Author: Jennifer Graham

(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

(Celadon, 269 pages)

As possibly the only person on the planet who hasn’t read Gone Girl, I am unqualified to compare Gillian Flynn’s 2014 novel to any other book, but I know enough about it to know what it means when other people do this. The comparison promises multiple twists that will knock you out of your chair, your perception of the events and characters totally skewed.

Best Offer Wins is the latest novel to pulsate with the Gone Girl vibe, earning Marisa Kashino the kind of buzz that rarely accompanies a first-time author. It has an entirely relatable premise: a young woman is shut out of the housing market because of too many buyers (and hedge funds) flush with cash and becomes caught up in her quest to be the winning bidder on a suburban D.C. house she wants to raise a family in.

Margo Miyake and her husband, Ian, don’t have children yet, but they’re trying. They’re living in an apartment “so small you can vacuum almost all of it from a single outlet,” having sold their modest starter home planning to upgrade with the profits. But then they find out that the housing market has changed in terrible ways since they’d bought their first house.

Every house they want is getting dozens of offers, many well over the asking price and all cash. Margo and Ian are well off compared to most Americans — she’s in PR, he’s a government lawyer — and they are prepared to spend more than a million on their forever home. But even that’s not enough, and so when Margo gets an insider tip that a four-bedroom home in a desirable neighborhood in Bethesda will soon come on the market, she decides to pull out all the stops, sneakily befriending one of the homeowners and snagging an invitation to dinner at the house.

Friends, the cringe doesn’t come in on little cat feet; it bursts in like a golden retriever left too long outside in the cold.

But the cringe turns into something darker as Margo, the narrator throughout, becomes more and more obsessed with the house. She’s mentally moving in, imagining her new, perfect life within its walls so vividly that she even orders new house numbers to replace the current ones that she doesn’t like. When the homeowners, a gay couple with an adorable adopted daughter, grow suspicious and Margo realizes that her Plan A isn’t going to work, she recalculates and embarks on another scheme, and then another, even as her obsession begins to negatively impact her work and her marriage. It’s not at all clear whether, if she somehow places a winning bid when the house formally comes on the market, she and her husband will still have the income to qualify for a mortgage, or even if they will still be together at all.

As Margo plunges deeper into her quest, we learn, in bits and drabs, why this particular house matters so much to her, and what the life she imagines living there represents. We learn that she had a deeply insecure childhood, that her parents once lost a house to foreclosure, that she once lost a dog to which she was deeply attached. She may or may not be mentally unstable; she may or may not be justified in the increasingly bizarre ways in which she tries to obtain the house.

We’re also not so sure about her husband, Ian, who at first seems devoted to Margo and undeserving of the derision she casts on him. Later events call his devotion into question, but that’s par for the course; it’s unclear if anyone in this story is who they initially seem to be, except for a neighbor’s dog, Fritter, with whom Margo is infatuated.

Margo moves in and out of our sympathy, as she botches important work assignments, comes to the brink of losing her job and takes advantage of good-hearted friends who help when she asks. Yet she is also surrounded by people who have what she wants — to include great homes and children. At times she is even envious of her husband, who had a stable upbringing: “He grew up with a dad who coached his little league teams and a mom who sent him to school with homemade cupcakes on his birthdays. Two loving parents who call us at least once a week to check in,” Margo tells us. “But my childhood, erratic as it was, gave me something even more valuable, something I have come to accept that Ian will never have: hunger.”

There is a dark humor that underpins the narrative, and the story moves swiftly; except for the backstory, the events happen within a couple of weeks. The answers to the two questions that power the book — will Margo get the house, and if so, at what cost? — are impossible to to guess, right up to the final pages of the book, making Best Offer Wins the proverbial page-turner.

But making it to the end of a book doesn’t necessarily mean the reader will like it once they get there, and the ending raises other questions. Is a book enjoyable just because it is engrossing, because it distracts us so effectively from the real world? Sometimes that seems to be the case. But what if we rush to the end of a book, caught in its current like a fast-moving river, and once there, the ending turns out to be deeply unsettling? Is the book still enjoyable then? Those are the unexpected questions that Best Offer Wins presents, ones that I’m still mulling. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino

(Summit Books, 352 pages)

Is there anyone over the age of 20 who hasn’t seen an Anthony Hopkins film, or 20? It’s hard to imagine. As he approaches his 88th birthday on New Year’s Eve, the Welsh actor best known for his Academy Award-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs has amassed a formidable body of work, and became the oldest actor to win the Oscar for best actor for The Father in 2021.

Talent on the silver screen, however, doesn’t always translate to talent on the printed page, as any number of Hollywood memoirs attests.

