Six Books You Should Read Twice
· The Atlantic
In the seven years I taught writing to first-year university students, I always began the semester the same way: We’d start with lessons on how to read critically. To help them, I introduced the concept of the hermeneutic circle—a fancy philosophical name for a simple idea. To comprehend the meaning of a book, readers need to analyze its individual sentences and paragraphs, but those parts can’t be interpreted without understanding how they work as a whole. In practice, this usually means reading to the end and going right back to the beginning.
The hermeneutic circle isn’t just for academics, though; it explains why some novels feel impossible to put down. You’re using it when you flip back to the opening of a mystery after you’ve reached a pivotal scene that changes what you thought you knew. Sometimes a plot twist completely flips your understanding of a character, and you can’t help but reread the novel, this time with your eyes wide open. The six books below feature unreliable narrators, jarring perspective shifts, and slow-burning reveals. As soon as they’re over, they demand to be instantly started again.
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Devil House, by John Darnielle
Darnielle, the front man for the indie band the Mountain Goats, starts his third novel simply enough. Gage Chandler, a once-acclaimed true-crime writer, is sniffing out what just might be his next hit: an investigation into a 1986 unsolved double murder at a former porn shop. Some 20 years later, Chandler has moved into the scene of the crime, dubbed “Devil House,” to immerse himself in the story. But the more time he spends going through grisly source material purchased from eBay, the more he chafes at his task. Then Darnielle takes Devil House down a series of sharp left turns, and each new section feels like its own book: This meta-novel grows to include the story of the crime that inspired Chandler’s debut, The White Witch of Morro Bay, and a faux–Middle English myth rendered in Gothic font. Darnielle’s eventual return to Devil House—and Chandler’s accounting of the costs of digging up its history—is no less surprising. The reader is left to reassemble this dissection of the true-crime genre, and then to ponder what it means to arrange jumbled puzzle pieces into a coherent portrait.
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Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald
Though his memoir-in-essays is subtitled A Confessional, and though it opens by revising the story he and his family used to tell about his childhood, Fitzgerald doesn’t immediately lay bare the lingering pain of his tumultuous upbringing. The first 11 essays are plenty vulnerable: Fitzgerald writes that he was born of an affair; spent his early years living in a homeless shelter and then in low-income housing run by the Catholic Worker movement; moved to north-central Massachusetts, where “violence was the solution, problem, and consequence”; and began abusing alcohol and drugs before age 13. But these are mere “flashes of the past,” as Fitzgerald writes in the last essay, “My Story,” where he takes full control of the narrative of his life. As he admits to having avoided the full truth, Fitzgerald becomes his own confessor, the one with the power to forgive.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Janina Duszejko, the strange older woman who narrates this Nobel Laureate’s fairy tale–tinged noir thriller, seems too caught up in her devotion to animals, astrology, and the poetry of William Blake to involve herself in anything as petty as a whodunit. But when poachers start turning up dead in Duszejko’s remote Polish hamlet in the Kłodzko Valley, she fights to make the police listen to her theory of the crimes: The animals who have long made their home in the village’s bordering forest are taking their revenge. In Tokarczuk’s hands, Duszejko is no “crazy madwoman,” as the police see her, but a prophet—the only one who can see that “animals have a very strong sense of justice.” On a second pass, with full knowledge of why Duszejko becomes so wrapped up in the murder investigations, you can better appreciate how Tokarczuk subverts the thriller’s typical form with a philosophical meditation on how humans have become all too comfortable with destroying the natural world.
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Loved and Missed, by Susie Boyt
I picked up Loved and Missed after seeing it recommended again and again by fellow critics as a touching, engrossing novel about the pleasures of caregiving, one that they were desperate to talk about. The book—largely narrated by a middle-aged schoolteacher named Ruth as she takes over the parenting of her granddaughter, Lily, from her drug-addicted daughter, Eleanor—is indeed poignant and charming. Ruth builds a cozy home life after deciding that Lily “was not going to have a poultice childhood, a mending service, scrappy and provisional.” Yet buzzing beneath this domestic bliss is the live wire of Eleanor’s presence and absence, and the reader is forced to wonder how Lily is affected by being the object of all of Ruth’s displaced motherly love. Then, in the last chapter, Boyt hands the reins of narration to the teenage Lily, adding a fresh charge to all that came before. No wonder we can’t stop talking about it.
She’s Under Here: A Love Story, a Horror Story, a Reckoning, by Karen Palmer
The first time I read Palmer’s memoir of fleeing her abusive ex-husband and assuming a new identity, I hardly came up for air. I was fully submerged in her recounting of 14 dangerous years of marriage—including a harrowing scene of her ex holding a gun to her pregnant belly—followed by escalating torment after she flees with her daughters. But this memoir of surviving domestic violence and then coming to terms with what it costs to start over entirely, including forged birth certificates and a fake life story, deserves to be lingered over, just as Palmer’s fear stayed with her for decades. Only on my second read, once I had made it through with Palmer to safer shores, was I able to fully appreciate the author’s persistent doubts about the choices she was forced to make, as well her haunting meditations on why she stayed for so long.
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Women and Children First, by Alina Grabowski
The fictional decaying coastal town of Nashquitten, Massachusetts, is a place where “it seemed like there was a death every month”—opioid overdoses, drunk driving, suicides. But the mysterious death of the aspiring artist Lucy Anderson at a high-school party stands out. Grabowski follows the ripples and rifts that led to and came after Lucy’s demise via a Rashomon-like structure, switching among the perspectives of 10 different girls and women connected to Lucy: her classmate, her guidance counselor, her best friend, her mother. Each narrator’s story offers a shard of what happened at that party, yet their points of view are contradictory and hopelessly biased, each coloring the reader’s understanding of what came before. Women and Children First is less a puzzle than a kaleidoscope, offering several misaligned but interconnected visions of the truth. The satisfaction comes not from any definitive reveal of what happened to Lucy, but from unraveling how all these characters’ actions and stories affect one another—something you can only really understand once you’ve finished the book and gone back to page one.