Barkan's Briefly Noted, Vol. 3

Reviews of new novels

In the New York Times, I wrote on the Paul Wellstone legacy and how it connects to Tim Walz. In the Nation, I wrote on the scandal-scarred Eric Adams. And I got the chance to chat with Ethan Strauss about Kamala Harris and 2024 oddities. Have a listen!

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For earlier editions of Barkan’s Briefly Noted, my occasional series of book reviews, here’s Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis (Arcade Publishing)

Alt-lit. Internet lit. Dimes Square lit. It is either about digital life or the consciousness consumed by it; it is disdainful, usually, of conventional narrative. It favors the deadpan, the pared down. It is modernism without ornamentation; it is like The Waves, except disdainful, in my own view, of the English language. Largely absent ambition, it is also, more importantly, bereft of beauty. Of this wave of twenty-first century novels—Honor Levy’s My First Book and Gabriel Smith’s Brat come to mind, as does Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi and the works of Tao Lin—the most readable, and perhaps the best, is Matthew Davis’ Let Me Try Again. Davis’ debut novel is redeemable because he is funny. The blurbs on the novel nod to Philip Roth and Woody Allen, but the writing owes far more to early Bret Easton Ellis, if Davis never raises the stakes like Ellis or the Roth who wrote the exuberant, masturbatory Portnoy. The protagonist of Let Me Try Again is 23-year-old Ross Mathcamp (yes, that’s the name), a Jewish yuppie from Los Angeles who now lives on Roosevelt Island. He is a deeply neurotic prude who is obsessed with new gadgets and pop cultural ephemera. He loves, of course, Woody Allen movies (since Allen was cancelled, and slurs like “retard” and references to autism are peppered throughout, you know you’re in for a Dimes Square-inflected production) and he pines for his ex-girlfriend, a wealthy Manhattanite he originally dumped in some failed psychological ploy to make her mature and love him more. Ross’ affluent, car dealership-owning parents die in a helicopter crash, and suddenly he is rich. The thrust of the novel is Ross’ bid to win his ex back, though the narrative engine never really revs up and the climax is forgettable. Instead, we’re treated to a variety of set pieces, as well as ethnic and religious quips, and they can be amusing. At one point, Ross’ wunderkind teen sister converts to Catholicism (some Dimes Square personalities are performatively Catholic in a bid, it seems, to subvert social justice liberalism) and Davis is either satirizing the rad-trads or sotto voce cheering them on. I’m not sure which. But I did laugh when Ross, told that the elevator to his penthouse condo isn’t functioning, demands that the doorman carry him up all thirty-something flights. Davis, who is still young, may have a stronger novel in him, and I’ll be on the lookout for what he publishes next. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking about the viral trend taking Ross’ world by storm, the “Dershowitz shuffle,” whatever that may be.

What the Dead Can Say by Philip Graham

I have wondered whether my dead father visited me in dreams. This is, if you talk to enough Americans, an unremarkable thought to have, but one I never would have entertained before 2023. My father, an atheist to his core, would have laughed at the idea. Though we were very much alike, I was always more drawn to the paranormal and spiritual; I went through phases reading whole books on alien encounters, and I could never not believe in ghosts. The dreams that came after my father’s death were resonant in a manner entirely unlike any I had experienced before. I felt, oddly, that I was meeting him again, and when I awoke, I could only feel contentment. This was in stark contrast to how I’d lament, especially as a child, that a great dream I had was in fact not real. This time, I wasn’t sad when I woke up and my father wasn’t alive. Rather, I was glad, in my unconscious, we had found a meeting place.

The premise of Philip Graham’s stirring new novel is that there are ghosts all around us. Told from the perspective of alternating spirits but centering on Jenny, who fell down the stairs at age three and promptly died, What the Dead Can Say is one of the more remarkable meditations on death I’ve ever read. The afterlife is simply our world. The ghosts cannot be seen or heard by the living, but they are permitted to observe everything. A dead entomologist shrinks herself to the size of the ants she so loved in life. A dead newspaper reporter continues to carry out her own investigations, narrating exposés to herself. A man who died escaping slavery lingers around a town hundreds of years later, hoping for reincarnation in his homeland thousands of miles away. The ghosts do not experience hunger or thirst, but they know love, sorrow, and even lust. Jenny is the “hungry” ghost, able to absorb the stories of the spirits she comes into contact with, gaining wisdom far beyond the short years she experienced when alive. Her power—and ultimate burden—is to watch over the childhood and adolescence of the sister she never met, the child her parents conceived after her death. Graham is an elegant writer, his craft and care evident; I was tugged, happily, all the way through. The book itself is largely blank and blurb-less, and Graham has been dropping off copies at Little Free Libraries across America. It’s a fascinating project.

Vivienne by Emmalea Russo (Arcade Publishing)

Vivienne Volker is the collaborator and lover of Hans Bellmer, an artist who began making and photographing a famous series of peculiar adolescent female dolls in the 1930s. Volkner, now past eighty, is an artist herself, known chiefly for designing provocative clothes for the dolls, clothes that have developed a following of their own. Vivienne, the poet Emmalea Russo’s first novel, follows Vivienne’s resurgence and downfall; in 2023, she is selected for a feminist galley of forgotten female Surrealists and then promptly canceled by something called CAHR or the “Coalition for Artistic Harm Reduction.” Her artistic transgressions include “amputation” and “anxiety” and “animal abuse” and Russo is acidly funny when offering this send-up of a cultural moment that is leaving us but very much held elites captive for the last decade. The heart of the novel is the rural Pennsylvania retreat where Vivienne lives with her forty-something daughter, Velour, and Velour’s daughter, Vesta, along with Vivienne’s sanitation worker boyfriend who is half her age. The novel is peppered with text messages, comment threads, and other reproductions of digital life I could have done without; Russo is a talented enough writer to leave us with her characters, their interiority, and one of the best scenes might have been when Vivienne takes her granddaughter to church. Eventually, Vivienne ends up at a new gallery, and the outcome is much darker. Vivienne is an intriguing exegesis of our current cultural moment and what potentially waits on the horizon. By novel’s end, we are vaulted to an eerie, unsettling future, with Vesta attempting to see her grandmother one final time.