Melissa Broder’s new novel, Death Valley (Scribner; 240 pages), begins with its unnamed protagonist peeing—and trying to meditate—in a Circle K bathroom during a getaway to Joshua Tree. This bodily moment will pair resoundingly well with another sort of release at the close of this short book of blood and guts. Broder’s protagonist, we learn, is a novelist working on a book about a young-to-middled-aged woman, a pseudo-hippie, struggling with her husband’s chronic, undiagnosable illness. The writer is sober after years of alcoholism, depression, and suffering from the long-term hospitalization of her dying father. She’s seeking spiritual solace on a […]

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“Literature, as I saw it then, was a vast open range, my equivalent of a cowboy’s dream.’’ So wrote Larry McMurtry about how life at his father’s Idiot Ridge cattle ranch changed forever when a World War II-bound cousin dropped off a farewell gift of a box of books. Riding that range for decades since, McMurtry has been condescended to, by the usual contingent of Eastern critics, and overpraised, for his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic, Lonesome Dove, which he self-mockingly described as the “Gone With the Wind of the West.’’ But the bulk of his work, including the Thalia trilogy (Horseman, […]

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Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite books. Michael Cunningham’s reworking of those themes in The Hours is also terrific. If you’re a fan of either of those, In the Orchard, Eliza Minot’s third novel, will not disappoint. Of the family that includes authors Susan and George Minot, Eliza Minot has the same skill with the extended stream of consciousness, with the added plus of a pitch-perfect ear when it comes to children and the weight and pleasure of being in charge of them. I’ve been waiting for Minot’s next book since The Brambles, which also has some great writing […]

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“When I joined the Times in the mid-1950’s, I wanted to specialize in writing about nobodies,’’ Gay Talese states in his delicious new collection, Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener (Mariner Books; 320 pages). The ghost of Melville’s famous refusenik haunts these pages, as Talese—the chronicler of everyone from deaf printers in the Paper of Record’s composing room to Southern California nudist colonies—takes a farewell lap. At the ripe old age of ninety-one, he hasn’t lost a step. You can read herein about his first New York Times piece—unbylined, but published on the editorial page, no less—about James […]

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“There exists a heaven for the carnal,” writes Chuck Palahniuk in his most recent novel, Not Forever, But for Now (Simon & Schuster; 256 pages). An ultimately lackluster addition to what was once a biting oeuvre, Not Forever makes the reader wonder whether the author’s tendency toward excess was once a project in well-executed theatrics, rather than one in purely over-compensatory irreverence. Although it’s in his nature to render carnality ad absurdum—whether through Fight Club’s battle between split personalities or Choke’s setting at a colonial theme park—Palahniuk’s previous renditions are stylistically tight and thematically straightforward. Victor Mancini chokes himself in […]

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Many stories are, in a sense, mysteries, asking some version of the same question: what is this life, and how are we meant to live? There are, of course, no definitive answers to these questions—only a multitude of responses, from which we seek to make the meaning and beauty that connects and sustains us amid persistent uncertainty. One such story is The Postcard (Europa Editions; 475 pages). Written by French author Anne Berest and translated by Tina Kover, the novel frames the true story of a family—nearly eradicated by the Holocaust—as a fictionalized memoir. Nestled inside a simple and concrete […]

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Reading After the Funeral and Other Stories (Knopf; 240 pages) by Tessa Hadley is like watching a magic show. There is suspense, but it is not the stressful, nauseating sort of a horror movie or domestic drama—it is the sweet suspense of enchantment. The reader has some sense of the hidden techniques being employed, but the final effect is still eye-widening and gasp-inducing. Each story is about a complicated marriage or family and involves divorce or death or infidelity. Although the characters are in wobbly, anxious situations, the prose is never mawkish or emotionally fatty. Instead, it is light, plain, […]

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Jamel Brinkley’s second story collection, Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 240 pages), records glimpses of lives across New York, disparate but proximate—as though looking at people in lit windows across the cityscape. Lingering in the worlds and heads of his protagonists, Brinkley’s stories elongate these moments into chasms of psyche and memory. They remind us that whatever we see in the window, observation alone is superficial. To witness is a full-body experience, affecting the mind as much as the eye. New York is a familiar setting for Brinkley, whose debut, A Lucky Man (2018), also features stories set in the […]

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In Kathleen Alcott’s Emergency (W.W. Norton; 208 pages), the tales of seven women whose lives come undone create haunting depictions of desire and harm. Alcott’s first story collection following three novels, Emergency is permeated by a sense of disaster lingering in the wings and about to unfold. Her protagonists are typically clever and have ascended by their tenacity to the middle or upper-middle classes. Yet even in these stations they are endlessly reminded of the boundaries that do not get erased by their bank account balances. Several of them leave their homes, but often become trapped in their escapes. Sometimes […]

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The name “Comet” evokes the fiery and dramatic path of a celestial body, the kind that might portend the end of the world, or at least make for good cinema. But a comet is also a solitary thing, moving silently through the solar system. In Patrick deWitt’s new novel, The Librarianist (Ecco Press; 352 pages), Bob Comet is the curiously quiet carrier of this name. Bob is a protagonist out of step with time and life. On deciding to become a librarian, his mentor tells him that “librarianism doesn’t hold up in our society’s real time … the language-based life […]

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Autofiction is usually accompanied with disclaimers and explanations, shame and caveats. Caroline O’Donoghue’s new novel The Rachel Incident (Knopf; 304 pages), too, is bookended with disclaimers. It opens with, “It was never my plan to write about any of this” and closes with the protagonist saying, “It’s not my story.” Though it is unclear how much memoir this confessional novel actually holds, this conceit of autofiction is marvelously executed—the details of memory feel preciously excavated, the plot clicks in place in that inevitable way of real life. Even at its most alarming—the protagonist extorts an older couple to fund her […]

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