Ho, ho, ho, hope you’ve brought an appetite for destruction, because we’ve got some choice cuts for you this holiday season.
Among the books being tarred and feathered in the town square this year: Melania Trump’s cliché-riddled memoir, Haruki Murakami’s latest work of bad magical realism, Lionel Shriver’s ham-fisted satire, and Malcolm Gladwell’s hollow brand extension.
So here they are, in all their wounding wondrousness: the most scathing book reviews of 2024.
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“As a rule, she has existed in the collective imagination not so much as real-life woman, with her own interests and idiosyncrasies, but as a glossy 2-D image, largely known through the mediating scrim of magazine coverage, which has tended to present her as one luxury object among others in her mogul husband’s arsenal … Even after Trump became President, Melania remained an essentially unknowable text. Of course, all actors in the political arena depend on some level of obfuscation, and an attempt to figure out what a public figure really thinks tends to be a fool’s errand. And yet, historically, the role of First Lady has depended on a kind of approachable legibility—a cheerful, open-bookish willingness to soften the hard edges that the role of President demands, through displays of helpmeet-like keenness.
Melania, with her pronounced Cold War accent, snugly streamlined outfits, and reluctance to discuss personal matters, seemed more sexy Bond spy than traditional First Lady … Melania is one of the flattest, most abstract, and least revealing accounts of a life that I’ve probably ever read … I realize that the above makes some fascinating and exceptional episodes seem quite dull, but what if I told you that Melania’s much lengthier account adds almost nothing of note or interest to the bare bones of this précis? The writing is riddled with generalities and clichés, at a level I haven’t seen since teaching college-freshman comp in the early twenty-tens.”
–Naomi Fry on Melania Trump’s Melania (The New Yorker)
“The problem with Murakami’s dreamscapes are that they are so entirely unmoored from reality that nothing seems to matter; meaning is endlessly deferred. It feels as if his work, with its talking cats, mystical landscapes and drifting, nameless, middle-aged protagonists obsessed with their teenage years, has never moved on from a form of magical realism that was just about bearable in his short early novels. His books have not evolved—they have just got longer … There is little here that passes for plot—dei ex machina abound in the form of ghosts who crop up to deliver important pieces of information to the reader. There is an endless central section set in a library in the ‘real’ world in which Boku befriends a lonely adolescent. Then we return to the unicorns.
Murakami’s work is often described as fantasy, but there is none of the intricate world-building that we find in the classics of that genre. Bad magical realism lacks both magic and realism, and The City and its Uncertain Walls should take its place alongside Coelho’s The Alchemist, Fowles’s The Magus, Gibran’s The Prophet and any number of other books that you can just about be forgiven for admiring as a teenager but which, to an adult reader, offer little more than embarrassment”
–Alex Preston on Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (The Observer)
“On Tuesday, the South Dakota governor published a political memoir called No Going Back. But days before it appeared, everyone on planet Earth already knew about the passage in which Noem describes shooting her 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket …The description of Cricket’s Last Stand is the one time in this howlingly dull book that Noem demonstrates any sense of setting, character, plot and emotional honesty. Otherwise, it’s mostly a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge … the central moment in Noem’s memoir is that transcendent scene of South Dakota gothic.
Picture it: Harvest season, ‘the Super Bowl of farming.’ But it’s hunting season at their lodge, too. ‘Balancing both at full throttle is enough to break a family,’ Noem says. She does everything possible to make sure friends from Georgia bag some pheasants, but Cricket—’out of her mind with excitement’—ruins everything … Gripping, right? Disturbing, even. Forget Travis and his beloved yellow cur. For a few glorious pages, Noem feels like a Flannery O’Connor character with tax cuts. Honestly, as someone who had to endure all 260 pages of No Going Back, I wish Noem had shot more dogs—or me.”
