Category: Books

The Society of Shame, by Jane Roper (Anchor, 360 pages)

The year is young, but it’s hard to imagine that there will be a smarter, sassier takedown of social media this year than The Society of Shame, Jane Roper’s merrily caustic novel about cancel culture.

Roper, who claims to live in Boston, but whose real home is apparently Twitter, has taken pretty much everything that’s happened in social media over the past few years and mocked it so deftly that it’s impossible to be offended, even if you see yourself in it. It’s tempting to compare her to Christopher Buckley, the author of Thank You for Smoking and Florence of Arabia, but she may be better.
The novel is centered around Kathleen Held, a mother, writer and editor who returned home early from a trip to visit her sister in California to find her garage — and soon, her life — in flames.

Held’s husband, Bill, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, was unexpectedly at home, and even more unexpectedly at home with a lissome young staffer with her underwear removed. The taxi driver who brought Kathleen home first rescued the family dog from the house, and then in the chaos of emergency services arriving, snaps a photo of the scene, which includes not just Bill and the staffer, but Kathleen from the rear, with a large menstrual blood stain, “the size of a saucer,” on her capris.

When the picture gets out — the taxi driver turns out to be enterprising — Bill’s campaign and the couple’s marriage are on the brink. But the biggest news turns out to be Kathleen’s stained pants, which, combined with sympathy for the cheated-on wife, turns into a social-media, menstrual-positive movement called #YesWeBleed.

The perimenopausal Kathleen, furious at her husband and mortified about her pants, is faced with a couple of choices: leave or stand by her man, and ignore the movement or join us. Meanwhile, she is dealing with conflicted emotions of her middle-school-age daughter, Aggie, who was away when the incident happened but soon came home to find her life as turned upside down as her parents’.

If this all sounds kind of angsty and icky, yes, it could be. But Roper is a gifted comic writer, who knows how to throw a punchline and to sustain a running gag, or two or 20. The taxi driver, who parlays his fortuitous fare into fame, having been savvy enough to snap a selfie with the Helds’ dog, is one of the recurring jokes.

But it is social media cameos that make the novel so hilarious, the ever-changing, irreverent hashtags (from #YesWeBleed to #YesWeRead to #AllBloodMatters) along with the all-too-familiar tweets, which are fiction here but draw their power from their ubiquitous inspirations in real life. Examples: “Rich white lady bleeds through her organic cotton pants on the lawn of her Gold Coast mansion. Cry me a river, Karen” and “While the internet is falling all over itself to feel sorry for privileged Kathleen Held, more than half of the 37 million Americans living in poverty are women. #Priorities #EqualPayNow #LivingWage #EndPoverty #MedicareForAll.

There are also numerous bad puns in the media coverage that pops up in short chapters throughout the book (e.g., a “Tampon in a Teapot” as one droll commentator put it).

“The Society of Shame” is not a metaphor, but an actual group of people who have experienced cancellation, whether from becoming a shameful meme or by uttering something unfortunate that was caught on a hot mike. Membership is by invitation only, and Kathleen intercepts an invitation meant for her husband, and attends a meeting out of a combination of curiosity and desperation, because her life is becoming unrecognizable due to her overnight notoriety.

The group was formed by a popular romance novelist who was canceled after audio leaked out of her calling her fan base “fat Midwestern housewives and pensioners on cut-rate Caribbean cruises.”) The author had shut down her social media and disappeared from public view after her explanations and apologies hadn’t helped.

But now she coaches a diverse group of people about how to recover from public humiliation. The current group includes “Angry Cereal Mom,” a mother who turned into a GIF after someone filmed her speaking angrily to her son in Whole Foods, after which “an entire cascade of natural and organic cereal boxes from the shelf behind her rained down on her head” and “the Moonabomber,” a college frat boy whose innocent antics on the beach was inadvertently captured in photos of an elderly couple celebrating their anniversary on a balcony up above.

There’s also a famous actor caught saying crude things about a woman on a hot mike, and a woman who became famous because she called the police on a Black man reading the electric meter in her backyard. There are others, and Roper covers all the bases of cancel culture with just the right tone.

The tension in the novel involves the fracturing of the Held family concurrent with Kathleen’s reinvention of herself, with the coaching of Danica, the founder of The Society of Shame. There’s a weak and somewhat tired thread here, about a wife who had set aside her own ambitions to support a rakish husband, and while it’s pretty clear where that is headed, it doesn’t detract from the wicked pleasures of the book, which expand as the #YesWeBleed movement grows and contorts. As Willie Wonka once said, there are “little surprises around every corner but nothing dangerous,” and The Society of Shame proposes to make us both laugh and think.

