Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Nicholas Dames on Rachel Cusk’s , Chelsea Leu on Akwaeke Emezi’s , Sasha Archibald on Francine Prose’s , Ron Charles on Julia Phillips’ , and Chris Power on María Bastarós’ Brought to you by , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * “After reading , you might be tempted to imagine the history of the novel as a cyclical battle between accumulation and erasure, or hoarders and cleaners. For the hoarders, the ethos is to capture as much life as possible: objects, atmospheres, ideologies, social types and conventions, the habits and habitudes of selves.
For the cleaners, all of that detail leaves us no space to move or breathe. The hoarder novel may preserve, but the cleaner novel liberates. And that labor of cleaning, of revealing the bare surfaces under the accumulated clutter of our lives and opening up space for creation and nourishment, is women’s work.
Or so Cusk’s allegory invites us to feel ...
This is Cusk’s negative theology of the self, a desire to imagine lives perfectly unconditioned and undetermined, no longer shaped by history, culture, or even psychological continuity ...
What Cusk has relinquished, as if in a kind of penance, is her curiosity. Even at its most austere, her previous work displayed a fascination with the experience of encountering others ..
. Too pallid ..
. The problem is not that Cusk has trouble finding a language adequate to her theory of the burdens of identity—the problem m.