Author: Jennifer Graham

(Harvest, 203 pages)

If you are a woman of a certain age who spends any time on social media, you’ve likely encountered Melani Sanders, glasses on her head, glasses on her face, glasses on a lanyard around her neck, speaking deadpan to the camera about the things she doesn’t care about.

Sometimes she’s wearing a shower cap, too, or has a travel pillow around her neck. The more ridiculous the get-up, the better. It’s comedy gold, born in a Whole Foods parking lot.

“Hello, and welcome to all new and existing members of the We Do Not Care Club,” she says. “This is a club for all women going through perimenopause, menopause and beyond. We are putting the world on notice that we simply just do not care much anymore.”

With dramatic effect, she opens a notebook and takes out a pen, which she uncaps with her mouth. “Let’s go ahead and get started with today’s announcements.”

The announcements are the punchlines — the things Sanders doesn’t care about anymore:

We Do Not Care if we are wearing leggings and a graphic tee. We are dressed for the day. We’re ready for bed and possibly dressed for tomorrow.

We Do Not Care if we excel at work. We will be meeting expectations.

We Do Not Care if you have no interest in true-crime stories. Celebrity gossip does not interest us; we need to know why Ann in Toledo offed her husband in 1983.

After the announcements, she invites her audience to send her things they don’t care about anymore. Couldn’t be simpler. Also couldn’t be more viral.

Not even a year after her first “Do Not Care” video hit the internet, Sanders is out with a book, the idea of which will surely thrill her followers. Just the idea — not the book.

What makes Sanders so funny on Instagram — her deadpan delivery — is absent on the printed page, and even the same jokes aren’t as funny when you’re reading them yourself. Moreover, trying to make her short-form persona become long-form in a book, Sanders has produced a book that is part menopause primer, part autobiography, part social media posts and part fourth-grade diary. These things do not go together. The wise crone has no use, truly, for any book whose resources include an Official We Do Not Care Club Membership Card, with dotted lines so you can cut it out.

The clippable Letter to Coworkers is probably a joke? Not so the templates for the letters she suggests we send elected representatives supporting menopause care and research. Peak ridiculousness comes with the lyrics to a song — two full pages of lyrics — that begin:

We’re the We Do Not Care Club / She’s Melani, the fierce leader / Where peri and menopause / Will not ever defeat us.

There were Barney the Purple Dinosaur songs that were more thoughtful and intelligent than this.

A married mom of three, Sanders had a modest social media following with whom she shared household tips and snippets of family life before she went viral pretty much by accident. It is that story, summarized in a few opening pages, that holds narrative promise, promise snuffed out with the “handbook” format, with its club songs and club patches (like Scouting patches).

The only tolerable parts of this book are the occasional “Real Talk with Melani” pages, where she gives tidbits of her life with her husband and their three sons, before ripping us away for a list of things club members have forgotten (“vaccuum cleaner attachments / books we were just reading / sanity”) and all manner of trite self-love exercises. Brief bios of honorary members of the Club add no heft, nor do “Challenges of the Day” such as silencing your inner critic.

Sanders’s appeal is more than comedy. But the deeper issues she speaks to are not plumbed here.

The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook is evidence that there are many things worse than social media, and one of them is books born of social media. By all means, if you enjoy cutting dotted lines with safety scissors, there is fun to be had with this book. If not, just find Sanders on social media. She’s a queen there, deservedly. Not in this book. D

Featured Photo: The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook, by Melani Sanders

(Roxane Gay Books, 291 pages)

“You don’t realize how small your life has become until something wreaks havoc, until the pin is removed on which the threads of reality hang.”

That’s Rose Cutler musing on the havoc in her spare bedroom, where her 6-year-old nephew is barking and playing with chew toys, having been inhabited by the soul of a dead corgi.

This is the improbable premise of The Hitch, Sara Levine’s comic novel about a young woman whose world is thrown into chaos by an otherworldly event. Single and childless by choice, Rose lives alone — very comfortably, thanks to the success of her artisanal yogurt business. She’s a vegan, sharing recipes throughout. She’s also a moral scold who can’t get through a meal or a conversation without a lecture about the environmental problems caused by this, that or the other, and yet seems bewildered at the effect this has on other people. (“Chat rooms, social media platforms, electronic bulletin boards — people routinely misunderstand my tone,” she says.)

