Review by New York Times Review
This article is by Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai. IN 2016, the feminist press Emily Books held a panel in Brooklyn titled, a bit cheekily, "What Is Women's Writing?" There was no consensus, much laughter and a warm, rowdy vibe. Eileen Myles read from her memoir and Ariana Reines read a poem, wearing a dress with a pattern of a city on fire. All of this felt exactly right. But even if it puts your teeth on edge to see "women's writing" cordoned off in quotes, you can't deny the particular power of today's women writers - their intensity of style and innovation. The books steering literature in new directions - to new forms, new concerns - almost invariably have a woman at the helm, an Elena Ferrante, a Rachel Cusk, a Zadie Smith. For Women's History Month, The Times's staff book critics - Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and myself, Parul Sehgal - sat down together to think about these writers who are opening new realms to us, whose books suggest and embody unexplored possibilities in form, feeling and knowledge. As we put together a reading list, we introduced a few parameters, for sanity's sake. We consigned ourselves to books written by women and published in the 21st century. And we limited our focus to fiction, but not without some grief. Memoir has emerged as a potent political and literary force in recent years (see the terrain-shifting work of Maggie Nelson, for example). And poets like Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif and Tracy K. Smith are some of the most distinctive voices working today. The books we selected are a diverse bunch. They are graphic novels, literary fiction and works inflected with horror and fantasy. They hail from Italy, Canada, Nigeria and South Korea. They are wildly experimental and staunchly realist. Any list, especially one as idiosyncratic as ours, is bound to leave off some worthy contenders, like "Wolf Hall," say, or "Gilead" or "A Visit From the Goon Squad" (to name just a few). This is not a comprehensive list, far from it. We hope it will be seen as a start - a way to single out these extraordinary books and the ability of fiction to challenge and reimagine the world. Some of the books we selected, like "Americanah," bring a fresh slant to the novel's natural concerns about character and fate and belonging. Others, like "How Should a Person Be?," pluck new questions out of the air, in this instance about authorship and authenticity. They ransack classic stories ("American Innovations") and invent genres out of whole cloth ("Her Body and Other Parties"). Every one of these books features a woman at the center. She is brainy (Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy), grimy ("Homesick for Another World"), terrorized ("The Vegetarian") and all of the above (the new mother in "Dept, of Speculation"). Each book's utterly distinct style emerges as its women try to invent a language for their lives. You could say these books are on the vanguard, but to suggest just one vanguard feels so insufficient. What makes these books so rich is their plenitude, the variety they contain and embody. "My story flows in more than one direction," Adrienne Rich once wrote. "A delta springing from the riverbed/with its five fingers spread." - Parul Sehgal "Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie If you were paying attention, you might have seen this book coming. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, "Purple Hibiscus," was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her second, "Half of a Yellow Sun," won the Orange Prize. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. But "Americanah" more than paid off on this writer's promise. It's a resonant and fiercely intellectual novel about a Nigerian woman named Ifemelu who leaves Africa for America and suffers here before starting a blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black" and winning a fellowship at Princeton. Adichie works both high and low; she's as adept at dissecting internet and hair salon culture as she is at parsing the overlapping and everchanging meanings of class and race in the United States. "Americanah" brings news, on many fronts, about how a new generation of immigrants is making its way in the world. It has lessons for every human about how to live. - Dwight Garner "The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For" by Alison Bechdel Long before "Fun Home" (2006) - perhaps the greatest, most consequential graphic memoir since Art Spiegelman's "Maus" - Alison Bechdel published a comic strip following the entanglements of a group of queer women living in the Midwest. The comics were funny, sexy and very frank - "half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel," Bechdel said. It was also a lifeline in an era when representations of queer life were few and far between. The strip ran from 1983 to 2008, and was collected into a book that still feels at the cusp of something new: a way of folding the world into fiction, of examining how the personal and the political intersect in intimate life. Over 20 years, Bechdel's radical, sweetly earnest crew falls in and out of love, marches on