Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (Knopf). This acerbic novel explores the ramifications of a controversial topic in Japan: surrogacy. (Although the practice is legal there, it is widely regarded with skepticism.) Riki, the protagonist, is a twenty-nine-year-old woman from the countryside who is struggling financially in Tokyo. Desperate for stability, she decides to become a surrogate for a rich, artistic couple. But she quickly starts to resent the wife’s desire to control Riki’s body, and she is wary of the husband’s attempts to show feminist solidarity. As Riki navigates conception and pregnancy under the couple’s gaze, she comes to feel that even their good intentions and a substantial paycheck can’t alleviate a sense of exploitation. As she tells the couple, “I just don’t want to be treated like a machine.”

Information Age, by Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions). Observations, snippets of dialogue, and wry anecdotes make up this laconic novel, which focusses on the life of a young woman in New York. The woman works as a reporter for a news website, where she covers such subjects as “the celebrity candidate” and “the ‘unusual animal’ beat,” and is trailed by doubts about the journalistic enterprise. As she wonders whether she is a “hack” or is simply subject to “a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information,” the novel becomes a subtle meditation on the difference between what can and cannot be communicated, ultimately suggesting that intimate moments are the most difficult to capture and convey.

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Cryptic, by Garry J. Shaw (Yale). Language’s ability both to reveal and to conceal is at the heart of this engrossing history of medieval encoded and encrypted manuscripts. Shaw outlines various motivations for engaging in “performative secrecy” in the creation of a text, from a desire to prevent powerful forms of knowledge (such as alchemy or medicine) from falling into the wrong hands to a simple love of intellectual puzzles. Some texts claiming divine inspiration, such as John Dee’s celestial script and Hildegard of Bingen’s “Unknown Tongue,” are perhaps purposefully indecipherable. Shaw also considers the mysterious Voynich manuscript, from the fifteenth century, which has never been decoded and which some contend is a hoax with no decryptable meaning.

No Sense in Wishing, by Lawrence Burney (Atria). “Though they do take place, happy endings are not common in the human experience,” Burney, a music critic, writes—and yet this earnest and engaging essay collection winds its way to such an ending. Burney grew up working class in Baltimore, endured his father’s fits of rage, pulled shifts at soul-crushing jobs to support his daughter, and lost sight in one eye from injuries in a car accident. But, as the book relates, his love of Black music from his home town and elsewhere pulled him through. At a concert by the New York rapper MIKE, the author finds himself “thankful for being alive” at a time when Black musicians outside the mainstream “can thrive.”

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