Rose has a younger brother, Victor, to whom she became a de facto mom after their parents died. Now that Victor is married and has a child, Rose is overly invested in the life of her nephew; spending two hours with Nathan every Saturday is the highlight of her week.

When Rose’s brother and sister-in-law announce they are visiting Mexico for a week to reconnect as a couple, she is thrilled to have Nathan stay with her. But she does not have a contingency plan for the dark turn the week takes when her dog, a massive Newfoundland, accidentally kills a corgi in a park and her nephew insists the soul of the corgi entered him.

This is a ludicrous premise, but Levine is known for absurdity. One of her previous books has three exclamation points in the title (Treasure Island!!!); I’ve not read it but am informed by the internet that it’s a cult classic. The internet also informs that she writes in the style of Kevin Wilson, who has an enormously appealing dry wit. And even though Levine’s muse appears to be slightly unhinged and The Hitch dangles on the precipice of lunacy, it works.

It works because (a) Levine is funny and (b) Rose, despite her circumstances, is achingly familiar; we all know someone like her, or perhaps we are her, if we’re willing to admit it. Rose describes herself as a “scientifically literate person with ethical standards,” and she is struggling to live in a world that violates these standards at every turn. Her own company, the Cultured Cow, violates them, adding to her inner turmoil.

Her comic foil is her sister-in-law, Astrid — Nathan’s mother — who “isn’t a dog person. Or a cat person. Or a people person.”

As much as Victor and Astrid love Nathan, they draw the line on their animal-loving son getting a dog, and so when the soul of the corgi enters him, Nathan is enthusiastic — he sees it as getting an “inner dog.” Rose, however, sees it as her nephew becoming possessed by a corgi, a turn of events made worse by the fact that she doesn’t like corgis: “The bat ears and the stubby legs, the huge head and the black-rimmed prostitute eyes; the length of the body, the absence of a tail! The breed is engineered to make people smile, specifically those people who need to patronize an animal in order to love it.” She is desperate to exorcise the corgi from her nephew before her brother and sister-in-law return from vacation. Hilarity ensues. And some sadness, too, as we begin to understand what motivates Rose, and how lonely she is.

The Hitch is by no means the great American novel, nor does it aspire to be. It’s more like a single episode of a sitcom contained in a book. Humorless vegans and corgi lovers best stay away, but for everyone else Levine offers a light-hearted diversion from the more reality-based cares of the world. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: The Hitch, by Sara Levine

(Summit Books, 229 pages)

A dozen years ago Tom Layward learned his wife had an affair. He decided he’d stay with her until his youngest child left home.

Now that milestone has arrived. Tom’s son, Michael, is living in Los Angeles, coming home as rarely as he can get away with; he has become “one of those young people who decides that contact with their family is not a source of happiness, so you have to limit it to unavoidable occasions.” His daughter, Miri, is headed to Carnegie Mellon University and trying to extract herself from a romantic relationship before she goes.

For Tom and his wife, Amy, the past 12 years have been an exercise in marital managed care. Most people who stay married for the long haul, Tom observes, do so because “you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.”

With that, author Ben Markovits signals what the ride of Tom Layward’s life will be like in his 12th novel, The Rest of Our Lives: an excavation of a marriage and its attendant family life, served with droll wit that is a welcome interruption to Tom’s matter-of-fact recitation of events.

It’s a quite manly book, unusual in a fiction market oversaturated with women’s points of view.

Tom, the first-person narrator, is a 55-year-old law professor who departed from literature when he realized he actually would have to write a book. He met his future wife (who “looks like the kind of woman who can ride a horse, which she actually can”) when they were both graduate students in Boston. Amy’s family has a vacation home on the Cape, which is where we first observe the Layward family’s dynamics: the simmering conflict between husband and wife, and between wife and daughter, of which Tom notes, “from the beginning their relationship was one long argument.”

Tom’s relationship with his kids is less fraught; he feels comfortable talking with his son, and he is looking forward to driving his daughter from their home in Scarsdale, New York, to Pittsburgh, as a family. When Amy decides not to go, he doesn’t object and is still planning to drive home after moving his daughter in.

But after spending the night in the spare bedroom of a friend in Pittsburgh, he takes off on an impromptu road trip that will begin with a visit to his brother and end with a visit to his son, first visiting a Walmart to buy clothes, snacks and a basketball for the road. (“If you ever want to feel your place in the scales of the universe, go into a Walmart Supercenter,” Tom says.)

