Review: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
With her usual prescience for the zeitgeist, Meg Wolitzer begins her latest novel with an incident of sexual assault on campus. It’s 2006, and a young and naïve coed named Greer is groped at a frat party. At first she hesitates to act, then decides to take action, spurred on by her hero and mentor, […]
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
With her usual prescience for the zeitgeist, Meg Wolitzer begins her latest novel with an incident of sexual assault on campus. It’s 2006, and a young and naïve coed named Greer is groped at a frat party. At first she hesitates to act, then decides to take action, spurred on by her hero and mentor, […]
Review: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
I knew the name of the author from a very odd but memorable 2006 novel of female friendship called The Last of Her Kind. From the get go, this new novel, The Friend, felt like a guilty pleasure. Not a real novel but a gossipy and self-conscious collection of observations of contemporary life as a […]
Review: Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck
In this beautiful novel, translated from the German, Richard is a retired and widowed Classics professor whose narrow existence is forever changed by his encounter with North African refugees stranded in Berlin. The heartrending tales of these men almost overwhelm the reader: Osarobo, who asks permission to play Richard’s piano; the Tuareg man named Apollo […]
Review: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
The jacket copy alone wouldn’t have grabbed me—a historical novel of New York, set in the Depression and War years? The first female diver? Gangsters and Ziegfeld Follies? Uh uh. But the author is Jennifer Egan, whose A Visit From the Goon Squad was the most inventive and lively collection of linked short stories that […]