Every novel starts with an act of imagination. A writer finds a story or a story finds a writer — it all starts with an act of imagination. Acts of faith and empathy, the occasional act of charity, come later; those layered acts build novels, conjure the emotional truths that underscore character, place, story — the elements that get readers turning pages, make them desperate to talk to each other about what they’ve just read.

A Summer 2016 selection of our Discover Great New Writers program, Rumaan Alam’s charming debut novel Rich and Pretty  traces the evolution of a long friendship between two women hits home for readers who hear echoes of our own friendships with other women as we read. Emma Straub (Modern Lovers) is also a fan of this “smart, sharp, and beautifully made” portrait of an enduring friendship “that is impossible to resist.”

A few weeks ago, Rumaan was joined for a reading and onstage Q&A at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper East Side by Mira Jacob, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. Jacob is the founder of Pete’s Reading Series in New York City; her work has appeared in Guernica and Vogue, among other outlets. The following is an edited transcript of their onstage conversation.–Miwa Messer

 

Mira Jacob: I have some questions for you, and I think the most pressing one starts this off, which is: How many lady brains did you eat to write this book? How did you make this up?

Rumaan Alam: I don’t know. I really don’t know. A lot of my closest friends are women. A lot of them are in this room right now. But I never asked anybody, you know, tell me about X or Y. I just watched these women over the course of our adulthood, and I knew more about their . . . They seemed to have fuller lives than I do. They had relationships. And I just sort of watched that whole thing unfold. And I guess I stole it. I guess that’s how I did it. I don’t know.

MJ: You stole it.

RA: I stole it. But isn’t that like . . . You do that, too.

MJ: I do that, too.

RA: That’s what you do. Right? So I stole it.

MJ: So then it’s not the lady brains.

RA: There’s a lot of frontline reporting in this book. Even I can recognize a lot of it. I think when my friends do finally now get a chance to read it, I anticipate them saying to me, “Oh, this is something that happened to me that you stole.”

MJ: Are you nervous about that?

RA: Well, I’m not, because I feel like it was well meant. I hope. I don’t think there’s anything mean or . . . Yeah, and there is not one person. It’s not like the book is about one person or two people. It’s a lie. That’s the other thing you do. Like, you’re lying.

MJ: Well, the book is about two people, but it’s not about two people in their actual life, right?

RA: Right.

MJ: So you’ve got the two main characters, who are white women.

RA: Yes.

MJ: You are brown.

RA: That’s true.

MJ: And a man.

RA: That’s true.

MJ: And gay.

RA: That’s true.

MJ: You are a gay brown man.

RA: Yes.

MJ: Can we talk about this?

RA: Yeah. I think we should talk about it.

MJ: How did you approach this?

RA: With some trepidation. Because I think that when you’re writing something that doesn’t belong to you, you should rightfully feel cautious about it. I was like, I just have to write it and see if it . . . Every person in the business of publishing is a woman. So if I had got it totally wrong, this book never would have gone anywhere. Right?

MJ: That’s a fair point.

RA: So I feel like it has been vetted, at least, and I feel like my editors and my agent would not let me do something stupid and make a big, obvious, stupid mistake, so I take some comfort in that. But I was very nervous about it for sure. For sure.

MJ: And it’s not the book that is expected of you.

RA: Yes, but that is its own kind of liberation. Because I think the book that is expected like you, when you look like you and I, is a book about people coming from overseas and struggling and learning a language. I see a friend of mine, who is a black woman writer, sitting in the audience, nodding her head, because she knows, and it’s the same thing that every writer who doesn’t look like Jonathan Franzen (unless he is Jonathan Franzen; he’s great), is meant to meet some expectation that is held by some person that no one can identify. I don’t know who that person is. I don’t know who that editorial director is. I don’t know who that critic is, who says, “This is the way the narrative of brown in America works.” I’ve read those books. I love Jhumpa Lahiri. She did, weirdly, write one story that is very similar to the story of my life. (Which is another story.) But she is, for the most part, not telling the story of my life. I felt very little desire to tell the story of my life. I felt like it was much more liberating to do something completely different. It was almost like writing about aliens.