He has the bandwidth for a road trip because, unbeknownst to Amy, he’s on leave from his job, having inadvertently become entangled with a scandal through a client. When she reaches him, bewildered, he’s in Akron and vaguely explains that he needs a few days to himself. It’s clear he’s not even really sure what he is doing or what he will do next. Meanwhile, the physical problems he’s been having for months — waking up with a puffy face and draining eyes — are worsening. Everyone has been telling him to get medical help, but Tom is too involved in his existential crises and keeps writing the symptoms off as long Covid.

Throughout the trip Tom ruminates on his marriage, which he concludes “was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than B overall on the rest of your life.” Along the way we learn more about Tom’s childhood and other aspects of his life.

He doesn’t have an especially compelling voice, which can make it difficult to want to stick with him when he’s talking about minutiae, such as what he and others are eating. There are no made-for-Hollywood plot twists here, just the quiet unspooling of a life, with two questions that beckon the reader to the end: What’s wrong with Tom physically, and will he leave his wife?

The Rest of Our Lives, first published in the U.K.,was on the short list for 2025’s Booker Prize, which may baffle some readers who find the novel’s plodding pace tough sledding. But it doesn’t so much intend to dazzle as to evoke, and its heart and intelligence won me over, as did its understated ending. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 401 pages)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, George Packer often traveled between rural New York and New York City. They seemed like two different worlds, he told the Pittsburgh Review of Books. The dichotomy underpins Packer’s dystopian novel The Emergency.

It centers on 48-year-old surgeon Dr. Hugo Rustin, struggling to adapt to his new life after the collapse of the government, defined only as “the empire.” There was a standoff in the capital that lasted for weeks and devolved into fighting between mobs, and before long the leadership and police fled and looting began. A new form of governance emerged, more egalitarian than the old system, marked by the motto “Together.”

Rustin was happy to do what he could to keep the hospital running. But as Together took hold, he began to resent some of the changes — how people under his command called him by his first name, how titles like “nurse” or “housekeeper” were replaced with “healing associate” and patients were called “healing recipients.”

He finally snaps when a junior associate points out a mistake at the end of a grueling day. That results in Rustin being called into a meeting — a “Restoration Ring” — where his colleagues recite principles of Together like “I am no better and neither are you” and “Listen to the young.” Rustin tries to apologize without compromising his values, and it doesn’t go well. He is advised to spend a month wandering around the city and then come back and share the lessons he has learned.

Meanwhile, Rustin’s wife, Annabelle, is caught up in the spirit of Together and starts a ministry of sorts helping to care for the homeless “Strangers” constructing tent encampments near their home. His son Pan and his daughter Selva, too, have taken up the cause.

It is the father-daughter relationship that is at the heart of this book, as Dr. Rustin and Selva attempt a dangerous journey in a dystopian world even while bickering about the ordinary things families bicker about. Rustin understands that Selva’s beliefs, as much as he thinks they are wrong, come from a good place — at one point, she tells him, she has been angry with him “because you never believed the world could be better or worse than the one you gave me. And that breaks my heart.”

And Packer makes it clear that there were things wrong in the pre-Emergency world; for one thing, the disdainful way Rustin and those of his standing referred to the bottom 10 percent, the ones barely getting by and often succumbing to addiction, as “Excess Burghers.”

But there are uncomfortable things in the new world, too, such as the “Suicide Spot” — a gallows where young people go and put a noose around their neck, and are then talked out of the act by young people serving as “Guardians.” It is a ghastly sort of therapy, but the Guardians take pride that they have not lost a child. And there are ghastly things that father and daughter encounter as they venture beyond the city’s borders in hope of reuniting a “Stranger” father in the city with his missing son.

From the opening pages of the novel it is clear we are being asked to consider what happens when a society of disparate means and morality throws out the old ways of being for a new order. But it is not clear whether Dr. Rustin is the hero or the antihero in this world. That is one of the mysteries that propels the reader through the story; it is as compelling as whether Hugo, Annabelle and their children can stay together in a Together world. Give Packer credit for not revealing his hand; this is a deeply nuanced book. Most astonishingly, it’s also occasionally funny. B+

Featured Photo: The Emergency, by George Packer

(Knopf, 177 pages)

Thomas McGuane’s 18th book, A Wooded Shore, fits nicely on a shelf in a man cave. Comprising eight stories and a novella, the collection is mostly about ordinary men: men striving but failing to rise to the myriad occasions that life presents. The fact that most take place in Montana shouldn’t be a deterrent to anyone in New England.

