This Land Is Our Land, by Suketu Mehta (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This timely defense of global migration offers an overview of its many material benefits and refutes nativist talking points. But its core is a passionately argued rejection of closed borders. Humanizing the current exodus from the Global South, Mehta portrays individual migrants and shows how inextricable their journeys are from the political, economic, and ecological consequences of colonialism, global capitalism, and cheap fossil fuel: “They are here because you were there.” Mehta, who came to the U.S. as a child, forty-two years ago, is both an immigrant and thoroughly American, and who he means by “they,” “you,” and “we” shifts throughout the book—a telling sign of assimilation’s power and its limits.
Eric Hobsbawm, by Richard J. Evans (Oxford). This exhaustively researched biography of the renowned Marxist historian, who died in 2012, shows that his path was set early. Born in Egypt in 1917, Hobsbawm discovered Communism as an orphaned, precocious teen in Berlin, before moving to England, where he made his name. “I hope I will grow so far into dialectical materialism that I don’t come out of it,” the adolescent auspiciously muses in his diary. Whereas Hobsbawm’s autobiography, “Interesting Times,” elided the personal, Evans’s skillful portrait adds rich nuance to the story of how Hobsbawm’s politics informed his sprawling social histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We learn that his allegiance to Marxism brought scrutiny from MI5, colored his romantic relationships, and stoked his emergence as a public intellectual.
Juliet the Maniac, by Juliet Escoria (Melville House). This striking autofictional début novel tells the story of the author’s teen-age years, when her struggles with substance abuse and mental illness alienated her from her family. After two suicide attempts, she is sent to a “therapeutic boarding school” in Northern California. Images from sketchbooks and letters illustrate her experience, and the story’s form—vignettes punctuated by the occasional “letter from the future,” in the voice of the thirty-two-year-old author—evokes both her mania and the disorder of memory. Escoria writes affectingly about the anguish of mental illness: “My problems didn’t seem bad enough to justify all that I’d done to myself.”
The Learning Curve, by Mandy Berman (Random House). This searching novel revolves around the figure of Oliver Ash, a charismatic professor famous for his autobiographical fiction and infamous for his affair with a young student, his subsequent dismissal from a university, and his self-imposed exile in Paris. At an East Coast college where he has come to teach he encounters Fiona, an anxious and self-destructive senior who is given to testing her limits and those of others. Exploring the shifting nuances of how power plays out in all relationships, Berman’s novel abounds with questions of our political moment: “Was it possible to be both a feminist and to want a man who was bad for women?”