MJ: Hilton Als, right, recently talked about this, about autobiography, and about Lemonade . . . How did you react to what he was writing?

RA: Well, I understand that there is a lot of dissent out there about his actual critique.

MJ: Could you summarize it in case someone missed it?

RA: That Beyoncé’s power comes from being a wronged woman, and because she has this visual iconography and this very precise writing, has recast the entire narrative of Black Womanhood, essentially. He makes the point in that particular piece that I loved, which is that people have a very specific expectation of autobiography from writers who are minorities — I don’t even know what “minority” means — but from writers who are brown.

MJ: Yes.

RA: They expect it to be autobiography. And I do it, too.

MJ: Did you do it with the dancing?

RA: No, I did it with Nicole Dennis-Benn, who I was just talking to you about.

MJ: Oh, that’s interesting.

RA: I was reading her book. Nicole Dennis-Benn is a Jamaican writer, and she has a book coming out in July that’s amazing, called Here Comes the Sun, and I was reading it, and I was like, Huh, I wonder if this was Nicole’s life story. Then I was like, that’s so fucked up that I think that when I know better, and I know that she’s just a really talented artist who was spinning a tale and building a universe, which is what everybody does. I don’t think anybody says — to use Jonathan Franzen, no one says Purity is the story of his life.

MJ: They don’t do that.

RA: They don’t do that. It is, I think, a kind of curse of being a minority writer. I think what Hilton was saying was that it’s the curse of being a minority artist.

MJ: Absolutely.

RA: That’s a fair point.

MJ: That is a fair point. Fairly quickly, just because we’re on the subject, what did you think of Lemonade?

RA: I don’t know. I haven’t watched the video because I don’t have that much time on my hands, honestly. I can’t sit and watch something for that long without getting, like, distracted. But I listened to it a lot. I think it’s great.

MJ: Give me three descriptions for each character in your novel. Like, if you were writing a dating profile, but honest. Three things that you could tell me about each of them.

RA: The book is about two women named Lauren and Sarah, and they are friends from the time they are eleven. The book takes place from when they’re thirty-two to around thirty-seven. Lauren is beautiful. She is sardonic. And she is uncertain. Sarah is lovely, and cultivated, and a square.

MJ: I feel like now is a good time to talk about the title.

RA: First of all, I don’t really believe in spoilers, unless you’re talking about Game of Thrones, which please don’t, because we’re very far behind. But the title is very reductive. The title of the book is Rich and Pretty, and it is intentionally a reductive way of talking about these two women. It is my opinion that it is a trick, and there is a scene in the book that gives context to the title that will hopefully make you feel that it is not as reductive as it may seem if you just see it. When I was writing it . . . You asked if it was, like, scary. I was imagining a woman seeing the title of this book and being, “What the fuck do I want to read this fucking book of some dude saying, ‘Here is a book about someone who is rich and someone who is pretty.’ ”

But in a way, that is like the joke that I am making. The title dares you to have that misunderstanding, and I would not . . . A woman who felt that way, seeing the title and seeing my author photo . . . a woman who felt that way would not be wrong to feel that way. You know?

MJ: Right.

RA: It is a reductive title.

MJ: You’re just hoping to punch through to the other side of that.

RA: Hopefully.

MJ: Who did you like writing more, Sarah or Lauren?

RA: Lauren.

MJ: Really?

RA: Yes, which is funny, because I am so much like Sarah. It’s funny, because it seems like the readers who have read the book . . . there does seem some sense that, like, people want to take a side and pick.

MJ: Absolutely.

RA: Yes. But you can feel for Lauren.

MJ: Did they stay with you, the characters?

RA: Yes. You know this. It’s like psychosis. It’s insanity. When I was writing this book — I mean, I can’t believe that I’m still married. In my experience, what it did to me was crazy. I thought about them all the time. I felt like I was them. When we’d walk around the city I’d look at things and shift, as I was walking, between “What would Lauren think about this?” and “What would Sarah think about this?” I’d go to places that I thought they would go to. It was insane.