–Ron Charles on Kristi Noem’s No Going Back (The Washington Post)
“The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein—as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero—usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse. In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, Mania, the balance is off … As parody goes, this is ham-fisted stuff. Ironically, Mania lacks the discernment required to make it work. Satire demands precision, and Shriver applies an ax to a job calling for a scalpel. Although Shriver has made writing unlikable protagonists into a sort of cottage industry, Pearson is something more, a preeningly self-righteous didact swathed in false modesty about her own supposedly mediocre brain. Like many of Shriver’s narrators, Pearson often speaks or narrates with the sort of affected, antiquated vocabulary of a stock character from a 1930s movie, the portly gentleman in a white three-piece suit, up to no good and puffing on a cigar, played by Sidney Greenstreet …
The most—really the only—intriguing aspect of the novel is the relationship between these two friends and Pearson’s growing realization that Emory lacks a moral center. Emory herself remains a cipher. Is she a sociopath? Or just an opportunist? If only she were the unlikable narrator to tell this story. That would constitute a stretch for Shriver, imagining the interiority of a character who’s not basically an avatar of herself. That would be a truly daring choice, and dare I say it, a smart one.”
–Laura Miller on Lionel Shriver’s Mania (The New York Times Book Review)
“The meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions. About 70 pages in, RuPaul—at the time, a Black high school dropout driving luxury cars across the country to help a relative flip them for profit—declares without irony, ‘Americans have always been frontiersmen, people who are open to a new adventure, and I felt this as I drove cars alone, back and forth, across the United States … Aside from breathtaking dismissiveness of the decades of racial violence that made the migration necessary, it’s chilling to see a public figure known as a champion of the marginalized so easily dismiss survivors of Jim Crow-era terror as people who ‘hold onto their victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity’ …
The way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. The memoir reveals an author who thinks he understands outsiders when, really, all he understands is that he wanted to become famous and eventually became famous … Living a life and coherently expressing a life story on the page are two very different arts. Rather than patiently allowing his tale to unfold, he struggles not to remind us that everything that has ever happened to him happened for a reason.”
–Saeed Jones on RuPaul’s The House of Hidden Meanings (The New York Times Book Review)
“…uneven and exhausting … Hallberg is an intelligent writer, but he’s a wild and frequently sloppy one. His narratives don’t click into gear; his curveball only sometimes makes it over the plate … Ethan is a familiar figure. He’s a beautiful loser, an amiable screw-up of the genus Jim Harrison once classified as the ‘nifty guy at loose ends.’ We know this creature from Thomas McGuane’s novels, and from Barry Hannah’s, and from Harrison’s, among other writers. Hallberg’s amiable screw-up, unlike those in his predecessors’ fiction, is never much fun to be around. Ethan is almost entirely sexless as well, which gives the novel a deracinated feeling. Like Ryan Gosling in Barbie, he seems to have only a smooth plastic panel down there …
This novel, like Ethan’s life, lurches sideways. There are many, many characters—siblings, parents, parole officers, lovers, spouses, drug dealers, old friends. There is little sense of momentum; the pages never turn themselves. It is so intensely written that it gave me a headache, as if I had been grinding my teeth. I was glad when it was over.”
–Dwight Garner on Garth Risk Hallberg’s The Second Coming (The New York Times)
“Conley’s book is… short on action, but without a compensating depth of character analysis … I can see what Conley was aiming for. There is promise in the idea of two families growing and warping around the secret of queerness, in such a time and place. Yet its development here is circular and shallow … Sensibly, Conley doesn’t attempt to recreate the speech of 18th-century Puritans … The issue with his dialogue is that it’s undifferentiated, every character sounding the same. And what can’t be forgiven is his profligacy with verbal cliché …
Crawling across this prose desert, the reader pants, thirst unslaked, for a pleasurable sentence, a fresh image, a dynamic scene, a single sign of genuine life. In an afterword, Conley criticizes, with belated zest, those historians who have hesitated to name gay desire when they have encountered it, often claiming ‘romantic friendship.’ He is right that heterosexuality has not been relativized with anything like the same insistence. And he is right that the challenge of writing queer history lies in ‘expanding the way we think about the past, the way we make assumptions, in opening up possibilities.’ Certainly, All the World Beside does not represent a failure of sympathy. It represents a failure of art.”
