
intellectual-as-a-young-man,
narrated with an occasional
fondness for clinical detail remi-
niscent of Edmund Wilson’s
“The Princess With the Golden
Hair.” Young Neil Klugman
meets beautiful, wealthy Brenda
Patimkin, a Radcliffe under-
graduate. Neil pursues Brenda
with the determination of a
well-trained bird dog, and soon
catches her. After a summer
love affair, he rejects Brenda
and the nouveau-riche Pa-
timkins with the smug self-
righteousness of Joyce’s
Stephen Dedalus.
Such a summary, however,
does justice neither to the au-
thor nor to his people; out of
such hackneyed materials Mr.
Roth has written a perceptive,
often witty and frequently mov-
ing piece of fiction. He is a good
story-teller, a shrewd appraiser
children called “Hava Narima.” It
sounds great in Hebrew.
ZALMAN SHOVAL
TEL AVIV
Listening to Gibbon
TO THE EDITOR:
Daniel Mendelsohn (By the
Book, Jan. 7) is kidding himself if
he thinks he’s getting the whole
enchantment of “The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire”
by listening to it on tape. If, as I
suspect, it doesn’t include the
footnotes, he’s missing out on
some of the wittiest and most
malicious delights of Gibbon’s
book.
JIM SKOFIELD
WALPOLE, N.H.
CORRECTION
A picture caption on Jan. 7 with a
review of two books about how
literature has shaped human
society misstated the location of
the Anna Amalia Library. It is in
Weimar, Germany, not Leipzig. A new book club from
PBS NewsHour and
The New York Times.
Find reading worth talking
about — join the club.
nytimes.com/nowreadthis
of character and a keen recorder
of an indecisive generation.
Most of Mr. Roth’s protago- Join us every month, as
nists are, like Neil Klugman, we choose a book to read
adrift in a limbo between past together as a nation. Tune
and present. The author seems in to PBS NewsHour to
to know his people inside and watch an interview with
out, whether he writes of a boy the authors.
arguing the Virgin Birth with an
exasperated rabbi, (“The Con- Follow Now Read This
version of the Jews”), or, in “Eli, Book Club on Facebook to
the Fanatic,” of a young Jewish share your thoughts and
lawyer trying to explain subur- submit questions.
ban mores to the leader of a
rabbinical orphanage, or, in
“Epstein,” of the ludicrous yet
pitiable aftermath of an aging
man’s search for love. These
stories, though concerned with
universal, archetypal experi-
ences, are somewhat trans-
muted into that which is at once
strange and familiar. “I’m a
Jew,” one character says. “I am
different. Better, maybe not. But
different.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 5
0
“A treasure.”
—MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
President, Children’s Defense Fund
UNPUBLISHED BLACK
HISTORY FROM THE NEW
YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
BY DARCY EVELEIGH,
DANA CANEDY, DAMIEN CAVE,
AND RACHEL L. SWARNS
“A vivid account of race
relations in America,
narrated through images
that survived between the
spaces of stories, in the
gaps, silences and lacunae
buried in the paper’s
archives. … If any book
proves that it is never
too late to publish ‘all the
news’ — and images —
‘fit to print,’ this is it.”
—HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
IN HARDCOVER
AND E-BOOK
6 SU N DAY , JAN UARY 21, 2 018
By the Book
Simon Sebag Montefiore
The historian and author, most recently, of the novel ‘Red Sky at Noon’
has little patience for thrillers that rely on tricks: ‘When I found out the
“Girl” wasn’t quite “Gone,” I went.’
What books are on your nightstand?
A crenelated wall of books encircles my
bed, its tottering towers looming ever
taller, always on the verge of collapsing
onto oblivious sleepers. Today it con-
tains “The Arab of the Future,” by Riad
Sattouf; “ Russian Criminal Tattoo En-
cyclopaedia,” by Danzig Baldaev and
Sergei Vasiliev; “Americanah,” by Chi-
mamanda Ngozi Adichie; “Grant,” by
Ron Chernow; “Home Fire,” by Kamila
Shamsie; “The President’s Gardens,” by
Muhsin al-Ramli; and right now I am
reading a scholarly but gripping history
of the Wars of Succession after the
death of Alexander the Great — “Divid-
ing the Spoils,” by Robin Waterfield.
Tell us the last great book you read.
I read many wonderful novels though I
now find the idea of literary fiction
obsolete. Few qualify as “great” in the
sense of Tolstoy or Balzac but I just
finished one that did: I was dazzled by
the brilliance of “The Goldfinch,” by
Donna Tartt, a masterpiece of charac-
terization, plot, technical artistry com-
bined with exquisite heartbreaking
understanding of loss, love and art. Now
that I have finished I regret its pleas-
ures are gone, like a delicious feast — or
a vanished love one will never know
again.
Which historians and biographers do
you most admire?
Great inspirations have been classics
like Antonia Fraser (“Cromwell”); Si-
mon Schama (“Citizens”), Robert Caro
(Lyndon B. Johnson); Robert K. Massie
(“Peter the Great”); Hugh Thomas
(“Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and
the Fall of Old Mexico”); Duff Cooper
(“Talleyrand”); John Hemming (“The
Conquest of the Incas”); Doris Kearns
Goodwin (“Team of Rivals”); Jean
Lacouture (“De Gaulle”). Most of all, I
admired the late Isabel de Madariaga,
the author of “Russia in the Age of
Catherine the Great,” who taught me to
write Russian history as I was starting
my first one, “Catherine the Great &
Potemkin,” which she supervised with
an imperious but indulgent severity that
recalled the empress herself.
What book might people be surprised to
find on your shelves?
I like the implication of the question: Do
we all have a predictable reading list for
our curriculum vitae, our class, our race,
our gender? A book from a new genre
that I most enjoyed recently was Neil
Gaiman’s “American Gods,” sublimely
fantastical storytelling that blends adven-
ture, magic, sci-fi, and cultural-religious
syncretism. Another that I usually abhor
are on relationships or self-help, but I’ve
really enjoyed Laura Kipnis’s “Against
Love” which explores the absurd rules of
love and marriage in the West since the
19th century.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
Which childhood books and authors stick
with you most?
Voracious, excitable, starry-eyed. Du-
mas’s “The Count of Monte Cristo” en-
capsulates so many fantasies of my child-
hood — the escape from prison, the mys-
terious fortune, vengeance on enemies. I
was a lover of vicious fairy tales like
Struwwelpeter. I remember sobbing over
Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince.” I
relished the poetry of Byron, Keats and
Kipling; my favorite was “The Highway-
man,” by Alfred Noyes. I was taught
Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric
genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lem-
mon who made me want to be a writer. I
consumed everything by Robert Graves
and Mary Renault, then Orwell, Heming-
way, Guy de Maupassant, and Michael
Moorcock’s Colonel Pyat novels in a
frenzy until I discovered Tolstoy, Bul-
gakov, Pushkin, Lermontov and, my
favorites, Isaac Babel and Kurban Said’s
“Ali and Nino,” which infected me with a
feverish fascination for Russia and the
Caucasus that led me to go out there in
1991 as the U.S.S.R. dissolved.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good:
What book did you feel as if you were
supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you
remember the last book you put down
without finishing?
I will be unpopular for this! I relish
thrillers but find that many start bril-
liantly then collapse when the initial trick
is unveiled. “Gone Girl” was one — when
I found out the “Girl” wasn’t quite
“Gone,” I went.
Who would you want to write your life
story?
A committee consisting of George MacDon-
ald Fraser, Gabriel García Márquez, Alex-
ander Pushkin and Guy de Maupassant. 0
An expanded version of this interview is
available at nytimes.com/books.
ILLUSTRATION BY JILLIAN TAMAKI
0
CRIME / MARILYN STASIO
Nanny Dearest
WHEN A CHARACTER in a crime
novel snaps and kills a child, it’s
usually a mother stressed beyond
endurance. In Leila Slimani’s
unnerving cautionary tale, THE
PERFECT NANNY (Penguin, paper,
$16), subtly translated by Sam
Taylor, we know from the outset
that it’s a beloved and trusted
nanny who murders the two
children in her care. That’s pretty
radical for a domestic thriller; but
what’s more remarkable about
this unconventional novel (which
was awarded France’s prestigious
Prix Goncourt) is the author’s
intimate analysis of the special
relationship between a mother
and a nanny.
Myriam and Paul, the Parisian
couple who hire Louise to help
care for their son and daughter,
are delighted to discover that
she’s “a miracle worker” who
cleans, reorganizes the household
and even cooks delicious meals.
“Nothing rots, nothing expires” in
Louise’s kitchen. At first, they
bask in their unexpected comfort,
“like spoiled children, like purring
cats.” Much too late, Myriam
realizes that the new nanny may
not be entirely benevolent: “She
is Vishnu, the nurturing divinity,
jealous and protective.” But al-
ready Louise “has embedded
herself so deeply in their lives
that it now seems impossible to
remove her.” Despite Myriam’s
fears, Louise has no intention of
replacing her as the woman of the
house; rather, in her pathological
loneliness, the nanny increasingly
fantasizes that she has become a
de facto member of the family.
Slimani writes devastatingly
perceptive character studies.
Dropping their children at day
care, the mothers are “rushed and
sad,” the children “little tyrants.”
She also raises painful questions.
Could Myriam be projecting onto
her nanny her own forbidden
desire to be free of her children
and their insatiable needs?
(“They’re eating me alive,” she
thinks.) Is there an element of
racial prejudice in the Moroccan-
born Myriam’s attitude toward
MARILYN STASIO has covered crime
fiction for the Book Review since
1988. Her column appears twice a
month.
her French nanny? Is Louise’s
pitiless act the transference of her
forbidden feelings about her
privileged employer? One thing is
clear: Loneliness can drive you
crazy, and extreme loneliness can
make you homicidal.
! and water and the occasional
THE INTENSE THRILLS of Thomas
Perry’s THE BOMB MAKER (Mysteri-
ous Press, $26) are almost unbear-
able. After sweating through a
scene in which a member of the
Los Angeles Police Department
Bomb Squad narrowly escapes a
PABLO AMARGO
lethal explosion, we’re knocked
back by the loss of 14 team techni-
cians — half the squad — who are
blown to smithereens. “Bombs
were acts of murder,” Perry
writes, but “they were also jokes
on you, riddles the bomber hoped
were too tough for you.”
Dick Stahl, who steps in to head
the depleted squad, doesn’t get
the joke, but he goes mano a
mano with the abominable riddler,
whose clear intention is to de-
stroy those who respond to his
devilishly clever booby traps.
There seems to be no pattern to
the placement of these “well-
designed, insidious and psycho-
logically astute” devices, which
turn up at a gas station, a school
cafeteria and a hospital ward.
Before they go off, the tension is
killing. And when they do, the
damage is spectacular.
! that you are real after all.”) But it
DRIVING UP AND DOWN Utah’s
desolate Route 117 with the
trucker Ben Jones is an educa-
tion. LULLABY ROAD (Crown, $26),
The Pentagon Papers
as Published in
The New York Times
James Anderson’s second novel “The most significant leaks of
(after “The Never-Open Desert
Diner”), introduces us to more of
classified material in American
the “desert rats, hardscrabble history.” —The Washington Post
ranchers and other assorted
exiles” who choose to live off the
grid and depend on Ben’s Desert
Moon Delivery Service for food
luxury, like soap. Some of Ben’s
customers are deep thinkers like
Roy Cuthbert, who suggests
holding Second Amendment Days
(“with a huge gun show and
fast-draw competition”) to save
the town of Rockmuse from sink-
ing into the desert sands. Other,
more desperate people, like Pe-
dro, the tire man at the Stop ‘n’
Gone Truck Stop, trust him to
transport a small child and a
large dog in his 28-foot tractor-
trailer rig. Ben is nothing if not a
decent man, and Anderson re-
wards him with a deadly adven-
ture and the most poetic prose
this side of Salt Lake City.
!
KAREN ELLIS’S A MAP OF THE DARK
(Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) is a
valiant, if unsuccessful attempt to
contain an intensely personal
narrative within the structure of a
traditional police procedural.
Special Agent Elsa Myers of the
F.B.I.’s Child Abduction Rapid
Deployment division is assigned
to the case of 17-year-old Ruby
Haverstock, who went missing
after finishing her shift at a cafe
in Queens. Even from the little we
learn about her, Ruby seems like This Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times
a clever, resourceful girl. (As her
kidnapper drags her off to a cave
series on America’s involvement in Vietnam
in the woods, she drops several riveted a divided nation. As a standard for
rings to create a trail of clues.)
For some reason that isn’t
freedom of the press, and the backdrop for
made clear, this particular case Steven Spielberg’s new film, “The Post,” it
awakens Myers’s memories of remains as timely as ever.
mistreatment at the hands of her
unstable and abusive mother.
That may shed some light on the $17.99 Paperback
agent’s secret habit of cutting
Available everywhere books are sold in stores and online.
herself with the Swiss Army knife
she keeps with her at all times. Racehorse Publishing
(“The puncture of metal, the an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
breaking of skin, comes with a
rush of sensation that assures you
doesn’t begin to explain how she
can cut herself until she bleeds
and still handle such a demanding
and dangerous job. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7
0
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means receive special
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For more information,
please contact Mark Hiler
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8 S U N DAY , JA N UA RY 21, 2 018
Time Passages
A French writer looks back, assessing private and public lives.
By EDMUND WHITE
THIS IS AN autobiography unlike any you
have ever read; you might call it a col-
lective autobiography. James Merrill used
to mock the egotistic memoirs of the day
by calling them “ME-moirs.” Ernaux’s is a
“WE-moir,” the group memory of her gen-
eration (she was born in 1940). As someone
also born in 1940, but in the United States,
not France, I found her memories both fa-
miliar and distancing.
Ernaux was raised in a traditional work-
ing-class Roman Catholic family
in Normandy, and the first two-
thirds of her book is genera-
tional; it is the world Édouard
Louis so brilliantly updated and
dramatized in his recent novel,
“The End of Eddy.” It is only as
THE YEARS
By Annie Ernaux
Translated by Alison L. Strayer
237 pp. Seven Stories Press. Paper,
$19.95.
Ernaux moves into the 21st cen-
tury that she becomes com-
pletely individual — retired, di-
vorced, a famous writer (best
known to English-speaking read-
ers for the translations of “A
Man’s Place” and “A Woman’s
Story”), the mother of two grown
sons. In the process, as her pub-
lisher puts it, “a new kind of auto-
biography emerges, at once sub-
jective and impersonal, private
and collective.”
Throughout “The Years,” Er- Annie Ernaux
naux traces the collapse of Catho-
lic prudishness as it’s attacked by
secularism, the pill, the legalization of
abortion and the women’s movement.
While as a teenager she was terrified of
losing her virginity before marriage, in late
adolescence her unmarried sons begin to
sleep with their girlfriends at their moth-
er’s apartment.
The other important theme in Ernaux’s
memoir is how we’ve been gradually led,
guilt-free, into greater and greater levels of thing, no matter how obscure or distant, is
consumerism. By the 1990s, she notes,
there were so many kinds of yogurt and
dairy dessert that even if you ate a differ-
ent one every day you couldn’t sample
them all in a year. On the other hand, “In
nursing homes, an endless parade of com-
mercials filed by the faded eyes of elderly
women, for products and devices they
never imagined they would need and had
no chance of possessing.”
Ernaux certainly isn’t a Marxist, but at
the same time she sees history as sociolog-
ical and the economy as determinative.
EDMUND WHITE is the author of a forthcoming
memoir, “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of
Reading.”
She uses herself as a “case,” a person who
has been conditioned by advertising and
consumerism. She marvels at how quickly
people have learned to use the mobile
phone, computer, iPod and GPS — and she
is unable to imagine the devices we’ll be
using in 10 years’ time. People must keep
up, acquire the latest gadgets; to fall be-
hind would be to accept aging and dying.
She remarks on how goods can freely cir-
culate, unlike refugees, who are “turned
away at the borders.” She knows that pos-
sessions can’t make people happy, but also
acknowledges the popular belief that this
“was no reason to abandon things.”
Change happens so imperceptibly that
only big events like the collapse of the
Berlin Wall or 9/11 allow us to establish a
“before” and an “after.” Closer to home,
photographs set a time line, as do family
holidays, and both are used as markers
throughout the book. But because every-
now available on the internet, we inhabit
“the infinite present.”
Ernaux attributes the “I remember”
concept that summons up an endless list of
events and products, no matter how trivial,
to the French writer Georges Perec, but it
actually started with the American artist
and poet Joe Brainard. Unlike their ran-
dom lists, Ernaux’s are arranged chrono-
logically, and so she becomes something
more than a list-maker: a Greek chorus
commenting on politics and lifestyle
changes. And yet her recollections are eva-
nescent, unstable, because the media have
taken charge of memory and forgetting.
And the media have divided people into
generations: “We belonged to all and none.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE DELFINO/PARIS MATCH/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES
Our years were nowhere among them.”
The media have become the gatekeepers
of the imagination.
Like Proust, Ernaux is always trying to
envisage the book she will write — this
very book we are reading, in a fluent, idi-
omatic translation by Alison L. Strayer.
“She would like to assemble these multiple
images of herself, separate and discordant,
thread them together with the story of her
existence, starting with her birth during
World War II up until the present day.
Therefore, an existence that is singular but
also merged with the movements
of a generation. Each time she
begins, she meets the same ob-
stacles: how to represent the
passage of historical time, the
changing of things, ideas and
manners, and the private life of
this woman?”
Feelings themselves seem to
go in and out of fashion. People
now find the words “honor” and
“patriotism” absurd. Other,
newer emotions are unnamable:
“There was no specific word for
the feeling one had of simulta-
neous stagnation and mutation.”
Life, caught up in meaningless
rituals, feels as if it’s slipping by,
but at the same time “progress”
has landed us in a place we no
longer recognize.
Ernaux comes to despise
Christmas, “the most grueling
period of desire and hatred of
things, the peak of the consumer
year.” Because “she feels no par-
ticular age,” she feels no older in
her 70s than women in their 50s,
but she knows that younger
women have no doubt about the
age difference.
Perhaps, as Ernaux’s book suggests,
changes in attitude occur more rapidly in
France. I remember when I lived in Paris
in the ’80s and ’90s how shocked I was that
feminism and gay liberation were consid-
ered old hat, fads that had prevailed only in
the ’70s. “Feminism,” Ernaux observes,
“was a vengeful, humorless old ideology
that young women no longer needed, and
viewed with condescension. They did not
doubt their own strength or their equality.
. . . The struggle of women sank into oblivi-
on. It was the only struggle that had not
been officially revived in collective memo-
ry.” The opinions Ernaux summarizes are-
n’t hers; they’re the common wisdom of
the society around her. Everything in
France is treated as a fad or fashion, which
has the virtue of giving every idea its mo-
ment in the sun. In America, ideas fade less
quickly, protected by the university tenure
system.
“The Years” is an earnest, fearless book,
a “Remembrance of Things Past” for our
age of media domination and consumer-
ism, for our period of absolute commodity
fetishism. 0
0
Way Down Yonder
A novel about murder and mayhem in New Orleans at the dawn of the Jazz Age.
By CHRIS BACHELDER
A STREET PREACHER, perhaps the most mi-
nor of characters in Nathaniel Rich’s ambi-
tious and metaphorically dense third nov-
el, “King Zeno,” hangs moralistic signs on
the back of his church wagon. One is about
John Barleycorn. Another — we’re in New
Orleans in 1918 — reads, “JAZZ KILLS.”
This is a tiny, atmospheric touch, viewed
through the window of a police captain’s of-
fice while prominent characters discuss an
investigation into serial ax murders, but
KING ZENO
By Nathaniel Rich
386 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
$28.
like nearly every detail in this novel
of digging and questing, it has figur-
ative resonance. The novel makes
clear that jazz does indeed kill —
not by its decadence, as the prose-
lytist suggests, but by its novelty, its
ingenuity. Jazz kills the old art
forms, rag and swing. Jazz enacts
violence on a song — one band is
shown “teasing apart the ‘Tiger
Rag’ like an old sweater until it un-
raveled into something unrecogniz-
able and frightening.” And jazz as-
saults the listener — “Slaughter me
dead!” one audience member
screams during a show. In its dia-
bolical innovation jazz is danger-
ous, and as such it is an ideal subject
for a novel that roils with the insep-
arable energies of creation and de-
struction.
Jazz is but one of numerous intri-
cate subjects that Rich admits into
the novel. Others include World
War I, the Spanish flu epidemic, se-
rial murder, police procedures, race Louis Armstrong, holding his trumpet, poses with a band at a radio station in New Orleans in the 1920s.
relations, the New Orleans Mafia,
and the construction of the Indus-
trial Canal, which links Lake
Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River
(and whose catastrophic breach during
Hurricane Katrina looms meaningfully
over the book: PROGRESS KILLS). Rich,
a resident of New Orleans, throws his arms
wide open to history and to the city, and
“King Zeno,” particularly in its first half, is
as unruly and laterally active as a big ur-
ban novel ought to be. And the novel, like a
city, somehow coheres, as Rich never loses
control of the riotous raw material. The
close third-person point of view rotates
among three central figures, providing
pattern and the promise of convergence;
the mysterious ax murders serve as a nar-
rative through-line; the canal exerts cen-
tripetal and allegorical force; and the ex-
traordinary American yearning of the
characters, as in Stephen Millhauser’s
CHRIS BACHELDER’S latest novel is “The Throw-
back Special.”
PHOTOGRAPH FROM TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES
“Martin Dressler” or E. L. Doctorow’s
“The Waterworks,” is a constantly propul-
sive force.
Despite his large canvas, Rich is a gifted
portraitist of his three main characters.
One is William Bastrop, a detective in the
New Orleans Police Department who is
haunted by recent experiences in the war.
Bastrop has not been forthright to his wife,
Maisie, nor to himself, about what hap-
pened in a besieged dugout in France,
where many of his fellow soldiers died. One
of the ghosts from his past turns out to be
real — an eye-patched, trench-coated fel-
low soldier seeking revenge for Bastrop’s
cowardice — and Bastrop must escape
harm and then confront his own trauma
and fraudulence. Maisie (or Maze), after
learning the truth about France, moves
out. To save his marriage and to regain a
sense of purpose and integrity, Bastrop de-
cides, roughly midway through the novel,
that he must solve the ax murder case.
“This was no longer police work, at least
not only police work. By solving this un-
solvable case, he would solve Maze. He
would prove his courage, regain his confi-
dence.” At this point his character achieves
velocity and direction — he becomes a dra-
matic vector, a supersleuth.
The second central character is a Creole
musician named Isadore Zeno. Isadore is a
startlingly original cornet player who
longs to be the king of New Orleans jazz, to
make a new music that “would live forever,
flowing from one generation to the next
down the river of time into the sea of im-
mortality.” But listeners are not quite
ready for Isadore’s sound, and he is frus-
trated by his lack of good gigs. Zeno has a
pregnant wife and he needs steady work.
He dabbles in armed robbery, but ulti-
mately goes straight, working as a canal
digger and a cooper. For a time he forsakes
the cornet, but eventually he resolves,
roughly midway through the novel, to be
both a family man and a jazzman. (As the
son of a trumpet player, I was perhaps inor-
The extraordinary American
yearning of the characters is a
propulsive force in Rich’s novel.
dinately curious about how Zeno achieves
and maintains his brilliance without seem-
ing to practice.) When the hysteria sur-
rounding the Axman gives Zeno an odd op-
portunity to take the stage, he very cre-
atively capitalizes on the widespread fear.
This daring and desperate move — some-
what convenient, dramatically speaking —
furthers Zeno’s music career, and also puts
him on a dangerous course toward both the
Axman and Bastrop.
The third character is Beatrice Vizzini, a
Mafia matriarch, widow and mother. Her
company, Hercules Construction, is in
charge of excavating the canal, and Be-
atrice hopes that this respectable, high-
profile venture will lead her out of the
“shadow business” of racketeering. Like
Zeno, she is obsessed with immortality;
she takes baths in potions designed to pro-
long life. (Immortality baths, by the way,
do not work.) Beatrice becomes progres-
sively agitated by the ticking of her enor-
mous grandfather clock, by the canal
project — where workers have begun find-
ing severed body parts — and by her colos-
sal son, Giorgio, whose behavior has be-
come increasingly sinister and secretive
as he tries to prove himself worthy of in-
heriting the dark family business.
Having done what she can to spur
the incompetent and lazy Giorgio
into professional action, Beatrice
eventually loses control of him alto-
gether. She then becomes a detec-
tive, investigating her own son.
Thus all three characters are in
compelling motion, propelled by
deeply rooted desires, as well as by
the exigencies of plot. The Spanish
flu, meanwhile, is ravaging the city,
countervailing the vibrant, creative
forces of music and public works,
the striving, the dreams of longev-
ity. This is a novel with a high body
count, but it has far too much ener-
gy ever to feel morbid.
The canal, connecting lake to
river, also connects these three
characters, as does the murder in-
vestigation. (“King Zeno” is not
properly a whodunit — readers
know the identity of the Axman long
before Bastrop does.) All three
characters converge, as I suppose
they must, in a final climactic scene,
Rich’s complex and capacious uni-
verse narrowing to a pair of coordi-
nates, lit by the headlights of the ve-
hicles that brought them all there.
This scene feels cinematic in all the
best and worst ways. There are
weapons and blood, there is a ri-
poste that no screenwriter or script
doctor could improve. The resolu-
tion is exciting and tense, and yet after all
of the novel’s artful chaos, it feels like a
diminution. Rich delivers what the struc-
ture promises — that is the good news and
the bad.
Novels expand, then contract. The con-
traction is compulsory, the application of
narrative form on the messy and entropic
world the novel is attempting to represent.
Elegant contrivance is necessary in the
novel, and it has its own pleasures; yet I’ve
always been a fan of the accretion phase.
When I think of “The Great Gatsby” — an-
other Jazz Age tale — I think of that puppy
at Tom and Myrtle’s apartment, or Daisy
crying about Gatsby’s shirts, or the myste-
rious energy in the list of attendees at Gats-
by’s parties. It’s always a mild surprise to
remember that the novel culminates in ve-
hicular manslaughter and a murder-sui-
cide. Mistaken identity, jealous husband,
poolside gunfire. Narrative kills. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9
0

