This week’s quintet of quality reviews features Joanna Scutts examining Shawn Gude’s American Socialist, Dwight Garner exploring Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, Rhian Sasseen looking at Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Will and Attention, Lily Meyer assessing Madeline ffitch’s Avalon, Rise, and Max Callimanopulos evaluating Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster. Together, these works—and the critics engaging with them—paint a fascinating picture of how literature continues to grapple with history, human frailty, systemic power, and the persistent search for meaning.
Unpacking the Legacy of Eugene V. Debs in American Socialist
What can the history of American socialism tell us about the present and future of democratic politics? The question is more than academic. The last decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of interest in socialist politics, stretching from Bernie Sanders’s high-profile presidential campaigns to the rise of prominent figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more recently, the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor. Each of these political figures has had to confront and overcome a long-standing, deeply embedded assumption in American political culture: the notion that socialists simply cannot find traction in the United States.
Shawn Gude, a former editor at Jacobin, tackles this historical hurdle head-on in American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs. Writing in The New Republic, Joanna Scutts notes that Gude’s biography offers an important corrective to conventional political narratives. The book illuminates the myriad forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, while simultaneously detailing the exceptional, often ruthless efforts of his political and corporate opponents to crush both him and his burgeoning movement. Along the way, Gude’s meticulous tracking reveals a deeper, sobering truth about the nation: in the United States, the story of socialism is very frequently the story of the intense, institutional opposition to socialism.
As Gude describes it, Debs’s unique brand of political oratory relied on a potent fusion. He seamlessly wove nationalist and Christian mythology together with Marxist theory, evoking the spiritual resonance of Christ alongside the revolutionary fire of the abolitionists. It was an ideological and rhetorical brew that appealed deeply to crowds wherever he spoke. The era of grand political oratory famously made stars of unlikely speakers, capturing an intensity that modern photographs and cold transcripts can barely convey—to contemporary audiences, it frequently felt like an electrical current passing through the room. Eugene Debs would spend the remainder of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, drawing comparisons to Jesus Christ from both his devoted followers and his harshest critics alike.
The international socialists who initially inspired Debs at the dawn of his political conversion were wildly excited by the prospects for American labor. How far, they wondered, might a nation go that possessed no ancient kings to depose, no deeply entrenched feudal hierarchies to uproot—a country so young, iconoclastic, and resource-rich? According to Scutts, the subsequent realization was as brutal as the conditions in the mines and mills: they discovered just how powerful the capitalist pushback would be. While the grand promise of American socialism remains unfulfilled, Gude’s book serves as a reminder that the United States is a country where almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Even politics, and perhaps even capitalism itself. As Scutts observes, the story of Eugene Debs, told with such care, demonstrates that true reinvention will not arrive courtesy of a single inspiring leader, but rather through the collective resistance and joyful community built by ordinary people.
Rediscovering Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack
Moving from the sweeping plains of political history to the intricate, biting dynamics of domestic fiction, critic Dwight Garner writing for The New York Times turns his attention to a welcome literary resurrection: Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack.
Garner confesses an immediate captivation with the book, praising its peculiar brand of literary wit. "The shuckling on display is so good—so literate, funny, cruel and eccentric—that I slothed with this endearing novel immediately and was chagrined to have to climb out," he writes. Noting that the book is ideally short, Garner admits to a common readerly desire to simply live inside its pages, inhabiting the charmed parenthesis it opens up within the exhausting flow of the daily grind.
Despite its merits, the novel has faced a notable hurdle. Its awkward and hard-to-remember title—which serves as an allusion to William Butler Yeats’s brother Jack, a remarkably talented painter in his own right—may well have prevented the book from developing the wide audience it has long deserved. But with its return to the conversation, Garner asserts that readers should have been talking about Barbara Trapido all along.
Garner reveals a personal connection to the book’s underlying theme, noting a special fondness for stories about young people who grow up in narrow cultural circumstances—homes with few books on the shelves or paintings on the walls—only to sense that another, richer way of living exists. They find their way into this broader world by being befriended, or nearly adopted, by unconventional, urbane figures. Noting that this personal resonance is why Willa Cather’s One of Ours stands as his favorite Cather novel rather than My Ántonia, Garner elevates Trapido’s work as a true ornament to this specific literary genre.
