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      Two Novels About Social Withdrawal

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      A chilly marriage; a catatonic protagonist.She wanted to be let alone, with a book.Ruth Harriet Louise/John Kobal Foundation, via Getty ImagesDear readers,Recently, a lovely and well-meaning friend texted me one of those trending articles that make you want to trade your smartphone for an abacus and never speak of the internet again. The gist of the piece was that in order to survive in a terminally online world, people hoping to advance in their chosen field — painter, novelist, late-middle-aged accountant — should, like some kind of manic TikTok David Mamet, Always Be Closing: flogging their wares, their souls, their “story” on whatever platforms manifest success in likes and view counts.In the face of so much frenzied curation and compulsory personal branding, how might a modern human maintain some iota of unshared selfhood, a soupçon of Greta Garbo mystique? (Even that legend is faulty; Garbo later insisted that she said not “I want to be alone” but “I want to be let alone,” a small but somehow critical distinction.)The power of absence and refusal is perhaps more edifying in literature — see “The Stranger,” “The Quiet Man,” the brick-wall calm of I-would-prefer-not-to Bartleby — than in real life. Even within the two titles featured in this week’s newsletter, withdrawal can be confusing and cruel, sometimes quite literally maddening. But that tension is also what makes these narratives pulse and shimmer on the page.I found both novels one late-winter evening in the English-language stacks of a pleasingly musty secondhand bookshop in Paris that looked like it wouldn’t know a branding opportunity if it kicked it in the cobblestones. Parfait.—LeahWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: 2 New Books by Terese Svoboda

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      Terese Svoboda considers what’s worth protecting in a new novel and a story collection.THE LONG SWIM, by Terese SvobodaROXY AND COCO, by Terese SvobodaEach story in “The Long Swim,” the latest collection from the interdisciplinary writer Terese Svoboda, begins with a tangled paragraph of striking sentences. Characters cross paths in unpredictably baroque relationships. Narrators find themselves on the edges of the action — the wife of “a beloved-enough cousin,” “the only woman” on the expedition — paddling their way to the center of the plot. Call it amped-up in medias res, and take a moment to find your bearings. You have been gleefully tossed into the deep end.The book’s 44 stories cover a lot of ground: New Zealand, Ottawa, Oxford, the Haight. A sinking cemetery built on a pond, the flight of a hot-air balloon, a town where a loose circus lion is reportedly on the prowl. There are hints of another world just below this one, giving the collection a destabilizing effect.A father’s affair with his daughter’s roommate roils beneath a friendship. On the other side of a closed door, a stepchild is either awake or lost to a drug overdose. A story of a honeymoon seems to be narrated by the couple’s fetus — “just a cell or two or three inside her womb” — until the narrator comes into focus as their grown child, imagining the parents’ relationship from memories heard secondhand. In another piece, an actor goes “hard,” completely catatonic and unmoving, despite his wife’s best efforts to revive him. When he returns from his trance, he claims he was held captive, trapped in a place where “the reception was fuzzy.”There is the sense that one could reach through each of these vignettes and overturn reality; characters struggle with the “too-close rhyme” of worlds hopelessly beyond reach. In the title story, on the beach at night with her family, the narrator sticks a flashlight in her mouth: “It lights me, my mouth so wide and red I’m scary, I could be a beating heart. Love, love, love.” As brightly as it shines, the light in this story and others turns off quickly. Most of the plots resolve in just a few pages, leaving the suggestion of other, longer swims rippling at their margins.In “Rain People,” we meet high school students who serve as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film “The Rain People.” After Coppola gets a shot of a teenager in a phone booth, 13 other teens climb in. “It was the era of piling: Volkswagen bugs with dozens of kids stuffed inside,” one of the pilers tells us. The booth topples, the glass breaks, and this image illustrates what’s wonderful about the collection. Svoboda’s prose is similarly stuffed to the brim — with invention, surprise and the sweaty mystery of whom we get tangled up with, and why.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      RuPaul Is Sending a Rainbow Bus to Give Away Books Targeted by Bans

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      The star, whose show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has an international following, is one of the founders of a new online bookstore promoting underrepresented authors. The giveaways are part of its outreach.At a time of book bans and efforts by state legislatures to ban drag shows, the performer and television producer who is arguably the country’s most famous drag star, RuPaul, is the co-founder of a new online bookstore that will be sending a rainbow school bus from the West Coast to the South to distribute the very books targeted by those bans.He announced on Monday that he was one of three business partners behind the bookstore, Allstora, which will promote underrepresented authors and provide writers with a greater share of profits than other online booksellers do.RuPaul said that this sort of book website would fill an important gap, especially in “these strange days, we’re living in,” to support the ideas of people “who are willing to push the conversation forward.”In recent years, there has been a sharp rise in efforts to restrict access to books at libraries in the United States, and most of the challenged books are by or about L.G.B.T.Q. people or people of color, according to library and free speech organizations. Some libraries have received bomb threats, and others have faced closure over efforts to remove books. At the same time, states have tried to ban drag shows and restrict access to health care for transgender people.RuPaul with Eric Cervini, left, co-founder and chief executive of Allstora, and Adam Powell, co-founder and director of the Rainbow Book Bus.AllstoraEnter RuPaul. Drag has been in popular culture for decades, but his reality competition show “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which is airing its sixteenth season and has more than a dozen international editions, has brought the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of drag performers to home audiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘The Witch of New York,’ by Alex Hortis

