This past year, I moved cross-country from the small tenement apartment where I grew up, in the process moving away from my mother. Predictably, I waited until the last few days before packing my things. My mother stayed up for hours with me to help nestle bubble-wrapped jars of dried red dates, goji berries, and preserved black beans into cardboard boxes. We went to the store together to pick out my first wok, and she remembered all the herbs and Lee Kum Kee sauces I would need that I would surely have forgotten. After we had loaded the moving truck, we hugged each other close to say goodbye, our dog nervously jumping and pawing us, not understanding. We didn’t know how long it would be until it was safe to see each other again, but she wanted me to leave with the tastes and smells of home. When reading Michelle Zauner’s new memoir, Crying in H Mart, I saw so much of my own mother in hers — the meticulous attention she paid to the people she loved, caring for you by remembering the “preferences that made you, you.”
“Fiction has a new star in its firmament” gushes Carol Ann Duffy on the cover of Yes Yes More More. And for once, such praise is substantial — and deserved. There is indeed something glistering, hard-edged and remote about these stories; but they hold, too, a woozy wonder, a sense of dream-like possibility. After all, we prod the night sky with telescopes and satellites. But our first response is perhaps the most honest: to lie back, to stare.
Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake is a novel so comprehensively steeped in American literary history that it comes as something of a surprise to find that its author is a fortysomething from Surrey. It’s as if Lee, whose three superb earlier novels include a reimagining of the IRA bombing of the Grand hotel in Brighton, has distilled more than a century of American letters into a single book.
Peace can be an uneven writer, but he’s somewhere near his best in this powerful, overwhelming novel, in which genre excitement steadily gives way to the uncannier frisson of being plugged into a current of secret knowledge.