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protests, the prizes.
Join us for the latest
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The Great Divide
In Sam Graham-Felsen’s coming-of-age novel, a white boy and a black boy become friends, to a point.
By JONATHAN MILES
“GREEN,” THE DEBUT NOVEL from Sam
Graham-Felsen, who was chief blogger for
Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential cam-
paign, chronicles the middle school tra-
vails of an anomalous variety of minority
student. “I am the white boy at the Martin
Luther King Middle,” is how 12-year-old
David Alexander Greenfeld, nicknamed
Green, introduces himself in the novel’s
opening line. Martin Luther King Middle is
a Boston public school — “mad ghetto,” in
Green’s estimation — where his progres-
sive parents have sent him for sixth grade.
GREEN
By Sam Graham-Felsen
301 pp. Random House. $27.
He’s not the only white boy in the school,
but the other one — his friend Kev, who’s
got lip scruff and spiky black hair along
with prowess on the basketball court — of-
ten passes for Puerto Rican. There’s no
mistaking Green, though: not with his blue
eyes and blond curls and constantly
flushed cheeks, not with his mono-
grammed L. L. Bean backpack, not with
his weakness for blurting the word “awe-
some” (“a Caucasian catastrophe,” he
notes). Almost all 12-year-olds are con-
fused about who and what they are, but for
David Greenfeld, at school, one conspicu-
ous facet of his identity defines him: not his
Green-ness, but his whiteness.
Hewing to the classic coming-of-age-
novel formula, “Green’s” Green experi-
ences a variety of awakenings — sexual,
religious, familial, moral and not surpris-
ingly racial — during the course of his
sixth-grade school year (1992-93), all of
which get relayed in first-person, present-
tense, slanged-up narration. The alarm
clock for some of these awakenings is the
friendship Green strikes with Marlon
Wellings, a pious, studious black classmate
who lives near Green in the Robert Gould
Shaw Homes, a.k.a. “the projects.” Marlon,
unlike Green, is mostly immune to social
tensions, sitting by himself at lunchtime
studying for the entrance exam to Boston
Latin, the city’s elite public school, where
Green also aims to transfer. Green’s first
impression is that Marlon “looks pretty
soft,” and thus approachable: “creased
khakis, pilled-up flannel, boxy black shoes
and a short, unkempt flattop, more like a
clumpy cloud.” He has a gap in his front
teeth, just as Green does, but the similar-
ities don’t end there. The bond they form is
based partly upon a clandestine love for
the Boston Celtics — “no one openly ad-
mits they feel the Celtics anymore,” Green
JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels
“Dear American Airlines” and “Want Not.”
His latest novel, “Anatomy of a Miracle,” will
be published in March.
says — and partly upon their shared desire
for an upward move to Boston Latin. At
Martin Luther King Middle they’re out-
siders, and both of them are desperate to
get even farther outside.
The similarities do, however, bear some
obvious endpoints. Green’s Birkenstock-
shod parents went to Harvard before em-
barking on a life of bobo activism (“Pops
gives mad loot to Greenpeace”); Marlon’s
father is somewhere down South while his
grandmother cares for him along with his
mentally ill mother. Green and his 8-year-
old brother, Benno, spend summers help-
ing their parents tend a community garden
plot; Marlon eats asparagus for the first
Sam Graham-Felsen
time at Green’s house and the resultant
urine smell triggers a cancer panic. Green
is a secular Jew, confounded by what that
even means, while Marlon sings in the
choir in a storefront church near the Rox-
bury border. Green’s parents, if they would
relax their principles, could conceivably
send him to a safer private school (brother
Benno, who recently stopped speaking, at-
tends one such school “for sensitive
kids”); Marlon’s grandmother is absent
that option. And Marlon is black, while
Green, glaringly, is white.
This dynamic — the white boy adrift in
the urban and predominantly black school,
the fraught cross-racial friendship that
blooms there — isn’t new to fiction. Jona-
than Lethem probed it, with exquisite
grace, in his 2003 novel “The Fortress of
Solitude.” (A line from Lethem’s novel, in
fact, could serve as a 10-word summary of
Green: “A white boy in sixth grade,
squirming in the glare.”) Graham-Felsen
isn’t reaching for the same lofty heights as
Lethem did (few novelists dare to), but he
is reaching in the same general direction:
toward the terribly thorny beauty at the
heart of cross-racial friendships, which
constitutes, per Leslie Fiedler and others,
one of our essential American stories.
These thorns keep getting denser and
sharper as “Green” progresses, as when
Green discovers that the pair’s snow shov-
eling business is successful only when he
approaches potential customers without
Marlon in sight. What we call racism Green
apprehends as “the force”: its energies ev-
erywhere, “working on everyone,” himself
included. When Green copies a couple of
answers from Marlon during the fated en-
trance exam, the white proctor takes no-
tice but lets it slide. “A sickening mix of re-
lief and shame sweeps over me,” says
Green. “Mar knows it and I do, too: I’ve
been saved by the force.”
MOMENTS LIKE THESE — rendered subtly,
without poster-size messaging — are when
“Green” is at its most prickly and compel-
ling. Scenes of innocence — Green and
Marlon clowning in homemade pro-
wrestler costumes, or watching VHS tapes
of Larry Bird-era Celtics games from in-
side a living room fort made of blankets
and chairs — serve as their delicately cali-
brated counterbalances, affecting in their
sweetness but credible in their lack of sac-
charine. Graham-Felsen lets boys be boys:
messy-brained, impulsive, goatish, self-
centered, outwardly gutsy but often in-
wardly terrified. The voice with which Gra-
ham-Felsen equips Green, overseasoned
with hip-hop slang, is the epitome of this.
At first blush it suggests Holden Caulfield
as translated by Vanilla Ice (“If I’m gonna
make another attempt to kick it to her, I’m
gonna need a new Machine, and for that
I’m gonna need to fatten my muenster
stack, fast”). Yet as the novel advances,
and this street stud pose starts splintering,
the voice itself gathers a kind of dorky
poignancy, the reader sensing an unseen
wobble upon Green’s stiff, pale lip. Is it lin-
guistic blackface, with all that implies, or a
12-year-old’s guileless attempt to cobble to-
gether a voice of his own from what’s near-
est at hand? “I wish I had what he has,”
Green says of Marlon at one point. He’s
talking about religion, but it could be iden-
tity or maybe identity’s midwife, commu-
nity. “All I came up with was confusion.”
Yet this reader found himself wishing for
something of Marlon’s, too: his awak-
enings, his perspective, his inner voice, his
fullness on the page. As Lethem wrote in
“The Fortress of Solitude”: “The white kid
has one set of feelings, the black kid an-
other.” That we aren’t privy to those feel-
ings owes less to malpractice than to the
inherent limitations of Graham-Felsen
telling this story through Green’s blue
eyes. Marlon only exists within Green’s
purview, which means that “Green” — and
by extension the reader — sees only a frac-
tion of the whole. “We match up in a million
soft little ways — why can’t we just be boys
again?” Green laments near the end, when
the friendship has run aground. “But the
more I think about it, the more I wonder if
we were meant to be shards from the start.
Not just me and Mar — everyone. Look
around. . . . The force is everywhere, pry-
ing us apart.” There’s more hopefulness
than this by the final pages, but it’s a long-
shot hope, a coin into a fountain. He and
Marlon match up in a million ways save
one, but that one, in America then as now,
seems cursed to outweigh all the others. 0