A

Reading the Glass, by Elliott Rappaport (Dutton, 322 pages)

Have you ever felt the urge to throw everything away for the love of a good boat and a life at sea? Me neither. But there are people who not only feel the urge, but obey it, who consider “life ashore” boring and “hard to reconcile.”

Part-time Maine resident Elliott Rappaport is one of those people and with his new book he promises “a captain’s view of weather, water, and life on ships.” For those whose knowledge of seafaring comes from Carnival cruises and watching The Perfect Storm, Reading the Glass might be a rough slog. Who knew that boat captains, always portrayed as blue-collar and salty, could be so erudite? Who knew that their memoirs would read like high school science books? Reading the Glass is eye-opening in this respect, as modern mariners apparently talk more like learned meteorologists than pirates of the Caribbean.

But Rappaport brings a dry sense of humor to the task and works to break up long professorial descriptions of weather with elegant descriptions of life at sea. “Below the surface,” he writes, “are things seeable only when the sea is calm — the dolphins, grazing whales, sharks, and mola, ocean sunfish as big as car hoods. Once a giant leatherback turtle, four feet across with long triangular flippers and drooping dinosaur eyelids. I’ve seen their babies on a beach in Mexico racing toward the surf, identical but small as silver dollars.”

Rappaport has been a ship’s captain for 30 years and teaches at the Maine Maritime Academy, a small public college in Castine, Maine, that trains ships’ officers and engineers. (If you have a driftless kid, send them there — the school says 90 percent of its graduates have jobs within three months of graduation.)

Whatever the seafaring equivalent of a public intellectual is, that’s what Rappaport is. He can wax eloquently about where New England’s summer air originates (“the subtropics, carried along by the southerly winds at the the edge of the Bermuda-Azores High and moistened by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream”) and about atolls, the “recipe for shipwreck” created by submerged islands that present “an opportunity to run aground without ever seeing land.”

He can smartly and simply explain weather phenomena we so often hear about in forecasts, such as jet streams, El Nino and the ever popular polar vortex. And you will learn so much about clouds that you didn’t retain from middle school. “There’s a lot going on inside a cloud, most of it poorly understood by the average person,” Rappoport writes. “Or, fairer to say, it’s not a priority for most people to understand.” For example, one misconception is that most people think clouds are composed only of water vapor, which can’t be true since water vapor is invisible. “Clouds are in fact clusters of of water droplets and ice crystals spawned by condensation or deposition the process whereby water vapor converts directly to ice.”

That’s clear enough, but many of his explanations aren’t quite as simple; it would have taken me two years to finish the book if I’d looked up every word I didn’t know (“Taxonomically the bora and mistral are katabatic (downhill) winds….”) and it is not by coincidence that the first glowing Amazon review I saw for this book was written by someone who included at the end of his name “Ph.D.”

For those of us with B.A.s, it’s more of a struggle to enjoy this book, but it’s possible if you focus on Rappaport’s stories, which are wide-ranging like his travels, and vividly memorable. He’s sailed all over the world, and for every place he hasn’t been, he’s seemingly talked to someone who has. He can tell you about the port in Tahiti where the tattoo artists are so good that the crew requires time off for appointments, and explain the origins of a microburst from a personal encounter with one at sea.

For those interested in maritime disasters, he is an encyclopedia of knowledge, not only of long-ago tragedies with no survivors, but also of contemporary battles of human vs. sea. Describing the type of offshore cyclone that can suddenly roil the ocean without warning, he writes of a discussion he had with a friend about a storm in 1990: “‘A giant hole opened up in the ocean,’ he told me, ‘and the ship fell in.’”

It was, Rappaport writes, “an image I have not forgotten,” and neither will we.

Nor will we forget his funny description of the Beaufort scale of wind force (which includes “Force 6: Umbrellas ruined” and “Force 10: Don’t go out”) or the image he paints of himself making his way through suburban Washington, as off-kilter as most of us would be at sea.

“It is May, the trees already a deep summer green and the sky boiling with clouds that would alarm me if I were at sea.” He vaguely knows the direction of the Metro station, but the battery has died on his phone, and “I have no chartroom to visit, no swarm of seabirds flying helpfully in the right direction.” He is wearing the orange rain slicker he wears at sea, its pockets filled with “old bits of twine and candy wrappers.” Finally he finds something by which he can navigate: a Starbucks in the distance, where the well-dressed professionals are “mysteriously dry.” Perhaps they’ve read the forecast, he quips.

It’s that kind of writing and imagery that makes Reading the Glass pleasurable for those without Ph.D.s.

But truthfully, a Ph.D. would help. B+

The Promise of a Normal Life, by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson (Arcade, 266 pages)

The pantheon of bad mothers is crowded, from Medea to Mommy Dearest. The latest inductee is Polina, a Jewish physician and mother of two who dabbles in motherhood the way some people dabble in a hobby that they are only vaguely interested in.

Polina curdles the childhood and adolescence of the unnamed narrator of The Promise of a Normal Life, a debut novel from Marlborough resident Rebecca Kaiser Gibson. She is a perfectly coiffed, upwardly mobile chain-smoking pseudo-villain who, in her perpetual self-absorption, is unaware of how she is failing at her most important job. Her oldest daughter, sensitive and unusually perceptive, sees all.

The novel, told in first person, opens in 1967 with the narrator at age 18 en route to Israel on a ship. It is an impromptu trip during a break from the University of Sussex and marks the first time she feels the promise of the freedom of adulthood, of the glamor and adventure that might await away from the stifling control of Polina and Leonard, the narrator’s father. This is where I belong, she thinks. As it so often does in real life, reality soon rudely barges in. She is sexually assaulted by a hairdresser on the ship in an encounter that she can only fuzzily remember, having been asleep at the time.

Her meekly passive response turns out to be a pattern of her life, seemingly the result of growing up with a larger-than-life mother who had provided for her children in material things but did not bestow any emotional gifts. The reason was evident, not only in her behavior but in her words.

“Polina told me once that she’d decided, when she was in Scotland talking to some women about how they would treat the children they would have, that the most important thing was to keep your own life first. The children should stay in their place,” the narrator remembers.

That hands-off philosophy was enhanced by Polina’s employment of a housekeeper, who prepared most of the meals, did the housework and did much of the work of tending the children. When Polina did mother, she did it brusquely, as when she would bring consomme to a sick child in bed, command them to drink lots of liquids, and then depart.

Even once her daughters are young adults, they are people to command, not to enjoy. When the narrator meets the parents of the man she will marry, she is surprised by their relationship. “When I actually met her, I was struck by how much Tom’s mother seemed to admire her son. I didn’t know how to understand a mother who made room for her child’s maturity.”

And it wasn’t just Polina. When her daughter and Tom decide to get married, Leonard and Polina could not let go of their roles. “My father could barely look at me, his own child, could hardly stand to see my green eyes doting on those blue ones. Leonard could not prevent me, but he could take over,” pushing the couple to marry on the parents’ timetable.

While the narrator is a thoughtful, intelligent and self-aware young woman who finishes college and starts a career, she struggles to see how she is taken advantage of by men. The reader, as well, is not easily able to see the next trainwreck coming as the narrator navigates adulthood.

In my own family lore, there is a story we tell about my then-5-year-old son who, during an apparently uneventful movie, leaned over to his great-grandmother and said “If they don’t start blowing up stuff soon, I’m outta here.”

There will be that temptation at times for readers who grew up on Dan Brown or James Patterson, those who expect something explosive to happen in the last paragraph of every chapter, which will then yank them into the next.

The Promise of a Normal Life moves slowly; there’s not much in the way of TNT. It is a quietly revealing character study that wields its power in lyricism and detail. Gibson, a widely published poet who taught creative writing at Tufts University for 23 years, endows her narrator with her own gifts of observation and wisdom. At one point, when the narrator and her husband move to Los Angeles, she joins a synagogue having suddenly felt attached to Jewish heritage. (“Suddenly it seemed interesting, instead of ordinary and assumed. The desert dry air had given me room to imagine.”) A rabbi later tells her, “You are a mystic, a true Jewish mystic,” which in the context felt like something of a come-on, but still resembled truth.

Without spoilers it’s difficult to discuss the last quarter of the novel, but it extends to the end of Polina’s life, when her daughter, for the first time, addresses her mother by something other than her first name.

