reviews of novel the latecomer

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Jean Hanff Korelitz’s ‘The Latecomer’ offers wit in triplicate

The Oppenheimer triplets were conceived in a petri dish, but the real miracle of their creation took place in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s fertile imagination. These three spoiled scions of a wealthy Brooklyn family are the subject of her sharp new comic novel, “ The Latecomer .”

Although it’s set around the end of the 20th century, the story luxuriates in the flourishes of an earlier era, including uncanny coincidences, hidden identities and chapter headings in which the author foreshadows what is about to unfold. Indeed, like a latter-day Edith Wharton, Korelitz simultaneously mocks and embraces these upper-class combatants. Other readers will hear in this vivisection of a dysfunctional family a Franzenesque attention to the great forces pulsing through American culture. But Korelitz writes with such a light touch that one doesn’t feel strong-armed through a college seminar on, say, pharmaceuticals or bird conservation. (Like her previous novel “ The Plot ,” “The Latecomer” is already set for a TV series adaptation.)

In the early chapters, Korelitz carefully lays the foundation of a storied Jewish family that can trace its roots — and its misfortunes — back to Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in the 18th-century court of Stuttgart. But the moment the Oppenheimer triplets emerge into the world with the help of IVF, they’re cradled in deception and obfuscation that will spark explosions throughout their lives. As a young man, their father killed two friends in a driving accident. He never mentions that catastrophe, although it essentially cauterized his heart, which now has room only for modern art. Their mother, meanwhile, is so determined to preserve a lovely tableaux of happiness that she can never see her children in action.

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Although raised together with every advantage money can buy, the triplets never develop even the most basic habits of sibling comradery. They sound almost like characters in a fairy tale when the narrator claims, “The faintest hint of affection, the palest expression of warmth, was enough to make each Oppenheimer triplet recoil.” Harrison, Lewyn and Sally — “the smart one,” “the weird one” and “the girl” — remain inert elements in a family compound that never coheres. The narrator, whose hidden identity adds a touch of “Gossip Girl” intrigue, moves freely across the years, in and out of the triplets’ minds: “So powerful was the mutual aversion, and so ironic, given the triplets had never actually been apart, that you might even have said it was the single thing the triplets actually did share.”

“The Latecomer” casts a witty eye on a wide spectrum of American life, but when Harrison, Lewyn and Sally become teenagers, Korelitz turns her satiric vision to the excesses of liberal education with particularly singeing effect. The triplets attend the exclusive Walden academy, one of those chronically compromised prep schools designed on the most egalitarian principles for the most aristocratic parents. Walden’s touchy-feely ideology is enforced with a death grip throughout the curriculum. “Every student,” the narrator writes, “marched in lockstep to his or her mandated different drummer.” While European history is reserved for a senior elective, all the grades concentrate on the rights of women and LGBTQ people. It’s a terrible fit for Harrison, who’s already an archconservative by second grade and believes “he was not just smarter than his siblings (a low bar, in his opinion) but smarter than his classmates, his teachers, and the head of school.”

Although bound for Harvard like a salmon to its birthplace, Harrison meets an iconoclastic professor who convinces him he’s too special for the halls of Cambridge. He should, instead, join the little cadre of Spartan intellectuals at Roarke (a wonderful parody of Deep Springs College). There, while reading Latin and cleaning out the chicken coop, Harrison finally finds someone he can truly respect: a fellow student named Eli Absalom Stone.

In such moments — and there are many in “The Latecomer” — Korelitz’s skill as the ringmaster of this vast collection of episodes feels particularly dazzling. Eli Absalom Stone sounds something like an African American version of Jedediah Purdy, that home-schooled West Virginian who, in 1999 at the age of 24, published a much-heralded work of cultural criticism titled “ For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today .” But Korelitz has made her young autodidact far more conflicted. As a Black man, Stone becomes a right-wing media celebrity, richly rewarded for inhabiting “that vile gray zone between fiscal conservative and Tiki Torchbearer.” Harrison hitches his bespoke wagon to that star, and the resulting scandal shows how deftly Korelitz moves as a satirist, feinting in one direction and then delivering a knockout blow in the other.

She demonstrates the same dexterity in another, equally surprising, storyline involving Lewyn at Cornell University, where, once again, a peculiar experience reverberates with national implications. Although raised in a culturally Jewish home with no particular interest in theology, Lewyn is fascinated by his Mormon roommate. At first, Lewyn’s worldly sophistication seems to make a mockery of his new friend’s white-bread lifestyle and theatrical spirituality. Indeed, there are many opportunities here for gags reminiscent of the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” but Korelitz has something else in mind entirely. Soon, Lewyn finds himself craving the love and the mystery of this homegrown American faith.

