4 Writers to Watch This Summer
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Version 0 of 1. ‘the vanishing half’ Growing up in rural Palmetto, La., during Jim Crow, Lena Bennett used to sit with other black kids on the upper level of the segregated movie theater and throw popcorn kernels onto the heads of white people in the seats below. It was “kind of subversive,” the author Brit Bennett said of her mother’s childhood prank, over FaceTime in late April: “If you’re going to make us sit in this balcony, we’re going to throw popcorn at you. My mom will say now, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t have done that.’ I’m like, ‘No, maybe you should have.’” Bennett, 29, turned that anecdote into a scene in her second novel, “The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead, June 2). It’s one of many stories the California-born Bennett has inherited that have formed her impression of Palmetto — current population: less than 200 — as “a kind of mythical place.” The sort of place that, like many insular Creole communities, looms large in its residents’ psyches even long after they’ve left. Bennett spent nearly a decade working on her debut novel, “The Mothers,” mostly alone or in her M.F.A. workshops at the University of Michigan, wondering if it would ever be published. When the book, about a grieving, pregnant teenager in California, was published, in 2016, it drew comparisons to Toni Morrison, and landed Bennett on best-seller lists and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list of young writers. So writing her second novel, she said, there was more “external pressure.” She spent years maneuvering pieces of the plot, in close collaboration with her editor at Riverhead, Sarah McGrath. The resulting narrative is an intricate house of cards involving oscillating time frames and perspectives, and requiring some suspension of disbelief. Set between the 1950s and 1980s, the novel centers on Stella and Desiree, light-skinned identical twins from the fictional town of Mallard, La., whose lives, once collinear, fork irrevocably after decisions they make in early adulthood. Stella moves to Los Angeles, passes for white, marries a white man and has a daughter, while Desiree marries “the darkest man she could find,” and raises her daughter — “blueblack,” Bennett writes, “black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and the end of the world” — back home in Mallard. Lena Bennett eventually left Palmetto — one of only two siblings out of nine to do so. “I’ve always been interested in the version of my mom’s life where she stays in Louisiana, versus the version where she goes to California,” Bennett said. But the book “strayed so far from myself and my family,” she said, becoming a broader, more theoretical inquiry into the stakes and consequences of so-called passing. Bennett wrote Stella not to judge her, but as a way of answering that question for herself: Why do some people, if given the choice, alter the identities with which they were born? “I did not want to go into the morals of passing,” Bennett said. She felt that to punish the white-passing character, as so many narratives in this tradition do, would be to implicitly reinforce the social hierarchies they transgress. “I was interested in the illogic of race, but also the real, lived realities of it,” she said. In “The Bluest Eye” (the first Morrison novel Bennett ever read, when she was “far too young to be reading it”), Pecola, an 11-year-old black girl, blames the traumas she’s suffered on her dark features. “If those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful,” Pecola thinks, “she herself would be different.” In “The Vanishing Half,” Mallard’s residents call Desiree’s dark-skinned daughter “Tar Baby” — a name that Morrison gave to a character in “Sula,” and later to an entire novel. Bennett said echoes of Morrison’s work in her own were not so much intentional as inevitable. “It’s weird to feel that type of familiarity toward people you don’t know,” she said. “People who make this art that you not only deeply connect to, but that you feel has mothered you in some way.” Morrison, Bennett said, is simply “built into my DNA.” — Lauren Christensen ‘A burning’ As a child in Kolkata, India, Megha Majumdar watched the city come alive during religious celebrations like Diwali, Christmas and Eid. “People joke about how Bengalis celebrate every holiday, every festival — we’ll take it,” she said. Majumdar views that plurality as the soul of her home country. So when she started reading in 2014 about an India where extremism was taking hold and Muslims were being persecuted, she didn’t recognize it. In her debut novel, “A Burning” (Alfred A. Knopf, June 2), Majumdar follows three characters trying to make it in contemporary India amid political turmoil. Jivan is a Muslim girl who dreams of escaping the slums where she lives but gets implicated in a terrorist plot. PT Sir is a teacher who gets a taste of power when he becomes involved in a right-wing political party. And Lovely is an aspiring actress who could help Jivan, but only at great personal cost. “I started writing from a place of alarm and anger and wanting to bear witness,” Majumdar said. But she also wanted to show “how people hold big dreams close even during these really hard conditions.” For