The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt, 784 pp., $30.
In The Mirror & the Light, the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s triumphant Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Henry VIII’s superstitious, ignorant, and ruthlessly intriguing court — it is a glossy reflection of Reformation England — elevates and then destroys its most adept creature. We walk for years in Cromwell’s shoes, up to and through his decapitation with a blunt ax on Tower Hill.
Cromwell is central. Everything we see and everything we realize that he fails to see are revealed through his observations. This literal and figurative Renaissance man, once the master of every detail, starts to miss tricks — “He forgot to play his Chapuys card. But then, he has a great deal on his mind.” True, but that never used to trip him up — and his slimy, stupid, and sadistic enemies close in for the kill.
With Cromwell at the center of the novel, it can seem both to his rivals and to readers that he reflects Henry’s glory. But in truth, however, the king is not only the light but also the mirror, the alpha and the omega. And it is doom to forget it. Everyone bets their lives and fortunes in the cockpit defined by Henry’s vanity, insecurity, and power.
Caveats? Mantel occasionally waxes too lyrical in her evocation of misty 16th-century England and its spiritually occluded people. And Cromwell is made a more sympathetic figure than strict students of Tudor England can allow. But this is nevertheless a brilliant novelization of history at its most intense.
— Hugo Gurdon, Editor-in-Chief
The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage, 528 pp., $16.95.
Another novel about Brooklyn? Well, not that Brooklyn. The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem’s sprawling, semi-autobiographical masterpiece from 2003, is set mostly in the Gowanus of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s: a not-quite-yet-gentrified no man’s land where a handful of stray white hippies and idealists — like the avant-garde painter Abraham Ebdus and his wife, Rachel, modeled after Lethem’s own parents — live side-by-side with working-class Puerto Ricans and black people from the projects.
The protagonist of the book is Dylan Ebdus, Abraham and Rachel’s only child and one of the only white children in the wider universe of Gowanus. Although the book includes a section narrated by the adult Dylan, the book is largely concerned with his childhood and adolescence on Dean Street, and in particular his friendship with Mingus Rude, the half-black, half-white son of a once-great, now-bloated and drug-addled soul singer. Stoopball, graffiti, comic books, funk, punk, and new wave all feature prominently.
I could praise The Fortress of Solitude for its intelligent and psychologically sophisticated portrayal of race and class in America, and that would be fair praise. But the real reason you should read this book is because it’s a blast, one of the funniest novels I’ve read in years. Few living writers can match Lethem’s ear for language, his love of slang and wordplay and the rhythms of American English, and The Fortress of Solitude shows him at the height of his powers.
— Park MacDougald, Life & Arts Editor
The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. NYRB Classics, 144 pp., $14.95.
Cancel culture has had one clear effect on public discourse: widespread self-censorship. The worry over having one’s words repurposed or redefined has led many to follow a path laid out almost a hundred years ago by the Polish-Soviet “experimental realist” Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Any of his novellas or short-story collections would make for satisfying summer reading, but The Letter Killers Club, written in the 1920s, is particularly suited to our current moment.
The book revolves around a group of Moscow intellectuals who meet in secret once a week and tell stories by heart. The group has devoted itself to the only pure writing: the unwritten word. The host, a professional writer, recalls his epiphany: “a street, a little boy on the frozen pavement hawking letters (R and L) for galoshes, and my immediate thought: both his letters and mine will end up underfoot.” He explains, “And then I made up my mind: to shut the inkwell lid and return to the kingdom of free, pure, and unsubstantiated conceptions.”
Those conceptions, rather than flesh-and-blood characters, serve as the book’s protagonists. One of the club members’ stories is a retelling of Hamlet through a fictional production of the play. When the actors realize they need a Hamlet, they attempt to retrieve one from the Land of Roles, a warehouse of spectral manifestations of past versions of the role, which take on lives of their own once released. Another story is about separating mind from body by moving living humans’ brains into mechanical hosts. The tragic and terrifying turns these stories take teach the horrified characters an important lesson: Ideas are powerful things, and once separated from their creator, they are at the service of society, beyond anyone’s control.
— Seth Mandel, Executive Editor
How Not to Die Alone, by Richard Roper. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 336 pp., $26.00.
It’s a risk to take a chance on a first-time novelist. Still, I was intrigued reading the premise of Richard Roper’s debut, How Not to Die Alone.
We’re all faced with the opportunity or conundrum of telling a lie, even if we know it’s one we’re telling to spare someone hurt feelings or to cover for a friend. For some people, lying becomes part of their everyday life, and the consequences are often tragic. Roper manages to inject humor into the tragedy.
The story centers around Andrew, whom Roper makes clear is not someone who lies for nefarious purposes. He’s a thoughtful and caring person.
Andrew is single and childless but manages to convince his co-workers he’s married with two children, a yarn born not out of malice but out of a desire to deal with his past traumas. He knows the jig is up when his boss compels the employees to host dinner at their homes. The question is whether or not Andrew will fess up, and the title pretty much tells us he does.
Andrew must confront his demons to make sense of how he got to such a place, and Roper handles it with a deft touch, allowing readers to laugh despite the subject matter. It’s not a “fun” novel but still fun to read.
— Jay Caruso, Managing Editor
A Time to Build, by Yuval Levin. Basic Books, 256 pp., $28.
In his latest book, A Time to Build, social philosopher Yuval Levin looks at the collapse of American institutions and charts a path forward toward their restoration.
Levin begins from the straightforward premise that we are living through a social crisis, and he sees institutional dereliction as the chief reason why. Institutions, be they the family, schools, companies, or churches, are meant to be formative, shaping entities that give structure to social life. They “give shape, place, and purpose to the things we do together.”
Healthy institutions should function as molds for the people inside of them, at once constraining and enabling. The shape provided by institutions “enables us to be more effective,” he writes, by instilling us with particular values, habits, and ties. Today, however, Levin believes that our institutions are “deformed.” Instead of acting as molds, they function as “platforms” used by individuals — in effect, inverting the very purpose of institutions. Allowing individuals to use and to pervert institutions rather than to be shaped by them has led to what Levin describes as a “distinct kind of institutional dereliction, a failure to even attempt to form trustworthy people.”
Levin’s solution is not to tear our institutions down but to rebuild them. By recommitting to the expectation that institutions should be formative and connecting, he argues, we can begin to restore trust in our societal structures and draw back those that have been alienated away from them.
— J. Grant Addison, Deputy Editor
