Five Reviews That Frame the Week: Debs, Trapido, O'Gieblyn

By Marcus Bennett

Five critics passed judgment this week on five very different books, and the verdicts ranged from pocket classic to near-miss. Book Marks, Lit Hub's review aggregator, collected the batch: Joanna Scutts in The New Republic, Dwight Garner in The New York Times, Rhian Sasseen in The Baffler, Lily Meyer in The Atlantic, and Max Callimanopulos in The New Yorker.

What did the critics actually say?

Shawn Gude's American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs leads the list. Joanna Scutts frames the biography around a contemporary question: what can the history of American socialism tell us about democratic politics after Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani's election as New York mayor? Gude, a former Jacobin editor, argues through the life of Debs that, in Scutts's words, "in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism." She credits the book with revealing that reinvention "will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people."

Dwight Garner takes the warmest line of the week. Reviewing the reissued Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido in The New York Times, he calls it "a pocket classic, a book that takes life seriously, earns its emotions and befriends the reader without getting all gooey about anything at all." The title, an allusion to William Butler Yeats's brother Jack, a talented painter, may have cost the book its audience, Garner suggests. His verdict on the author is blunt: "We should have been talking about Barbara Trapido all along." The dialogue, he writes, is "Stoppard-level."

Can a memoir of addiction escape the genre?

Rhian Sasseen argues in The Baffler that Meghan O'Gieblyn's Will and Attention does. The memoir, set mostly around the time of the pandemic, traces O'Gieblyn's relapse into alcoholism alongside her unexpected return toward Catholicism years after renouncing religion. Drawing on Simone Weil, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Catholic theology, O'Gieblyn "produces an addiction memoir that transcends the form," Sasseen writes, one that sidesteps the pitfall of viewing addiction "merely through the lens of disease or choice."

Lily Meyer, in The Atlantic, praises Madeline ffitch's Avalon, Rise as "a sophisticated novel, intellectually complex and slyly funny at every turn." The book braids the story of a town driving out white supremacists with the structures of children's literature — Abiyoyo, Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, The Dead Bird. Meyer's assessment is unambiguous: in fusing a clear moral code with genuine complication, "ffitch has written a remarkable book."

Is Tom McCarthy's method running dry?

The sharpest dissent comes from Max Callimanopulos in The New Yorker. Tom McCarthy's The Rhyl Poster, he argues, recycles the machinery of Satin Island and trades in jargon — "networks and spreads," "contrafluvial vectors" — that beats the reader down "with their elaborate banality." The plot seemed "at once frantically busy and totally empty." Yet the review turns: only after finishing did the book "start to grow on me," Callimanopulos admits, and he closes by noting that McCarthy appears to be moving toward "another kind of book: one that stops trying to X-ray bureaucracies and institutions and starts, more simply, looking at the world."

What does this change for readers?

It sets the autumn nonfiction and fiction agenda. Trapido's reissue gives a 1982-era comic novel a second hearing in the paper of record, while the divided McCarthy verdict signals that one of Britain's most-discussed novelists now faces real critical resistance. Readers choosing among the five will find one emphatic endorsement, one qualified admiration, and one fascinating quarrel — a useful map of where serious criticism stands this week.