Groff’s depictions of the untrammeled natural world, in all its beauty and brutality, are gorgeously rendered, as is the psychological portrait of her indefatigable protagonist, whose light blazes and then dims as her fortunes change. The girl recalls the cruelty of her mistress’ son, the vanity and hubris that prompted the family’s voyage to the New World, the frailty of the doomed child in her charge. As she forages for food, takes shelter from the elements, slinks away from predators, and suffers through bouts of fever and injury, she looks back on a life of servitude that began in a hellish English poorhouse and ended in a godforsaken colony on the other side of the ocean. Groff’s bravura latest is the story of a teenage servant girl who flees from a famished settlement in colonial America, braving the hostile fauna and frigid temperatures of the titular wilds as she plods stoically onwards, first in panicked flight and then in search of some vaguely imagined salvation. Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds(Riverhead, September 12) I realize I’m saying very little about plot here, but if you like the Paris Review essay, you’ll love this book. Never have I felt more tense about a dinner between a father and his adult daughter than I felt in the final scenes of this book.ĭey’s last novel was the eerie, original, highly atmospheric novel Heartbreaker (if you haven’t read it yet, stop what you’re doing and track down a copy-never will you read better prose narrated by a dog), but Daughter is much more in the vein of her 2018 Paris Review essay “ Mothers as Makers of Death.” In fact, I reread that essay and recognized several images from the novel (when you’ve got great material, reuse it!). I couldn’t help but think of Ferrante, too: how the greatest stakes are drawn from the most domestic scenarios, how the sentences sometimes extend beyond themselves and other times conclude in a cold staccato. Paul leaves women and children (most especially daughters) in his wake as he flits from relationship to relationship, absorbing love and affecting innocence, expecting the women in his life-even those he’s unceremoniously abandoned-to bolster him, enable him, tell him what to do. It’s almost impossible not to: though Mona Dean, a young playwright who appears frustratingly enigmatic to everyone other than her husband, Wes, and sister, Juliet, is the protagonist of Daughter, it’s her father, the former literary giant and beguiling patriarch Paul Dean, around whom the world spins. –Julia Hass, Contributing EditorĬlaudia Dey, Daughter (FSG, September 12)Īt one point during my breathless, two-sitting reading of Claudia Dey’s third novel, I thought, “Oh! This is a literary Succession.” And I was pleased to read Dey referencing that parallel, too. It took a genius to write it, and cements Zadie Smith as the British novelist of our time. I would describe The Fraud as I would describe life: it’s complicated, deep, ridiculous, scary, and funny. It’s an extremely smart and involved novel that asks all the right questions about morality and nuance. Ainsworth, and it is in her head and through her eyes we witness this time in history: the mostly male, self-congratulatory novelists she waited on, the household she gave her life to, and the trials that transfixed the nation. It takes those sturdy plot-points and then shoves them into the background, instead centering on a housekeeper named Eliza Touchet, who serves in the household of William Ainsworth (a once-successful British novelist who has been pushed into obscurity in the past hundred or so years.) Mrs. But even still, it’s hard to sum up exactly what this heady, clever book is about. The Fraud is about the Tichborne Trials in London in the late 19th century, trials that have fascinated the British public since they occurred, and it’s also about the cloistered literary scene of that time, which inarguably will include that larger-than-life, omnipresent figure, Charles Dickens. Thankfully for her, and for us, she managed to take this form and spin it into something entirely new, a feat only Smith could undertake. Zadie Smith has done what she never wished to do: she wrote a historical novel. Zadie Smith, The Fraud (Penguin Press, September 5) If you need a little guidance, here are the books of the season that the Literary Hub staff loved best-if you read any of them (or read something else great that we missed!), let us know what you think in the comments. And, of course, your stack of fall books. It may not be technically fall just yet, but the weather is beginning to cool (at least here in the Northeast), the days are getting shorter, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back on the menu-so it’s basically time to pull out your boots and blankets.
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