For much of the novel it is unclear just how damaging Polina was — there are hints that there might be something more than just garden-variety bad parenting involved. At the same time, the narrator is at times so fragile that it also seems possible that the hard-driving Polina will eventually be vindicated — that she wasn’t the problem, but something else was. It’s a thin mystery within the complex tapestry of this family, but it works. The Promise of a Normal Life offers anyone with a — how to put it? — challenging mother a compelling sense of solidarity. A

The Half Known Life, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 225 pages)

Pico Iyer is primarily known as a travel writer, but it should not be surprising that he delves into the spiritual in his latest book, given that he spends a part of each year in silent retreat at a hermitage in California. In The Half Known Life, Iyer rummages through his experiences traveling from Iran to Israel to Sri Lanka to North Korea.

The book is a travelog, of sorts, and the subtitle (“In search of paradise”) suggests that he intends to write an examination of how different religious traditions view the afterlife. But Iyer’s purpose is more complex than that.

Our longing for paradise after death is simply an extension of our longing for paradise on Earth, whether it be a place or a state of mind. He quotes Omar Khayyam, “Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth.” He is more concerned with how we live together in this realm, on this planet, given our vastly different perspectives on life’s biggest questions. How, he asks, can we “keep faith with even the hope of Paradise when nearly all the paradises I’d seen were, sometimes for that very reason, war zones?”

Ultimately, he offers no prescriptions, only musings, and a wealth of trivia on different cultures’ views of death and what comes after.

In Japan, for example, cemeteries are called “cities of tomorrow,” a hopeful take on human remains. Iyer writes of his Japanese wife’s custom of maintaining an altar in their home dedicated to her deceased parents, of leaving food and tea for them there every morning, and visiting their graves to tell them everything that’s going on in the family. “The doors between the living and the dead are kept open across the land, and at intervals throughout the year, lanterns are lit so the dead can make their way back to earth and look in on their much-missed loved ones.” To some Japanese, the dead are even closer to the living than they were in life.

In Sri Lanka, Iyer retraces the steps of the famed monk Thomas Merton, who was found dead in Bangkok shortly after his travels. Although a Christian, Merton had been moved by a 46-foot Buddha in deathly repose, so much so that he later wrote, “I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for.” Iyer marvels at this, “that a man who had devoted his life to the Christian God had been so stirred by the face of the Buddha, as if heaven was not the private property of any group.”

In Australia, Iyer visits the coastal city of Broome, where he is confronted by hostile Aboriginal people who resent the encroaching tourism. He notes that although a majority of Aboriginals identify as Christians, “they did not understand why Europeans needed to go into a special house to talk to God, eyes closed. For them, the promised land was nowhere but the land around them.”

And in Kashmir, the contested region which has territory that belongs to Pakistan, India and China, he visits the places that once represented earthly paradise to his mother and extended family, and muses on Salman Rushdie’s poignant question, one that can keep you up all night: “Was happiness God’s gift, or the Devil’s? He’d begun his book on Kashmir by quoting the local poet Agha Shahid Ali: ‘I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of hell.’”

And of course, he visits Jerusalem, which he has come to believe is “the place where everyday morality and religion part ways, on grounds of irreconcilable differences.” The constant tussling over holy spaces by Muslims, Jews and Christians (and within Christianity, that tussling between various denominations) renders the city a crowded and harsh cacophony that contradicts the heart of the various faiths. Jerusalem, he writes, is “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles.” It is, he writes, “an unusually rooted place … that was always about to go up in flames.”

Iyer is a thoughtful, spiritual man of great intellect who writes beautifully, as in this description of Broome: “Nighttime clouds were illuminated by long, silent flashes, as if the heavens themselves were submitting to an X-ray.” The biographer of the Dalai Lama, he stands outside the biggest Abrahamic faiths — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — yet is reverential to religious faith of all kinds and writes respectfully even as bringing a critical eye to their battles and contradictions.

Still, the book struggled to hold my attention, as it never established a clear storyline other than the author holding forth on the myriad places he has visited; the paradise theme seems thin connective tissue that does not rise to its promise and its usual power. More memorable than Iyer’s own reflections were those of others, such as the Sufi koan about man: “Though drowned in sin / Heaven is his lot.”

Commenting on a particular type of film, Iyer writes, “they hold you for two hours with supple and constant swerves, and at the end you’re farther from a clear conclusion than ever.” The same could be said of this book. Paradise is neither lost nor found here; The Half Known Life is more of a purgatory. C+

Wolfish, by Erica Berry (Flatiron, 380 pages)

After Erica Berry was awarded a fellowship to work on a book about wolves, she took a train from Minneapolis to Portland, where she would spend a few weeks alone researching and writing in the delightful paid-for isolation awarded to writers of promise. By the time Berry had settled in her seat, I had already learned something new: that Amtrak cars are segregated into “families/couples” and “singles.” Maybe everyone in the world but me knew this already, but our brains like learning new things, and I discerned that Berry’s book about wolves and fear would be quite a trip. And it was, just not in the way that I expected.

After Berry settled down comfortably in her seat, happy to “watch the prairie buckle into the mountains” and read, she was dismayed to be joined by a somewhat threatening man who was eventually forcibly removed from the train. It was the first, it turns out, of many times that Berry felt threatened by men, causing her to move throughout the world in the emotional state of a rabbit or other small mammal that is always on cusp of being somebody’s dinner.

Enter the wolf.

More than a decade ago, Berry became interested in the politics of wolves in the West, where in some places wolves were being reintroduced to areas where they had gone extinct. (“More wolves, less politics” is actually a slogan for some wolf advocates.) Some of the wolves have been outfitted with tracking collars (despite the fact that some don’t survive the stress of temporary capture), and they had a cult following as they crossed state lines and found mates. Their exploits, and those of the people who follow them, are in fact more fascinating than much of what is found on network TV.

But Berry took it further. She started to think deeply about archetypes of wolves and why they are so embedded in our culture as animals that inspire fear, so much so that we compare terrorists to wolves. (It is a good question — why do we so frequently identify a killer as a “lone wolf” instead of, say, a lone Grizzly bear?) Wolfish is the result. The book is a gorgeously written, deeply researched and smartly plotted examination of animal fear that will be well reviewed and possibly win prestigious awards, but will be read by hardly anyone.

That’s in part because Berry is telling two painfully disparate stories: that of these beautiful, wild, unafraid creatures, and that of the crippling anxiety that seems to be part and parcel of the lives of so many young adults, especially women. In the world that Berry describes, young women are always moving through a terrifying forest with wolves around every tree; it is a story that we’ve been told since childhood, and it’s interesting to learn the origins of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (The oldest version in print dates to 1697; similar stories have long histories in China, Korea and Japan.)

And Berry does not seem to be exaggerating in terms of her own life. She has had a staggering number of threatening encounters with men, to include being surrounded by a silent group of men wearing white T-shirts (with slits for eyes) over their faces, to men who follow her in a park, whistle at her while she runs and murmur obscenities to her on a bus — to the point where she says friends have “suggested I was prone to ‘bad luck,’ as if the encounters I had were mistakes, aberrations, not just blips in the field of female — of human! — life.”

No woman, of course, should have to be subjected to constant threats and harassment, and every woman, whether or not they are as beautiful as Berry as is, has stories about feeling threatened — stories that even years later can leave us, in the language of Emily Dickenson, zero at the bone. But the narrative that Berry employs — interspersing tales of the famous wolf known as OR-7 and his travels, with stories of murdered women and children, and her own crippling fears — makes for unnecessarily dark reading, with just enough light for the occasional eye roll.

Cases in point: her agonizing over the ethics of flying to England for two weeks of wolf-watching paid for with yet another grant (“What could I observe about the wolves to justify two-pickup-truck-beds worth of sea ice melting, the amount the emissions from my round-trip seat will hypothetically finish off?”) and her guilt about calling authorities on another genuinely threatening man who showed up at her home (“It was a story about the power of my white female fear, a fear that could ignite the apparatus of a police state I had long ago come to doubt.”)

And so we go on like this for nearly 400 pages, Berry luring us forward with delectable wolf stories and treats while the reader wishes she had gotten professional help for her fear. Even her mother, it seems, has felt this way; Berry writes, “Whenever I used to tell my mother about being afraid of this or that, she would look worried,” she writes.

“How much fear should you stoke to stay alive? How much trust can you afford before it kills you?” Berry asks, and they seem to be questions she asks in her own defense. Fear is, of course, an evolutionary tool to keep us alive. It is also, like physical pain, more difficult to control once it gets past a certain point. She quotes from the Robert Browning poem “Ivan Ivanovitch,” which is about wolves attacking a family traveling by sled: “Who can hold fast a boy in a frenzy of fear?”