PHOTOGRAPH BY TAMAR STEINBERGER

10 SU N DAY , JA N UA RY 21, 2 018
0
The Unmoored
In a series of interconnected stories, Neel Mukherjee explores the boundaries of freedom.
By MICHAEL GORRA
NEEL MUKHERJEE LIKES to keep his titles a
bit abstract, suggesting a mood or even an
ethical choice, but conveying nothing
about a book’s characters or setting or plot.
His first novel, “A Life Apart,” published in
2010, could be about almost anything; in
practice it begins with an Indian student at
Oxford and then moves in on the London
sex trade. His 2014 novel, “The Lives of
Others,” shares its name with an earlier
Oscar-winning German film, but those
words fit beautifully onto its complex story
of political and familial turmoil in Bengal.
A STATE OF FREEDOM
By Neel Mukherjee
278 pp. W.W. Norton. $25.95.
Both books have a 19th-century plenitude
of detail, but it’s the 19th century of Zola
rather than Dickens. They’re works of rub-
your-nose-in-it naturalism, unforgiving
and emotionally draining, books that make
you squirm, and think. That’s especially
true of his latest novel, “A State of Free-
dom.” Except this title is less open-ended
than it seems, and in using it Mukherjee
has something very specific in mind: He
has his eye on one crucial literary prede-
cessor.
V. S. Naipaul’s “In a Free State” won the
Booker Prize in 1971, just a few years after it
was established to recognize the year’s
best fiction from Britain and its former col-
onies. The award has had a better record
than most: Many of its winners have stood
the test of time and their tally includes re-
markably few embarrassments. But “In a
Free State” stands out, even in a list that
includes “Disgrace” and “Possession,”
“Midnight’s Children” and “Wolf Hall.” It is
dark and bitter and grand, and its prose
mixes despair with a sense of majesty.
Naipaul divides the book into five sections,
each about people in motion from one con-
tinent to another, and frames its different
narratives with a prologue and an epilogue
whose cadences match his own autobio-
graphical writing. No character reappears
from one part to the next, but the book is
unified by its sense of freedom as a disrup-
tive force, as though its people were un-
moored in something other than a physical
sense.
Calcutta-born and London-based,
Mukherjee has twice been a finalist for the
now-renamed Man Booker Prize, and this
new novel stands as an echo of Naipaul’s
great work. The first of its five semi-inde-
pendent sections concerns an expatriate
Indian academic, a man bent on showing
the Moghul remains of northern India to
his American son: the Taj Mahal over
MICHAEL GORRA’Sbooks include “Portrait of a
Novel: Henry James and the Making of an
American Masterpiece.” He teaches at Smith
College.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL HART
lunch and then an hour’s drive to the aban-
doned 16th-century capital of Fatehpur
Sikri. He’s a worried father, concerned that
he “might have imposed too much on a 6-
year-old,” but he drags the boy along just
the same, and grows irritated at his inat-
tentiveness. He’s also horrified at their
driver’s breakneck pace and dismayed by
the beggars and touts, for whom his guide-
book marks him as prey. America has
made him soft; he’s lost “the easy Indian
ability to bark at people considered as ser-
vants.” In other hands this might be comic,
but Mukherjee begins on a foreboding
note, and so as we read we wait for some-
Neel Mukherjee
A man with a bear glimpsed outside
a car window in one story occupies
the center of another.
thing to happen, something bad.
On the way back from Fatehpur Sikri the
car passes a fox-faced man with “a mus-
tache that seemed alive,” leading a trained
bear along the roadside. While Mukher-
jee’s unhappy professor will vanish from
the book, the bear’s owner, Lakshman, re-
appears in its third section, as though the
novelist had decided to imagine a life for a
man glimpsed from the window of a mov-
ing car.
Lakshman finds the cub near his village
in the mountains and saves it from the cru-
elty of the local children, only to inflict a
further cruelty of his own. The keepers of
dancing bears are traditionally Muslims,
known as “qalandars”; Lakshman, a
Hindu, doesn’t so much train the animal as
beat it into submission, having first gotten
its canines knocked out. Nevertheless the
bear soon acquires a name, Raju, and a
character, and when Lakshman runs away
from the cares of village life, from his fam-
ily and his debts, Raju becomes his only
companion. This is the hardest of Mukher-
jee’s narratives to read, but it’s also the
most original and the most beautifully
written. (On a morning when “the heat is
beginning to bare its teeth,” the man and
his bear must “cleave to the shaded ar-
eas.”)
Nothing beyond a description of Laksh-
man’s face makes an explicit connection
between these two sections, but the second
and fourth parts of this book have a closer
relation. In the second, an unnamed narra-
tor returns from London to spend a month
in his parents’ Bombay apartment and
finds that his conversations with the fam-
YOU’LL
ily’s cook, Renu, make his mother pro-
foundly uncomfortable. It’s a story about
NEVER GUESS
the social insulation afforded by relative
wealth. The later narrative dives into the
WHO’S
life of the family’s other servant, Milly,
tracking the difficult course that has COMING UP
brought her, over many years, into some-
thing close to safety. But not everyone is so
lucky, and Mukherjee also spares a glance
NEXT.
at the rural violence Milly has left behind,
in a way that recalls “The Lives of Others.”
ALL THIS GIVES “A State of Freedom” more But you can be the
visible stitching than Naipual employed first to know, when
with “In a Free State,” and the book’s es-
sential unity is underlined by the last and you sign up for
boldest of Mukherjee’s five narratives. our TimesTalks
Lakshman’s brother has also run away newsletters. We’ll
from their village and is now rumored to
work on building sites in the plains. Here a send you the latest
construction worker in Agra mounts a on upcoming
rickety scaffold, moving along “the pliable interviews with the
bamboo ribs inch by inch on his bare feet
the world spread out far below and so
most influential
much air between him and the world.” names in culture
Safety precautions are nonexistent on this today, directly to your
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Mukherjee’s description makes it clear
that the man’s earlier work has given him to TimesTalks.com.
asbestosis. Only alcohol numbs his pain.
And what Mukherjee does is to step inside
him, offering an unpunctuated stream-of-
consciousness that’s clearly meant to re-
call Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of
“Ulysses.” Molly’s unforgettable last word
is “Yes”; Mukherjee finishes with “at last,”
and in doing so returns us both to Laksh-
man’s story and to what had seemed a mi-
nor incident in this book’s almost forgotten
beginning.
“A State of Freedom” requires those of us
who live comfortably to imagine a world in
which almost no one ever does, a world in
which the novel’s very title seems like a
bad joke. Indeed, the Londoner who nar-
rates the book’s second part makes just
such an effort, in effect modeling what
Mukherjee asks of his readers. This would
suggest that this novel carries a more obvi-
ous ethical burden than anything Naipaul
might allow himself, and it’s correspond-
ingly less concerned with awakening a
sense of wonder, with providing what the
Trinidadian master himself described as a
“cause for yearning.” A book that begins in
homage remains then a bit narrow when
set against its model. But it’s a mark of
Neel Mukherjee’s range and force and am-
TIMESTALKS.COM
bition that any lesser comparison would
seem an injustice. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11
0
Beware of Family Members Bearing Gifts
The latest novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal cycle features a contentious holiday.
By MEG WOLITZER
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT novels in trilo-
gies, tetralogies and beyond that gives
them a certain allure. It’s not the allure of
deathlessness, precisely, but maybe the
next best thing: delay. We know from the
start — whether reading the first in a mul-
tivolume set or whether further books
have merely been announced — that the
disappointment in having to exit the world
of this novel will be postponed, that the can
will be kickable down the road. The Scot-
tish writer Ali Smith has just published the
second of four novels that are being called
a seasonal cycle, and there is much to cele-
brate in this fact, though the allure here (at
WINTER
By Ali Smith
322 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.95.
least so far) is very different from that of
other “sets.”
It’s not that the reader is in the same
place, or with the same main characters.
(The seasons, in real life, barely resemble
one another, so why should these books?)
But shifting from “Autumn” to “Winter,”
and then plunging on through the rest of
the year, Smith is the one doing the telling,
which means the books can’t help connect-
ing through various channels, most nota-
bly her vast supply of preoccupations. Of
course, all writers have preoccupations,
refrains, obsessions; and by using the sea-
sons as a thematic tarpaulin that covers
the whole enterprise and publishing the
volumes in fairly quick succession (“Au-
tumn” appeared here last February) with
some exciting, punctuating overlaps, she
allows the books to exist at once separately
and in comfortable relation.
“Winter” opens with the world’s tem-
perature being taken. “God was dead: to
begin with,” Smith writes, riffing on the
opening of “A Christmas Carol.” “And ro-
mance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poet-
ry, the novel, painting, they were all dead,
and art was dead. Theater and cinema
were both dead. Literature was dead. The
book was dead. Modernism, postmodern-
ism, realism and surrealism were all dead.”
The catalog goes on and on, branching out
to include some not-dead, or at least not-
yet-dead things. The effect is as if Smith is
peering down into the interior of a shaken-
up snow globe.
The narrative quickly narrows, homing
in on a large house in Cornwall where, on
the day before Christmas, an older woman
named Sophia Cleves sits in the presence
of the disembodied, suspended head of a
child. The head never speaks, it just hov-
ers, bringing to mind Freud’s instruction
about a psychoanalyst needing to listen
with “evenly suspended attention.” (In
MEG WOLITZER’S next novel, “The Female
Persuasion,” will be published in April.
12 S U N DAY , JAN UA RY 21, 2 018
fact, there are several references to Freud
in “Winter.”) By opening in this dislocating
way, then moving back into Sophia’s ado-
lescent past and returning to the present in
a droll bureaucratic scene at a bank —
where Sophia is a “Corinthian account
holder, which meant her bank cards had a
graphic on them of the top of a Corinthian
pillar with its flourish of stony leaves, un-
like the more ordinary account holder
cards which had no graphic at all” — Smith
alerts us early on to the enormously ex-
pansive free-range of her vision.
Sophia’s son, Art (whose name is no acci-
dent, since this book examines the mean-
ing and use of art in a world like ours), soon
arrives, accompanied by a Croatian-Cana-
dian named Lux, impersonating his long-
time girlfriend, Charlotte. The sitcom trope
is deposited lightly: Smith is comfortable
with the setup, just as she is with her pop
culture references. She seems genuinely
interested in them because she is inter-
ested in the entire culture and its shifts,
both glacial and volcanic.
After Lux decides that Sophia’s es-
JOSH COCHRAN
In a large house in Cornwall, a
woman sits in the presence of a
hovering, disembodied head.
tranged, longtime political activist sister,
Iris, should be called, the “action” of the
novel can be said to begin. But action is a
subjective word. For a writer like Ali
Smith, the exploration of consciousness it-
self constitutes satisfying action. So the
book, which uses “A Christmas Carol” as
one of its organizing principles (“Cymbe-
line” also appears as a reference), at times
leaps from era to era, often with surprising
bursts of joy.
Along the way, there is much wordplay
— “What’s a carapace? It’s a caravan that
goes at a great pace.” “I said to your aunt
last night. . . . Art is seeing things. And
your aunt said, that’s a great description of
what art is” — and a freight of literary and
artistic allusions. As in “Autumn,” a female
artist becomes one of the novel’s many
subjects. Last time it was the pop artist
Pauline Boty and this time it’s the sculptor
Barbara Hepworth, who provides one of
the epigraphs — “Landscape directs its
own images” — and whose work figures in
a section that subtly and satisfyingly links
“Winter” to its predecessor.
But where there’s art (at least in this
book) there’s suffering, and politically pas-
sionate Iris is the one to draw our attention
to injustice: “Tell them about what torture
does to a life, what it does to a language.” A
couple of the protest descriptions feel duti-
ful, though everywhere else Smith is rou-
tinely brilliant, knowing, masterful. Here’s
an interlude with Art: “He thinks about
how, whatever being alive is, with all its
pasts and presents and futures, it is most
itself in the moments when you surface
from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness
that you didn’t even know you were at, and
break the surface and when you do it’s akin
to — to what? To a salmon leaping God
knows where, home against the flow, not
knowing what home is.”
The first two books in Smith’s quartet
process and employ news items with speed
and precision. “Autumn” was considered a
Brexit novel, and “Winter” includes refer-
ences to the presidency of Donald J. Trump
and the worldwide women’s marches. It
also uses Nativity scene/no-room-at-the-
inn ideas to address the hateful rejection of
immigrants now on display. In the past, the
kind of books that came out shortly after
real-world happenings might have had as
their subjects, say, events like the Jon-
estown massacre, to satiate immediate
reader need.
There is an immediate reader need here
too: We need someone to process and eval-
uate our political and cultural moment, but
it should be someone who is unflinching in
the face of bleakness and has great reser-
voirs of interest in and knowledge of the
past. And it helps if that person is ex-
tremely funny and seriously angry and ex-
perimental and heartbreaking, but never
sentimental. And if she’s someone who
loves the strange power of language. “ ‘In
her ga-what?’ Lux says. ‘Galoshes,’ Art
says. ‘What a fine word,’ Lux says.”
All multibook “projects” have a kind of
ambition and grand vision, but they must
also function close up, book by book, chap-
ter by chapter. That is true of Elena Fer-
rante’s Neapolitan novels and Karl Ove
Knausgaard’s work. (He is writing his own
seasonal quartet, having just published
“Winter,” which is reviewed on the facing
page.) While Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick
Melrose novels, looked at in the aggregate,
are a way to understand family trauma,
Smith seems to be using her cycle as a way
to process the larger trauma of our break-
ing, swirling world — over time, over hu-
man moments, over seasons. Each novel
will give her a new chance to inspect her
preoccupations in a different light. In
“Winter,” the light inside this great nov-
elist’s gorgeous snow globe is utterly origi-
nal, and it definitely illuminates. 0
0
Dark Days
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s seasonal quartet continues with a wintry mix of short essays about quiet, emptiness and depression.
By SARAH MANGUSO
“WINTER,” THE SECOND COLLECTION of es-
says in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “four sea-
sons” quartet, comprises 60 short pieces,
punctuated by three letters addressed to
his youngest daughter. Framed as a “lexi-
con for an unborn child,” the collection
evokes the shape of nondirected, un-
bounded thought, and an artist’s sensibil-
ity, free from conventional judgments of
what’s worth noticing. They are impres-
WINTER
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Ingvild Burkey
Illustrated. 254 pp. Penguin Press. $27.
sionistic records, a constellation of bits
that accumulate in an appealing miscel-
lany of objects and concepts — the moon,
the 1970s, winter sounds, manholes. Each
essay is about three pages long.
A short essay isn’t just a truncated long
essay; it has its own distinct pacing, pros-
ody and form. A three-page essay is in-
tensely interested in constraint. It depends
on its final moment of arrival, which is
sometimes preceded by one or more small-
er or more temporary arrivals. Knaus-
gaard seems to recognize this — the place-