Majumdar, that dream was an American education. In 2006, she moved to the United States to attend Harvard University, where, she said, she learned to think for herself. “For the first time, I was in classrooms where people asked me what I thought,” she said. “It was just revelatory for me. I did not know that you could question a book.” After she graduated, Majumdar earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in anthropology, which taught her about complexity and nuance, and even more about questioning and observing the world around her. Part of what she wanted to capture in her book was the “grainy specificity” of life in India, which she saw during visits home and heard through conversations with her parents and younger sister, who still live there. Majumdar seeks a similar complexity in the books she acquires as an editor at Catapult in New York City, where she’s worked since the press started in 2015. “I want to help provide a space of intellectual freedom to writers of color, to support them in being free to pursue their curiosity and imagination,” she said. Despite the hefty issues her novel explores, Majumdar also wanted to make sure the story was engaging and moved swiftly — “a book that would be entertaining as well as intellectually serious.” “That was kind of a fun challenge that I had throughout this writing process, of like, competing with Netflix,” she explained. The book played like a movie in her head, and she incorporated “that visual richness, that texture, that surprise.” Though her life revolves around literature, Majumdar wrote characters who did not all rely on book smarts. “I wanted to acknowledge that there are people who are intelligent, who live with determination, who live with humor, and books do not serve them,” she said. In India, she witnessed the ways in which impoverished people had to hustle and use ingenuity to survive. One man in her neighborhood charged a small fee to stand in line to pay utility bills for others. Stores kept informal credit systems. Kids worked as tailors’ assistants or in hole-in-the-wall restaurants. “There’s a great spirit of living with inventiveness and humor, and finding solutions” to systemic oppression, she said. One of the central questions Majumdar tried to answer in “A Burning,” she said, is: “How do we live in a society which does not serve us?” She views it as particularly relevant in the United States today, when the coronavirus pandemic has further exposed persistent inequality and disparity. As readers find her novel, she said, “I hope people feel that resonance, too.” — Concepción de León ‘love’ Like many of us, Roddy Doyle is a bit lonelier these days, but not just for the obvious reason. His standing weekly session at the pub with friends — “most Thursdays,” he said, dating back to 1976 — had become a diminished event even before Dublin’s watering holes shut down. “It’s been an open arrangement,” Doyle, 62, said of the group’s gatherings. “First a lot of us and then a few and now just three of us.” During the pandemic, they’ve been sharing their pints of Guinness on Zoom. They initially missed the din of other patrons and sports on TV, but they’re growing more comfortable with the quieter lulls in conversation. Doyle lost his father six years ago, and his mother and one of his closest friends two years ago. He’s found all this loss not very much fun to live through, unsurprisingly, but “creatively interesting,” he said. “There’s no one over me, so to speak,” he said. “It’s a new way of approaching your own life. Any little relic of the little boy running home from school to show his mother or father something good that happened to him is gone. I’m a strong believer that you carry your whole life with you, and you should cling to it, so it’s a strange experience.” Doyle’s new novel, “Love” (Viking, June 23), like his previous one, “Smile,” is hung on the simple bones of two men talking. It’s told from the perspective of Davy, approaching 60, who left Ireland for England years ago and meets up with an old drinking buddy named Joe during a visit home. Over the course of a night spent in pubs, Joe confesses to Davy that he’s left his wife for another woman, a woman both men knew a bit in their younger days. Doyle’s turn toward writing two-handers began in 2011, when Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama visited Ireland in quick succession — momentous political moments for his country, he said. Doyle imagined a couple of men a few years older than he was discussing the current events at a pub, and posted the dialogue on Facebook, where it was met with enthusiasm. He eventually turned the concept into a play, “Two Pints.” In “Love,” Joe’s admission to Davy takes place over many drinks at several different bars. It’s a circuitous and often interrupted conversation, revealing its secrets slowly. “If they were 30, perhaps there might not be a novel in it, because they’d get to the point much quicker,” Doyle said. “I think we have great trouble expressing feelings and vulnerability.” The “we” is Irish men of Doyle’s generation, who he says took a long time to get over their inherited understanding of masculinity, if they ever fully did. He praised the “brilliantly done” television adaptation of his fellow Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s “Normal