An often funny, occasionally tedious satire steeped in the “transgressive postmodern prose” it purports to spoof.
Swedish author Stoopendaal’s ruminative, cerebral, darkly humorous novel follows one man’s search for his intellectual soul.
The social theory of the title concerns “a cognitive bias that means someone who’s incompetent is also incapable of understanding their own incompetence.” Would that refer to the narrator? His pontifications about controversial psychologist Jordan B. Peterson before having read the man’s work hint that neither his nor Peterson’s views need be taken seriously. Readers need not be fascinated by lightning rods like Peterson or Michel Houellebecq to follow the never-named narrator’s emotional, spiritual, and mental health journey during the increasingly hot Swedish spring and summer of 2018—reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus’, although Joyce is too old-modern to be mentioned here—but it wouldn’t hurt. The tale of that journey is interrupted by the insertion of a story, written by the narrator, in which Houellebecq appears as a fictionalized version of the narrator. (How closely the narrator represents Stoopendaal remains a question among many layers of meta to unpack here.) While a professed fan of “transgressive postmodern prose” like Houellebecq’s, the narrator lives as a “normie” in Gothenburg with a respectable civil service job and a girlfriend studying to be a librarian. Their Pomeranian, Molly—labeled by the narrator his “baby surrogate”—is the book’s most endearing character, perhaps because she’s a watcher, not a talker. The novel’s big dramatic moment, with comic undertones, occurs when the narrator wakes up hungover after a night of philosophic discourse and briefly can’t find Molly, whom his girlfriend has left temporarily in his care. Molly turns up safe in the laundry hamper, but the narrator’s horrified remorse over his irresponsibility causes him to stop drinking and consider the Bible. Otherwise, there’s not much plot. The narrator describes his dreams, his drinking, his slightly confused sex life, and a lot of conversations. Expect to be bombarded by both high- and lowbrow cultural references, including footnotes.
An often funny, occasionally tedious satire steeped in the “transgressive postmodern prose” it purports to spoof.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668020197
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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