The Crossing, by Richard Parker (Mariner). “American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,” Parker asserts, in this sweeping history of El Paso, his home town. The account, which starts in the sixteenth century, is one of both endless conflict and cross-cultural accommodation. “El Paso is where Native, Spanish, European, African, Jewish, and Arab cultures fought, bled, died,” he writes, but it’s also where they forged a “vibrantly diverse” society that became a model for the country. Although Parker was moved to write the book after a white nationalist murdered twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart, in 2019, he strikes a hopeful note: “This isn’t just where America began. If we’re lucky, it can show America how to begin again.”
Powers of Reading, by Peter Szendy, translated from the French by Olivia Custer (Zone). In this elliptical meditation on the nature of reading, Szendy draws a connection between Phaedrus reading aloud to Socrates, the reading regime of Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” and audiobooks. He argues that the solitary, silent type of reading that has become the norm is “an interiorization of the reading aloud that prevailed” for centuries. “When I read silently,” he writes, “I listen to myself reading.” Much here is theoretical, but Szendy’s ultimate purpose is to point toward a new “politics of reading,” one that will empower the “readee,” or “the one for whom one reads,” amid the proliferation of digital devices and techniques that are “shaking up our experience as readers.”
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Dream State, by Eric Puchner (Doubleday). This expansive novel delineates the multigenerational fallout from a young bride’s impulsive decision to leave her new husband for his best friend. Cece spurns life with a Los Angeles anesthesiologist named Charlie and throws her lot in with Garrett, a depressive baggage handler who lives in Salish, Montana, where Charlie’s parents own a vacation home. The story is no fairy tale; it’s one of “guilt and second-guessing and trapdoor ambivalence opening to regret.” The action, which begins in 2004 and unfolds over the next several decades, is set against the backdrop of an increasingly inhospitable world—glaciers are disappearing, fires are raging, the air is unbreathable—and explores how we might make meaning of our existence in the face of escalating loss.
Tilt, by Emma Pattee (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books). Annie, the narrator of this propulsive novel, which takes place in a single day, is nine months pregnant and in a Portland IKEA when the “Really Big One” hits the Pacific Northwest. After the quaking subsides, Annie—left with no phone, money, or car—begins walking across what remains of the city. While traversing blazing hot asphalt and mounds of rubble, her mind flits back and forth between her present circumstance and her not so distant past: getting engaged, taking birthing classes, and fighting with her husband, whom she can’t reach. “This is not an Indiana Jones movie where everybody will end up alive,” she says to her unborn baby. “Your father is lost to us now . . . and if I don’t get home, you will be lost to me, too.”