MJ: Now you have two kids.

RA: Yes.

MJ: The oldest is?

RA: He’s almost seven now.

MJ: And you started writing this in 2009. I’m just doing the math here.

RA: I did not have kids when I started writing it.

MJ: And then it took over.

RA: Yes.

MJ: Did you ever find that it was a complete joy to disappear into these characters when you were in the throes of parenthood?

RA: I have always been suspicious of writers who are like, “I love writing,” because I think it sucks. I mean, there are certainly moments when I’m working, and everything is alive, and it’s working the way I want it to, and the words are coming out, and you can see the page count growing, and you’re like, “OK, I’m getting somewhere.” But the feeling is so fleeting. And then the next day you’re like, “Oh, it’s all garbage” — twenty pages of garbage.

MJ: So in other words, it was an escape from the drudgery.

RA: It was like a fugue state. It was like a trance state. I was very tired. I had kids. I wrote the book at night. I was always very tired when I was working on it. But I think in some ways, like . . . Yes, it was devoid of joy, but it was an escape, yes.

MJ: Interesting. You say that they are still with you. Did you ever think that you weren’t going to get it done?

RA: Oh yeah, all the time.

MJ: It sounds like it. It sounds like you were anxious about it.

RA: Yes.

MJ: Was there ever a specific point like, This is it; this is not going to happen.

RA: Yes. The book centers on Sarah getting married, and when I finally got to the point where she was going to get married, I was like, “Fuck, I can’t do this.” I don’t want her to get married, I don’t care about romance. But there’s another part of, the joke — it’s not a joke, again, but like the mechanism of the book is a mechanism that is really familiar. Right? Somebody getting married. But it was not one in which I was deeply invested. It was just that, like, that’s what they were doing. It was putting them through their paces.

MJ: It was the propulsion.

RA: Yes.

MJ: So when you got to the payoff point . . .

RA: Exactly. So the wedding, barely exists in the finished book, because I thought, I can’t do it. I couldn’t figure out how to talk about how a woman looks in a wedding dress, or how Sarah would have looked in her wedding . . .

MJ: You could figure out how to talk about how a woman looks. I totally don’t buy that.

RA: I just think . . . Who knows?

MJ: I know that this is years and years in the making, and many things have happened that your friends and family who are here today will know. Can you tell me, just for the joy of all of us, what have been the most gratifying things so far about this book?

RA: That is such a good question. Every milestone on this particular journey or whatever has been so gratifying. Like, I sent the book out . . . I’m so superstitious and stupid. I sent the book out to agents on our wedding anniversary . . . no, on David’s birthday. I thought, I’ll send it out on October 5th. Then I was convinced, I’m never going to get an agent; no agent is going to want anything to do with me. And then I got the best agent that I could want. Then I thought, Oh, this is amazing; now I have like the world’s best agent — but even she can’t sell this book.” Then she gave me all these, like, horrible edits to the book that I had to like go and do, and then it went out and I was like, No one is going to want to buy this book. And then my agent told me, “You have a phone call tomorrow with this editor.” I said, “Really?” Then I talked to her and she said, “I really liked your book.” So every part of that thing was so crazy and gratifying in its own way. So hopefully, there will be more.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29v7cSV

With its new black cover and red edging, it looks like the Bible. Fitting, because like the Gideons’ favored volume, Valley of the Dolls has spent a lot of time stashed in nightstand drawers. Not the nightstands of hotels, where the temporary guests have no reason to hide their vices, but the nightstands of suburban homes and small city apartments inhabited by the readers, especially housewives and what used to be called career girls, who bought 31 million copies of the Bantam mass market paperback and, maybe, were a little ashamed to read it in the open. Those were the nightstands from which kids, who knew something racy was being kept from them, filched the book and read it on the sly.