There’s a jigsaw-puzzle thrill to Korelitz’s family epic — the way it feels like a thousand scrambled, randomly shaped events until you’ve got the edges in place, and then the picture begins to resolve with accelerating inevitability and surprise. Part farce, part revenge fantasy, the climactic scene at a triple birthday party at the Oppenheimers’ “cottage” on Martha’s Vineyard is one of the most hilarious and horrible calamities I’ve ever found in a novel.

Korelitz is not so sentimental as to finally draw the Oppenheimer triplets together in a hug, but she knows how to adopt the old conventions of romantic comedy and domestic drama to her thoroughly modern ends. By the time we’re done with these siblings, their lives have been turned inside out, and all their stored-up junk and secret treasures have been sorted, culled and curated for this immensely enjoyable sojourn with a truly memorable family.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

The Latecomer

By Jean Hanff Korelitz

Celadon. 439 pp. $28

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Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer Is a Social Satire Perfect for Summer

The author of “The Plot” returns with a novel that skewers privilege and offers delights on every page.

Triplets, conceived via IVF into a wealthy New York Jewish family, who never grow out of hating each other. A father’s secret, held closely for generations, that permanently poisons the family well. A mother who dives into empty-nest desperation with a too-late-in-life baby, delivered via gestational carrier.

To read The Latecomer is to be treated to a garden of literary delights. Thoroughly modern social satire! Tonally spot-on chapter titles, like “Summer Lovers: In which Sally Oppenheimer discovers her brother’s snakeliness, and contemplates the entire baffling mosh pit of adult life.” Soaring sentences like this one, in which Triplet Harrison describes his life to date. “Eighteen years of being coddled, overscheduled, and overseen, paid attention to in all the worst ways (and none of the ways that mattered), housed and clothed and fed and amused in a manner commensurate with his family’s endemic wealth.”

What’s not to love about Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 11th book? Absolutely nothing.

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What do novelists find difficult about writing a novel? Absolutely everything.

The best novelists make it look easy, constructing a compelling plot, and subplots; character development that makes the reader root hard for and/or against the good and/or bad guys; lyrical prose that makes sentences sing; settings that invite the reader into new worlds, or paint new pictures of familiar ones. Plus, social relevance that connects the fiction to reality. Narrative tension to keep those pages turning. Pacing that holds the reader in the palm of the author’s invisible hand. A compelling beginning. A satisfying ending. Oh, and everything in between.

Most novelists get something right. Many get some things right. Very few novelists—Hanff Korelitz among them, as she has proven in her previous 10 books, including the 2021 novel The Plot —weave all these qualities into a welcoming net its readers can fall back into with grateful abandon, trusting the book and its author have the strength of purpose to hold them.

The Latecomer introduces us to the Oppenheimer family before they’ve become one. Salo and Johanna meet as teenagers, at the funeral of a friend who was killed in a car accident. The driver was Salo Oppenheimer.

“Our parents met in central New Jersey, in a conservative synagogue that looked like a brutalist government building somewhere in the Eastern Bloc.”…“Even then, nobody blamed him. Nobody!...It was somehow held by all present in the synagogue…that Salo Oppenheimer’s brand-new Laredo had been traveling at an eminently reasonable speed down a perfectly respectable road when it hit a loose rock and—abruptly, incomprehensibly—flipped. It was as if the hand of God itself had picked up that vehicle and dropped it back to earth.”

State of privilege established, the novel traces the patterning of Salo and Johanna’s relationship as first evidenced during their courtship. “Salo had known it was absurd to be a young man, in the 1970s (when even women were shrugging off old ideas about promiscuity), but he’d felt incapable of crossing that abyss. Johanna took charge of the whole thing, somehow, meaning that he was not required to do anything but be accommodating.”

Johanna’s role thereby becomes more pivotal, and more complex. “From this moment forward it was all going to be about our father, and the great purpose of her life would be to love him enough to relieve him of his great burden, and to free him from that one, terrible shard of time in which he was so unfairly trapped, and to salve at last that wound of his, that one that wouldn’t heal.”

In 1979, now married, the Oppenheimers buy a house on the then-sketchy Brooklyn Esplanade. “She was a girl from suburban New Jersey. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was where John Travolta went to the disco…and where gangs on the subway roamed at will.” In an early experiment with IVF, they birth triplets, Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally, who are sent to New York’s finest private schools.

