Rebecca Donner
In 1939, wondering how Russia would react to the expanding war, Winston Churchill memorably stated: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. This is an apt description of Hystopia, David Means’s long-awaited novel about Vietnam. Means focuses not on the war but its irresolvable aftermath—specifically, on the psychic damage visited on veterans years after the fall of Saigon. The opening pages introduce us to a twenty-two-year-old vet who commits suicide, the concluding pages present a series of suicide notes, and the pages that come between attempt to answer a grave and persistent question: Why did he 
When I meet with John Freeman to discuss his new book, How to Read a Novelist, he is in the middle of moving. The wood-planked floors groan under the weight of books, thousands of them stowed in boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling. He offers coffee—the coffee maker isn’t packed yet—and I see at once that he’s the sort of bibliophile whose immersion in the world of fictional people hasn’t hampered his ability to communicate with real, breathing ones. The coffee is good and strong; I haven’t had a cup in almost two years, an experiment in caffeine deprivation that 
I met with Rebecca Miller on a recent chilly afternoon in New York to talk about her ambitious new novel, Jacob’s Folly (Farrar, Strauss Giroux). Her previous books include a story collection, Personal Velocity, and a novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; she also wrote and directed the films based on these books. While it may be for her films that she is best known (she is also the writer and director of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” and “Angela”), Rebecca Miller is a novelist in her own right. We took refuge in the warmth of a Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy’s method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. “I was afraid I would break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word,” she says, and likens her mother’s emaciated body That a chemist figures prominently in Andrea Barrett’s new novel, The Air We Breathe, will come as no surprise to those familiar with her fiction. Over the past decade, Barrett has produced a novel and two story collections that dramatize an abiding fascination with scientists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury milieus. Her characters, both historical and imaginary, have included botanists, geneticists, zoologists, biologists, and ornithologists. A genealogical chart is appended to Barrett’s latest offering, illustrating the latticework of relationships that unites major and peripheral characters in all four books. In this way, The Air We Breathe completes the author’s ingenious tetralogy. Daphne Beal’s first book might be considered an exemplar of what Edmund White recently characterized as the “Peace Corps novel,” in which a “young, privileged American” travels to another country and is transformed by the experience. “I wanted to come home different from what I’d been—bolder, wiser, happier,” insists the narrator of In the Land of No Right Angles, recounting her peregrinations through Nepal and India. To Beal’s credit, she resists facile resolution; cultural dislocation may be transformative, but she also notes the gaps and incongruities.