Far and Wide
Fall ’s best new fiction ;
the climate crisis
transcends genre; a
seasoned diplomat
reflects; and a stunning
spycraft debut.
With its resplendent rooms
and gilded features, the titular
building of Ann Patchett’s
The Dutch House is more
like a fairy-tale castle than a
suburban home. So it’s fitting,
then, that Danny and Maeve’s
icy stepmother banishes the
two children from the house—
like something out of the
Brothers Grimm—after their
father passes away. (Their
mother disappeared to India
early in their childhood.) As
the fiercely loyal siblings grow
up, they’re held captive by
the house and the lives that
they might have lived inside
it. The third novel from Ben
Lerner, The Topeka School,
arrives laden with the kind
of future-of-the-novel hype
that can sink a story from the
get-go. And then the book itself
surmounts it. It is ostensibly
the tale of Adam, a high
school debate prodigy, and
his psychotherapist parents,
one of them the author of a
best-selling self-help book and
“famous in Topeka.” Lerner—
one of the preeminent modern
autofiction writers—is also a
poet who grew up in Topeka,
but to confine his book to that
genre is to reduce its power.
The Topeka School is a tour de
force that stands on its own.
The witty Jami Attenberg
further tills the fertile ground
of family dysfunction in All
This Could Be Yours. After
a brutal, taciturn patriarch
suffers a heart attack, the
rest of his family is left to
reconcile their own intensely
flawed relationships. Told from
a number of perspectives,
the story’s center is the
daughter, who is committed to
unearthing some sort of truth
about her father. Set in balmy
New Orleans, All This Could Be
Yours is an engaging portrait
of the unshakable connection
of family. That connection was
put to the test in Elizabeth
Strout’s greatest triumph, Olive
Kitteridge, her 2009 Pulitzer
Prize–winning collection
of interconnected stories
starring the flinty, flawed title
character. Kitteridge is back in
a sequel of sorts, Olive, Again—
another novel-in-stories that
is somehow both achingly sad
and delightfully fun. The title
character has a new man in
her life and is still bewildered
by love for her wayward son.
Kitteridge remains a formidable
and utterly human heroine to
the final, heartbreaking page.
More and more writers
outside scientific disciplines
are contending with the
terrifying specter of climate
change. Novelist Jonathan
Safran Foer has advocated for
a vegetarian diet since 2009’s
Eating Animals, but now he
makes a plea for Americans to
adhere to a vegan diet at least
until dinner, with his slim but
wide-ranging new BOOKS>292
BOOKS
290 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
VLIFE
JOSEPHINE SCHIELE
