Few things bother Nell Freudenberger more than the way girls and women are still so often held back from studying science. For her new novel, Lost and Wanted, which follows Helen, an eminent theoretical physicist and single mother, as she mourns the death of her closest friend, Freudenberger set out to teach herself as much physics as she could. Growing up in New York City, she was, like so many other young women, encouraged to believe she didn’t “have the right kind of brain for it”. After doing badly in a maths test in her teens, she was told by a teacher that she might as well quit, and by the time she reached Harvard, hoping to study medicine, she was so far behind that “I couldn’t even take a remedial math class”.
Abandoning the idea of medical school, she travelled in Asia after college, teaching English for a year in Thailand, and then found early success as a writer, publishing her first story in the New Yorker in her mid-20s after being discovered during an internship there. She hopes her own two children will keep going with maths, “especially my daughter”, but fears they won’t. “It breaks my heart,” she says of the new book, “to see people on social media, especially women, saying: ‘I’d like to read this book but I’m a little intimidated, it sounds like it might be hard.’ Please give it a chance. It doesn’t have to be my book; you can read any of the books in the acknowledgments, just read one and prove to yourself that you can understand it. Someone has told you you can’t.”
The central irony of my life remains that my stutter, which at times caused so much suffering, is also responsible for my obsession with language. Without it I would not have been driven to write, to create rhythmic sentences easier to speak and to read. A fascination with words thrust me into a vocation that has kept me aflame with a desire to communicate. As a little girl, I hoped my stutter would let me into the secret world of animals. As an adult, given a kind listener, I am privy to something just as elusive: a direct pathway to the human heart.
When I try to recall what mourning feels like — the immediate aftermath of a death, I mean, the days and weeks, and months that follow — I can only grasp the edges of memories. Grief can be a kind of deadening, a latching onto the past in order to fill in the gaps left by the person who has died or exited our lives. Yet life goes on, no matter how absent from it a mourner may feel. It's in this precarious emotional space that Kristen Arnett's debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, is set. But lest you cringe at what sounds like a difficult read, this isn't a depressing book: it's darkly funny, both macabre and irreverent, and its narrator is so real that every time I stopped reading the book, I felt a tiny pull at the back of my mind, as if I'd left a good friend in the middle of a conversation.
It would be easy to dismiss City of Girls as joyous escapism, and God knows there’s little enough of that around right now. But look more closely and what you’ll see is an eloquently persuasive treatise on the judgment and punishment of women, and a heartfelt call to reclaim female sexual agency. “At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time,” says Vivian as she looks back on her life. “After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.” Let’s hope Gilbert is right.
Richard J Williams begins his study in what was once one of the greatest trading cities on earth: Venice. He feels that, as someone who knows art history, he should relish the experience of walking around its architectural splendours. Instead he admits: “I hate Venice” – a city that clings to the image of gentle decay and aestheticised ruination that first attracted 18th-century tourists. Prevented from modernising by its heritage status, it is today defined by the circulation of tourists: “The true spectacle of the contemporary Venice is the tourist industry itself.”
In this slim and insightful book, Williams explores cities as the function of financial, social and political processes rather than as the result of “design and intention”. His focus is on the cities that aim to attract capital from across the world with glitzy shopping malls, bars, restaurants and galleries that feel disconcertingly similar from Beijing to New York.