These New Books Will Get You Through the Dog Days of Summer
The bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife, Téa Obreht, delivers a stunning tale of derring-do. Edwidge Danticat's stirring new story collection feeds the mind and the soul. And Jia Tolentino's debut essay collection probes millennial womanhood.
Inland by Téa Obreht
Inland, Téa Obreht’s mordantly imaginative new novel, comprises two stories that do not exactly intertwine but run, like rivers, in view of each other, sometimes crossing, headed toward a remote meeting point. The first concerns an immigrant known as Lurie, who begins as an abandoned child and becomes—in the opening pages—first an errand boy for a collector of corpses, then a body thief, then a conduit for the dead and a pickpocket, then an accidental murderer, after which he goes on the lam. Eventually, he ends up a cameleer; that is, in charge of one of a number of camels brought to Texas for their ability to transport enormous weights long distances without stopping for water.
Mingled with Lurie’s tale is an account of just over 24 eventful hours in the life of Nora Lark, a frontierswoman in Arizona Territory in 1893. Nora has three living sons, one talkative dead daughter, a silent grandmother, a ward with a spiritualist bent, a missing husband, and a literal constant thirst. Lurie’s sections are rollicking and full of movement; Nora’s sprawl in the manner of great landscape paintings. This is a desert story rendered in technicolor.
Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever change the way you think about a thing, just through her powers of description—one scene in which the residents of a small Texas town empty their houses to see how much a camel might carry haunts me still—and she can snap your head back with an aphorism. “I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions,” says Lurie, and who alive today could argue?
Inland is an ambitious and beautiful work about many things: immigration, the afterlife, responsibility, guilt, marriage, parenthood, revenge, all the roads and waterways that led to America. Miraculously, it’s also a page-turner and a mystery, as well as a love letter to a camel, and, like a camel, improbable and splendid, something to happily puzzle over at first and take your breath away at the end.—Elizabeth McCracken
Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
Everything Inside (Pantheon) is a haunting, profound collection by Edwidge Danticat—an answered prayer for those who have long treasured her essential contributions to the Caribbean literary canon, beginning with 1994’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The eight intimate tales, centered primarily around the diverse experiences of women in Port-au-Prince and Miami’s Haitian diaspora, probe what it means to love a deeply troubled country, to leave it, and to then come home.
With little introduction, we drop into people’s lives midcrisis, just as they’re confronting choices from which there’s no turning back; these characters feel not like strangers, but close friends. In “The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special,” a woman who has moved back to Haiti to open a hotel with her husband is forced to reckon with her privilege when the young nanny caring for her child is diagnosed with AIDS. In “Dosas,” musician Blaise borrows money from his ex-wife, Elsie, to pay the ransom for his kidnapped girlfriend—the woman he left Elsie for. And in “Seven Stories,” Brooklyn-based Kimberly writes an essay about her childhood friend Callie’s traumatic past, including her father’s assassination. The publication of the piece leads to their reconnection on an unnamed Caribbean island, where Callie has married the country’s prime minister. How does an artist write so deftly from the outside about people’s interior lives? Everything Inside is an answer to that question: This remarkable writer shows us how. —Alexia Arthurs
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Mixing memoir and incisive cultural criticism, New Yorker staff writer and former Jezebel deputy editor Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (Random House) exposes what it’s like for women to come of age amid the internet’s vast, mirage-laden wasteland. Considering topics ranging from “the rise of athleisure as late-capitalist fetishwear” to the proliferation of Instagram-mandated, faux-empowering entrepreneurial endeavors that promise “photogenic personal confidence is the key to unlocking the riches of the world,” she reckons with the notion that “today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form.”
Tolentino’s restless intellect often shepherds the reader to unpredictable places. In an essay on her participation in the early-aughts teen reality show Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico, for instance, she somehow spins an anecdote about speed-eating hot mayonnaise into a musing on the solipsism and performative passivity of youth: “I’ve always felt that I was special and acted accordingly.”
Tolentino is special. With Trick Mirror, she has solidified her status as one of our most evocative social commentators. —Michelle Hart
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