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Clytemnestra weds Agamemnon, catching him on the rebound after being rejected by Helen, Clytemnestra’s sister. They become rulers of Mycenae, and have three daughters, including Iphigenia and Elektra. Agamemnon and the other suitors assuaged their disappointment at Helen’s rejection by pledging to defend her should anyone sully her honor. This sets a trap sprung by Paris, who flees with Helen to Troy. Keeping the pledge, Agamemnon assembles an army and sails off to the Trojan War. During preparation, Agamemnon betrays Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, leaving Clytemnestra prostrate with rage and grief that burns into an implacable urge for vengeance against her husband.

Elektra sees her father off to war and spends the next ten years pining for his return. Her mother tires to get her to understand Agamemnon’s betrayal, but Elektra finds her father’s conduct honorable and grows impatient with her mother’s insistence. Elektra also learns of the curse on Agamemnon’s family, and so on her. When Clytemnestra takes a lover connected with the curse, Elektra sets her course against her mother. Her father returns in victory, her mother has her vengeance and Elektra gets a turn at the family curse.

Cassandra, a princess of Troy, is fascinated by her mother’s spells of foresight. Ignoring her mother’s warnings, she becomes an Apollonian priest in hopes of receiving foresight too. Apollo obliges, but she rebuffs him when he tries to claim what he considers his due. Enraged, he curses her so no one will believe her prophecies. Her inability to convince anyone of the impending doom for the Trojans and for Troy slowly drives her mad.

Elektra is a story of the Trojan War as experienced by Clytemnestra, Elektra and Cassandra. The three stories are interwoven, chapter by chapter, with Clytemnestra carrying the majority of the story until Elektra takes over towards the end of the book. Clytemnestra has the motive, means and method to drive the story forward. Elektra is less successful, mostly being sulky and bratty until her mother is done, leaving her to drive the story. Even then she is sunk in her monomania to a degree that exceeds her mother’s. Cassandra is a puzzle. She is tangential to the Trojan War. She is unable to prevent it, or change it in any significant way, and ends up claimed by Agamemnon as a spoil of war. Her story is interesting allegorically — people who are disbelieved are still called Cassandras, usually by those who forget that the other half of Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth — but the connection between her and the Mycenian women is at best coincident.

For two of the three women, the Trojan War is at a remove; they hear of it only through messengers and the occasional returning combatant. For Cassandra the war is immediate, but as an observer until the end when she becomes a prisoner. This lets Elektra emphasize the women’s conflicts, both internally and externally: Clytemnestra and Elektra with each other, and Cassandra with everyone. Saint’s writing handles these currents well, delineating and distinguishing the three women, and exposing their inner drives. Readers familiar with the Trojan War may feel a tinge of guilt when Clytemnestra rages against those in on Agamemnon’s betrayal of her and Iphigenia. Saint makes a nasty little reversal against Cassandra sting: her father perceives she will act against the Greeks’ horse, and convinces some guards to stand alert to the possibility. Cassandra is thwarted when she tries to burn the horse; her father's successful prophecy places a final check on her attempt to react to her unheeded prophecies, sealing Troy’s fate.

When Marek was born, his mother died, or so he was told. He lives with his father, a shepherd, in Lapvona, the fiefdom of a corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord. Marek is the line that runs through Lapvona. He was born with skeletal deformities that earn him the contempt of Lapvona villagers, including his father. However, he makes friends with the lord’s son, although the prince treats him more as a hunting dog than as a friend. The relation between Marek and the prince is the feeble engine driving whatever plot there is in Lapvona. Overall, Lapvona reads like a truly terrible year, from spring to spring, at a tyrannically-run Ren Faire: murderous bandit raids, drought and starvation, relentless poverty and grinding work. Add to that humanity’s propensity to lie, and the almost impossibility of meaningfully connecting with another person, and you get a Boschian horror-show from which there is no escape but death, and no dignity even in death.

It’s hard to say what kind of story Lapvona is telling. Despite the corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord, it’s not a political allegory because there’s no politics. Although the fantastical happens, it’s not a fantasy because there’s no quest or rescue. It might be a fairy tale — a pauper does become a prince — but there’s no moral, and it’s hard to make up an edifying one that’s even tenuously connected to the story. It might be journalism, but the narration is omniscient and shifting, and the fantastic moves it into some other world despite the medieval-like, middle-European-like setting. It might be satire — the priest and the lord examine a pregnant nun and conclude she’s a virgin, even though they have no idea what they’re looking at, or what they’re looking for — but repeatedly hammering the same few nails becomes numbing. The story’s God-soaked, but not in any way that can be considered sacred. It’s more accurate to consider it an anti-God story, but the arguments against are a thin thread of commonplace hypocrisies. Probably the best way to take Lapvona is as it’s offered: a carnival ride of gross-outs and horrors.