Fifty years after it was released, Jacqueline Susann’s story of three young women trying to make it in the showbiz worlds of New York and Hollywood still ain’t the Bible, but it’s acquired at least a glimmer of respectability. That started in 1997 when Grove Press reissued the novel in a fabulous pink paperback edition with a die-cut cover from under which peeked the stars of the 1967 film version. This was a meaningful collision. Grove, the house that, under Barney Rosset, had spent the ’60s as haven to the avant-garde and the prosecuted, the American publisher of Burroughs, Miller, Genet, de Sade, and so many others, was now the publisher of the book that had epitomized the mainstream the authors on Grove’s list had scorned. Of the pieces that noted the ’97 return of Susann’s novel, none was smarter or more impassioned than Mim Udovitch’s in the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Udovitch, who understood the novel as a prefeminist touchstone, was out to stake a claim for all those women who had been mesmerized by the book, who felt Susann was speaking rough truths about their lives and had been looked down on by the literary establishment for wallowing in trash. In the literary season in which Udovitch was writing, the book that was supposed to define women’s empowerment was Katharine Graham’s memoir Personal History. In it the Washington Post publisher wrote, among other things, about how she struggled to take over the paper after the previous publisher, her husband, Philip, committed suicide. Udovitch wasn’t having it. I’m sick, she announced, of being asked to marvel at the courage of Katharine Graham for taking over a paper she already owned.

It was a great rude remark, and it suggested how the division that existed over Valley of the Dolls, the adulation of a wide readership, and the scorn of cultural gatekeepers had always in part been a class division. That division was never clearer than in the review by the hapless Gloria Steinem, who wrote about Valley of the Dolls for the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. In 1987 Steinem told Susann’s biographer Barbara Seaman that she had said “Valley of the Dolls is for the reader who has put away comic books but isn’t yet ready for the editorials in the Daily News.” The class snobbishness of Steinem’s remark encapsulates the suspicion with which the literary establishment has always reacted to any book the popular audience responds to. That isn’t to say that a book is good because it’s popular. But if a book resonates with the reading public to the tune of 31 million paperback copies, any after-the-fact analysis needs to dig a little deeper than merely putting the response down to the bad taste of the masses.

There’s no denying Susann was a formally crude writer, working in a genre that was often cruder. Her novels didn’t offer the noble suffering endured by the heroines of Fannie Hurst and Olive Higgins Prouty. Susann’s beat was showbiz at its most ruthless and fame at its gaudiest. As an unsuccessful actress, sometime TV game show panelist, wife to the producer Irving Mansfield, mistress to stars both male and female, and, after she achieved fame, tireless self-promoter, Susann well knew the territory she was working. Trading in her own experience, as well as gossip about Judy Garland and Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe, Susann was employing the same formula Harold Robbins had worked to great success in his 1961 smash The Carpetbaggers (crass and vulgar to its soul, it is nonetheless a protean read), which had played off the stories of Howard Hughes, Jean Harlow, and others. One of the reasons authors no longer write trashy romans à clef about the rich and famous, the genre epitomized by Susann and Robbins and later Sidney Sheldon, is that the public no longer needs novelists to deliver disguised gossip when they can get it with the identities right out in the open. Websites and shows like TMZ provide much nastier gossip than any of the guess-who stories Susann and Robbins traded in. And when it’s the celebs themselves providing the gossip via reality TV shows, you know that Susann died before she got a chance to see her great subject, the self-cannibalizing potential of fame, taken to its most hideous extremes.

But vulgarity needn’t preclude sincerity or honesty. Nothing in Valley of the Dolls feels cynically calculated. What gives it its conviction — and what may have turned off the critics who can’t get past the surface absurdities of melodrama — is that as you read it you feel that Susann believes every word. In its way, this is an absolutely uncompromised novel. Susann drew in readers by putting them in the sensible shoes of her heroine (and stand-in), Anne Welles, who comes to postwar New York from a soul-stifling New Hampshire town (perhaps a nod to Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place?) and is swept up by the glamour of it all. Then, with heedless deliberation, Susann smashed those fantasies. Valley of the Dolls is a tour of hell in which every success or accomplishment is a herald to some new dissatisfaction, some new heartbreak. Neely O’Hara, the novel’s version of Judy Garland and its one true monster, goes from young singing sensation to wildly revered diva. No defeat is bad enough to preclude a comeback for Neely, and no success is so fulfilling that it will keep her from fucking up again.

