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Our celebration of fabulous reviews this week includes Becca Rothfeld on Charlotte Shanes An honest womanHillary Kelly on Jo Hamyas The HypocriteMegan O’Grady on Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s MatchboxDaniel Felsenthal about Beth Linker Slurpand Matthew Stewart about Brenda Wineapples Keeping the faith.
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“Writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane defies this grim image. She is neither desperate nor oppressed; she has never been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery; and as far as I can tell, she has never yearned for the sudden appearance of a white knight. An honest woman…is a corrective to disinterested narratives in which sex work is seen as nothing more than a relentless degradation. Shane’s path into the world of escorting was sometimes bumpy, but it was freely chosen…
Shane’s memoir begins with memories of her youth, when she was an avid researcher of pleasure, and ends with a moving account of her marriage to a man she loves. In less than 200 pages, the book manages to be part autobiography, part anthropological investigation, and part feminist treatise – but above all, it is a eulogy to Roger (not his real name, of course), who was Shane’s client for nearly a decade…The greatest tragedy of Shane’s career is not the cliched one imagined by squeamish critics of sex work. It’s not that she became devalued or debauched, or that she became too jaded to love, or that she was routinely exploited. It’s just the everyday but unbearable catastrophe of death.”
–Becca Rothfeld on Charlotte Shanes An honest woman: memories of love and sex work (The Washington Post)
“The Hypocrite is a brilliant litmus test for a novel, which is not to say it is indecisive or wavering. Hamya, an older member of Generation Z, suggests that several theories can be true at once—that baby boomers can be outraged by changing social mores while their children inspire necessary change, that men and women can attack each other intellectually with equally hurtful ferocity, that the question of how to deal with womanizers (to use an intentionally outdated term) is not easily answered by pillorying them. How to interpret The Hypocrite says more about you than about the novel: Hamya knows that your pity is as valuable – and misleading – as that of her characters …
What Hamya brings to this modern debacle is, in addition to a linguistic precision and a sense of structure that would have made her contemporaries tremble, a tenderness that one would not expect. This is one of the reasons why The Hypocrite cannot be easily classified among the #MeToo novels despite its subject matter. Pity is a natural feeling between generations, each of which thinks that the other is surely misunderstanding something important in life – and yet the bonds are strong: it is almost impossible to stop recognizing the humanity of your own parents or children. Hamya manages to create a mess with The Hypocriteand I mean that as high praise. Contemporary literature too often seeks the relief of an imaginary perfect morality, perhaps because so many readers today confuse the beliefs of the characters and their creator. It’s a pleasure to read a 27-year-old author using the power of the novel to obscure certainties about “bad people” – and goad readers into joining in.”
–Hillary Kelly on Jo Hamyas The Hypocrite (The Atlantic)
“Mina’s Matchbox is above all a book about storytelling, the transmission of unresolved emotions that it enables, and the way our futures are determined in large part by our ability to imagine them. The novel is full of pocket stories and references to literary classics that become a kind of liturgy for the girls, such as Katherine Mansfield’s The garden party and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snowland— although another Japanese novel about a wealthy Ashiya family whose standard of living is in danger of dwindling comes to mind: Junichiro Tanizaki’s World War II-era masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters. A family home is not just architecture, but a shared collection of stories – ideas, values and narratives in which one lives…
Tomoko’s innocent perspective as the family outsider – rendered in Ogawa’s snappy prose, translated by Stephen Snyder – balances the almost Wes Anderson-esque cuteness of the production (notwithstanding Ogawa’s jarring use of animals as cute props)… The function of memory – the memories we share with those we love, as well as those we agree with or deliberately forget in the telling of the story – is a fascination for Ogawa… ‘We look at the world once, in childhood,’ wrote Louise Glück in her 1996 poem ‘Nostos.’ ‘The rest is memory.’ Ogawa captures the enduring spark of that imprint and its oracular glow. We relive those moments when the match was first lit, when it still felt as if the future was in our hands.”
–Megan O’Grady on Yoko Ogawa Mina’s Matchbox (The New York Times Book Review)
“As Beth Linker, professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, makes clear in her robust, often astonishing new book, Slouch: Posture panic in modern America, Upright postures are signs of American conformity… Linker shows how disabilityism has permeated the country’s social fabric and woven itself into its growing industries, including clothing and furniture manufacturing and, more recently, pharmaceuticals. Her book’s remarkable scope connects an over-discussed and under-studied medical subject to both broad currents and specific phenomena of the past century, from racism and feminist reform to Buster Brown shoes and the lumbar support chair. A strict ideal of good posture has become essentially universal, but that is hardly a sign of scientific progress: It is an indicator of how societal pressures have driven huge swathes of the population to embrace an untruth…
The history of posture science, and evolutionary science in general, is replete with examples of disadvantaged, disabled, and non-white people being used as experimental subjects. Yet the value of good posture has become self-evident, and an entire economy has been built around its salutary promise. How can we break free from such a brittle formulation that has become increasingly entrenched in our culture for 150 years? We would have to abandon the idea that a correct human anatomy exists. In our capitalist status quo, this would mean positing a potentially more marketable proposition: we could celebrate human diversity rather than perpetuating the elusive, abusive paradigm of physical perfection.”
–Daniel Felsenthal about Beth Linker Wimp: Attitude panic in modern America (The New Republic)
“Schools banned books. White supremacists marched in the streets. The donor class waged a war on democracy. Immigrants, wayward women, bad music and a godless elite were blamed for, well, everything. Much about the 1920s sounds familiar today. How are we to understand the last time America was so close to fascism? … The Scopes trial of 1925 – the ‘monkey trial,’ as the irascible journalist H.L. Mencken called it – was one of those uniquely American events that regularly fill the newspapers of a nation constantly asking itself questions, and which comes to life again in this riveting story. That story is usually told as an epic confrontation between faith and science, with the past on one side and the future on the other. Wineapple presents it in a much more interesting way as a conflict between political visions that remain very much alive in the present. The 1925 “trial of the century” was much more about political theater than legal issues or scientific theories, she makes clear, and everyone knew who the two stars of the show were…
With his rumpled shirt and cigarette-lined face, (Clarance Darrow) strides through these pages, in the words of a friend, “as human as a pie à la mode,” a humanist with plenty of drive, a champion of the damned with a penchant for headlines… Although widely portrayed as a throwback seeking to anchor America in a simpler past, (William Jennings) Bryan is, as Wineapple suggests, better understood as a political entrepreneur feeling his way into a steely future in which the enormous powers of a modern state would be tied to the intolerance of the majority population and the demon-infested imagination of ethnonationalism… History at its most delicious, presented free from the musty odor of the archives, where it was obviously compiled with great care.”
–Matthew Stewart on Brenda Wineapples Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Divided a Nation(The New York Times Book Review)
