Drew Basile at the LARB:
IF THE PURPOSE of art is to achieve some semblance of catharsis, then critics be damned, the novel is alive and well. It’s hard to keep up today with the number of blustering young American writers who use short little books as so many ways to blow off steam. These follow-ups and debuts are almost always about angry characters, or at least the pathologically resentful and repressed. People who are deranged, people who have little station in life but who should’ve, perhaps, had more: a let-down elite, betrayed by the cultural institutions—the publishing house, the magazine, the university—that might have welcomed and celebrated them 50 years earlier.
This is Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) and Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life (2025)—novels not just about angry young women and men but also about a certain layer of contingency: about writers and academics who have prepared all their lives to enter through the ivied gates of the campus quad, or to write good novels and attain, if not good money, at least a certain prominence, trading on their wits and letters. But both those doors have closed. Like most Americans, the young writer is angry about this. Like some, that small crust that still reads, the young writer is turning to Thomas Bernhard.
more here.
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