Seen in full, the finished cycle directly confronts our unsettling world without assuming the arrogant role of an oracle. While teeming with the anxieties of both history and the disorienting present, they are also emphatic narratives of idiosyncratic characters facing — and sometimes transcending — the isolation of modern life. Without bombast or melodrama, Smith exposes the quotidian horrors beyond the paralyzing headlines while capturing a latent hunger for beauty and unity that pushes individuals beyond comfort to imagine (yes, it’s possible) a better world.
As Smith herself put it during a long email exchange, these books may be experimental in their topicality but they are also deeply embedded in the origins of the novel — of the word itself. “The novel form comes originally from it being meant to be about the latest thing, the most novel thing,” Smith wrote.
It makes sense that Kaufman, one of our deepest and most imaginative thinkers about the self, would want to write a novel, one of our most conspicuous channels for self-investigation. That novel, “Antkind,” has arrived, and, due to its length and slapstick sense of humor, it has already been labelled Pynchonesque. But the author referred to most often in the book is Samuel Beckett, and this offers a better clue about the tradition Kaufman aspires to belong to. In contrast to Pynchon’s political epics, Beckett’s work is one of the landmark achievements of literary introspection. “Molloy,” the first book in his mid-century trilogy (and the one most often alluded to in “Antkind”), contains no secondary characters and hardly any events. It is famous partly for showing that great art can emerge solely from a mind wrestling with itself.
Taipei was a city that belonged to my childhood imagination. Built of words spoken quietly to me by my mother, its streets were paved with her longings. The air was made of memories. In this place, Taipei was a single hillside, a school at its crest and a tenement block at its base. A packed-dirt road cut a straight line between them, bustling with street-food sellers in carts that looked uncannily like the Toronto hot dog vendors of my youth. There was no wind, and there were no trees. The light was yellow, and the only smell was that of the choudoufu my mother missed most after leaving Taiwan.
“But does it really smell like poo?” I would ask her, having never smelled choudoufu before.
Picking up a sequel to a book as original as Gideon the Ninth is a little scary—the first book set an incredibly high bar. Tamsyn Muir’s second novel, Harrow the Ninth, thankfully, clears it with room to spare. Returning to that preposterous but somehow organic blend of black magic and science fiction, Harrow the Ninth is a gleeful, genre-bending romp, sliding effortlessly between different modes of horror, and is relentlessly funny without ever dropping its core seriousness. Muir has once again distilled several variations on “frenemy” to fuel a compelling cast, and the novel’s pacing is amazingly controlled given how chaotic the story is—like a building deliberately falling down.
What if, instead of loving Romeo and dying dramatically, Juliet fell for Benvolio and their relationship died a natural death? That’s the question posed in “Sweet Sorrow,” the new novel from David Nicholls that just might be the sweetest book to brighten your late summer.
The apple tree in the backyard with white waterfall blossoms: