Hey, guys! It’s me! It’s bad out there! Like, really bad! They shut down baseball, they shut down Broadway, they shut down Tom Hanks. I’m not an epidemiologist, just a standard hypochondriac with anxiety, but I feel like you cannot overstate how bad it is out there. I’m taking every precaution, and you should too. In the summer of ‘09, I contracted H1N1, and it was, without a doubt, the sickest I have been in my entire life. So as an anxious hypochondriac, I am pretty nervous right now, not gonna lie! But as a lifelong Indoor Kid, I feel like I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life: finally, an excuse to just stay home.
So for those of you also looking forward to just staying home, here are my three book recommendations of the week.
Full disclosure: I belong to The Wing, the occasionally controversial, purportedly feminist co-working space for women on which Bartz clearly based “The Herd,” the eponymous occasionally controversial, purportedly feminist co-working space that serves as the setting for this tremendously fun, juicy thriller. Investigative reporter Katie finds her next subject in Eleanor, the Herd’s coolly secretive founder, through her sister Hana, who happens to be Eleanor’s publicist and best friend. When Eleanor goes missing right before a major press conference, chaos ensues and secrets are revealed and - well, you get it. More than your standard post-Gillian Flynn thriller, it’s a mordant satire of third-wave consumerist feminism that neither exalts nor condemns its participants.
I really loved Bartz’s debut novel, The Lost Night, which balanced great plotting with an incredibly clever depiction of the New York media class, and her followup is just as good. Bartz writes complex, cunning women who are often jealous, manipulative, and straight-up bad people, and does it without falling into misogynistic clichés. This book is for anyone who has ever read a viral tweet along the lines of “When you put women together on an island it’s Themyscira, but when you put men together on an island it’s Lord of the Flies,” and wondered whether that person had ever seen what goes on in a secret feminist Facebook group. It’s not misogynistic to write about women being cruel to each other - frankly, it’s insulting to suggest that depictions of cruelty between women is inherently anti-feminist. In a recent piece for the Guardian, Katy Kelleher wrote about the proliferation of ostensibly-feminist online communities where “mobs of anonymous users picked at various women, dissecting their choices and their appearances, all under the guise of enlightened ‘snark’.” She likens those groups and subreddits to the 18th-century practice of brûler les chats, or cat-burning, a sadistic group activity in which live animals were tossed onto bonfires for the enjoyment of large audiences; she’s not wrong. Feminism didn’t make individual women less cruel, and when cruel women flock together, they encourage each other. All feminism did was provide people who were already mean with more acceptable targets.
Which brings me back to the Wing. The thing about the Wing is that, for all the online rending of garments over What It Means For Women, it’s honestly just a co-working space with the vibe of an upscale coffee shop, minus all the men. The events are not wildly glamorous, but more like what the campus women’s center at a cool college might offer; they run the gamut from “Grant Writing 101” to “Celebrating the Women of the Harlem Renaissance.” Is it expensive? Yes, but as far as co-working spaces go, it’s actually one of the most affordable! Is the membership overwhelmingly white women? Actually, no! It’s pretty diverse! Is it exclusionary? Well, they let me in! Basically, for all that people talk about the Wing, it’s just not that deep. But for a couple of years, the Wing became a kind of synecdoche for the entire millennial pink Feminist Industrial Complex, and in that way, served as a strawman for anyone on the internet with a beef against the wealthy white woman CEOs they imagined were its sole members. That phenomenon of anti-Wing think pieces is touched on in The Herd, too; I’m not going to spoil anything, but this is, really, just a very funny book with a very sharp plot.
The Herd is out on 3/26. Thanks to Net Galley and Ballantine Books for sending a copy my way in exchange for a fair and honest review.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
By now, if you’ve heard anything about My Dark Vanessa, you’ve probably already made up your mind whether or not you want to read it.
I tore through this book in two nights. I am still digesting it, frankly, and may have more to say at a later date. What I’ll say now is that the inaccurate and damaging narrative that took hold on Twitter earlier this year - that Kate Elizabeth Russell plagiarized this story from Wendy C. Ortiz’s 2014 memoir Excavation, and that no true victim would write such a complicated fictional narrative of sexual abuse, which in turn all but forced Russell to disclose her own history of abuse and eventually led Oprah’s Book Club to drop MDV as its March pick - was one of the most disgusting instances of cat-burning I’ve ever seen on Book Twitter. And let me tell you: Book Twitter burns a lot of cats.
The thing is, I still can’t figure out why it happened to this book. In the wake of the well-reasoned criticism American Dirt received, the publishing business absolutely has to take a hard look at whose voices are elevated and whose are minimized. But the story Russell tells here is not one that “belongs” to any particular woman, or any particular group of women. She doesn’t even claim it belongs to her, as her lengthy author’s note takes pains to make (legally) clear. Yet it reflects a dynamic, a type of man, and a set of experiences that likely feel familiar to anyone who was once a teenage girl, and it does so in beautiful but accessible prose that made me angry anyone could write this story that well.
I mean, read it if you want to. But I’m glad I did.
My Dark Vanessa is available now. I bought it myself, thanks.
You’ve probably seen Severance on one of the many, many “Pandemic Fiction Books To Read Right Now” lists published this week, so I’ll be succinct. Yes, it’s eerily similar to [gestures] everything right now; it’s also much more than that, and you should read it! It’s a brilliant and sharp reflection on nostalgia and consumerism and the first-gen American experience and millennial workplace malaise, and it’s also a really good, spooky post-apocalyptic story set in the wake of a devastating plague - Stephen King by way of Jia Tolentino. Highly recommended reading for our year of rest and self-quarantine.
Severance has been out for a while and I bought it myself, yada yada.