Reading for the New Year: Part Four

This is Obomsawin’s take on Kaspar Hauser, a nineteenth-century German man who claimed to have grown up in a dark cellar, without any human contact. We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he’s around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: “The Man in Black.” The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside. Kaspar has never before stood up or seen celestial light. The man drops him off in the middle of Nuremberg, with a note addressed to a captain in the local squadron, promising him to the military corps.

It takes a while for the world to figure out who, or what, Kaspar is. “He’s a madman! An imbecile! A half-savage! An impostor!” policemen guess, before locking him up. He becomes a curiosity. He gets passed from one custodian to another, including scientists and aristocrats, all around Europe. He falls in love with nature, and paints sought-after watercolors of flowers and fruit. (One of his paintings is reproduced in the book.) “The day I see red apples,” Kaspar says, “I feel true satisfaction.” Obomsawin pulls from the historical record to create a distilled tragedy, and the result is an unforgettable little novel.—E. Tammy Kim

Absolutely and Forever

by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain’s slim, beautiful 2023 novel, “Absolutely and Forever” may be the book I’ve had the most success recommending to others in recent years: my husband, my daughter-in-law, my novelist friend who doesn’t always like what I like—all ate it up. Now it’s your turn, dear New Yorker readers. Tremain’s novel of youthful romantic obsession and painful growing up reminded me in its comic astringency of Muriel Spark, and, in its respect for the roiling emotions of one’s teens and twenties, of Sally Rooney. And because it deals with love and sex in nineteen-sixties England, telescoping enormous cultural changes into a small story that contains surprising depths and a heart-wrenching twist, it also made be think of Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” and Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.”

Our narrator, Marianne, is fifteen when we meet her, a boarding-school girl in love with a vaguely arty boy named Simon, with “a dark flop of hair over his forehead.” Her mother tells Marianne that no one falls in love at her age—she has simply “manufactured a little crush.” It turns out to be more than that, and to resound long after she and Simon no longer see each other, when she has confected a new life in Swinging London (where the young women on King’s Road have “mighty” hair and “tiny little slanty boxes for skirts”), slept with other men and married a good one, grown close to her more grounded and intellectual friend Petronella, worked in a department store and as an assistant to an advice columnist. Likably incompetent and slightly stunned though she is, Marianne seems destined to become a writer—presumably, the writer Rose Tremain. That Tremain, who is now in her eighties and the author of many esteemed novels, could summon up the world of her youth—of youth in general—with such tender, precise affection strikes me as a small miracle.—Margaret Talbot

After the Revolution

by Amy Herzog

Lately, I’ve found myself turning to plays. The spaciousness of the form is appealing, as is the total focus it commands: everything can turn on a silence, an interruption, the slightest cue. (Not that there can’t be chaos on the page, too; I loved Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” which perfectly captures the dizzying warm-up chatter of a high-school girls’ soccer team.) Also, plays are short, and I have a small child; when I have time to read, I want full immersion. Recently, I read Amy Herzog’s “After the Revolution,” from 2010, about a family forced to confront its own wobbly mythology. Set in 1999— “Clinton is a big-business president, the poor are getting poorer, racial divides are deepening, we’re dropping bombs in the Balkans, and people are complacent,” a member of the middle generation says, in a paternally baroque toast—the play turns around Emma Joseph, a recent law-school graduate and civil-rights activist, who discovers that her late grandfather, Joe, a committed “ideological communist” lauded for his silence during the McCarthy era, was politically compromised. (“After the Revolution” may have been inspired by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.) As one might imagine, the members of the Joseph family have different perspectives on the gravity of this transgression. Rich, classic conflicts—between structure and agency; history and mythology; truth and protection, parentally speaking—emerge through intergenerational banter that made me laugh out loud in public spaces. Fine behavior in a theatre; stranger on the subway. A wonderful text for holidays spent around relatives with whom you cannot discuss politics—or, perhaps more riskily, around those with whom you can.—Anna Wiener

Palo Alto

by Malcolm Harris

If you want to understand the background to the A.I. wave—a wave that might crash the American economy or the human species or, I suppose, somehow make us all rich and happy—then “Palo Alto” is a very good place to start. It’s an account of capitalism through the lens of this one town, beginning with the gold-rush era, and it is angry and incisive in equal measure. In Harris’s telling, Stanford’s Herbert Hoover is not the failure we remember him as but the architect of our present, where tech barons dominate the government that in a rational world might regulate them. The conservatism that Hoover represented meshed with a Stanfordian commitment to selecting the best and brightest, and they combined to produce the hothouse atmosphere that is Silicon Valley. Harris’s book is very long, and in some ways not exactly helpful—the alternative to billionaire-based capitalism he can imagine involves the various Maoist movements that bombed lots of stuff in the Bay Area during the sixties and seventies—but it sets the events of our time in a context that allows you to understand figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman as part of a deep, insidious tradition.—Bill McKibben