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      In “The Witch of New York,” Alex Hortis revisits a Staten Island case that helped usher in a lurid new era of journalism.THE WITCH OF NEW YORK: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice, by Alex HortisThe story began with a fire: On Christmas night in 1843, a Staten Island teenager spotted smoke coming from the white house owned by Capt. George Houseman. After he raised the alarm, men drinking at the local tavern came running to help put out the blaze. The captain was away at sea, but the men made a grim discovery in the burned-out kitchen: the bodies of Emeline Houseman, 24, and her toddler daughter, Ann Eliza.Suspicion soon fell upon Mary (Polly) Bodine, née Houseman, the dead woman’s sister-in-law. For one thing, Polly, 33 at the time of the fire, had already strayed from the conventions of the era. Born into the comfort and stability of one of the island’s most prosperous families, she blossomed in what was then an idyllic and still mostly rural setting just a ferry ride away from bustling Lower Manhattan, which had exploded in population in the first decades of the 1800s. Following an early marriage to an abusive drunk named Andrew Bodine, Polly returned to her parents’ house with her son and daughter. Now she was “a single mother on an island of gossips,” writes Alex Hortis in “The Witch of New York,” his fascinating look at the crime and what came after.It’s not just that Polly was different. She was also carrying on an affair with George Waite, an apothecary who had hired her teenage son, Albert, as his assistant. As Hortis points out, this was a profession with a “slightly nefarious reputation,” and indeed, Waite and others provided the drugs that women could use to end pregnancy. (Abortion was legal in the state of New York until 1845, when a new law criminalized the procedure and made women vulnerable to prosecution.) Still, Hortis writes, once Polly was identified as a suspect in the murders of Emeline and Ann Eliza, “the public would judge Polly’s character as a woman and her fate would turn on the outcome.”Later it would be rumored that Polly had become pregnant by George multiple times, and that he had provided the necessary means to end each one — except the last. At the time of the murders, Polly was around eight months pregnant. After attending the funeral, at which Emeline’s father, John Van Pelt, declared to his side of the family that she was “the murderess,” Polly fled, despite her condition and the cold, snowy weather. She surrendered on New Year’s Eve, and a few days later delivered a stillborn baby in her cell.This part of the narrative — the fire, the suspect, the police — is really just throat-clearing before Hortis reaches the book’s major topic: how an ascendant new institution, the tabloid press, both reflected and fomented public opinion (and prejudices) in a way that swayed justice itself.As Polly and George sat in jail awaiting trial, reporters and editors at The New York Herald, The New York Sun, The New-York Daily Tribune and others sharpened their pencils. They knew already that “murder mysteries that involved female victims or an element of sex sold newspapers” and the upstart Herald (founded just a few years earlier) quickly got to work on Polly, publishing a woodcut that emphasized her gaunt features and long nose. This visual shorthand, coupled with The Sun’s publication of a hoax confession shortly after, established the archetype through which American readers could understand the crime: Polly was a witch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Books About Lovable Unlikable People

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      Molly recommends a novel about a scornful teenager and a collection of interviews about a difficult filmmaker.Johann Joachim Winckelmann and bookAnton Raphael Mengs, circa 1777Dear readers,Some time ago I found a crown-of-thorns plant (Euphorbia milii) by the trash bins in our building. The plant had once been glorious but was abandoned in critical condition, with sap-oozing wounds and wizened limbs. I rehomed it and performed triage. The plant responded by perking and expanding at a “Little Shop of Horrors” rate, expressing tentacles that pricked all passersby, including me, with those murderous titular thorns. Euphorbia milii is a plant that can be loved but never liked.Books are full of characters with the same quality. (As is life.) Below, some irresistible figures with whom you’d never, ever want to grab a beer.—Molly“Lucy,” by Jamaica KincaidFiction, 1990This short novel is a study of several types of defiance: daughters defying mothers, employees defying employers, children defying logic. Lucy Josephine Potter arrives in Manhattan at age 19 from the West Indies to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple and their four kids. The beam of her intelligence is in the range of 200,000 lumens; in a matter of weeks she has taken the measure of the unhappily married couple, captivated their children and mapped out exactly how entangled in this family she wishes to become. (Not very.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Grief Is for People,’ by Sloane Crosley