People,” about the troubled, passionate relationship of a man and woman through high school and college. “I spoke to a few men, and we were saying how envious we were” of the show’s main characters, Doyle said. “Not that we’d be that age again — I don’t think we would — but to be brought up in a way that allowed this boy and girl to be so considerate of each other and at ease with each other.” In Ireland, the publication of “Love” has been pushed to October. So for now, when he might normally be promoting the novel there, Doyle’s living the lockdown life, which for a prolific writer has some significant resemblance to everyday life. “The opportunity to learn Russian and Urdu, I don’t have the time,” Doyle said. “And yoga for a 62-year-old, I haven’t explored that either.” “I started a novel set in the present day,” he said, “but I’ve had to put it aside, because I don’t really know what the present day is.” — John Williams ‘parakeet’ People know to call Marie-Helene Bertino when things need to get weird. Her creative writing students covertly come to her for off-the-wall reading suggestions, “as if they’re asking for contraband,” she said. At some colleges where Bertino has taught, students have told her things like: “We’re not allowed to write anything that’s not realistic — we can’t even have ghosts in our stories.” There are plenty of ghosts in Bertino’s second novel, “Parakeet” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 2), starting with the title character. In the opening scene, the protagonist — known throughout the book as the Bride — is visited by a bird whom she immediately recognizes as her dead grandmother, tipped off by the “glittering, hematite eyes, the expression of cunning disapproval.” The grandmother is there with what she admits is a doomed mission to reunite the family. When the Bride balks, Granny registers her disapproval in a highly scatological fashion, then disappears. It’s not the novel’s only supernatural occurrence. The Bride, a self-described “ethnically ambiguous” New Yorker who works with trauma survivors, has a series of destabilizing encounters in the days leading up to her wedding. At one point, she sips coffee in an unfamiliar diner and chats with a reptile who runs a Japanese lifestyle blog. The strangeness of these episodes, Bertino said, allowed her to unearth a deeper truth. “Trauma can be a borderline supernatural feeling,” she said. “‘Parakeet’ was the answer to a question I asked after my last book, which was: What is the most honest thing I can write?” Her previous books are a short story collection, “Safe as Houses,” and a novel, “2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas.” Both zero in on highly unusual characters: a woman who rejects a ham she won from a local store after her home burned down; a chain-smoking 9-year-old who dreams of becoming a jazz singer. Bertino has some commonalities with her latest protagonist. She, too, worked as a biographer for people who had sustained traumatic brain injuries, describing her clients’ suffering as vividly as possible so that juries could determine what settlement they would receive. She quickly learned the difference between writing that a man’s back ached and writing that he was in such agony he could “no longer pick up his 4-year-old and give her a kiss.” She called the work a “master class in mapping pain.” And she is also the descendant of immigrants; her grandmother Marie-Louise, a reluctant bride with a tendency toward black humor, came to the U.S. from the Pyrenees in 1912, and was the model for Granny in “Parakeet.” “One of the most radical things I could do was put someone who looks like me” at the center of a story, Bertino said. “Not as a sidekick, not as a best friend.” Growing up in Philadelphia, Bertino heard little from her family about their experience settling in the United States. “They just had to survive immediately,” she said. Not knowing more of their stories, and not speaking their native Basque and Italian languages, “I lost an understanding of how difficult it was” for them to acclimate. In March, Bertino returned to Brooklyn from the University of Montana, where she was a visiting writer. A 17-year resident of New York through Hurricane Sandy and other upheavals, she said it was inconceivable to be anywhere else during the coronavirus outbreak. (She has continued to teach in Montana’s M.F.A. program, via Zoom.) It occurred to her early on in the crisis that being a writer had been good preparation for isolation. “To write a novel takes such long-term, dedicated practice” and endurance, she said. “It requires you to be away from the world.” Still, she has been able to return to one of her favorite places, Green-Wood Cemetery. “Being around death makes me calm,” she said. The cemetery is also home to a parakeet colony, populated by the descendants of birds who arrived here by accident around the 1970s, en route to South America. Bertino has a longtime fascination with “creatures that were supposed to be someplace else,” but end up thriving in an environment “not suited for them.” While she and her grandmother had plenty in common, starting with their names, the affection for birds is completely Bertino’s. She laughed, thinking about it. “I would love to know what my grandmother thinks of me turning her into a bird.” — Joumana Khatib |