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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Paper Tiger: Irish Financial Fiction after the Bust
Situated on the periphery of both the eurozone and the London-New York axis of Anglo-American finance, Ireland offers an intriguing vantage point on the global slump. Not so long ago, buoyed by booming technology and pharmaceutical sectors and juiced by neoliberal reforms, the Irish economy was feted as the Celtic Tiger, but a massively overinflated commercial and housing market left it dangerously exposed when the 2008 financial crisis hit. What started out as a meltdown in the mortgage market soon turned into a sovereign debt crisis as the government made the disastrous guarantee to fully backstop insolvent banks, driving the country itself into bankruptcy and, ultimately, the fiscal embrace of the European Union. Ireland, not Greece, proved to be the opening act in a tragedy that is still unfolding as the bonds holding together the single currency in Europe continue to fray. For the Irish, the consequences, including the imposition of International Monetary Fund discipline and harsh austerity policies, have been dire. Starved for opportunity, many fled the country in search of a better life elsewhere. So many, in fact, that officials from the Central Statistics Office suggest that emigration levels are comparable to the Great Famine years of the mid-19th century. Once again, a great pestilence stalks the land, but this time the contagion is virtual.
Irish writers have begun to take stock of the post-Tiger years in ways that attest to the global nature of the bust. Two in particular, Aifric Campbell and Alan Glynn, offer compelling if wildly divergent responses to the challenge of representing in fictional terms what Campbell calls “the closed world” of the financial industry. If anyone is familiar with this world, it is Campbell, whose literary career was preceded by over a decade spent as an investment banker. She rose to become the first female manager of Morgan Stanley’s London trading floor before trading in her Bloomberg terminal for Bloomsbury aspirations. Her third novel, just published in North America, was longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize and borrows liberally from Campbell’s banking years. Set in 1991, with the outbreak of hostilities in the first Gulf War looming in the background, On the Floor tells the story of Geri Malloy, a trader coasting on a reputation built on a single mammoth deal, but lately struggling to keep it all together. Reeling from a devastating romantic rejection, Geri finds herself buffeted on all sides by the demands of the men in her life.
Courting betrayal at every turn, Geri lurches from one crisis to another. She’s a hapless mark for those looking to use her for their own purposes because, when it comes right down to it, she doesn’t know what she wants; “my life story scripted by three men, and me the willing pawn.” In addition to her ex Stephen, there is also imperious client Felix Mann who threatens to take his substantial business elsewhere if Geri doesn’t relocate from London to Hong Kong, her noxious boss (nicknamed “the Grope”), not to mention the raucously bro-ish atmosphere of the trading floor. Deep in denial about an unhappy past she mistakenly thought was well behind her, Geri is forced to acknowledge that she will finally have to account for herself. On the Floor is a compelling psychological portrait of a woman whose professional success masks profound personal turmoil, documenting the precise moment when the blithe coping strategies employed since childhood begin to fail her. However, where Campbell’s work truly shines is in placing Geri’s struggles within the wider context of the changes sweeping through the world of finance.
Though she identifies wholeheartedly with the messy human drama of the trading floor, Geri also has an uncanny facility with numbers. What her fellow traders boozily dismiss as her “circus trick” is really a glimpse of the future, albeit one in which they hardly figure at all. For tomorrow belongs to the so-called rocket scientists in the back office, those quantitative analysts busily deriving the equations that will transform the market. As one exasperated boffin chides Geri and her mates: “Your kind of traders with your finger in the air, making up prices like you were on a fruit and veg stall. You think it’s all supply and demand and some sort of intuition, some sort of special touch. You don’t even understand the instruments you trade.” On the Floor dramatizes the crucial moment in our recent history when the bluff and bluster of the pit gives way to the impersonal operation of exquisitely crafted algorithms, the once-ferocious clamor of open outcry auctions echoing faintly in the miles of cabling and quiet whir of remote servers.
Geri, of course, has a foot in both worlds and a decision to make. Will she continue to obsess over the past or finally realize her losses, mourn them, and move on, thus opening herself to the prospect of future gains? Crucially, the pivotal moment comes only after the intervention of her client Felix, the man whose caprice made her career and could quite possibly break it. He reminds her that the story of her heartbreak is not the story. “I’m not interested in your grubby narrative,” he tells her, explaining that “background my dear, is not always essential to the development of the plot.” For Felix, plot is the epic corporate dealmaking that Geri’s frailties inadvertently catalyze rather than the myopic story of her suffering. By the end of a harrowing series of events, Geri starts to see things his way, admitting that she has been played, most egregiously by herself: “If I hadn’t been shitfaced, broken hearted, broken down, malfunctioning, I might have actually paid attention to what was really going on.”
