No matter how many pandemic novels
are eventually written, Louise Erdrich’s
current entry “may be the best one we
ever get,” said Ron Charles in The Wash-
ington Post. In a story that “hovers be-
tween the realms of historical horror and
cultural comedy,” an ex- convict named
Tookie is working at a Minneapolis book-
store in late 2019 when she becomes
convinced the shop is being haunted by
a former customer who was a wannabe
Native American. But before Tookie, who
is Ojibwe, can exorcise this annoying
specter, Covid and the police killing of
George Floyd throw the city into turmoil.
Erdrich’s whimsical tone, which helped
win her a Pulitzer for 2020’s The Night
Watchman, works less well this time,
said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker.
It “jostles uncomfortably, at times fatally,
against the fraught subject matter.” Still,
“the book sings” when Erdrich focuses
on Tookie’s suddenly uneasy marriage to
the man who arrested her years earlier.
In those passages, Erdrich’s gifts, begin-
ning with “an intensity of honesty,” are
on full display.ARTS^23
Review of reviews: Books
“Yes, that sit-up-and-huh title is intended to
be provocative,” said Christopher Borrelli
in the Chicago Tribune. Magazine journal-
ist Jay Caspian Kang, the accomplished
40- something son of accomplished Korean
immigrant parents, fully understands
that he is risking being dismissed as self-
hating when he claims that he belongs to
the group that gets the measliest reward
from contemporary identity politics. The
people who refer to themselves as Asian-
Americans, he writes, tend to be well-
educated, middle-class, second- generation
immigrants who are acceding to America’s
demand that they erase their cultural heri-
tage while at the same time they embrace a
derivative hyphenated identity to acknowl-
edge they’re being still set apart. “It’s a
messy, frustrating, thoughtful, confusing,
illuminating argument—all at once.” But
Kang’s book is very hard to put down, and
maybe even harder to shake.“A definitive biog-
raphy if there ever
was one,” Matthew
Sturgis’ 861-page
Oscar Wilde might
disappoint read-
ers who like to
remember Wilde
as a saintly gay
martyr, said Brooke
Allen in The Wall
Street Journal.
Sturgis’ Wilde is by
no means a bad man. The legendary Irish
writer, humorist, and bon vivant comes
across instead as kind, attentive to others,
and unusually generous. But Sturgis, a his-
torian, aimed to find the true Wilde beneath
the myth, and “he has succeeded remark-
ably well.” When the story calls for it, he
reminds us that Wilde was at times prideful
and self- indulgent, and that many of his
sexual partners were boys, not adults. This
is, in other words, “the story of the man in
full,” and we readers are lucky to have it.Wilde’s life “reads almost like a perfectly
formed work of art,” said Scott BradfieldBook of the week
In the autobiographical sections of his book,
Kang “displays tremendous honesty and
courage,” said S. Nathan Park in Foreign
Policy. Early on, he sketches what his story
might have sounded like if he’d written it
as a conventional immigrant memoir: “On
the day my mother was born, the skies over
the 38th parallel lit up red.” From there,
he promises, he’d be able to line up enough
anecdotes about bias and struggle and
family triumph to assure readers that the
American dream still works. But in subse-
quent chapters, he moves around the coun-
try to probe stories about Asian- Americanidentity, and “at each location, he sees the
same issue: Any attempt at a unifying nar-
rative for Asian- Americans, however well
intended, falls apart at the slightest touch.”
The problem, he concludes, is built into his-
tory: The skilled professionals who arrived
from Asia in a wave after 1965 have had
little connection with existing working-class
Asian enclaves.Kang can be a thrilling writer; “he can also
be annoying as hell,” said Madeline Leung
Coleman in New York magazine. Though
he is right that the term “Asian- American”
is too vague to be useful, he carelessly picks
fights, argues in circles, and offers no solu-
tions other than a half-formed notion that
middle-class Asian- Americans should stop
worrying about the slights they suffer and
worry instead about helping out the Asian-
American working poor. Still, his angst
feels useful, said Marella Gayla in The New
Yorker. Kang’s compulsion to undermine
the Asian- American label “might be best
understood as a resistance to the broader
cultural tendency to see oneself in everyone
and everything.” Maybe, he’s suggesting,
the problem is building a personal politics
around simply looking out for one’s own.The Loneliest Americans
by Jay Caspian Kang
(Crown, $27)Novel of the week
The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich
(Harper, $29)Oscar Wilde: A Life
by Matthew Sturgis
(Knopf, $40)in the Los Angeles Times. While studying
at Oxford in the 1870s, he said his main
aim was to become famous or at least
notorious, and he went on to become both.
Sturgis’ book tracks that arc well. “The
first two-thirds is as bright and entertain-
ing as an evening with its subject; the final
third describes one of the saddest stories
ever told.” In 1895, as Wilde’s professional
acclaim peaked, the 40-year-old playwright
picked a legal fight with the father of his
24-year-old male lover and wound up being
tried, convicted, and imprisoned for engag-
ing in sex with men and boys. He died,
impoverished and broken, at 46.There’s a major weakness in Sturgis’ just-
the-facts approach, said David Hare in The
New York Times. “No writer of English
was ever better at acute and devastating
self- dramatization than Wilde,” and we
can’t truly understand how he put himself
in such jeopardy without considering how
such thinking may have motivated him.
Did he wish to become a martyr when
he started paying rent boys for sex? How
about when he sued for being accused
of such activity? When Sturgis needs to
explain motivation, “his approach breaks
down altogether.” Wilde wanted to have
symbolic impact. To forget that is to misun-
derstand him.Asian-American demonstrators, March 2021Ge
tty