Conspicuous Consumption

    I've praised Tana French in the past for her willingness to take her time, to build suspense without resorting to crude action. (The extent of the action, or at least the violence, in this novel is: one fist fight and one off-stage murder.) French is as deliberate in The Hunter as she is in the previous novel in this trilogy, The Searcher , but rather than being a satisfyingly consistent slow burn, in the middle of the book there are longueurs. As much as one appreciates the effort she puts into her description of the rural Irish village in which her protagonist, a retired Chicago cop, lives—she gives us the bad about rural life along with the good—there are times we feel we've had enough and want her to get on with it. Likewise, the most engaging character in the book is that ex-cop; when the narration veers away from him we find ourselves eager for his return. Still, before and after the longueurs, and in spite of the cop-free sections, the novel is a satisfying re...

  At the beginning of Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, the protagonist, Vesta, finds a note in the woods behind her house asserting that a woman, Magda, was killed, that her body will never be found, and that the author of the note did not kill her. Or maybe she doesn't find that note. By the end of the novel, the narrator seems to be, to put it politely, unreliable, or to put it less politely, crazy. We can see that she might be have been made so by the pain she carries from her earlier life as wife to an unsympathetic and unfaithful professor, and that this pain might have been exacerbated by the solitude in which she lives, in a cabin on a disused girl scout camp. We go back and question things that she has told us. Vesta recounts her efforts to understand who the victim named in the note, Magda, was and who might have killed her. Doing this, she is, in essence, creating characters: Magda, her lovers, her killer. She imagines (she might say "discovers") what th...

Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which takes place mostly on board a ship and in South America, is clearly apprentice work. The young person’s earnestness about the big subjects—love, marriage, and death—is there, and at times predictably leaden. But having said that, the young person making this first attempt is Virginia Woolf , and there are flashes of her future brilliance throughout. Her descriptions of social events, the society in which they occur, and of the people who populate that society are often witty, perceptive, and brilliant, and her engagement with at least one of the big issues, death, is substantial and moving. In her reflections on the place of women in society we see the seeds of A Room of One’s Own . This was the last book I finished in 2025. I look forward to continuing my reading and rereading of Virginia Woolf’s novels in 2026.