Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

The Renoir Girls, by Catherine Ostler (Atria). This sweeping biography of the daughters of a French Jewish banking dynasty—who were painted by Renoir, and counted Proust as a family friend—unfolds in parallel worlds: a glittering Paris of privilege, and a Paris where widespread poverty and political instability fuelled profound social anxiety. Ostler traces a thread of anti-Jewish hatred through both worlds, as she illustrates how the sisters’ rarefied existence was frequently marred by bursts of prejudice. In 1882, shortly after completing the girls’ portraits, for instance, Renoir declared that he was “washing my hands of the Jews.” As Ostler shows, his stated reasons were vague and irrelevant. Renoir was merely a “cork in the current” of antisemitism.

Little Blue Dot, by Katherine Dunn (Bloomsbury). Dunn’s thoroughly engaging history of the Global Positioning System opens in the early years of the Second World War, with the discovery that the Germans were using radio waves to bomb targets sight unseen. The British response—attempting to manipulate the Germans’ system while developing a more sophisticated one of their own—sets the stage for the technological arms race that would eventually produce G.P.S. and its rivals. As Dunn follows that race through the decades, she explores the physics behind G.P.S., and its strange duality: if the technology is now an almost invisible feature of civilian life, it also remains a “military product, one designed to drop enormously powerful bombs with staggering precision.”

Illustration by Henri Campeã

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Air, by Christian Kracht, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles (Liveright). Two story lines anchor this novel: one centered on a present-day designer with a Luddism-inflected aesthetic, and one that takes place in a fantastical realm where a young girl accidentally shoots a man she has mistaken for a deer. In the first plot, the designer disappears during a solar storm while working on a project in Norway. In the second, the girl and the man run from soldiers sent by a malevolent ruler. In that reality, people live on what they forage and kill; they wear shared clothes; they don’t have inventions like mirrors or—crucially—antibiotics. Though this world lacks the twenty-first-century trappings that so bothered the designer, its brutalities also suggest that nostalgia for the pre-modern is a knife that cuts both ways.

I Want You to Be Happy, by Jem Calder (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). “A new person finding you interesting makes you feel new.” So reflects one of the protagonists of this intimate novel, which follows the relationship between two creative aspirants in London—a young woman working as a barista while nursing dreams of poetry, and a slightly older man who is a copywriter, but hopes to become a novelist. The two meet at a bar one night, then go home together. As Calder tracks the course of their romance, from the careful texting of its early days to reckonings with the characters’ darker elements—the copywriter, it emerges, drinks excessively—he gives the perennial human features of self-sabotage and solipsism a fresh look.

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