“Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare,” Matthew Desmond writes in the prologue of Evicted. Outline is a book that illuminates the persistent need we humans have to reveal ourselves to each other, even as it points to the places where our understanding falls short.īook I’m hoping to read before 2018 arrives: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
What kept me turning the page, though, was the compulsion toward empathy that Cusk so beautifully captures in her characters and provokes in her readers. I’m a sucker for narrative experiments, and someone who likes to eavesdrop on people on buses, and the form of this book-it’s billed as “a novel in 10 conversations”-was what led me to pick it up. The result is something thoroughly immersive, an intimate portrait of people stumbling toward truths that are always almost within reach. Instead, the novel is driven by conversations-by the detailed accounts that a range of strangers and acquaintances give to the narrator about their lives, worries, recent failures, and hopes. It’s not even, exactly, the characters: The narrator, a novelist on a brief solo trip to teach a summer course in Athens, reveals very little beyond the most basic facts of how she came to be where she is. Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline is spellbinding in a way that’s difficult to explain: It’s not just the plot, which is minimal, and it’s not just the prose, which is lucid and precise and vivid without ostentation. Evie loses Suzanne, but her life will be forever entwined with Russell’s-a lasting insult.īook I’m hoping to read before 2018 arrives: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson The girls have traded something for all this freedom, to the point that freedom is not liberating-it’s just chaos. Then slowly, inexorably, the patina wears off and Suzanne and the others are revealed in a more complicated and dangerous light.
Step aside Manson/Russell-who are these astonishing girls? As the novel spirals toward the inevitable murders, Evie’s flush of passion for Suzanne crescendos. The inverted expectation here is spectacular. And she decides to claim some of that for herself. But more than recognition, Evie is bewitched: How can she be like Suzanne? Forget the neuroses of teenagedom, forget being “pretty,” forget mores, forget the fumbling rites of teenage sex, forget crippling self-doubt-in Suzanne, Evie sees a way to opt out of all of it she sees pure potential and wild freedom. A 14-year-old Evie first spies Suzanne and her retinue-all young followers of a Manson-esque figure named Russell-at a park and immediately recognizes their power (“sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water”). It’s about those girls themselves and their electric pull, their sexuality, and their desires at a time when any kind of suburban female anarchy was shocking. So it is that in subsequent visits to the same entrée, it’s possible to pick out new flavors and subtleties each time, and that in each rereading of a great book there are new morsels to digest and in which to delight.Įmma Cline’s novel is not about Charles Manson and his electric pull on girls. After the last word, the reader must hunger for more, a sensation that always exists in opposition to the fullness of the work.
BEST READS 2017 NEW YORK TIMES FREE
While the details of this chronicle are revelatory in themselves- Bunk offers nearly 500 pages’ worth of folly to explore-the book is even more compelling as an argument: that hoaxes, so tangled with stereotype and systemic lies, are inextricable from race, “a fake thing pretending to be real.” As Young puts its, in one of the many sentences I underlined and margin-starred and will keep thinking of for years to come: “The hoax reminds us, uncomfortably, that the stories we tell don’t just express the society of the self.” Instead, “they construct it."īook I’m hoping to read before 2018 arrives: Feel Free by Zadie Smith Barnum’s “humbugs” to the false fairies of Cottingley to the familiar fakers of the present day: James Frey, Jayson Blair, Lance Armstrong, Rachel Dolezal. It begins with the “winged men on the moon” stories published in the New York Sun, the 1835 version of fake-news-y clickbait, and from there offers a wide-ranging biography of B.S., from P.T. Young is a poet as well as a critic, author, and professor-he directs the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and recently became the poetry editor of The New Yorker-and Bunk is accordingly deep in its research, profound in its insights, and lyrical in its prose.
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