ment of several of the best essays, at the
end of the book, indicates a sense of the
ceremony of endings — but most of the es-
says in “Winter” read like excerpts from,
or preambles to, longer essays. They read
not just as though their initiating subjects
were noticed quickly but as though they
were written quickly; they seem uninter-
ested in pursuing the goals of the short es-
say, which are precision, originality and
speed.
It is impossible to read this book without
also considering “My Struggle,” Knaus-
gaard’s six-volume, oceanic work of aut-
ofiction, its thousands of pages translated,
published and admired around the world.
“My Struggle” is fearlessly expansive. It
probes the banal content of life to the point
of exhaustion. It takes its time. It is inter-
ested in endurance. It is less interested in
omission, compression, silence.
Fans of “My Struggle” will find some
finely articulated passages in “Winter,”
written by a gentler, more mildly tempered
narrator than that of the longer books.
Knausgaard realizes while fishing that
“the expectation of an answer runs so deep
that it is presumably fundamentally hu-
man, the most characteristic trait of our
nature.” He turns a painterly eye to fields
“covered by a thin layer of snow, with the
brown soil showing through in places, as
when a wound is visible through strips of
gauze.” In one of my favorite passages, his
shame about his messy house “flaps
around in me like one of those large hollow
SARAH MANGUSO is the author of seven books,
most recently “300 Arguments.”
figures through which air is blown and be the comma in a sentence in a newspa- completely private project, apparently un-
which sometimes flutter about outside per that hasn’t been picked up yet.” This intended for publication. As I read “Win-
shopping centers or fast-food restaurants.” familiar idea doesn’t elevate itself above ter” I wondered whether its author had
“Windows,” the last essay in the collection, its familiar context. I could blame the grown bored by his facility with very long
ends: “How ambivalent we are in relation translator for deadening the prose, but I prose; whether he wished to elude being
to these categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ think the larger problem is that three pigeonholed as a certain type of writer, or
becomes apparent if we consider the cof- pages just isn’t enough space to hold a worried that he’d discovered the limits of
fin, which by virtue of being our final complete Knausgaardian thought. his interests or, perish the thought, of his
dwelling, our last defense against the ele- talent. After all, “My Struggle” ends with
ments, our final ‘inside,’ in large measure WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, mature writers the avowal that he will never write again.
denies our true nature, but not entirely: In each carry the burden of an individual It’s easy to give advice, even if I would-
that case, the coffin too would have win- style. I frequently suspected, while read- n’t take it myself, so when my graduate
dows.” ing this book, that Knausgaard doesn’t students write labored work out of some
Knausgaard’s strongest writing tends to consider the three-page essay even to misplaced sense of obligation, I tell them
concern childhood and parenthood. In possess form; just size. The form doesn’t to write after pleasure and relief; to let
“Setting Limits” he scrutinizes the exter- seem to interest him, and his prose is writing come to exist as a byproduct of
nal signs of his daughter’s tantrum. After poorly suited to it. To do it right he’d have pure need; and not to let an idealized end
reacting to it in the moment, he realizes he to write all new, non-Knausgaardian sen- product twist them away from what they
has crossed the razor’s edge between tences and paragraphs. He’d have to stop must write, or what they’d write anyway,
healthy discipline and humiliation, and being Knausgaard. without a teacher or even a reader — in
broods that he has channeled his disci- The “four seasons” quartet started as a other words, to be the writers they al-
plinarian father. So he decides to “make ready are. Or perhaps I should be less
things right again,” though he knows a sim- judgmental of an artist who tries new
ple apology won’t cut it. The piece ends The narrator of these essays is things and works against his natural
with a gentle redirection, an act of self- gentler and milder than the style. Perhaps I should admire Knaus-
comfort expressed as parental comfort: narrator of ‘My Struggle.’ gaard for daring to become an amateur
“So what I am going to do is to get out a again. 0
hammer and some of those little staples
that one uses to fasten cables to the wall,
and put up the lamp that for several
months now I’ve been promising to hang
from the ceiling of her room. It is made up
of a long row of little round paper lanterns
in various colors and will hang above her
bed like a garland.”
Quite a few of the sections feel stereotyp-
ically Scandinavian, with their focus on
darkness, snow, quiet, emptiness and de-
pression. One of the best (and most Scandi-
navian) is “Loki,” which retells the myth of
the Norse god and ends with an exquisite
description of anticipated horror. Some-
times an essay doesn’t proceed very far be-
yond setting a Scandinavian mood: “The
Funeral Procession” concludes with
Knausgaard’s report of watching an ambu-
lance boat float away, carrying a corpse:
“As the boat was swallowed up by all the
gray, I thought that that is exactly how
death is.”
In a collection of 60-odd pieces, not ev-
ery one can be a home run, but too many
of these essays anticipate a point of arriv-
al that never comes. “Cold” begins to dis-
cuss the physics of entropy, but it barely
restates the general principle, meanders
a bit, then stops before it discovers any-
thing unfamiliar. Twenty more pages
would have allowed “The Nose,” a clinical
consideration of the facial feature’s essen-
tial qualities, to proceed to a worthier cli-
max. More concerning are the essays
that indulge in lax thinking, which is hard
to hide in a 750-word piece. In “Hollow
Spaces,” “all the thoughts we produce are
organized like clothes in a wardrobe, with
trousers on one shelf, sweaters on an-
other.” That isn’t the way memories are
laid down in the brain; it’s faux science
deployed in support of a convenient met-
aphor. Elsewhere, “the Milky Way might JOSH COCHRAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13
0
A Brooklyn Misadventure
Isabel Allende’s new novel interweaves three narratives of the immigrant experience in America.
By ELIZABETH WINKLER
IN ISABEL ALLENDE’S new novel, a snow-
storm and a car accident bring three peo-
ple together on an unexpected journey that
transforms their lives. As if this premise is
not sufficiently hackneyed, Allende adds
literary insult to injury by spelling it out in
IN THE MIDST OF WINTER
By Isabel Allende
Translated by Nick Calstor
and Amanda Hopkinson
342 pp. Atria Books. $28.
breathy prose: “Over the next three days,
as the storm wearied of punishing the land
and dissolved far out to sea, the lives of Lu-
cia Maraz, Richard Bowmaster and Evelyn
Ortega would become inextricably linked.”
The novel is riddled with such formula-
tions. Seemingly intended to stab at the
surreal, fablelike quality for which Allende
is known, they come off as merely soppy
ELIZABETH WINKLER is a reporter for The Wall
Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column.
When Rape Becomes a Weapon of War
A harrowing memoir describes a Yazidi woman’s kidnapping by Islamist militants.
By ANNA DELLA SUBIN
HOW TO APPROACH a memoir of a war still
being waged? “The Last Girl: My Story of
Captivity, and My Fight Against the Is-
lamic State” contains open wounds and
painful lessons, as the Yazidi activist Nadia
Murad learns how her own story can be-
THE LAST GIRL
My Story of Captivity, and My Fight
Against the Islamic State
By Nadia Murad with Jenna Krajeski
Illustrated. 306 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.
come a weapon against her — co-opted for
any number of political agendas. In August
2014 Islamic State militants besieged her
village of Kocho in northern Iraq. They ex-
ecuted nearly all the men and older women
— including Murad’s mother and six broth-
ers — and buried them in mass graves. The
younger women, Murad among them,
were kidnapped and sold into sexual slav-
ANNA DELLA SUBIN is the author of “Not Dead
but Sleeping” and a contributing editor at
Bidoun, a publishing and curatorial initiative
focused on the Middle East.
14 S U NDAY , JA N UARY 21, 2 018
and uninspired.
In fact, the story owes less to magical re-
alism than to histrionic crime dramas.
Richard, a lonely, aging professor, sets out
in a car from his Brooklyn apartment and
collides with a vehicle being driven by Eve-
lyn, an undocumented immigrant who
happens to be driving her employer’s car.
She turns up at his apartment later that
night, distraught and unintelligible, her
Spanglish broken by a stammer she devel-
oped after suffering a brutal gang assault
in her native Guatemala. Richard calls his
tenant Lucia, a middle-aged visiting Chil-
ean professor under his direction at N.Y.U.,
to help. The three split a pot brownie, as
one does during blizzards with strangers,
and swap life stories.
It comes out that there is a corpse in
Evelyn’s trunk, which won’t close thanks to
the crash. She is terrified of returning the
damaged car to her employer, the abusive
Frank Leroy, who is sure to come after her
if he knows she’s seen the body. Naturally,
Evelyn can’t go to the police either. Moved
by her plight, Richard and Lucia decide to
help her dump car and corpse. This fantas-
ery. Raped, tortured and exchanged
among militants, 21-year-old Murad finds
an escape route when she is sold to a jihad-
ist in Mosul who leaves a front door un-
locked. She flees into Kurdistan by posing
as the wife of a Sunni man, Nasser, who
risks everything to escort her to safety.
Just when Murad, and the reader, expect
a flood of relief, there is another sinister
turn: Murad and Nasser are detained by
Kurdish officials who force them to testify
about their escape with cameras rolling.
The officials are eager to hear how pesh-
merga fighters from a rival Kurdish faction
— the two groups fought a civil war in the
1990s — had abandoned the Yazidi commu-
nities they were supposed to protect. The
officials swear no one will ever see the
tape, but it appears on the news that same
night, putting Nasser and his family in
grave danger. “I was quickly learning that
my story, which I still thought of as a per-
sonal tragedy, could be someone else’s po-
litical tool,” Murad writes.
Freed from captivity, Murad remains
trapped inside politics. To publish “The
Last Girl” right now, in the United States,
means there are tricky issues of sensation-
alism to navigate; in a threatening climate
of Islamophobia, Muslims of all kinds are
tic bit of plot — why on earth should they
undertake such a risk for a stranger who,
for all they know, committed the murder
herself? — is supposed to be justified by
their own immigrant histories: Lucia fled
Chile’s military junta in the 1970s; Richard,
whose father escaped the Nazis, hears “his
father’s voice deep inside him reminding
him of his duty to help the persecuted.”
As the trio journeys upstate, the novel
flashes back through each character’s past
— Lucia’s memories of a family fractured
The characters’ back stories plead
with the reader to have sympathy
for Latino immigrants.
by war in Chile, Richard’s doomed mar-
riage in Brazil and Evelyn’s tragic child-
hood in Guatemala. Some images are
memorable: Lucia’s murdered brother is
“a feeling, a fleeting shadow, a kiss brush-
ing her forehead”; a Guatemalan gangster
has “tattoos spreading like a plague across
his skin.” Though inventive, these back
stories are marred by simplistic exposition
vilified for the actions of one group. Yet
Murad, and the team of translators and
writers with whom she worked, hedge
against this response with a book in-
tricate in historical context. Visi-
ble throughout are the disas-
trous legacies of the American
intervention that dismantled
Baathist institutions and
bred a generation of Iraqis
raised on violence and with
few prospects. In a childhood
flashback, a young Nadia re-
ceives a ring from one of the
many American soldiers who ar-
rived in Kocho in the mid-2000s
Nadia Murad
bearing trinkets and empty prom-
ises. During the Iraq war, Yazidis
became increasingly isolated from their
Sunni Arab neighbors, caught in cross
hairs of sectarianism in the wake of the
“coalition of the willing.”
“The Last Girl” is also a primer on the
ancient Yazidi faith that sustains Murad
throughout her ordeal: its creation myths,
visions of the afterlife and idiosyncratic
customs. (Many Yazidis avoid eating let-
tuce, and consider blue a color too holy for
humans to wear.) Yazidis pray to Tawusi
Melek, an archangel who, at the creation,
(“the deep crisis dividing Chile became un-
sustainable”) and clunky dialogue (“this
violence is the result of an endless war
against the poor”). They plead with the
reader to have sympathy for Latino immi-
grants, which is a fine humanitarian
agenda. But heaps of suffering and misfor-
tune cannot give depth to thin characters.
Nor can love. Lucia and Richard fall into
a late-age romance and, as in Allende’s
other love stories, their passion inspires
some of the novel’s most cringeworthy
lines: She accuses him of having spent
“many years with your soul in winter and
your heart locked away.” It also leads to a
rosy, fairy-tale ending, which figures awk-
wardly in a novel that wants to tell the
truth about immigration.
This neat conclusion is a missed oppor-
tunity. It is difficult to imagine a more ur-
gent time to tell stories of Latino immi-
grants. With references to Donald J. Trump
and racial resentment in America, Allende
is clearly eager to weigh in on the political
moment. But the story is too shallow and
the writing too syrupy to make for a
thoughtful treatment of the subject. 0
took the form of a peacock, and painted a
desolate earth with the colors of his feath-
ers. Over the centuries, misunderstand-
ings surrounding the mysterious reli-
gion have fueled genocide — 73
times, Murad writes, a figure
eerily exact. According to a
pernicious myth, Tawusi
Melek refused to bow before
Adam and was condemned
to hell, echoing Satan’s be-
havior in the Quran. Brand-
ing them “devil worshipers,”
ISIS legitimized the massacre
and enslavement of Yazidis, sin-
gling them out among Iraq’s
many minorities for particularly
inhumane treatment.
“I want to be the last girl in the world
with a story like mine,” Murad concludes.
Despite recent gains against ISIS in Iraq,
many Yazidis still remain in captivity. As
a story that hasn’t yet ended, “The Last
Girl” is difficult to process. It is a call to
action, but as it places Murad’s tragedy in
the larger narrative of Iraqi history and
American intervention, it leaves the
reader with urgent, incendiary questions:
What have we done, and what can we
do? 0
PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK SEEGER/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
0
Gifted and Talented and Complicated
What happens to child prodigies when they grow up?
By AMANDA RIPLEY
AT AGE 3, before she could write by hand,
Barbara Newhall Follett was banging out
words on her parents’ Corona. Her first
book, a lyrical romp about a child runaway,
came out in 1927 when she was 12. The Sat-
urday Review of Literature called it “al-
most unbearably beautiful,” and this news-
paper deemed it “wonderful.” A second
book, based on her adventures at sea,
earned more accolades just a little over a
year later.
But at age 15, Follett was arrested in San
Francisco after fleeing the suffocating
OFF THE CHARTS
The Hidden Lives and Lessons
of American Child Prodigies
By Ann Hulbert
Illustrated. 372 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
plans of her mother. “I felt I had to have my
freedom,” she told a reporter. A decade lat-
er, Follett walked out of the apartment she
was sharing with her husband in Brook-
line, Mass., evidently seeking freedom
once more, this time from her marriage.
She was never heard from again.
Child prodigies are exotic creatures,
each unique and inexplicable. But they
have a couple of things in common, as Ann
Hulbert’s meticulous new book, “Off the
Charts,” makes clear: First, most wun-
derkinds eventually experience some kind
of schism with a devoted and sometimes
domineering parent. “After all, no matter
how richly collaborative a bond children
forge with grown-up guides, some version
of divorce is inevitable,” Hulbert writes.
“It’s what modern experts would call de-
velopmentally appropriate.” Second, most
prodigies grow up to be thoroughly unre-
markable on paper. They do not, by and
large, sustain their genius into adulthood.
