Author: Jennifer Graham

(Viking, 449 pages)

Wall Street wasn’t always glamorous. Until the early 1900s, “The practice of buying and selling stock was disdained by polite society as a grubby endeavor, the handiwork of gamblers and social benefits,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in his new nonfiction book 1929.

But in a couple of decades that had changed, to the point where brokerages dotted New York City streets like Starbucks cafes do today, thanks in part to Americans’ new, lenient attitudes toward credit.

It was an ominous setup to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Most contemporary Americans know little about these events, says Sorkin, who has set out to change that and to convince us that there are alarming parallels today.

Sorkin is the business journalist and CNBC personality whose 2009 book Too Big to Fail chronicled the 2008 financial crisis and was made into an HBO movie. That book was the kind you call both exhaustive and exhausting, coming in at more than 600 pages. In comparison, 1929 is a mere 456, not including footnotes. It is, let’s be honest, a lot, and I didn’t have “refresh my knowledge of the Glass-Steagall Act” on my to-do list for 2025.

But Sorkin does his research and wants us (or the future writer of the film script) to know every detail of this story, largely written in narrative style, with the players’ dialogue, surroundings and daily life recreated from diaries, memos, oral histories and private letters — as well as court records, depositions and lawsuits.

The cast of characters is large: presidents and partners of major banks, assorted business leaders and politicians. Some of the major players are largely obscure today (apologies if you are a fan of Russell Cornell Leffingwell) but many are names we know well, if only by their business legacy: Walter Percy Chrysler, Charles M. Schwab and Louis-Joseph Chevrolet among them. There are also cameos by people such as Groucho Marx and Winston Churchill.

Sorkin opens his story with a prologue set just after the market closed 13 points down on Oct. 28, 1929. A 13-point drop is nothing today, but it was worrisome then, particularly after a turbulent week. We follow Charles Edwin Mitchell — a banker known to the press as “Sunshine Charlie” — back to his office after emergency meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At his office, he learns that in his absence, his colleagues at National City Bank had been purchasing shares trying to inflate the bank’s value despite the volatility. They’d purchased 71,000 shares, at a cost of about $32 million — a risky scheme that could take the bank out if the market continued to fall. Mitchell envisions people lining up at National Bank’s 58 branches: “A run on the country’s largest bank. There was nothing bankers feared more.”

To make matters worse, the market downturn was occurring on the heels of one of the most optimistic times in America. Ten years earlier, Sorkin explains, General Motors started letting Americans buy its cars on credit. Sears, Roebuck & Co. joined in, offering credit plans for appliances. And before long, Wall Street let people buy stock “on margin” — putting up a percentage of the stock’s value and paying the rest over time. “Borrowing became a habit, born along with optimism,” Sorkin writes. “… And individuals became spectacularly rich. The wealthiest in the nation amassed fortunes in excess of $100 million, which, in today’s dollars, would be nearly $2 billion.” For the first time, businessmen were becoming celebrities, like performers and athletes.

Sorkin then takes us back to February 1929 and leads us month-by-month through that fateful year, exploring the mindsets that kept most of the business leaders from seeing what now seems inevitable in hindsight. “Across the country, speculating in the stock market had become so widespread and profitable that it seemed almost as if everyone were leveraged, committed, and in on the action.”

One Philadelphia banker suggested that women should be prohibited from the market “as a way of keeping in check the public enthusiasm for speculation.”

“So many women had started investing that brokerages had installed specially designed lounges and galleries where they could watch the fluctuations of the market safe from the rowdiness of men buying and selling,” Sorkin writes.

When President Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, he told Americans, “In no nation are the fruits of accomplishment more secure … I have no fears for the future of our country.”

There were a few Cassandras, among them Roger Babson, an economist who started a college by his own name in Massachusetts. He had been predicting a market crash for two years. But the majority of New York bankers in their stately Upper East Side homes would not and could not see it, as they had too much riding on the market. Besides, the economy had been up and down over the past few decades — the country had, after all, recovered from the Panic of 1907 and other more recent volatility.

