I love reviewing books but sometimes the pace of reading them can be frustrating that classic I love Lucy episode In the chocolate factory. The conveyor belt speeds up and books keep arriving faster than they can be “wrapped” in the review. In the summer I get a chance to read some of the good books that come out in the spring.
James Lasdon’s The Family Man: Blood and betrayal in the Murdaugh household Published in the first week of May, that’s when I read it. This nonfiction book that developed a piece Lasdun wrote New YorkerIt is about the investigation and conviction of Alex Murdaugh, a prominent South Carolina attorney, for the murders of his wife and adult son in 2021.
Then the real-life story took a twist: A little more than a week after Lasdun’s book was published, Murdaugh’s conviction was overturned due to jury tampering. Retesting is being scheduled. instead of rendering Family Man Uncharted, this new twist intensifies the maze of stories that revolve around the Murdaugh case – including suspicious deaths and embezzlement.
Lasdun is a “true crime” writer in his late contemplative mold. New Yorker Colleague Janet Malcolm. Although the investigation of a double murder drives the narrative forward, Lasdun is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery: the mystery of evil.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Harriet Clarke’s first novel, hill, which came in May, Is getting a lot of praise. The novel is clearly drawn from Clark’s own background: born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when his mother, a member of the radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in the Brinks armored truck robbery, which resulted in the deaths of three people. Clark’s maternal grandparents gained custody and she visited her mother in prison for nearly 40 years, before being released on parole in 2019.
When the story begins, Clark’s main character Susanna is 8 years old and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of perpetual claustrophobic stasis. Every week, Suzanna is taken to visit her mother at the Children’s Center at Hillcrest Prison – first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then alone. Susanna’s voice fills this novel with wisdom:
Every week… my mother would fix and re-fix my hair. I slept and did not sleep. … Women around us were counting down for release, but my mother and I were released from the countdown. No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back, as I saw it, we were free from the past and free from the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day – the holidays continued at their slow pace at the Centre, and finally we surrendered again to the peace and happiness of our eternal life.
while i was reading hillI kept thinking about EL DOCTOR book of daniel, Inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels have different scopes, but like Doctorow, Clark interrogates the cost of parents’ radical commitment to their children, while also interrogating how the world changes radically from one generation to the next.
Sometimes I put a good book aside for a bad reason. Mary Costello’s slim novel, a beautiful loanPromoted as a devastating story about relationships, it came out in March. “No,” I thought then, “there was no other artist, Sally Rooney, on St. Patrick’s Day.”
But, one free afternoon, I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present-tense story of the main character, Anna, seemed strange to me. Her deadpan voice did not match her emotional turmoil. Here 19-year-old Anna summarizes how Paul, an elusive older man whom she will eventually marry, keeps her in check in what she calls “this roller coaster of a life”:
In the middle of the night,…he stands on one elbow on the bed next to me and says, in an insistent, desperate voice, I love you. In the morning, he made no reference to it, and I think he may have said it in his sleep. He will never say these three words together again in our lives.
a beautiful loan Spanning 25 years and featuring two men, a dog, Anna’s obsessive devotion to the writings of Camus and Jung and the practice of Islam. Like the other two books I reviewed here, it may not be the ideal “beach read”, but it would be perfect for spending a summer weekend.