On its face, Campbell’s novel has little to say about Ireland’s post-Tiger malaise -- it is set in 1991, after all -- but Geri’s sense of her own Irishness makes for a striking contrast with the confidence and optimism of the Tiger years, illustrating both how far Ireland has come, as well as how far it has recently fallen.
The very first time I came to Hong Kong five years ago and stood down there at the water’s edge, I was struck by the thought that only the British could do something so crazily grandiose as transform a huge rock in the South China Sea into a magnificent power base. I stood transfixed by the Peak in a gaping neck-arch and years of myopic schoolbook history unraveled—a continuous loop of embittered bleating about Cromwell and disemboweling and famine, the coffin ships, the martyrs, the faces of The Six Men, the agony and the ecstasy of dying for your country—all collapsed into the astonishing revelation that The Enemy had in fact, Bigger Fish to Fry. That all the time we were crawling in and out of hedge schools and mustering futile insurrections, the British Empire was gripped by the tentacles of a dizzying ambition that explained the stunning irrelevance of Ireland. Even after Home Rule and a bellyful of potatoes and Rural Electrification, the story of Ireland was still about the same thing: a Self as defined by the Other, an island clinging onto the victim psychology of an identity crisis, trailing a stone-age language through the jostling visa queue of emigrants, licking our own sores as we clutched our one-way tickets in a stampede for the next plane out of there.
On the Floor gestures at a new era of confidence and optimism for both its protagonist and Ireland itself. However, the novel ends on a deliberately ambiguous note because it’s not really clear whether Geri’s identity crisis has been resolved or merely deferred. Similarly, it remains to be seen whether the Irish will revert to what Geri describes as victim psychology after the all-too-brief age of affluence came to a sputtering halt amidst the global turmoil of 2008 and after. For a time the Irish -- and everyone else! -- were too busy making money to worry about inequality, but as the pace of economic growth slowed and even reversed, discord became harder and harder to outrun. Today, the specter of an oppressive Other once again captivates the popular imagination, albeit this time in the form of policymakers from the IMF or European Central Bank rather than representatives of Her Majesty’s Government. The accents may be different, but the underlying psychological dynamic appears worryingly familiar.
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What happened to Ireland during the age of easy money is Alan Glynn’s great theme. In contrast to Aifric Campbell, who reports on the closed world of finance with the ease and familiarity of a consummate insider, Glynn is a gatecrasher. Working in the thriller mode, he treats the world of finance as a conspiracy, the ultimate goal of which is to conceal the truth about the unsavory and often criminal origins of great wealth and power. His latest novel Graveland continues in the same vein of international intrigue that informs Winterland (2009) and Bloodland (2011), the previous two entries in a trilogy loosely organized around the shadowy figure of James Vaughn, the reclusive and incredibly well-connected head of the private equity firm Oberon Capital. Winterland opens with a nicely Hitchcockian twist when two men named Noel Rafferty, one a gangster and the other an architect, are murdered on the same evening. Which one was the actual target? Convinced that the police have closed the case too early, a grieving family member launches her own investigation, one that reveals a sordid underbelly of crony capitalism and political corruption that reaches all the way from a controversial property development in Dublin to the highest office in the land.
Winterland is very much a product of the boom, a novel about the overly cozy relationship between politicians and their patrons, as well as the go-along-to-get-along mentality that flourishes so long as no one is looking too closely. Bloodland takes place barely two years later, but in the interim, the game has changed. The global bust has left everyone scrambling, from a down-on-his-luck journalist struggling to make the rent to an overextended tycoon whose empire is coming apart for want of a loan. Recently laid off, Jimmy Gilroy reluctantly accepts a freelance assignment to write the biography of Susie Monaghan, a reality star whose legend only grows after she perishes along with five others in a helicopter crash off the coast of Ireland. Almost immediately, he’s approached by a fixer who warns him not to look too closely into the murky circumstances of the accident -- a request that makes him suspect his project may be more than tabloid fodder after all. The ensuing action stretches from Dublin to New York and the Congo where an obscure mining concession is at the center of scandal implicating, among others, an ambitious United States senator, a private military company, and the big money backing the next step in drone technology. Glynn is working with a much broader canvas here because in Bloodland corruption is globalized. Ireland’s bent political and business elite remain our entry point into the narrative, but they are merely local symptoms of a spreading sickness.