So, are there trigger warnings? Oh yeah, there are trigger warnings out the ass: rape, incest, body horror, child abuse of various kinds, animal cruelty, blasphemy, cannibalism and its aftereffects, some kind of crypto-Aryanism, shit play of various kinds (you thought that “out the ass” was gratuitous, didn’t you?). Fortunately, Moshfegh’s prose style works well with this problematic litany. The flat and characterless descriptions efficiently move the reader from one gross-out or horror to the next, and give no reason to tarry; on the other hand, they also provide no place for the reader to hide. Occasionally Moshfegh waxes lyrical, usually about nature, and only for a sentence or two, otherwise it’s this atrocity, then this one, then this one.

Somebody cracks wise on the Internet (I know, I know, but stay with it, it’s fiction after all), and it goes viral. Interviews, guest lectures, panel discussions and world travel ensue until... Until something terrible happens, and everything collapses to the point of disruption. In Ohio, so you know it’s serious. Then, maybe, we see what matters in this big ol’ world of ours.

That’s mostly the story; as you read along, that’s what you’re reading. The story’s written in two parts: the happy part and the sad part. The happy part is happy, jouncing along with one-liners, wry observations and winsome meditations, a bit like a Steven Wright routine, except more Internetty. The sad part is sad, and, unlike the happy part, is capable of being spoiled, which cramps the review a little. It’s probably safe to point out if you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s (alleged!) comment about little Nell, then you’re equipped to handle the sad part, except you probably won’t laugh, but more like eye-roll, because Internet.

No One Is Talking About This is written like it’s from the Internet, which it calls the Portal. The effect is possibly supposed to be Twitter-like, but it reads more like it’s from an earlier era: Flutterby, Wonkette or — St. Berners-Lee protect us — InstaPundit. That works fine for the happy part (assuming you overlook the meme-slippage, which, if you couldn’t, they wouldn’t be memes), but it cuts into whatever it is the sad part is supposed to be doing; the pitch turns somber, but the register remains the same. Unless that’s the point: even the Portal-poisoned can recover their humanity, or maybe the hive-mind strength of the Portal can help you through tough times, something like that.

A Tunisian reporter is machine-gunned at sea, and a retired Sicilian is knifed in an elevator. Inspector Montalbano avoids the first case and investigates the second, but eventually finds the threads from his case weave through the other case.

Camilleri was apparently still finding his way around his characters in the story, the third in the series. The plot is good, complex and integrated yet clear, but overlaid with fussy, scene-setting business. Montalbano is particularly assholish: hair trigger, jealous and moralistic. His northern-Italian girlfriend Livia has a role in the story, and is also burdened with outlining the contours of her and Montalbano’s relationship; Montalbano chips in by writing her a letter explaining how he sees things. And, for some reason, Montalbano has a dying father to contend with. Camilleri is wandering around a lot in the telling. This story also signals the commissioner’s retirement, which is doubly unfortunate. The relation between Montalbano and the commissioner was a warm and humane part of the first three stories, a respite from frenetic aggression otherwise in play. In subsequent stories Montalbano’s relation with the new commissioner is buffoonish and ridiculous. On the positive side, Catarella is still a background character, his shtick not yet developed and hardened into the annoyance it will become in later stories.

He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away

MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention by Chris Lee in Vulture, 2022 Mar 11

Delaney Wells got screen-addicted in her early teens, but recovered. Her parents’ health-food store was driven out of business by a national chain acquired by the jungle, the world’s biggest on-line department store. Delaney becomes a foe of the source of these problems: the Every, a merger of the jungle and the Cirlce, the world’s largest social-media/indexing service. She wants freedom from the Every, and schemes for a decade to join the Every and destroy it from the inside. With the help of her friend and co-conspirator Wes, she lands a job; Wes later follows her coattails to an Every job too. Once inside, Delaney begins her orientation by rotating through several Every departments, all the while looking for leavers to wrench and gears to spike.

