New Words #17: What I Read This Summer
(and wholeheartedly recommend to you)
A change of pace this time around—this edition of the newsletter is all recommendations, all the time. (Plus: cats. I have been informed that the cats are a necessity.) Everything on this list is new fiction, published in the last year or so, and it’s my hope that there’s something here to suit every reader’s tastes. Another thing these books have in common is that they were written in English; you can expect a similar list of recommended reading in translation sometime in the next few months. Let’s get to it!
The twentysomething protagonist of Emma Cline’s new novel, The Guest, is trying to hide in plain sight in the Hamptons for the last few days of summer. Part victim of circumstance, part agent of chaos, she survives on nothing but charm and a single tote bag, in which she carries her clothes and the valuables she swipes from her hosts. Why she’s stranded, what she’s running from, and her prospects for salvation at the end of the week are all open questions, because her memory and motivations are hazy at best. She is by turns endearingly vulnerable and maddeningly opaque, and her destiny at the end of her week-long journey is left to our interpretation.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust, winner of a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, consists of four narratives, linked by their central characters but each with a distinct style and point of view. The book opens with Bonds, a roman à clef-within-a-novel, which details the meteoric rise and personal tragedies of an obscenely wealthy New York financier in the 1920s and ’30s. As Trust continues, we see the same events from the perspectives of the financier, his wife, and the reluctant ghostwriter of his memoir. It’s this last narrator—the daughter of an Italian immigrant, torn between her father’s dedication to social activism and her own desire for financial independence as an unmarried woman in the mid-twentieth century—whose voice I find most compelling. But the novel’s true pleasure lies in teasing out the half-truths these characters are telling themselves.
In Kate Doyle’s debut story collection, I Meant It Once, the focus is on women in their twenties and the stories they tell themselves about how they have been shaped by relationships with their parents, siblings, friends, roommates, and romantic partners. For a taste of Doyle’s writing style—and of Helen, Evan, and Grace, siblings who reappear several times in this collection—take a look at “This Is the Way Things Are Now” in No Tokens. I also recommend Arturo Vidich’s interview with the author in the Chicago Review of Books.
The linked stories in If I Survive You, the Booker Prize-shortlisted debut collection by Jonathan Escoffery, follow a Jamaican American family in Miami through hurricanes and recessions, odd jobs and pipe dreams. These stories reflect all the facets of the characters’ lives; even as they wrestle with questions of identity and face challenges with housing and underemployment, their humor, ambitions, and complex family dynamics remain at the forefront. A standout for me is “Independent Living,” which first appeared in Prairie Schooner under the title “Chasing Carlos.”
Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, follows protagonist Bunny Glenn from her life as a teenage Foreign Service brat in post-Soviet Azerbaijan to present-day Texas, where she has built a prominent career managing communications for an oil company—working on its renewable energy initiatives, she would hasten to add. Though her personal choices are inextricably linked to class anxiety and geopolitical influences, Bunny is too well-drawn and complex a character to be reduced to the mere product of her circumstances.
In R. F. Kuang’s new novel, Yellowface, professional jealousy, Twitter pile-ons, and an ethnically ambiguous pen name all contribute to a scandal that rocks the literary world. A bold departure from the settings of the author’s previous novels, this is a fast-paced and thoroughly enjoyable satire of the publishing industry in the age of social media. It’s also worth seeking out the interviews Kuang gave upon the book’s release; I particularly recommend the ones that appeared in The Guardian and on NPR.
Laura Lippman’s new thriller, Prom Mom, sees its protagonist return to her hometown two decades after her life was upended by a traumatic event that made her locally infamous but that she has blocked from her memory. To my mind, the most compelling aspect of the novel is the author’s choice to set much of the action during the first year of the Covid pandemic. To be clear, the story is not about Covid, yet Lippman demonstrates how the characters’ individual responses to social isolation and the differing economic effects of the pandemic on their respective careers lead inexorably to their ultimate decisions to cooperate or betray one another.
Logan Steiner’s debut novel, After Anne, is a sensitive and well-researched depiction of author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s adult life. It depicts the inspirations behind the Anne of Green Gables series and her later works; Montgomery’s relationships with her taciturn grandmother and a lively, ambitious younger cousin; and her troubled marriage to a minister, whose struggles with mental illness she felt obligated to hide from his parishioners. Primarily of interest to fans of Montgomery’s work, this novel makes a compelling argument that she wrote her best-loved stories and her most optimistic protagonists as a way of escaping from her own dilemmas.
Here, Look at My Cats
The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth, here are my cats.
Happy reading—and happy decorative gourd season to all who observe!
Laura