“I propose that, far from being an outlier in DeLillo’s twentieth-century canon, the novel is central to his work.”
Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Hillary Kelly on M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, Merve Emre on Tom Overton’s John Berger, Ed Park on Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons, Ryan Ruby on Emily Ogden’s Darkness Becomes Bright, and Josef Burton on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line.
Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
“The End of Everything is brief and confounding; it also doesn’t care a whit for the conventions of dystopian fiction. It’s set about 20 or 30 years in the future, mostly in the small coastal towns of Kent, where strange entities (they might be aliens, or bio-machines, or really anything) wash up onshore. The ‘artefacts,’ as they are called, arrived around the same time as the iGhetti; together they somehow upended life as everyone knew it, rendering Britain unrecognizable within a decade. As one man, Phillip Tennent, moves through this uncanny new world order, all of the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction fall away in favor of a far more timely and provocative proposal: The apocalypse might not be an end at all, but simply a long chain of baffling, disorienting incidents.
Writers have been thinking about different versions of doomsday for thousands of years—the tale of Noah’s ark is just one example of an ancient religious story about the eradication of humanity. But the fear that seems to plague modern minds is that it might all end with a whimper, rather than a bang. Through rants about late-stage capitalism, that infamous dog-in-a-fire meme, and other expressions of alarm, it’s become more and more common to hear people worrying—or joking—that the world is enduring a rolling apocalypse, a series of catastrophes so slow-moving that they won’t prevent you from browsing a J.Crew sale while everything falls apart.
“Yet the subject of Harrison’s experiment is larger than one referendum on territorial boundaries—or any single Event at all. He seems to be asking how humans will respond when they discover, en masse, that they are no longer in control of the planet’s destiny. Really, The End of Everything is a novel about surrender. ‘The apocalypse,’ one character writes, ‘seemed to withhold itself, quickly becoming just another historical continuity. That is to say, we got used to it. No one had expected the utter banality of that.’
Harrison’s sociological portrait is attuned to the common idea that disaster can quickly become boring—or all too quickly assimilated and ignored. Horrible images of global catastrophe—razed cities, drowned villages—now flit through our phones in between makeup tutorials and political punditry. Pondering barbarity or devastation is as easy as pondering a lunch menu. So what might people do if the tide turns against the whole of humanity, if the End Times finally come? In Harrison’s estimation, they’ll shrug.
As bleak as this interpretation may sound, the novel is expansive rather than dismissive. It reaches out for connection, feeling at once bizarrely creative and, on a psychological level, strikingly familiar. In a short novel, in a wholly original way, Harrison has managed to sketch not just a world, but a worldview. I suspect that he knew he needed to create a new style of language and imagery to convey the emotional reality of a world ‘disconnected from itself.’ As John Ashbery put it in 1977, ‘You can’t say it that way any more.’ The same is true now.”
–Hillary Kelly on M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything (The Atlantic)
“Biographers do not advertise themselves as mediums. Still, the fantasy is there—that a book’s subject will rise from its pages, like some stranded ghost, to clap one hand on the writer’s shoulder and the other on the reader’s. It is a fantasy that imparts romance to the work of intruding on the dead: flattering the family, interrogating the neighbors and lovers, sorting through mostly useless documents in the archive. Left unchecked, however, it can turn a biographer into a sentimental illusionist. He touches a finger’s smudge on a letter. He walks into a bedroom and sniffs the air. He seems to see the man himself: his features fine and lined, his white shirt unbuttoned at the top of his chest, his mouth open, as if about to speak.
“In reading Berger, one discovers that his Marxist aesthetic is less a doctrine than a vague and ennobling justification for why he liked the art that he did. What makes Berger special are, as he wrote about Picasso, ‘not his individual works, but his existence, his personality,’ his ‘new ways of looking at the world.’ Berger was an ideologue; most charismatic people are. As they age, they risk shrivelling into preachers or bores. Berger was saved from this fate by his restless searching, among mediums and forms, for the purest expression of his way of seeing.
