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BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE by Nell Stevens
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“In this debut novel set in 1990s Harlem, a young girl learns—and redefines—what it means to take up space.”
big girl
AN EVENING OF ROMANTIC LOVEMAKING
Slotky, Ben Dalkey Archive (120 pp.) $15.95 paper | July 19, 2022 978-1-62897-401-0
While holding a small-town movie theater audience hostage—at least in his own mind—a disgruntled man rants for more than 100 pages about this, that, and nothing.
According to this nameless man, who waves a gun and says he’s rigged the place with tripwires and plastique, he is 46, dying of cancer, failed at business and marriage, and has six kids. He’s loaded with gripes, among them how “everything is simultaneously the biggest deal that’s ever happened and also totally pointless.” In his own eyes a daring comic (à la Gilbert Gottfried, perhaps), he delights in nonsensical segues. “Huey Lewis wanted a new drug, but I want a new dog,” he says, launching an aimless routine about getting the right pooch. He assaults good taste, going on about how the best frozen lemonade he ever had was at the Holocaust Museum and jumping on the opportunity to repeatedly utter the N-word in riffing on what people once called Brazil nuts. It’s hard to say what Slotky, who is White, is after since the book is neither funny nor shocking nor alive with ideas or feeling. In other words, it’s no A Horse Walks Into a Bar, Israeli novelist David Grossman’s International Man Booker Prize–winning 2017 work about a tormented stand-up comic. If anyone is being held hostage, it’s the reader who keeps waiting for Slotky’s patter to matter.
A book whose brevity is its greatest reward.
BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE
Stevens, Nell Scribner (320 pp.) $26.99 | July 19, 2022 978-1-982190-94-1
A 15th-century ghost describes falling in love with an oblivious George Sand during her family’s stay in Mallorca in this lyrical debut novel. Blanca died at the age of 14 in 1473 and has been haunting the Charterhouse, a once-bustling monastery in Valldemossa, ever since. She’s never encountered a fellow ghost and has spent the past 365 years silently observing the living. She’s discovered things about herself since passing on— she’s attracted to women as well as men, and her spectral powers include the ability to explore people’s memories and gaze into their futures—but has also found her afterlife growing smaller and smaller in scope as time wears on. The monks Blanca used to torment with poltergeistlike antics are long gone, and Blanca’s last living direct relative, a “multiple-times-great granddaughter,” is on death’s door when, out of the blue, new tenants arrive at the Charterhouse: French writer George Sand; Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, her lover; her two children; and a servant girl. Sand’s masculine gender expression immediately draws Blanca’s fascination even as it alarms the locals, who are already wary of foreigners and Chopin’s obvious ill health. Stevens’ prose is by turns languid and visceral—she manages to capture both the alienation from the normal passage of time that comes with a lonely eternal life and the profound longing for and appreciation of the sensory that comes with lacking a physical body.
An entrancing and singular exploration of a fascinating historical footnote and a queer life after death.
BIG GIRL
Sullivan, Mecca Jamilah Liveright/Norton (320 pp.) $27.00 | July 12, 2022 978-1-324-09141-7
In this debut novel set in 1990s Harlem, a young girl learns—and redefines— what it means to take up space. Eight-year-old Malaya Clondon weighs 168 pounds. It’s also true that she is Black, that her family recently moved from a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side to a brownstone uptown, and that she attends Galton Elementary Academy for the Gifted, but her weight seems to be the most important fact about her to most of the people around her. It’s what her classmates see. It’s what leads her mother, Nyela, to monitor Malaya’s food and take her to Weight Watchers meetings. And it’s what prompts her grandmother Ma-Mère to suggest that Malaya get gastric bypass surgery. Only a couple of close friends and Malaya’s father recognize that there is more to her than a number on a scale and unruly desires. By high school, she will have a larger circle of friends. She finds solace and joy in the rhymes of Biggie Smalls. And she discovers a new sense of style as she builds a wardrobe inspired by the rappers she sees on MTV. But she still hungers for experiences that she believes are reserved for thin girls—a hunger that becomes more complex when her best friend, Shaniece, becomes a thin girl herself. In an effort to meet this need, Malaya will acquiesce to sexual experiences that bring her no pleasure, just a hint of what it feels like to be wanted, before she begins to explore what it truly is that she, herself, wants. Sullivan writes with tenderness and uses the language of poetry to communicate her protagonist’s inner life. In difficult moments, Malaya escapes into fantasy, and she uses drawing and painting as emotional outlets. But what begins as dissociation evolves into a more confident relationship with her art, just as Malaya will ultimately learn to inhabit her body with a sense of license and possibility. She decides to let go of the shame Ma-Mère passed on to Nyela, and Nyela passed on to Malaya, and not measure herself in terms of fatness and thinness but in terms of “the smallness of a body against a broad scape of mountains” and “the smallness of life in the big, busy world.”