The brilliance of the novel, according to Garner, lives largely in its razor-sharp conversational exchanges. The dialogue operates at a Stoppardian level of sophistication. If the characters were dogs, Garner quips, they would be constantly lifting their legs at one another; yet, this incessant hassling is simply how they express their underlying affection. Ultimately, Garner characterizes Brother of the More Famous Jack as a pocket classic—a book that takes life seriously, earns its emotional beats, and befriends the reader without ever slipping into sentimentality.
Meghan O’Gieblyn Confronts the Soul in Will and Attention
The human soul is an old-fashioned term nowadays, swirling with the antique patina and shine of a discarded heirloom. To take such a concept seriously in an era dominated by cultural nihilism and widespread disenchantment risks marking a person as unserious—someone overly committed to abstraction, favoring emotional resonance over cold logic and material reality. Furthermore, contemporary life unfolds across rigid binaries, where the very instruments of our daily existence—the computers we type on and the phones we endlessly scroll through—depend entirely on a foundational binary code of zeroes and ones.
Yet, in American writer Meghan O’Gieblyn’s latest work, the memoir Will and Attention, the soul—alongside the vast human consciousness and humanistic intellectual tradition for which the word functions as shorthand—refuses to be so easily dismissed. Writing in The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen explores how the book is set primarily around the turbulent period of the pandemic, tracing O’Gieblyn’s abrupt, frightening relapse into severe alcoholism. This personal crisis is paired alongside her unexpected, intellectually charged flirtation with Catholicism, occurring years after she had formally renounced religion to live as a committed atheist.
In this sense, Sasseen notes, O’Gieblyn’s memoir is fundamentally a book about obliteration in various forms. It examines the blotting out of the self that occurs when substance abuse obscures a person’s life from their own understanding, rendering their reflection indistinct in the mirror. Simultaneously, it explores the psychological and spiritual destruction of the individual when brought face-to-face with the concept of the divine.
Over the course of the memoir, O’Gieblyn successfully trains her authorial gaze squarely on herself, interrogating the twin problems introduced in the book’s will, encompassing the philosophical debate of free will and the capacity to will changes in our lives; and attention, representing the focus we dedicate to rigorous self-examination and our engagement with the world. Drawing on thinkers such as French philosopher Simone Weil, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and traditional Catholic theology, O’Gieblyn produces an addiction memoir that successfully transcends the standard tropes of the genre. Instead, she offers a salient, deeply philosophical exploration of the varieties of care and attention we owe both to ourselves and to others.
Sasseen highlights a central, uncomfortable irony that O’Gieblyn openly confronts: once a semblance of equilibrium has been established in a life—once stability, a steady relationship, a thriving career, and travel have been achieved—boredom inevitably sets in. And out of that very boredom arises a different kind of will: a destructive self-willedness driven by the unconscious need to tear down the hard-won happiness. While acknowledging the complex emotional reactions that books about alcoholism can trigger—such as a reader’s knee-jerk judgment regarding the collateral damage inflicted on loved ones—Sasseen argues that O’Gieblyn’s expansive approach allows the memoir to bypass the simplistic traps of viewing addiction exclusively through the binary lens of a biological disease or a mere moral choice.
Madeline ffitch’s Avalon, Rise and the Complications of Community Courage
Turning to contemporary fiction, Madeline ffitch’s novel Avalon, Rise offers readers a sophisticated narrative that is both intellectually complex and slyly humorous at every turn. Reviewing the novel for The Atlantic, Lily Meyer compares its core dynamic to the classic children’s story Abiyoyo, noting that ffitch’s book is similarly a very direct story about facing systemic evil with courage.
Avalon, Rise argues on nearly every page that standing up to oppressive forces—the metaphorical "Big Bad"—is an absolute necessity. However, the novel immediately complicates this basic principle by suggesting that standing up to those who threaten a community is never an easy undertaking. Indeed, the ever-shifting, delicate balance between clarity and moral complication forms the very heart of the narrative.
ffitch manages to maintain this narrative equilibrium largely because she exhibits little interest in demonstrating moral purity—neither her own nor that of her characters. Avalon, Rise remains unconcerned with whether its inhabitants execute the precisely correct maneuver in every given situation. Consequently, the novel achieves the rare literary feat of maintaining a distinct, unshakeable sense of right and wrong without ever degenerating into preachiness or heavy-handed didacticism. It blossoms instead into an honest exploration of how genuinely confusing and agonizingly difficult it is simply to try to be good.