Sorkin recounts the clashes between Washington and Wall Street as the point of crisis neared. Hoover, becoming worried, was starting to listen to Babson, but the powerful bankers countered Babson’s warnings with relentless optimism. One banker, 10 days before the crash, sent the president an 18-page letter saying that the American future “appears brilliant” and that it would be folly for the president to interfere with the market with “corrective action.”

All too soon we arrive at the last week of October 1929 and see why Charles Mitchell was having such a meltdown in the prologue 200 pages ago. In the days to come, there will be those crowds lined up outside banks and brokerages (16 pages of photos and images of New York Times front pages are a nice addition), suicides (though not as many as have been reported) and eventually criminal charges against Mitchell. There would be “Hoovertowns” (homeless encampments named after the president), breadlines and periods when nearly a quarter of Americans were unemployed. This is a story, after all, that did not end in 1930, but affected many people throughout the next decade and resulted in changes that still govern banking today.

Could the crash have been avoided? Sorkin says yes, with caveats. He also believes Hoover deserves a better grade as president than history has given him. The lessons he offers to us are simple: “we need to remember how easily we forget,” he writes.

And also: “No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written, people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever. They will dress up hope as certainty. And in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.” B

Featured Photo: 1929, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

(Flatiron, 159 pages)

It’s impossible to imagine the Back to the Future franchise without Michael J. Fox, whose portrayal of Marty McFly seems effortless, even preordained. Surely Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote the script with Fox in mind.

But the blockbuster film, released in 1985, started production with another actor in that role — Eric Stoltz. In fact, filming had gone on for more than a month before the team came to a conclusion that seems obvious now — Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly. But for that to happen, not only would Stolz have to be let go, but Fox would have to work two full-time jobs, as he was under contract to play Alex P. Keaton in the popular sitcom Family Ties. In fact, there had been conversations early on about Fox taking the role, but his handlers wouldn’t even approach him about it, because they knew he couldn’t get out of Family Ties and thought it would be too much.

Once offered the part, though, Fox gladly took on the role, thrilled to be working for a team of luminaries capped by Steven Spielberg. He showed up for work two days later, wearing outfits that had been quickly assembled and his own Nike sneakers, which would turn out to be an iconic part of the film. That story, and how the film came to be, is told in Future Boy, Fox’s latest memoir, written with Nelle Fortenberry and released 40 years after the film.

Even if you haven’t seen the film in decades, it’s an engrossing story that reveals the ins and outs of Hollywood and shows how cinematic sausage gets made. (If you’re one of the 11 or 12 people who haven’t seen the film, here’s the short version: a California teen gets accidentally sent back in time in a modified DeLorean and winds up interacting with young versions of his parents, threatening his own future existence.)

What it also reveals is how jaw-droppingly talented Fox was, even at age 23. When he first filmed a scene with Lea Thompson, who played Marty’s teenage mother, he had met her only 10 minutes earlier, and he had to negotiate a working relationship with an actress who was unhappy about Stoltz being let go. Even so, within a few takes, Fox was already comfortable enough to make suggestions, even adding a joke for Thompson and a pratfall for himself in the scene where they meet in a bedroom. (A pratfall is a fall on your bottom, if you haven’t heard the term.) He writes, “I was used to these comedic rhythms, my body was not my temple — it was a resource to be ransacked and pillaged.” She warmed up to him in short order.

As naturally as the acting came to him, the schedule was grueling: He’d work eight or nine hours during the day being Alex Keaton at Paramount Studios and then be driven 45 minutes to his next job, being Marty McFly at Universal, where he would sometimes film until 1 or 2 in the morning. Food would be set out around midnight. He was living in his own time portal.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Future Boy also goes back and forth in time. Fox takes us back to 1972, when his family traveled from their home in Vancouver to Los Angeles and took a tour at Universal Studios. Seven years later, after some promising work in the theater and on TV in Canada, he returned there again, this time with his father, to sign with an agent at age 18. He had a few “starving artist” years before he landed the role on Family Ties and recalled collecting day-old cookies that had been thrown out in dumpsters behind bakeries while going on auditions that resulted in no work. “I got the s … kicked out of me as a fledgling Los Angeleno and nearly threw in the towel,” he writes. But once those days were gone, they were gone for good. Family Ties was a hit.