–Tom Crewe on Garrard Conley’s All the World Beside (The New York Times Book Review)
“Her essays contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality. She is beloved for her unrepentantly implacable persona, but a persona is always at risk of calcifying into a shtick … The occasional judgments that can be found in this book-length apologia for judgment are predictable and facile. All of the fruit that Oyler picks is so low-hanging that she would do better to leave it rotting on the ground … Not for a moment does she display any interest in discovering why the things she scorns are so wildly popular … No Judgment is full of lines with the cadence, but not the content, of zingers. ‘I despise a happy ending’ sounds daring until you realize that it means Oyler despises Jane Austen and all of Shakespeare’s comedies. It is not a serious pronouncement: It is just an accessory, designed to present the person who wears it as a provocateur …
For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang … Oyler is constantly retreating into sarcasm, interrupting herself to remind us of her wry distance from everything she says, squirming in the face of commitment or conviction. Any ugly sentence, jumbled argument or exhausted platitude can be passed off as a bit and thereby disavowed … She is so desperate to demonstrate that she is in on the joke that she neglects to ask if the joke is even funny … This is not criticism as a practice; it is criticism as a lifestyle brand.”
–Becca Rothfeld on Lauren Oyler’s No Judgement (The Washington Post)
“This is a pretty little world in which the girls wear lots of nice skirts and the boys are real softies and the worst thing that can reasonably happen is that it gets rainy in Ireland, as it tends to do at sad moments … Has the form but not the content of a novel of ideas … Each character has been flattened like the butter on the bread they incessantly eat, turned into a blandly satisfying fantasy of good humour, essentially good motives and good old romance … While Intermezzo also presents as a novel about ‘grief’, the brothers’ father having recently died, he is sketched so vaguely that we must content ourselves with bland and unaffecting sentiment … It would seem that mainstream publishing wishes to gain the credibility of allusion to the more sullied aspects of contemporary life without depicting anything unsavoury. I imagine the Sally Rooney team chafes at the potential of losing even one member of her huge fanbase, and thus she has strained this tactic to absurdity, writing a young adult novel about two supposedly problematic males who make love tenderly and give love fiercely. Money, work, even the internet—none of these threaten to impinge on the function of her sentimental machine.”
–Ann Manov on Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Times Literary Supplement)
“BoyMom, alas, mostly denies itself the mirroring pleasures of art and popular culture—there’s no fizz and foam to let out some air. The reporting is overfamiliar (much of the chapter on campus sexual assaults could have been written a decade ago or more). And Whippman’s dismaying fatalism about screen time feels out of step with the current conversation … It is difficult to know how to engage constructively with a world view in which seismic political, social, and cultural transformations are most acutely relevant as a hypothetical affront to you, personally.
Whippman’s book is useful, however, as an embodiment of the scarcity mind-set that deforms so much of our civic life, whether it’s debates over universal-preschool funding or élite-college admissions, immigration reform or health-care policy. It’s a grasping, hoarding impulse, and a fundamentally conservative one … Gender norms, of course, are the ultimate zero-sum binary, and the #boymom phenomenon could not exist without them. For all the voices that Whippman seeks out, her book doesn’t push with any genuine force against this binary; instead, it enacts the pain and unease of being locked within it.”
–Jessica Winter on Ruth Whippman’s Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity (The New Yorker)
“…call this a fictionalised memoir or a justification for breaking the usual bonds of matrimony, but it isn’t much of a novel. July quickly gives up on her plot and begins writing a guidebook to female liberation, which, according to her, is brought about through luxury bath-products, polyamory and expensive carpeting. It’s like reading an extended advertisement for an all-inclusive health spa … This is basically indistinguishable from the adverts that I, a middle-aged woman, am served up by Instagram algorithms. For all the anxiety about how she’s perceived, July never considers the possibility that she looks ridiculous. The guy with the camera turns out to be someone in real estate who wants to let the narrator know her house is worth millions. The younger man she desires doesn’t see her as middle-aged, invisible and pathetic; he’s a huge fan of her work. That admiration creates a kind of aura, a glow that covers up any imperfections. That’s how a book such as All Fours happens, I suppose: being surrounded by people who tell you how amazing you are.”
