Interstellar Ineptitude: On Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of prestige is as precarious as the production of literature itself: finding any book worthy enough to not further demean the reputation of the Prize by its bestowal is difficult enough; add to that the mutually hostile demand that it might be adored by the general public. Any consumer of contemporary literature is familiar with the end result of this compromise: small “l” literary with enough genre convention to find its way into book clubs, morally ambiguous but not so much as to obscure its political message (lest The Guardian have to think of adjectives beyond “urgent” and “important” in their praise), with prose elevated beyond the typical Taylor Jenkins Reid fare but never so much as to alienate the typical Taylor Jenkins reader. They are magical realist murder mysteries, multigenerational historical epics, Westerns and dystopians that are just anticlimactic enough to escape the “genre” label.

Cooties and Careers: On Stuart Ross’ The Hotel Egypt

Ty Rossberg ought to try being a serial killer. He’d at least be more loved than what he is in Stuart Ross’ The Hotel Egypt: a straight white male writer during the dawn of the Trump era. While his girlfriend Jenny Marks’ new essay collection is the hottest book of the year, he is relegated to playing the once prestigious, now subordinate, role as sole breadwinner (as a management consultant). Her semi-truthful account of her abortion captivates audiences, elevating her to the “literary equivalent of the Rolling Stones, or at least the National,” as Ty snidely remarks to himself while attending her reading in Chicago. The Hotel Egypt is an exploration of a modern American man’s yearning to be needed and relevant. The results are mixed, with a relatively strong first part that wanders into the surreal and which ultimately undermines the story’s initial intriguing bitterness. In many ways, Ty has a great life: he has an apparent soulmate for a girlfriend (both he and Jenny grew up together in Queens, went to the same schools, and have similar literary ambitions), he has a well-paying career, and he lives comfortably in a desirable Manhattan neighborhood. Yet something crucial is missing in his life.

Summer’s Gone: On Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

It’s not a book for summer. Despite the yellow checkered cover, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which came out in September, is most certainly a winter book. The yellow is wrong anyway, not the yellow of sun, but instead tinged with a sickness, the checkered pattern alternating between subdued yellow and gray. Like a jaundiced hue, the cover blends in with the orange and marigold seats on the subway, configuration and color of a D train about to be defunct. Shortly after Intermezzo came out, my ex bought me a copy at Target. It was from the Brooklyn Target in Caesar’s Bay with a view of Coney Island on one side and the Verrazzano on the other. It was still warm, the waves outside the box stores lapping like summer. And I thought, how wonderful it must be to have every type of literary success. Rooney is equally displayed at indie bookstores, on the cool hotgirl IG pages, and also under the bright, antiseptically illuminated aisles of big box stores. But it took several attempts to truly commit to this book.

Escaping the Panopticon: On Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

What do you need to build a panopticon? If you ask the ghost of Jeremy Bentham, who originated the concept in the late 18th century, he’d say something like the following: you need a circular building with a central observation tower staffed by a single guard. You need the ring of the building to be built with cells filled with prisoners who are being observed by the guard in the tower. If you ask the contemporary liberal subject — the citizen of a free society — you’d receive a more complicated answer. The modern concept of a panopticon isn’t confined to a single building, but expands into the more sprawling, networked, and technologically sophisticated notion of the authoritarian surveillance state.

A Tepid Search for Genius: On Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” Sheila Heti wrote this line in her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? and a thousand well-behaved girls who treat their art like it’s going to affect their grade point average underlined it, posted it to their Tumblr, and fervently whispered into the pages, “Me.” The last fifteen years or so have been ardently dedicated to figuring out what a woman genius looks like. Much of this has focused on digging through the past, trying to trace matrilineal pathways in and around the artistic canon. Publishing, art museums, historians, and film scholars have sought out “rediscovered voices” to exploit and establish. While much of this work has been invigorating, the backward glance toward the overlooked, the forgotten, and the inappropriately maligned has given our culture a nostalgic feel, one lacking in vigor and direction.

The Blind Spot: On Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Boxing is the most honest of sports. The boxer, unlike the normal person, steps into the ring and willingly accepts that he’ll be punched in the face. Anyone can throw a punch at a heavy bag, but you’re not a boxer until you’ve eaten some punches and nodded like a demented little freak at the guy trying to take you out. Years ago, in the heat of my boxing fandom, I had my dad buy me a pair of gloves and I proceeded to throw jabs and hooks and uppercuts into the air. The great Mexican fighter, Julio César Chávez, was one of my heroes, and, so, for a brief interlude in the burgeoning days of my adolescent baseball career, I thought that I’d give boxing a go. I was already a jock, after all, so the transition would be easy. I was a tough kid, too. I’d watched hundreds of bouts alongside my dad, so, like a typical young man, I thought: I can do that. I can throw a punch. I can bob and weave and bounce off the ropes and attack my opponents with body shots and keep coming. I can surely take a punch.

A Flawed Novel Addresses A Failed Utopia: On Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals

We can never escape the world. Nor can we remake it. This truism underscores all great would-be utopian novels, from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Erewhon — an anagram of “nowhere” — to dystopias proper like Brave New World and 1984, to failed-cult novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Any attempt to lift a few, quixotic human beings out of the psychosocial morass of human nature

Dream Warrior: On Bruce Wagner’s Remarkable Oeuvre

The time has come for Bruce Wagner. Because Wagner is the most pun-drunk writer since Nabokov, if not since Shakespeare, I couldn’t possibly not mean this phrase in multiple senses. For one thing, Wagner says he’s finished. After an almost 35-year career in fiction punctuated by occasional movie and TV writing, which includes his celebrated screenplay

Great American Misfire: On Percival Everett’s James

Percival Everett’s James is a novel that's set on the eve of the Civil War, in a town in Missouri. It's told from the point of view of James, who is Black and who is an enslaved man. He and his wife and daughter are owned by a woman named Miss Watson, and he often has to do tasks for her like chopping wood and hauling chickenfeed. James has a wife and a daughter. They live in a cottage. It's not clear what this wife and daughter do with their time, but this family survives and they seem to love each other.

Discovering A Great American Writer On Inter-Library Loan: On Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book

I first saw the name “Nate Lippens” while poking around alt-lit circles online. This might have been on Substack, or Twitter X. He was mentioned as a new writer, apparently of the alt-lit milieu. Based on the name “Nate Lippens”, I pictured some young kid, who was funny maybe? Not necessarily an author, but maybe a Twitter anon, a political commentator or a Dimes Square personality, someone offbeat.  He seemed to be someone significant though. It was unclear why.

Against Self-Actualization: On Susan Minot’s Don’t Be a Stranger

An older male friend once gave me the single best piece of dating advice I know of, even if, like most good advice, it’s sometimes easier to articulate than to abide by. I was in my early twenties, new to the city and eager for connection when he told me not to approach potential new relationships as if I am auditioning for the guy, as if my interest is already secure, and I am just waiting to find out if he reciprocates or finds me good enough—this is a trap, my friend said. Instead I ought to be auditioning the guy.