Washington, flirts, bears children, goes broke, reads novels, gets sick - in short, ages. As they refine and redefine their notions of gender, kinship and community, the strip grows up alongside them. And this all happens in Bechdel's beautifully crowded panels, in the matter-of-fact diversity of her men and women and their bodies: femme, butch, slim, scrawny, ample. Her lines feel like a caress. These characters are loved - and you fall right in love with them too. - Parul Sehgal "Outline," by Rachel Cusk "Outline" is a crisp, poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people. The book's events take place over the several days that a divorced English writer named Faye spends in Athens, where she has gone to teach a writing class. Little happens but everything seems to happen. Rachel Cusk creates conversations that are as condensed and vivid as theater. Sometimes the chapters in "Outline" bring Harold Pinter or Wallace Shawn or Annie Baker to mind, at other times J. M. Coetzee or Diane Johnson. With no traditional narrative to hang onto, no moving in and out of rooms, Faye is left with the sound of her own mind, and it's a mind that is subtle, precise and melancholy. This is an exacting novel with no wasted motion. - Dwight Garner "The Neapolitan Novels," by Elena Ferrante Elena Ferrante's blockbuster novels, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, follow the entwined lives of two childhood friends with an intensity and psychological acuity that put contemporary fiction on notice. The books are also social novels of remarkable and subtle power, offering a history of postwar Italy and the terrorism of the Camorra. But everything comes filtered through the personal lives of Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, ordinary women who would never make it into the history books. Lila and Elena grew up in the slums of Naples, in a clinch so ardent and dangerous that to call it friendship feels hideously inadequate. The series carries us through 50 years, as the women rescue and betray each other, struggle to escape the slums and their mothers, and become mothers themselves. Ferrante captures the barely contained violence of domestic life and is taboo-shattering in her unsparing and relentless exploration of the secret lives of women - their ambivalence and shame. Like Lena, these books give off "an odor of wildness." Their intelligence cuts into the skin. - Parul Sehgal "American Innovations," by Rivka Galchen At the heart of Borges's short story "The Aleph" is a dead woman, forced to stay silent even as the plot orbits around her. In one of the stories in Rivka Galchen's witty, winning collection, the silent woman finally speaks. Each story remixes a classic of the form - Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," Gogol's "The Nose," James Joyce's "Araby" - but plops a woman at the center. They're clever women - "1 language along," one says of arguing with her husband - trained in quantum mechanics and epigenetics but baffled by surreal developments (one suddenly sprouts a breast on her back) or merely the sundry ordinary indignities of being someone's daughter, someone's wife. The DNA in these stories may be old, but Galchen has uncovered a new register and a new space for the domestic and the fantastic to meet. There might be no better model for looking to the past in order to move forward. - Parul Sehgal "Asymmetry," by Lisa Halliday Mozart supposedly said that music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them. Lisa Halliday's masterly first novel plays out in these spaces - in the gulf between two story strands that never intersect: a MayDecember romance between a young woman and an older writer, and an fraqi-American economist detained at an airport. In that silence, as you uncover the points of congruence, so too do you uncover Halliday's beautiful argument about the pleasure and obligations of fiction. She asks difficult questions about the ebb and flow of power in relationships, and about the fetishizing (and limitations) of storytelling as a vehicle for empathy, ft feels as if the issues she has raised - both explicitly and with the book's canny structure - have sown seeds that fiction will harvest for years to come. - Parul Sehgal "How Should a Person Be?," by Sheila Heti The protagonist of Sheila Heti's thorny novel is a young divorced woman, living in Toronto, who is a heap of contradictions. She has a Jungian analyst yet works at a beauty salon. She's writing a play for a feminist theater yet is in sexual thrall to a man named Israel. She is concerned with the biggest questions ("How do you build a soul?") but realizes that "to go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life." Heti's prose is dark and perceptive. She has a special gift, given to few, of being able to deliver prose that feels like actual, flickering, unmediated, sometimes humiliating thought. Speaking about art with a friend, Heti's narrator says: "You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything." There is wit in Heti's novel, for sure, but also a sense that she is drawing from a deep well, and that this will not be her last major book. - Dwight Garner "The Vegetarian," by Han Kang Don't be fooled by