First and foremost The Every is satire. There’s lots of low-hanging fruit, and Eggers makes sure he puts an arrow through every one, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes more like St. Sebastian. The Every’s using eye-tracking software, spandex and social-media canceling to vanquish a political antagonist was clever and funny. New employees have to arrange a field trip, and Delaney organizes a trip to watch sea lions, which comes together with all the usual difficulties, falls apart spectacularly during the trip, and has a long, drawn-out postmortem. This too is funny, but the humor runs a little too close to “wow, look at all these weirdos and dimwits.”

The Every also wants to be novel of ideas, with concepts like freedom, autonomy, and privacy rubbing up against concepts like security, safety, and transparency. In this The Every is less successful. Ideas clash several times throughout the book, but it usually goes like this: Surveillance capitalism good: you won’t forget to take your pills. Surveillance capitalism bad: freedom.

Early in the book it becomes clear Wes is going to drink the Kool-Aid, and many of these arguments are between him and Delaney. Occasionally Delaney engages a co-worker, but because she’s undercover, those arguments are even more tepid and over reliant on irony. Delaney has a favored, Shoshana-Zuboff-like professor who sends an occasional (snail-mail) letter, but those grow more despairing.

The third role The Every tries to play is as a dystopian warning, but for that to be compelling it has to wrestle with the satire and win, which it doesn’t (a truck bomber wears a Tim Berners-Lee mask to foil surveillance cameras). Delaney’s attempts to spark revolution-fomenting dystopias show diminishing returns; it’s hard to ramp up much further after introducing a lie detector into a friend app. And the ending, though foreshadowed, is completely unearned. The intention was probably to produce a “gosh, how terrible and ruthless and ominous” cliff-hanger for a likely third book in the series, but instead produces (at least in me) a feeling of “huh, Eggers went there” (readers of The Parade are rolling their eyes and thinking, of course he went there).

The Every follows up The Circle, which I haven’t read. I don’t know if it’s necessary to read The Circle before The Every, but I don’t think so. The Every’s satire is so broad there isn’t anyplace to hide subtle call-backs to the earlier story (the reference to the movie was not subtle); the story is so thin it needs no other explanations than Delaney vs. the machine; and the main human character in The Circle hardly appears in The Every.

Gilda, the main character in this story of debilitating obsessions, is a woman in her late 20s unable to get it together enough to establish a reasonable life. She checks out a therapy group at a Catholic church, is mistaken for a job applicant and is offered an administrative assistant position recently opened by the previous assistant’s death. Despite being lesbian and an atheist, she accepts. Apart from having a job, this seems like a disastrous decision, but it becomes clear further into the book, if it wasn’t already, that there’s not much that can slow her descent into despair and dissolution.

Putting someone like Gilda at the heart of a story is tricky because she’s incapable of generating plot. The plot shreds that exist are the result of other people or things bumping against her, and watching what happens: she searches for a missing cat, she’s fixed up with an obnoxious male life coach, and, in the most serious shred, questions come up about the previous assistant’s death. Left by herself, she obsesses about death — hers and particularly her pet rabbit’s when she was ten — about her having a skeleton under her skin and about being an infinitely small object in an infinitely large universe. Other people paralyze her with the fear of causing sadness or disappointment. She got an inappropriate job because she didn’t want to embarrass a priest, it’s why she goes out with an obnoxious male life coach and why she continues an e-mail correspondence with a friend of the former assistant who doesn’t know she’s dead.

This sounds grim, and from one point of view it probably is, but Austin’s straightforward, sharp writing uses basic shapes and primary colors to present delicate matters. The story is schematic — How tall is Gilda? What color is her hair? — which moves it along at a good clip, unobstructed by sentimentality or pathos. It isn’t black comedy, but it has its moments. Like a good prole, Gilda steals stuff from work, but in her case it’s the blood and body of Christ, which she discovers when she goes on-line to leave a negative review at the web site of the manufacturer of the bland and insubstantial crackers she’s been eating. And, of course, the ol’ favorite: at confession she admits to eating pork. In the other direction, there’s her horrible family, the shameful way she treats her girlfriend, and her habitual lying. And her mental health. Austin’s firm, sure grip turns all of this into a good, if not necessarily edifying, ride.

A man moves from bohemian youth to bourgeois middle-age. In Paris he loses his first love, desultorily picks up another before temporarily reconnecting with his first, develops interests at school, makes a stab at a career, then pitches everything and goes back home. In Puerto Rico he fumbles around, then fades from the story as he becomes a university professor, married, and a father. In his place he describes a dying (and eventually dead) colleague and a former student with a talent for bad poetry and squandering advantages. The end.

