{"id":7395,"date":"2025-07-20T02:40:27","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T02:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/7395\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T02:40:27","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T02:40:27","slug":"5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-literary-hub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/7395\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week \u2039 Literary Hub"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Book<\/a><\/p>\n

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Brandon Taylor on Ocean Vuong\u2019s The Emperor of Gladness, James Wood on Geoff Dyer\u2019s Homework, Christian Lorentzen on Michael M. Grynbaum\u2019s Empire of the Elite, Charlotte Shane on Mayumi Inaba\u2019s Mornings Without Mii, and\u00a0Becca Rothfeld on Tony Tulathimutte\u2019s Rejection.<\/p>\n

Brought to you by Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHere is a narrator who tells us how people are, how they think, how they live, a narrator who leans forward and explains, floats a theory now and then, and attempts to integrate the shaggy procession of images and descriptions into a totality or at least into a meaningful structure. It\u2019s a welcome reprieve from the current mode of contemporary narrators who flee from any sort of explanatory responsibility and whose jobs seem to be to obscurerather than to generate meaning through the integration of experiences. This is not to say that Vuong\u2019s narrator is objective or pretends to be objective, but only to say that I enjoy a narrator who occasionally, like a narrator from Wharton or James, pauses to describe the kinds of guys who exist.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point of view in The Emperor of Gladness is unstable in a way that, pardon me, feels inappropriate \u2026 Naturally, some will say that the Western tradition of the realist novel as it descends from Henry James with its single, controlling point of view is an outmoded and outdated notion that is itself a refutation of the novel\u2019s early profligacy with respect to style of narration. And that a looser, messier, even seemingly incoherent set of choices with respect to point of view comes closer to the experience of consciousness, etc., something, something, non-Western narrative traditions, whatever, OK. But the questions I always return to are: Does the technique make the book better? Does it add something? In this case, I would say the violations in point of view just felt random and distracting and underattended to.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cMore often the novel treats its characters like hogs to the slaughter. Why else does Vuong strip them again and again of their dignity, making them dance like rickety little puppets? The novel\u2019s worldview is bleak beyond imagining, which itself is no great sin, but the mechanism of that bleakness seems particularly cruel. It feels somehow that the novel wants to convince us that these characters are living lives worth living and also that they\u2019re fucking fools.<\/p>\n

In interviews timed for the release of the novel, Vuong has expressed a desire to write about characters who fall outside the paradigm of progress. He wants to write about stuck people who work dead-end, annihilating jobs that will never permit them to rise out of material precarity. In short, he wants to write about the way that most people live. One senses that this novel is written to appear \u2018unsentimental.\u2019 I find it very sentimental. In fact, I find it practically romantic about the prosaic facts of working-class life. Vuong resists turning everything into poetry as he did in his first novel, that\u2019s true. But I would argue that the romantic or sentimental impulses have merely been camouflaged by the novel\u2019s more prosaic language.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Brandon Taylor on Ocean Vuong\u2019s The Emperor of Gladness<\/a> (Bookforum<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Homework\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn a sense, Dyer grew up alongside British cultural materialism. Intellectually, the era was one of radical ferment, but radicalism worked on the canonical: D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy remained royalty in schools and universities, thanks to the king-making attentions of Williams and F. R. Leavis. It\u2019s no surprise to find Lawrence and Hardy invoked in Homework, or to learn that one of the secondhand books Dyer\u2019s mother brought home was a battered orange Penguin of Williams\u2019s Border Country. You could say that Dyer has done his homework.\u00a0But it\u2019s not just homework; it\u2019s also the work that home does on you. The reason Lawrence, Hardy, and Williams shadow Homework is not simply that Dyer is a shrewd reader who propelled himself from a bookless, working-class home to Cheltenham Grammar, and then to Oxford. Others have made that climb, too. What makes those writers crucial here is that Dyer\u2019s own journey is viscerally connected to theirs.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cDyer\u2019s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be. Many of the classic elements are here\u2014the murky atrocity of school food; the ecstatic discovery of literature (for Dyer, especially Shakespeare) and music (gallons of dubious prog rock); a spurt or two of rebellion; sexual fumblings in cars; the anxious opening of exam results in \u2018buff-coloured\u2019 envelopes, those official passports to the wider world.\u00a0All this is delivered in Dyer\u2019s familiar mode of extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cGradually, it becomes apparent that, running alongside the book\u2019s comic freestyling, there\u2019s a painful shadow text. Perhaps \u2018shadow text\u2019 isn\u2019t quite right\u2014the words are out in the open. In fact, they often compose sentences of acute, lancing pain, pain too great to linger over or even to fully acknowledge.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cSo this painful and pained book proceeds\u2014the searing, isolate sentences tearing repeated holes in the screen of banter. The punctum keeps returning, no matter how hard Dyer tries to puncture it. And how. \u2018Never put anything in writing\u2019 is one of the few pieces of advice that Dyer, the author of more than twenty books, remembers his father giving. Think about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013James Wood on Geoff Dyer\u2019s Homework<\/a> (The New Yorker<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Empire<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cA newspaperman I used to work with liked to say that there are two types of media columnists\u2014reporters who get the dish on newsroom gossip and critics who are philosophers of ink and pulp\u2014but you never get the twain in one writer. Grynbaum belongs to the former category. When it comes to hirings and firings and office intrigues, the technical word for this book is juicy. He has all the details he can fit, and he has many of them from inside sources, both on the record and anonymous, even if much of it has been aired over the years in earlier tell-alls, screeds, biographies, diaries and gossip rags.<\/p>\n

Empire of the Elite is weaker on questions of the company\u2019s aesthetics and editorial approaches; here Grynbaum tends to repeat the conventional wisdom, swallow the hype or, in matters of controversy, teach the debate.\u00a0Grynbaum has given himself the task of mythologizing the mythmakers, where he might have chosen instead to demystify them.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat these editors have in common more than some Horatio-Alger-with-a-pica-ruler climb is that they were good at their jobs. They had strong visions and were good at marshaling talent to execute them. They were also the avatars of a major generational turnover in Anglophone culture. The term Grynbaum uses is \u2018yuppie,\u2019 but a more relevant one might simply be \u2018baby boomer.\u2019 With the exception of Cooper, who was born in 1937, these editors were of the generation born between 1945 and 1960, the first to grow up with television from the cradle.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one way of explaining their comfort with the celebrity-infused high\/low editorial formula Brown brought to Vanity Fair that quickly spread across the rest of Cond\u00e9 Nast. The new guard of editors were uninhibited in matters of sex and unrestrained in their pursuit of buzz. There was no shame in chasing whatever was hot. The embrace of vulgarity caused a few resignations when Brown took over The New Yorker, but now it seems to most readers and magazine hands the natural order of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Christian Lorentzen on Michael M. Grynbaum\u2019s Empire of the Elite: Inside Cond\u00e9 Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America<\/a> (The New York Times Book Review<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Mornings<\/p>\n

\u201cCat people are the only conceivable audience for Mornings Without Mii, an uneventful memoir in which a Japanese woman\u2014married at the beginning of the book, later divorced\u2014loves and lives with a cat who succumbs to old age. Who else would be entertained by meticulous descriptions of Mii sleeping, playing in newspapers, sniffing everything she comes across, lapping up milk? Much of the book is devoted to Mii\u2019s habits and tastes, her comings and goings, the style in which she arranges her body, and Inaba\u2019s passion for documenting every detail.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing here will surprise a cat lover, not the engrossed study and indefatigable solicitousness or the stressful relocations and the health scares. The terminus of this relationship is a forgone conclusion\u2014with or without the giveaway of the book\u2019s title. Mornings with Mii will inexorably give way to mornings without, which means the people most likely to appreciate the book will also find it excruciating. \u2018I could barely get through it,\u2019 says Sloane Crosley in a blurb. A friend of mine teared up upon simply hearing the title. Humans die, too, of course, we all know that. And the loss is terrible. But I would not have psychically braced myself to pick up a book called Mornings Without My Sister\/Husband\/Friend. Nor would I have felt so raw throughout. Love is always the Trojan horse of grief, but companion animals make this unusually clear, probably because their lifespans are so short.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cBut\u00a0Inaba\u2019s writing, as accomplished as it may be, is affecting to me because it draws on a broad and exquisite sensitivity that Amy Hempel, in her short story \u2018At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,\u2019 aptly named \u2018the tender vittles emotion.\u2019 It is a protective, even worshipful fellow feeling for the animals of the world, especially the domesticated and dependent ones, regardless of whether they are unknown to us or personally beloved, and it\u2019s an impulse easily belittled by those who\u2019ve either never felt it or refused to tolerate it in themselves \u2026 There is an intensity here that, being widespread but not universal, borders on the deranged, yet it is one of the most precious, vital sensations I know. To adore without reservation\u2014which is, essentially, a religious experience\u2014is to feel that one\u2019s own life has meaning and purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Charlotte Shane on Mayumi Inaba\u2019s Mornings Without Mii (Bookforum<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Rejection\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn this book there is no alternative to shame and self-loathing, no possibility of redemption. Tulathimutte\u2019s stories are impressive, but that doesn\u2019t make them nice to read. Their unpleasantness is testament to the perversity of their subject matter, because the writing itself is enormous fun. Tulathimutte seizes on the indignities of contemporary language and wrests them into absurdities. Bee, Kant\u2019s sister, says she\u2019s \u2018always believed that microaggressions warrant microapologies.\u2019 Alison describes herself as being in a \u2018whatevership\u2019 with the man whose wedding she disrupts. Descriptions are satisfyingly tart. Kant\u2019s incompatible boyfriend is \u2018tanned and centered, his chakras agape, comprehensively Californian.\u2019 Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace come to mind as antecedents, though Tulathimutte has their wit without their warmth. He writes like a child holding a microscope over the ground, peering down at an insect burning to death.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cTulathimutte is engaging here in a kind of hysterical augmentation, a gothic enlargement of the sort that influencers undertake when they document (and dramatize) their days. He writes in the exaggerated register of the internet post: one story in Rejection even takes the form of a Reddit post, while \u2018Main Character\u2019 is a series of entries on a forum. In \u2018Pics,\u2019 Alison belongs to a group chat that functions like a judgmental Greek chorus. (We can tell that Alison is a pariah because her contributions are fastidiously punctuated.)\u00a0These stories are everything that a good post should be\u2014including a little too outrageous to be believable.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026most of Tulathimutte\u2019s characters are nothing but their online avatars: pure shtick, without any interior life. It would be interesting to see him turn his skills to the plight of someone who isn\u2019t simply loathsome and inauthentic\u2014not because fiction has to be populated by good guys, but because most people are at least marginally more complex than they appear online.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Becca Rothfeld on Tony Tulathimutte\u2019s Rejection<\/a> (London Review of Books<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Brandon Taylor on Ocean Vuong\u2019s The Emperor of Gladness, James…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-7395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}