Laura miller what makes a book great

But like the Neapolitan novels themselves, this book derives much of its powerful momentum from the deeper currents of identity and class Ferrante depicts all of this with the utmost seriousness, in a prose style as mercurial as her teenage narrator Some scenes are depicted dramatically, while others are described in lengthy summaries A promising sign, indeed But if Mexican Gothic begins like du Maurier, it veers a little before its midpoint into the territory of a Guillermo del Toro movie And no lazy afternoon spent reading it will ever feel wasted.

David Mitchell. Positive Slate The overarching plot of Utopia Avenue is one long climb Or perhaps Mitchell hopes to educate younger readers about a historical and cultural milieu he obviously adores.

At times, though, he seems starstruck by his own novel Since Utopia Avenue—rather than any individual member—is the protagonist of the novel, this makes for a strangely friction-free plot. Utopia Avenue dematerializes in a rosy cloud, without suffering the corrosion that tarnished so many counterculture dreams Despite its flaws, Utopia Avenu e is, page by page, a sheer pleasure to read.

Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard on the prettiest day of the year while luminaries wave to you from the sidewalks and nothing truly bad ever happens.

As with enjoying any great party, the art lies in knowing when to leave. Suzanne Collins. Gone is the crisp, action-packed pacing of The Hunger Games, and the epigraphs featuring quotes from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley suggest that success has filled Collins with a perhaps overly optimistic sense of how much philosophical weight a YA novel or, really, any novel can bear.

A friend asked me if I thought The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes , being a portrait of a tyrant as a young man, might be a veiled commentary on Trump. But Coryo is no vulgar, narcissistic bully and parvenu.

The closer parallel is collective—to America itself, frantically trying to live up to past glories and cover up past sins Most people, and that includes most readers, are more like Coryo than the blameless and noble Katniss, and that makes his story, with its petty resentments, flashes of generosity, and moral failures truly rather than aspirationally identifiable.

It also makes The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes a true novel, in the 19th-century sense, Balzac compared with the adventure yarn and romance of The Hunger Games. The stakes seemed low, and Lucy Gray the more obvious choice as a hero. But finally, particularly in the last section set in District 12, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes found its feet, maneuvering Coryo toward his moment of truth. The Hunger Games describes how life often feels to teenagers: a horror show endured in a state of total, excruciating surveillance.

But The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes describes how most lives are actually lived, the consequences of countless small choices that ultimately amount to a big one: not just how to feel but who to be.

Curtis Sittenfeld. Mixed Slate Unlike American Wife , Rodham has a strong whiff of longing about it, a resemblance to the category of fan fiction known as RPF, or real-person fiction, in which fans write fictional stories about actual celebrities Above all, she is diligent, a grind.

The weakness of Rodham is this lack of any significant transformation. Charlie Kaufman. If this sounds wearisome, it is. Yet Antkind also has flashes of wit and even beauty, often just at the point when the reader has started to wonder if Kaufman wants her to suffer What at first appears to be a parody of the parasitical nature of criticism soon metastasizes into a grab bag of long-standing Kaufman motifs and themes: doubles, time travel mental and otherwise , the torment of consciousness, the impossibility of truly representing experience in art, erotic fixations, professional envy, artistic failure.

This proves a mixed blessing, as B himself is such a relentlessly broad caricature that he makes the cadaverous restaurant critic in Ratatouille seem nuanced These gags are funny once, perhaps twice, but Kaufman keeps making them over and over again until they arrive like a kind of blow In another giddily amusing section of the novel, B meets an imperious woman named Tsai and becomes sexually obsessed Sadly, however, this segues into an extended bit about clowns and clown porn that is best passed over in silence.

Lawrence Wright. Probably this seemed like fodder for informative entertainment as recently as a few months ago, but at the moment it may be more excitement than many readers can take.

It seems prophetic because Wright, unlike most of the rest of us, was paying attention As a novel, even as a thriller, this book is pretty basic. The novel has neither the panache of a Lee Child thriller nor the ingenuity of Harlan Coben, although occasionally a minor character stirs to life Nevertheless, The End of October scared the shit out of me. Ottessa Moshfegh. Positive Slate Moshfegh gives the old canard about the association between artistic genius and madness an additional twist to arrive at the notion that inventing complex stories about the intersecting lives of entirely imaginary people is itself a species of madness.