–Jessa Crispin on Miranda July’s All Fours (The Telegraph)
“Tom Selleck could have written an interesting memoir, just as he could have had an interesting career. But he didn’t… A luckier, or cannier, actor might have made a career out of satirising his former image, as Reynolds did in Boogie Nights. But that requires having a sense of humor about oneself, and judging from his memoir, You Never Know, that is not one of Selleck’s strengths … With a determination that verges on admirable, he refuses to write about anything potentially interesting. Celebrity memoirs require at least one of two things: self-revelation and gossip. Selleck adamantly refuses to disclose either … If there exists a reader who has been longing for a book detailing all of Selleck’s early auditions, followed by 150 pages dissecting what feels like every Magnum episode, then happy news: your wait is over. Alas, I fear that reader may only be Selleck himself.”
–Hadley Freeman on Tom Selleck’s You Never Know (The Times)
“Malcolm Gladwell could have written a fresh book. Instead, he created a brand extension of his 2000 hit, The Tipping Point. The result, Revenge of the Tipping Point, is a genre bender: self-help without the practical advice, storytelling without the literariness, nonfiction without the vital truths, entertainment without the pleasure, a thriller without actual revelation and a business book without the actionable insights. But it will be big! … He has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking. His signature methodology is to convey relatively boilerplate, already well-known ideas, by rebranding the ideas and wrapping them in stories … Gladwell has the independence to go deeper and tell us hard truths and upset the status quo. When that clout is used to hawk Frameworks™, not seek complexity, to mine universal laws from anecdotes, not confront the present, to croon the old hits for your fans, not push them, or yourself, into new lands, what’s good for the brand is a loss for writing.’
–Anand Giridharadas on Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point (The New York Times Book Review)
“This apparent about-face of Silicon Valley prompted Swisher to undertake some agonized soul-searching, the results of which have been published as Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, a tortured and tortuous memoir that, in remixing swaths of past reporting and commentary, as well as regurgitating tales she’s told ad nauseam, tries to answer two burning questions: How did Silicon Valley end up in that room with Trump? And, more importantly, how did a tech journalist as good and uncompromising as Kara Swisher fail to anticipate this turn to the dark side? The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price … she tries to atone for her decades of boosterism by adopting a slightly more critical posture, but the analysis, such as it is, has no bite because Swisher still, at her core, fundamentally believes in Silicon Valley …
Given how generally rosy her vision of the Valley and its problems has been for years, one would expect a blood sacrifice as proof that her pivot, however slight, in Burn Book is sincere. But despite the book’s juicy title, no such offering is made. Instead, she winds up emphasizing her affinity with the industry at nearly every turn … We could go on and on about the various ways Swisher’s meek apologia nevertheless hammers home an unbroken faith in digitization, in technology as a progressive transformative force, and in Silicon Valley’s fundamental goodness…But I am much more interested in what we are supposed to do with the memoir, whether we believe its critical pretensions or not …
I use ‘we’ loosely because Swisher’s intended audience is not you or me, but instead those with power: she writes about and for them. Over the course of a long and storied career closely reporting on the tech industry and its titans, she has aped their motions, sat at their dinner tables, drunk their wine, gone to their weird parties, played with their baubles, repeated their lies, and offered them counsel. Swisher may style herself as Silicon Valley’s critic laureate, but she’s much closer to the court fool.”
–Edward Ongweso Jr. on Kara Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (The Baffler)
“It would be hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye from the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude … A microscopic story, its contents hardly sufficient for it to be called a novella, much less a finished novel. Reading it may provoke unhealthy levels of frustration in those familiar with García Márquez’s most indelible creations … None of his editors or longtime publishers appears to have thought of protecting him or acknowledging the manuscript’s vapidity … Reading Until August is a bit like watching a great dancer, well past his prime, marking his ineradicable elegance in a few moves he can neither develop nor sustain. This is most keenly felt in the second half, when the author’s command of his subject slips and the story rushes to its hackneyed conclusion. One can almost pinpoint the place where the thread attaching author to subject unravels, as he repeats tropes and images, and the generation of new material falls beyond his grasp … García Márquez’s work has survived legions of imitators who have misunderstood magic realism as a stylistic mannerism rather than the means to a sharper, less omniscient reality. Much of what is thought of as ‘magical’ in his novels reflects life as his characters believed it to be in the Caribbean towns he so vividly described. Now, his literary guardians have put in front of the world the indignity of García Márquez imitating himself.”
–Michael Greenberg on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Until August (The New York Times Book Review)
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