14 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020 +ten a few years later. O’Farrell, an Irish-
born novelist, conjures with sensual viv-
idness the world of the playwright’s home-
town: the tang of new leather in his cantan-
kerous father’s glove shop; the scent of ap-
ples in the storage shed where he first
kisses Agnes, the farmer’s daughter and
gifted healer who becomes his wife; and,
not least, the devastation that befalls her
when she cannot save her son from the
plague. The novel is a portrait of unspeak-
able grief wreathed in great beauty.HOMELAND ELEGIES
By Ayad Akhtar
Little, Brown & Company. $28.At once personal and political, Akhtar’s
second novel can read like a collection of
pitch-perfect essays that give shape to a
prismatic identity. We begin with Walt
Whitman, with a soaring overture to
America and a dream of national belonging
— which the narrator methodically dis-
mantles in the virtuosic chapters that fol-
low. The lure and ruin of capital, the
wounds of 9/11, the bitter pill of cultural re-
jection: Akhtar pulls no punches critiquing
the country’s most dominant narratives.
He returns frequently to the subject of his
father, a Pakistani immigrant and onetime
doctor to Donald Trump,
seeking in his life the an-
swer to a burning ques-
tion: What, after all,
does it take to be an
American?THE VANISHING HALF
By Brit Bennett
Riverhead Books. $27.Beneath the polished surface and en-
thralling plotlines of Bennett’s second nov-
el, after her much admired “The Mothers,”
lies a provocative meditation on the possi-
bilities and limits of self-definition. Alter-
nating sections recount the separate fates
of Stella and Desiree, twin sisters from a
Black Louisiana town during Jim Crow,
whose residents pride themselves on their
light skin. When Stella decides to pass for
white, the sisters’ lives diverge, only to in-
tersect unexpectedly, years later. Bennett
has constructed her novel with great care,
populating it with characters, including a
trans man and an actress, who invite us to
consider how identity is both chosen and
imposed, and the degree to which “pass-FICTION
A CHILDREN’S BIBLE
By Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
In Millet’s latest novel, a bevy of kids and
their middle-aged parents convene for the
summer at a country house in America’s
Northeast. While the grown-ups indulge
(pills, benders, bed-hopping), the kids, dis-
affected teenagers and their parentally ne-
glected younger siblings, look on with
mounting disgust. But what begins as gen-
erational comedy soon takes a darker turn,
as climate collapse and societal break-
down encroach. The ensuing chaos is un-
derscored by scenes and symbols repur-
posed from the Bible — a man on a blowup
raft among the reeds, animals rescued
from a deluge into the back of a van, a baby
born in a manger. With an unfailingly light
touch, Millet delivers a wry fable about cli-
mate change, imbu-
ing foundational
myths with new
meaning and, fi-
nally, hope.
DEACON KING KONG
By James McBride
Riverhead Books. $28.
A mystery story, a crime novel, an urban
farce, a sociological portrait of late-1960s
Brooklyn: McBride’s novel contains multi-
tudes. At its rollicking heart is Deacon
Cuffy Lambkin, a.k.a. Sportcoat, veteran
resident of the Causeway Housing
Projects, widower, churchgoer, odd-jobber,
home brew-tippler and, now, after inexpli-
cably shooting an ear clean off a local drug
dealer, a wanted man. The elastic plot ex-
pands to encompass rival drug crews, an
Italian smuggler, buried treasure, church
sisters and Sportcoat’s long-dead wife, still
nagging from beyond the grave. McBride,
the author of the National Book Award-
winning novel “The Good Lord Bird” and
the memoir “The Color of Water,” among
other books, conducts his antic symphony
with deep feeling, never losing sight of the
suffering and inequity within the merri-
ment.
HAMNET
A Novel of the Plague
By Maggie O’Farrell
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
A bold feat of imagination and empathy,
this novel gives flesh and feeling to a his-
torical mystery: how the death of Shake-
speare’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet, in 1596,
may have shaped his play “Hamlet,” writ-
ing” may describe a phenomenon more
common than we think.NONFICTION
HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD
Inside the Mind of an American Family
By Robert Kolker
Doubleday. $29.95.Don and Mimi Galvin had the first of their 12
children in 1945. Intelligence and good looks
ran in the family, but so, it turns out, did men-
tal illness: By the mid-1970s, six of the 10
Galvin sons had developed schizophrenia.
“For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a
felt experience, as if the foundation of the
family is permanently tilted,” Kolker writes.
His is a feat of narrative journalism but also
a study in empathy; he unspools the stories
of the Galvin siblings
with enormous com-
passion while tracing
the scientific advances
in treating the illness.A PROMISED LAND
By Barack Obama
Crown. $45.Presidential memoirs are meant to inform,
to burnish reputations and, to a certain ex-
tent, to shape the course of history, and
Obama’s is no exception. What sets it apart
from his predecessors’ books is the re-
markable degree of introspection. He in-
vites the reader inside his head as he pon-
ders life-or-death issues of national securi-
ty, examining every detail of his decision-
making; he describes what it’s like to en-
dure the bruising legislative process and
lays out his thinking on health care reform
and the economic crisis. An easy, elegant
writer, he studs his narrative with affec-
tionate family anecdotes and thumbnail
sketches of world leaders and colleagues.
“A Promised Land” is the first of two vol-
umes — it ends in 2011 — and it is as con-
templative and measured as the former
president himself.SHAKESPEARE IN A DIVIDED AMERICA
What His Plays Tell Us About
Our Past and Future
By James Shapiro
Penguin Press. $27.In his latest book, the author of “Contested
Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” and“1599: A Year in the Life of William Shake-
speare” has outdone himself. He takes two
huge cultural hyper-objects — Shake-
speare and America — and dissects the ef-
fects of their collision. Each chapter cen-
ters on a year with a different thematic fo-
cus. The first chapter, “1833: Miscegena-
tion,” revolves around John Quincy Adams
and his obsessive hatred of Desdemona.
The last chapter, “2017: Left | Right,”
where Shapiro truly soars, analyzes the
notorious Central Park production of “Jul-
ius Caesar.” By this point it is clear that the
real subject of the
book is not Shake-
speare plays, but
us, the U.S.UNCANNY VALLEY
A Memoir
By Anna Wiener
MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.Wiener’s stylish memoir is an uncom-
monly literary chronicle of tech-world
disillusionment. Soured on her job as an
underpaid assistant at a literary agency
in New York, Wiener, then in her mid-20s,
heads west, heeding the siren call of Bay
Area start-ups aglow with optimism, vi-
tality and cash. A series of unglamorous
jobs — in various customer support posi-
tions — follow. But Wiener’s unobtrusive
perch turns out to be a boon, providing
an unparalleled vantage point from
which to scrutinize her field. The result is
a scrupulously observed and quietly
damning exposé of the yawning gap be-
tween an industry’s public idealism and
its internal iniquities.WAR
How Conflict Shaped Us
By Margaret MacMillan
Random House. $30.This is a short book but a rich one with a
profound theme. MacMillan argues that
war — fighting and killing — is so inti-
mately bound up with what it means to be
human that viewing it as an aberration
misses the point. War has led to many of
civilization’s great disasters but also to
many of civilization’s greatest achieve-
ments. It’s all around us, influencing ev-
erything we see and do; it’s in our bones.
MacMillan writes with impressive ease.
Practically every page of her book is in-
teresting and, despite the grimness of its
argument, even entertaining. 0The 10 Best Books of 2020
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUIS MAZÓN