But Hopkins’ new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, is surprisingly compelling and will be of interest to even people who aren’t especially enthralled with cinema. Like all good celebrity memoirs, it is strongest in reflecting the experiences of a human being, not a star. Hopkins’ luminous career is almost incidental to the lessons learned over the course of a lifetime as someone who was underestimated in his youth and had to overcome parenting that was, let’s just say, not always ideal.

The title comes from Hopkins’s own message to the child that he was, at age 3, in a photo that appears on the jacket of the book. He had a slightly enlarged head that worried his parents and elicited teasing from cruel peers who called him “elephant head.” Making things worse, he was not much of a student. A pivotal moment came when he was sent to boarding school by his parents, against his will.

He writes: “I vowed, I’ll take my chances and never get close to my mother and father again — or anyone else for that matter. I no longer cared. I decided to live life on my terms, to open my eyes to the future. Forget the past. Childhood over. Copy that. Over and out. The ghost had entered the machine.”

He was 11 at the time.

Despite this steely girding of adolescent loins, Hopkins continued to perform poorly in school. He recounts the dreaded opening of the envelope containing his grades that would arrive at his home. On one such occasion, his father exploded, saying, “Honestly, you’re bloody hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere, amount to anything in life, the way you’re going on. … Can’t you do anything useful?”

Young Hopkins, who had been cultivating a demeanor of “dumb insolence,” listened to the rant coolly and then told his parents, “One day, I’ll show you. I’ll show both of you.”

It wasn’t a relationship-ending exchange — father, mother and son then went out to see a movie — but something changed again that day, in Hopkins and in the way that his father viewed him. It is one in a series of memorable scenes that the actor recounts throughout the book, like his first encounter with a young Richard Burton (another legendary Welsh actor, who died in 1984), and having drinks with Laurence Olivier, to name a few.

The first indication that young Hopkins had the seeds of an extraordinary orator within him came when he was asked to read a poem before his class at the boarding school. (His teacher’s response was “Thank you. Rather good.”) The poem was “The West Wind” by John Masefield, and it’s among the meaningful verses and monologues he shares in an appendix of the book — a nice touch.

Bumbling his way through his first stage-related jobs, Hopkins was told more than once that he wasn’t careful or attentive enough; he was fired from one job. But everyone he encountered seemed to recognize a raw talent in him despite the rough edges. He earned a scholarship to an acting school on the strength of an interview. One woman recommended him for a job after briefly interacting with him in a restaurant. His capacity for memorization is legendary, and it was a skill he developed as a child when he repeated words and phrases over and over. His current wife, Stella, believes he has some form of Asperger’s syndrome, “given my proclivity for memorization and repetition … and my lack of emotionality.”

“But,” he writes, “like any stoic man from the British Isles, I’m allergic to therapeutic jargon. Even if the world might prefer I accept the Asperger’s label, I’ve chosen to stick with what I see as a more meaningful designation: cold fish.”

The “lack of emotionality” comes across on the page in stark, clipped prose. No one will ever accuse Hopkins of overwriting. He tells what needs to be told, nothing more, and yet the book sometimes feels like a confessional. He writes, for example, of his failures as a father to his only child, Abigail, after leaving her mother when she was a toddler “after the worst two years of my life.” Although he went on to marry again twice, he vowed not to have more children. “I knew I was too selfish. I couldn’t do to another child what I’d done to her,” he says. Performing in a production of Lear, “the line that hit me harder than perhaps any I’ve ever spoken was ‘I did her wrong.’”

He wonders if his failure to connect with his daughter was in some way connected to his experiences in his own parents’ house, even though his father turned out to be a complicated person. Despite his harshness to his son, he also cried when young Hopkins delivered his first line in a play at a local YMCA (it was a beatitude: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the world.”) And he asks his son to recite lines from Hamlet when he is on his death bed.

Like father, like son, Hopkins grew up to drink heavily, which contributed to the abrupt end of his first marriage. After a doctor warned him that he was drinking his way into the grave, he started attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At the first one, “I was moved by the speaker’s story. He’s just like me, I thought. He was a truck driver, not an actor, but we were the same.”

Sitting in that room, Hopkins thought, “They’re all misfits like me. Like all of us. We feel we never belong. We feel self-hatred. All of us are the same. I’m not alone.”

It is that sort of revelation that makes this more a human story than a celebrity memoir. Yes, there are big names in this book, but coming as they do from Sir Anthony Hopkins (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1993), they never feel like name-dropping; how could they? In most cases, he is the bigger star. He did far more than OK. And yet in the deeply human memoir, Hopkins plays an ordinary man, perhaps his most extraordinary role of all. B+

Featured Photo: We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins