We All Came Here Together

Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (2024) Worth the price of admission strictly for the author’s wide-ranging recommendations when it comes to modern Austen adaptations. Who knew I needed Mormon Pride & Prejudice or tech-startup Persuasion in my life?! On a more sober note this is the most enjoyable nonfiction I’ve read in a looooong time; the pages flew by. I would not however recommend it unless you have all six Austen novels under your belt. Brodey writes unusually lucidly for an academic but I notice the book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which probably means the Big Five wouldn’t touch it for being overly dry. Speaking for me personally it was the EXACT sweet spot between entertaining and edifying. Brodey’s project is straightforward: She breaks down the subversive aspects of the ending of each Austen novel, going in the order in which Austen wrote them. Her conclusion:

The real power of Austen’s endings comes from her unusual juxtaposition of romantic happiness and individual fulfillment, tradition and innovation, comedy and tragedy, fantasy and realism, desire for and suspicion of happy endings … To consider such happiness as a common or natural outcome, rather than the product of effort and superlatively good fortune, is to fall into the rom-com trap.

One thing Brodey does superlatively is selecting the right lens to examine a given text. For Northanger Abbey she selects Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I’m fond of but it would never have occurred to me to draw a straight line between the meddlesome narrators of the two works. For Persuasion she brings King Lear, specifically the version of Lear that was most often performed in the Regency era, in which Cordelia lives(!). For Sense & Sensibility she brings Disney’s Frozen. It floored me when Brodey noted that Austen was not seen by her contemporaries as a romantically inclined writer, or as writing primarily for an audience of women—both things we take completely for granted nowadays. It’s just that by accepting the hegemony of the marriage plot, Austen was paradoxically able to win the space to delve into the neglected realms of women’s agency and interiority. I’ll be thinking about this one for awhile.

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting (2025) I’ve bounced off Harrow in the past as she is a mite too meta for my taste. This book is the correct amount of meta about Arthuriana and WWI and how national mythologies are shaped. I could have taken or left the central romantic relationship but the parental relationships and the competing models of parenthood were what held my interest. I was iffy about the villain for three-quarters of the story but that ending rescued it: what a home run of a villain origin story.

Harrow went on Worldbuilding for Masochists to promote “my new book: big sad lady knight stuck in a time loop.” This is a fair synopsis. There is also the matter of the co-protagonist, aka nebbish historian who keeps lady-knight on-task. Listen, if I wanted a love story between lady-knight and nebbish historian I would simply go hunting in the Palamades/Camilla tag. That is to say I don’t think the love story is the most convincing component. But Harrow has hit on something by harnessing the time loop for her metafictional commentary. Harrow herself proclaims, “The trajectory of my career has been ‘The power of stories: smiley-face’ to ‘The power of stories: frowny-face’“.

Fundamentally this book succeeds at what it’s doing and it deserves its accolades but for me it’s a little too on the nose. Here’s what I mean: There’s a scene where Owen, in his manuscript, leaves a ciphered note for his future self. Harrow then does the authorial equivalent of tapping me on the shoulder to make sure I’m paying attention to Owen’s punctuation errors. It’s minor but if Harrow can’t trust me to make the connection here, it indicates an alarming tendency to handhold on larger thematic issues. Alix, I wish you would trust your readers more.

Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me (2016) Psychological suspense set at an elite gymnastics club rocked by MURDER. The tension is wound tauter than a vault spring and it’s dark dark dark. Not dark like they’re cannibals but ugly-petty dark. Abbott is lauded for her insight into the adolescent psyche and she does not disapoint: “That’s what parenthood was about, wasn’t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn’t yours but herself.”

John le Carré, A Perfect Spy (1986) It’s a tour de force but is he writing a thriller or a memoir??? After 700 pages the answer is unclear. The question of target audience haunted me so much, I dug around and found out that Le Carré executed a mid-career pivot in which he leaned into characterization and away from plot. Not that he was writing straight potboilers prior to this; his language has always made me green with envy. But A Perfect Spy is as much the story of Magnus Pym’s traumatized childhood as it is his exposure as a Czech double-agent. I don’t think Le Carré quite pulled it off, insofar as I don’t think the two narrative threads of Pym’s past and present hang together to weave a satisfying story. But I was definitely bought into the tragedy of Pym’s penchant to mold himself to his environs until he’s all things to all people—a house of cards whose days were numbered from the start. I was relieved to find that at no point was I led to believe the “real” tragedy was that Pym had betrayed the British Empire or any such hogwash. I think the way the resolution clicked into place was well-earned: you needed someone from both sides of Pym’s double life—his British wife and his Czech handler—to put two key pieces of information together. If you read this be forewarned about the womanizing. It’s not graphic or anything but there is so much of it and it’s so gratuitous, since Pym is not a Casanova I’m like why does he sleep with so many women when he doesn’t even enjoy it!!

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore (2025) A twisty thriller about a woman who washes up on a remote Antarctic research island. The sense of place was so vivid it took me fully half the book to recognize the slow-rolling climate apocalypse in the background, ie. wildfires and hurricanes in other parts of the world. I can report that the one member of our book club who didn’t gulp it down in one sitting had a more negative impression than the rest of us, because when you’re not feverishly turning the pages some of the twists strain credulity. I think it could have used about 30% fewer twists; that is the percentage that felt manipulative rather than earned. Is Dom a good guy? Is Dom a murderer? Must find out!! For this book to work McConaghy needed to walk a very fine line in her characterization of the villain, and I don’t think she managed that, but I appreciated the multitude of perspectives on parenting she furnished us with. Even if I found myself rolling my eyes at the world’s most precocious nine-year-old child.