Smith’s follow-up is a different sort of experiment. Rather than reach back into history, she set out to create a work rigorously interested in the present moment. The aim wasn’t to do something with the novel form but rather to dispense with what has long been understood as the genre’s prerequisite: time. The UK edition of Autumn appeared in 2016, mere weeks after she delivered the manuscript to her publisher. (The novel was published in the United States a year later.) It tells the story of a young girl and her friendship with an elderly neighbor, one that distilled the political moment even as it was happening. A novel engaged with politics is not surprising; a novel keeping pace with the headlines—in particular, those about the Brexit drama as it unfolded—was.
Readers of Autumn may not have been aware of Smith’s intentions, but it was the first in a “Seasonal Quartet” that she intended to publish at the same brisk clip—Winter in 2018, Spring in 2019, and now Summer. None of the books is exactly a sequel to its predecessors. In each, we are introduced to a separate cast of characters making their way through a United Kingdom riven by bizarre domestic politics, reckoning with Europe’s refugee crisis, and ruminating on the moment’s pop culture and the off-kilter climate of the modern world. This is a work—if we consider the four books a single work, as Smith clearly does—fixed in the contemporary, aspiring to tell us about a world that is still taking form. In Winter, the characters fret over Twitter and argue about “the [ice] shelf the size of Wales that’s about to break off the side of Antarctica.” How like life.
I once worked for a few weeks at a big, busy company, and one day I asked, jokingly, “Where do I go to cry?” An hour later, I was taken aside and told in seriousness about a specific stairwell. Another person there led me on a five-minute walk through the skyscraper to a tiny, hidden conference room, and then made me promise to keep the location a secret, a vow I have kept. (They also cried.)
With 99 protons and 99 electrons, it sits in obscurity near the bottom of the periodic table of chemical elements, between californium and fermium. It first showed up in the explosive debris of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the team of scientists who discovered it gave it a name to honor Albert Einstein.
When Chang-rae Lee was young, he was drawn to old souls. He published his first novel, “Native Speaker” (1995), at twenty-nine, and though its protagonist is roughly the same age, he is so freighted with world-weariness that he seems twice that. Lee’s next two novels, “A Gesture Life” (1999) and “Aloft” (2004), were both narrated by retirees, men looking fitfully backward. Now Lee is fifty-five, and his sixth novel, “My Year Abroad” (Riverhead), brims with youth. Its narrator, Tiller Bardmon, is a twenty-year-old college dropout just back from an adventure overseas, whose outrageous particulars he recounts in wide-eyed detail in the course of the novel’s nearly five hundred pages. Where did he go? To Asia, the place that many of Lee’s previous characters left for the United States. Much is made of Tiller’s heritage—he is “twelve and one-half percent Asian,” one-eighth—and the novel delights in the prospect that the Old World should now beckon to this representative of America’s “growing minority of basic almost white boys” with the same promise of reinvention that the new one offered to Tiller’s forebears, once upon a time.
The roads taken by the family in The Removed, Brandon Hobson's new novel, are essential ones in this moment of national reclaiming. The story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It's also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, and family separations we ignored.
In a short book about biography, Hermione Lee, literary life-writer par excellence, offered two metaphors for the art at which she excels. One was an autopsy. The other was a portrait. “Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation,” she wrote, “portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character.” She argued that these contrasting approaches had something in common. They “both make an investigation of the subject which will shape how posterity views them.”
Lee is clearly no coroner, even when writing about the dead. Tom Stoppard is her first living biographical subject—on a roster that includes Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and, most recently, Penelope Fitzgerald—and she concludes her portrait by lobbying posterity on his behalf. Stoppard “matters,” she writes; “he will be remembered.” His significance seems a strange thing to feel in need of proving. Surely if Stoppard’s reputation in postwar British theater weren’t secure, this giant biography—nearly twice the length of Lee’s last—would never have been undertaken.
New York is the best city to cry in.
Speak plainly, said November to the maples, say
what you mean now, now