What happens to alter the trajectory of
shooting stars like Follett? In “Off the
Charts,” Hulbert attempts to capture the
complicated lives of child prodigies with-
out descending into voyeurism or carica-
ture. She has tried to “listen hard for the
prodigies’ side of the story,” to her great
credit.
This is an arduous task, and it some-
times shows in the writing, which can be
stilted in its reliance on quotes and docu-
mentation. But Hulbert’s diligence results
in a surprising payoff: The best advice for
managing a child prodigy may be a wise
strategy for parenting any child, including
the many, many nonbrilliant ones.
Hulbert, The Atlantic’s literary editor,
wrote her last book, “Raising America,”
about the tortured history of parenting ad-
vice. So she is appropriately wary of
preachy morality tales. “My goal isn’t to
AMANDA RIPLEY is a senior fellow at the Emer-
son Collective and the author, most recently, of
“The Smartest Kids in the World.”
pile on the stark cautionary fare.
Nor am I aiming to crack some
‘talent code,’” she writes in the
prologue for “Off the Charts,” to
our great relief.
Instead, she tries to place
each of the boys and girls fea-
tured in the book in a specific
time and place; their celebrity
reveals much about their partic-
ular moment in American his-
tory. For example, Bobby Fisch-
er’s chess prowess might not
have been impressive enough
for adults to overlook his breath-
taking egotism — but for the
launching of Sputnik and Ameri-
ca’s anxiety about creeping Sovi-
et domination in education and
science. One era’s prodigy is an-
other’s anonymous misfit.
The book begins with the
story of two gifted boys who at-
tended Harvard at the same
time, in the early 1900s. Norbert
Wiener, a budding philosopher
and mathematician, was 14, and
William Sidis, a star in linguis-
tics and mathematics, was only
11. They were not friends, which
was a shame. Both suffered un-
der the weight of their elders’ in-
tellectual expectations, com-
bined with the impossibility of
fitting in as boys among men.
They were told they were supe-
rior, but then punished if they
acted like it. Their identities de-
pended on superhuman smarts,
which made any academic fail-
ure feel like a knife to the heart.
Wiener would struggle with
depression for the rest of his life,
but he did manage to eventually
find professional fulfillment at M.I.T.,
where he helped invent the field of cyber-
netics. Sidis was not so successful; after
fleeing a criminal charge related to a poli-
tical protest, he did low-level accounting
work in New York. He continued to alien-
ate others with his stubborn arrogance be-
fore dying at 46 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
What would have helped these boys and
the other struggling prodigies in this
book? Maybe nothing. But after poring
over their words and stories, Hulbert has
concluded that they might all offer parents
similar advice: Accept who they are.
That doesn’t mean protecting them from
failure or stress; quite the opposite. “What
they want, and need, is the chance to ob-
sess on their own idiosyncratic terms — to
sweat and swerve, lose their balance, get
their bearings, battle loneliness, discover
resilience,” Hulbert writes. Interestingly,
this is the same advice contemporary psy-
chologists tend to give to all parents, not
just the parents of prodigies. Parents must
hold children accountable and help them
thrive, which is easier said than done; but
if they try to re-engineer the fundamentals
LIS XU
of their offspring, they will fail spectacu-
larly, sooner or later. And this lesson is par-
ticularly obvious in the extremes.
“Extraordinary achievement, though
adults have rarely cared to admit it, takes a
toll,” Hulbert writes. “It demands an inten-
sity that rarely makes kids conventionally
popular or socially comfortable. But if they
get to claim that struggle for mastery as
theirs, in all its unwieldiness, they just
might sustain the energy and curiosity
that ideally fuels such a quest.”
THE SPECIAL CHALLENGE for prodigies is
that they are exceptional in more ways
than one. “Genius is an abnormality, and
abnormalities do not come one at a time,”
explains Veda Kaplinsky, a longtime
teacher of gifted students, in Andrew Solo-
mon’s “Far From the Tree,” a book that is
cited by Hulbert. “Many gifted kids have
A.D.D. or O.C.D. or Asperger’s. When the
parents are confronted with two sides of a
kid, they’re so quick to acknowledge the
positive, the talented, the exceptional;
they are often in denial over everything
else.”
The very traits that make prodi-
gies so successful in one arena —
their obsessiveness, a stubborn re-
fusal to conform, a blistering drive
to win — can make them pariahs in
the rest of life. Whatever else they
may say, most teachers do not in
fact appreciate creativity and criti-
cal thinking in their own students.
“Off the Charts” is jammed with
stories of small geniuses being
kicked out of places of learning.
Matt Savage spent two days in a
Boston-area Montessori preschool
before being expelled. Thanks to
parents who had the financial and
emotional resources to help him
find his way, he is now, at age 25, a
renowned jazz musician.
Interestingly, some prodigies
may actually do better when their
eccentricities are seen by loving
adults as disabilities first — and
talents second. Hulbert tells the
story of Jacob Barnett, born in
1998, who withdrew into autism as
a toddler in Indiana. His parents
tried every form of therapy they
could find, before finally discover-
ing that he could be drawn out
through his captivation with as-
tronomy. His mother, Kristine,
took him to astronomy classes at
the local university — not to jump-
start his genius but to help coax
him back to life. “If I had stopped
and let myself bask in the awe of
Jake’s amazing abilities — if I had
stopped to ponder how unusual he
really is — I don’t think I could
have been a good mother to him,”
she explained.
The most vivid section of the
book comes at the end, when Hul-
bert reunites with the musical prodigy
Marc Yu, a decade after first interviewing
him at age 6. With his mother’s support, Yu
had tried to ease up on his musical career
and live a more normal life, an approach
that had worked for other prodigies, in-
cluding the child actress Shirley Temple.
But Yu found that the strategies that
worked at the keyboard were useless in
high school, where no amount of discipline
and focus could make him cool. The ador-
able, joke-cracking boy she’d remembered
had grown into a lonely teenager. “I always
expected things to go my way,” Yu told Hul-
bert. “If I wanted it, I worked hard enough,
I got it, and people loved me. That’s no
longer true, and I feel I exist in the shadow
of popular kids.”
Yu’s story reinforces one of Hulbert’s
central, if unsatisfying, findings: Chil-
dren’s needs change. If you think you’ve
got a child figured out, you will be proved
wrong momentarily. As Hulbert writes:
“Prodigies offer reminders writ large that
children, in the end, flout our best and
worst intentions.” And adults always over-
estimate their own influence. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 15
0
Philip Roth Is Still Here
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
for example, challenging the online ency-
clopedia’s preposterous contention that he
was not a credible witness to his own life.
(Eventually, Wikipedia backed down and
redid the Roth entry in its entirety.) Roth is
also in regular touch with Blake Bailey,
whom he appointed as his official biogra-
pher and who has already amassed 1,900
pages of notes for a book expected to be
half that length. And just recently, he su-
pervised the publication of “Why Write?,”
the 10th and last volume in the Library of
America edition of his work. A sort of final
sweeping up, a polishing of the lega-
cy, it includes a selection of literary
essays from the 1960s and ’70s; the
full text of “Shop Talk,” his 2001 col-
lection of conversations and inter-
views with other writers, many of
them European; and a section of
valedictory essays and addresses,
several published here for the first
time. Not accidentally, the book ends
with the three-word sentence “Here I
am” — between hard covers, that is.
But mostly now Roth leads the qui-
et life of an Upper West Side retiree.
(His house in Connecticut, where he
used to seclude himself for extended
bouts of writing, he now uses only in
the summer.) He sees friends, goes to
concerts, checks his email, watches
old movies on FilmStruck. Not long
ago he had a visit from David Simon,
the creator of “The Wire,” who is
making a six-part mini-series of “The
Plot Against America,” and after-
ward he said he was sure his novel
was in good hands. Roth’s health is
good, though he has had several
surgeries for a recurring back prob- Philip Roth at home in New York City in January 2018.
lem, and he seems cheerful and con-
tented. He’s thoughtful but still, when
he wants to be, very funny.
I have interviewed Roth on several occa-
sions over the years, and last month I
asked if we could talk again. Like a lot of his
readers, I wondered what the author of
“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Commu-
nist” and “The Plot Against America”
made of this strange period we are living in
now. And I was curious about how he spent
his time. Sudoku? Daytime TV? He agreed
to be interviewed but only if it could be
done via email. He needed to take some
time, he said, and think about what he
wanted to say.
C.M. In a few months you’ll turn 85. Do
you feel like an elder? What has growing old
been like?
P.R. Yes, in just a matter of months I’ll de-
part old age to enter deep old age — easing
CHARLES MCGRATH, a former editor of the Book
Review, is a contributing writer for The
Times. He is the editor of a Library of Amer-
ica collection of John O’Hara stories.
16 S U NDAY , JA N UA RY 21, 2 018
ever deeper daily into the redoubtable Valley
of the Shadow. Right now it is astonishing to
find myself still here at the end of each day.
Getting into bed at night I smile and think, “I
lived another day.” And then it’s astonishing
again to awaken eight hours later and to see
that it is morning of the next day and that I
continue to be here. “I survived another
night,” which thought causes me to smile
once more. I go to sleep smiling and I wake
up smiling. I’m very pleased that I’m still
alive. Moreover, when this happens, as it has,
week after week and month after month
since I began drawing Social Security, it
produces the illusion that this thing is just
never going to end, though of course I know
that it can stop on a dime. It’s something like
playing a game, day in and day out, a high-
stakes game that for now, even against the
odds, I just keep winning. We will see how
long my luck holds out.
C.M. Now that you’ve retired as a nov-
elist, do you ever miss writing, or think
about un-retiring?
P.R. No, I don’t. That’s because the condi-
tions that prompted me to stop writing fic-
tion seven years ago haven’t changed. As I
say in “Why Write?,” by 2010 I had “a
strong suspicion that I’d done my best
work and anything more would be inferior.
I was by this time no longer in possession
of the mental vitality or the verbal energy
or the physical fitness needed to mount
and sustain a large creative attack of any
duration on a complex structure as de-
manding as a novel.... Every talent has its
terms — its nature, its scope, its force; also
its term, a tenure, a life span.... Not every-
one can be fruitful forever.”
C.M. Looking back, how do you recall
your 50-plus years as a writer?
P.R. Exhilaration and groaning. Frustra-
tion and freedom. Inspiration and uncer-
tainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing
forth and muddling through. The day-by-
day repertoire of oscillating dualities that
any talent withstands — and tremendous
solitude, too. And the silence: 50 years in a
room silent as the bottom of a pool, eking
out, when all went well, my minimum daily
allowance of usable prose.
C.M. In “Why Write?” you reprint your
famous essay “Writing American Fiction,”
which argues that American reality is so
crazy that it almost outstrips the writer’s
imagination. It was 1960 when you said
that. What about now? Did you ever foresee
an America like the one we live in today?
P.R. No one I know of has foreseen an
America like the one we live in today. No
one (except perhaps the acidic H. L.
Mencken, who famously described Ameri-
can democracy as “the worship of jackals
by jackasses”) could have imagined that
the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the
U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters,
would appear not, say, in the terrifying
guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the
ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte
figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I
was in 1960 to think that I was an American
living in preposterous times! How quaint!
But then what could I know in 1960 of 1963
or 1968 or 1974 or 2001 or 2016?
C.M. Your 2004 novel, “The Plot Against
America,” seems eerily prescient today.
When that novel came out, some people saw
it as a commentary on the Bush administra-
tion, but there were nowhere near as many
parallels then as there seem to be now.
P.R. However prescient “The Plot
Against America” might seem to you, there
is surely one enormous difference between
the political circumstances I invent there
for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calami-
ty that dismays us so today. It’s the differ-
ence in stature between a President Lind-
bergh and a President Trump. Charles
Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have
been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite
and a white supremacist sympathetic to
Fascism, but he was also — because of the
extraordinary feat of his solo trans-
Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an
authentic American hero 13 years be-
fore I have him winning the presi-
dency. Lindbergh, historically, was
the courageous young pilot who in
1927, for the first time, flew nonstop
across the Atlantic, from Long Island
to Paris. He did it in 33.5 hours in a
single-seat, single-engine mono-
plane, thus making him a kind of
20th-century Leif Ericson, an aero-
nautical Magellan, one of the earliest
beacons of the age of aviation.
Trump, by comparison, is a massive
fraud, the evil sum of his deficien-
cies, devoid of everything but the
hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.
C.M. One of your recurrent themes
has been male sexual desire —
thwarted desire, as often as not —
and its many manifestations. What
do you make of the moment we seem
to be in now, with so many women
coming forth and accusing so many
highly visible men of sexual har-
assment and abuse?
P.R. I am, as you indicate, no
stranger as a novelist to the erotic
furies. Men enveloped by sexual tempta-
tion is one of the aspects of men’s lives that
I’ve written about in some of my books.
Men responsive to the insistent call of sex-
ual pleasure, beset by shameful desires
and the undauntedness of obsessive lusts,
beguiled even by the lure of the taboo —
over the decades, I have imagined a small
coterie of unsettled men possessed by just
such inflammatory forces they must nego-
tiate and contend with. I’ve tried to be un-
compromising in depicting these men each
as he is, each as he behaves, aroused, stim-
ulated, hungry in the grip of carnal fervor
and facing the array of psychological and
ethical quandaries the exigencies of desire
present. I haven’t shunned the hard facts
in these fictions of why and how and when
tumescent men do what they do, even
when these have not been in harmony with
the portrayal that a masculine public-rela-
tions campaign — if there were such a
thing — might prefer. I’ve stepped not just
inside the male head but into the reality of
those urges whose obstinate pressure by
PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
0
its persistence can menace one’s rational-
ity, urges sometimes so intense they may
even be experienced as a form of lunacy.
Consequently, none of the more extreme
conduct I have been reading about in the
newspapers lately has astonished me.
C.M. Before you were retired, you were fa-
mous for putting in long, long days. Now
that you’ve stopped writing, what do you do
with all that free time?
P.R. I read — strangely or not so strange-
ly, very little fiction. I spent my whole
working life reading fiction, teaching fic-
tion, studying fiction and writing fiction. I
thought of little else until about seven
years ago. Since then I’ve spent a good
part of each day reading history, mainly
American history but also modern Euro-
pean history. Reading has taken the place
of writing, and constitutes the major part,
the stimulus, of my thinking life.
C.M. What have you been reading lately?
P.R. I seem to have veered off course
