Jennifer Egan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Richard Lloyd Parry deliver the best reads of the month.
Richard Lloyd Parry Richard Lloyd Parry wrote The People Who Eat Darkness, easily one of the best works of true crime in the past decade. In his new book, The Ghosts of the Tsunami, Parry explores the tragedy of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake by honing in on the small coastal town of Okawa. It’s not true crime, but Ghosts has the same keen eye toward deconstructing Japan through a narrow lens as Parry speaks to survivors and grieving parents. Japan is better prepared for disasters than any other nation. (Parry credits Japanese infrastructure for saving countless lives.) And still, the immensity of the loss in terms of the dead made the event the worst disaster since the bombing of Nagasaki.
As you might imagine, grief possesses the entirety of the book. Parry’s voice prefers clarity to beauty, which makes what might be an utterly depressing read at least bearable. It makes the moments when Parry chooses to be dramatic land all the harder. Like when he talks about the appearance of the tsunami, which in popular imagination, we might imagine something akin to Hokuasai’s The Great Wave (or the emoji it inspired: 🌊). In reality: “[t]he tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien.” A stunning portrait of devastation and its aftermath.
Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan Confession: I didn’t love A Visit from the Goon Squad, though the rest of the world (and the Pulitzer committee) disagrees with me. So maybe I’m wrong! (But the Powerpoint chapter, I mean come on.) I do love Manhattan Beach, though, Egan’s first novel in the seven years since. Whereas Goon Squad’s strength came from its clever structure, Manhattan Beach is a more traditional novel in form. Hell, it’s even a swerve into historical fiction.
The book opens in ‘30s Brooklyn with 11-year-old Anna and her “bagman” father Eddie, just before he disappears. Later, Anna will work a menial job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to support her mother and sister, moving onto become a diver as an adult. The central mystery of what happens to Anna’s father is carefully unraveled, as well as her fraught relationship with Dexter, the gangster that her pop worked for.
Manhattan Beach is a bit slow in places, but beautifully written throughout, even when it’s leaning on descriptions of the ocean (IT’S A METAPHOR). But for an author who won literature’s highest accolade for a book based on its uniqueness, it’s perhaps even more impressive that she can also write a fantastic novel that is, at least on the surface, as classic as they come.
We Were Eight Years in Power
Ta-Nehisi Coates From MF Doom-verse-inspired Blogspot blogger to Atlantic columnist to America’s most prominent writer on race, Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest incarnation is author of We Were Eight Years in Power. It catalogs his strongest work, one representative for each of President Obama’s years in office. It’s not a wholly original work like Between the World and Me, but more of a greatest-hits collection.
The material here is excellent, even if this collection isn’t essential, especially if you've kept up with Coates's writing for the past decade or so. (Though there is plenty here worth revisiting, especially “The Case for Reparations.”) And even if you are familiar with Coates’ body of work, the most relevant, lucid pieces are the new ones. Each essay is preceded by the author’s meta-analysis, admitting what’s aged well, what he would’ve written differently with the gift of hindsight. But more than being right or wrong, Coates provides a glimpse into his headspace when he was writing—both intellectual and emotional.
These are as sharp as his essays, with some pointed lines (“‘gentrification’ is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy”) and other broader, more harrowing ideas to consider (“If we had misjudged America’s support for a black man running to occupy the White House, perhaps I had misjudged the nature of my country.”). We Were Eight Years in Power is a great primer for newbies, but with plenty more to revisit and re-interrogate for those who aren’t.