Graveland, the final entry in the Vaughn trilogy, traces this illness back to its source in New York, the financial epicenter of both the 2008 meltdown as well as the new gilded age that preceded it. (Gotham, incidentally, also serves as the backdrop to Glynn’s debut, 2001’s The Dark Fields, which received the Hollywood treatment and was released as a hit film in 2011 under a new title: Limitless.) Opening with the assassination of two Wall Street figures and seemingly unrelated disappearance of a college student, Graveland alternates between three main narrative perspectives. Ellen Dorsey, who plays a minor role in Bloodland, is an investigative journalist with a hunch that these events may be linked. Frank Bishop is a laid-off architect struggling to keep himself afloat, and is increasingly distraught over the fact he can’t get in touch with his daughter. Meanwhile Craig Howley, the number two at the secretive Oberon Capital, is champing at the bit to replace his boss while wondering if he has a target on his back, too. Glynn expertly generates suspense by deftly building up and then subverting our expectations, leaving us uncertain as to the nature of the plot. Is this a kill-the-bankers revenge fantasy? A right-wing myth about the sinister aims motivating the Occupy movement? A grim parable of corporate ambition? Or is it entirely personal, rooted in one family’s responsibility for a Madoff-style ponzi scheme?
As Ellen and Frank work through various theories as to who is responsible for the violence and why, their investigation serves as a proxy for a much broader inquiry, one that characterizes the trilogy as a whole. Working within the conventions of the suspense thriller, Glynn attempts to visualize something that remains frustratingly opaque and out of reach: the financial system itself. As recent events have shown, it proves remarkably hard to see. At a time when transactions are increasingly found off-balance-sheet and bankers hide in the unregulated shadows, there is no overarching perspective capable of providing a full and proper accounting, to make the facts as they stand cohere into a lucid narrative (that is, if there ever was...). The “closed world” of finance quite literally resists oversight. For Frank, “the financial crisis of 2008 -- its origins stretching back over decades, its aftermath unfolding into the foreseeable future -- is a huge, unwieldy subject, a web of interconnecting narratives that cannot be contained in an single text or contemplated in a single glance.” Ellen is similarly confounded:
Each new post she reads, or thread she follows, seems to hold out the promise of something, an insight, an angle, a revelation even. In discussing stuff like fractional reserve banking, the creation of the Fed, the Glass-Steagall Act, Keynes, the Chicago School, subprime, securitization, the bailouts, there’ll be an initial hint of reasonableness, a striving for clarity -- for the holy grail of a coherent point -- but sooner or later, and without fail, each contribution will descend into ambiguity, internal contradiction, and ultimately gibberish.
Glynn’s solution to this interpretive dilemma is, quite simply, James Vaughn, the head of Oberon Capital and personification of the revolving door between the private sector and government. “Without once being elected or appointed to public office, the man has exerted enormous influence, and mainly by operating in the interstices between federal agencies, private contractors, consulting firms, lobbyists, think tanks, and policy institutes.” Although Glynn grants him a legendary backstory (including offhand references to his role in the Kennedy administration, even the swaggering admission that he walked in on JFK bedding his soon-to-be-replaced wife), the octogenarian yet still strangely vital Vaughn is less a fully rounded character than an avatar of global capital: “He’s one of those extraordinary guys, and there aren’t that many of them, who somehow float between [business and politics], and it’s not that he’s both -- businessman and politician -- it’s that actually he’s neither. He’s something else again, something more evolved than that,” marvels a character from Bloodland. “It’s like he’s the very embodiment of money.”
Vaughn appears in every volume of Glynn’s trilogy, the only character to do so, and thus serves as its main source of continuity. However, from his first appearance as an outside investor in the Dublin property scheme detailed in Winterland to his apparent retirement lap in Graveland, the publicity-shy Vaughn lingers discreetly in the background, visible only in glimpses as the author keeps us otherwise entertained with the tightly wound and frenetic plotting of his conspiratorially-minded tales. As the trilogy moves farther and farther away from its parochial origins in order to situate Ireland’s experience in a global context, Vaughn and his outsize role come into sharp focus. Indeed, by the end of Graveland, the pursuit of the Wall Street killers turns into a searching examination of those who made a killing in the markets. Rather than getting caught up in what Frank calls “an ever-widening gyre of speculation and paranoia,” Glynn substitutes the story of the secret origins of Vaughn’s wealth and power for the frustratingly incomplete and unsatisfying nonfictional narratives of the crash.
Five years removed from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, our tentative economic recovery is marred by the nagging sense that nothing has really changed, that the same people who got us into this mess are still running the show, that no one has been held accountable and, as the shock wears off, that we are back to business as usual. Worryingly, while there is no shortage of answers -- journalistic accounts of the financial crisis are one of the few growth areas in publishing -- it remains to be seen whether we are asking the right questions. In the face of such uncertainty, it falls to writers like Aifric Campbell and Alan Glynn to take up the challenge of representing the world of finance by reducing it to human scale. Wearing her hard-earned expertise in the banking industry ever so lightly, Campbell grounds her story of Geri’s heartbreak in the customs and routines of the trading floor, the workplace rituals that Geri clings to even as they are on the verge of disappearing. Glynn, meanwhile, harnesses the conventions of the popular thriller to the task of rendering transparent a world that otherwise remains abstract and inaccessible, compressing and dramatizing the dance of contemporary capital flows in the figure of James Vaughn.
