October's best-written recent releases in literary fiction II
Read the opening pages of our picks below
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—’Hell isn’t the psychosis. Hell is leaving the psychosis’: our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. Our previous pick is here, along with the list of books considered.
—‘a prick was an innocent violence, a timid violation, nothing much. Life must go on: errands to run, places to be, jobs to be done’: and our next pick.
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TOVE
They say that depression is congealed anger. I think of it as a petrified troll. A creature of darkness and the incomplete – irate, dangerous – transformed by daylight into something unmoving and lifeless.
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I think of mania as similar to forgetting yourself, the way you might forget a saucepan on a hot stove.
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The psychosis occurs when the mania exhausts itself, when the encounter with reality is the only thing left for it (and mania fears reality more than anything else). The psychosis is like one of the three doors in the folk tales, the one that must never be opened no matter what. It mustn’t be opened. Everyone knows. And yet it always gets opened in the end. When faced with nothing and something, you choose something first.
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The folk tales.
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The trolls, the three doors, the forest. The one where the animals can talk, and people turn into animals. The one with witches, crofters, kings, underground halls, tree stumps, princesses no one can spellbind, stepmothers and poor women, mountain pastures and rugged blue peaks.
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Even as a small girl I sensed that the folk tales were concealing something. And that their secrets were significant. Later I would read Jung and his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, but that wasn’t what I’d sensed was present in the tales, it was something else. What I took from Jung was that I was the Magician and Arne the Orphan (even though his relationship with his father, right until his father died, had been a happy one, and even though he continued to enjoy a happy relationship with his mother), as well as an understanding of the universality and power of symbols. Apart from that, nothing.
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The Magician is the one who transforms. The Magician is a revolutionary. The Orphan is the one who needs. The Orphan is a manipulator.
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Hell isn’t the psychosis. Hell is leaving the psychosis. Hell on earth is what that is. Nothing of what you’ve thought, seen or felt has been true. And you’ve thought, seen and felt with your entire being. But that’s not all. Now suddenly they’re staring at you, your husband and kids. Imploringly or angrily, I’m not sure which is worse.
That’s when the tears come. The bottomless grief.
Over what?
My self, my inadequacy.
Nobody wants a mad mother. Nobody wants to be one either.
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‘Are you normal now?’ Heming once asked when they came to visit me.
What could I do but nod and cry and hold his reluctant body tightly to my own?
RECOMMENDED:
1.
It was a strange, sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker, but Brooke Orr had decided not to let that interfere with the business of life in New York. She and everyone in the city carried on, ignoring the debilitating heat and the lunatic at large who was jabbing unsuspecting commuters with a hypodermic. The Post had dubbed this man (well, it must have been a man) the “Straphanger Sicko.” That moniker wasn’t the one WNYC used. They spoke to an expert on air who speculated that this man derived some sublimated sexual thrill at poking into strange women. A layperson could have figured that out. There were three victims thus far. But a prick was an innocent violence, a timid violation, nothing much. Life must go on: errands to run, places to be, jobs to be done.
So Brooke was, where else, on the subway. You’d have known it was Monday. Some sobriety in the air, some frankness in the light. There was a feeling of beginning. A man in a shapeless suit and too-wide tie frowned at his cellphone. A woman, all pointy joints and neck, leaned with idiosyncratic grace over the edge of the platform, yearning to catch the light of an approaching 6, recalling a flower contorting for sun. A skinny boy in glasses wore an NYU T-shirt. A gaunt and bedraggled person was likely homeless, but might have been one of the last of the bohemians, a cohort supplanted by coeds and millionaires. At the top of the stairs, a girl in a blue smock handed a free tabloid to anyone willing to take it. Inside the station, a few sweating New Yorkers pointlessly fanned themselves with its insubstantial pages.
Brooke could feel the damp at the back of her neck coalescing into a drop, which would eventually descend, at its geologic pace, over her spine’s uppermost moraine. She was aware of the musk of her body beneath the many remedies used to disguise that smell. She had that specific twinge at the temples that only caffeine would mollify. No matter. The train’s conditioned air would dry the sweat, her deodorant (scented of thyme) would do its work, and there was time—she always left a cushion—to procure an iced coffee before walking the blocks crosstown to the offices of the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation.
The train arrived with a clatter that could damage the human ear. Its silver carriage might once have seemed optimistic, though now it was dingy and pockmarked. The open doors were accompanied by an unintelligible announcement, but most riders did this by rote: the same station, at the same hour, sometimes even served by the same conductor with his signature pitter-patter—the forecast or a thank-you for riding with the MTA or a general wish for good cheer as the train scooted along its merry way. The seats were citrus colored, the floor warped with bubbles. You had to choose to find it charming.
The crowd would overwhelm at the next station, but for now, plenty of seats. As the train moved, it was sometimes possible for Brooke to catch her reflection in the window opposite and she took the opportunity for appraisal: skin dewy, teeth clean, hair tidy, jewelry simple, shirt and blazer spotless. The normal workday considerations, the more important as this was a significant one. Today, Brooke would meet Asher Jaffee, the big boss, the man in whose name she worked, the deity for whom she and her colleagues were intermediaries in the exalted task of giving away his earthly fortune. First impressions mattered.
Union Square was thick with impatient nine-to-fivers. The doors took a moment to open, a beat so automated grates could slide forward to bridge the gap between train and platform. This brief hesitation drove people to frowns, grimaces, near despair. Once upon a time, Brooke would have leaped from her seat, back of her hand against the door instead of on the greasy bar, pushed through the crowd, and transferred to the express train that would carry her into the Bronx. There was still that muscle memory of the commute she’d navigated for nine years as a teacher at the Endeavor School, and it was a relief that this was no longer her fate.
Brooke pulled limbs into herself as a heavyset woman eased beside her. She lost sight of her own reflection as people filled the car. Commuters grasping for the bar took that opportunity to glance at wristwatches. They shuffled bags from one shoulder to the other. A muscular man wore a tank top that left his tawny nipples peeking out. There was a bewildered family of tourists, eyes searching for some confirmation that this was the way they sought, but the universe offered them only another garbled announcement. New Yorker born and bred, Brooke was adept at noticing as well as ignoring all of this. The very reason she didn’t fear a subway pricker. She was impervious.
A GUARDIAN HIGHLIGHT FOR 2024
A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?
Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.
Love the Alam opening graph. Pulls you right in.