The novel is expansive and introspective, fragmented and dreamlike, a coming of age tale conveyed in images and anecdotes and explorations. The plot, if you can call it that, is simple: a boy from Vietnam grows up in Hartford, Conn., raised in a household of women traumatized by war and domestic violence. As a teenager, he has a tender but fraught first relationship with another boy. Then Little Dog leaves Hartford for college in New York and becomes a writer.
It is tempting to read this book as memoir — it has an intimate, confessional tone, and Little Dog shares some key biographical details with Vuong — but “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is explicitly a novel. Just as he fuels his prose with his poetry, Vuong takes what he needs from lived experience to animate his storytelling with visceral beauty and a strain of what feels like uncut truth. This is, of course, a difficult art, and one of the chief goals of many fiction writers.
After reading “How to Build a Boat” I still don’t know a dinghy from a dory. But as a father I am grateful that a dad has put into words and wood the fathomless love a parent has for a child.
Is The Book of Science and Antiquities a sly existential joke, or an entirely solemn endeavour? It’s billed as the latter, as Keneally’s most candid work of fiction to date, a kind of grand human hymn. But there’s a wink or two that suggests he is chuckling into the cosmic void.
Paradoxically, this open-endedness, this refusal of received literary templates, is what makes “City of Girls” worth reading. It’s not a simple-minded polemic about sexual freedom and not an operatic downer; rather, it’s the story of a conflicted, solitary woman who’s made an independent life as best she can. If the usual narrative shapes don’t fit her experience — and they don’t fit most lives — neither she nor her creator seems to be worrying about it.
As far as the Guinness Book of World Records is concerned, the quietest place on Earth belongs to Microsoft. On their Redmond, Washington campus, the company has built a room cocooned in concrete and steel, resting atop a bed of vibration-damping springs. Inside, fiberglass wedges jut out from the walls, floor, and ceiling, soaking up sound. In photographs, the room has a nightmarish look. Microsoft uses the room to test how loud a component, such as the clicker on a mouse, really is. There are different ways of weighting decibels; if you adjust for a human ear’s response to sound frequencies, a typical bedroom or library sits at about thirty decibels. Microsoft’s anechoic—or echo-free—chamber is minus-twenty decibels. As the negative in that number suggests, the quietness of the room is literally at a level beyond human perception.
There are days when sitting in a room that noiseless sounds appealing. But some people are so unaccustomed to such levels of quiet that, after just a few minutes inside the chamber, they become disoriented. Hundraj Gopal, the room’s principal designer, says that some find the room “deafening,” that it brings “a sense of fullness in the ears.” Microsoft’s quiet room is exclusively for company use, but Orfield Laboratories, in Minneapolis, has a similar room that anyone can visit. Standing in the room, which measures at roughly minus-nine decibels, you hear the unbearable noise of your heartbeat, your breath, the churning of your stomach. You grow too conscious of your own thoughts, your own body, the passage of time.
The Lees’ book also effectively — if incidentally — conveys the underlying socioeconomics of the industry, of the conspicuous consumption of patrons versus the invisibility of worker bees. Ultimately, the greatest accomplishment of “Hotbox” is that it’s careful to separate catering from restaurant work, making clear how different they are. In doing so, the authors both explain and ennoble a profession whose mechanics, like those who execute them, “need to be hidden … so the pageant appears effortless.”
If Hernando comes across as a control freak, it may be because life taught him about fuzzy categories and the destructive power of time. “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books” is an intellectual biography, but its beating heart is the tangled love of a son for his father. While the fickle Diego received Columbus’s inheritance, Hernando was the spiritual heir. He fought to preserve his father’s legacy and territorial claims, attributing his own discoveries to Columbus and papering over his father’s excesses. Ultimately, both his library and the family name declined. Edward Wilson-Lee’s magnificent book helps us understand his obsessive desire to gather and preserve, even in the face of chaos.