Over the decades, Salo loses interest in family life and throws himself into the modern art world, while Johanna becomes increasingly desperate to coax her mutually antipathetic triplets into providing her the picture-perfect family she wishes for, and pretends to have.

“When Harrison called Lewyn fat and Sally put Harrison’s chess medal (which came not from Walden, where everyone got a medal, but from the Brooklyn Chess League, where you actually had to win in order to get a medal) in the garbage, or Harrison lifted not one finger to help his brother conquer homesickness at summer camp—our mother refused to attach great importance to any of these things, because…she maintained the fragile notion that all three of her children were devoted to one another.”

One of the many delights of The Latecomer is its author’s adroit handling of the era, locations, and demographic in which the novel is set. Clearly, Korelitz has thoughts and feelings, strong ones, about the personal/psychological theme of her story: the ways in which parents are shaped by their own childhood traumas, and necessarily pass them on, despite their massive, often backfiring efforts not to. Korelitz seems equally passionate about the story’s social/political theme: the narcissistic hypocrisies of wealthy New York’s contemporary creative class.

“The Walden School…represented…the bright shining lie of progressive education. At Walden, they’d been taught about the European genocide against Native Americans, about the enslavement of Africans, about eugenics and lynch mobs and the unmitigated evil of the Republican Party, all while fanning the flame of their own goodness.”

The Latecomer is not a plot-driven, action-fueled novel. The story line doesn’t gallop from start to finish; rather, it moves with the stolid intentionality of the hooves of horse-drawn carriages clip-clopping on cobblestones, returning to their feed bags near New York’s Plaza Hotel. The story line of this satiric, incisive, comical, 439-page New York novel hangs on the two tragedies that bookend it: the opening disaster that lays the groundwork for the plot, and the final, shocking yet inevitable tragedy that closes it.

There are many pages in between, but the masterful skills of the author ensure that the reader won’t be waiting impatiently for the next plot point. Rather, the reader is most likely to close the book disappointed that Hanff Korelitz hasn’t yet supplied another 439 pages of laughter, head-slapping, pure delight, and possibly self-recognition to savor.

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Review: ‘The Latecomer’ skewers wealth and privilege

“The Latecomer” by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books)

Wealthy, dysfunctional families are so common in novels that it’s easy to dismiss books centered around them. Don’t make that mistake with “The Latecomer,” which introduces readers to the Oppenheimers, a New York family with triplets born via IVF who were “in full flight from one another as far back as their ancestral petri dish.”

The novel’s title contains the key to the story, a fourth child added to the family as the triplets leave home for college. Hers is the distinct narrative voice of the novel and it’s a pleasure to read. Her sharing of the family history and her role in its reconciliation drive the plot. About her mother, Johanna, a dutiful spouse committed to creating a family with her husband, Salo, as a way to find happiness after he killed two fellow Cornell students in a car accident, she writes: “This was the flaw in making a bargain with yourself. There is no one else there to agree to the terms.”

The beauty of the novel’s structure is that the aha moments are revealed slowly, during detailed recountings of each of the family members’ lives. We don’t even learn the name of the title character until about a quarter of the way through the book and connections are made between characters until the final page. It makes for a very satisfying read.

In addition to grief and guilt, the book tackles other weighty themes as seen through the eyes of the privileged family. Religion factors prominently when one of the triplets, Lewyn, rooms with a Mormon his freshman year at Cornell. “He was thoroughly ignorant, of course, about the vast and foreign territory known as ‘upstate New York,’” writes Korelitz, “where people lived without reference to Brooklyn Heights or even Manhattan… The notion that something had actually happened in this backwoods wilderness which was of critical interest to millions of people around the world would come as something of a shock.”

Race plays a critical role as well, when the triplet named Harrison meets a Black conservative during the first stop in his educational journey, a fictional institution called Roarke in the woods of New Hampshire. That character, with the pitch perfect name Eli Absalom Stone, serves as a reflection point not only for Harrison, but for the rest of the family as they grapple with identity and cultural appropriation.

If it all sounds very heavy and serious, the reading experience is the opposite. The wry and incisive narrative voice and the hope it conveys for her family and by extension, those of us readers in the real world whose issues are closely mirrored in the novel, make the time and effort well worth it.

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THE LATECOMER

by Jean Hanff Korelitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2022

A bit slow in the middle section but on balance, a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations.

