Books about America’s history and national identity are nothing new, but they land with particular impact around Election Day. (Or should I call it Election Week? Election Month? Is it possible to read a book when you’re dosed on Xanax?)
This week we recommend four works that get to the heart of the American experiment in all its fits and starts. There’s “Bland Fanatics,” Pankaj Mishra’s essay collection urging a re-evaluation of the country’s role in the world. There’s “The Kidnapping Club,” Jonathan Daniel Wells’s history of a gang that sold New Yorkers into slavery in the decades before the Civil War. John O. Brennan’s “Undaunted” recounts his career at the highest levels of the intelligence community. And from Laila Lalami, “Conditional Citizens” traces her path to American citizenship as an Arab Muslim immigrant, and asks what it means to “belong” to a country anyway. With notions of civic duty and democratic rule on everybody’s minds right now, that might be an especially fitting book for the moment.
But maybe you get all the civic duty you can stand from the front page? In that case, we also bring you pure escapism in the form of Susanna Clarke’s new fantasy novel, Xiaolu Guo’s Brexit-themed romance and three delightful collections of literary essays by Namwali Serpell, Daniel Mendelsohn and Brian Dillon, who sings the praises of stylish prose in his book “Suppose a Sentence.” All those in favor, say “aye.”
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
THE KIDNAPPING CLUB: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, by Jonathan Daniel Wells. (Bold Type Books, $30.) In 1833, Black children began to vanish from the streets of New York City. “The Kidnapping Club” describes the circle of slave catchers and police officers who terrorized New York’s Black population in the three decades before the Civil War, snatching up children, as well as adults. “Wells writes, one senses, not to memorialize the missing, but to reopen their cases — to make a larger argument about recompense,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “This is history read with a sense of vertigo, suffused with the present: a rash of child abductions met with official complacency, stories about Black men and women attacked while sleeping in their homes and praying at church.”
PIRANESI, by Susanna Clarke. (Bloomsbury, $27.) Clarke’s long-awaited second novel is a haunting study of confinement and solitude. Piranesi lives in a house of many halls, filled with statues and flooded periodically by tides; within his meticulous journal entries lies the mystery of his strange and beautiful world, and of the curious figures who inhabit it. “That Clarke herself has wrestled for years with an elusive illness further illuminates the secluded world of ‘Piranesi,’ which so thoroughly captures the isolation of this moment,” Amal El-Mohtar writes in her latest science fiction and fantasy column. “But I don’t want to risk reducing the plenitude of this novel to allegory: It is rich, wondrous, full of aching joy and sweet sorrow.”
BLAND FANATICS: Liberals, Race, and Empire, by Pankaj Mishra. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) In a collection of essays written since 2008, Mishra challenges America’s conception of itself and urges the country to rethink its place in the world. His goal is to shake up settled liberal assumptions and force a reckoning with capitalism and imperialism. “There’s enough truth in Mishra’s alternative history for it to stand as a useful corrective to the Grand Narrative that still maintains a firm grip on the imagination of many in the West,” Damon Linker writes in his review. “As a goad to liberal self-criticism, Mishra is well worth reading.”
A LOVER’S DISCOURSE, by Xiaolu Guo. (Grove, $26.) A romance blossoms in London between a Chinese graduate student and an Australian-German landscape architect. Set against the backdrop of the Brexit debate, Guo’s novel presents a vivid and mischievous survey of cultural difference and the perplexing questions that love demands. “What propels the book forward is in part the sense of suspense that hangs over the nascent relationship: Has our heroine made an enormous mistake?” our reviewer, Marcel Theroux, writes. “But there’s also something compelling about the breadth of the world the narrator inhabits. … It’s capacious enough to touch on moments of real darkness, while somehow managing to be mordant, funny and, ultimately, life-affirming.”
UNDAUNTED: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, by John O. Brennan. (Celadon, $30.) The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency recounts his career as America’s spy chief while lashing into Donald Trump for disparaging the intelligence community. “Brennan’s memoir presents a rich portrait of his unusual life, which took him from a working-class New Jersey neighborhood to a position as a Middle East specialist who met with kings and presidents and witnessed the rise of Al Qaeda,” Charlie Savage writes in his review. His “reflections on his long and momentous career are a worthy addition to the available history of the post-9/11 era.”
CONDITIONAL CITIZENS: On Belonging in America, by Laila Lalami. (Pantheon, $25.95.) In her deeply felt first nonfiction book, Lalami recounts her disillusionment in the wake of becoming an American citizen 20 years ago. As an immigrant, an Arab and a Muslim, she argues, she understands what it’s like “for a country to embrace you with one arm and push you away with the other.” Reviewing the book, Sonia Nazario writes that “conditional citizens, in Lalami’s account, are not allowed to dissent or question the choices of their government; if they do, they are viewed with suspicion, their allegiance to their new country questioned. … Lalami shows how our nation’s schizophrenia toward immigrants — Immigrants built this great country! We are a nation of immigrants! Immigrants bring disease, crime and rob us of our jobs! — can give conditional citizens whiplash as they are simultaneously regarded as America’s best hope and its gravest threat.”
STRANGER FACES, by Namwali Serpell. (Transit, paper, $15.95.) Serpell, the author of an acclaimed novel, “The Old Drift,” is also an accomplished literary scholar, as she demonstrates in these ingenious essays on various unusual visages — from the so-called Elephant Man to emojis — all dismantling the notion of what she calls the “Ideal Face.” The book is “wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging,” Becca Rothfeld writes, considering it with two other essay collections. “Her clear prose unknots a dense tangle of academic concepts along the way.”
THREE RINGS: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, by Daniel Mendelsohn. (University of Virginia, $19.95.) Originally composed as a series of lectures, Mendelsohn’s latest book is a thrillingly inventive meditation on literary digression (or “ring composition”), incorporating sources from Homer to the Holocaust. “Mendelsohn is a trained classicist,” Becca Rothfeld points out in her review, “and as he notes, one of the ancient Greek words for ‘digression’ doubles as the language’s term for scholarly commentary. The critic is a digresser par excellence: His task is to wander away from a text in order to devise a richer route of return.”
SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, by Brian Dillon. (New York Review Books, paper, $17.95.) In each chapter of this elegant collection Dillon contemplates a sentence from a writer he admires: Thomas De Quincey, Elizabeth Hardwick, James Baldwin, even Shakespeare’s transcription of Hamlet’s deathbed moan. “Dillon’s affinities prove eclectic and unexpected,” Becca Rothfeld writes in her review of three essay collections. “He loves writers who craft sentences crooked with clauses. … ‘Suppose a Sentence’ has many rewards, but its greatest gift is its exuberant style.”
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