Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Dan Piepenbring on Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life, Jane Hu on Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors, Nicole Flattery on Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare, Hilary Leichter on Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, and Becca Rothfeld on Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered. 

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“…his prose here, as ever, is so redoubtably stylish that I almost wish he’d enshrined every last tryst in print. What he has gotten down are the wisdom, fun, churlishness, humor, vanity, despair, agony, elevation, debasement, discovery, and delight, along with the bad breath, the body odor, the crabs, and the English Leather liberally applied. Above all, the beauty.

“Clearly this is not a book for prudes. An anecdote about ‘an entire football’ (American or Euro, I cannot say) used at ‘a fisting colony in Normandy’ had me clutching my pearls. On the whole, though, White respects carnality too much to profane it. He can describe an episode of defecation in a two-car garage as if it were the plainest, tenderest thing, a chaste kiss.

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“He mentions AIDS often, ruefully but always passingly, because he’s here for the sex: this is what mattered most for him, and this is what he can transmit in high fidelity. I’ve seen sex written about with passion and dispassion, but seldom in the same book, and never in the same sentence. Maybe everyone in their eighties should write candidly, fearlessly, about what they did and wanted to do in bed or in the steam room or with twenty men in an empty truck on Christopher Street, and their stories should form the fundament (as in, the buttocks, not the foundation) of sex ed. But really what I want is for White to have access to everyone’s memories, their spank banks, with full creative license.”

–Dan Piepenbring on Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (Harper’s)

“Ng tells the story of her father’s crossing in her memoir, Orphan Bachelors, a title drawn from her father’s term for Chinese men who came to the U.S. during the age of exclusion. His phrase underscores the heightened loneliness of these figures, who were effectively abandoned twice over—severed from their families back in China and unable to start their own in the United States … Her father teaches Ng to call each orphan bachelor ‘Grandfather.’ He would often describe exclusion as a brilliant piece of legislation, because it was ‘bloodless.’ ‘America didn’t have to kill any Chinese; her law assured none would be born.’ Ng’s book is at once an investigation into the afterlife of exclusion in her family and an attempt to memorialize the missing generations of Chinese Americans—the children these men never had—on paper.

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“Because so much of her father’s life, and the lives of men like him, is lost to history, Ng uses the techniques of storytelling to reimagine his past. She moves between fact and fiction, embellishing, hyperbolizing, frequently falling into a mock-heroic tone. The memoir’s structure is winkingly experimental—Ng jumps back and forth in time, expanding or compressing the events of her childhood, returning again and again to the same primal scenes. ‘This book has no simple timeline,” she announces early on. “I’ve left our fissures in because what can’t be known or forgiven is part of our history.’

In unsettling the division between truth and lies, Orphan Bachelors remains faithful to a tradition of Asian American literature that stretches back to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, from 1976. Kingston’s book, a radical scrambling of folktale, myth, and autobiography, is largely fiction but was initially received as a straightforward memoir—exactly the kind of stereotypical immigrant story Kingston had tried to avoid.

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“Eighty years after the repeal of the Exclusion Act, Ng continues to parse the consequences and contradictions of its demands: to live as a family man in China and a bachelor abroad; to tell the truth by memorizing a Book of Lies; to be the living descendant of those whose progeny were never intended to be born; to commemorate that which was designed to be forgotten. Perhaps those whose pasts have been erased must first learn the rules of believable lies—the art of fiction—before they are able to write the bones of truth.”

–Jane Hu on Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors (The New Yorker)

“When I read her slim, dread-inducing novels, I feel the same excitement as when I read something deeply and truly mean, mean in its heart, like Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970), a novella about a woman essentially plotting her own murder. Butler’s worldview is similarly black, and like Spark’s, her women are defective, strange, unbending.

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“Butler has little regard for dramatic moments or operatic scenes: her characters are undone by small deceits, selfishness, their secret spitefulness, their inability to get out of their own way. In fact, given the sexual repression and deadening outlook of each of her three novels, the closest progenitor I can think of for her work is the British sitcom: Nighty Night, The Office, Fawlty Towers. Her characters are trapped in cycles of indignity, in confined settings (offices, apartments), surrounded by people who hate them. Butler has a comedian’s tics, too—the monologues against society’s ills, the dissatisfaction, the bottomless exasperation.

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“In the critical writing on Sad Girl Novelists, there has been a tendency to examine these writers as if they were temps: they’ll do for the moment, but we better get someone serious in here pretty quickly. And, as with temps, an assumption lingers that they don’t know what they’re doing. I’d argue that Butler knows exactly what she’s doing, down to each sentence.”

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“Butler’s real skill isn’t merely skewering these people—which is a largely self-defeating project—but offering her own, reluctant version of sympathy. Her talent lies in depicting how these sore winners think, and the quiet madness that comes from measuring every interaction in your life by what might be gained in power and status. Like Wharton, she understands the misery of the inheritance class. Not the televisual misery we’re familiar with—private jets, the sprawling, ghostly properties, that obvious shorthand for the rich and spiritually damned. This is the grievous, unshakable misery that takes place in your own head when you can’t connect to anyone or anything. Wealth doesn’t make you free: it makes you a coward.”

–Nicole Flattery on Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare (The New York Review of Books)

“Balle’s thrilling seven-volume meditation on time, in a translation from Barbara J. Haveland, nods at these speculative protocols and then politely abandons them on the banks of an endless Nov. 18. Here, the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions. Whereas the reader expects the loop to be straightened by sheer will or gamed through kindness, Balle dismisses such resolutions for something much more compelling.

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“On the Calculation of Volume, structured as a numbered diary (we begin on Tara’s 121st Nov. 18), plunges us into what Georges Perec called the infraordinary, the perplexities of the habitual and the banal: a stirring confrontation with reality that feels genuinely new. These books might brim with repetitions, but they are hardly recapitulations.

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“Such is the terrain of Balle’s first volume: a quiet meditation on marriage observed from both a terribly near and far distance. ‘Time has come between us,’ Tara writes, a sentence that could easily speak to the gradual drift in any relationship. When she moves into the spare bedroom and decides to hide as a stowaway in her own house—for convenience, for not wanting to retell the story of the loop, on loop—it doesn’t feel far-fetched. When she covertly follows Thomas on his daily errands rather than walking beside him, Balle communicates something painful about the limits of sharing a life, and perhaps the limits of sharing time at all.

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“On the Calculation of Volume doesn’t present the time loop solely as a problem to be solved but as a condition of being alive. Who hasn’t walked through a day oblivious to the fact that it’s the beginning or the end of a certain type of day? By accepting that time has been changed, irrevocably, we can find a way to live inside it. And while time is a kind of container, the ultimate unknown is the measure of what tomorrow holds.”

–Hilary Leichter on Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (The New York Times Book Review)

“The dullest parts of Shattered are the periodic harangues about politics, which might have been lifted from an aggrieved opinion column in any major newspaper. ‘We have entered a new era of censorship and self-censorship,’ he scolds. ‘Both liberals and conservatives have become insistent on certain things not being said or heard.’