A fatal car crash sets the stage for a fraught marriage and family life.

Drifting through his privileged existence, 20-year-old Salo Oppenheimer is further unmoored after a Jeep he’s driving flips and kills two passengers. On a subsequent trip to Europe, a rapturous encounter with a Cy Twombly painting launches his passionate engagement with cutting-edge art. He’s less engaged with Johanna Hirsch, even though he marries her (it’s expected) and, after three childless years, agrees to IVF, which results in four embryos and the birth of triplets Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally. Salo’s real life is in the Brooklyn warehouse where he keeps his art collection—and with Stella, a fellow survivor of the crash whom he meets again some years later; soon they are lovers and have a son. Korelitz deftly limns this tension-riddled setup and the resulting Oppenheimer family dysfunction. Harrison, supersmart and arrogant, looks down on his siblings. Shut-off Lewyn seems to have imbibed his brother’s dismissive assessment of him. Sally keeps secrets from herself and others. Johanna, wracked by a longing for connection neither her children nor husband care to fulfill, learns of Salo’s other family on the eve of the triplets’ departure for college and decides to have the fourth embryo thawed and gestated by a surrogate; Phoebe is born in June 2000, shortly before Lewyn and Sally depart for determinedly separate lives at Cornell and Harrison for an ultra-alternative school that, somewhat paradoxically, nurtures his aggressively conservative views. Part 2, which chronicles the triplets’ college years, is long and at times alienating; Korelitz makes no attempt to soften the siblings’ often mean behavior, which climaxes in an ugly scene at their 19th birthday party in September 2001. It pays off in Part 3, narrated by latecomer Phoebe, now 17 and charged with healing her family’s gaping wounds. The resolution, complete with a wedding, persuasively and touchingly affirms that even the most damaged people can grow and change.

Pub Date: May 31, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-79079-8

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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THE PRINCE OF TIDES

by Pat Conroy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 1986

A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline ), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.

Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986

ISBN: 0553381547

Page Count: 686

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986

THE BOARDWALK BOOKSHOP

by Susan Mallery ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2022

A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.

Bree is a friendly but standoffish bookstore owner who keeps everyone she knows at arm’s length, from guys she meets in bars to her friends. Mikki is a settled-in-her-routines divorced mother of two, happily a mom, gift-shop owner, and co-parent with her ex-husband, Perry. And Ashley is a young, very-much-in-love bakery owner specializing in muffins who devotes herself to giving back to the community through a nonprofit that helps community members develop skills and find jobs. When the women meet drooling over a boardwalk storefront that none of them can afford on her own, a plan is hatched to divide the space in three, and a friendship—and business partnership—is born. An impromptu celebration on the beach at sunset with champagne becomes a weekly touchpoint to their lives as they learn more about each other and themselves. Their friendship blossoms as they help each other, offering support, hard truths, and loving backup. Author Mallery has created a delightful story of friendship between three women that also offers a variety of love stories as they fall in love, make mistakes, and figure out how to be the best—albeit still flawed—versions of themselves. The men are similarly flawed and human. While the story comes down clearly on the side of all-encompassing love, Mallery has struck a careful balance: There is just enough sex to be spicy, just enough swearing to be naughty, and just enough heartbreak to avoid being cloying.

ISBN: 978-0-778-38608-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Susan Mallery

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Review: ‘The Latecomer’ skewers wealth and privilege

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One Book, One Hadassah: ‘The Latecomer’ Discussion Guide

A lingering discontent overhung each of the three, and had since they were old enough to glean their shared origin story, judge their parents, and basically make up their minds about the other two.”— The Latecomer

New York Times best-selling author Jean Hanff Korelitz’s recent book, The Latecomer , is the story of the dysfunctional Oppenheimers, a wealthy New York Jewish family struggling under the weight of secrets. Witty, thought-provoking and multifaceted, The Latecomer explores betrayal and sexuality, religion and art, sibling bonds and rivalry—but most of all it is an examination of what makes a family. Genes, birth, cohabitation? Or is it love?

Local book groups are a vital part of Hadassah for many members. If your chapter doesn’t already have one, now’s the time to start! We encourage groups to have their own discussions about The Latecomer before or after watching the virtual interview with the author . To facilitate those discussions, we present the following discussion guide.

