By the time I got there shortly before midnight, thinking I could waltz on in and be one of the first 30 buyers receiving an exclusive gift bag, the cheese and crackers were long gone and there were two measly chocolate fingers left. With the number of people crammed into the space, I couldn’t even move to eat them if I wanted to. Almost like a parody, the accent of the young woman in front of me was Irish, and somehow found a mutual connection with the stranger standing next to her.
Where I come from on the coastal plains of Georgia, we drink tea. The sweet and the iced are implied. You trust that your neighbor, the local meat and three, and the ladies at church know just how much sugar to add. Packets of sugar are for coffee.
At home, mama did not make sweet tea, and she only let us swirl in anemic packets of Sweet’N Low. To get my fix, I walked barefoot atop crunchy, parched grass to my neighbors’ house. There, Mrs. Denise, a second mother whose name my sister and I abbreviated to “Nise,” had the good stuff in a gallon pitcher in her fridge. She brewed it in a teamaker permanently enshrined on her kitchen counter. I remember watching and waiting as hot tea drip-dropped onto a mound of cane sugar, which transformed into a concentrated, viscous syrup.
Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s “Rejection” did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. It sucks for them, the inept, lonely, self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it’s a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project—both his own and that of his characters—with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. Thus, you simply surrender to the sick pleasure of watching humiliating people humiliate themselves, as when a clammy self-styled feminist ally gets shut down by a girl and goes, “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” while shaking his fists at the ceiling, then creates a dating profile that includes the line “Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan.” These are two of the mildest things to happen in this incredibly depraved book.
Sally Rooney, who made such a splash with her first novel, Conversations with Friends, back in 2017, has made it clear with each succeeding book that she is no flash in the pan. Intermezzo, her fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet.
In the tense, messy contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves together beautiful whole cloth.
Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the way humans can. Those naysayers will be hard-pressed to wave away The Great Gatsby, the debut novel from the super-advanced Xerox 914 photocopier—an exciting new voice that wrote Gatsby after being trained on a data set comprising a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.