the innocuous title; Han Kang's triptych of a novel, translated by Deborah Smith, is surreal, shocking and savage. After a terrifying and bloody dream, a Korean housewife named Yeong-hye stops eating meat; it's a renunciation that feels unbearably threatening to her narcissistic, conventional husband and her bitter tyrant of a father, both of whom try to force her back to conformity. Women's bodies are never culturally neutral, and Yeonghye makes the objectification explicit, registering her resistance the only way she knows how: with unrelenting passivity. Her sister institutionalizes her. Her brother-inlaw becomes erotically obsessed with her. Eventually Yeong-hye stops eating much of anything and starts sunning herself, in a bid to leave the animal world altogether and photosynthesize into a different life-form. In Smith's elegant translation, the story proceeds deliberately, a steady march of corporeal horror and carnal dread. - Jennifer Szalai "The Flamethrowers," by Rachel Kushner Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers" unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel, ft plays out as if on fmax, or simply higher-grade film stock. This is a coming-of-age novel of a sort, set in the 1970s, about a young woman who has come to New York to turn her fascination with motorcycles into an art career. We know her only as Reno, her nickname, because that's where she's from. In Kushner's prose you find a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. This is a novel with dozens of topics on its mind: speed and sex, reality and counterreality, art and intellect, politics and fear, and perhaps above all - a subject too often left solely in male hands - "the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine." - Dwight Garner "Her Body and Other Parties," by Carmen Maria Machado Mysterious afflictions stalk the land, ghosts of women conceal themselves in the seams of prom dresses, a wife struggles to keep her husband from removing a ribbon she keeps strategically tied around her neck. Carmen Maria Machado brings together horror, fairy tales, fantasy and police procedurals to create a glittering genre all her own, one that looks hard at what we fear and what we desire - and then mischievously scrambles everything together. There is abundant, utterly hypnotic invention in these stories, but it's the psychological realism at their core, their depictions of the everyday violence visited upon women, that gives them their otherworldly power. - Parul Sehgal "Dept, of Speculation," by Jenny Offill The tiny size of Jenny Offill's novel belies how capacious it is. A woman writer with grand plans to become an "art monster" finds her ambitions thwarted by motherhood and marital crisis. She reveals her story in glimpses, fragmentary dispatches that accumulate with increasing urgency into a ringing, resonant whole. A Post-ft note that says "WORK NOT LOVE"; marriage tips from the Greek poet Hesiod; a colicky baby who calms down under the harsh lights of the Rite Aid: Offill writes with a light but insistent touch, chronicling the details of domestic life without rendering them sentimental or trivial. The perspective shifts too - from first person to third person and back to first person again - reflecting the protagonist's changing understanding of who she is and how she relates to those she loves. The result is an immersive experience that feels a bit like new parenthood itself: uncanny yet very real. - Jennifer Szalai "Homesick for Another World," by Ottessa Moshfegh Ottessa Moshfegh's dark, confident, prickling stories are mostly about youngish men and women who have taken a wrong turn somewhere and find themselves hunkering down in nowhere towns, dismal cabins, shabby apartments. Like the photographer Diane Arbus, Moshfegh lights things from below. Psychologically, you don't see well-set dinner tables in her fiction. You see the chewed gum and crusted snot stuck to the table's underside, the run in the hostess's stocking. There is a good deal of pus, acne, scarring and vomit. The transgressive sex in her stories can put you in mind of Mary Gaitskill. Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter. But this writer's voice is entirely her own. The humor here is wild, modern and unnerving, like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood. - Dwight Garner "NW," by Zadie Smith Tidy and traditional narratives that move smoothly from points A to B to C are as familiar and comforting as they are profoundly artificial. Zadie Smith's novel, set in a working-class neighborhood of northwest London, feels more immediate and realistic the more experimental it becomes. She deploys stream-of-consciousness, enjambment, disjointed fragments and irregular line breaks to convey the experiences of four Londoners to devastating effect. What starts off as an uncomfortable encounter between former schoolmates - one who has less and one who has more - unfurls into a searching exploration of race and class, money and sex. Smith has a finely tuned ear for a range of registers, as well as an acute understanding of how easily we betray our better selves. - Jennifer Szalai "Salvage the Bones," by Jesmyn Ward In Jesmyn Ward's gorgeous, gutting novel, 