“Reading one of Dantiel Moniz’s stories
is like holding your breath underwater
while letting the salt sting your fresh
wounds,” said Michele Filgate in The
Washington Post. Set in and around
Jacksonville, Fla., the 11 stories in this
“electrifying” debut fiction collection
focus mostly on black women or girls
and swell with the dramas of life, death,
and coming of age. The title story
“opens with a visceral scene”: Two
13-year-olds are mixing drops of their
blood together in a bowl of milk, mani-
festing a mutual obsession with death
that later has dramatic consequences.
“Several of the strongest stories in
Milk Blood Heat are about mothers and
daughters,” said Colette Bancroft in the
Tampa Bay Times. Two deal with preg-
nancies that have starkly different out-
comes. And in “Hearts of Our Enemies,”
a mother’s confession of barely there
infidelity upsets her teenage daughter,
who has unknowingly become the tar-
get of a predatory teacher. At whatever
stage Moniz finds their characters, these
stories, in their essence, are about need,
“about intimacy physical and otherwise,
and about what happens when it fails.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
You may know Kazuo Ishiguro as a
2017 Nobel laureate, but he is also
“one of the best pure mystery nov-
elists around,” said Charles Finch
in the Los Angeles Times. His first
novel in six years features a narra-
tor who is a humanoid robot, who
although she is an acute observer is
only just learning about the world
around her. Klara, programmed to be
an “Artificial Friend,” is purchased early on
to be a companion to an ailing 14-year-old
named Josie. Why Josie is sick and referred
to as “lifted” we at first don’t know, and
“as soon as one mystery clarifies, another is
born.” But for the author of The Remains
of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Klara
and the Sun marks “an unequivocal return
to form”—a subtle meditation on what it
means to be human.
As curious and attentive as Klara is, said
“True Believer may
not be the book that
Stan Lee’s fans want,”
said Rob Salkowitz in
Forbes.com. “But it’s a
book that anyone con-
cerned with the busi-
ness of popular culture
over the last 80 years
needs.” For decades
before his death in
2018, Lee was cele-
brated as the genial impresario who had
built Marvel Comics and overseen its magi-
cal 1961–72 run, when the upstart shop
created the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man,
and too many other iconic superheroes
to count. But doubts about Lee’s creative
role were growing well before journalist
Abraham Riesman wrote a startling “warts-
and-all” profile of Lee for New York maga-
zine, and Riesman has now expanded that
2016 story into a biography that serves,
among other things, as “a takedown of the
myth of the heroic creative genius.”
The Stan Lee we meet here comes across
as “a serial abuser of the truth,” said Andy
Book of the week
Laura Miller in Slate.com, “often she’s not
curious about the things that most intrigue
the reader.” But we eventually discover,
sometimes indirectly, that Josie’s father has
been replaced at work by a robot, that her
older sister has died, and that her mother
has put Josie’s life at risk by subjecting
her to a procedure meant to secure her a
place among the elite in the novel’s highly
stratified society, apparently a near-future
U.S. Klara, who is solar- powered, comes to
regard the sun as godlike, capable of pro-
viding even Josie with life- sustaining
energy. We notice and appreciate the
flowering of such thoughts in Klara.
But her chief characteristic remains
her ability to block out all potential
distractions to pursue her mission
of caring for Josie. In a way, “she
is Ishiguro’s most fulfilled character
yet, and that may be the most inhu-
man thing about her.”
“I scoured the book for sour notes
and found only one,” said John Self
in The Times (U.K.). Hoping to aid
Josie, Klara and Josie’s father collab-
orate on a potential solution that’s
simply too neat. Otherwise, this
“tender, touching” novel “feels like a new
definitive myth about the world we’re about
to face.” Yet it is also a novel about how
we have always lived, said James Wood in
The New Yorker, particularly how we have
forever failed to look squarely at the inevi-
tability of death. In Ishiguro’s fiction, people
strive to outcompete one another and also
strive for longevity, but all in vain. “For we
die unequally but finally equally, in ways
whose randomness seems to challenge all
notions of pattern, design, selection.”
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Knopf, $28)
Milk Blood Heat
by Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove, $25)
True Believer: The Rise and Fall
of Stan Lee
by Abraham Riesman (Crown, $28)
Lewis in the Los Angeles Times. Yes, the
gregarious New Yorker born Stan Lieber
provided much of the zippy dialogue in
Marvel’s 1960s comic books. But Riesman
downplays Lee’s central role, emphasiz-
ing the complaints of Marvel artists Jack
Kirby and Steve Ditko, who claimed that
they often dreamed up the characters
and plotlines that Lee put his name on.
Though he has turned careful research into
a “compulsively readable” account of Lee’s
eight-decade career, Ries man “overplays his
hand, diminishing his biography’s strengths
by shading every story to Lee’s disadvan-
tage.” Many Marvel artists actually liked
Lee’s working methods, and the business
failures Lee suffered in later years shouldn’t
be treated as evidence that he’d never done
anything right.
“Generous observers might compare Lee to
an orchestra conductor,” one who coaxed
talent from others, said Stephanie Burt in
The New Yorker. Just as Lee was never the
same after leaving Marvel, falling prey more
than once to unscrupulous business part-
ners, Marvel was never the same after his
1972 departure. Until the end, Lee gladly
played the role of father of the Marvel uni-
verse, a universe that means so much to mil-
lions. Whatever his true role in creating it,
“it couldn’t have happened without him.”
Future vision: How exactly will our robots see us?
Ge
tty