The Latecomer opens with a funeral for the victims of a devastating car accident. How does Salo Oppenheimer, the driver of the car, react to the accident and its aftermath? Describe how the guilt from the accident shapes his life as well as the lives of his wife and children. Why do you think he won’t open up about the accident with his wife and children?
Discuss Johanna and Salo Oppenheimer’s marriage, including Johanna’s struggles with infertility and IVF journey as well as her high-risk pregnancy with the triplets. What do you think of Johanna’s “great purpose” in the marriage? The book describes her as an involved, loving mother, yet her children fault her for not seeing or meeting their individual needs. What do you think of their assessment of her parenting? Is Salo equally blamed for not meeting his children’s needs? What do you think about Johanna’s decision to have a late-in-life child, after the triplets are in college?
Descriptions of fine art run throughout The Latecomer . Indeed, a number of turning points in the story are connected in some way to art. Discuss how the different generations of Oppenheimers appreciate and/or collect art. Many of the paintings described in the book are real. Google the artworks and artists mentioned; why do you think these artists and pieces captivate Salo? Why does Salo keep his art collection hidden from his family? Other types of collections are noted in the book, including furniture and family photos. What is the author saying about the act of ownership and collecting?
What does the story of Judd Suss/Joseph Oppenheimer represent to the Oppenheimers? Why is the tale of Salo’s persecuted ancestor repeated in the book?
Author Jean Hanff Korelitz never explicitly gives a cause for the dislike that triplets Harrison, Sally and Lewyn have for each other. Based on your reading, what do you see as the source of their antipathy? Do you relate to the sibling dynamics in the book? What do you think of the triplets? Do you find any of the characters in the book likeable?
The Latecomer is narrated by one of the Oppenheimer siblings who forthrightly describes her parents’ relationships, her siblings’ contempt for each other as well as the many family secrets. Do you think she is a reliable narrator? Why or why not?
What role does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have in Lewyn’s life and quest for spirituality? What do you think Korelitz is saying about the connection between art and religion in her character’s appreciation for Mormon pageantry and imagery? How do the Oppenheimer siblings relate to their own Jewish culture and religion?<
Sally shows both attraction to and expertise in minimalism. What does her career choice to become a “finder”—decluttering houses to uncover valuable furniture—say about her? What role does hoarding play in her life? Is the author creating a connection between collecting and hoarding? Why is Sally unable to face her own sexual orientation, one of many secrets in the book?
Discuss the educational systems described in the novel. How does inherited wealth and privilege impact the Oppenheimers’ educational choices? Do you think Harrison is correct in his criticism of his progressive prep school as well as the “typical” college experience? What about his experiences and friendships at the conservative Roarke institution? Why isn’t he as critical of them? What do you think about Phoebe’s decision to attend Roarke?
What is the significance of Phoebe’s stated discomfort with not being born at the same time as her siblings? Do you agree that she was “left behind,” or is she better off than the rest of her siblings? How does the family dynamic change with the discovery of another Oppenheimer sibling?
Did the conclusion of Salo’s story come as a shock? How was it foreshadowed earlier in the book? Given his treatment of his wife and family as well as his actions at the triplets’ cataclysmic birthday party, did he “deserve” that ending?
Describe the impact of the Oppenheimer family reunion on the siblings as well as on Johanna. After nearly a lifetime of pain and betrayal, are Johanna’s healing and self-knowledge plausible? What do you think about her reaction to her husband’s long-time mistress and their son. What do you think of Phoebe’s quest to bring all the family, particularly her siblings, together?

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Review: ‘The Latecomer’ skewers wealth and privilege

By Rob Merrill, The Associated Press

Posted May 31, 2022, 3:15PM EDT.

Last Updated May 31, 2022, 3:33PM EDT.

“The Latecomer” by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books)

Rob Merrill, The Associated Press

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A Writer Recognizes Herself in Another Writer’s Story

Keziah Weir’s debut novel, “The Mythmakers,” is a fresh addition to the library of fiction about tortured literati.

A kaleidoscopic illustration containing many views of a woman in a red striped T-shirt working on a keyboard.

By Jean Hanff Korelitz

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THE MYTHMAKERS, by Keziah Weir

What navel-gazers we writers of fiction are! It’s an attribute few of us would deny, but while it most often evokes autobiography, even those of us who tend not to mine our “lived experience” are still drawn back ceaselessly into the great and fascinating murk that is … writing about writing fiction.

It should surprise no one that there is an ever-expanding genre of these self-reflective works, or that they primarily explore the constantly mutating notion of appropriation: outright plagiarism, the theft of ideas, the taking of our loved ones’ (or our unloved ones’) personal experiences (without consultation, let alone permission), the adaptation of classic texts whose authors are unreachable for comment by virtue of the fact that they are dead.