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      In her new memoir, “Grief Is for People,” Sloane Crosley works through the death of a beloved friend and mentor.GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE, by Sloane CrosleySloane Crosley opens her new book, “Grief Is for People,” with an explanation: “Container first, emotion second.” It’s a four-word guide for the reader: Relieve yourself of the need to understand, and open your mind to the experience of death, suicide and the emotional debris found when you consider the ultimate inevitability.“Grief Is for People” is Crosley’s eighth book (counting the novel she co-wrote under a pen name and the anthology she edited) and her first memoir. In it, she ties together two losses she suffered in 2019. The first: the theft of a collection of jewelry, including a beloved green cocktail ring that Crosley inherited from her grandmother, which was stolen when Crosley’s home was burglarized one afternoon. Threaded with it is the death of Crosley’s close friend, mentor and former boss, Russell Perreault, who worked for years as the executive director of publicity and social media for Penguin Random House’s Vintage Books imprint. He took his own life just one month after Crosley’s home was broken into, and the close timing of both events intertwines them emotionally for her, ultimately altering the experience of both losses in her memory and hindering her ability to process either.The memoir is divided into five sections that allude to Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression and Afterward (instead of acceptance). In each section, Crosley dissects her memories for missed warning signs, lamenting her inability to predict what, and who, would soon be gone from her life. In the Depression, Anger and Bargaining sections, she anxiously considers if this was the moment that changed everything or maybe it was that one; she wonders if there was a right question she could have asked Perreault, something to say that would have rescued him from his fate.Perreault was a robust and complicated figure — he was a friend and mentor to Crosley, yes, but, as Crosley recounts, he also faced a series of complaints about his conduct inside the workplace and was confronting a host of other unknowns (to the author and to us). After his death, Crosley wants to know much more about him. She interrogates every interaction from their time together, especially those nearest to the tragedy. She wonders about the lack of invitations to his home in upstate New York, which, it turns out, Perreault had begun filling with more and more objects. (“He wasn’t a hoarder per se, but he was engaging in a land grab for the past, for souvenirs of a more contented time.”)A vein of tension in Crosley’s memoir is the desire to hold the memory of Perreault close, while trying to anticipate what life will be without him. Without his living voice present, she’s left to sift through old text messages and wonder “where everything I loved has gone and why.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Headshot,’ by Rita Bullwinkel

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      Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, “Headshot,” spotlights eight boxers in a national tournament and the struggles of their inner lives.HEADSHOT, by Rita BullwinkelIt takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as “Headshot,” Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, which is set in the world of young women’s boxing. To put this another way: Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.The young women in “Headshot” have driven a long way, many of them, to Reno for a national 18-and-under championship. Some have slept in their cars. The novel follows eight of these boxers, fight by fight from the semifinals on, in chapters divided into short sections. The event is at Bob’s Boxing Palace, a grandiose name for a cheerless warehouse. Its ring looks secondhand, as if it were bartered for on Craigslist, the author writes.To remark that Bullwinkel is observant about Reno and its casinos would be an understatement. “The people are like moths being lured to their own deaths, but instead of death all that awaits them are large, plastic, alcoholic slurpees,” she writes, an oddly incisive description of the American experience writ large. She is just as shrewd about the second-rate referees, one of whom resembles “a hated magistrate trying to give a speech to the masses during a time of war.” Whatever she turns her attention to glows under her scrutiny.A tournament bracket turned on its side, Bullwinkel notices, resembles a family tree, though almost none of these boxers are related. Some are still girls, really. But without straining, the author locates commonalities. Few are from stable families. They are flowers that bloomed in muddy vases. Several were the kind of children “who were made to believe by other children that they may not deserve to be alive.” They have something to prove, even if only here in “the abyss of boxing.”These women revel in their toned bodies, radiant with heat. A black eye is likened to war paint. A vein slithers like a baby snake under the skin. A left hook to the side makes sweat pop “like a shower of diamonds.” This is kinetic writing, but it would mean little without this novel’s undertow of human feeling and the rapt attention it pays to life’s bottom dogs, young women who are short on sophistication but long on motivation.The tournament bracket provides this novel’s scaffolding, each chapter a bout. We witness the boxers’ different styles and their variegated interior monologues. One mutters and grunts through her fights, the way Erroll Garner did under his piano riffs. Others walk in with all guns blazing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath

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      Sociopaths are modern-day boogeymen, and the word “sociopath” is casually tossed around to describe the worst, most amoral among us. But they are not boogeymen; they are real people and, according to Patric Gagne, widely misunderstood. Gagne wrote “Sociopath,” her buzzy forthcoming memoir, to try to correct some of those misunderstandings and provide a fuller […] More