Despite Fox’s natural ability and his belief in the self-help mantra “Act as if,” he knew the stakes were high and he could fail at Back to the Future. He also knew how the rest of the cast and crew were being inconvenienced to accommodate his schedule. “I was either going to be the best thing or the worst thing that had happened to these people. There could be no middle road,” he writes. And a lot was being spent on this film. “A single night [filming] in the mall parking lot probably cost as much as a full episode of Family Ties.”

Talking to the team about their remembrances, he learns that they don’t believe anyone would do something like that today. One says, “It was a ballsy thing we did, and I was afraid there was going to be a mutiny because we had to reshoot five weeks, but they all stayed. I think it’s because they loved the project; they were fans of the material.”

Fox, who is now 64 and has been living with Parkinson’s disease since age 29, dishes respectfully on some of his co-stars throughout the year and shares anecdotes from the Family Ties days, like how he randomly added the initial “P.” to his character’s name. He also reveals that some people had not wanted him for that show; the network president said he was too short for the role and also said, “You’ll never see that kid’s face on a lunchbox.” Fox later gifted him one.

There would be much more to his career that is not detailed here, but Fox was smart to make this book a moment in time. It also has a perfect coda: what happens when Fox, after 40 years, reaches out to Eric Stoltz, the actor whose place he took in the movie. Incredibly, they’d never talked about it. Read this, then watch the movie again. Or vice versa. Either way, you’ll enjoy the experience. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron, 159 pages)

(Riverhead, 400 pages)

Elizabeth Gilbert is not known as a humor writer, but a few pages into her latest book I laughed out loud when she apologetically wrote that she hadn’t yet said much about herself. “How very typical of me, to have immediately put my focus upon the other,” she wrote.

What? Say again? This is the woman who made the confessional memoir a genre when Eat, Pray, Love detonated on the world nearly 20 years ago. That bombshell of a book, and its subsequent movie, and its subsequent sequel (2010’s Committed) made Gilbert so much money that, had she lived modestly and managed it prudently, she wouldn’t have to work again, ever. She could have just flitted around the world eating and praying.

But as Gilbert reveals in her latest memoir, All the Way to the River, she gave money away as fast as it came in. She paid off credit card bills, medical bills and student loans, paid for friends’ homes and vacations, invested in businesses and covered college tuition. She sent checks to women she heard were getting divorced. At one point during the financial crisis of 2008, she says, she literally walked down the street of a small town in New Jersey asking business owners if they needed any money.

Some people might call that extraordinary kindness. Gilbert calls it co-dependancy. It was a symptom, she says, of a larger problem that has ruled her life: “love and sex addiction.” And with that, we kind of know what we’re in for here.

All the Way to the River is a book-length confession, told through the unfolding relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life: a hairdresser/musician named Rayya who at first was an acquaintance, then a best friend and eventually a lover.

Rayya was also addicted to drugs. She had gotten clean, but then, a week after her 56th birthday, learned that she was dying of cancer. And in the course of her illness, she again spirals into addiction.

Rayya died in 2018, and Gilbert has said that she is just now telling this story because it took “years of therapy, grief, confusion, recovery and sobriety for me to even be able to understand all that happened between us and why.”

She sees her own compulsive behavior reflected in Rayya’s addiction and entwines their stories in a narrative that is alternately harrowing, mystical, strange, unhinged and deeply touching. Could a less gifted writer publish a book in which she describes herself as being a conduit for a dead woman to hold and kiss her dying daughter and find a world receptive to this story? Unclear.

But Gilbert sees herself as both a radiant soul and a painfully flawed human being, and this sort of mysticism infuses her life. (At one point, Rayya told her that the first time they met, when Gilbert came to her apartment for a haircut, she saw “a big circle of golden light around my head” and later wondered “Who has that much freaking sunshine? What’s that all about?”)

