“Don’t write a novel about trying to
write a novel. It’s cliché and insular
and lazy,” said Ron Charles in The
Washington Post. But that advice ap-
parently doesn’t apply to Lily King,
whose “wonderful, witty, heartfelt”
new book somehow turns one tena-
cious woman’s struggle for creative
fulfillment into a “dangerously ro-
mantic” argument for the possibility
of finding happiness through force of
will. “The result is an absolute delight.”
Casey, who is a 31-year-old waitress, is
also the only member of her old grad
school circle who hasn’t given up on
writing. But she must fight daily not to
feel worse—about her debts, her last
breakup, and the recent loss of her
mother. For a while, our heroine ap-
pears to be on her way to putting her
writing ambitions on hold to create
room for those of one of two men she
begins dating, said Hillary Kelly in the
Los Angeles Times. Instead, though,
she stays with her craft, and King
writes so well about what writing well
requires that her follow-up to Euphoria
becomes “a classic bildungsroman for
struggling artists everywhere.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
“To call this book a ‘conversation piece’ or
‘an important book’ feels belittling,” said
Kim Liggett in The Washington Post. Kate
Elizabeth Russell’s heavily promoted debut
is “so much more than that,” because it’s at
once electrifying and as “brilliantly crafted”
as the venerated 1955 novel it talks back
to. Vanessa Wye, Russell’s narrator, was
15 when she was gifted a copy of Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita by the 42-year-old male
prep school teacher who coaxed her into a
sexual relationship that Vanessa, even in her
30s, continues to interpret as having been
a romance. Russell doesn’t try to match
Nabokov’s florid prose, said Katie Roiphe
in The New York Times. Occasionally —very
occasionally —her purposefully plainer writ-
ing “veers toward clunkiness.” But Russell’s
so-called Lolita for the #MeToo era proves
to be “an astute account of brokenness,”
a compelling study in the lasting damage
wrought by predatory older men.
For five years now,
Mohammed bin
Salman has been
selling his vision of
a new Middle East,
and “when he speaks,
people listen,” said
Lloyd Green in
TheGuardian .com.
Still only 34, Saudi
Arabia’s crown prince
and de facto leader
has revealed a penchant for brutality to
go with his inclination to dream big. He
has launched a devastating war on Yemen,
put his own mother under house arrest,
tortured rivals and dissidents, and, accord-
ing to the CIA, ordered the assassination
of Washington Post columnist Jamal
Khashoggi. For anyone watching interna-
tional politics, “what makes MBS tick, how
he arrived, and where he may be headed
are subjects of continued interest,” and the
answers that Ben Hubbard’s new bio pro-
vides are “definitely worth the read.”
“MBS did not grow up nurturing expecta-
tions that he would one day rule,” said
Book of the week
Though the narrator herself resists framing
the story this way, “Russell captures the
insidious cunning with which Mr. Strane
flatters, grooms, and seduces Vanessa,” said
Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. He tells her
she’s special for her age, a fellow romantic,
and that she has enormous power over him.
“He also convinces her that she’s dark and
bad, and that he would have done nothing
if she didn’t want him to.” In the present,
Strane has been freshly accused of abuse
by a past student who succeeded Vanessa,
yet still our protagonist hangs onto the
interpretation in which she held the power.
In fact, she’s “not particularly likable.”
But that’s purposeful, said Hillary Kelly in
the Los Angeles Times. “Ultimately, what
makes My Dark Vanessa so hypnotic is
that it provides Vanessa with what so many
abused women want—the chance to admit
that they had desires, too.”
Russell’s novel “straddles established pub-
lishing classifications,” said Anne Helen
Petersen in BuzzFeedNews.com. It’s “nei-
ther literary nor pulp,” but something in
between, and just before publication it
kicked up a storm: Another writer, Wendy
Ortiz, wrote a widely circulated online essay
that was misinterpreted as suggesting that
Russell, who’s white, had borrowed her
plot from Ortiz’s relatively obscure memoir
and won a seven-figure publishing deal for
it. Russell, who is 35, actually began writ-
ing My Dark Vanessa when she was in her
mid-teens, and the book deserves the atten-
tion it’s gotten because of “the way it inter-
rogates the boundary between memoir and
fiction, between honesty and sex positivity,
between consent and abuse.” I’m still not
sure if it’s pulp or literature, “but when I
was done, I wanted everyone to read it so
we could talk about it.”
My Dark Vanessa
by Kate Elizabeth Russell
(William Morrow, $28)
Writers & Lovers
by Lily King (Grove, $27)
MBS: The Rise to Power of
Mohammed bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard (Tim Duggan, $28)
Christopher Dickey in The New York
Times. Because his father was the 25th son
of Saudi Arabia’s founding king, the old
man’s ascension to the throne in January
2015 could not have been predicted. But
given the opening, MBS acted quickly. As
his father’s chief aide, he appointed himself
both defense minister and head of economic
development, launched a war on Yemen’s
Houthi rebels, and became the pitchman for
a new Saudi Arabia that would ease restric-
tions on women and welcome in the mod-
ern world. The war signaled MBS’s deter-
mination to reduce Iran’s influence in the
region, and in a related move, he detained
Lebanon’s prime minister and forced him
to resign. Despite his transgressions against
global order, he has meanwhile won stead-
fast support from President Trump.
Hubbard labels MBS Machiavellian, “but
I’m not sure that this comparison is quite
right,” said Daniel Larison in TheAmerican
Conservative.com. Often, MBS is “utterly
clueless” about how other leaders will
respond to his aggression; his overconfi-
dence produced “one blunder after another.”
Still, he does not seem likely to reform his
authoritarian ways, which makes reading
Hubbard’s account of MBS’s ugly record
“an unavoidably grim affair.” Despite that,
“I found that I couldn’t put it down.”
Some wounds engender self-deception.
Getty