Just in time for Valentine’s Day, it appears that oil and stocks have developed an unhealthy, codependent relationship. They’re way too deep into each other. Where one market goes, the other follows. If they were people, a counselor would be urging a trial separation. “This is highly unusual,” Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, wrote to clients in late January. “Call it the oil correlation conundrum.”
Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can't quite bring yourself to leave. It's a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all.
Market-driven memoir insists on redemption — on some version of a hero’s journey in three acts: the beginning, the middle, the end. But there’s an argument to be made that this is a false construction — that to author a personal story in this way is to impose a distorting narrative arc over a life, and thus, some would say, to deceive. In Liar, a new memoir by Rob Roberge, the author chooses instead to untangle the lie. Roberge plumbs the mental constructions, obfuscations, omissions, exaggerations, and half-truths he has told himself and others, beginning, in the book, in second grade (in 1972), and ending in 2013, when, undone by his own lack of integrity, he writes of himself, “you walk into a room and the first thing you say is ‘I’m sorry.’”
As with Hope’s highly acclaimed debut novel, Wake, the writing is elegant and insightful; she writes beautifully about human emotion, landscape and weather: “There was no wind. It was as though they were all simmering under the great grey lid of the sky, like water almost brought to boil.”
Like all successful historical novels, The Ballroom tells us a story of the past in order to shed light on the present.