Anxiety and fear has always infused her life as well. Without specifically assigning blame, Gilbert says that her parents “made it clear to me growing up that I was expected to leave the house right after high school and never live there again.” She did so, but with a “lifelong quest to make other people into my home,” a strategy that didn’t work especially well. She bounced from relationship to relationship and estimates that between the ages of 20 and 48, she lived in about 20 different homes. She left men she describes as good and says she broke up marriages. She could bear neither intimacy nor living alone.

Then she fell into the rabbit hole of Rayya, the woman that Gilbert let move into a church that she had bought sight unseen off Craigslist, planning at first to make it her forever home and then to turn into a working sanctuary for artists. Gilbert was still married at the time, but over time, she was falling in love with Rayya as they spent more time together and their relationship deepened.

After Rayya’s cancer diagnosis in 2016, Gilbert writes, “I cried so hard, I fell out of time and space.” She ended her marriage and became Rayya’s lover when they thought Rayya had six months to live. It turned out she had more time than that, and it wasn’t a Taylor Swiftian love story, but a dark, chaotic tunnel in which Rayya’s treatment depleted both women. At one point, Gilbert confesses, she considered killing Rayya with an overdose, and while she didn’t do that, she did finally ask her to move out of church.

When Rayya leaves and gets sober through the help of another friend, Gilbert is distraught and angry that someone else was able to help Rayya when she couldn’t. Theirs is a messy and complicated relationship, right to the end, except there really isn’t an end, because Gilbert believes that Rayya continued to communicate with her after her death.

As in Eat Pray Love, which proceeds from a middle-of-the-night instruction delivered from God, Gilbert has a running conversation with the divine, which is likely not the same kind of divinity perceived by her readers, especially those, say, in the deep South. The God that speaks to Gilbert throughout is one who addresses her as “my love” and “my child,” a love language that disbelieving cynics might call “wackadoodle.” And to be sure, there are scenes throughout that might also be described as cringe. But Gilbert answers her critics with her talent — she is, first and foremost, a creative force of nature expressed through a keyboard — and with her unwavering belief in the spiritual realm.

All the Way to the River is a memoir about addiction and love, but it is also a memoir about death — what it costs the living to watch someone close to us die, how it changes us. It’s a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.

It is a reminder that even in the genre of memoir, not everything is revealed, although it’s hard to see what Gilbert could have possibly left out here. Yes, we are entertained, touched, riveted. But there is an underlying ickiness to it, the sense we’ve been enlisted as voyeurs to another’s pain without their consent. But Gilbert has an answer for that: Rayya, she says, told her to write this book, told her after her death. “Tell them every single thing that happened! Don’t worry about protecting my dignity or yours — just go full punk rock with it. Lay it all out there.” Rayya assures Gilbert that she doesn’t mind being dead. “But I do miss grilling.” A

Featured Photo: All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

(Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

There are few relationships in life as complex as that of the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom. This is true not only as the two women prepare for the union of their children, but throughout the course of their lives. It becomes more true if there are ever grandchildren involved.

Marisa Silver dives into the dynamic in At Last, a sharp and perceptive novel that is heavy on characters if light on plot. The story follows the lives of Evelyn Turner and Helene Simonauer, who are thrown together, unwillingly, when their children decide to get married.

Helene was not at all happy about the union of Ruth — “this tall and rashly opinionated girl” — to Tom, her “otherwise responsible son.” Evelyn, for her part, sees the upcoming wedding as a tragic accident of timing. “Two years ago, [Ruth] met a young man on the street, and now they were getting married. If either she or Tom had been at that same spot five minutes earlier or five minutes later, Evelyn would not be driving around with a woman who clutched her purse on her lap as if she thought Evelyn might steal it.”

“The woman was a disturbance. Evelyn needed to be undisturbed,” Silver writes, letting us know that however disagreeable the women are, her own prose is going to be delightful.

