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.
July 1, 2024
Playwright, poet, and novelist Silverman's (We Play Ourselves) latest is a dual-timeline novel set in 2018 and 1968. In 2018, Minnow takes a job abroad in Paris, running from a small-town scandal and looking for a fresh start. She starts an affair with a younger professor entrenched in the Yellow Vest (Gilet Jaune) movement, a populist group protesting income inequality and seeking economic justice. Unbeknownst to Minnow, she is living out a story similar to that of her father, Keen. In the novel's 1968 timeline, Keen, a Harvard graduate student, falls for Minnow's mother, an activist involved in volatile protests against the Vietnam War. Narrator Marin Ireland ably navigates the book's interwoven timelines, offering a smooth, engaging performance. Ireland keeps the tension high; though listeners may predict the ending to Keen's plotline, they'll be anxious to learn how Minnow's story resolves. VERDICT A well-plotted, character-driven novel that thrusts listeners into the emotionally fraught landscape of antiwar and antiestablishment protests. The dual star-crossed lovers add another level of enjoyment, making this a solid recommendation for listeners seeking literary fiction blended with politics, romance, and intrigue.--Jessica Caniglia
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