Laura Miller
The opening scene of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way is one of the most famously difficult to get through in literature. That’s not because of its style, which is sublime, but because it describes the experience of falling asleep. Many susceptible readers nod off the first few times they attempt it. All writing about sleep has this problem; of the fundamental human appetites, it’s the least exciting. The better you invoke it, the more likely you are to incite it, and because it can’t be remembered, sleep can’t be described. Rebecca Stead chose to set her children’s novel “When You Reach Me”—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that’s where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted “to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy.” Her characters, middle-class middle-school students, routinely walk around the Upper West Side by themselves, a rare freedom in today’s city, despite a significant drop in New York’s crime rate since Stead’s footloose youth. “I have been a kind of undercover person from birth almost,” says one of the two main characters in Michael Gruber’s “The Good Son,” “and I am bound to offend those who like neat classifications.” Not an improbable statement, coming from a major player in a spy thriller — if “The Good Son” can be accurately described as a spy thriller. It is that, and yet it’s a lot more. You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published “A New Literary History of America” — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I’m not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.