I cannot start any document — a novel, a letter, an invoice — without first clicking on the drop-down menu labeled “Font” and considering my options. There are the obvious choices: Times New Roman, reliable if bland; Arial, crisp and austere; Proxima Nova, clean and versatile. But what about those occasions that require the fine china of typography?
And yet making sense of dreams, it occurs to me lately, is not wholly dissimilar from making sense of “reality,” whatever that is. Yes, we all live in the same world. We can compare notes on what is happening, and draw inferences, in a way impossible with dreams.
And yet your experience of the world is unique to you. So is your interpretation of it, which depends on your prior beliefs, yearnings and aversions, and on what matters to you. No wonder we often disagree vehemently, violently, on what has happened and what it means.
In “The Christie Affair,” an ingenious new psychological suspense novel that concocts an elaborate backstory behind Christie’s disappearance, Nina de Gramont reminds readers of “the other woman” in the story and suggests that it also would be a mistake to underestimate her. This Nancy Neele — here called “Nan O’Dea” — is powered by rage and grief and matches wits with the Queen of Crime herself, not only to possess Archie, but to achieve a greater end that few readers will anticipate. And, here’s the neatest narrative trick of all: As Christie characteristically did, de Gramont hides the solution to the mystery of “The Christie Affair” in plain sight.
The Family Chao is a riveting character-driven novel that delves beautifully into human psychology; Dostoevsky himself would surely approve.
For all its run-on sentences and muddled emotions, “Men in My Situation” is possessed of an austerity and bleakness that is satisfyingly unforgiving (and that is tempting for an American reviewer to attach to cold, northern weather conditions — but I shall resist). The hapless, deeply flawed Arvid can make no sense of the string of senseless events that make a life. And his puzzlement offers comfort, transcending middle-aged male disaffection to speak to the universal condition of adulthood.