When days are at their shortest, it puts me in the mood for long novels—something to take with me when I go into hibernation for the chill New York winter. My perfect companion for a cozy winter weekend would be Workhorse by Caroline Palmer (Flatiron, Oct. 14; 560 pp.), a former editor at Seventeen and Vogue, who plunges the reader into the not-entirely-glamorous world of early 2000s magazine publishing, just before glossy pictures on paper began to lose their luster. Clodagh Harmon is an editorial assistant at an unnamed Vogue-like magazine, and she’s a workhorse, not a show horse, a privileged kid trying to make it in an atmosphere where only the super-privileged tend to survive. This isn’t The Devil Wears Prada—the higher-ups barely make an appearance as Palmer “teases out class issues behind the doors of elite Manhattan media,” according to our review, which calls the book “tense, propulsive, and authentic.” Here are some more luxuriously long novels to dig into this month:
Crux by Gabriel Tallent (Riverhead, Jan. 20; 416 pp.): Nine years after the publication of Tallent’s debut, An Absolute Darling—also long at 432 pages—he returns to bookstores with this tale of two high school seniors who live to go rock climbing in the Mojave Desert. There’s a lot going on here: Dan and Tamma’s individual trajectories, their families, their financial pressures, the beautiful descriptions of climbing, and what our starred review calls “Tallent’s gift for surprising and lively language, from the peculiar names climbers give to sites…to Tamma’s robust and profane rants, to the lingo used to describe climbs themselves.…Even if you don’t climb, the language is rich and resonant.…A sharp novel about youth in conflict with dreams, nature, and reality.”
Effingers by Gabriele Tergit; trans. by Sophie Duvernoy (NYRB Classics, Nov. 11; 864 pp.): Originally published in 1951, Tergit’s multigenerational novel about a Jewish family in Germany has only now been translated into English. “The Effinger family is a blend of urban and rural, secular and religious, socialist and capitalist, its paterfamilias a watchmaker in a small German town, his children striving to find their places in the world as the 20th century nears,” according to our starred review. Soon Germany will be unrecognizable. “Pensive and full of foreshadowing, Tergit’s novel nonetheless suggests that things might have been otherwise,” says the reviewer. “A masterwork of modern German literature.”
Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon, Oct. 28; 1232 pp.): We can’t talk about long books without mentioning this one, even if our reviewer thought it was a bit too long: “At only a couple of dozen pages shorter than War and Peace, it serves as a pointed lesson in the fact that life—as so many of Danielewski’s characters discover—is short indeed.” But wait! The reviewer also calls it “carefully plotted and imaginatively written.” So don’t let the extra pages stop you from plunging into this updated Western with a side of horror and police procedural—not something you see much these days—about a boy named Kalin March from Orvop, Utah, who steals a pair of horses bound for slaughter, determined to free them.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