Both Evelyn and Helene are widows, and the sort of women that are often described by others as a “piece of work,” but of course they don’t see it in themselves. They think if they can just get through the wedding and its preparations, they can retreat to their lives and not have to pretend to be nice to each other again.

That’s not how life works. But as the women’s relationship develops over decades, we learn stories from the past that turned them into who they become. Their own mothers are very much architects of their daughters, at least to a point. We witness Evelyn’s attempts to get out from the shadow of an insecure and sometimes cruel mother, and Helene’s efforts to keep her family functioning after her two siblings die in unrelated incidents.

The past is interspersed with the relationships of the present, always with Silver’s shrewd humor and her deep understanding of human nature. In one scene Helene takes Ruth to a hair salon, where she says, with all good intentions, “it looks to me like you haven’t had a good cut in quite a while.” As Ruth sits in the chair, the hairdresser looks at Helene.

“What a feral cat you’ve brought me, her raised eyebrows seemed to say. Oh, don’t I know it, Helene’s eyebrows responded. Satisfied, Helene picked up a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal and pretended to read about tapioca.”

The story’s complexity owes not just to current events but to past ones. At one point Helene comes across a packet of letters in her late husband’s things that indicate a secret relationship overseas. The letters were written in German between 1939 and 1943 by someone named Irina. (“It was the string, wrapped several times around the letters horizontally and vertically and then knotted, that made her know she was in the presence of something dangerous.”)

As Helene tries to figure out their meaning, she sets into motion the events that will culminate in Tom and Ruth meeting, and ultimately getting married, and having a daughter named Francine. The grandmothers, as grandmothers are wont to do, compete for the child’s affection as she grows up into a person old enough to have her own narrative in this story — it’s Francine who tells us, in her own words, what it’s like to be told by her parents that they’re getting a divorce, what it’s like to see her grandmothers ravaged by age and memory loss.

Silva has said that At Last has its roots in a childhood memory. One of her grandmothers, driving her to the other’s grandmother’s house, said “I know you love me more than her.” She was 4 at the time, but those words were burned into her memory and provided the scaffolding on which she built Helene and Evelyn’s story.

We hear her own experience when she writes, “When Francie was a newborn and Helene would go over to visit, Evelyn would be there more times than not holding Francie while Ruth rested. And so it was Evelyn who would ask Helene if she’d like to hold the baby, or if she’d like to give Francie a bottle, and it was Evelyn who would take the baby from her when Francie started to fuss, as if Helene didn’t know how to calm a child.”

This is Silver’s eighth novel, and it is expertly crafted. Despite the fine writing, it’s hard to imagine what audience it might find among men. It’s a novel of and about women and the intermingled tensions that hum through their lives. Mother-in-law and baby experience is not required to enjoy the story, but it helps. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

(Knopf, 304 pages)

Did we really need another book about food? Yes, foodies, we most certainly did. Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming is a fresh take on an old subject, a disjointed romp through the world of bubble tea, Magnum ice cream and TikTok recipes that is both an indictment of and a tribute to food culture.

Tandoh was a runner-up on The Great British Bake Off, one of the most popular TV series to cross the pond. Just 20 years old when she applied to the show after being encouraged by her mother to watch it, she parlayed the experience into a food- and cookbook-writing career. As she demonstrates in a New Yorker piece about the show, not only can Tandoh cook, but she can write, in a breezy tone and with a sardonic wit that invites you to follow along whether you’re interested in this stuff or not. You may not have realized you wanted to know the history of the All Recipes website or the vagaries of the New York automat, but Tandoh somehow makes even the most useless information fascinating.

She begins with a reflection of why we eat what we eat, and how that has changed. Until the past century, our food choices were shaped by availability and family tradition: “Conversations, meals together, some person you want to be more like, some person you hate, a myth about this or that, a recipe taught to you, a story about witches.”

“Not always, not for all people, but as a rule: almost everything you knew about food, you probably learned either in the kitchen or at the table,” she writes.

