The Maris Review, vol 62
First things first
It's Amazon Prime week. Every damn publication that I read has a list of their favorite crap you can buy on sale. Luckily, Prime Week means that Bookshop.org has its anti-Prime sale where you can get free shipping all week while supporting indie bookstores. I know where I'll be shopping!
Also
My book happens to be on sale at Bookshop this week. Use the code MARIS to get 15% off, on top of free shipping!
What I read this week (and last!)
I took last week off to promote my own book, so now I've got a lot of books to tell you about.
The Stalker by Paula Bomer
An audacious character study of a psychopathic man-boy named Doughty, The Stalker is the story of a blue blooded frat boy with no frat, a master manipulator in his own mind, but not quite in reality. The marketing copy sums Doughty up perfectly: "An Untalented Mr. Ripley, a Dumb American Psycho." If Doughty is the ultimate of unreliable narrators, then the clues are everywhere that his perspective is off. Think of any and every masculine quality that might be toxic in vast amounts and then add a level of utter delusion and you've got Doughty.
We follow Doughty's misadventures in New York City in the 1990s, where he causes havoc with little more than a few bucks in his pocket and a boundless sense of entitlement. The Stalker is a mercifully fast-paced read, a brilliant depiction of Everything That Is Wrong with (Some? Many?) Men with little time to fester in Doughty's mind. Bomer gets in and out like a sucker punch.
El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott
No one does interpersonal conflict among tight groups of women and girls quite like Megan Abbott, all of the little digs that build up to bursting. Set in Detroit, where the daughters of former car execs who grew up in splendor are now plagued by money troubles like the rest of us, El Dorado Drive is the story of the three Bishop sisters and what happens when Pam, the middle one and the most charismatic one, turns up dead. Maybe it has something to do with The Wheel, the new group that has occupied so much of her time and headspace? Kudos to Megan for writing about a good old fashioned pyramid scheme. Her characters need no pretense of pretending to sell products a la MLMs. These women simply want MONEY and they want that money to multiply (and the freedom that all that money can buy). What could go wrong?
Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman by Harron Walker
This is exactly what I want in an essay collection: a combination of the kind of astute yet delightfully silly writing that used to flourish in corners of the feminist internet, and hard-hitting journalism. Harron Walker's debut collection gets it all done with the right mix of deadpan humor and righteous anger, spanning topics from the paucity of reproductive healthcare for trans women to the various ways of interpreting the art of legendary doll-maker Greer Langton. Her anti-fanfiction essay about the girl bosses of the silver screen is worth the price of admission alone.
Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke by Leigh Claire La Berge
One of the essays in my new book is about how I came to my realization that the most successful business people, for the most part, don't need to be smart at all as long as they are very, very good at bullshitting. This involved watching my college classmates, the ones who went to the fancy business school whose proud alums include Donald Trump and Elon Musk, being recruited to work in consulting. There are few requirements to succeed as a consultant: you've gotta be an expert at corporate lingo and at pretending like you know what you're talking about. My class in college was one of the last to be recruited for Arthur Andersen before its spectacular collapse along with Enron just a few years later in the early aughts.
In the late 1990s Leigh Claire La Berge was hired to work alongside Andersen consultants to help a Fortune 500 conglomeration prepare for Y2K, a looming potential disaster which, spoiler alert: turned out to be a non-event. How did she, a new college grad, help them prepare? Well, she read endless spreadsheets? And uh, traveled all around the world to field offices to ask her colleagues about their contingency plans if all of the clocks failed on January 1, 2000 and caused chaos, before going out to some Michelin starred restaurant or another? And was careful to document every interaction she had, just to have evidence on hand in case the company one day was sued? Somewhere between memoir and autofiction and Marxist critique, Fake Work is about that crucial awakening when we realize that laboring for an extravagantly bloated megacorporation is absolutely absurd.
New releases, 7/8
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş
Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams
Vera, Or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst
Becoming Baba: Fatherhood, Faith, and Finding Meaning in America by Aymann Ismael
These Summer Storms by Sarah Maclean