3 good books
Assembly | The Marriage Portrait | The Idiot
Assembly by Natasha Brown (2021)
Assembly is a tight coil that slowly unwinds as the narrator looks to regain a sense of agency in light of a cancer diagnosis and a life lived following the instructions:
Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable.
Against the backdrop of preparations for a fancy party at her white boyfriend’s countryside estate, the narrator, a Black British woman of Jamaican descent, interlaces the present with scenes of racist, sexist, and xenophobic micro-aggressions in a style reminiscent of Arthur Jafa’s film, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” and Claudia Rankine’s book, Citizen.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (2022)
Lucrezia de Medici is sixteen years old, not quite a year into her marriage, when she realizes that her husband, the Duke of Ferrara, means to kill her. She is not even supposed to be here, but when her older sister dies while engaged to the duke, it is all too expedient for Lucrezia to take her place. The stakes are simple: produce an heir and earn the love of her duke and his province or don’t and face the consequences.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (2017)
Selin is a freshman at Harvard taking classes seemingly at random and looking for something to ground her in this confusing new stage of life when she begins an email correspondence with Ivan, “a seven-foot-tall Hungarian guy who stares at everyone like he’s trying to see through their souls.” As their relationship expands online, he’ll barely talk to her in person, forcing Selin to deal with the intoxicatingly vast depth of language and the chasm between talking about life and living it.
📚 Up next: Edisto by Padgett Powell