Review by New York Times Review
LAKE SUCCESS, by Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $18.) Overwhelmed by his young son's autism diagnosis and dodging a subpoena from the S.E.C., this book's antihero leaves behind a job at a Manhattan hedge fund and hops on a Greyhound bus, hoping to reconnect with an ex-girlfriend teaching Holocaust studies in El Paso. Shteyngart's frantic humor keeps the story afloat and gleefully satirizes the upper class. SOMETHING WONDERFUL: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, by Todd S. Purdum. (Picador, $20.) This book is an authoritative portrait of the duo behind some of our best-loved musicals: "Oklahoma!," "South Pacific," "The King and I" and more. For all their masterpieces, the pair was often seen as stodgy and middlebrow. Purdum, a writer for Vanity Fair, shows how that wasn't at all the case. EARLY WORK, by Andrew Martin. (Picador, $17.) An aimless, struggling young writer is undone by a love affair, but this intelligent debut novel is about more than the calamity of romance: Martin stuffs his narrative with a cast of compelling characters, many of them authors, as they negotiate their desires. Our reviewer, Molly Young, praised the book, calling it "a tidy and perfectly ornamented novel with no unsanded corners or unglossed surfaces." BRING THE WAR HOME: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, by Kathleen Belew. (Harvard University, $16.95.) Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago, traces the beginning of the radical right in America to the Vietnam War. The book makes the argument that the white power movement led to the deadly Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which Belew sees as a reaction to the war. While much of the book draws on events from the 1970s and 1980s, it has particular resonance today. ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD: Stories, by Anjali Sachdeva. (Spiegel & Grau, $17.) In tales that leap across the globe, characters struggle to reconcile their hopes and dreams with their fates. Our reviewer, Julie Orringer, praised the collection, writing, "The brilliance of these stories - beyond the cool, precise artistry of their prose - is their embrace of both the known and the unknown, in a combination that feels truly original." NO ONE TELLS YOU THIS: A Memoir, by Glynnis MacNicol. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) Childless, single and in her 40s, MacNicol had a grim thought - that she had officially become "the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman's life worth living." Her smart memoir celebrates women who forge their own paths, ignoring the cultural scripts they've been handed.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Ostensibly, Peter Cunningham is a writer. But lately, all he has been doing is drinking, smoking pot, and teaching a bit at a local women's prison seemingly only to feel better about himself. It doesn't help that his college girlfriend is proving to be a successful poet and soon to be doctor. When he meets fellow writer Leslie, he is immediately drawn to her, and after reading her short story, he becomes completely smitten. Leslie seems to be everything he is not, both in life and as a writer: a confident, independent risk-taker flush with talent. Perhaps she'll lead him to a successful and happy life as a writer but of course, there's his girlfriend, and Leslie's fiancé. The novel is told in seven parts, breaking up the current-day story with brief snippets of characters' backstories. In his debut novel, Martin's writing is clever and funny, but Peter can be a trying narrator whose waywardness and terrible choices elicit more derision than empathy. Still, this is a solid choice for those who enjoy novels of lost twentysomethings' introspection.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
That moment in early adulthood when life seems full of possibilities but is also incredibly scary forms the sweet spot of Martin's astute debut. Peter Cunningham, a compulsive reader and lover of literature (but not of academia), teaches in a women's prison while trying to finish writing his first novel. He has abandoned a rigorous PhD program at Columbia to follow his undergraduate lover, Julia, to medical school in Virginia, where they adopt a dog, settle in, and drift apart. Peter finds a whole new set of friends and, with time on his hands, enjoys himself with them while Julia works tirelessly. For Peter, it's the mental acknowledgement of an estrangement that causes the separation to widen. Just as these new friends take over Peter's life, the novel shifts focus, from Peter's first-person narrative to a third-person examination of Leslie, a woman who has clear romantic chemistry with Peter. The book's seven parts alternate between these two perspectives. Leslie's backstory traces her young adulthood up to the point where she meets Peter. Her path is similarly rootless, with stints in New York and Montana for graduate school. Peter keeps the relationship a secret from Julia as long as he can, with significant consequences. This is a smart and beautifully observed story about fallible people. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two would-be writers embark on an affair, testing commitments to existing partners, their creative efforts, and each other in this clever morality tale.When Peter meets Leslie, sparks fly and the dialogue crackles with irony and snarkas it often determinedly does among Martin's small cast of well-educated artistic types. The two are around 30, and both are feeling doubt about their desire to be fiction writers. They also both have serious partners. Peter lives with Julia in Virginia, where she attends medical school and writes poetry. He teaches and tends to dither. "I preferred to do nothing. This was not Julia's favorite aspect of my character." Leslie has a fiance in Montana, but she is having second thoughts about the marriage and has come to Virginia to visit her aunt. Peter narrates the bulk of the tale, an anatomy of his affair with Leslie and dishonesty with Julia. (" We're adults,' I said, the universal verbal marker of childish behavior.") Three sections with a third-person narrator deliver slices of Leslie's life: a relationship with a woman in New York; how she got to know her fiance; and where she ends up. The structure is a bit creaky, though it gives Leslie some pointed limelight as a character apart from Peterand it gives readers a break from Peter's voice, which can be tiresome. His own narration reveals him to be irresponsible and living "[a] pantomime of commitment," marked by steady consumption of alcohol and pot. There are nearly as many references to drinking as there are to great writers. Meanwhile, his depiction of the warm, brainy, intriguing Julia makes his treatment of her all the worse. And Leslie: Is she Peter's muse or foil or female counterpart? Or none of the above? But that would be telling.A well-written and often amusing debut about what it takes to succeed or fail in love or art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
