![]() When a former West African president accused of ethnic cleansing requests her as his personal interpreter, she begins to wonder, queasily, if her professional neutrality is a form of complicity: “I was pure instrument,” she notes, “a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape.” (At the same time, she’s acutely aware that the court’s defendants come disproportionately from African nations, while other wealthy European nations are left largely alone.) Outside the courtroom, she tries to navigate a fledgling friendship and decipher a days-long silence from the married Dutch man she’s dating. There, her job is, as she puts it, “to repeat the unspeakable”-a task at which she, an observant outsider, is immediately adept. ![]() After the death of her father, the unnamed narrator leaves New York to work as an interpreter at a criminal court in The Hague. ![]() Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel spins a taut web of dread from the start. But he begins to wonder, as I did, whether failure, brutal though it is, “mightn’t have been the real pursuit all along.” - Jane Yong Kim Specktor threads into these essaylike chapters a portrait of his own tempestuous allegiance to this city of dashed fantasies. With that lens, he examines the lives of folks such as the coolly talented writer Eleanor Perry, who never got sufficient credit for work that she’d done with her husband, Frank, but then wrote a gimlet-eyed novel about her marriage or the vibrant yet aloof actor Tuesday Weld, constantly on the verge of becoming a starlet but perhaps also saved by her ambivalence about fame. Matthew Specktor’s sad and entrancing book takes as its topic failure, “a pattern of mind,” he writes, that is also, “when we are close to it, delicious.” A child of Hollywood-his mother was an unhappy screenwriter, his father a high-powered agent-he focuses his attention on its denizens, exploring artists meaningful to him “whose careers carry an aura of what might … have been.” Specktor is a sharp cultural critic, but he also writes with the sweet conviction of someone who still has heroes, and he opts to consider foundering a virtue. Megan GarberĪlways Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, by Matthew Specktor She documents the casual cruelties that shape her daily life-and she defies them. She observes, and she watches herself being observed. The narrator’s assessments of her life, rendered primarily in the first person, are studies of evocative contrasts. There is a pointed plot twist I won’t spoil, but what makes Assembly singular, in the end, is less its story than the manner of its storytelling. ![]() She goes to a party (thrown by the parents of her wealthy, white boyfriend, on their ancient estate). The narrator, a Black woman living in London whose name is never revealed, goes to work (the job is a financially lucrative and spiritually vampiric role in banking). Force yourself into their form.” Natasha Brown’s debut novel is propelled by elegant, elliptical, violent lines like that. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. “Dissolve yourself into the melting-pot,” says the narrator of Assembly.
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