Tales of Becoming

In new books, men and women find themselves.

Dolly Alderton is something of a modern-day Nora Ephron, bringing a fresh and mordant perspective to the eternal struggle between the sexes. Her last novel, Ghosts, had the inscrutable male psyche as its subject; her new novel, Good Material (Knopf), tells the story of a breakup from a tortured male perspective. Its narrator, Andy, is a London comic in his mid-30s who, recently abandoned by his more corporate-minded girlfriend, finds himself having to redefine his place in the world among his coupled-up peers. He has the instinct (if not the perspective, in his lovelorn state) that as Ephron would have put it everything is copy, and the book finds the amusing angle in even the most poignant moments.