In Death in Her Hands , the plots devised by novelists uncomfortably resemble the conspiracy delusions of a paranoiac Vesta lacks the deliciously shameless antisocial tendencies of Eileen and of the main character of My Year of Rest and Relaxation , who prefers sleeping huge chunks of her life away to dealing with just about anyone—or, at least, Vesta lacks the courage to embrace and celebrate such tendencies.

This prevents Death in Her Hands from attaining the perverse grandeur of those two novels. The minor, idiosyncratic key it strikes does not make it any less enjoyable, and may even make it more so.

A bolder, more universal vision of how isolation can drive you nuts would, right now, cut a little too close to the bone. Hilary Mantel. The novel bogs down with portentous conversations and remodeling plans and municipal updates and protocol. The Cromwell of The Mirror and the Light is beset by ghosts When Wolf Hall came out, the notion of a professional class rising to rule on the strength of its knowledge and competence felt almost inevitable.

Bring Up the Bodies showed that consolidating power usually requires feeding a beast of some species. The Mirror and the Light is a protracted journey to arrive at the conclusion that expertise, talent, and tireless commitment are not enough to hold it. This is a novel of its time, despite appearances. No wonder Mantel puts her ending off for so long.

Yuval Noah Harari. Readers have long exhibited an appetite for sweeping surveys of world history Sapiens appeals to this old-fashioned appetite even as it revamps the genre to address the dreams and fears of a 21st-century audience He has come not to congratulate us for our achievements, but to deliver some inconvenient truths This makes him seem more scrupulously scientific and less like someone selling a party line Chastened by the spectacle of social media and big data mobilized to manipulate voters and sow tribal division, Harari now sounds the alarm James McBride.

None of the men appear to be veterans of any war Is this a weakness? Emily St. John Mandel. The pleasure, which in the case of The Glass Hotel is abundant, lies in the patterns themselves, not in anything they mean.

Megan Angelo. Is there a moral to this story? Probably not. Anna Wiener. Wiener lavishes her most meticulous observational powers on the many older and sometimes younger people she views as enviably sure of themselves and their place in the world What Wiener excels at is not argument or analysis—the articulation of deep patterns or historical shifts in power and attention—but the texture of life for people in a particular and pivotal time and place The spongelike quality of the Wiener of Uncanny Valley makes her a frustrating memoir narrator, however.

Kyle Chayka. The following chapters, often broken into fragments, ruminate on the most culturally exalted manifestations of minimalism: fine artists like Donald Judd, avant-garde composers like John Cage, and Japanese writers and philosophers who elucidated the Zen-influenced aesthetics of their own culture This is disappointing, and at times intellectually muddled.

He testifies, persuasively, to having experienced some transcendent moments when meeting those challenges The fresher subject of contemporary lifestyle minimalism and its relationship to this high-art past goes largely unexplored True, the quintessential blogger minimalists often seem to rely, paradoxically, on the fetishization of certain perfect commodities But high-art minimalism has its fair share of absurdities, too I found myself wishing that Chayka might occasionally live up to this rhetoric and succumb to the charms of a stand mixer or any other genuinely mass-produced object, minimalist in style or not.

Positive Slate Forget all those pandemic novels people have been praising for their prescience in the age of COVID For uncanny relevance, no fictional crisis rivals the showdown in N. A valentine to New York City The city she sings fizzes so joyously through the veins of this novel that anyone mourning the New York before COVID will likely find The City We Became equally sustaining and elegiac, a tribute to a city that may never fully return to us.

Unfortunately, the plot Jemisin uses to explore this world is fairly generic and overly in debt to cinematic precedents like superhero films Jemisin too often lets herself get bogged down in unnecessary exposition and transitions; characters are constantly explaining that knowledge has simply popped into their heads, that they just had a feeling that they ought to do this or that, go here or there.

