VIRTUE by Hermione Hoby

“A small book about small things that becomes a big book about everything.”

virtue

THE WIFE UPSTAIRS

Hawkins, Rachel St. Martin’s (304 pp.) $19.09 | Jan. 5, 2021 978-1-250-24549-6

Jane Eyre gets a modern, Alabamabased reboot in Hawkins’ latest thriller. Dog walker to the elite and sometime petty thief, Jane will do what she must to survive. Growing up as a witness to violence in various foster homes, she’s tougher than she looks. Then she meets Eddie Rochester, who’s recently lost his wife, Bertha, and his wife’s best friend, Blanche Ingraham, in a tragic boating accident, their bodies never found. Dating Eddie gives Jane the social capital to move from dog walker to equal within the neighborhood, and soon, copying the style and mannerisms of the status-conscious women around her, she is welcome on their committees and at their parties. Bea Rochester, who was the glossy creator of a fashion brand, gets her own sections of the story as well. Given the names, it quickly becomes clear that Hawkins is basing the novel on Jane Eyre. While reimagining the classics is always fair game, there must be a point to it; that is, the original text must in some way enhance or add complexity or interest to the new text, and vice versa. In this case, Hawkins’ novel falls short. Given the title and all the existing criticism of Charlotte Brontë’s original, Hawkins had the opportunity to explore the ideas of feminism and exoticism through a 21st-century lens; to critique ideas of masculine strength and mental health; to overlay a more complex idea of family and parenting and status. Instead, the characters are themselves mere caricatures whose only claims to having layers are the names they share with the originals. The Gothic creepiness is mostly lost; the subtext is nonexistent; and perhaps worst of all, Jane, though never perhaps a heroine to emulate, loses the opportunity to change and evolve. With no one to feel for, or even cheer for, the novel offers little true enjoyment and never really takes off as an original mystery.

Skip this one and read Wide Sargasso Sea instead.

VIRTUE

Hoby, Hermione Riverhead (320 pp.) $23.36 | Jul. 20, 2021 978-0-593-18859-0

A recent college graduate with amorphous literary ambitions is taken up by a wealthy artist couple in the first months of the Trump years. As he becomes increasingly entwined in their lives, he finds himself questioning his own allegiances.

With her second novel—following Neon in Daylight (2018)— Hoby returns to a favorite subject: unmoored young New Yorkers enmeshed in other people’s lives. This time, it’s Luca, a 22-year-old intern at a prestigious literary magazine called The New Old World, whose main ambition is to transcend his past as a chubby kid with a single mom from Broomfield, Colorado. “I wanted badly to be good; I wanted desperately to be liked,” he explains, narrating from his perch more than a decade in the future. “It was easy to confuse the two.” This will be the conflict of the novel, although it will take the better part of the next 300 pages for Luca to figure out that he is torn between two opposing poles. At one end, there is Zara, a wildly talented fellow intern, who is both the magazine’s only Black employee and the lone voice against the publication’s mealy-mouthed postelection attempt at “resistance.” At the other, there are Jason and Paula, a glamorous couple with loose ties to the magazine who take Luca under their wing. He is transfixed by them, their effortless beauty and easy wealth; that summer, he accepts an invitation to join them at their home in Maine, and this, nearly halfway through the slow-burning, sometimes-florid novel, is where the book takes off. At first, Maine is idyllic, a blissed-out dreamscape of adulthood, but as the weeks pass into months, their relationships begin to show subtle signs of strain. But it is only when tragedy strikes back in New York that the spell is broken and Luca is left to reckon with himself—and choices he hadn’t realized he was making.

A small book about small things that becomes a big book about everything.

OVER THE FALLS

Hodge, Rebecca Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $27.99 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-1-64385-754-1

A Tennessee woman is called on to find the vanished sister who ruined her life. Bryn Collins has never met 14-yearold Josh Whitman before he turns up at her farm. But he instantly looks familiar to her: He looks just like her former fiance, Sawyer Whitman, whom she sent packing after he slept with her kid sister, Del. That same sister, Josh’s mother, has now gone missing, and Josh has Uber’d across the state from Memphis to beg Bryn to look for her. It won’t be an easy search, since Del has abused alcohol and prescription painkiller for so many years—Josh has mostly parented her rather than the other way around—that it’s impossible to predict her actions. And it’s clear that the downside of failure will be steep once Carl Griffith, a bullying schoolmate of Bryn and Del’s who’s been Del’s supplier, threatens Bryn and Josh with violence if they don’t find Del and the 2,000 pills she vanished with within the week. The search for Del takes Bryn and Josh as far as Colorado, where there are few signs of her but a disconcerting number of signs of Sawyer Whitman, who died in a plane crash 12 years ago. Or did he? Hodge amps up the my-sister, my-frenemy vibe and keeps everything else baby-simple until the authentically messy ending.