Neely is the novel’s horror show in full, foul-mouthed flower. What makes her train wreck of a life unique is that Susann — for every character, not just Neely — removed the cliché that had provided the escape route in every lonely-at-the-top saga: the possibility of redemption. Nobody gets past their weakness here, not even the levelheaded Anne, whose grim future is laid out in the book’s final pages. As for the romantic notion of escape, Susann treats that for the lie it is when Lyon Burke tries to persuade Anne to return to the New Hampshire house she’s inherited from her mother and live with him while he finishes his novel. Lyon is everything Anne wants in a man, and even that won’t persuade her to give up New York for the picturesque little New England cow town she escaped. New York begins to look frayed and familiar to Anne as the novel goes on, but it beats the hell out of New Hampshire, and Anne is savvy enough to recognize the return to the simple life as the crock it is. Susann once said that the book gave readers living ordinary lives the kick of feeling they had found something better than the hell of showbiz success. But she was underselling herself, because the dissatisfaction she was writing about was the same for her readers — whether they were suffering it on Park Avenue or on Main Street.

Oddly, there’s no cruelty in Susann’s dashing every hope for happiness that she holds out. Rather, she’s keeping faith with an audience who, whether they had articulated it or not, had begun to resent being placated by soap operas and romance novels. Unlike the good cry they offered, the refuge of uplift to be found in the saga of some self-sacrificing heroine, Susann told her female readers that life was just as unfair and hypocritical and unfulfilling as they suspected it to be, and you can’t help but think part of the mammoth response to the book was gratitude to its author for not bullshitting them.

In 2000 the great feminist critic Ellen Willis wrote, “For its coiners, the idea [behind the phrase “the personal is political”] was that the social rules governing sex, marriage, and motherhood were part of a system that enforced women’s subordination, so that much of what appeared to individual women to be their own private unhappiness was widely shared and reflected their social inequality.”

Valley of the Dolls wasn’t the first novel to suggest that private unhappiness was systemic rather than personal. One of Susann’s models, the 1958 The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe, remains a remarkable work about the confining expectations placed on women. Like Valley, it follows a group of young women determined to make it in New York (this time in the publishing world). Far less profane and blunt than Susann’s writing would be, the novel still manages to be startlingly frank. When the smart-girl heroine, Caroline, finally goes to bed with the man she’s in love with, the sex is so unsuccessful that afterward she’s not sure whether or not she’s still a virgin. There are excruciating blind date scenes written from Caroline’s point of view in which her merciless eye for mediocrity is brought to bear on the well-meaning dullards who’ve been funneled her way by friends. What remains startling is that this smart young woman, who has no interest in fulfilling the expectations that have ben set for her, remains boxed in by the sexual double standard of the era, essentially unable to divorce any hope for love and a satisfying sex life from marriage.

And that’s the failure of imagination that hovers over Valley of the Dolls. The women here aren’t powerless, but their brains and success are not enough to keep them from buying into the internalized notions of what, for a woman, was meant to constitute happiness. None of them are so enamored of their careers that they wouldn’t chuck it for the right man. (Susann doesn’t delve nearly as deeply into the men, but she gets at how sex roles crippled them, too, nowhere more so than in the places where the nice, mild guys who’ve been content with a goodnight kiss suddenly explode in tirades of sexual jealousy when it becomes apparent to them they don’t have what it takes to excite the women they love.) And so the dolls, Susann’s own slang for the pills that deliver the release of sleep that each of the women in her novel seeks, are a logical step. This is a world in which Sleeping Beauty doesn’t want to be awakened but wants to keep on sleeping. You read Valley of the Dolls and you know why feminism had to come.