Take “Slant Six,” my favorite of the bunch. It is a deceptively simple slice-of-life story about a couple, Drew and Lucy, going through common problems of life, like dealing with an aging mother/mother-in-law. The story opens with Drew, a lawyer, stopping by a hardware store. There he runs into a former client trying to figure out what shade of white his wife would want off a color wheel featuring 27 different shades. As the story unfolds, we learn that the couple, despite Drew’s profession, live in a rental with a “tall, lean and Lincolnesque” landlord named Jocko who lives with a parrot named Pontius Pilate and likes to mow the lawn in a thong. “The fact that Jocko was their landlord seemed to stand for everything they hadn’t gotten in life,” McGuane writes.

The fact that Drew and Lucy work hard at being good people, even volunteering to pick up trash along two miles of a highway, seems to offer no karmic benefit. In the seminal scene of the story, the couple go to a party at a client’s house, where they interact with the various people who cross paths in their life. The story concludes with a smart callback to the paint color-wheel scene and an observation by Drew that is haunting and likely universal.

Memorable also is “Balloons,” which has just a little more than eight pages but delivers a surprise punch in the final paragraph. It’s narrated by a doctor who had an affair with a woman, Joan, who “stirred up our town with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to Roger couldn’t last.” That was true: Joan eventually left Roger, leaving her former husband and her former paramour to awkwardly interact with one another, around town and in the examination room. Even after the divorce, the narrator was unsure whether Roger had known about the affair. When he comes to the doctor’s office with news and a surprising request, he doesn’t question the motive. Theirs had seemed an idyllic marriage at the start: The narrator reflects, when looking at the church where they were married, “I had never seen two such good-looking people as Joan and Roger at their peak.”

Some writers of short fiction end their stories so abruptly that it seems they got tired and decided to stop and let the reader figure out where they were going. That’s not the case in this collection; the endings appear well-thought out, even if the story itself drifts a little bit. That’s the case in “Retail,” which introduces us to Roy, an insurance salesman who achieved modest success selling policies to people who owed him something in some way: old classmates, distant relatives, an abusive foster mom. When Roy achieves local stardom by rushing into a burning house to save a child’s cat, his fortunes improve, but he still finds himself managing an unimpressive group of salesmen and trying unsuccessfully to court a widow in an adjacent office.

And so it goes: despair and hope, hope and despair, one foot in front of the other, and occasionally a flash of revelation. Each story can be seen as mildly to enormously depressing, but for the schadenfreude.

There is pain and loss at the heart of these stories, which gives them their depth. McGuane’s extraordinary voice, honed over 85 years of living, gives them their meaning. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: A Wooded Shore, by Thomas McGuane

Our reviewers read a lot of books this year; these are the ones they gave A grades to.

Fiction

The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy, is “a beautiful, messy journey as Lila searches for her identity among two very different cultures and within a family defined by each other in the best and worst of ways.” A- —Meghan Siegler

Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson, is “a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy…. If Hollywood options this … I’ll be at the theater on opening day.” A- —Jennifer Graham

The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett: “…at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.” A- —M.S.

Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger, has “a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics…. Culpability moves slowly at times … [but] Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —J.G.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is “an achingly beautiful story that will send readers to Kang’s previous novels, which include 2017’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, published in the U.S. in 2016. Bring on the K-lit.” A —J.G.

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige: “In simple and sparse narration that blooms with lyrical descriptions of New England landscapes, Heartwood manages to be part mystery, part thriller, part how-to-hike-the-Appalachian-Trail guidebook — or it might convince you to never set foot in the woods again. Either way, start Heartwood and you’ll likely be a thru-reader, all the way to the end.” A —J.G.

Tilt, by Emma Pattee, “is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called ‘apocalypse genre,’ [but] it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans.” The book “thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. … Tilt is a remarkable literary debut.” A —J.G.

Nonfiction

The Ghost Lab, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, resulted from “a years-long investigation into paranormal enthusiasts and their work” and is “a fascinating book …. Regardless of how you feel about the paranormal, Hongoltz-Hetling is a first-rate reporter and storyteller, and The Ghost Lab is easy to love — as long as you’re not one of its subjects.” A+ —J.G.

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp, is “a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries. A —J.G.

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green: “We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general.” A —J.G.

All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert, “is … a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.” A —J.G.

Aflame, by Pico Iyer: “In Aflame … Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.” A —J.G.

Featured Photo: The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy