The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks
What an elegant little novel this is, so precise and trim that when it was first published in the New Yorker in 1961, it worked just as well as a very long short story as it does now as a very short novel. It tells the story of Miss Jean Brodie, a flamboyantly off-kilter schoolteacher in 1930s Edinburgh who has defiantly declared herself to be in her prime. (But if you say you're in your prime as often as Miss Brodie does — well, maybe you aren't.)
Miss Brodie reads at first as a comic take on a Dead Poets Society-type of educator. She rejects the stuffy girl's school curriculum in favor of teaching her pupils about cosmetics and classical art and her own storied love life. Every class, she cautions them to keep a textbook propped open on their desks to deter prying eyes while she cheerfully ignores the proscribed subject, a proto version of Robin Williams hopping on a desk.
Yet slowly, in Sparks's deadpan, understated prose, the sinister elements of Miss Brodie's pedagogy begin to emerge: her fascination with the fascists of Italy, her desire to mold her chosen pets into her own form, the way she intertwines their romantic paths with her own. This is a funny and richly ambiguous novel, one you can roll around in your mind like a chocolate truffle long after you've finished reading it.
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
When Akwaeke Emezi released Freshwater, their debut novel, in 2018, it hit like an electric shock. What a ferociously strong new voice: so self-assured, so clear already in what it was saying.
Since then, Emezi has been prolific, putting out romances and mysteries and children's books to the tune of at least one book a year. (They told me in 2021 that they have a list of 15 books to write and that it keeps growing.) Still, Freshwater remains my favorite of Emezi's oeuvre. It's a novel not quite like anything else I've ever read, one that knows exactly what it's doing.
Ada, born in Nigeria, is a changeling, an ogbanje. She houses a malevolent spirit in her body, and she was born only to torture her mother by dying. Instead of dying, however, Ada grows up and goes to college in the US. The ogbanje, a gleeful cloud that refers to itself as we, tells the story of what happened from there, and how it shapes and molds Ada's experience of her gender and her body. Throughout, the ogbanje remains an unforgettable narrator.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
After winning back-to-back Pulitzers with The Underground Railroad (2016) and Nickel Boys (2020), Colson Whitehead decided his next book would be a romp. Harlem Shuffle is an absolute delight of a heist novel, a stylish and clever caper set in the striving Harlem of the 1960s.
At the center of Harlem Shuffle is Ray Carney, an upwardly mobile furniture salesman who occasionally moonlights as a small-time fence. Ray is aiming for a house on Strivers' Row, where his light-skinned in-laws live, but his noncriminal enterprises aren't quite lucrative enough to get him there. A job robbing the most glamorous hotel in Harlem, though? That might do it.
Harlem Shuffle is the first of a planned trilogy of novels about Ray and his seedy window into New York City. (The second, Crook Manifesto, shows us Ray in the 1970s; the third is not yet published.) Reading it is such a profound pleasure that you get why Ray's story keeps expanding: His combination of relentless ambition and salesman patter means you never quite know what he's going to do next — but you do know you'll have fun watching him.
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
So you already know the big twist in 1972's Stepford Wives. (If you don't: the wives are robots.) Who cares! Read it anyway. It's a ball.
Joanna is a harried feminist who moves out to the suburbs with her family in the hopes of finding a way to balance looking after the house and children with her part-time career as a photographer. In the new town of Stepford, however, Joanna is surprised and somewhat spooked to find that all the women have no hobbies or professions of their own outside of endlessly waxing their kitchen floors while maintaining perfect lipstick.
Levin's book is spookier and more playful than its pop culture footprint (especially the 2004 movie starring Nicole Kidman) would lead you to believe. It gallops deliciously along, hardly giving you space or time to stop and think about the implications of the world it's describing. When you pause to put it down, though, the satire becomes wickedly clear.
The Stepford Wives was published the same year Congress passed the never-ratified ERA. Levin is painting a portrait of a culture on the precipice of vicious backlash to a feminist achievement that never comes after all. One of the funniest and saddest plotlines is the story of Joanna's feminist ally husband, Walter, who Joanna assumes will surely help protect her from whatever's going on with all those Stepford wives. You can tell from page one: ally or not, Walter's in on all the dirty secrets of Stepford.
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