5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our mishmash of magnificent reviews this week includes Junot Díaz on Jane Schoenbrun’s Public Access Afterworld, Kevin Power on Yiyun Li’s Music Against the Night, Sarah Chihaya on Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night, Anna Louie Sussman on Sarah Anderson’s Fallow, and Kathryn Schulz on Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Rush. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. A purveyor of cinematic opacities, Schoenbrun is far more accessible here, though they haven’t abandoned their propensity for the uncanny.

Schoenbrun draws upon a cosmos of influences and genres: Public Access Afterworld is not just an Orphic epic, but also a political conspiracy, an urban fantasy and a neo-slave narrative that recalls Videodrome, The Matrix and even Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. But for all this generic prolixity, Schoenbrun keeps the narrative planted in the everyday lives of their marginalized characters. By refusing the temptation to escape into the fantastic, they resist the very trap that the novel sets for its heroes.

Schoenbrun has an almost preternatural talent for rendering characters—for excavating strange channels buried underneath regular ones—whether it be the self-hating and substance-rattled Jules; David, who cannot see the harm he perpetuates; or anxious Willa, who, in a separate plotline set in 1940s Los Alamos, lives with her scientist husband and finds herself drawn to a newcomer named Rachel. Even when Schoenbrun inhabits a monstrous creature caught between dimensions, the effect is devastating. Profoundly realized and profoundly human, Bethany is an emphatic rebuttal to the vile cruelties that our conjuncture has heaped on trans people.

In a novel where young women are stalked and eliminated, Bethany is an exceptional ‘final girl,’ in Carol Clover’s phrasing, a tormented sole survivor who is part of a community that is itself always ‘scheduled for destruction.’ She’s alert, trusts her scars and knows better than most what it is to be trapped. Creativity, solidarity, laughter and, barely visible through the static of our agonies, something that might just be love. Public Access Afterworld is proof of these hard-earned sureties.

Make it real,’ the novel urges. An entire generation may have found a receiver in this revelation of a book. Schoenbrun has called together the dreams and tribulations of a dimension of peoples—long erased, long maligned, too often brutalized, heroically resisting—and made them real.” –Junot Díaz on Jane Schoenbrun’s Public Access Afterworld (The New York Times Book Review) “In his recently published A History of the Novel in Britain, Philip Hensher makes a bold claim.

Historical novels, he tells us, don’t last. However popular and prestigious a historical novel might be in its day, it will almost always get thrown overboard as the ship of literary culture sails on, piled high with novels of contemporary life. He might be on to something.