Some of us — myself included (see: “ The Plot ”) — have an insatiable appetite for stories that grapple with these issues. I am happy to report that Keziah Weir’s assured first novel, “The Mythmakers,” is a laudable addition to a reading list that already includes such standouts as Meg Wolitzer’s “ The Wife ,” Karen Dukess’s “ The Last Book Party ,” Andrew Lipstein’s “ Last Resort ” and R.F. Kuang’s new novel, “ Yellowface .” In “The Mythmakers,” most of the relevant offenses surround a recently deceased novelist named Martin Keller as a young journalist sets out to investigate a simple act of appropriation and finds something far more complex and — for any writer — infinitely more shameful.

Salale (Sal) Cannon is sharing an apartment with her college boyfriend in Brooklyn, living the dream by writing “Hamlet-lite monologues” for an online magazine (while continuing to make lunch reservations for the editor she was first hired to assist). Prone to cruelty, but blissfully ignorant of that cruelty because she is also prone to alcoholic blackouts, Sal longs to do important work but falls prey to a devious profile subject whose many lies she fails to detect. (“It is difficult to imagine how any journalist and her editorial machine could have been deceived so thoroughly by a man who, for the last decade, has been leaving a trail of nuclear bread crumbs,” a rival writer opines.) When her boyfriend, who earns the bulk of the rent money at his own post-art job, tries to support her, she can’t help thinking, “You can say that because you gave up on what you wanted.”

Shamed, fired and acting out, Sal finds a new obsession after recognizing herself in the pages of an important magazine. There she is, plain as day, in a story by Martin Keller, whom she briefly met at a literary event, now immortalized as a young and fascinating girl who charms and inspires a much older writer/protagonist. Keller made a faint mark in the 1970s with a first novel before fading from view; this story, an excerpt from a final novel, turns out to have been posthumously published.

“There is a version of my life in which that was the extent of it ,” Sal tells us. “ It was surreal, I’d say at parties, I opened up the magazine and there it was, a story about me.”

This isn’t that version.

In pursuit of redemption from personal and professional debacles, Sal heads upstate to the home of Keller’s widow, where she makes the case that a revival of Keller’s work is possible and that she is the right person to set it in motion. Sal’s real goal, however, is to confirm her own importance to the dead author’s unseen final novel, and her combination of youthful and writerly narcissism makes this a perfectly good reason to insinuate herself into the life of a grieving woman: “That I’d found myself in his fiction had to mean something.”

Once ensconced, however, Sal spins her wheels (she is carless and has to bike long distances), snoops, clinically observes the end of her relationship back home in Brooklyn and gradually realizes that her wish to discover Martin Keller’s “truth” is “being granted through a kaleidoscope.” Therein lies the great fun of this novel.

It is a fear universally acknowledged among writers that someone else will write and publish “our” work before we ourselves can get it finished. For the young Martin Keller, we learn, this has happened when a small literary magazine publishes a short story containing elements of his own work in progress. (He also dreams that Martin Amis has written “his” — that is, Keller’s — novel: “I realized it had his name on it. I kept trying to scratch the Amis off.”) This sadly Everyman novelist will also be outraged when he discovers that another writer has “appropriated” him , albeit incorrectly: “You didn’t just steal it from me,” he tells the offending party. “You got it wrong, too.”

Like many a writer writing about writers, Weir seems to take great pleasure in laying literary mines throughout her work — “Naturally I began to picture our life together” is Sal’s response to seeing a man reading Martin Amis’s “ The Information ” in a bar called The Last Resort — and it’s only right that Meg Wolitzer’s “The Wife” should also rear its head in this story of multiple combative, creative marriages.

Weir weaves an even more appropriate conversation between “The Mythmakers” and Wolitzer’s debut novel, “ Sleepwalking ,” in which a young woman insinuates herself into the family of a dead writer for reasons not yet clear to herself. Like Wolitzer’s, Weir’s protagonist will learn the lesson of all narcissistic endeavors: that the bad behavior, mishegoss and pain of another person’s life have, in the end, absolutely nothing to do with us.

Jean Hanff Korelitz’s latest novel, “The Latecomer,” just came out in paperback.

THE MYTHMAKERS | By Keziah Weir | 368 pp. | Marysue Rucci Books | $28

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35th Anniversary Edition of The Latecomer

Sarah aldridge.