A Survivor’s Struggle
The heroine of Madeleine Thien’s new novel confronts the demons of her past in communist-occupied Cambodia.
By LIGAYA MISHAN
BORDERS ARE POROUS in Madeleine
Thien’s novel “Dogs at the Perimeter,” both
in the world and in the mind. The narrator
is a neurological researcher whose care-
fully compartmentalized memories of her
childhood in Cambodia living under the
DOGS AT THE PERIMETER
By Madeleine Thien
253 pp. W.W. Norton. Paper, $15.95.
Khmer Rouge — the communist guerrillas
whose reign of terror in the 1970s left an es-
timated 1.7 million dead — start to leak into
her present day after a colleague disap-
pears in search of a brother lost, like hers,
in her home country. Timelines converge;
suddenly nothing separates the woman in
a lab in Montreal, sharing with her son the
beauty of a neuron “lithe as a starburst,”
from the 8-year-old girl gazing up at a
swarm of airplanes over Phnom Penh as
the guerrillas close in.
To navigate the slippage in her mind, she
turns to case studies of brain damage — a
patient who “ceases to recognize faces, in-
LIGAYA MISHANhas written for The New York
Review of Books and The New Yorker, and is
the Hungry City columnist for The Times.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BABAK SALARI
lately and read a heterogeneous collection
of books. I’ve read three books by Ta-Ne-
hisi Coates, the most telling from a literary
point of view, “The Beautiful Struggle,” his
memoir of the boyhood challenge from his
father. From reading Coates I learned
about Nell Irvin Painter’s provocatively ti-
tled compendium “The History of White
People.” Painter sent me back to American
history, to Edmund Morgan’s “American
Slavery, American Freedom,” a big schol-
arly history of what Morgan calls “the mar-
riage of slavery and freedom” as it existed
in early Virginia. Reading Morgan led me
circuitously to reading the essays of Teju
Cole, though not before my making a major
swerve by reading Stephen Greenblatt’s
“The Swerve,” about the circumstances of
the 15th-century discovery of the manu-
script of Lucretius’ subversive “On the Na-
ture of Things.” This led to my tackling
some of Lucretius’ long poem, written
sometime in the first century B.C.E., in a
prose translation by A. E. Stallings. From
there I went on to read Greenblatt’s book
cluding her own,” and a sufferer of aso-
matognosia, unable to detect the physical
boundaries of her body while “her
thoughts continued, anchored to nothing.”
She recalls how, as a child in Phnom Penh,
she gave all her dolls the same name:
Vesna, after Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight
attendant who survived a jetliner explo-
sion in 1972, falling 33,000 feet over what
was then Czechoslovakia . She even tapes
a picture of Vesna — “like a drop of rain or a
very tiny bird, someone whom the gods
had overlooked” — to her wall when she ar-
rives in Canada as a refugee, “ashamed
that I had lived.”
Her own name, the name her parents gave
her, is never revealed. Early on, a Khmer
Rouge soldier urges her to “become someone
else” and calls her Mei, an act of both erasure
and protection, freeing her from the crimes of
her educated parents. (“Families are a dis-
ease of the past,” says the Angkar, the Khmer
Rouge leadership.) Later, in a foster home in
Canada, she is reborn again as Janie. Both
names hover over her awkwardly, like
aliases. Once, “in the temple schools, a new
name had been a rite of passage, a bridge
from one shore of life to the next,” she muses.
Now, “names were empty syllables, signify-
ing nothing, lost as easily as a suit of clothes,
a brother or a sister, an entire world.”
The revision of history and the disman-
tling of the self under communism were
central themes in Thien’s 2016 novel of the
about “how Shakespeare became Shake-
speare,” “Will in the World.” How in the
midst of all this I came to read and enjoy
Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born
to Run,” I can’t explain other than to say
that part of the pleasure of now having so
much time at my disposal to read whatever
comes my way invites unpremeditated
surprises.
Pre-publication copies of books arrive
regularly in the mail, and that’s how I dis-
covered Steven Zipperstein’s “Pogrom: Ki-
shinev and the Tilt of History.” Zipperstein
pinpoints the moment at the start of the
20th century when the Jewish predica-
ment in Europe turned deadly in a way that
foretold the end of everything. “Pogrom”
led me to find a recent book of interpretive
history, Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Cen-
tury,” which argues that “the Modern Age
is the Jewish Age, and the 20th century, in
particular, is the Jewish Century.” I read
Isaiah Berlin’s “Personal Impressions,” his
essay-portraits of the cast of influential
20th-century figures he’d known or ob-
Cultural Revolution, “Do Not Say We Have
Nothing,” which was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize. “Dogs at the Pe-
rimeter,” first published in Canada in 2011,
reads like a seed of the later novel:
contrapuntal and elegiac in tone,
with a white heat beneath.
Where “Do Not Say We Have
Nothing” is symphonic and
expansive, “Dogs at the Pe-
rimeter” turns inward, to
the workings of a mind in
flight from itself.
Such are Thien’s gifts that
she can write lyrically about
horror without stripping it of
force. When bombs fall on Phnom Madeleine Thien
Penh, Janie registers her brother’s
screaming as “a wide emptiness, a pressure
in the air blinding me, and in the darkness I
hear a strange, familiar ticking — insects, the
typewriter, a clock counting time.” The hol-
lowed-out bodies of refugees evoke “an ex-
humed cemetery.” A dying friend appears in-
substantial, “as if the sea inside her had evap-
orated.”
A curious fact about the Khmer Rouge: Al-
though they condemned anyone who could
read or write — eyeglasses were evidence
enough — they kept thousands of pages of
files, and every citizen was required to write
a record of his or her life, naming and impli-
cating family and friends. In the end, these
memoirs were used as confessions, of crimes
served. There is a cameo of Virginia Woolf
in all her terrifying genius and there are
especially gripping pages about the initial
evening meeting in badly bombarded Len-
ingrad in 1945 with the magnificent Rus-
sian poet Anna Akhmatova, when she was
in her 50s, isolated, lonely, despised and
persecuted by the Soviet regime. Berlin
writes, “Leningrad after the war was for
her nothing but a vast cemetery, the grave-
yard of her friends. . . . The account of the
unrelieved tragedy of her life went far be-
yond anything which anyone had ever de-
scribed to me in spoken words.” They
spoke until 3 or 4 in the morning. The
scene is as moving as anything in Tolstoy.
Just in the past week, I read books by
two friends, Edna O’Brien’s wise little bi-
ography of James Joyce and an engag-
ingly eccentric autobiography, “Confes-
sions of an Old Jewish Painter,” by one of
my dearest dead friends, the great Ameri-
can artist R. B. Kitaj. I have many dear
dead friends. A number were novelists. I
miss finding their new books in the mail. 0
real or imagined. (“If you act correctly, you
are the enemy, if you act incorrectly, you are
the enemy,” an officer says.) Janie’s little
brother, anointed at age 9 as an interrogator,
listens as a tortured prisoner admits
to being a spy and describes an
America he’s never seen, where
people “lived on airplanes or
underground, leaving the
surface of the country empty
as a sheet.” The lesson still
haunts Janie: “that the story
of one’s own life could not be
trusted, that it could destroy
you and all the people you
loved.”
Four decades later, she must
find another way to live with the
past, to make room for her ghosts. Midway
through the novel, she turns to the case of
Lev Zasetsky, a Russian soldier who sur-
vived a shot to the head during the World
War II Battle of Smolensk. Despite losing
the ability to process language, he managed
to keep a diary that eventually surpassed
3,000 pages. “Each sentence required that
he hunt through the disintegrated rooms of
his memory, fumble blindly for words, the
simplest words, hoarding them like gold
dust until he had enough to construct a sen-
tence,” Thien writes. Zasetsky’s doctor saw
the diary as a way for his patient to not sim-
ply remember his life, but “make a whole-
ness of it.” For Janie, the hope is the same. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17
0
Children’s Books / Maria’s Picks
Know a child who just started to read independently? These old
and new favorites are short, but they pack a memorable punch.
MY FAVORITE BOOKS for fledgling readers
don’t have ranked letters or numbers or
other indicators of “levels” on the covers.
They’re not part of megaseries like The
Magic Treehouse or Junie B. Jones (useful
as those books can be to get readers go-
ing). What they have in common is gor-
geous art and extremely simple but highly
literary writing — the kind of writing that
lets a young reader know what an inner life
can sound like. And while they couldn’t re-
ally be called full-fledged chapter books,
they are often cleverly divided into a few
very short chapters, as a sort of secret
handshake. These books tell new readers
they have fully embarked on the journey to
independent reading.
All of these, I should add, are also fantas-
tic to read aloud like a picture book to a
child who is not reading alone yet.
A FRIEND FOR DRAGON Written and illustrat-
ed by Dav Pilkey Scholastic/Orchard, $5.99
Dragon is blue, round, and not at all fero-
cious — in fact, he’s kind and quite dim,
which makes you want to protect him from
all the trouble that finds him. What he
needs most is something harder than it
might seem to get hold of: a friend. First
published in the 1990s, the Dragon books —
there are five in total — are sweet, silly and
profound all at once, with more of an edge
than you usually find in this kind of story.
The villain of the first is downright biblical:
a merciless snake who tricks poor Dragon
into thinking an apple is the friend he’s
been longing for. Pilkey is the big-hearted
genius behind Captain Underpants, and
his watercolor art for this more tender se-
ries has regular dollops of the emotional
depth he can find in even the goofiest plot
turn.
TALES FOR THE PERFECT CHILD Written by
Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Sergio
Ruzzier
FABLES YOU SHOULDN’T PAY ANY ATTENTION TO
By Florence Parry Heide and Sylvia Worth
Van Clief, illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier
Atheneum, $16.99
These ultrashort, ultrawitty tales of
naughty children and badly behaving ani-
mals won a cult following when they first
appeared in the 1980s, but went out of print.
Now they’ve been reissued with wily new
art by Sergio Ruzzier that perfectly suits
their offbeat sensibility. We meet Harriet, a
champion whiner. “She practiced and prac-
ticed, and so of course she got better at it.
Practice makes perfect.” And there’s
Chester, a lazy turkey, who won’t run when
the farmer calls. “The next morning, which
MARIA RUSSO is the Book Review’s children’s
books editor.
18 S U N DAY , JAN UA RY 21, 2 018
was Thanksgiving morning, Chester
looked around the empty barn. It pays to be
lazy, thought Chester.” Heide, who died in
2011, wrote more than 100 children’s books,
including the classic Treehorn Trilogy, il-
lustrated by Edward Gorey, and it’s great
to see her dark, winking take on the eternal
conflicts between children and parents
sally forth for a new generation.
ANNA HIBISCUS Written by Atinuke, illustrat-
ed by Lauren Tobias Kane/Miller, $5.99
These days more American picture
books feature racially diverse children
than ever and international picture books
are increasingly published here, but it’s
still hard to find early chapter books with
children who are black, and children living
in other parts of the world. This joyful se-
ries about a little African girl named Anna
Hibiscus is a revelation — the books ring
with laughter even as they stab (deli-
cately) at your heart. In sprightly lan-
guage and adorable line drawings, they tell
the story of a young girl whose eyes are
wide open to the beauty and the struggles
of the place where she lives. A sense of
strong community and mutual caring per-
meates throughout, with Anna both enjoy-
ing the routines of everyday life at her fam-
ily’s comfortable compound and, often,
confronting and trying to help children
who have much less than she does. At-
inuke, who lived in Nigeria as a child but is
now based in Britain, works as a tradi-
tional oral storyteller, and that’s not sur-
prising: She keeps Anna’s stories moving
while seeding them with helpful repetition
and bits of warm humor.
LITTLE TIM AND THE BRAVE SEA CAPTAIN Writ-
ten and illustrated by Edward Ardizzone-
Frances Lincoln, $18.99
Little Tim may be the original free-range
child. These books were originally pub-
lished in the 1930s, and they have aged
well. Four have been reissued in handsome
volumes, with classic pen-and-ink and wa-
tercolor art and big, old-fashioned letters
telling the tale of Little Tim, who can’t be
more than 6 years old, but “wanted to be a
sailor.” He stows away on a steamer and
kicks off a life at sea, with occasional trips
back to see his relieved (but understand-
ing) parents. There’s adventure and dan-
ger, of course — in the first book, every-
thing from seasickness to a harrowing
storm that almost dooms Tim and the Cap-
tain — but it’s all told in direct, clear lan-
guage. The tone is just a tad mock-serious,
but eminently respectful of the childhood
wish for greater agency. If you’re new to
Ardizzone’s art, you’re in for a treat — his
dazzling pen lines and watercolor brush
strokes dance across the page, creating
stirring vistas of the sea alongside witty,
humane portraits of Tim and the people he
encounters.
BARKUS By Patricia MacLachlan Chronicle,
$14.99
MacLachlan, the author of the beloved
novel “Sarah, Plain and Tall” and many
other books for children of all ages, makes
her early chapter book debut in this first of
a promised new series. The charm is infec-
tious, with MacLachlan’s almost hypnoti-
cally appealing language assembling a se-
ries of surprises for the plucky little red-
haired narrator. First, her favorite uncle
leaves a superfun dog, who names himself
Barkus, at her house. He doesn’t talk, but
he doesn’t need to: In successive stories he
makes many exciting things happen, start-
ing with what transpires when he comes to
school with her — all the way to the ap-
pearance in the little girl’s household of,
yes, a new kitten too. Marc Boutavant’s
whimsical, graphically interesting art
makes Barkus’s adventures seem even
more like some kind of candy-colored de-
light a child would be thrilled to pull out of
her pocket.
And of course . . .
FROG AND TOAD STORYBOOK TREASURY Writ-
ten and illustrated by Arnold Lobel Harper-
Collins, $11.99
The books in Lobel’s series from the
1970s are something like modern classics,
with their warm depiction of the devoted
bond between worrywart Toad and mag-
nanimous Frog, who might look somewhat
similar but are polar opposites in tempera-
ment. While the friends approach life very
differently and have the occasional con-
tretemps, together they make a world of
their own, a kind of community of two. The
language is simple, and there are no con-
tractions, which no doubt made the Frog
and Toad books good candidates for the “I
Can Read” series treatment they’ve lately
been given, with the numbers on the cover
telling parents their level. But I fear those
numbers can also signal to kids that these
are pressurized, teacher-mandated
schoolwork, books that are out to measure
them and rank them against their peers. If
you can find copies of Frog and Toad with-
out that business on them, I recommend
those — with books as deep and rewarding
as these, the numbers are just buzzkill.
(Yes, they can indeed read — make them
want to!)
GEORGE AND MARTHA Written and illustrated
by James Marshall Houghton Mifflin Har-
court, $6.00
These James Marshall books about two
hippo friends may just be the ne plus ultra
of the entire genre of Very Short Chapter
Books. Many people consider these to be
picture books, and they are rewarding to
read aloud to any age child, but I think a
fledgling reader will especially appreciate
spending time with them. Each volume has
four or five self-contained stories — vi-
gnettes, really — with few words, all easy
to follow. The humor is strange and sneaky
— the books kick off with George pouring
split pea soup, which he hates but which
Martha has made, into his shoe. There is
something wonderfully cranky and realis-
tic about the entire premise: two friends
who try so hard to be nice to each other,
and have a hard time figuring out how to do
that. 0
PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICIA WALL/THE NEW YORK TIMES
0