Jenny Offill. What Offill excels at committing to the page is the flux and ephemera of everyday consciousness Instead of a call to arms, Weather is a document of a certain way of life that we take for granted now, so much so that we barely pay attention to the texture of our own days. One day, all this will be gone, but here are some fragments to shore up against that ruin.

Maybe then, they will be precious to us. Toni Morrison. Race and racism, ancillary concerns in Love for the most part, throw the small groups she writes about back upon one another, steeping their passions. When passion is at its most extreme, Morrison suggests, its workings can be indistinguishable from those of ordinary heartlessness.

Carmen Maria Machado. Instead, she experiments with forms known for their irreality, especially fairy tales and folklore. This story may be too dark to be called a last laugh, but its power is undeniable nonetheless. This is Roddy Doyle territory, an excavation of that particular torture experienced by those who want to break out of a hopeless, working-class world but keep getting sucked back in by the loyalty that is its one redeeming quality.

Faithful Place is wrenching to a degree that detective fiction rarely achieves French does something fresh with every novel, each one as powerful as the last but in a very different manner. Perhaps she has superpowers of her own? Kim Stanley Robinson. After having cut out so much cerebral work for himself, Robinson could hardly be blamed if he lost track of more intimate matters in this book.

The writing often becomes regrettably expository, weighed down by long, stodgy passages about economic and political developments Nevertheless, The Years of Rice and Salt is for the most part a magnificent and endlessly fascinating book. David Foster Wallace.

Wallace can still be funny, but his humor has been creeping away from the playful, omnivorous sort on display in his first three books Trauma lurks somewhere, usually offstage, in each of the eight stories Richard Powers. Positive Salon Powers, when you get right down to it, is more interested in processes and patterns than in people, but when he hits on the right combination of ideas, as he does in his newest book, The Time of Our Singing, he finds a place for people in his celestial clockwork Character and story drive most good novels, while theme makes a satisfying byproduct, but for Powers the idea is the engine that makes everything go You care all the same, not just about the way this author opens up a universe of thought and makes you hear the legendary music of the spheres, but also about the fate of a few baffled human beings, muddling their way through to a life worth living.

Margaret Atwood. Rave Slate Atwood picks up plot elements that originated in the TV series The Testaments owes more to the TV series than a handful of details.

Its tone hews closer to the series than to the novel that precedes it Its characters are not powerless or crushed The Testaments comes adorned with much splendid writing. All of this and a corker of a plot, culminating in a breathless flight to freedom, makes The Testaments a rare treat.

Stephen King. Edmund White. My Lives does bear a resemblance to party chatter and coffee shop confidences. Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. It is too often reminiscent of those French films where long-haired peasant maidens in muslin shifts flash their tawny limbs in fields of wildflowers and the countryfolk demonstrate their lusty nature by making a mess with their food. Jia Tolentino. Tolentino is a classical essayist along the lines of Montaigne, threading her way on the page toward an understanding of what she thinks and feels about life, the world, and herself The strongest pieces in Trick Mirror have to do with the commodification of the self The less penetrating essays in Trick Mirror —a consideration of literary heroines and a critique of the wedding industry—are solid enough but cover well-trodden ground.

Lisa Taddeo. None of the narratives in Three Women are inspirational or empowering, but they are what the best long-form journalism should be, which is truthful Neal Stephenson. Positive Slate Fall tricks you into thinking it plans to be this or that sort of fiction a bitingly plausible near-future dystopia or tale of corporate intriguing, for example , only to heel around and head off in a new direction entirely.

It does this more than once, yet remains a coherent whole. Thomas Harris. Colson Whitehead. Can he please them while continuing to fascinate those of us who fell in love with his idiosyncrasies two decades ago?

Julia Phillips. Positive The New Yorker As remote as this world is, readers will find it strangely familiar. Petropavlovsk uncannily resembles a small, overlooked city in the American West, with its old-timers praising the way things used to be, its restless youth dreaming of metropolitan glamour and escape But for Phillips the intricate web linking her characters is not a mystery to be uncovered by a solitary detective.

