Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

A Terrible Intimacy, by Melvin Patrick Ely (Holt). This history, by a Bancroft Prize winner, analyzes six trials that took place in Prince Edward County, Virginia, between 1825 and 1861, illuminating the complexity of interracial relationships in the slaveholding South. Ely calls upon a wide range of sources to illustrate the ways in which physical proximity between enslavers and enslaved people created “crosscurrents of community life,” including moments of recreation, socializing, trade, and sex. His most compelling observations arise from smaller details he teases out of the trials’ testimony, which capture the texture of the everyday—from how people travelled at night to the manner in which they kept time.

This Is Not About Running, by Mary Cain (HarperCollins). In the U.S., running is a sport marked by the achievements of female teen-age prodigies, who set impossible records and then disappear. In this memoir, Cain, arguably the greatest high-school runner of all time, recounts how her success led to bullying from teammates and their parents and online attacks from men who dissected her prepubescent sex appeal. She also details the abuse she faced at the hands of Alberto Salazar, the now disgraced former head of Nike’s distance-running program, whom she left her high-school team to work with when she was sixteen. As Cain describes her decision to walk away from the sport, the book becomes a rejoinder to the fifteen-plus years of vitriol she faced during her career.

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Illustration by Henri Campeã

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The Summer Boy, by Philippe Besson, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Scribner). “I have a feeling that nothing will ever be the same again, that my adolescence is over,” the eighteen-year-old protagonist of this bildungsroman, Philippe, remarks as he and his parents descend upon the island where they summer each year. Though the terrain is familiar, uncharted interpersonal dynamics emerge among Philippe and his vacation friends as they navigate budding love and the sense of imminent loss. Philippe observes that he and his cohort are “so preoccupied with our own pleasure, our own worries” that they often fail to heed other people’s “distress signals.” For the first time, Philippe and his peers face the consequences of their egocentrism, and begin to understand “the darkness of the human soul.”

The Children, by Melissa Albert (Morrow). As this lightly speculative novel begins, its protagonist, Guinevere Sharpe, has just published a memoir about being the daughter of an enigmatic children’s-book author, who died before she could complete a celebrated series of novels about a shadowy figure who extracts children’s dreams to create fantasy worlds. The launch coincides with news that Guinevere’s brother, from whom she has long been estranged, will soon open an art installation titled “Mother” at a gallery. Albert’s prose sometimes strains for lyricism, but the mysteries embedded in the novel—creative, familial, and supernatural—exert a powerful draw.

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