THE NEW LIFE by Tom Crewe

“A smart, sensual debut.”

the new life

the living who wished they were dead in that small town were woken rudely up.” But, despite the diversity of narrators, there isn’t much diversity of voice—a lack of interiority makes it difficult to distinguish one character from another—and most of this story is told in a flat, expository style that is, ultimately, wearying. There is something initially powerful in the way that Chen presents cruelty as commonplace, but this stylistic choice quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. It seems likely that most readers will either become anesthetized to the brutality or simply quit reading.

Chen’s exploration of generational trauma is both too much and not enough.

THE NEW LIFE

Crewe, Tom Scribner (400 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 3, 2023 978-1-668-00083-0

Two Englishmen dare to challenge Victorian-era homophobia. In 1894, John Addington, a well-off married man with three daughters, can no longer deny his attraction to men. Henry Ellis, a virgin who’s studied to be a doctor and has an academic interest in sex, has married Edith, a young bisexual writer, and they soon invite another woman into their relationship. (The quasi-throuple is almost as scandalous as his fetish for watching women urinate.) Coincidence and a shared enthusiasm for Walt Whitman connect John and Henry, and though they never meet, they begin to collaborate via letters on a kind of proto-Kinsey report about the lives of gay British men. At that time, gay men were subject to two years to life in prison if found out; to publish a book on homosexuality courted additional calamities. (The plot integrates Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial, conviction, and imprisonment for “gross indecency.”) Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, deftly captures the atmosphere when “the law frightens us into lies,” as John puts it. (John’s betrayed wife is especially well drawn.) The novel’s plot is loosely based on the lives of two pioneering researchers on homosexuality: John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis. But the novel is equally inspired by works by Alan Hollinghurst like The Stranger’s Child (2011), models for British fiction about gay men that’s intellectual, erotic, and wise to the nuances of the British class ladder. Crewe has his own rich and engrossing style, though, and his own approach to plot dynamics, concluding the story with a dramatic trial sequence that captures a mood of both frustration and defiance, blending the graceful ambiguity of literary fiction with the deftness of a page-turner.

A smart, sensual debut.

LIAR, DREAMER, THIEF

Dong, Maria Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 10, 2023 978-1-5387-2356-2

In Dong’s vertiginous debut, a mentally unstable woman stumbles across a conspiracy. After Katrina Kim flunks out of college, she returns to her family’s home in Pleasance Village, Illinois, seeking solace; her father sends her away, however, suggesting Katrina stay at a hotel or a friend’s house. Katrina goes to the local library and parks, curling up in her car’s back seat while her mind retreats into Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man, her favorite Korean children’s book. Like Katrina, Mi-Hee is a lonely girl with compulsive tendencies, but Mi-Hee can access a fantasy world via her kitchen door and has a truth-revealing spyglass. Determined to create her own new existence, Katrina drives to

Grand Station, gets an office job, and moves in with a stranger who saw her plea for help on Craigslist and took pity. The stress proves too much, and Katrina starts dissociating, layering MiHee’s “kitchen-door world over [her] own, like a colored pane of glass.” She develops elaborate protection rituals and starts following co-worker Kurt Smith because she thinks they’re connected. Then, one night on the Cayatoga Bridge, Katrina sees Kurt crash his SUV. He extricates himself, screams at Katrina for ruining things, and jumps off the railing. Katrina tells the police, who dismiss her, but when Kurt misses work on Monday, Katrina launches her own investigation, uncovering a reality far stranger than her inner fictions. Events unfold courtesy of Katrina’s anxious, unmoored first-person present narration, keeping readers off-kilter. Some characters lack depth and verisimilitude, but Katrina’s fraught relationship with her immigrant parents rings true. Though the setup drags on, sapping the book’s momentum, once the mystery drops into gear, increasingly bonkers twists propel the story to a cogent, poignant close.

A rabbit hole worth falling down.

LITTLE MISERIES This Is Not a Story About My Childhood: A Novel

Fakih, Kimberly Olson Delphinium (240 pp.) $27.00 | Jan. 10, 2023 978-1-953002-20-4

A young girl growing up in 1960s Iowa learns that grown-ups are rarely what they seem. The Castle family name once meant greatness—or, rather, a particular sort of Midwest greatness, when their seeds were sold all over Iowa and their name adorned signs and silos everywhere they looked. But the Castle family of the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the middle child, narrator Kimmy, no longer lives in the big house on the hill that they still drive by every Christmas Eve. Instead, Mr. Castle is a church deacon and a mortgage broker with a scotch- and cigarette-loving wife and three children: plump, bookish Kimmy, older brother Paul, and little Nellie. While the book is labeled a novel, it reads much more like a collection of linked stories or personal essays, its string of vignettes taking place mostly during Kimmy’s tween years. They recount Kimmy’s eyes first opening to the rules and constrictions that govern the lives of the adults around her, from the gym teacher who unleashes his cruelty upon two of Kimmy’s classmates to Kimmy’s cadre of grandparents and extended family in Des Moines. Though many of these figures appear in lower-stakes anecdotes (such as the disappointment Kimmy experiences when family friends skip out on a shared holiday tradition to stay at home with their new color TV), the book’s main throughline shows how catastrophic the secret world of grown-ups can truly be on the delicate web that is a family. Fakih’s book, her first for adults, will appeal to anyone who looks back on their own childhood with a mixture of nostalgia and horror.

Despite the book’s unwieldy structure, it shows Fakih as a gifted chronicler of children’s helplessness and familial angst.

CODE 6

Grippando, James Harper/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 3, 2023 978-0-063-22378-3

An aspiring playwright’s plan to base her first production on the secrets kept by her father’s powerful IT firm unleashes a Pandora’s box of demons. Buck Technologies International counts among its clients the Pentagon and the CIA. Kate Gamble, the daughter of CEO Christian Gamble, knows a little and suspects more about the legacy of its surveillance technology. Still grieving the suicide two years ago of her alcoholic mother, Elizabeth, she takes time from her studies in law school to draft a play about the history of