137 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1974

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I picked up The Latecomer because I loved Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel The Plot (review hopefully coming soon.) The Latecomer is not a thriller like The Plot but I liked it just as much. It asks the ... Read full review

Triplets Lewyn, Sally, and Harrison are the much-wanted product of their mother's IVF. Johanna, their mother, dotes on them, but is oblivious to them as actual people. She insists that they love each ... Read full review

The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings – Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally – feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer” play in this fractured family?

A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.

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The Latecomer, Jean Hanff Korelitz, author; Julia Whelan, narrator Joanna Oppenheimer is a totally devoted wife determined to bring comfort to her husband. She also wants to be a mother and ... (read more)

The Oppenheimer triplets we’re born during the early days of IVF. The story is being told by Phoebe, the last egg that had been frozen and implanted about 17 years later. The book does not... (read more)

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June 9, 2023

Achtung, baby: Is Jenny Erpenbeck’s tale of doomed romance the new Great German Novel?

If the German novel as a category exists, its undisputed star in America at the moment is Jenny Erpenbeck.

By Jenny Erpenbeck Translated by Michael Hofmann New Directions: 336 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

It feels a little strange to talk about the modern German novel as an idea. Two world wars, genocide, a new surveillance state: as German identity has been riven again and again by historical events in the last century, what continuities can we expect from its fiction? Perhaps fittingly, the greatest novelist in the language during the peak of the Modernist novel wasn’t German at all: Kafka .

Inasmuch as the German novel exists, however, its undisputed star in America at the moment is Jenny Erpenbeck . She’s a writer with a roving, furious, brilliant mind, and in her best-known books, including “ Go, Went, Gone ,” about a retired professor drawn into the refugee crisis, she fuses the emotional and historic in a way that suggests a new path for — well, the German novel.

Book jacket for author Jenny Offill¹s "Weather"

Review: The right novel for the end of the world

Jenny Offill’s lapidary masterwork, “Weather,” is about unstable climates and families.

Now, in her severe but rewarding “ Kairos ,” Erpenbeck has done it again, carefully mapping the disintegration of an East German love affair onto the era just before the 1990 reunification of Germany . The book bears with it, as so startlingly few novels seem to when you encounter one that does, the absolute urgency of existential questions. Questions that encompass both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of S&M.

“Kairos” is the story of a Berlin couple — Hans in his late 50s and Katharina in her late teens by the time they fall in love. An equivalent American novel would likely be about this age gap; to whatever extent Erpenbeck may be interested in the subject, she scarcely mentions it, instead treating the love affair with the deadly seriousness that both of its participants do. This credulity suggests the story may be autobiographical, as does Katharina’s job working in a theater around the end of East Germany, something Erpenbeck also did . (Her essay on that time, “ Homesick for Sadness ,” is worth seeking out.)

Hans is married, but he is in love with Katharina (as I can hear them both insisting to me) and behaves like a teenager, both in his passion and in his bullying jealousy. As for Katharina, she imprints on Hans so deeply that even late in the novel, after they’ve had difficulties, she can still think, “Like a chestnut and its hull, so close does she feel to Hans … one a complement of the other, one the original of the other.”

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Erpenbeck writes “Kairos” in a skillfully volleying point of view that subsumes the perspectives of both its leads. It’s a way of showing their love dynamically, not as he-said, she-said, or he-thought, she-thought, but they-felt — a hybrid consciousness. “Two bodies lie stretched out side by side in the dark. It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way, thinks Katharina.” The problem is that the chestnut and its hull are different, as this line shows. This lingering gap between two people who want to find all of life’s meaning in each other is the book’s tragedy.

The book cover of 'Kairos' by Jenny Erpenbeck

For long stretches, “Kairos” is an impressive but claustrophobic love story. Then, however, the slow irruption of history into Hans and Katharina’s lives gives Erpenbeck the chance to introduce the larger ideas she’s writing for: dissolution, union, the limits of human connection. Like Hans, she seems hugely invested in the “tired old state” of the DDR. (“Someone put in a request for a telephone twenty-five years ago,” the book notes dryly at one point.)

Through this lens, Hans is parallel to the socialist state — “first they were all young,” he recalls of the birth of the new East Germany , “then they had babies together, married, separated, fell in love, became enemies, friends, plotted or practiced withdrawal” — while Katharina, young and in love but uncertain, embodies a new generation that can love the East and covet the West simultaneously.

