So many novels aspire to it—“the
moment when the reader recognizes a
part of themselves that they hadn’t yet
verbalized,” said Rebecca Wat son in
the Finan cial Times. Garth Green well’s
writing “achieves this effortlessly,” and
does so even though he depends on a
very Garth Greenwell–like narrator: a
gay Amer i can expat who is teaching in
Sofia, Bul gar ia. In the nine linked stories
that compose the follow-up to 2016’s
What Belongs to You, this familiar nar-
rator explores how love, sex, and shame
blur together, and Greenwell’s evocation
of even everyday intimacy is so precise
that “it can feel almost unbearable to
read.” In one sexual encounter that turns
ugly, the detail Green well provides “will
exceed some readers’ tolerance,” said
Ron Charles in The Wash ing ton Post.
But the detail is never gratuitous. And
when a healthier relationship blooms,
it “feels like the arrival of spring.” I only
hope that Green well someday ventures
beyond his own experiences. “There
is a vast world outside of Sofia that’s
waiting for this brilliant writer.”ARTS^23
Review of reviews: Books
A magazine photo spread of a spare,
white-on-white modern luxury apart-
ment can spark a lot of questions, said
Laura Miller in Slate.com. “How, it’s
worth examining, did millennia of
human culture pull a 180-degree turn
so that appearing to own next to noth-
ing is now higher status than owning
a ton of stuff?” Art critic Kyle Chayka
begins and ends his new book with such
mysteries in mind. An articulate guide to
minimalism as it’s defined in the art world,
he is also suspicious enough of lifestyle min-
imalism to underscore how much wealth is
required to live in spaces emptied of clutter.
But “the subject of minimalism is rife with
mental thickets,” and Chayka can’t find a
path through to explain why so many of us
feel minimalism’s draw. “This longing is not
just for less stuff but less self,” and I fin-
ished Chayka’s book still wondering what
that says about us.The biggest new novel in
America is also something
else: “proof that the publish-
ing industry is broken,” said
novelist David Bowles in The
New York Times. American
Dirt, a story about a Mexican
woman who flees north to
the U.S. with her 8-year-old
son, has been hailed by some
white writers as a modern-day
Grapes of Wrath. But even
before Oprah Winfrey made
it her latest book club selection last week,
the novel was being trashed as “trauma
porn” on social media by the very people it
purports to valorize. This “atrocious piece
of cultural appropriation” not only insults
Mexican-Americans who could tell such a
story better, it also shows how foolish the
publishing houses are to each bet nearly all
funding on just one book per season.Some of the protests go too far, said Mitch
Albom in the Detroit Free Press. Author
Jeanine Cummins, who has a Puerto Rican
grandmother, is apparently too white for
some detractors, who say she was simply
not the right person to tell such a story. But
where does such thinking stop? “When weBook of the week
But a resolution of such questions “would
be beside the point,” said Jennifer Szalai in
The New York Times. The type of minimal-
ism that Chayka values “encourages not an
escape from the world, but a deeper engage-
ment with it.” While he dismisses the recent
craze for Marie Kondo’s decluttering tips
as a banal manifestation of the individual’s
desire to assert control when the world feels
threatening, he finds more useful lessons
in the so-called minimalist art of the 1960s
and ’70s. To him, Donald Judd’s sculptures,Agnes Martin’s paintings, and composer
John Cage’s famous 4 minutes and
33 seconds of silence were invitations
to be more alert and open to one’s sur-
roundings, and thus more aware of one’s
vulnerability as well. To have unresolved
questions and fears is to be human, and
it is better not to suppress them.Chayka isn’t blind to minimalism’s
contradictions, said Emma Sarappo in
Washington City Paper. There’s noth-
ing minimal about the price of a Donald
Judd sculpture, and the minimalist
aesthetic of an Apple iPhone obscures
a vast, messy supporting infrastructure
of mines, factories, satellites, and under-
water cables. Likewise, his book offers
no simple takeaways. By the time Chayka
moves past a consideration of minimalist
art to an exploration of the Japanese influ-
ence on Western minimalist practice, “the
book’s scaffolding recedes, and straight-
forward thesis statements are less and less
common.” Chayka’s “often funny, always
intelligent” voice instead comes through
mostly in asides, and that’s good: The strat-
egy “offers plenty of space for readers to
explore and make their own connections.”The Longing for Less:
Living With Minimalism
by Kyle Chayka (Bloomsbury, $27)Novel of the week
Cleanness
by Garth Greenwell
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)American Dirt: A hit novel stirs up a cloud
start telling people not to write
at all if they ‘don’t belong’
to a community, you’re step-
ping on a dangerous live wire,
one that could sizzle into less
understanding between us, not
more.” A ban on writers reach-
ing beyond their own worlds
“would erase an awful lot of
books.”But most of American
Dirt’s critics aren’t arguing that
only Mexicans can write about
Mexico, said Ignacio Sánchez
Prado in The Washington Post. We’re say-
ing that this particular novel traffics in ste-
reotypes and “wallows in ignorance.”No such early criticism dissuaded Oprah,
said Constance Grady in Vox.com. But
after anointing Dirt, she quickly pivoted,
promising that critiques of the novel will
be central to the video discussion she’ll
host next month. Still, Oprah is ultimately
less to blame than the largely white New
York publishing industry. At the book’s
launch party, the tables featured flowers
set in wall-like vases festooned with faux
barbed wire. As centerpieces go, “they’re a
fairly good illustration of what the phrase
‘trauma porn’ means.”The ultimate interior, or an urge to disappear?Ste
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