Hello Smarty, It's Your BookWag!
Dear Wags,
This past Sunday, September 1, was my birthday. I celebrated by reading. The downside of being a book columnist is that I rarely have time to read simply for love. As a writer and critic, I try to choose titles that appeal to me, but the gig demands I compromise with assignment editors.
On special occasions, I brook no compromise. I’ll go back and rediscover a classic, or crack open a book I’m dying to read but haven’t gotten to. Before e-readers, I’d haul an enormous tote full of volumes on vacation. Now they are all loaded on my phone. I’ve got about 60 books in there ready to go. It will take a while to make a dent in that list, but this weekend I caught up to two great reads I didn’t get to review at publication.
Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles deserves all of its awards nominations. I’ve been following Thorpe since her debut, The Girls from Corona del Mar, but this story is fresher and fiercer than almost anything I’ve read this year. The author melds sexual politics, pro wrestling, OnlyFans, and magic mushrooms into a single wild ride. The story of the unsinkable Margo, a college student who gets pregnant by her English professor and finds her way as a single mom and half-hearted online porn star, is an inventive delight. If you missed it, circle back immediately.
Honey by Victor Lodato will stick with me for a long time. Lodato, a playwright, is also a terrific novelist (Mathilda Savitch, Edgar and Lucy). His latest stars an older woman with quite a past — a Mafia childhood, an affair with a controlling older man, a career as an art dealer, and finally, an unexpected second chance at romance. Lodato’s Ilaria “Honey” Fasinga is an indelible creation, and his novel has the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale. Don’t let it pass you by.
Yours ever,
BKP
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Senna’s previous novel New People focused on race and campus politics; her follow-up is more of a grown-up affair. A married African American couple trade their artsy lives back East for money and status in Los Angeles, and the results are absurd, truthful, and hilarious. It makes for terrific social satire, as rapier sharp as the fiction written by Senna’s husband, Percival Everett.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Already on The Book Prize Longlist, Kushner’s latest novel is a clever reinvention of the espionage novel. Sadie Smith is a spy living in an unappealing corner of France, where she’s been assigned to disrupt an anti-capitalist group that plots to wreak havoc with corporate agriculture. The more Sadie gets to know Bruno, the leader of the mysterious cell, the more her values are challenged. As her targets become humanized, the mission becomes increasingly impossible.