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It’s been a broken, chaotic year in life and in fiction. Authors such as Hernan Diaz and Namwali Serpell broke their novels and heroes into pieces.

But any definitive reading of “Kairos” in those terms would be reductive. In truth, the book’s central character is neither of the rather thinly drawn leads, but Erpenbeck’s mind, which patrols the borders of bourgeois assumption like a crossing agent, invoking Hölderlin, Gorky , Bukharin , Mozart and Brecht , wrestling with love and time. The book’s setting 30-odd years ago comes to dovetail with that age gap’s built-in sense of evanescence. “Today and tomorrow, and then she’ll be gone,” Hans thinks. “Then the thing that today still passes for ‘now’ will be over.”

Above all, Erpenbeck’s books are filled with Germany. History is everywhere there, she tells us — strewn recklessly and jaggedly around, like the glass in an Anselm Kiefer . All countries have tragedies, but Germany seems almost designed to produce them, and as the nation-state dissolves into a world state of technology, perhaps we will grow to wonder at the pain it inflicted on us. As Erpenbeck writes of Katharina, in a remarkable passage that illuminates the beautiful fatalism of this difficult and interesting book, “She cannot remember a time in her life when she didn’t know that in Germany, death is not the end of everything but the beginning … there is no other walking, ever, for a German, than over skulls, eyes, mouths, and skeletons.”

Finch’s novels include the Charles Lenox mysteries.

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To kick off this summer reading season, I'm recommending two suspense novels that gleefully overturn the age-old "woman-in-trouble" plot.

Megan Abbott is a superstar of the suspense genre who's generated a host of bestsellers like The Turnout and Dare Me , which was made into a series for Netflix. But what Abbott's fans may not know is that she holds a doctoral degree in literature and wrote a dissertation on the figure of the macho "tough-guy" in the mysteries of writers like Dashiell Hammett , James M. Cain and Chester Himes . In other words, Abbott is one smart dame when it comes to sussing out the sexism inherent in those mysteries that so many of us love.

Her latest novel is called Beware the Woman and it's inspired, not so much by hardboiled mysteries, but by another hallowed suspense genre: the Gothic, which almost always features a woman running in terror through the halls of a maze-like mansion. As this novel's title suggests, maybe it's the men here who should start running.

At the outset of Beware the Woman , our narrator, a 30-something pregnant woman named Jacy, is driving with her new husband, Jed, deep into the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. They're going to visit Jed's widowed father, a retired physician named Doctor Ash, whom Jacy has only met once, fleetingly. In fact, Jacy married Jed only a few months after they first met, but she's so in love she feels she's known him forever.

"Honey, ... we all marry strangers," Jacy's mom wearily told her on the day of the wedding. In this case, mother really does know best.

The family "cottage," as Jed had called it, turns out to be much grander, "[l]ike a hunting lodge in an old movie." And, inside, in addition to Doctor Ash, the lodge is occupied by a caretaker, the chilly Mrs. Brandt who, halfway into the novel tersely mutters to Jacy, "Maybe you should go home." Too late. By then Jacy is having problems with her pregnancy and the bedrest Doctor Ash and his physician friend have prescribed is beginning to feel like house arrest.

If you detected strains of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic masterpiece, Rebecca , in that plot summary, you'd be half right: Beware the Woman is Rebecca wedded to Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid's Tale . Along with the feverish psychological twists and turns that Abbott's novels are celebrated for, Beware the Woman explores the timely topic of women's autonomy over their own bodies, especially during pregnancy.

Katie Williams also riffs on some hallowed traditions in her ingenious debut suspense novel called, My Murder . I'm thinking here of noir films like Sunset Boulevard and D.O.A., whose voiceovers are narrated by dead men talking. In the very first sentence of Williams' novel, a young wife and mother named Lou tells us: "I was supposed to be getting dressed for the party, the first since my murder." (1)

It's hard to move on from that arresting first sentence, but eventually we readers learn that Lou — along with some other women identified as victims of the same serial killer — have been brought back to life by a government-funded "replication commission" (17) that grew them from the cells of their murdered originals.

Williams is adept at swirling sci-fi and domestic suspense plotlines into this unpredictable tale. For instance, one night Lou's husband, Silas, arrives home to tell her one of his work mates has alerted him to a new virtual reality game:

"It's a game of you, " [Silas] said woodenly . . . . "Of your murder, Lou." He put his hands to his face. "I'm so sorry. Someone made a game out of your murder." (109)