BestSellers
For the complete best-seller lists, visit
nytimes.com/best-sellers

COMBINED PRINT AND E-BOOK BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF DECEMBER 31-JANUARY 6

THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Fiction WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Nonfiction WEEKS
ON LIST

1 THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, by A. J. Finn. (Morrow) A recluse who drinks heavily and
takes prescription drugs may have witnessed a crime across from her Harlem townhouse.
1
1 FIRE AND FURY, by Michael Wolff. (Holt) A journalist offers an inside account of the
first year of the Trump White House.
1

2 13 END GAME, by David Baldacci. (Grand Central) Jessica Reel and Will Robie fight a
dangerous adversary in Colorado.
8
2 1 ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Norton) A
straightforward, easy-to-understand introduction to the laws that govern the universe.
35

3 3 ORIGIN, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday) A symbology professor goes on a perilous quest

with a beautiful museum director.
14
3 THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD, by Douglas Preston. (Grand Central) A
frightening search for a lost civilization in the Honduran rain forest.
11

4 UNBOUND, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam) The 44th book in the Stone Barrington series. 1
4 2 LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster) A biography of the
Italian Renaissance polymath which connects his work in various disciplines.
12

5 ROBICHEAUX, by James Lee Burke. (Simon & Schuster) A bereaved detective 1

confronts his past and works to clear his name when he becomes a suspect during an
investigation into the murder of the man who killed his wife.
5 3 GRANT, by Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press) A biography of the Union general of the Civil
War and two-term president of the United States.
13

6 12 LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin Press) An artist upends a quiet
town outside Cleveland.
11
6 HOME SWEET MURDER, by James Patterson. (Grand Central) A true-crime story
involving a lawyer, his wife and a man claiming to be a Securities and Exchange
1

Commission agent.
7 8 THE SUN AND HER FLOWERS, by Rupi Kaur. (Andrews McMeel) A new collection of 14
poetry from the author of “Milk and Honey.”
7 5 THE LAST BLACK UNICORN, by Tiffany Haddish. (Gallery) The comedian recounts
growing up in South Central Los Angeles, exacting revenge on an ex-boyfriend and
5

8 7 THE ROOSTER BAR, by John Grisham. (Doubleday) Three students at a sleazy for-profit
law school hope to expose the student-loan banker who runs it.
11 finding success after a period of homelessness.

8 6 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, by David Grann. (Doubleday) The story of a murder 30

9 10 MILK AND HONEY, by Rupi Kaur. (Andrews McMeel) Poetic approaches to surviving
adversity and loss.
47 spree in 1920s Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians, whose lands contained oil.

9 WE’RE GOING TO NEED MORE WINE, by Gabrielle Union. (Dey St.) Essays by the 4

10 6 DARKER, by E. L. James. (Vintage) Christian Grey’s tormented and difficult pursuit of

Anastasia Steele is told from his perspective.
6 actress and activist on love, step-parenting and living beyond personal tragedy.

10 12 HORSE SOLDIERS, by Doug Stanton. (Scribner) Special Forces operatives fought the 2

11 PROMISE NOT TO TELL, by Jayne Ann Krentz. (Berkley) A Seattle gallery owner and a
private investigator, both of whom spent time in a cult during childhood, team up when
1 Taliban on horseback shortly after Sept. 11. The basis of the movie “12 Strong.”

an artist takes her own life.

11 15 HILLBILLY ELEGY, by J. D. Vance. (HarperCollins) A Yale Law School graduate looks at
the struggles of the white working class through the story of his own childhood.
70

12 READY PLAYER ONE, by Ernest Cline. (Broadway) It’s 2044, life on a resource- 7
depleted Earth has grown increasingly grim, and the key to a vast fortune is hidden in a
virtual-reality world.
12 7 PROMISE ME, DAD, by Joe Biden. (Flatiron Books) The former vice president recalls
his toughest year in office, as his son battled brain cancer.
8

13 SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner) A 13-year-old boy comes of age
in Mississippi while his black mother takes him and his toddler sister to pick up their
1
13 11 LET TRUMP BE TRUMP, by Corey R. Lewandowski and David N. Bossie. (Center Street)
Insider accounts of the Republican presidential campaign and its outcome by two of its
5

white father, who is getting released from the state penitentiary. advisers.

14 11 THE MIDNIGHT LINE, by Lee Child. (Delacorte) Jack Reacher tracks down the owner of
a pawned West Point class ring and stumbles upon a large criminal enterprise.
9
14 MURDER, INTERRUPTED, by James Patterson. (Grand Central) The real-life story of
the fight between two men after one botches the murder of the other’s wife.
1

15 BEFORE WE WERE YOURS, by Lisa Wingate. (Ballantine) A South Carolina lawyer

learns about the questionable practices of a Tennessee orphanage.
15
15 8 ANDREW JACKSON AND THE MIRACLE OF NEW ORLEANS, by Brian Kilmeade and
Don Yaeger. (Sentinel) Major General Jackson takes on the British in Louisiana.
11

A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. ONLINE: E-BOOKS AND EXPANDED RANKINGS : For more lists, more titles, more rankings and a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/best-sellers.

Editors’ Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review

..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

CRAEFT: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Mean- THE WORLD GOES ON, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Translated by John LATE ESSAYS: 2006-2017, by J. M. Coetzee. (Viking,
ing of Traditional Crafts, by Alexander Langlands. Batki, Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes. (New Directions, $27.95.) In $28.) In his own work, the Nobel Prize-winning author
(Norton, $26.95.) Langlands is a sort of method ar- his marvelous new book, Krasznahorkai’s characters wander the may reinvent the rules of fiction, but his literary
chaeologist, unearthing the various ways that humans globe in search of meaning — and find none. Still, a playful irony criticism hews to more traditional formulas, enriched
used their hands for thousands of years and taking it undercuts all the anguish. with fascinating biographies of writers and brilliant
upon himself to do things like cutting hay, building a psychologizing of their characters.
VIVIAN MAIER: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife,
drystone wall and making a skep for beekeeping.
by Pamela Bannos. (University of Chicago, $35.) Bannos LOVE, by Matt de la Pena. Illustrated by Loren Long. (Putnam,
THE RUINED HOUSE, by Ruby Namdar. (Harper, $29.99.) An award- tracks the legacy of a remarkable photographer who $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) Everything that can be called love — from
winning novelist in Hebrew, Namdar likes to infuse the ancient remained utterly unknown during her lifetime. Maier shared joy to comfort in the darkness — is gathered in the pages
and biblical into our contemporary world, creating a story that worked for years as a nanny, yet her aesthetic ranks of this reassuring, refreshingly honest picture book.
brims with blood and incense. with the best of 20th-century street photography.
HERE WE ARE: Notes for Living on Planet Earth, written and
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: Edward Lansdale and the American THE BUGHOUSE: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra illustrated by Oliver Jeffers. (Philomel, $19.99; ages 4 to 8.) Jeffers
Tragedy in Vietnam, by Max Boot. (Liveright, $35.) As an intelli- Pound, by Daniel Swift. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Perhaps no addresses his young son in this effervescent picture book, an
gence operative, Lansdale personified the view that the key to other poet presents more forcefully than Pound the need to explanation of our wondrous planet and a call to kindness.
victory in Vietnam lay in winning the hearts and minds of the separate the life from the work — and the impossibility of doing
people. Boot argues that “his approach, successful or not, would so. Swift seeks insights into the poet through his years at the The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the
have been more humane and less costly.” mental institution where he was confined. web: nytimes.com/books

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 19

0

Inside the List PRINT | HARDCOVER BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF DECEMBER 31-JANUARY 6
G REG ORY COWL E S

....................................................
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Fiction WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Nonfiction WEEKS
ON LIST

The Outsider: Presidential endorse-

ments can help writers bigly. President
1 THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, by A. J. Finn. (Morrow) A
recluse who drinks heavily and takes prescription drugs may
1
1 FIRE AND FURY, by Michael Wolff. (Holt) A journalist
offers an inside account of the first year of the Trump
1

Kennedy declared his love of the James
Bond spy series, and brought Ian Flem-
ing to this country’s attention. President 2 1
have witnessed a crime across from her Harlem townhouse. White House.
ORIGIN, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday) A symbology professor
goes on a perilous quest with a beautiful museum director.
14
2 3 ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, by Neil
deGrasse Tyson. (Norton) A straightforward, easy-to-
36

Reagan enthused about understand introduction to the universe.

the first novel to be
published by the Naval
3 2 THE ROOSTER BAR, by John Grisham. (Doubleday) Three 11
students at a sleazy for-profit law school hope to expose
the student-loan banker who runs it.
3 1 LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon &
Schuster) A biography of the Italian Renaissance polymath
12

Institute Press — an which connects his work in various disciplines.

obscure submarine
4 5 LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin 16
technothriller called
“The Hunt for Red
Press) An artist upends a quiet town outside Cleveland. 4 2 GRANT, by Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press) A biography of
the Union general of the Civil War and two-term president
13

‘He is not
October” — and turned 5 15 SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner) A
13-year-old boy comes of age in Mississippi while his black
3 of the United States.

Tom Clancy into a star.

going to suc- It’s less usual for a
mother takes him and his toddler sister to pick up their white
father, who is getting released from the state penitentiary.
5 7 PROMISE ME, DAD, by Joe Biden. (Flatiron Books) The
former vice president recalls his toughest year in office.
8

ceed. This is presidential cease-and-

worse than desist letter to propel a 6 ROBICHEAUX, by James Lee Burke. (Simon & Schuster) A
bereaved detective confronts his past and works to clear his
1
6 8 LET TRUMP BE TRUMP, by Corey R. Lewandowski and
David N. Bossie. (Center Street) Insider accounts of the
5

everybody book’s sales. But then, name when he becomes a suspect during an investigation Republican presidential campaign and its outcome by two
thought.’ part of the point of into the murder of the man who killed his wife. of its advisers. (†)
Michael Wolff’s “Fire
and Fury” (new at No. 1 in hardcover 7 UNBOUND, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam) The 44th book in
the Stone Barrington series.
1
7 4 ANDREW JACKSON AND THE MIRACLE OF NEW
ORLEANS, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger. (Sentinel)
11

nonfiction) is that nothing about Presi-
dent Trump is usual. Wolff’s behind-the-
scenes look at Trump’s first year in office
Major General Jackson takes on the British in Louisiana.
8 3 THE PEOPLE VS. ALEX CROSS, by James Patterson. 7
(Little, Brown) Detective Cross takes on a case even
though he has been suspended from the department and
8 11 THE LAST BLACK UNICORN, by Tiffany Haddish. (Gallery)
The comedian recounts growing up in South Central Los
4

draws heavily on interviews with aides
and staffers, and the picture it paints is
as grim as anything by Hieronymus
Bosch. “Nothing contributed to the chaos
9 4
taken to federal court to stand trial on murder charges. Angeles and finding success after a period of homelessness.
THE MIDNIGHT LINE, by Lee Child. (Delacorte) Jack
Reacher tracks down the owner of a pawned West Point
9
9 10 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, by David Grann.
(Doubleday) The story of a murder spree in 1920s
29

and dysfunction of the White House as
much as Trump’s own behavior,” Wolff
writes in a passage claiming that the 10
class ring and stumbles upon a large criminal enterprise. Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians.
13 BEFORE WE WERE YOURS, by Lisa Wingate. (Ballantine)
A South Carolina lawyer learns about the questionable
16
10 14 HILLBILLY ELEGY, by J. D. Vance. (HarperCollins) A Yale Law
School graduate examines white working class struggles.
71

president, afraid of poisoning, won’t let practices of a Tennessee orphanage.

housekeepers touch his toothbrush and 11 6 KILLING ENGLAND, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. 16

barks at them even for tidying up: “If my
shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it
on the floor.” In Wolff’s telling, his subject
11 7 YEAR ONE, by Nora Roberts. (St. Martin’s) When a
pandemic strikes and the world spins into chaos, several
5 (Holt) Major events and battles during the Revolutionary
War are told from several perspectives.
travelers head west to find a new life.
12 THE DANGEROUS CASE OF DONALD TRUMP, edited by 5

— used to the home comforts of Trump
Tower — finds the White House “vexing
and even a little scary.”
Vilifying the commander in chief is
itself a proud tradition on the lists (Di-
nesh D’Souza, take a bow), and Wolff’s
scorching portrayal would probably have
12 6 ARTEMIS, by Andy Weir. (Crown) A small-time smuggler
living in a lunar colony schemes to pay off an old debt by
8 Bandy X. Lee. (Thomas Dunne) 27 psychiatrists and mental
health experts give their assessments of the president.
pulling off a challenging heist.
13* 9 BOBBY KENNEDY, by Chris Matthews. (Simon & Schuster) 10
13 A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, by Amor Towles. (Viking) A
Russian count undergoes 30 years of house arrest.
47 The New York senator’s journey from his formative years to
his tragic run for president.
14 8 END GAME, by David Baldacci. (Grand Central) Jessica Reel
and Will Robie fight a dangerous adversary in Colorado.
8
14 WOMEN & POWER, by Mary Beard. (Liveright) A look at
the roots of misogyny and its manifestations today.
1

done well even had Trump not threatened

an injunction. For his part, though, Wolff 15 THE POWER, by Naomi Alderman. (Little, Brown) Young
women around the world suddenly have the ability to
1
15 WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR, by Paul Kalanithi.
(Random House) A memoir by a physician who received a
67

maintains that he set out with no precon- generate harmful electric shocks. diagnosis of Stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36.
ceptions. “I would have been delighted to An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.
write a contrarian account here: ‘Donald
Trump, this unexpected president, is
actually going to succeed,’” he told “Meet
the Press” this month. “That is not the
Paperback Row / BY JOUMANA KHATIB

story. He is not going to succeed. This is

worse than everybody thought.”
The Insider: “The Woman in the Win-
dow,” A. J. Finn’s debut thriller about a
possible murder and an unreliable wit-
ness, enters the hardcover fiction list at
No. 1. This book arrives with sky-high
expectations courtesy of a reported seven-
figure advance, rave early reviews and —
maybe — the fact that Finn, in real life, is
Dan Mallory, vice president and executive
editor of William Morrow. (As it happens,
Morrow is also publishing the novel.) “I
knew that the market was ripe,” he told
The Houston Chronicle recently. “But you
have to have a story, and I wasn’t going to
publish a novel until I felt comfortable with
the narrative. . . . In the end, I think it was
a happy confluence of my instinct as a
writer and my expertise as a publisher.” 0
THE UNSETTLERS: In Search of the Good Life
in Today’s America, by Mark Sundeen. (River-
head, $16.) Sundeen profiles three families —
whom he calls pioneers, of a sort — who chose
to live off the grid. They share an important
commonality: “They had each taken on a
fundamental aspect of how the world is broken,
and had attempted, with all their might, to
address it — in ways that felt sustainable,
maybe even replicable.”
ENIGMA VARIATIONS, by André
Aciman. (Picador, $16.) Aciman
chronicles a lifetime of desire,
love and loss. The central
character, Paul, has an early
infatuation with a craftsman in
Italy that provides the story
line’s loose framework; the
plot skips ahead to find him years later, nearly
unrecognizable in an acrimonious relationship.
Aciman’s novel is a masterly portrayal of
arousal and the selves forged by passion.
LETTERS TO VÉRA, by Vladimir Nabokov. Edited
and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd.
(Vintage, $20.) For over 50 years, Véra was a
“song,” a muse, a protector for her husband.
(She was the one to save an early draft of
“Lolita” after Vladimir tried to destroy it.) “It
is the prose itself that provides the lasting
affirmation,” our reviewer, Martin Amis,
wrote, “and underlying it all the lavishness,
the freely offered gift, of his divine energy.”
LONG BLACK VEIL, by Jennifer Finney Boylan.
(Broadway, $16.) It’s August 1980, and a band
of college friends are looking for mischief in
an abandoned Philadelphia prison. But when
one of them goes missing, the night ends in
tragedy. Years later, the student’s body is
found, and one of the survivors risks exposing
two long-held secrets to protect the truth. As
our reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, put it: “To the
author, the prison is more than a setting, it’s
also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she
once led.”
PRINCE CHARLES: The Passions and Para-
doxes of an Improbable Life, by Sally Bedell
Smith. (Random House, $20.) A sympathetic
portrait of Charles comes down squarely in his
favor, particularly with regard to Diana. He
emerges as a thoughtful, intellectually driven
man in Bedell’s telling. The author, who has
written at length about the royal family, offers
a cleareyed view of the monarchy, its privilege
and its faltering morals.
ON TURPENTINE LANE, by
Elinor Lipman. (Mariner,
$14.99.) Faith Frankel is 32,
perhaps more than a little
bored, and has set down
roots in her Massachusetts
hometown. But mysterious
objects in her new bungalow draw her into the
neighborhood’s past. Lipman’s screwball
romance is full of delightfully weird characters,
from Faith’s neo-hippie fiancé to her father, an
amateur artist churning out Chagall copies.