But in the middle of the 20th century, she explains, tastes and diets began to be determined by corporations and advertising. This trend was exacerbated by the internet, which shapes our appetites with photographs and recipes that seduce us into embracing whatever is the hot new trend (think sriracha and kombucha) while we order groceries and meals from our couches while salivating over TikTok recipes and restaurant reviews on our phones. The most influential restaurant critic in America right now, Tandoh says, is a TikToker named Keith Lee who has 15 million followers and admits he knows very little about food.

“I love it. I love humankind’s inexhaustible capacity for nonsense,” Tandoh writes. She herself has fallen under the spell of TikTok food, saying as soon as she saw the videos of a certain kind of chocolate-covered strawberries, “I knew two things: I was going to buy them, and it was going to be a mistake. … The algorithm brought these videos to me tenderly but insistently, the way a cat drops a dead mouse on the carpet.” The staggering number of people looking at these strawberries — 150 million at her last count — added to the appeal, just like lines outside a Shake Shack make the meals inside seem more desirable than they are. Fear of missing out, she says, is responsible for 80 percent of her biggest food mistakes.

She devotes a chapter to explain the rise of bubble tea — usually a concoction of tea, milk, assorted add-ins and tapioca pearls — that originated in Taiwan, soon overran China and started showing up in California in the 1990s. “There is no practical reason to drink bubble tea, no culture to which it is truly traditional…. In fact, in most places, the point is exactly that it’s fun and unserious.” It’s also hard to define, having become “an umbrella term for a miscellany of Instagrammable drinks, many of which don’t have tea, milk or even tapioca pearls.” (Her recommendation to friends who want to try it but are bewildered by the choices: get the brown sugar boba milk tea, the archetype.)

There’s another chapter on food influencers like Nara Smith, who absurdly show us how to, for example, prepare grilled-cheese sandwiches for toddlers by first making the bread from scratch, and then the cheese, and the fresh pesto, and eventually, yes, even the butter, seasoning it delicately with parsley, garlic and sea salt. These sorts of influencers make Martha Stewart look like a slacker, and they have arisen even as the gold standards of food magazines, like Gourmet, have gone out of business, which she clearly rues.

Martha Stewart does not go unskewered; in fact one of the chapter titles, “Cook remaining 100 lobsters,” is apparently one of the more precious lines from her debut book Entertaining. Real cooking, Tandoh informs us, is “making the same five dishes on rotation for 363 days of the year, and then getting wildly above your station for the remaining two.” And about entertaining? It is, she says, “an invented and avoidable problem. Nobody is making you do this.”

This is a very British book — it begins by examining how food content in British newspapers led to the foodies of today and ends with Tandoh’s visit to Wimpy, a U.K. fast-food chain. But it’s impossible to talk about food without America being a large part of the story — for example, how a handful of tech nerds at the University of Washington, in the early days of the internet, were casting about for websites that would be enormously profitable and landed on the idea of cookierecipe.com. Launched with just a couple dozen recipes in 1998, the venture expanded to other categories — there would be a pierecipe.com and a thanksgivingrecipe.com, for example, before all this gloriously combined into allrecipes, which is usually one of the first websites to turn up when you look for a recipe on the internet.

Tandoh talks to the Iowa woman who uploaded “Banana Cake VI” to the website in 1999 — distinguishing it from many other banana cake recipes is that you put it in the freezer for 45 minutes after taking it out of the oven — and explains how “Carrot Cake XII” — a disastrous cooking experience because of its use of canned carrots — made it onto the website. She also explains the origin of “crockpot squirrel” which is another one of those things that I didn’t know about, but very much needed to know.

After a spin through cookbooks, ice cream and tonic water, Tandoh grants us all absolution. She wonders whether she’s ever had an original craving for anything. “For anyone who has ever been anxious about food, getting pulled over the event horizon of your feelings, I have to tell you — it feels amazing when you realize that your appetites don’t just belong to you.”

