Five Book Reviews Worth Your Time: Hanawalt, Harbach, Bennett

Lisa Hanawalt's I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex leads this week's review roundup, with five critics taking on new books from Hanawalt, Chad Harbach, Claire-Louise Bennett, Meghan O'Gieblyn and K Ming Chang. The selections come via Book Marks, Lit Hub's review aggregator. The verdicts are largely admiring, with reservations. Some are very admiring indeed.

What did Sam Thielman make of Hanawalt?

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Sam Thielman praises Hanawalt's graphic work as "not a book of short stories, but 'memoir' feels too narrow." The book mixes jokey vignettes, silent sketch pages and "striking, Hockney-esque paintings."

Thielman notes the book's tonal risks. "Sometimes Hanawalt's perspective veers into the horrifying, and the transition from Richard Scarry to Extremely Scary can be shocking," he writes. He laughed hardest at an eroticized Mister Rogers. He also flags the book's structural trick: Hanawalt's depictions of events "often contradict her character's assessments of them."

The companion figure is Juniper, whose emotional avoidance Thielman sums up with a dry kicker: "She isn't crying. She's just a little horse."

Is Chad Harbach's The Brightness defending the realist novel?

B. D. McClay, in The New Yorker, finds Harbach's characters dismissing ambitious realism as "mashed-potato realism" — inside a large realist novel of Harbach's own. McClay calls the fictional models cited within the text, including Wharton's "The Pelian" [sic] and Anna Karenina, attentive to social judgment.

The critique lands on Harbach's fictional Westish college, "a gentle and perhaps too-good-natured institution, where even the jocks are nerds." McClay argues this softness lets the larger social dynamics created by rape in small communities go unconsidered. The verdict on form, though, is generous: "You need only a prose style, an interest in people, and a sense of society. In art as in sports, the best defense is a good offense."

How does Claire-Louise Bennett's Kiss Kiss, Bye-Bye read in an AI age?

Meghan O'Gieblyn, in The New York Review of Books, makes the week's boldest comparison. Bennett's deliberately redundant prose recalls "a certain type of buggy LLM output known as repetition degeneration (sometimes called the 'repeat curse'), in which the model gets stuck in self-reinforcing loops."

O'Gieblyn ties this to Bennett's stated poetics. In a 2016 Paris Review interview, Bennett said: "Habit creeps into thought and cuts off other more generative possibilities." The novel, O'Gieblyn suggests, may document "the end of a love affair with language" in a world saturated with machine-generated text, "like a currency that is devalued by inflation." Yet she returns to Bennett's narrators eagerly, preferring their raw circling consciousness to "the plodting linearity of other novels." [sic]

What is James Wood's read on O'Gieblyn's own memoir?

In a second New Yorker review, James Wood takes on O'Gieblyn's Will and Attention, an addiction memoir framed by theology. O'Gieblyn got sober, relapsed during the pandemic, and recovered — but Wood calls the book "closer to an unfinished spiritual diary than to the familiar sort of sculpted redemption story."

Wood anchors the review in Iris Murdoch's line: "God does not and cannot exist, but what led us to conceive of him does exist." He identifies the book's central torment: O'Gieblyn's sense "that the substance that has ruined her life also grants the surrender she was unable to achieve through worship." He calls it "this beautifully sober book."

Does K Ming Chang's Needlemouth repay the disgust?

Jac Jemc, also in the Times, describes Needlemouth as "a densely symbolic fairy tale and a harrowing family drama," comparing its allegorical mode to Hesse's Siddhartha and Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The novel's quest — two cousins seeking to murder Needlemouth's father — passes through worlds "filled with excrement, viscera and bodily effluence."

Jemc's verdict is precise: "every sentence is a pleasure to read, even — or perhaps especially — the most disgusting ones." The book's final question, per Jemc, is whether "the desires for destruction and for care might, in fact, be one and the same."

Five reviews, four outlets, two New Yorker critics. Readers choosing one book this week have an unusually clear map.