Bookforum

Read it here. In our cover story, Moira Donegan considers the life and work of the late painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer. Hermione Hoby looks at the incredible run of lacerating novels produced by Gwendoline Riley. Sarah Nicole Prickett posits what we can learn from William H. Gass’s hatred-ridden anti-novel The Tunnel. Haley Mlotek explores the mother-daughter divide. Audrey Wollen reads Éric Rohmer’s Elisabeth, an early novel that prefigures the director’s films.

Gwendoline Riley breaks free of her phantoms The Palm House BY Gwendoline Riley. New York: New York Review Books. 224 pages. $17. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon GWENDOLINE RILEY, THE FEROCIOUSLY TALENTED forty-seven-year-old British novelist, is deeply and rightly admired—by younger female readers in particular—for a body of work that now comprises eight increasingly sophisticated novels, all of them short and lacerating.

Late in The Vivisectors, the aloof protagonist, Agathe, theorizes about the state of the contemporary novel. “There are no places and barely any proper names,” she reflects ruefully. Agathe is the daughter of a renowned literary critic, who has his own theory on the state of modern fiction, that fiction must now “move as smoothly as possible; there could be no friction.

JENNIFER KRASINSKI: You had The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories come out ten years ago, and now your new book, Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture (David Zwirner Books, $45), has just been published. How would you distinguish the two collections? LYNNE TILLMAN: Madame Realism was a fictional character, and it was much more about setting her up as the narrator. It’s much more discursive—a very different voice telling those observations.

Vilhelm’s Room BY Tove Ditlevsen. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 160 pages. $25. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon THE DANISH WRITER Tove Ditlevsen divorced her fourth husband, the tabloid mogul Victor Andreasen, in 1973. They’d been together for twenty-two years. Andreasen was then in his second stint as editor in chief of Ekstra Bladet, the tabloid he’d saved from financial ruin.

Offenses BY Constance Debré. Los Angeles : Semiotext(e)/Tuskar Rock. 96 pages. $17. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s antihero, gives himself one of many pep talks about why he might have been right to have murdered an elderly woman. There are naturally two types of man, he tells himself: the inferior, who can only reproduce what already is, and he who has the ability to bring forth something new.

IN HOUSEPAINTER’S LINGO, there is a term for a missed spot or a patch of uneven coverage: “a holiday.” As in, somebody took one! As in, make sure to get that holiday by the garage before you go home. A fleck of some forsaken color marks a gap: a slick of neglect, a tiny relic of unaccounted leisure. Originally, the word “holiday” dates from the fourteenth century, a holy day of religious observance with an accompanying pause in labor.

WHEN THE WORLD ENDS, what will you miss most? I’ll miss running in the woods, and the buttery, grassy smell of a horse’s cheek. In Earth 7, Deb Olin Unferth’s third novel, characters miss what they never knew: Earth in her prime. From their perspective, the golden age of Earth includes our own current moment, everything you and I can still experience: mountains, skateboards, dogs, trees, amusement parks, fireflies.

NEARLY EVERY MILLENNIAL WOMAN I KNOW carries with her a bone-deep knowledge of the same frightening folktale: a girl-child, blonde and beautiful, is born in Nowhere, USA, and becomes public property by virtue of her talent. She turns sixteen, and as the clock strikes midnight a transmogrification occurs, turning her into a plastic thing, an idol—a symbolic, hollow effigy of sex, all tits and abs and white, bared teeth.

IS THIS WHAT IT FELT LIKE, living through 1975, the months before everything came apart? Or fell into place, depending on—relative to the chess pieces, people’s lives—your position. That year, a leftist politician named Maarouf Saad was assassinated in Saida, the northernmost tip of southern Lebanon, while leading protests against a scheme to monopolize the country’s fish trade. Less than two months later, a bus full of Palestinians were slaughtered in Ain el-Remmaneh, in Beirut.