“Overton, who grew close to Berger while cataloguing his archives at the British Library, and who found, in a fallout shelter Berger once used for storage, a tranche of sooty diaries and drafts, had a mass of material from which to sketch a dense and sober portrait. Yet his biography is anything but rigorously archival. Like Berger, Overton wants to create the illusion of a life seen from many different perspectives. He calls his subject ‘John,’ sometimes addressing him directly, and often breaks into the present tense, to speculate about what John is, at this very moment, thinking or feeling. The smallest details are magnified, whereas significant events pass with almost no mention. I could not keep the procession of Berger’s wives and lovers straight, but I did get a vivid impression of the blue window shutters, on which he painted lines from A Winter’s Tale, at a house in Gloucestershire where he lived for a time. The biography is as random, repetitive, uneven, and blurred as life itself, which makes it an unusual and exciting experiment, if not an entirely successful one.
“Having previously read Sperling’s biography, I had no strong judgments about Berger’s treatment of women. It was hardly a shock to learn that men on the left did not extend the same principles of equality and nonexploitation to their wives that they did to mankind in the abstract—that they could be unfaithful or abandon their children, citing, all the while, the punishingly conventional nature of marriage. I was, however, shocked that Overton sees fit to absolve his subject. ‘Perhaps you didn’t do what was expected of contemporary fathers, but you were there,’ he writes. The dead rarely come back as we would like them to. They are covered by the grime and the stink of life. It is not the biographer’s job to wipe them clean.
“In interviews, Berger described his turn to the pastoral as the outgrowth of his ‘Romantic Marxism.’ Overton seizes on the figure of the Romantic Marxist as a historical type, aiming to replace a ‘mushy reverence’ for Berger among the British left with a more concrete case for his significance. But what type of person is a Romantic Marxist? A class-conscious libertine? A womanizer who supports women’s lib? The vague and stentorian tone of Berger’s late political pronouncements provides a clue. He came out on the side of what was good: the rights of animals, peasants, migrants, political prisoners. He showed no deep interest, however, in the particulars of their histories. If he typified anything, it was not a Romantic Marxist but what the late Hungarian philosopher G. M. Tamás called a Rousseauian socialist: an intellectual devoted to equality among the people, but without a radical commitment to class abolition. Berger longed, instead, to return to ‘a more natural (and with luck, completely natural) way of life’ and championed ‘the folk-art virtues.’
Class was an abstraction, and Berger hated abstraction. ‘The people,’ however, could be embodied, drawn close to and lived among. But his peasant fictions sapped his writing of its revolutionary energy and replaced it with a moral imperative. The aim was not a way of seeing—sharply, dialectically—but a way of living, nostalgically. Yet Berger had long anticipated this criticism. In A Painter of Our Time, the director of a London gallery dismisses Janos as a ‘Desperate Optimist’: ‘They’re sentimentalists at heart. They idealize what’s called The People. But, believe me, people just aren’t like that.’ The final act of Berger’s life argued otherwise, with a desperate optimism of the will. A little more pessimism of the intellect would have been most welcome.”
–Merve Emre on Tom Overton’s John Berger: From Life (The New Yorker)
“We’re privy to these racy and random details because Holt published Cleo’s self-consciously baggy autobiography, Amazons, in 1980—the same year Team USA upset the Red Army at the Olympics in Lake Placid, and midway between the Paul Newman movie Slap Shot (1977), a scuzzy paean to the minor-league circuit, and Stanley Cup–winning Ken Dryden’s goodbye-to-all-that memoir The Game (1983), capturing the in-season moment he opted for law school over goaltending. Hockey’s rarely been hot in America; despite decades of expansion into sun-filled states, it’s a distant fourth in terms of team-sport popularity. But 1980 was arguably the sweet spot. Cleo and Floss had perfect timing. Out of print for decades, Amazons has just been reissued by Scribner to piggyback on the hit homoerotic hockey series Heated Rivalry.