A tale for everyone who’s hated her sister and wondered what it would be like to work out all the kinks.

SEVERAL PEOPLE ARE TYPING

Kasulke, Calvin Doubleday (256 pp.) $23.00 | Sep. 7, 2021 978-0-385-54722-2

The petty trials and supernatural tribulations of a public relations firm are explored through its Slack conversations in this debut novel. Gerald, a mediocre employee of an unnamed PR firm, is stuck inside his company’s Slack channel. He doesn’t know how his consciousness became trapped inside the business communication app, and he struggles to explain to his colleagues how he’s “just kinda, in here,” which he describes as “pretty existentially terrifying.”Gerald’s co-workers barely register his predicament, however; they believe he’s merely engaging in an elaborate bit to take advantage of the firm’s new work-from-home policy. Meanwhile, Gerald frantically solicits help from Slackbot, the app’s troubleshooting AI, who initially only responds with preprogrammed messages like, “I can help by answering simple questions about how Slack works. I’m just a bot, though!” Things get interesting when Gerald convinces his co-worker Pradeep to check on his absent body, and even more so when Slackbot discovers how to “help” Gerald. Kasulke adopts the epistolary format by restricting the action to Slack, composing his novel out of message threads titled by nickname (“#nyc-office”) or the list of participants (“Nikki, Pradeep, Louis C”). Most of the conversations read incredibly quickly, even before the characters are sufficiently differentiated by typing style. Kasulke uses the line breaks and repetition of digital communication to stitch poetry out of textspeak, business lingo, adaptive chatbot phrases, and emojis—the latter represented by frustratingly clunky colonbracketed text (“:thumbsup:”). Subplots about a PR catastrophe at a dog food company, an office hookup, and an employee haunted by mysterious “howling” offer varyingly interesting sendups of business life. As Gerald dissociates further from reality in favor of endless cyberspace, he laments: “We’re not made to absorb this much human information at once.”

A compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.

THE MINISTER PRIMARILY

Killens, John Oliver Amistad/HarperCollins (480 pp.) $27.99 | Jul. 27, 2021 978-0-06-307959-5

This previously unpublished novel by a late, venerated Black novelist is a free-wheeling satire of late-20th-century racial politics in both post-colonial Africa and post–civil rights America. Killens (1916-1987) was in his crowded lifetime a World War II soldier, activist, mentor, teacher, screenwriter, polemicist, and novelist. One of his most notorious works was The Cotillion (1971), which trenchantly lampooned the upper reaches of the African American middle class, and that side of Killens comes through even more boisterously in this posthumous novel. Its protagonist is James Jay Leander Johnson, an itinerant musician from the Deep South whose restless wanderings have led him to the mythical African country of Guanaya, where he seeks cultural communion with “the Motherland.” Meanwhile, Guanaya’s stature as “the most insignificant of nations” is stunningly transformed by its discovery of cobanium, “a radioactive metallic element five hundred times more powerful and effective than uranium.” The country’s charismatic prime minister, Jaja Olivamaki, is being supplicated by the American government to negotiate an alliance over this earthshaking discovery. But neither he nor his cabinet trust the U.S. to have their country’s best interests at heart. Which is where Jimmy Jay Johnson, performing folk music throughout Guanaya, comes in. Tall-and-handsome Jimmy Jay looks so much like the tall-and-handsome P.M. that he is recruited to put on a false beard and pretend to be Olivamaki on a high-profile diplomatic visit to America. Though set sometime in the 1980s, Killens’ novel comes across as a compendium of social and political phenomena in American race relations, whether it’s Pan-Africanism, the Ku Klux Klan, or, of course, the Black upper middle class. Most if not all are treated with scathing irreverence and acerbic wit. At times, the shakiest element in Killens’ situation comedy is the extent to which Johnson’s masquerade holds up as his iteration of the African leader becomes something of a folk hero among Black Americans and a target for White racists. And there are times when the plot gallops ahead of Killens’ ability to control it. But even at its most unruly, the go-for-broke narrative style grows on you, and the author himself occasionally materializes in a walk-on role, lending the book a metafictional feel.

An audacious final testament of an underappreciated craftsman.

WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

Labatut, Benjamin Trans. by West, Adrian Nathan New York Review Books (192 pp.) $18.95 paper | Sep. 14, 2021 978-1-68137-566-3

A belletristic exploration of the psychic and social tolls of 20th-century scientific innovation. The Nobel-winning chemist Fritz Haber discovered the process that made lifesaving nitrogen fertilizer but also facilitated chemical weapons that killed thousands in World War I. The physicist Karl Schwarzchild discovered the phenomena behind black holes but was haunted by the violence he witnessed during the same conflict. Alexander Grothendieck was a pioneering mathematician who became a troubled and eccentric recluse. The central figures in quantum physics were