It seems incredible that we still have to insist that a novel can be entertaining, moving, enveloping, even important — and Valley of the Dolls is an important novel — without being literary. Susann defined a widespread dissatisfaction and despair shared by many women before there was a movement dedicated to naming and ameliorating that despair. And there’s no reason to think Valley of the Dolls would have been a better novel had the modern feminist movement, which burgeoned a few years later with the 1969 Women’s Strike for Equality, been there to support her. In fact it probably wouldn’t have. Writing out of her own experience and her insatiable need for fame, Susann didn’t worry about whether she was striking the right ideological note, whether she would be judged on the perceived right side of issues. She simply told the truth. And I’m not going to end with a line like “In the process, she also wrote a wildly entertaining novel.” That was no “also” for Jackie Susann. It was everything.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29oll19

“After being called out for editing its live broadcast of the fireworks in Washington, D.C., to show fireworks bursting in clear air — on a night in which the weather was dominated by fog, low clouds and misting rain — PBS called it ‘the patriotic thing to do….’ The public broadcaster acknowledged intercutting old footage with its live broadcast shortly after the show ended.”
— NPR, July 5, 2016

Viewers, we apologize for last night’s hurricane coverage, which we labeled the Storm of the Century.  We have just been informed that it was not raining last night, and what we aired was a combination of old storm footage, highlights from the 2000 film The Perfect Storm, and a home video of two toddlers playing in a bathtub.

We would also like to acknowledge that we edited Novak Djokovic back into Wimbledon this past week in celebration of St. Vitus’s Day in his native Serbia.  Despite what our coverage may have indicated, it is not the case that Djokovic beat Martina Navratilova in straight sets.

In addition, note that former figure skater Tonya Harding has not been accused of any additional assaults on Nancy Kerrigan this week.  Replaying segments of our 1994 scandal coverage was merely our attempt to increase the ratings for last night’s local news hour.

Obviously, our latest business report, with its detailed discussion of Brexit and the European Union, was much too confusing for American viewers, and irrelevant to our own independence weekend celebrations, which is why we instead aired a re-enactment of what television coverage would have looked like when the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929.  We realize now that it might have been poor judgment for us to report on our Twitter account that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to a low of 238.

You may have figured out by now that Copernicus did not die of natural causes yesterday evening. We made an inadvertent error last night, intercutting a breaking news report about his death into a rerun of Modern Family. We apologize for any confusion.

There was not an earthquake this morning during the local weather report.  We just shook the camera a bunch.

Finally, we admit that our upcoming coverage of the next Presidential Inauguration will actually be reconstructed footage from the inauguration of President James K. Polk, which took place in 1845.  It is, we have to say, the patriotic thing to do.

Jeremy Blachman is the author of Anonymous Lawyer and co-author (with Cameron Stracher) of the recently-released satirical novel The Curve.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29ilams

The bookshelf devoted to works on war expands infinitely, but at least now you can be certain which book goes on the far left and which, for the moment, you can slide into the other end. Mary Roach is the hugely popular science writer who has taken readers on breezy trips down the alimentary canal, inside cadavers, and into the process optimistically termed lovemaking; she retains the adolescent’s adoration of the gross-out and makes humorous hay with it. In Grunt she examines the state of the scientific art of preparing soldiers to go into battle. That’s why her book goes first.

At the far side of the long line of volumes describing heroism and tragedy throughout humanity’s history of belligerence, a.k.a. humanity’s history, Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging prescribes the requisite conditions for the return from combat that will ensure a soldier’s best chance for healing — which is as much as to say no longer being a soldier.

The vast difference in tone of these two books is appropriate to their respective before-and-after placement. Perennially chipper, finding the punch line in even the grimmest circumstances (the 45 percent amputation rate resulting from “deck slap,” or underbody explosions; the ongoing struggle against the serious depredations of dysentery), Roach is writing from a safe, preemptive spot: Stateside, among the ranks of scientists who, in their laboratories, investigate methods of killing first and better and receiving fewer casualties than the guys who are trying to do the same to you.

Her book could have been titled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About War but Were Afraid to Ask. (And it could have been made vastly better if someone had cautioned her about the wearying effect of reading footnote after footnote constructed on an identical plan: even more awe-inspiring fact followed by rimshot joke.)  Junger writes soberly, at times with angry despair, about a fractured society ill equipped to restore the hearts and minds, the essential humanity, of those we’ve sent abroad armed with those superior adaptations.

