Staff Picks: What Book World writers and editors are reading now

Ron Charles, fiction critic

I enjoyed Michelle Gallen’s debut novel, “Big Girl, Small Town,” immensely, but last fall when her second book, “Factory Girls,” came to America, I foolishly skipped it. Fortunately, my wife and my younger daughter read it, and their praise made me realize what a mistake I’d made. This time around, Gallen tells the hilariously frank story of Maeve Murray, a teenager in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. As Maeve waits for her high school exam results and fantasizes about the life she’ll lead in college, she takes a miserable ironing job in a local shirt factory. In addition to the drudgery of the work and the sexual aggression of her English supervisor, there’s the abiding shock of working right alongside Protestants, with all their alien ways. Although grief hangs over her family and the threat of violence keeps the whole town on edge, Maeve and her pals are determined to have a life. This reads like a darker, often tougher version of Lisa McGee’s TV series “Derry Girls,” but with the same heart of gold.

John Williams, Book World editor

There are few things I love more than the podcast “Backlisted,” in which co-hosts Andy Miller and John Mitchinson have extended conversations with guests about books, frequently obscure ones. It combines enthusiasm, discernment and even erudition in a completely convivial way. The show recently returned from a well-deserved hiatus — “Welcome to the first in what we are calling our third season,” the team wrote on its website, “(the first one lasted for 109 episodes, the second a mere 68).” The first show back was about Graham Greene and, uncharacteristically, divided its focus among multiple books. I’d read a couple of Greene’s novels many moons ago, but I own several others that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while, and I’m reaching an age when “meaning to get to” starts to sound a little spooky. “Backlisted” inspired me to read “The Quiet American,” as well-known as any of Greene’s books, and for good reason. Its superficial pleasures — expertly paced scenes, biting dialogue, a Hall of Fame last line — are first-rate; the articulateness of its prescience about American involvement in Vietnam and the rest of the world is astonishing.

Lorrie Moore's new novel is a love story between living and dead

Nora Krug, editor

This is not a cookbook or an insensitive treatise about Russian women. It’s a novel about mothers and daughters and other entanglements, both personal and political. At its center is Rosa, an imperious woman who meddles in her daughter’s life to comic extremes. Is Rosa terrible? As the novel unfolds, the answer becomes less clear. Rosa wants what all mothers want — what’s best for her child. In this case, that means getting her out of Russia and into a happier, safer life in Germany. The plotline seems to reflect the life story of its author, who was born in a small town at the foot of the Ural Mountains and now lives in Germany. Bronsky, which is a pseudonym, toys with these themes in several other works, including “Broken Glass Park” (2008) and “Baba Dunja’s Last Love” (2015), which I also read — and enjoyed — in preparation for our review of her latest book, “Barbara Isn’t Dying.”

Sophia Nguyen, news and features writer

With Colson Whitehead, you can pick between zombies, John Henry, the World Series of Poker, the demons of American history and some unforgettable elevators, so I know it sounds prim, or perverse, to recommend him in straight realist mode. But as I was looking for a book to get me in the mood for summer, I turned to “Sag Harbor,” his novel set in the upper-middle-class Black enclave in the Hamptons. “Sag Harbor,” nominally about teen brothers Benji and Reggie, left to their own devices in their family’s vacation house, is, like many coming-of-age novels, about everything and nothing: It’s about jobs scooping ice cream, still having your braces on, inescapable nerdiness, the thirst to be cool. It’s about boredom and misadventures that seem endless precisely until they’re not. (And when you’re done, I recommend day-tripping through reviews from when it was originally published — a cultural and political moment that feels impossibly far away. Were we ever so young?)

Becca Rothfeld, nonfiction book critic

I recently read Norman Rush’s gloriously extravagant novel “Mating” for the fifth or sixth time (I’ve lost count). This time around, I was preparing for a podcast on it that will come out next month. The question we try to address on the podcast is whether the central relationship in “Mating,” which follows a pair of anthropologists in an egalitarian and matriarchal commune in the Kalahari Desert (a conceit every bit as incredible as it sounds), is even briefly perfect. My line is that it is — and my meta-line is that the novel celebrates utopianism in both love and politics. The egalitarian commune that the male anthropologist has founded is hopelessly idealistic, as is the brand of love that the book’s unnamed and unabashedly cerebral female narrator craves: “Equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. … Why, even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions, are we afraid that we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity?”

