Tag
Family
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Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Destroying Families
“Women—who disproportionately carry the burden of caregiving and are often left alone when partners are kidnapped—are pushed into deeper poverty and isolation.”
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Sweet Rage
Until the publication of the long-awaited See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s stories and novels had met with almost unqualified praise. When it appeared last year her latest book was almost unanimously trashed for what its reviewers saw as inappropriate and excessive rage directed at Kincaid’s former husband Allen Shawn. But reading the novel as a roman à clef…
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Her Mother and Herself
Do you hear a sound like rolling surf in the self-help section labeled “Family”? It’s what a sea change sounds like in its early stages, when one paradigm is fading away and another surging forward. Drifting away is the idea of the repressive family, out to “fuck you up,” in Philip Larkin’s phrase of 1971.1…
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Ordinary People
Edwidge Danticat has a way of making small lives tell big stories. Gently and quietly, she writes the outrageous and compels us, her readers, to become intimate with tragedies that are at once particular and global. From her very first novel, the 1994 best seller Breath, Eyes, Memory, which made her something of a literary…
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In Praise of MA (Middle-Aged) Fiction
Reading what we might call MA (Middle-Aged) fiction, it’s easy to see how YA (Young Adult) fiction has become so popular among not-so-young adults. In the face of characters burdened with troublesome children, aging parents, failures of love and marriage, professional frustration (or even more frustrating professional success), depression, cancer, and obesity, who wouldn’t want…
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The History of Secrets
Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen injects the marrow back into two centuries of skeletons locked away in household closets. A leading historian of modern Britain and Europe, Cohen has put together a rollicking read through the hidden land of cultural morality and its fundamental institution, the family. A son who prefers lipstick to lip balm…
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People in Trouble
“My Awesome Place is truly the result of a massive community effort …”1 When the poet and performance artist Cheryl Burke died at the age of 38 from complications related to the treatment of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, friends and members of her writing group brought her unfinished memoir to publication. The book, which was awarded a Lambda Literary…
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Class Diaries: Reflections on Michael Apted’s Up Series
The British documentary film Seven Up!, broadcast for the first time in 1964, was originally intended to be a single, stand-alone program. Made by Granada Television for the current affairs program World in Action, it focused on 14 seven-year-old children from a variety of backgrounds across England. According to Paul Almond, the director of the…
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Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from…
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Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section that nobody knows what to call: in front of the cash register, between the chocolate bars and fridge…
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When the Diaspora Is Enuf
Quiet as it’s kept, some of us colored-girl creative-writer types kept our cool circa 2006 when that gelato-dripping, Gita-flipping, Bali-bossa-nova-ing best seller Eat, Pray, Love went multi-multiplatinum. We did not hate, because we knew the truth: we too binge, chant, and passionately blur the pages of our passports with so many stamps from Senegal, Salvador,…
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Fostered Alike By Beauty and By Fear
Foster kids are often called orphans of the living. It’s a particularly apt designation and rich emotional territory for a novel. Foster kids can neither mourn their missing parents nor fully attach to their surrogates; they are caught in the purgatory between a full loss and a fresh start. It’s a wonder more authors don’t…
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Animal Studies
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, without turning into a beast. In Lydia Millet’s Magnificence, a widow feeling guilty about her husband’s death compares herself to a taxidermy display of stuffed carnivores. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a blonde dream girl fakes her own kidnapping, slaughters her ex-boyfriend in flagrante, and threatens to abort…
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Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild
Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with…
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Into the Crud
How can a book transform how we think about the human? It is one thing to claim for oneself, as does a character in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a dispossession so thorough that she lives with “No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity,” prompting her father to add, “like a dog.” It…
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Edward St. Aubyn and the Depressive Third Person
Few recent novelists offer as many misguided reasons for being liked or disliked than Edward St. Aubyn, whose five Patrick Melrose novels—Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2006), and At Last (2011, published in the United States in early 2012)—have been the occasion of some glowing press. Sensationalism is the…
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Lost and Found: Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, Aimee Phan’s ambitious first novel, makes a striking contribution to the growing field of Vietnamese diasporic literature. As bearers of a traumatic history of colonization, war, and displacement, authors from the Vietnamese diaspora face the difficult task of negotiating a relationship with this past, and of determining the form and…