Both authors write from an experiential standpoint. Roach tests her ability to withstand killing heat by treadmilling uphill wearing a thirty-pound pack in the “cook box” at the Consortium for Health and Military Performance; she stands by at a simulated casualty crisis management session, where fake blood spurts and scattered severed limbs demand triage from harried corpsmen. She learns from going to the source about how the government is working to devise an apparatus that can protect against hearing loss in the incredible din of war while at the same time — almost paradoxically — amplifying aural capacity, a lifesaving necessity in the field. She voyages in the military’s strange hierarchy of need, one that, for example, sets the best brains in the business to concocting the most noisome odor known to man. (Grunt stands as a concise explanation of those pie charts of federal spending in which, say, education is an anorexic sliver squeezed by the grotesque avoirdupois of the military budget.) But her primary aim is to entertain, to set us loose with a handful of ride tickets in a giant amusement park of thrilling facts. It is not to build an argument, although one hovers unsaid in the background: Stop and think. What is this expensive, amazing ingenuity for?

Sebastian Junger’s aim, on the other hand, is to militate, not against the military but against our fractured society. Good luck with that. Yet even though his case is brief — it contains elaborations loosely stitched onto a 2015 Vanity Fair article — it is persuasive. (He renders its gist in a recent TED talk.) That doesn’t mean it’s possible. He believes we must heal the rupture that represents modern capitalist society’s separation from our evolutionary past, in which groups of humans lived in small units marked by cooperation, mutual respect, and sharing. Our current valorization of individualism, in which the amassing of personal wealth and the notion of the family as an island has replaced the commonweal as the highest attainment, has left us a society marked by low “social resilience” — the amount of resource sharing endemic to its structure. Junger expends a fair amount of type describing Native American lifeways, a familiar and attractive ideal not likely to reappear anytime soon. The soldier who returns from war, where he has bonded to others of his unit as tightly as if in a nomadic tribe, finds himself alone, with only his disturbing memories and his status as a veteran — a person whose private agonies and wants can never be understood. The thank-you-for-your-service cant and 10 percent discounts reinforce his newly permanent status as outsider; true reintegration, Junger maintains, depends instead on the availability of meaningful work and deep connection to community.

Junger’s credentials for making such an argument result from his wartime experience; he was not a soldier but came very close, embedded with a platoon fighting in the dangerous Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. He chronicled it in his 2010 book War and the film Restrepo, made with the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington. Tribe is, in a way, a 168-page caption to the award-winning documentary, which powerfully brings to life Junger’s thesis that chaos and peril bind soldiers in a tightly knit – sometimes surprisingly happy — family in which every member, each a bulwark against death for the other, feels necessary, heightenedly alive. Then they come home. The “community of sufferers” (in the term of researcher Charles Fritz) they had formed at the front is disbanded. They long again for the closeness it seems only war can afford. Or at least not an America in which a handful of bankers can cause 9 million people to lose their jobs and go unpunished. (Junger similarly connects the shocking rise of rampage shootings — which have doubled in incidence since 2006, and this was written before Orlando — to the same ailing social system of which white-collar crime is also a symptom.)

The elemental joy that paradoxically arises when severe adversity calls upon people to set aside individual concerns and tend to communal needs was more thoroughly, and beautifully, detailed in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. She, like Junger, uses the London Blitz as an example of a time when people were in mortal danger but upon which they later looked back with a sort of longing. Not that either author promotes the idea that we should incite more crises to bring us together, to permit us to be the people evolution engineered from out of the most cooperative primates. We can only comment on what has been lost and yearn quietly for its return. Or welcome the revolution when it comes.

Tribe is a sketch of a book. Its most important points are artillery rounds, coming in so rapidly there’s little time to do more than take cover. Each one could be the subject of a whole new treatise. “A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly . . . isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.” It is also possible that America is just fine with being such an entity. All it has to do is perennially source enemies, among potential friends if necessary.

What Roach suggests, and Junger upbraids us for, is that war is in some ways our highest calling, as human as it is inhuman. It is a notion unspeakable but one that, these two very different writers are at pains to prove, must somehow be spoken.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k3PyR

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine.  See more topics here.

