BRIEFLY NOTED MICHELLE OBAMA, by Peter Slevin (Knopf ). After Barack Obama
was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, his wife warned him, “This business is not noble.” Slevin argues that the question of how to make a difference while also having a good life has been a constant one for Michelle Obama—from her childhood, on the South Side of Chicago, to Princeton, Harvard, and her legal career. His book is better at explaining how she became the person who arrived at the White House than how she operates now. The Michelle who emerges fully understands the transformative value of being an African-American First Lady; she also has a conservative streak. When Barack, dawdling over proposing, would ask if marriage really mattered, she’d say, “Marriage is everything.” by Eve MacDonald (Yale). This taut study of the Carthaginian commander unfolds at the intersection of myth and history. Hannibal, described by Livy as “by far the best soldier” ever to set foot on a battlefield, acquired a reputation as Rome’s most fearsome enemy. His invasion of Italy— tens of thousands of troops crossing the Alps—stunned the Romans. MacDonald argues that Roman historians magnified Hannibal’s ferocity to add to the glory of Rome’s eventual triumph. She paints him as a Hellenistic leader who built an army around strong personal ties. She also follows his myth through the ages, from Napoleon’s determination to lead his own army over the Alps to Freud’s fascination with Hannibal’s strong-willed father.
HANNIBAL,
AQUARIUM, by David Vann (Atlantic). This wrenching novel focusses on a lonely twelve-year-old girl’s relationship with her emotionally disturbed mother. Caitlin spends her days at the Seattle aquarium, admiring the tranquillity of undersea creatures, while her single mother, Sheri, works a gruelling shift at the docks. Their fragile familial harmony shatters when Sheri’s estranged father attempts to befriend Caitlin and indirectly revives a dark history of abuse. In bracing prose, Vann shows Caitlin’s home becoming a claustrophobic prison, as much a glass tank as the ones that contain the fish she admires. “She had always been my safety,” Caitlin reflects after one of Sheri’s explosive incidents. “To have this place become unsafe left nowhere else.” WHILE THE GODS WERE SLEEPING,
by Erwin Mortier, translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent (Pushkin Press). Mortier, a Belgian novelist, has translated Virginia Woolf, and her vatic inventories of domestic life echo in his writing. His narrator, Helena, is an elderly witness to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. She describes horrific things she saw in the First World War’s trenches but, a fierce aesthete, is unabashed by pleasures that she experienced close to the front. “The war was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she confesses. Her hedonism earns her the scorn of her mother and her daughter. The novel’s only false note is Helena’s frequent apologies for rhapsodizing—it’s clear that she needs to, and the book is the pearl that results from these shining accretions. THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2015
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