The story moves along, but in no particular direction. He claims art, but in incidentals and asides; a diarrhea attack at the start of a vacation gets more detail than his artistic life. His side of romance is banal and self-centered, and her side doesn't appear, not even speculatively. His behavior doesn't change much from his complicated first love to his more straightforward Parisian lover, and his wife is mentioned only as an object in his life, like his car. His studies give him drive and purpose, which evaporates at the first sign of tedium. This is definitely the story of a guy going through stuff, but after that I don't know, which is maybe the point.

A quasi-factual family history of an eccentric, polio-stricken grandmother who's a writer and a mild, Jewish grandfather who's a gastroenterolgist. The story's organized around a room-by-room description of the couple's home in a Parisian mansion, and non-linearly jumps around the century from the 1870s to the 1970s. The plot is twisty, covering both the Boltanski family history and how the history was gathered. The story hinges on the early 1940s, and once the name "Anne Frank" drifts by in an early chapter, expectations in that direction are set. The grandmother motivates the story. She's both a black hole and a tent pole for her family, usurping them to compensate for polio, which she otherwise refuses to acknowledge, and directing their dealings with the outside world (she recognizes that her husband's latest summons to the police station is likely to be disastrous, and sets off his disappearance).

Adding temporal and spatial shenanigans the usual immigrant-story vagaries (forgetfulness, mendacity both fearful and face-saving, indifferent record keeping) produces a complex story, one that most likely requires at least two readings to appreciate fully. Fortunately the story is short (around 200 generously spaced pages) and the writing in translation is pleasure to read.

There's a thesis holding that, once Napoleon made warfare dangerous and barbaric, capitalism became the new arena in which gentlemen displayed their martial prowess. If that thesis is true, then Malcom Bricklin is capitalism's Bowie or Crockette or whoever it was that got slaughtered at the Alamo. Bricklin was a serial (and often parallel) entrepreneur who specialized in automobiles. After some modest success with Subaru and an almost pre-ordained failure with the Bricklin sports car, he hit upon the car that rocked American culture for a little while in the mid-1980s: the Yugo, a cheap, poorly-made car produced by a workers' collective in independently communist Yugoslavia.

A story of the Yugo from birth through life to death covers a lot of territory - global manufacture and trade, State Department Cold War policy, the U.S. regulatory system, the ol' financial hornswoggle, Balkan history - and this book is on top of it all. Although the story is shaggy, the book is tight, focusing mainly on the Yugo and Bricklin, but with lots of short and pertinent asides along the way.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. The emperor of a confederation seizes the means of control - mind witches! - and declares himself absolute ruler. A dissident confederate sends out a squad to meet with the disposed emperor to plot a restoration. The squad is run down by the emperor's troops and escapes through the looking glass, where they find former gods, who respond harshly. After a bit of to and fro, the reduced squad escapes back through the looking glass. After plotting and skull-duggery, the restoration is almost at hand when - double cross! - the Etch-a-Sketch gets well and truly shaken. As confederates squabble over what new picture to draw, the former gods visit with murderous intent, setting the stage for the final, epic battle. Whew.

This is the final book in the three-book Bloodsounder's Arc. Within the constraints of a genre story set among highly organized murderous thugs, Salyards' plotting blows hot and cold. On the hot side, the double cross is plain on the page, but, Purloined-Letter-like, he hides it in the obvious place. On the cold side, the former gods show up and kill everyone in two cities, tens of thousands of people, in a couple of days and without breaking a sweat. Then, faced with highly organized murderous thugs, the former gods apparently forget everything they've recently done and revert to spears and shields, arrows and rocks. I mean, I get it; it's a lot more exciting to read about arrows and rocks flying around than it is to read about people being driven into madness and death by a shimmering haze, but still... For fun, The mind witches, introduced in the second book, will continue to trigger your inner Neal deGrasse Tyson should you have one: if the former gods echo-locate using memories, and Soffjian, a renegade mind witch embedded in the squad, can absorb memories, why doesn't she act like stealth bomber? My recommendation is you waste your time reading mysteries set in the here and now, but if you, like me, are at the mercy of the Humble Bundle, then this book, and the Bloodsounder's Arc, is an ok way to spend your time, assuming you've read all the Octavia Butler available.

Following the paper theme, The Puttermesser Papers are linked stories of erasure. Ruth Puttermesser is a woman, a Jew, and a lawyer living in New York City during the late 20th century. The first two stories track her professional life's dissolution. The third story dismantles her personal relations, the forth story her ideals, and the final story her life.