“Amazons feels refreshingly out of place in 2026. At times it recalls the ambitious, chonky, libidinous fiction of the era, John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), as it does William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979) and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), though Amazons is trauma-free. In Cleo, you can detect traces of Renata Adler’s coolly ironic Jen Fain in Speedboat (1976) and of Joan Didion as herself, circa The White Album (1979). The intervening decades have also made Cleo’s ‘intimate memoir’ read like an antic historical novel itself. It’s an NHL time capsule, a nostalgia hit for old-time hockey buffs, a world in which Guy Lafleur still takes the ice for Montreal, Minnesota’s team remains the North Stars, and everyone (save rookies) could still play sans helmet, locks flowing in the chill air.
“But here is Amazons, in a slick new package, available once more: the return of the repressed. I propose that, far from being an outlier in DeLillo’s twentieth-century canon, the novel is central to his work. You can take this literally. Amazons emerges two years after Running Dog, and two before The Names; if included in the official bibliography, then, it appears at the midpoint of his first and finest run of novels—number seven of twelve. It’s not just a titillating soufflé amid headier fare, a money grab, a bit of sleaze, though it also is those things. The cover shows a hockey bench strewn with jersey, skates, lingerie, and heels; old paperback editions leave even less to the imagination. It’s fitting that DeLillo—bard of cults and conspiracies, scarcity and aura—would conceal his finest work in such trashy garb.
“DeLillo’s best novels mix humor and profundity; even darker work such as Players have moments of giddiness, but his post-Underworld books can feel overly portentous. In 1980, DeLillo and Buck happily threw all profundity out the window (just pseudo profundity, please), intent only on rolling out one goofy set piece and convoluted sex scene after another, poking fun along the way at not just the sports memoir but pornography, science fiction, the Southern Gothic, conspiracy theories, and various other literary and subliterary forms.
The freedom is thrilling, indeed out of control. Scenes go on too long, to our delight. Cleo, bless her, can’t stop. DeLillo has written his share of sturdy female characters, but never in the first person, and never so willingly. We can see him turning cartwheels, as if eager to impress his friend. DeLillo has been married since 1975; neither he and his wife nor Buck and her husband (as far as I can tell) had children, but the heroine of Amazons is like their daughter—the brainchild of an advertising vet and career novelist. Cleo is a successful woman, a complete fiction. Her parents are in love with her, and thus we are, too.”
–Ed Park on Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons (Bookforum)
“Poe is undoubtedly canonical, but he is canonical the way a zombie is alive. Although editions of his collected stories and poems, especially the ones that look like they are made to be the lever that reveals a library shelf to be a secret doorway, are still in print and sell well, I am told he no longer regularly appears on high school and junior high school syllabi. Cormac McCarthy’s demiurgical psychopaths and Pynchon’s paranoid detectives owe something to his macabre imagination, and Stephen King, Dennis Cooper, Marilynne Robinson, and Joyce Carol Oates have all claimed him as an influence; but off the top of my head I cannot think of a prominent American writer under the age of seventy—Ottessa Moshfegh would be the obvious candidate—who has followed suit.
“Ogden’s road to Poe was different from mine, which is why I trust her considered judgment about his work more than my callow intuitions. Skeptical at first—and not, as we have seen, without reason—she started to take Poe seriously when she was required to teach a course on his work at his alma mater, the University of Virginia, where she is a professor of English. Her change of mind—from antipathy to ambivalence to admiration—provides the main through line of Darkness Becomes Bright. In Poe’s ‘determination to confront the greatest difficulties of human experience,’ Ogden finds support for her conviction that what we ‘share’ as human beings are ‘demons,’ as well as for her conviction that stories ‘let us live for a while in our knowledge of the worst.’ Poe’s, in particular, show us how ‘horror’ can be made to yield ‘beauty,’ and in a world that is irremediably horrific, this is no slight compensation. Borrowing its structure from Italo Calvino’s metafictional masterpiece, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, her book is a Swiss army knife of scholarly delights: part biography, part reception history, part personal essay, and part reflection on the purposes of a life spent writing about reading.