20 S UN DAY , JA N UA RY 21, 2 018

0

CHILDREN’S BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF DECEMBER 31-JANUARY 6

THIS
WEEK Middle Grade Hardcover WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK Young Adult Hardcover WEEKS
ON LIST
There’s
a book
1 WONDER, by R. J. Palacio. (Knopf) A boy with a
facial deformity starts school. (Ages 8 to 12)
126
1 TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN, by John Green.
(Dutton) Aza and Daisy investigate a mystery with
13

a reward of $100,000. (Ages 14 to 17)

2 AUGGIE & ME, by R. J. Palacio. (Knopf) A 58

2 THE HATE U GIVE, by Angie Thomas. (Balzer & 45

for every
collection of three stories from the “Wonder”
series. (Ages 8 to 12) Bray) A 16-year-old girl sees a police officer kill
her friend. (Ages 14 and up)
3 LITTLE LEADERS, by Vashti Harrison. (Little, 4
Brown) The biographies of 40 African-American
3 THE CRUEL PRINCE, by Holly Black. (Little, 1

season.
women who made a difference. (Ages 8 to 12) Brown) Jude, a human raised by faeries, resolves
to become a member of the High Court of Faerie.
4 WISHTREE, by Katherine Applegate. Illustrated by
Charles Santoso. (Feiwel and Friends) An oak tree
15 (Ages 15 to 17)

on which people leave their wishes, is threatened

to be cut down. (Ages 8 to 12)
4 ONE OF US IS LYING, by Karen M. McManus.
(Delacorte) For five students, a detour into
28

detention ends in murder. (Ages 14 and up)

5 GRAVITY FALLS: JOURNAL 3, by Rob Renzetti 47
and Alex Hirsch. Illustrated by Andy Gonsalves and
Stephanie Ramirez. (Disney Press) More monsters
5 BATMAN: NIGHTWALKER, by Marie Lu. (Random
House) Bruce Wayne takes on a gang called the
1
Subscribe to
and mysteries. (Ages 8 to 12) Nightwalkers. (Ages 12 to 17)
The New York Times
6 WOMEN IN SCIENCE, by Rachel Ignotofsky.
(Ten Speed) Fifty women who have transformed
52
6 THE BOOK OF DUST: LA BELLE SAUVAGE, by
Philip Pullman. (Knopf) The first volume of a
12

science and technology. (Ages 8 to 12)
7 GOOD NIGHT STORIES FOR REBEL GIRLS, by Elena
Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. (Timbuktu Labs) The
lives of 100 influential women. (Ages 7 and up)
8 MINECRAFT: THE ISLAND, by Max Brooks. (Del
Rey) A lone castaway faces dangers in a strange
new world. (Ages 8 to 12)
9 THE MAGIC MISFITS, by Neil Patrick Harris.
(Little, Brown) Carter and a band of magicians
team up to take on B. B. Bosso’s crooked carnies.
(Ages 8 to 12)
10 THE DARK PROPHECY, by Rick Riordan. (Disney-
Hyperion) Lester, a.k.a. Apollo, summons the help
trilogy that starts before the beginning of “His Dark Book Review.
Materials.” (Ages 14 and up)
28
7 RENEGADES, by Marissa Meyer. (Feiwel and
Friends) The Renegades and the Anarchists clash
9 For readers as passionate about the written
for control of Gatlon City. (Ages 12 to 17) word as we are, The New York Times Book Review
23
sets the agenda each week on the most important
8 THIS IS WHERE IT ENDS, by Marieke Nijkamp.
(Sourcebooks Fire) An act of violence parsed from
66
and timely new books and ideas shaping our
four perspectives. (Ages 14 and up)
culture. Subscribers enjoy early access to reviews,
7
9 WONDER WOMAN: WARBRINGER, by Leigh
Bardugo. (Random House) Diana and Alia fight to
17
essays and recommendations from influential
save both of their worlds. (Ages 12 to 17) authors and critics, plus our unparalleled
best-seller lists. Join us as we discover the
33
10 WARCROSS, by Marie Lu. (Putnam) A New York
bounty hunter is hired to track down a hacker in
16

of demigods to restore an Oracle. (Ages 9 to 12) Tokyo. (Ages 12 to 17)

next great additions to your bookshelf.

THIS
WEEK Picture Books WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK Series WEEKS
ON LIST

1 HERE WE ARE, by Oliver Jeffers. (Philomel) A guide

for new arrivals to the planet Earth. (Ages 3 to 7)
8
1 DOG MAN, by Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) A dog’s
head is combined with a policeman’s body to
19

create this hybrid supercop hound. (Ages 7 to 9)

2 DRAGONS LOVE TACOS, by Adam Rubin. 202
Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. (Dial) What to serve
your dragon-guests. (Ages 3 to 5)
2 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, written and illustrated by
Jeff Kinney. (Amulet) The travails and challenges
460

of adolescence. (Ages 9 to 12)

3 SHE PERSISTED, by Chelsea Clinton. Illustrated 32
by Alexandra Boiger. (Philomel) Bringing to life 13
American women who changed the world. (Ages
3 HARRY POTTER, by J. K. Rowling. (Scholastic) A
wizard hones his conjuring skills in the service of
459

4 to 8) fighting evil. (Ages 10 and up)

4 ROSIE REVERE, ENGINEER, by Andrea Beaty.

Illustrated by David Roberts. (Abrams) A young
123
4 DORK DIARIES, by Rachel Renée Russell. (Simon
& Schuster) Nikki Maxwell navigates the halls of
233

inventor learns to fail better. (Ages 4 to 8) middle school. (Ages 9 to 13)

5 EVERYTHING IS MAMA, by Jimmy Fallon.

Illustrated by Miguel Ordóñez. (Feiwel and Friends)
13
5 WINGS OF FIRE, by Tui T. Sutherland. (Scholastic)
Only the five dragonets of destiny can unite the
24

To baby animals learning new words, Mama is seven warring dragon tribes. (Ages 9 to 12)
everything. (Ages 1 to 3)
6 CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, written and illustrated by 100

6 THE WONDERFUL THINGS YOU WILL BE,

by Emily Winfield Martin. (Random House) A
115 Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) Boys and their principal
fight evil. (Ages 7 to 10)
celebration of future possibilities. (Ages 3 to 7)
7 MISS PEREGRINE’S PECULIAR CHILDREN, by 96

7 AN ELEPHANT AND PIGGIE BIGGIE!, by Mo

Willems. (Hyperion/Disney) An anthology
3 Ransom Riggs. (Quirk/Penguin) Time travelers
try to save their beloved headmistress. (Ages 14
combines five of Gerald and Piggie’s adventures. and up)
(Ages 4 to 8)
8 MAGNUS CHASE AND THE GODS OF ASGARD, 14

8 AFTER THE FALL, by Dan Santat. (Roaring Brook)

Humpty Dumpty overcomes his fear of heights.
6 by Rick Riordan. (Disney-Hyperion) Magnus
Chase and his crew must overcome mythological
(Ages 4 to 8) challenges. (Ages 10 to 14)

9 DRAGONS LOVE TACOS 2, by Adam Rubin and

Daniel Salmieri. (Dial) Heading into the past for
18
9 THE BAD GUYS, by Aaron Blabey. (Scholastic)
Tough animals in suits take on some real villains.
2

the seed of a taco tree. (Ages 3 to 5) (Ages 7 to 10)

Subscribe now for $4 a week
10 ADA TWIST, SCIENTIST, by Andrea Beaty.
Illustrated by David Roberts. (Abrams) A girl
45
10 THE MAZE RUNNER, by James Dashner.
(Delacorte) Amnesiac teenagers endure a series
193
nytimes.com/bookreviewsub | 1-800-NYTIMES
emerges with a love of science. (Ages 5 to 7) of trials. (Ages 12 and up)

Picture book rankings include hardcover sales only. Series includes all print and e-book sales.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 21
0
The Shortlist / Foreign Fiction / By Alison McCulloch
THE TEMPTATION TO BE HAPPY
By Lorenzo Marone
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
247 pp. Oneworld. $26.99.
Cesare Annunziata doesn’t
like people very much, does-
n’t get along with his two
children, cheated on his wife
before she died, has lots of
regrets — and seems deter-
mined to gather a few more.
“I’m old,” he says (a little too frequently),
“and I do what I like.” Uh oh, here comes
another one of those colorful curmudg-
eons who drop pearls of senior wisdom
on their way to a new lease on life. Cesare
certainly fits the stereotype, but he’s
funny, interesting and grumpy enough to
stay on the winning side of the formula.
He lives alone in an apartment in Naples,
and along with two equally elderly neigh-
bors — a mad cat lady and a deaf, anx-
ious octogenarian “who listens even if he
can’t hear” — is drawn into the life of a
new tenant who they suspect is being
abused by her husband.
Amid their mostly useless plotting and
scheming to save her, Cesare takes stock
of his own existence (denying, of course,
that he would ever do such a thing) —
and stumbles toward a kind of peace with
his family, his friends and his dubious life
choices. “If I were to land on the planet
another 10 times, I’d still travel the same
journey and crash into the same rocks
along the way,” he insists. “Most of us are
like ants: We follow a trail that has al-
ready been laid for us.”
ALISON MCCULLOCH is a New Zealand journalist and writer.
22 S U NDAY , JA N UA RY 21, 2 018
THE TIME OF MUTE SWANS
By Ece Temelkuran
Translated by Kenneth Dakan
404 pp. Arcade. $24.99.
Street battles, kidnapping,
torture, fascists, communists,
rocky marriages and class
tensions — and most of it
seen through the eyes of two
8-year-old children living in
Ankara, in the summer be-
fore the 1980 coup in Turkey. Going by the
author’s dedication, to her two nephews
“who lived through the July 16, 2016, coup
attempt at the same age I lived through
the September 12, 1980, coup,” Temelku-
ran is drawing on her own experiences in
constructing this political bricolage.
Her guides are Ali, a “weakly boy”
from the poorer side of town, and Ayse,
the daughter of a troubled middle-class
couple. Despite their class differences,
the families are on the same side politi-
cally — the left — and the children be-
come friends after Ali’s mother takes a
cleaning job at Ayse’s house. As the poli-
tical unrest escalates, the children do
their own plotting, first to release butter-
flies inside the Turkish Parliament, then
to save the swans of Swan Park, which
are apparently being subjected to “an
Avian Deflighting Technique.” “Until the
swans are saved,” the children pledge to
each other, “and the butterflies get into
Parliament ... Even if we get really tired,
even if we get sleepy . . . we will resist . . .
I swear it! O.K., we’re done.”
It’s a perilous undertaking to tell such a
complicated story through the imagined
magical thinking of childhood, and aside
from some bright flashes of ingenuous
insight, the telling offers more confusion
than clarity.
SPRING GARDEN
By Tomoka Shibasaki
Translated by Polly Barton
154 pp. Pushkin. Paper, $13.95.
This gentle story about peo-
ple brought together by
places is like a good medita-
tion: quiet, surprising and
deeply satisfying. Taro, 30-
something, divorced and
mourning his father’s death,
lives alone in Tokyo, his unremarkable
life a lot like the lives of those around him
— his co-workers at the public relations
firm, his sister whom he hasn’t seen in
three years and his neighbors in the View
Palace Saeki III apartment block. The
building is soon to be demolished, and
one by one the residents are moving out,
all except for Nishi, an illustrator and
comic-strip artist, who recently moved in.
Taro finds out why after catching her
trying to climb over a wall near his apart-
ment: Nishi has fallen in love with the
house next door, a house she first discov-
ered in high school when a friend showed
her a book of photographs, called “Spring
Garden,” about a famous couple who
lived there. Shibasaki writes lovingly
about her characters. “The sky-blue
house” becomes one of them, standing
still in its emptiness, then coming back to
life when a new family moves in, as if
“time, which had stopped while the house
was empty, was now moving again.”
People come and go, buildings are put
up and pulled down, tenants move in and
out, all connected in a kind of dance that’s
impossible to put into words, except
somehow Shibasaki does it.
HAPPY DREAMS
By Jia Pingwa
Translated by Nicky Harman
490 pp. Amazon Crossing. Paper, $14.95.
The story of Happy Liu, a
Chinese peasant who moves
to the city and becomes a
trash picker, cut close to the
bone for Jia, for whom this
was not an easy book to
write. “Had it not been for
my having earned a place in college in
1972 as one of the ‘worker, peasant, sol-
dier’ cohort,” he writes in a lengthy au-
thor’s note, “I was sure I’d be a farmer
now, and a middle-aged trash picker too.”
What’s more, the character of Happy Liu
was inspired by a real-life person, a
schoolmate from the same village as Jia.
Despite the fictional Happy’s setbacks
— like selling a kidney so he could afford
a house for a future wife who went off
and married someone else — he lives up
to his name, pedaling his three-wheeler
through life with optimism and good
cheer. “I was born with upturned lips, so
I’m happy by nature,” he explains. The
death of his best friend, Wufu, bookends
the novel, which opens as Happy is being
apprehended trying to smuggle Wufu’s
corpse back to their home village of
Freshwind, then turns back to recount
the pair’s assorted quixotic adventures
on the streets of Xi’an.
The writing, in Harman’s translation, is
a delight — rich and lively — but while
Happy’s story is easy to read, it’s hard to
finish. “Life as a trash picker was boring,”
he observes at one point, and toward the
end of “Happy Dreams,” reading about it
gets a bit boring, too.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL
0

Sketchbook / The Power of Positive Thinking / By R.O. Blechman

R. O. BLECHMAN is an artist and animator, and the illustrator, most recently, of “GOD: 48 Famous and Fascinating Minds Talk About God.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 23

0

January 26–28, 2018

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24 SU NDAY, JAN UA RY 21, 2 018