Image Credit: Pexels/Pixabay.
How to Write a Movie About a Writer
In the 2011 film Limitless, Bradley Cooper is Eddie Morra, a struggling novelist. His ponytail is greasy, his apartment is a mess, his girlfriend is fed up. Then he accepts a neural accelerator from a shady source, finishes his manuscript in four days, shoves it in his editor’s face and promptly moves on to day trading and sport fucking. In The Words, released this past Friday, Cooper again plays a writer (Rory Jansen) confronted with a Faustian dilemma. The Words is a mess of cinematic and literary clichés weighed down further by a vaguely meta-fictional plot, twin voiceovers, and an obsession with a sparkling brand of literary celebrity that no longer exists, but it does effectively illustrate the difficulties inherent in conveying the illusion of great art and it serves as the most recent example of Hollywood’s strange vision of writers and their creative process.
The Words traffics in Easy Bake literary shorthand (Brooklyn lofts, Paris cafes, tweed, pensive cigarette puffs) familiar to any pretentious ninth-grader. Occasionally the camera pans a computer screen or a yellow page just closely enough for the viewer to scan half a sentence. The voiceovers, provided by a smug Dennis Quaid and a raspy Jeremy Irons, suggest we’re not missing much. Let’s just say that Quaid’s Clayton Hammond — a wealthy and respected novelist — would probably take great professional delight in describing Olivia Wilde’s eyes as “almond” and Bradley Cooper’s as “an icy blue.”
While the film employs a mirrored plot device, audiences may be bothered by a nagging sense of unintentional déjà vu. Movies about writers can differ in a few key ways, but there is one near constant: literary fiction is exclusively male territory. Women serve as muses and dishwashers. “Why would a beautiful and intelligent young woman like you want to be a writer?” Hammond asks Wilde’s Daniella, a Columbia grad student, as he pins her against a beam in his cheesy duplex. Additionally, the plot hinges on an act of fraud that is, ironically, very similar to the plots of other films. I was reminded of A Murder of Crows for the first time in many years, in which aspiring writer Lawson Russell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) publishes his dead friend’s manuscript as his own and enjoys instant fame and fortune. Recent scandals have shown that this type of behavior continues to tempt even those at the pinnacle of the profession.
What feeds these temptations? The blank page, a fear of rejection, claustrophobia, philosophical questions of ownership. The darker elements of creation are excellent fodder for thrillers and effective platforms for comedies. These films take the work itself less seriously (often a lack of literary merit is part of the joke) and instead focus on the pitfalls of the creative life. They ignore the words for the work and all that can inspire and disrupt it: psycho fans, ex-wives, portals to the Underworld. These writers can be cynical hacks (As Good As It Gets), genre stars (Misery) or dislocated sportswriters (Funny Farm). In romantic comedies, the writer is often a witty Lothario or a good-natured wimp. Either way, the profession’s primary function is to provide the character with plenty of free time. A more successful genre is the Literary Young Man Coming of Age. In these cases (The Squid and the Whale, Orange County) the films succeed because the film is the novel and the focus is on the yearning for a fulfilling creative life rather than a specific written work. The most offensive depictions usually appear in melodramas (The Words, A Love Song for Bobby Long), which exploit a milieu in order to tell vapid stories that wish to be considered intelligent simply for acknowledging the existence of literary culture.
Better to make a biopic (Quills, Becoming Jane, Miss Potter). While these films are frequently dull, they can coast on borrowed esteem and there’s much less potential for embarrassment. Nobody has to do the extra work of creating a fake masterpiece. We are familiar with Capote’s ouevre and are free to judge it as we wish.
The only evidence we have of Clayton Hammond’s greatness is a few fawning autograph seekers and a fancy refrigerator. We are told that Sean Connery’s William Forrester is a Salinger-level genius in Finding Forrester. We are assured that Grady Tripp’s fiction makes up for his numerous personal failings in Wonder Boys. But even Chabon didn’t want to waste good writing by giving his protagonist a few juicy paragraphs. Instead these films rely on our familiarity with Hollywood-established Literary Personality tropes: needy yet reclusive, lecherous yet noble, wise yet drug-addled. You know, writers.
A Quick Guide to Writing a Movie About a Writer:
You are writing a movie about a writer. He is a great writer. He must be a great writer, the plot demands it. Here are a few necessary visual shortcuts.
1. Tweed, tattered sweaters, corduroy, maybe an old Army jacket.
2. Bouts of inopportune drunkenness.
3. A library with one of those sliding ladders or perilous stacks surrounding a stained mattress (throw in a dusty globe to suggest world-weariness).
4. Rub jaw or stroke beard.
5. Have writer tell a beautiful and supportive female character that she just doesn’t get it.
Publicity image via The Words
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