January 8, 2024
The incisive if somewhat overstuffed latest from Silverman (We Play Ourselves) fuses two disparate narratives of contemporary Paris and 1960s Harvard with themes of protest and romance. In 2018, Minerva “Minnow” Hunter is fired from her high school teaching job in a tight-knit, conservative town, somewhere in the U.S., for reasons that are gradually revealed. She then moves to Paris, where she takes up a position in the English department of an unnamed university and falls in with the gilets jaunes protest movement against president Emmanuel Macron’s elitist policies. In a parallel narrative set in 1968, a grad student named Keen works at Harvard in a lab that makes napalm for U.S. forces in Vietnam. Each day, he and his colleagues listen to the shouts of protesters from outside their door. His eventual decision to join the protestors results in violent consequences. Silverman takes a lot on, and not all of it sticks. (The formulaic romance between Minnow and a French protester is a particular letdown: “The curve of his shoulder. The jut of his jaw.... She imagined him naked”). Still, Silverman manages to build suspense as they gradually connect the dots between the parallel stories. There’s plenty of intrigue bubbling beneath the surface of this surprisingly complex novel. Agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary. (Apr.)Correction: An earlier version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to the author.
Starred review from January 15, 2024
On the Harvard campus in 1969 and the Paris streets in 2018, parallel protagonists become enmeshed in radical politics and romance. Playwright Silverman's sophomore novel starts off strong, pursuing two storylines that will of course eventually converge. The earlier of the two, at Harvard, involves an organic chemistry graduate student named Keen who rescues a fleeing protestor from the police, then falls fast and hard for her and her world, though he works in the laboratory of a man Olya and her friends consider a war criminal. The 50-years-later plot revolves around Minnow, 38, an American woman living in France. Devastated after getting caught up in a scandal involving a student's abortion at the school where she taught, she escapes to Paris, where she, too, connects with a protester on the street, 23-year-old Charles. The rebellious scion of a wealthy man connected to President Emmanuel Macron, Charles is part of the gilet jaune (yellow vest) movement. In both cases, the political conversion experience involves hot sex and stirring scenes of activism (Keen at the Dow Chemical protest is wonderful), but eventually things go horribly wrong. Oddly, this book seems to be in sympathy with the attitudes and frustrations of the movements depicted, but the twin disasters are awful enough to scare an impressionable reader off radicalism altogether, especially because the upshot seems to be that political action can ruin people without changing the world at all. Young Charles says as much: "I think it must be a slow poison to come up against the limitations of justice again and again. The more you see, the more poison accumulates. But what changes in the end is you, not the systems, not the structures. Just you." (People make a lot of speeches to each other in this book.) In the end, the idea that one generation repeats the mistakes of the last is dramatized a bit too faithfully, and the ending leaves some big questions unanswered. A flawed but vibrant and juicy book, good conversation fodder for the politically inclined.
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March 15, 2024
Tilting in time between the student antiwar protests in the U.S. during the late 1960s and contemporary anti-administration demonstrations on the streets of Paris, Silverman's examination of the nature of rebellion, the influence of family, and one's pursuit of individuality coalesces around the stories of Minnow and Keen. For her role in helping a student at the prestigious private school where she teaches obtain an abortion, Minnow is fired amid a storm of notoriety. She decamps to Paris, where she falls in love with a younger man caught up in the Yellow Vest revolution against income inequality. Her story is offset by that of Keen, a Harvard grad student who also falls in love with a member of the countercultural resistance movement while confronting the revocation of his student deferment. As both Minnow and Keen become more deeply mired in the exigent circumstances of surrounding societal upheaval, their notions of their personal histories are challenged in the face of future existential threats. Politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows, but award-winning playwright and novelist Silverman (We Play Ourselves, 2021) excels at bringing the lives of her disparate characters into focus. Atmospheric and profound, Silverman's novel of defiance and acceptance shimmers with passion, repressed and unbridled.
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