His Illegal Self
by Peter Carey (Knopf, $25)
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How the Dead Dream
by Lydia Millet (Counterpoint, $24)
The satirical novelist Lydia Millet is “best when she makes startlingly odd events seem wholly real,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Her latest charts the unlikely environmental awakening of a mercenary American. It opens as he’s creating protection rackets on his childhood playground and climaxes when he’s breaking into zoos to commune with endangered beasts. Both those gambits work. Where Millet stumbles is in leading readers on a number of “distracting dead ends.”
The Commoner
by John Burnham Schwartz (Doubleday, $25)
The author of Reservation Road specializes in “the transformation of melodrama into something authentic,” said Sarah Weinman in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In The Commoner, he has “lightly fictionalized” the stories of Japan’s current empress and her daughter-in-law, both commoners who married into a stifling, tradition-bound world. Though the novel’s conclusion is slightly implausible, Schwartz makes clear that the Japanese monarchy “is no place for anything resembling a happy ending.”
Day
by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf, $24)
This award-winning new novel somehow survives the double risk its author takes, said Sam Anderson in New York. Written largely in the second person, Day is the story of a young World War II veteran working as an extra in a World War II film. But neither the tired subject nor that bullying narrative trick overwhelms A.L. Kennedy’s talent. When she puts “you” inside the rear gun turret of an RAF bomber, the experience is “intense, admirably sustained, and occasionally spectacular.”
The Reserve
by Russell Banks (Harper, $25)
Russell Banks’ “cheesy, histrionic” new novel is unworthy of his considerable talents, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Set at a 1930s Adirondack retreat, it features a romance between a macho lefty artist and a pampered beauty who comes across as “a parody of the crazy femme fatale.” The author of Continental Drift and other probing blue-collar dramas apparently wanted to try something new. Yet even his prose style here feels “weirdly secondhand.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”