What Happened to Anna K.
by Irina Reyn |
REVIEWED BY MICHELLE GREEN
People PICK
NOVEL
With a light-but-sure touch in her debut novel, Reyn takes Tolstoy's Anna Karenina from 19th-century Russia to 21st-century Rego Park, a gossipy immigrant neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., where Russian Jewish relatives "internally flambéed on vodka" grill singletons at holiday gatherings. It's easy to see why Reyn's indelible heroine, Anna Roitman—here, a bookish beauty well past 30 with a placeholder job in publishing—accepts courtly but dull Alexi K. after he bribes a chef to hide a ring in her chocolate soufflé. And it's just as easy to empathize when Anna leaves him later; aside from serving as cheeky counterparts to Tolstoy's cast, Reyn's characters have vivid lives of their own. An expatriate born in Moscow, the author brings a spot-on sense of detail and sly humor to her work; for instance, her description of Slavic traits, as listed by Anna, include "Suspicion of Positive Sentiments" and "Indifference to the Enjoyment of Others" (as in, loudly discussing "a friend's abortion during a Met performance"). Literate and fun, What Happened to Anna K. is an uncommonly ambitious book and one of the year's most amusing reads—even if the words "Russian novel" leave you cold.
by George Pelecanos |
REVIEWED BY ANDREW ABRAHAMS
NOVEL
In 1972 three white teens go for a joyride in a black neighborhood near Washington, D.C., looking for trouble. One of the youths tosses a Hostess cherry pie—and a racial slur—out a car window at a group of local men, who retaliate with gunfire, killing one of the agitators. Thirty-five years later, Alex Pappas, an innocent passenger in the car who remains tortured by the tragic—and still murky—event, is possessed with questions about what really went down, particularly with the two African-American brothers who were at the scene of the crime. One nasty obstacle in the way of his search for truth is the sinister Charles Baker, a hardened criminal and blackmailer. The Maryland-based Pelecanos infuses this yarn with raw emotion, centering the story on the growing bond between Pappas and Raymond Monroe, one of the black men whose life was changed by the incident. And if the ending seems a bit pat, the theme of redemption rings out as loud as the gun fired on that fateful day.
>WHAT'S ON YOUR SUMMER SYLLABUS?
BLAKE LIVELY I just read a memoir called The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I know they're making it into a movie and I would love to be a part of it.
ETHAN HAWKE Michael Almereyda's edition of Night Wraps the Sky, a collection of [Vladimir] Mayakovsky's works—it's revolutionary poetry.
AMANDA PEET I reread Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding. I named my daughter Frankie after the main character; I hadn't read it since I was 15.
• In his erudite, accessible The World in Six Songs, Daniel Levitin charts the evolutionary link between music and the brain through six types of songs: knowledge, friendship, love, comfort, joy and religion. Some pop examples:
"SMOKIN' IN THE BOY'S ROOM"
(BROWNSVILLE STATION) A friendship song says, "this is us," Levitin notes. This one binds "people on the fringe" as national anthems and protest ballads unite other groups.
"BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE"
(TALKING HEADS) A joy song—"it gets you moving and feeling good." In this case, Levitin says, "it's just that they're having so much fun and it's infectious."
"WALKING ON THE MOON"
(THE POLICE) As Levitin says, there's "nothing like" human love in the animal kingdom. This expresses giddy first love, in rhythm and lyrics.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