It is the web itself that provides the solution The ending ignites an immediate desire to reread the chapters leading up to it: incidents and characters that seemed trivial acquire new meanings What appears to be a collection of fragments, the remains of assorted personal disasters and the detritus of a lost empire, is in truth capable of unity. Rave Salon The most slicing satire in this novel is reserved for the technologized culture of everyday urban life; Shteyngart is the Joseph Heller of the information age Robert S.

Mixed Slate Palace intrigues make for addictive storytelling, as the popularity of Game of Thrones illustrates, and reading the report as a work of literature makes clear that the narrator of the document, whoever that may be, relishes a little bit of that now and then But how does it read?

Given that journalists and experts are willing to read it for you, does the report itself The first volume, devoted to Russian efforts to influence the presidential election, begins, like any good political thriller, with a bang A thriller is only as good as its villain, and the bad guys here have an undeniable panache The closest thing the Mueller report has to supervillain material is Julian Assange, whose bogus maverick posturing, suave mendacity, and comprehensive lack of human decency is spectacularly showcased in these pages Things quiet down after this roaring start, alas, as the report moves toward documenting evidence that the Trump campaign might have conspired with Russian persons Even the infamous June 9, meeting at Trump Tower comes across as something of an anticlimax The Mueller report, Olympian and meticulous, feels like an attempt to wrest back our government on behalf not just of real lawyers but of reality itself.

Susan Choi. Trust Exercise seems to be about the incendiary, ravenous nature of first love, nascent artistic ambition, hero worship Here is where Trust Exercise busts out of its coming-of-age shell and becomes a stranger and far more marvelous creature It must be said that the black characters in The March are too uniformly noble, and this has the counterintuitive effect of depriving them of the stature of the flawed whites.

The war is a mixture of grandeur and degradation, and only the characters who have sounded its depths seem to have fully grasped their experience. Don Winslow. If the two main characters of The Cartel are a little thin, they do their job, delivering the reader into the ongoing disaster that is the war on drugs These people Willow Wilson.

Wilson conjures the legendary beauty of the Alhambra The Bird King offers a rare portrayal of a platonic love fiercer than any of its erotic counterparts. Helen Oyeyemi. Positive The New Yorker The Power of the Dog But none of it is a laughing matter.

How do you choose which authors to write about and which books to review? I follow my nose, I guess. Genre is a complicated issue because it can be both an unfair stigma and an identifier of books that are reliably formulaic in an uninteresting way.

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. But it would be very boring to constantly read and write about the same sorts of books with the same sorts of people in them, so variety is something I seek out. Is there anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a particular book or author—the size of the advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist?

There are some editors with distinct tastes worth following or avoiding , and a handful of publicists I trust to tip me off that something might really appeal to me. Those are impartial takes. You also write about a fair amount of nonfiction as well. Do you believe that reviewing a work of fiction is a markedly different art from reviewing a work of nonfiction? Of course. Fiction is a work of art conjured out of whole cloth.

It may be based on real world events and people, but it has no obligation to them. Nonfiction has a relationship to the truth that also needs to be considered. There are so many writers who talk about how walking or running helps them to write and it makes a lot of sense to me that moving would also help them to read.

I think another way of having fun as a reader, for me at least, is seeing a writer call out some BS form of absurdity that I noticed and have been dying to see someone else notice and define, or just the pleasure of seeing something named, which is exactly what you did in your review of the literary survey Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher.

It was so fun to read. I wonder if you could read to us from that review. WT: Thank you. I just thought you did such a great job of explaining that.

LM: Well, it is something that I think of a lot. But the American idea that everything we do needs to be channeled into some kind of publicly agreed upon virtue or self improvement, that everything needs to be teaching you some kind of lesson and it has to have a moral of some kind. I think it is descended from that puritanical discomfort with the idea of a sporting lie; that you would read it just for its own sake is really kind of alien to the American mentality.

I wonder, when you write something negative, how do you anticipate reaction? Do you worry that the writer is going to get mad?

Some people still do this, but so much of the conversation today is elsewhere. Follow Author. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all.

That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever.

At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight — the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.