Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

The Yahoo Boys, by Carlos Barragán (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In 2022, the author of this engrossing investigation travelled to Lagos, Nigeria, to find the person who, years earlier, ensnared his mother in an online romance scam. What he discovered was a place primed by its history and its poverty for the emergence of youths, known as Yahoo Boys, dedicated to conning Western marks using false identities, fake naked pictures, and flattery. In Barragán’s account, Nigerian public discourse casts the Yahoo life style—fuelled by drugs and extravagant spending—as a double-edged sword, both a stain on the country’s reputation and a powerful economic engine. As the book follows four Yahoos, it assembles a story of loneliness in the digital age—a loneliness that deforms scammer and scammed alike.

Unsayable, by Michael Cunningham (Random House). When this warm memoir begins, the author, a celebrated novelist, observes that the world is “sufficient unto itself. It neither knows nor cares if anyone writes about it.” Why write, then? In the pages that follow, Cunningham remembers his upbringing in middle-class suburban California, his gradual awareness of his gayness, his time as a countercultural student at Stanford, and his stints working as a hustler and a bartender, all the while elaborating writing’s many purposes—and offering guidance on how to do it well. It’s a way to entertain, to turn “ephemera into objects,” to “render and recognize everything and everyone.”

Illustration by Henri Campeã

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Sunrise, by Téa Obreht (Random House). This kaleidoscopic novel, which unfolds across three time lines, opens in 2024, with the crash of a Cessna in the mountains of Wyoming. A survivor wanders alone through the wilderness until she finds Sunrise, an abandoned old Western town. It’s the very place that, some twenty years earlier, a county local, Coll, is working tirelessly to preserve. But, when Coll meets a writer who’s similarly interested in the town’s legacy, his plans get derailed. The writer shares her manuscript—embedded within the novel and set in 1902—which contains little-known truths about Sunrise and the man who founded it, someone whom Coll had long revered. As the narratives converge, Obreht teases out the relationship between our conceptions of history and of ourselves.

Skin Contact, by Eliza Faison (Cardinal). At the outset of this funny and pensive novel, Frances, a married woman, tells her husband, Ben, that she “sort of” has a crush on a waitress—thereby kicking off their open marriage. She and Ben soon discover the joys of sleeping with other people, both together and separately. For Frances, who is thirty, the experiment is, at first, a way to help her cope with the grief of losing her mother. Then, just as she is realizing that she might want to have a child, Ben falls in love with another woman. Torn between a life that might seem “frivolous” and one that feels “flattening,” the couple have to decide what, for them, is the right path.

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