 

Like all standout speculative fiction, these books use alternate realities as MacGuffins, telling tales about the present, the past, or eras that have yet to occur.  In their visions of pandemics, fiscal crises, alternate histories, environmental disasters, and life-size sex dolls, you’ll discern a terrifying familiarity among the bizarre.

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver (Harper)

In a Brooklyn soon to be, the upper-middle-class Mandible family copes with extreme water and food shortages, rampant homelessness, and an economy in meltdown. Tracing her characters’ varying responses to the emergency, Shriver deftly blends parable and satire with today’s headlines, creating a nightmarish world that looms just over our own horizon. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin (Ballantine)

In the explosive climax to Cronin’s best-selling Passage trilogy, a century-long vampiric siege has seemingly ended. But one monster lives on, determined to kill the young women who is humankind’s only hope. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

The Swan Book Alexis Wright (Atria)

Set in a surreal Australia that melds myths and fairy tales with political and environmental tumult, Wright’s astonishingly inventive novel creates its own language and illuminates the embattled history of the Aborigines. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Some Possible Solutions: Stories by Helen Phillips (Holt)

Phillip’s gift is for making the peculiar seem like it’s happening down the street. A couple in crisis decides to formally bring in a Stepford wife-like third party; a woman inhabits a city where she keeps encountering doppelgängers. And just when you think you’re onto Phillips game, here comes another little fable, postmodernist puzzle or sly revelation. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Underground Airlines by Ben Winters (Mulholland Books)

An altered past in which the civil war was never fought and slavery was not fully abolished leads to the strange, modern universe in this genre-bending detective yarn, in which Victor, formerly a slave, works as a bounty hunter tracking a mysterious runaway. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan (Hogarth)

The eagerly awaited second novel from the author of “The Panopticon imagines an ice age in which Stella, a transgender preteen, must make sense of herself and the glacial entropy around her. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading?  Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k4jF7

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O, the Oprah Magazine.  See more topics here.

Start with the basics: bad guys and gals trying to make good. Sprinkle in a detective here and a paranoid schizophrenic there. Set deft fiction side by side with harrowing real-life stories, then fold in heaping helpings of moral complexity. Sweeten with a touch of redemption, and devour.

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley (Doubleday)

It’s never easy being Easy Rawlins, especially when his main squeeze, Bonnie, cuts and runs just when he’s ready to pop the question. Next thing he knows, murder and intrigue are afoot, and we’re cruising the City of Angels in ’68, chock-full of degenerates, a few backsliding do-gooders, and everything in between. This is the 14th installment of Mosley’s celebrated mystery series. We say keep ‘em coming.  Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The Hospital Always Wins by Issa Ibrahim (Chicago Review Press)

Madness led Ibrahim to believe his mother was possessed and then kill her during an exorcism. His subsequent 20-year struggle to regain his sanity as a patient in a Cuckoo’s Nest-esque asylum roars to a searing, poignant climax. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Cook Up by D. Watkins (Grand Central)

After his older brother is murdered, the author quits college to run the family drug business. An East Baltimore bildungsroman memoir about hope, hustle, and getting out while you can. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

 

Walking the Dog by Elizabeth Swados (Feminist Press)

Following a lengthy prison term, Carleen lands a job as a dog walker in Manhattan, hoping to reconnect with her estranged daughter. Brilliant and layered, Swados’s posthumous novel asks searching questions about the delicate nature of atonement. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton (Putnam)

In this edgy, noir thriller from a crime fiction maestro, an ex-con struggles with unexpected freedom, falteringly rebuilding his life while a depraved puppet master still behind bars pulls his strings. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Crow Girl, by Erik Axl Sund (Knopf)

What is it about Sweden that produces such deliciously, darkly off-kilter thrillers, featuring fascinatingly idiosyncratic complex characters such as Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and now Detective Superintendent Jeanette Kihlberg? As Kihlberg investigates a killer who targets immigrant children, she must deal with xenophobia, extreme right-wing politics, and other hot button issues that only deepen our morbid fascination. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.
Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k3JY1