Equal love is difficult, but I cling to the belief that Rush’s narrator and her paramour are collaborators in very fleetingly achieving the impossible, for the admittedly partial reason that I am invested in their success. (You’re talking to a person who made her now-husband read “Mating” in preparation for our marriage.) It could be argued that other books and films address the pressing question of equal love, among them “Pride and Prejudice” and “His Girl Friday.” But I have never found another work of any kind that so explicitly states that it is an ideal we cannot afford to give up. I know, rationally, that “Mating” is probably not the best book I’ve ever read, but I can’t help but believe it to be, probably because I find it the most moving. Maybe equal love is impossible. But why should we settle for the merely possible when we could demand the perfect?

Jill Pellettieri, editor

My children are old enough now that our nightly reading typically consists of us doing so on our own, but every once in a while, we’ll opt to read something aloud together. My daughter and I recently found ourselves with a weekend alone, so we picked up “Tuck Everlasting,” a deeply moving middle-grade novel by Natalie Babbitt that tells the story of an unlikely friendship between 10-year-old Winnie and the Tuck family. The Tucks have a secret: They will live forever. When Winnie discovers this, the family pleads with her not to tell — no one else can know about the magic spring that granted them eternal life.

“Tuck Everlasting” raises profound questions about life, death and growing up: What would you do if you had a chance to live forever? Babbitt is a master storyteller who knows her audience. There is no talking down to her readers, no simplifying the complexities of life, no pat, happy ending, because in the Tucks’ world, that is impossible. I will not give anything away, but sensitive readers beware — tears may be shed.

For years, my mom was a fifth-grade teacher, and this book was a favorite of hers to teach. My daughter and I read from her old teaching copy, complete with notes neatly scripted in the margins. My daughter got a kick out of answering her grandmother’s discussion prompts, as if she were right there reading it with us. “Debate: Is immortality a blessing or a curse?”

‘Fire Weather’ is a gripping narrative and a loud wake-up call

Jacob Brogan, editor

I picked up Edward Eager’s “Seven-Day Magic” almost by accident last month while resting in the valley between the daunting peaks of another book’s chapters. (Okay, fine, it was Norman Rush’s “Mating,” which I have since finished and which is very impressive, yes.) I was hoping for something charming, and it is, but I was also surprised by how ingenious and wise it is.

In brief, “Seven-Day Magic” follows a group of eager young readers who check out a mysterious, untitled volume from the library. When they finally crack it open, they find that it contains a faithful record of their own day, repeating the very language with which Eager’s own book begins, only to lead them into a seemingly real adventure — featuring a hungry dragon, hapless peasants and a cranky but kind witch — that appears to take place in the prehistory of Frank L. Baum’s Oz novels. From there, they find themselves pulled from one story to the next — visiting the fictional worlds of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Eager himself, among others — guided only by the children’s own wishes about the kinds of stories they love and long for.

This metafiction is wholly free of pretension. It revels in the ways books both connect us to one another and help us make sense of our individual desires. As its playfully moving ending demonstrates, Eager understands better than most why readers of all ages see themselves in stories — and how they find themselves through them.

Becky Meloan, editorial aide

Last month I drove to work with Tom Hanks. Well, sort of — I listened to his first novel on my commute, and it felt like having America’s favorite actor share his expertise as we breezed down Canal Road. Following the making of a superhero movie over decades, from conception to postproduction, Hanks narrates the charmingly old-fashioned story while one talented actor after another — Peter Gerety! Ego Nwodim! Holland Taylor! — deliver engaging performances as production assistants, makeup artists and bona fide Hollywood stars. Filling a post-pandemic demand for easygoing, feel-good entertainment, Hanks’s homespun tale portrays a world where the characters are plucky, like each other “a helluva lot” and know how to get things done. In this faux reality, misbehavior is shown with all the subtlety of “Goofus and Gallant,” but for lovers of moviemaking, no matter. Hard work and talent will always save the day, and sometimes a happy ending is just what the audience wants.

Cormac McCarthy, lone wolf among the last of the literary giants

Michael Dirda, columnist

I’ve read and written a lot about T.S. Eliot in the last few years and thought I was done with this prim, unhappy, deceitful hypochondriac, who just happens to be one of my favorite poets. But I’m glad to have spent an evening with “Mary and Mr. Eliot: A Sort of Love Story,” by Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner. Trevelyan was Eliot’s confidante and dinner companion during the 1940s and early ’50s, came to love him and was cruelly hurt when the 68-year-old abruptly married his 30-year-old secretary. As edited, with valuable commentary by Wagner, Trevelyan’s letters and diaries blend gossip, declarations of love, Eliot’s table talk and, not least, a remarkable woman’s shrewd observations. For example, when Eliot wanted sympathy, usually undeserved, Trevelyan notes that he would put on his “distraught refugee face.” Trevelyan would be familiar with the real thing, or close to it: As the warden of the international Student Movement House and later an adviser to overseas students at the University of London, she would have looked into many truly confused and homesick faces.