15-year-old Esch Batiste lives with her brothers and their widowed father in Bois Sauvage, a poor corner of coastal Mississippi, waiting for a gathering storm. This one is called Katrina, and over the course of 12 days in August, warnings on the radio and television mark out the steady drumbeat of impending catastrophe, as the Batiste family starts its preparations while continuing to make do. Esch is at once pragmatic and dreamy, preparing meals and dressing wounds, seeing herself as a figure in Greek myth. She is beloved like Eurydice and Daphne; she is vengeful like Medea. She is also pregnant. Ward taps the well of ancient tragedy to concoct something more tender but no less harrowing. Her sentences are lush, thick with portent, like the air that hangs heavy before the flood. - Jennifer Szalai "Mislaid," by Nell Zink Elizabethan comedy meets saw-toothed social satire in Nell Zink's 2015 novel, which follows the improbable and very ill-starred couple of Lee Fleming (gay) and Peggy Vaillancourt (lesbian, his student). Two children later, Peggy is on the run with her daughter. They hide in a rural black community and pretend to be black themselves. "Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people," the narrator tells us. "Mislaid" is set squarely on the third rail of racial, gender and sexual identity, ft attacks every piety in its purview - without ever losing its inimitable screwball charm. - Parul Sehgal
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 25, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The greatest lesbian soap opera 527 episodes and, though suspended at the moment, counting is Bechdel's miraculously well-sustained chronicling of a circle of friends over the course of 20 years, Dykes to Watch Out For. Like its only possible peer among current comic strips, Lynn Johnston's For Better or Worse, and its great forebear, Frank King's GasolineAlley, Dykes plays out in real time. Characters age, change, see their parents die, and have children. Basically, everything revolves around erstwhile radical lesbian Mo, whose worries for the future persist as she and her friends realize their dreams. Life does get better for gay people, though struggles continue, as the determined-to-be-transgender preteen son of a newer cast member and the dissolution of two long-lived lesbian marriages remind them and us. Mo's kvetching centrality is complemented by the chorus of skewed radio and TV commentary and headlines that strikingly often intones a satirical leitmotiv under the characters' conversation, which is always pitch-perfect for the highly intelligent, well-educated, earnestly committed, and witty bunch they are. Bechdel's comics autobiography Fun Home (2006) has brought her much greater general attention than Dykes ever did, but make no mistake the strip is her masterpiece.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This ongoing comic strip chronicles the lives of a tight-knit group of lesbian friends over an astounding 21 years of life, work, love, boredom, political activism and countless reversals of fortune. At its heart are six women: the promiscuous Lois, a feminist bookstore clerk with a penchant for gender-bending; her two roommates, the overworked academic Ginger and self-identified "bisexual lesbian" Sparrow; their domestically partnered friends Clarice and Toni; and Mo, who despite (or perhaps because of) her frequent politically charged outbursts of neurosis is the hub of her circle. These characters, flawed but endearing, are brought to life by Bechdel's quirky artistic sensibility. Facial expressions are carefully nuanced, and she seems to take great joy in using small details to differentiate emotions. Late in the collection, when a character receives treatment for cancer, a tiny caret in her cheek is enough to transform her from a fresh-faced mischief-maker into a sallow and frightened chemo patient. What cannot be overemphasized is the sheer scope of the collection, which follows these women from idealistic young adulthood to contentedly disillusioned middle age and, for some, parenthood. All eventually end up a little more haggard than they began, but there isn't one whose Bechdel-illustrated bags under her eyes were not hard fought for and hard won. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For over 20 years, Dykes to Watch Out For has followed an endearingly individual group of lesbians and their friends-some straight and male-in a humorous yet poignantly human soap opera with an op-ed edge and wide following. The core cast includes prickly, hyper-politically conscious Mo (Monica) as the hub; Mo's current lover, pomo-academic Sydney; long-term partners and harassed parents Toni and Clarice; new parents Sparrow and Stuart; bed-hopping bookstore clerk Lois; and overworked teacher Ginger. The characters age in real time through reversals in love, fortune, and self-understanding. Winner of numerous awards and carried in over 50 publications, DTWOF is a real masterpiece that sparkles with wit and wry commentary. Eleven collections are available, plus this omnibus volume that includes selections from the entire run. Ages 18 up.-Martha Cornog, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
