As spooky season comes to a close and we barrel darkly toward this weekend’s daylight saving switch, members of the VF staff share the recent reads we can’t get out of our heads. (Following Halloween parties, perhaps you too are in a Kylie Minogue state of mind—maybe you even donned a literary-zeitgeist costume in which to dance.) Load up on books before Sunday comes; you’ll get an extra hour to enjoy them.
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‘Terrace Story’ by Hilary Leichter
Most of the time, I don’t believe in spoilers. My feeling is that great narratives can’t be ruined even if you know how they’re going to end. (I saw the final scene of The Sopranos on YouTube years before watching the series and when I got there it still punched me in the gut.) I believe that this theory holds up in Hilary Leichter’s bountiful Rubik’s cube of a novel, and so we’re going to have one minor spoiler here about a reveal that occurs 49 pages in. You’ve been warned! The book is told in four parts, the first following a couple named Edward and Annie who, while entertaining Annie’s work friend, Stephanie, find that their tiny apartment has an impossible, luxurious terrace that only exists when Stephanie’s around; this section ends in a ruinous betrayal. The next section picks up with a story of a marriage in tumult: George and Lydia, who are eventually revealed to be parents to Annie, who shows up, as a child. (That’s the spoiler.) That section, along with the third and fourth, introduces fairy tales, magical powers possessed by a misunderstood young woman, space travel, and tears in the multiverse—the novel continuously shifts the reader’s prior expectations and understandings without ever feeling like a gotcha. And here’s where I abandon my stance on spoilers, because a revelation about the identity of two characters in the final section is so beautiful, so devastating, that I would hate to deprive anyone of the experience I had reading it. After spending the whole book reveling in Leichter’s precise language and extraordinary powers of control over the intricate narrative. it reduced me to pure emotion, tears running down my cheeks. (2023, Ecco) —Keziah Weir, Senior Editor
‘The Fraud’ by Zadie Smith
I can’t ever listen to a book on tape without reading it on paper, first; I’m too prone to momentary distractions that make me quite literally lose the plot. But listening to a great audio recording of a novel I’ve recently read and loved is comforting and entertaining, and when it’s read by the author—as is the case with Zadie Smith’s The Fraud—there’s an added dimension of receiving the sentences’ emphases and pauses directly from the person who wrote them. The Fraud takes this to new heights: there are various accents, there are songs. Smith, who recently described herself as “a ham” to David Remnick in a New Yorker Radio Hour interview, studied with a voice teacher and goes delightfully full bore in narrating her novel about a scammy 19th century debt-evader claiming to be a missing English aristocrat entitled to a fortune; the formerly enslaved man insisting that he is who he says he is; and one household—a Scottish housekeeper, her novelist cousin, and his illiterate maid-turned-wife—captivated by the case. Come for the witty resonances with contemporary Trumpdom, stay for Smith’s interrogation of fiction writing writ large. (Penguin Press, 2023) —KW
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