Two Novels About What Their Names Are - The New York Times

Dear readers,

Where did all the Brendas go? The Donnas and Debbies, Sharons and Carols? I wondered that the other day after meeting a friend's beautifully springy newborn for the first time: a tiny loaf of bread fresh into the world, whose name was refreshingly far down the current list of popular choices. According to the people who compile this stuff, parents in the 2020s have enthusiastically adopted character nomenclature from an Edith Wharton novel, or at least HBO's “The Gilded Age,” and every Brooklyn daycare is now home to a little Evelyns army. , Elías, Amelias and Olivers.

I grew up in a certain corner of California madness where unusual was the default: My best friends had names like Melon and Panama, and even the adults we knew seemed free to redefine themselves as Hindu gods or whimsical shades of the color wheel. . My own birth name also marked me as unconventional, so as a teenager I took the opportunity of a family move to change it. (It has been empirically shown that in high school monster flags fly better at lower altitudes.)

Overwhelmed by options: should I be a bird, a tree, a TV star? — I panicked and went back to using a name that already came from the family. A perfectly good one! Easy to spell and only occasionally mispronounced, like the galactic princess with bows in her hair. But even now I feel a little removed from “Leah,” a designation that floats politely beside me but is still not entirely mine.

I have been drawn to fictional characters who also exist in that liminal space, not only because of my personal history, but because of the novelistic skill it takes to sustain an unsung hero over several hundred pages. Like the protagonists of Ralph Ellison's “The Invisible Man” or Graham Greene's “The Power and the Glory,” the incognito narrators in this week's newsletter find distinction in their anonymity: You may not be able to call them by their names. , but the humanity, clever and specific, still seeps through.

—read

It is probably a mortal sin to call an Irish writer “melodious”; Haven't you had enough clover-scented clichés? The writing of Burns's third novel, however, is more like free jazz: a teenager's almost psychedelic account of growing up in the acrimonious conflict of the late 1970s. (The town is also never identified, although all signs point to Belfast). Our heroine, a lonely and melancholic inveterate reader of the fat, worn paperbacks of Dostoevsky and Flaubert, is not entirely asocial: there is the friendly lover nicknamed “maybe-boyfriend” and a bunch of little brothers known as “little sisters.” . Other players, equally free from the hassle of proper nouns or even definite articles, use easily expository titles like “first brother-in-law” or “oldest friend.”

Despite her best efforts to dodge the ugly sectarian war that defines nearly every aspect of daily life in that time and place, she still attracts the unwanted romantic attentions of an older, married “state-renunciator,” known simply as Lechero. . (Spoiler: He doesn't sell milk.) And in an era when paranoia levels could be measured each morning like a smog index, her interest alone is enough to make her the subject of heated local gossip: a strange girl and stubborn whose inexplicable reluctance to become a paramilitary girl could easily be solved with bullets or car bombs.

Although “Milkman” won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, not everyone, understandably, was a fan. Burns' prose is poured out in dense, heavily referential paragraphs that you may need more than a butter knife to cut, and the driving force of the plot feels more like suggestion than fact. Still, the book's enchanting rhythms cast a Joycean spell, a 350-page fever dream written in blood and accent.

Read if you want: The dizzying, detailed madness of a Martin McDonagh film or play; The Pogues; unruly bookworms
Available from: Graywolf Press, in an incongruous and pretty pink paperback

“Rest,” by Tom McCarthy

Fiction, 2005 (in France) or 2006 (in Great Britain) or 2007 (in the United States)

The 30-something Londoner at the center of McCarthy's meager debut is almost heroically bland; If a barcode were a person, he would be this man. To be fair, he also has a catastrophic brain injury, caused by a fall from an unidentified object, and now, an eight and a half million pound legal settlement to spend on his leisure time. But what does a single man with few passions and no discernible personality have to do with that (literal) windfall?

“It was as if my memories were doves and the accident was a loud noise that had scared them away,” he reflects without further annoyance. The only thing that gives you a shiver of pleasure, a kind of pleasurable, effervescent tingling from head to toe, is what we might call the deliberate practice of déjà vu. By physically reconstructing ordinary moments from his barely remembered past (the smell of liver sizzling in a frying pan, an uneventful tire change at an auto shop), he can feel close to something divine, or at least less dead than alive.

It turns out that you can pay a lot for the privilege of real-time “reenactments,” and he does so, commissioning a series of increasingly elaborate scenes whose pursuit soon turns into monomania. The result is a cool slice of existential horror that feels a little, in fact, like it fell from the sky.

Read if you want: Gen
Available from: Old books, or maybe just looking at the clouds