There’s little in the way of deep thinking here and nary a recipe, but Tandoh is the dinner guest who will keep everyone entertained, and All Consuming is a delightful read, much better than its staid title suggests. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

(Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages)

Riki is a temp worker at a hospital, barely making enough money to feed herself and pay the rent. She is responsible enough and punctual, showing up promptly at 8 in the morning and working until 5:30, taking a break only to eat her lunch, often a hard boiled egg dipped in soy sauce. But Riki is bewildered by people who know what they want to do with their life, people with energy and ambition. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life; she just knows she wants to escape the constant worry about money, to be able to occasionally splurge on a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven.

Then comes an offer to bear a child for a married couple for what seems a life-changing amount of money. It would require a complete upheaval of her life, the subjection of her desires to others, and going against the mores of her family and culture.

This is the ethical quandary at the heart of Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and released in the U.S. this month. (It was published in Japan in 2022 with the title The Swallows Always Come Back.) The novel explores the issues surrounding surrogacy, which, while legal, is more controversial in Japan than in the U.S.; here, the auxiliary issues of class and privilege might resonate with readers more.

Riki, who is 29, didn’t set out to become a surrogate; a younger coworker, who supplemented her own insufficient income with sex work, suggested they both look into “donating” eggs to help couples struggling with infertility to conceive. While that’s not allowed in Japan, they would travel to Thailand for the procedure and be paid 500,000 yen, about $3,500 in U.S. dollars. But during Riki’s interview, she is asked to consider going further and being a surrogate, since she looked remarkably similar to the wife of a couple who needed one.

That couple, Motoi and Yuko, then become the focus of the narrative, and we learn how they got to this point. It is Motoi’s second marriage, the first having broken up because of his adulterous relationship with Yuko. They have tried unsuccessfully to have a child through IVF, and Yuko is resigned to its not happening, but Moito, growing older and wanting to see his DNA passed on, is increasingly adamant, even if they have to hire a surrogate. His mother offers to pay for the IVF and surrogacy — a surrogate would receive about $20,000 plus living expenses throughout the pregnancy, medical costs and gifts.

Motoi and Yuko proceed down this path even as a rift is developing between them. Motoi is a professional ballet dancer and teacher, the son of a mother and father who were also famous in Japan’s ballet world. Yuko is an outsider to their world — she had simply been a fan when she met Motoi. His motives for wanting a child have nothing to do with love for his wife or a desire for them to raise a family, but derive from his ego — his own star fading, he wants a child he can shape into a new star within the “ballet elite.” This, he believes, “would only confirm his own excellence. His obsession with having that proof only grew stronger with age.”

Meanwhile, Yuko, an illustrator, is increasingly cognizant of a sort of haughtiness that Motoi and his mother have toward her own family, especially a brother who is what is known in Japan as hikikomori — a young adult who rarely leaves the home and relies on his parents for support. When her brother came to their wedding, Yuko was delighted, knowing how difficult it was for him to leave the house. Her new husband, however, was contemptuous of her brother, and she later reflects that this moment was the start of the tension in the marriage.

In setting up these characters, Kirino presents a challenge for her readers: Where is a hero to be found in this cast? Who are we supposed to pull for? Despite our sympathies for Riki’s circumstances, there is a moroseness about her, and she makes decisions throughout the story that are reckless and dumb. And Yuko, despite not wanting to raise a child she has no biological connection with, and having doubts about the marriage itself, numbly goes along with the scheme.

The changing perspectives throughout the novel cause the readers to constantly reevaluate our allegiance. When Yuko and Riki first meet, there is the initial sense that they might experience a Thelma-and-Louise sort of bonding. There are some jarring events that occur as we travel from conception to birth; to call them plot twists doesn’t exactly seem right, but the dilemmas facing each character get more complicated. And Riki ultimately makes a decision that I never saw coming.

The setting adds depth for American readers, and the story doesn’t seem to have lost any power in its translation, though it moves a bit sluggishly in places. With advancements in IVF constantly making the news (the latest being the birth of a baby conceived via IVF more than 30 years ago), the field of assisted reproduction technology is ripe for exploration. While fiction, Swallows offers a compelling story that helps us process a mind-boggling world that’s getting newer and braver with each passing year.

B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda