Amy Bloom’s latest novel, White Houses, is a work of historical fiction that recreates the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. The novel is told from Lorena’s perspective and spans decades, encompassing everything from her abusive childhood in South Dakota to her time spent living in the White House (and ultimately finds her in her elderly years). Lorena makes a witty, charismatic narrator, and her relationship with Eleanor seems built on a mutual respect for each other’s strength. As a result, White Houses is a charming and tender depiction of middle-aged love, and Bloom captures the gamut of emotions—everything from rapture to pain—that accompanies growing older with someone.
Lorena’s childhood in South Dakota informs facets of her relationship with Eleanor, and this section proves to be one of the most moving and vivid parts of the novel.…
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There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on.…
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Tom Perrotta’s latest novel, Mrs. Fletcher, involves a lot of porn and sexual adventure, but that’s not to say it’s lacking in heart. Beneath the more sensational parts of the book is a story about embracing the fluidity of your identity and giving yourself the freedom to change.
The first part of the novel cuts between the titular character of Eve Fletcher—a single mother in her mid-forties—and her son Brendan during a major transitory period in both of their lives. Brendan leaves home for his first year of college, and Eve is alone for the first time. In her son’s absence, she is left to reexamine her choices. Her newfound independence becomes the impetus for her awakening sexually, intellectually, and socially. Specifically, she becomes transfixed by lesbian porn sites and starts seeing the scenes of her life through the lens of porn scenarios.…
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Absence populates Rachel Khong’s stellar debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. It’s a book about the absence of reliable memories, the absence of people you thought were permanent, and the absence of self-understanding. It’s about the memories that follow and haunt you, and the ones that only leave behind traces of themselves, their negative space haunting you all the same.
When we meet our narrator Ruth, she’s in her thirties and the life she envisioned for herself is in shambles. Her fiancé broke up with her on the day she thought they were moving in together. If that weren’t enough, she’s dispassionate about her job and her father, Howard, has Alzheimer’s disease, which is getting progressively worse. Everything she thought she could depend on has been upended.…
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Books of humorous essays can be hit or miss. Too often, the collection lacks cohesion or the humor can feel cloying. Scaachi Koul’s debut, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, is the rare collection in which none of the essays feel expendable. Rather, each one is well-crafted and thoroughly entertaining, balancing keen insight with effortless, acerbic wit.
Koul’s essays largely center around her identity and how it was shaped by her upbringing in Calgary as a child of Indian immigrants, the racism (both subtle and overt) she’s experienced growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood, and the sexism embedded in both Western and Indian cultures. Her experiences feeling like an outsider undoubtedly helped influence her perspective, which is uniquely her own.…
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Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.”
At some point, you realize you aren’t waiting anymore for your life to start. Your life’s happening right now, and it’s pretty dull.
– Jade Sharma, Problems
There’s an unspoken yet ubiquitous set of expectations we have for women in an attempt to keep them palatable. They shouldn’t be “too loud” or “too much.” We praise them on their restraint. We associate femininity with being demure. Maya, the narrator of Jade Sharma’s Problems, has freed herself from the shackles of these notions, so much so that her behavior directly upends them: She’s a drug addict. She’s blunt about not loving her husband. She’s unapologetically unfaithful, sleeping with a much older man who doesn’t bother pretending to be interested in her.…
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