When anxieties are rippling through the culture, novelists can’t help picking up the signal. It’s been an anxious, antsy couple of years in and around the American Jewish community—a time of looking back nervously, of reworking and rethinking the tales of assimilation and upward striving whose happy endings we once thought we knew. And these novels, some heavy and some light, reflect that mood, offering bulletins from an unstable present that struggles with an ever-changing understanding of the past.
It’s not that you can’t take these books to the beach. You can and should. And some patterns are familiar: What summer would be complete without a stack of novels about improbable romances, resourceful immigrant grandparents, rebellious teenagers, young women coming of age? Yet even the oldest stories constantly gain new dimensions, and new stories are pressing to be told.
One thought on “Partly Cloudy Reads for Your Beach Bag”
Loved “Levinson of Harvard”, L.M. Vincent’s most important work to date. Unlocks the longing we all feel about worlds in which we don’t belong. Maybe the end of legacy admissions at Harvard and other elite universities will assuage the ache.