À la carte (July 1, 2025)
A long novel, a short novel, a graphic memoir, and a show!
I wore a bathing suit nearly every day in June, something that has not occurred with such regularity since I begrudgingly attended the Harding Township Day Camp in 1998. Even on the days I don’t make it to the lake, I’m doing some sort of water play with my daughter that necessitates a bathing suit for at least one of us. I bought one sleek one-piece from Target, but most days have been wearing the only bikini top that fits my postpartum boobs, a raggedy old black bikini top from Aerie, and a mismatched polka dot bottom from Target. Is this a call for bathing suit recommendations? Yes please.
In exchange, I’ll offer you some recommendations for things to read (or watch!) in the stifling heat forecast for this holiday weekend in my neck of the woods.
A long, immersive novel
You may remember the name Susan Choi from the brightly colored cover of Trust Exercise, which has been on prominent display in bookstores since winning the National Book Award five years ago. Centering an adolescent love story set at a performing arts high school, Trust Exercise captured our cultural reckoning with the charismatic male authority figures from our younger days, the ones who crossed lines they wouldn’t be allowed to cross today.
Though imbued with a pulsating tension not dissimilar to the tension that propelled Trust Exercise, Choi’s newest novel, Flashlight, is a wholly distinct novel. Whereas Trust Exercise is set in a small, highly specific, richly developed social milieu, Flashlight takes place … around the world and across generations. It’s also LONG, nearly 500 pages, and took me nearly two weeks to read. This is the kind of book that’s worth buying—you’ll see it on the “New Releases” table at any bookstore this summer—not only because it will take a while to read, but because you’ll want to pass it around to people when you finish.
From its beginning, I wasn’t sure if Flashlight would be a thriller, or the multi-generational historical novel I was expecting. It turns out these are not mutually exclusive categories. If you love plot-driven fiction, this is a twisty turny novel. At multiple points, I gasped with surprise. But this novel carries much more than plot. It’s a social historical novel, but also a family novel and a racial identity novel and a political novel—defying categorization might actually place it in the category of Great American novels. It is heartbreakingly sad and incredibly dark—I’m not spoiling much to reveal this book circles around North Korea—but there is just enough redemptive filial love to carry the reader through the tides of incredible hardship.
For fans of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and maybe even Delillo’s classic, Underworld.
A quick, funny, and big-hearted novel
By Shakespearean standards, Rebecca Kauffman’s I’ll Come To You is a comedy, not a tragedy. No one dies (in 1995, at least, the year in which the novel is set), and family comes together for Christmas in a happy(ish) ending. Through their overlapping narratives, we meet each family member in a moment of quiet desperation. They would be, I think, humiliated to learn that the intersection of their lives produced a comedy, and not a drama. But real life cannot be categorized as easily as a Shakespeare play. And real life is where this novel takes place, at the point where comedy and drama meet—the point where a woman recently left by her husband agrees to go on a date with her friend Susan’s cousin Gary (on the date, Ellen feels “hope dribbling out of her”); the point where a divorced dad is so desperate for time with his twin sons that he agrees to join his ex-wife and her new boyfriend on a beach vacation (which goes about how you would expect); the point where a mother tries to shield her adult children from their father’s worsening dementia.
Because each chapter belongs to a different family member, there is no single protagonist in this story. Everyone is flawed, everyone thinks they are the main character. I wouldn’t say they are each allowed to tell their own story, since Kauffman never fully relinquishes the reins of narration. Like a quickwitted parent, she doesn’t hesitate to gently tease her offspring. She calls them out on their foibles, but treats each of their heartbreaks and humiliations with care. You will end up rooting for everyone, even Janet (the closest thing to a b-i-t-c-h you will find in this novel), especially as she attempts to remedy her misguided effort to touch up her husband’s grey hair. (“‘Oh my,’ she said. She used her blow-dryer to get a better look, and it was even worse when completely dry, with large, discrete eggplant-colored patches.’”)
I finished this novel a couple of weeks ago, and I think its startlingly humanity can be captured by one scene that I haven’t forgotten. Ellen and Gary have decided to just be friends. She continues to have dinner with him, and in a moment of weakness, calls him during a heat wave when her AC goes out. He invites her over, and standing in his kitchen, Ellen notices her name on the calendar hanging on the wall. “Ellen,” it said on the first Friday of this month, “followed by an exclamation point. This exclamation point startled her and she looked away.”
This is a quick, quietly funny, and eminently readable novel! But it does not sacrifice emotional heft for readability. Pack it for a week-long vacation and you’ll finish it midweek.
For fans of Laurie Corwin’s Family Happiness, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, and maybe even Franzen.
A graphic memoir
I haven’t read a graphic novel since Maus was assigned reading in middle school. But as you all know by now, I’ll read anything about motherhood and so I was excited to see a copy of New Yorker cartoonist Rachel Deutsch’s new graphic motherhood memoir at the library last week. The Mother follows Deutsch’s journey from the pre-partner desire for a baby through her baby's first year. It is darkly and deeply relatable. It is funny and heartbreaking. I looooved her visual representations of breastfeeding and wish I could share all of them here. For the mom for whom Matrescence is too much and too heavy (literally and figuratively) to read during postpartum, The Mother will be nipple balm for the soul. There is a partnership strained by the exhaustion and demands of the first year, the complicated relationship with a leaking and lumpy body, and the intoxicating infatuation with a new baby.
For new moms, fans of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, Amanda Hess’s Second Life, and Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors.
A TV adaptation
Described as a psychological erotic thriller, Disclaimer is also DARK. So dark that I hesitate to recommend it. It was the sort of show we raced through, not so much because we couldn’t wait to figure out what happened, but because we were eager to put the emotional suffering of these characters behind us. But Cate Blanchett is just SO GOOD that it’s worth putting this performance on your radar. She plays Rebecca Ravenscroft, a gorgeous and seemingly wealthy documentary filmmaker in her professional prime whose life begins to crumble when a newly published novel threatens to expose dark secrets about her youth. Kevin Kline is also incredible as an increasingly deranged widower and father of a deceased son. Based on the novel by the same name by Renée Knight, the film adaptation was written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. It’s not quite what I expected from Cuarón (I’m not sure why I thought I knew what to expect from him, not being particularly well-versed in his canon), but I trusted him more than I would trust a no-name director to steer me through a psychological nightmare on Apple TV+. The show is beautifully shot, particularly the scenes set in Italy.