The summary suggests Ozick is a puppet master, in that sense she reminds me of Nabokov. But Nabokov looked at the world as a poet, and Ozick looks at the world as a theologian. When Puttermesser's loses her municipal position through political machinations, she creates a golem, who becomes her campaign manager and gets her elected mayor. The flight to magical (or theological) realism undercuts the here and now, or moves it to a different place and time, depending on your point of view. I entered this book cold, based on a suggestion that it's a clear-eyed view of municipal politics on a par with Caro's biography of Robert Moses. It didn't take too long to figure out municipal politics isn't deeply or interestingly embedded in the story, and if it is being clear-eyed, it's looking at something a lot like smoke.

As radio developed and spread in Depression-era America, various groups began to notice and adjust. Public intellectuals and academics fretted over mass communication and mass culture. Demagogues (Charles Coughlin) and mountebanks (John Brinkley) moved in and prospered, as did politicians (Roosevelt). With network growth, mass culture became pre-eminent, with hit programs and devoted fan clubs on the rise, and more serious educational and artistic endeavors squeezed out by commercial considerations.

This book gives these matters the once-over lightly. If you're interested and have no prior knowledge, then this book might be interesting; otherwise, you've seen it all before (or don't care). There's a lot of history from below in the form of letters to presidents, programs and stars, but it's hard to make out anything particular about mass culture from individual letters, no matter how representative. Analysis is otherwise frustratingly light. There are occasional amusing bits (Ron DeSantis would smile at the way Kansas vote tallying kept Brinkley out of the governor's chair, and watching Adorno flounce around like a mass-cult Luddite is fun), but probably not enough of an award for going through the rest of the book.

"If both the left and the right are mad at me, then I must be doing well" is one of the more tiresome political analyses. The variant used by this book is "If I'm not doing what the left or the right are doing, I must be in the center." The problem is the post-war anomie blanketing democratic countries, although the ending chapters sharpen focus to post-colonial Asia. The business-oriented right is kowtowing to fascism, and the Marx-besotted left is playing footsie with Communism. After an early chapter on the right and fascism (presumably to establish one side of centerist cred), most of the book goes after Communism, although occasionally alternating between Communism and totalitarianism to be seen as taring with both sides of the brush. The centerist position emerging in later chapters is standard-issue liberalism (civil rights and civil liberties) at home and containment and development internationally (naturally Soviet Communism needs containment, although Mao pops up occasionally).

I suppose it's unfair to cast a jaundiced eye on this book after seventy years; it's a product of its times (the late '40s) and no more (if I'm reading the Acknowledgments right, portions of this book were originally articles in Life magazine about the perils of Communism). Schlesinger, in a new introduction, considers the book a historical artifact. As a snapshot of mid-century American conventional wisdom, the book contains some jaw-dropping, wince-inducing passages: a footnote lands at the bottom of page 16 like a shit someone took on a bone-china dinner plate; the pontificating about America's relation to Asia is grimly hilarious in light of what eventually happened; the debate between Lincoln and Lenin (although it's mostly Lenin haranguing Lincoln - those commies, amIright?); the anodyne relations between American labor and capital (a few pages later Schlesinger does concede a little by mentioning some unpleasantness at the Homestead strike). I'm interested in whether the pseudo-mathematical act of splitting the difference has some more convincing justification than gross pragmatism. I read The Vital Center because the title suggested that the book would go into it; I was completely wrong.

Describes the origin and development of partisanship in U.S. political parties from the gray mush of the Truman-Eisenhower post-war era to the fire-breathing of the Clinton-Gingrich turn of the century. Political scientists start it by theorizing issues-based parties to foster a deliberative democratic populace. Anti-communism on the right and civil rights on the left (as well as anti-civil rights on the right) motivate it and drive party restructuring. Reagan and Gingrich perfect it. Somewhere along the line ideology creeps in and replaces issues (or maybe it was always there), and here we are.

The book's a fun and easy read, heavy on the stories and light on the social science. There are lots of fun little facts to collect (e.g., the Democrats do procedural, top-down party restructuring, and the Republicans do bottom-up, organizational party restructuring), and the occasional hilarious joke ("The power of party polarization might very well lead to the forced disappearance of filibusters altogether in short order." p. 256). And, as always, it's a pleasure to see political cartoons used to illustrate topics under discussion.