That poem and other stories Berry tells, such as that of a young Alaskan teacher killed by wolves in 2010, remind us that there are in fact frightening beasts in the world that most of us will spend our lives comfortably distant from, seeking adrenalin elsewhere. Wolfish plumbs the depths of fear in interesting ways, but ultimately suffers from an author too much in its grip. B+

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 435 pages)

When the protagonist of Rebecca Makkai’s gripping new novel is a teen, she arrives at a boarding school in New Hampshire knowing little about the school or the region.

“I remembered wondering if New Hampshire kids had accents, not understanding how few of my classmates would be from New Hampshire,” she says. Bodie Kane was not headed to Phillips Exeter, but to the fictional Granby School, somewhere deep in the woods in the general vicinity of Manchester, Concord and Peterborough.

It’s now two decades later and Kane, a successful podcaster in Los Angeles, is headed back to her alma mater to teach a two-week “mini-mester” on podcasting and film. The trip is stirring up troubling memories about the death of her beautiful Granby roommate named Thalia Keith, whose body had been found in the school pool.

A Black athletic trainer had been arrested, tried and found guilty of the murder, but enough questions remained that the case had attracted national attention, even being featured on “Dateline.” And with the rising interest in true crime and an attendant rise in internet sleuthing, people were still talking about the case online and pointing out problems with the state’s case against the trainer, even picking through a grainy video of the musical that Thalia had performed in shortly before her death.

Despite their being roommates, Bodie had not been especially close to Thalia, who was one of the “in” crowd. Thalia had the sort of effortless beauty that attracted everyone to her: “She played tennis, and suddenly tennis practice had spectators.” And Thalia had arrived at Granby with an exquisite wardrobe that contained 30 sweaters, while Bodie, whose tuition was paid by kindly members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wasn’t remotely prepared for cold weather.

But Bodie, whose “Starlet Fever” podcast probed into little-known stories of often troubled Hollywood stars, has a knack for investigation. And so when one of the students in her podcasting mini-course proposes doing her initial podcast on Thalia’s murder — with the premise that Omar Evans had falsely confessed and was innocent — Bodie agrees.

Meanwhile, she seems to have trouble brewing back at home, where the father of her children (to whom she is legally married, but only on paper) is asking nervously if she has read the news and is asking her to stay off Twitter.

It would be reductive to call I Have Some Questions For You a thriller or a whodunit, although it has many components of both. Bodie, the narrator, has her own dark past; both her father and her brother are dead (the father having died because of something her brother did). When her mother fell apart, she was taken in by the Latter-day Saint family who paid for her to escape Indiana by going to Granby. And she brings parts of her own troubled history to her obsession with cases of abused and murdered women across geography and time, even while acknowledging the moral questions about probing into their cases in true-crime shows and podcasts.

“I have opinions about their deaths, ones I’m not entitled to,” Bodie says. “I’m queasy, at the same time, about the way they’ve become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I’m queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I’m not alone in my fixations.”

Thalia Keith’s murder is, in a sense, a fictional scaffolding on which Makkai builds a serious discussion about abused and murdered women, and how we exploit and fail them. While it’s a page-turner in a practical sense — the reader is carried in the current of wanting to know what really happened to Thalia, and what the role was of the teacher that Bodie keeps addressing in the narrative -— there are frequent mentions of real women who had violent, premature deaths, and the men responsible.

If this sounds like a lot to put on the reader, well, it is; the novel feels mildly oppressive at times, with all it is trying to take on. Plus, we know there is not going to be a happy ending: Thalia is dead when the novel opens; she will be dead when it ends. Meanwhile, we are going to hear about a lot of other dead women, abused women and sexually harassed women. Amazingly, in all of this, New Hampshire comes off just fine except for the repeated insinuations that its winters are cold. Makkai is careful not to suggest that any real-life police departments would force a false confession or that any real-life attorney would have so horribly failed the wrongly convicted man.

“New Hampshire’s public defenders are apparently excellent, and know everyone in the legal system of what is, after all, a very small state. They know the culture, and they don’t overdress for court,” she writes in what seems a bit of overkill. (In her acknowledgements, Makkai also credits Portsmouth public defender Stephanie Hausman, “who course-corrected and fine-tuned the legal parts of the book.”)

As such, while it’s not a novel that New Hampshire’s chambers of commerce will want to use for marketing, it’s not a bad one for the Granite State. And every good book is made better when it’s set in familiar environs. Look for this one when the lists of the best books of 2023 emerge later this year. A