“Ogden’s readings of Poe…seem at first to owe their greatest debt to psychoanalysis. But her real methodology is her life. ‘For the biographer,’ Ogden writes, ‘the most fundamental instrument of understanding is her own life experience.’ So along with interpretations of Poe’s concept of ‘perverseness’ as a forerunner of the death drive, or his concept of the effect as a form of analytic transference, or the ‘everyday fantastic’ scenes of his fiction as the hypnogogic soil for sudden outbreaks of hysteria, Ogden lights the matches of her childhood memories, nightmares, phobias, and experiences of death to illuminate the obscure chambers of the human mind where Poe’s tales take place.
These personal anecdotes, which reveal how Ogden became the reader she is, are in my view the most interesting as well as the most consequential passages in Darkness Becomes Bright. It is ‘scandalous’ to approach texts this way, she admits, because it challenges the pretenses of literary scholarship to scientific knowledge. But if interpretation is ultimately an art rather than a science, it is because understanding a text does not simply involve knowing facts about it or its author or the conditions in which it was written and received. It involves having a relationship with it—knowing it, in other words, as you know the city you live in, the person you live with, and hopefully also yourself.”
“The final years of the Biden administration proceeded like a slow, unchecked slide toward disaster—marked by tens of thousands of deaths in Palestine, the systematic destruction of its hospitals and universities, and an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. For many observers, myself included, the White House’s response felt bewilderingly self-destructive: Rather than leveraging American power or imposing a lasting arms embargo, the administration bent or broke US laws and squashed internal dissent to ensure Israel’s military campaign could proceed unchecked.
Longtime diplomatic reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed captures this dark period in Crossing the Red Line, a deeply reported account of White House and State Department decision-making from Hamas’s October 7 attacks to when Biden slunk out of office amid the wreckage of the so-called rules-based international order. Ahmed’s book is an essential text for analyzing US policymaking under pressure. Yet beneath its granular, blow-by-blow reporting, a central unanswered question looms: Why did a self-styled liberal administration fully commit itself to facilitating these atrocities, even at the cost of its own hold on power?
“As the body count mounted, the consequences of total American complicity bled directly into domestic politics. The book tracks the Biden-Harris administration’s slow, agonizing realization that Gaza had transformed from a distant foreign policy crisis into a catastrophic electoral liability. Faced with domestic outrage, mass protests, and internal dissent, the administration’s response was defined by administrative paralysis and rhetorical equivocation. Rather than changing course, officials scrambled to find messaging that might appease alienated voters, a story that ultimately culminates in a surprisingly cordial and orderly transition of power to the incoming Trump administration.
“Where the book falls slightly short is in its reluctance to explicitly prescribe legal or political accountability. While Ahmed details a drumbeat of implicit violations under US arms control laws and international principles, he stops short of full judicial judgment against figures like Antony Blinken, Sullivan, McGurk, and David Satterfield, all of whom could be considered co-conspirators in war crimes under the Nuremberg principles…
“Nevertheless, Crossing the Red Line offers a vital, sobering diagnostic of how American power operates behind closed doors. Ahmed can’t bring himself to unleash narrative pandemonium by wading into why exactly American liberal technocrats are so smitten with Israel that they will disbelieve the conclusions of their own treasured rule-based institutions and the sentiment of their own voters to insist that Israel is a normal country which can be reasoned with. Ahmed is all about showing and not telling. But what he shows to us throughout this book is that liberal hand-wringing, equivocation, and performative self-recrimination in practice functioned as a filibuster so Israel could do their dirty work, rendering the aftermath somebody else’s problem. In the end, Biden’s ‘red line’ was just another form of permission.”
–Josef Burton on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza (The Baffler)
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