by Meron Hadero

Schmidt, for his part, believes that the narrator’s American background makes him a second-rate intellect. (He likens America to “an obese infant with a concussion.”) In time, it becomes clear that the pair’s books aren’t feats of research so much as salvos in a decadeslong pissing match. Haber deliberately withholds details about the painting itself—we know there’s a donkey, a cliffside, rays of light, and apostles, but not enough to sense why the men are so thunderstruck. And in a way, they hardly seem to know themselves. As they squabble over Beckenbauer—to the point of wrecking the narrator’s two marriages, he claims—it’s increasingly questionable whether the artist was worth the trouble. (The biographical details suggest that he was a sex-obsessed syphilitic whose work, aside from the title painting, was unremarkable.) The recursiveness of the narrator’s sentences creates a sense that scholarship is a kind of prison, killing a love of art rather than expanding it. That strategy gives a fussy, mannered quality to the prose, but it does serve the point that obsession can lead to a crushing cynicism.

A darkly funny novel about the wages of small-stakes intellectual combat.

A DOWN HOME MEAL FOR THESE DIFFICULT TIMES

Hadero, Meron Restless Books (224 pp.) $26.00 | June 7, 2022 978-1-63206-118-8

In her debut story collection, Addis Ababa–born Hadero addresses Ethiopian Americans’ struggles for acceptance, the painful ties between present and past, and the elusive meaning of home.

Raised in the United States and now based in San Francisco, Hadero sets a tone of dizzying displacement from the start in “The Suitcase,” in which 20-year-old American Saba visits her birth city of Addis Ababa for the first time. Far from a romantic family reunion, the trip is full of cultural land mines including the one she nearly steps on when relatives and family friends bicker over which of their gifts Saba will bring back to the U.S. In “Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin’ Newton,” set in 1989 in a Brooklyn wracked by racial conflict, sixth grader Mekonnen learns the meaning of pride—and shame—as a member of a group of activist Black kids. And in “Sinkholes,” an Ethiopianborn high schooler, the only Black student in his class in rural Florida, is put to an impossible test when his teacher asks students to write racial epithets on the blackboard, thinking this “exercise” is empowering. A full range of stylistic approaches is on display in these stories, from the satirical spin on the odd disappearance of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in 2012 to the magical realism of mysterious “floating houses.” Hadero’s writing derives great power from her nuanced references to Ethiopia’s anguished history, including the atrocities of the Derg military junta. As one character says, survival is about “letting that past move through you and move with you and move you so that it’s you deciding for yourself what you’re worth.”

Entertaining and affecting stories with a deft lightness of touch.

NUCLEAR FAMILY

Han, Joseph Counterpoint (320 pp.) $26.00 | June 7, 2022 978-1-64009-486-4

An immigrant family is haunted by the past. Korean-born Han sets his debut novel in Hawaii in 2018, in the months leading up to a false alert of an impending missile attack from North Korea. Central to his tale are Mr. and Mrs. Cho, ambitious Korean immigrants who successfully run a popular plate-lunch restaurant they dream of turning into a chain in hopes that their two grown children, Grace and Jacob, will take over someday. The siblings, though, have other plans: Grace, perpetually (and tediously) stoned,