Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, by Tom Junod (Doubleday). In this bracing blend of memoir and detective story, Junod unearths secrets about his father. Lou Junod was a charismatic war veteran with a Purple Heart, a travelling handbag salesman, and a husband who was married to the same woman for fifty-nine years. He was also a failed singer and an inveterate philanderer. Only at Lou’s funeral, after a woman with whom Lou had an affair shows up, does Tom realize that his father’s life contained unknown mysteries. As he investigates that past, he discovers various shocks, but, ultimately, Lou’s story is one of a man who inculcated in his son an old-fashioned definition of manhood that stemmed from deep insecurity.

True Color, by Kory Stamper (Knopf). Which colors merit entries in the dictionary? Why is “duckling” a color but “mallard” is not? Stamper, a lexicographer and former editor at Merriam-Webster, charts the history of how thousands of colors came to be defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961. In her telling, the process of defining colors is intertwined with the arc of American modernization through industrialization, war, and scientific discovery. A dictionary may seem objective, but Stamper proves that it is deeply human as she highlights the personalities, disputes, drama, and enthusiasm for “brain-melting tedium on a microscopic scale” behind the work of creating one.

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Half His Age, by Jennette McCurdy (Ballantine).This consuming novel, written by a former child star who is also the author of a best-selling memoir, tackles an unsettling subject: intimacy between teen-agers and adults. Her narrator is a seventeen-year-old girl who begins a relationship with her forty-year-old writing teacher, Mr. Korgy. Though, at the outset, the girl seems to be the driver of the affair, as the story develops, it becomes apparent that she is motivated by wounds left by her absent father and by her mother, who has an “addiction” to love and sex. Eventually, her romance with the teacher is cast as just another way to cope with her pain. “Maybe it’s all the same,” she thinks. “Korgy and pants and YouTube and makeup and sweaters and junk food and sex. Maybe they’re all just distractions from me.”

Under Water, by Tara Menon (Riverhead). This melancholic début novel weaves between New York City in 2012 and a small island in the Andaman Sea in December, 2004. As a girl, the narrator lived on the island with her father, a marine biologist, and spent many of her days in the ocean with her best friend, Arielle, luxuriating in the semi-wilderness. As an adult, she works at a travel magazine, repackaging developing-world destinations with adjectives such as “pristine” and “rugged.” Her life is studded with losses—including that of her mother, and, later, of Arielle—and, as she wanders through New York, the past hovers with ghostly insistence. Above all, she mourns Arielle with a kind of longing that she feels society fails to recognize: “There is no place in our language for grief about friends, or love for them.”

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