In the tale of an alienated father and daughter, characters stare deeply into themselves.
The Great American Novel is a long-dead cultural aspiration, extinguished by a healthy realization that the country is too big and too varied to generate any singular, definitive volume. American novelists tend, in our time, to earn public recognition of greatness in a steady, incremental (one is almost tempted to say un-American) way: through the long-term production of many books that arrive with a certain regularity and are roughly on the same scale, one to the next. For writers as different as Alice McDermott, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers, the greatness classification comes more from accrual than from explosion.
Even so, some younger novelists with exceptional gifts seem to have a romantically persistent notion of the singlebook catapult. Now in his mid-forties, but still boyishly author-photo’d, Garth Risk Hallberg continues to wobble with promise and perplexity. His novels, so far only three in number, sometimes murmur and sometimes roar, operating by wisps of inference or by maximalist elaboration. He has flirted with a kind of cosmic connectedness, or at least a large sociopolitical canvas, before subsiding—as he has done with his new book, “The Second Coming” (Knopf )—back into the super-circumscribed and familial. Looking at the three books together, a reader perceives not so much a multifarious œuvre as a series of make-or-break shots.
Esta historia es de la edición May 27, 2024 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición May 27, 2024 de The New Yorker.
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Age of Anxiety
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
A Reporter at Large – You Make Me Sick
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
OLD ENGLISH
“Player Kings,”\"The Cherry Orchard,” and \"London Tide.”
THOROUGHLY MODERN
Yuja Wang uses her star power to lead audiences out of their comfort zones.
THE PERFECTIONIST
Why we're still catching up to Brancusi.
DESERT ISLAND
Tastes of Hawati abound in Las Vegas.
HIGHER AND HIGHER
To preserve humanity—and the planet—should we give up growth?
MAXED OUT
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”
WOMAN, FROG, AND DEVIL
January Wojnicz, a retired civil servant and a landowner, was a splendid man, as they said in Lwów, handsome and dignified.
THE STASI FILES
Piecing together the secrets of East Germany’s past.