By weaving various literary touchstones into the central tale of the town of Avalon defeating its metaphorical giant, ffitch constructs a layered story that articulates a clear ethical viewpoint without hammering the reader over the head. While few contemporary novels for adults pull this off successfully, Meyer points out that it remains a defining standard for greatness in children’s literature. ffitch directly incorporates several such classics into the fabric of Avalon, Rise, referencing works like Abiyoyo, Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, and The Dead Bird.
Each of these classic texts demands that its characters face daunting situations with courage, taking seemingly simple tasks—such as burying a small bird, celebrating a holiday, or navigating mundane routines—and surrounding them with emotional complications, mischief, humor, and delight. The same dynamic drives Avalon, Rise as it confronts the intrusion of white supremacists into a local town. The book understands, as well as the finest classics of children’s literature, that when one is a small, fallible, and utterly confused person, everything feels intensely exciting, yet almost nothing is easy. At the same time, it understands as well as any great adult novel just how remarkably difficult it is to get people to pull together in common cause, regardless of how high the stakes may be. By fusing these two clear yet complicated truths, ffitch has crafted a truly remarkable work.
Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster and the Topography of Bureaucracy
In the realm of experimental and contemporary fiction, aging writers sometimes lean toward a stark inarticulacy—as seen in the late career of Samuel Beckett, who traded in increasingly lonely phrases and flinty little fragments. Tom McCarthy, however, is moving decisively in the opposite direction.
Reviewing McCarthy’s latest novel, The Rhyl Poster, in The New Yorker, Max Callimanopulos notes that a distinct, geeky technical tang first announced itself in McCarthy’s 2021 novel, The Making of Incarnation—complete with Feynman diagrams, Fisher kernels, Prandtl tunnels, and hyper-converged infrastructure systems. That specialized vocabulary has now forcefully asserted itself over McCarthy’s prose as a whole. The Rhyl Poster overflows with references to networks, spreads, channels of association and disclosure, avenues, angles, vectors, eddies, and even "contrafluvial vectors." As Callimanopulos wryly observes, readers are left adrift, having essentially learned that the European legal system is vast and complicated, and that McCarthy possesses a great many inventive words to tell them so.
Squinting at the text, a reader might catch the faint structural bones of a legal thriller—imagining perhaps a John Grisham paperback rewritten by avant-garde formalist Georges Perec. Look a little closer, however, and The Rhyl Poster reveals itself to be nearly identical in spirit to McCarthy’s previous novels. While repetition and reenactment form the twin engines of McCarthy’s fiction, Callimanopulos admits it can be slightly disheartening to read repeatedly about isolated men and their invariably fruitless attempts to construct some kind of "infrastructural master-meaning" out of their contemporary historical moments.
Callimanopulos confesses to an irritating sense throughout his reading that McCarthy was hovering somewhere overhead, chuckling quietly at dutiful annotations and frequently exasperated margin notes. McCarthy’s novels have a well-established history of preempting their own criticism—noting famous meta-textual disclaimers like his warning at the start of Satin Island: “Events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.” But The Rhyl Poster pushes past those familiar impulses, appearing almost deliberately designed to deflect conventional reading pleasures. The prose, packed densely with bureaucratic jargon, beats the reader down with an elaborate banality, while the plot, largely recycled from earlier works, feels simultaneously frantic and empty.
Comparing the experience to stepping into a cluttered junk shop overflowing with miscellaneous bits and bobs collected throughout McCarthy’s career—a stark contrast to the clean, gallery-like cool of his breakout novel Remainder—Callimanopulos notes that the book only truly began to grow on him after he had closed the back cover for the last time.
Ultimately, Callimanopulos reflects that a writer so utterly committed to a single, rigorous method must eventually wonder what terrain is left to explore with it. Early in the book, a character named Stanton reflects on his document-smuggling operation, concluding that it constitutes "a topographic, not a spiritual, drama." For Callimanopulos, that single phrase effectively summarizes McCarthy’s entire literary career. The author has never shown much sustained interest in how or what his characters feel. Yet, in the closing chapters of The Rhyl Poster, McCarthy appears to be attempting to escape those characters altogether.
While he may never write another novel as clean, spare, and plainly enjoyable as Remainder, the novelist who once found his primary inspiration within the curated white spaces of the art world seems, in these final moments, to be finding his way toward an entirely different kind of book: one that finally stops trying to X-ray complex bureaucracies and distant institutions, and begins, far more simply, to look directly at the world around it.
