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See Our Summer
Books to Watch!
by Fredrik Backman
Most people don't even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it's just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.
Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.
Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa's care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting's birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she'll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don't always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.
Fredrik Backman's latest novel, My Friends, is a touching story that revolves around four fourteen-year-old friends during one glorious, adolescent summer. In a working-class coastal town, Joar, Ted, Ali, and a boy only known as "the artist" bond over being misfits, odd ones out who are constantly attacked by their peers. Joar, the leader of the group, decides that the artist is the only one of them that has a chance to be something better, to escape their bleak future. He encourages—demands—that his friend enter an art contest, convinced he'll win and that the victory will be his ticket to a better life.
Twenty-five years later, the resulting painting has become world famous, and Louisa, a homeless eighteen-year-old who is a fan of the work, meets the artist. When the artist passes away soon after their encounter, he leaves his painting to her and charges his old friend Ted with making sure she receives it. Ted and Louisa end up on a train together, heading back to the artist's hometown, where Ted knows someone who will help sell the valuable piece. During the journey, Ted tells Louisa about his friends, how the painting came to be, and the story of that carefree summer.
The narrative contains quite a lot of heartbreak, particularly in the book's early chapters. Louisa is grieving the recent overdose of her best friend; Ted is mourning the loss of the artist, and his sorrow is palpable. "Ted's chest hurts, like crying without oxygen," Backman writes, "because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe." Backman also describes the mental and physical suffering inflicted on Louisa and the four teens by the adults who should be supporting them—the artist's parents constantly telling him to "just be normal"; Joar's father routinely beating him; Louisa's mother abandoning her as a five-year-old. I'm not easily moved, but even I must admit that some particularly affecting scenes had me in tears.
But Backman manages to find humor even in the midst of pain. "Soon Ted will stand up and discover that he's forgotten how to walk too…when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together," he quips. Some of the scenes on the train between the brash, sarcastic Louisa and the neurotic, cynical Ted are laugh-out-loud funny, providing much needed comic relief from the emotional weight of the narrative.
Backman's prose is simple, but he is profound and searching about ideas like grief, friendship, love, and the beauty of the world around us:
"[H]ealthy people aren't quite right in the head, the artist thinks. Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here…It's an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories…That's all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn't think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted…That's the only courageous thing a person can do."
And Backman has the amazing ability to transport his readers back to their own youths, to those idyllic childhood years before adult responsibilities took over. In reading My Friends, readers may relive their own summers, when all they did was hang out with their friends and get into innocent trouble. The wistfulness he evokes feels almost magical.
My only gripe with My Friends is Backman's overuse of foreshadowing. He tells us early on that "the summer started and ended with death," and over the course of the plot we're repeatedly reminded that something bad is coming. ("That was the last time I swam in the sea with my friends," Ted tells Louisa, ominously.) As a device to keep the reader eagerly turning the pages, needing to find out what tragedy awaits, it's an effective one—but it's too obviously, and frustratingly, manipulative. There's one scene, for example, in which one of the teens shows up covered in blood… but Backman reveals several pages later that they'd simply cut themselves. There's this constant sense of anticipation followed by an abrupt letdown; and the overall effect, I think, is to weaken the story's impact.
During a pivotal scene, one character quotes the Mary Oliver poem "The Summer Day" (see Beyond the Book) to the artist: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" In My Friends, Backman shows us how one might answer that question, illustrating the beauty and fragility of life and friendship. The result is a charming, poignant novel with a huge heart.
Book reviewed by Kim Kovacs
Fredrik Backman's new novel, My Friends, repeatedly quotes "The Summer Day," a well-known poem by poet Mary Oliver (1936-2019).
Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a small, rural town less than 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Her upbringing was "chaotic" and she experienced sexual abuse at a young age, eventually finding solace in nature and spending her free time exploring the forests and wetlands near her home. "I got saved by the beauty of the world," as she put it in a 2015 interview.
By age 13, Oliver knew she wanted to be a writer, and by age 14 she had started writing poetry. In 1950, she visited Steepletop in Austerlitz, New York, the home of the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, which had a profound impact on her. She connected with Millay's sister, Norma, who was organizing her recently deceased sibling's papers, and Oliver became a permanent resident there after her high school graduation. Her exposure to Millay's work during the period heavily influenced her own poetry.
While at Steepletop, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her long-term partner. The two were instantly attracted to each other; Cook became Oliver's literary agent, and helped her publish her first collection of poetry, No Voyage, and Other Poems, in 1963. The pair moved to Cape Cod later that year, where they remained together until Cook's death in 2005.
Oliver was a prolific writer and has more than 30 collections of prose and poetry to her name. American Primitive, her fifth book, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and in 1992 her New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award. Her works are largely about her experiences in nature, encouraging her readers to observe and celebrate the beauty around them.
Arguably her most famous poem is "The Summer Day," first published in her 1990 collection House of Light, which won both the Christopher Award and the LL Winship/PEN New England Award:
"Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
In My Friends, an artist often shares these last lines with those around him. Of course, Backman is far from being the only person to quote the lines; their use is ubiquitous, appearing on mugs and t-shirts, as tattoos, taped to bathroom mirrors—anywhere and as anything people look to for inspiration.
You can listen to Oliver read the poem at The Kid Should See This.
by Thomas Levenson
Two out of three soldiers who perished in the Civil War died of infected wounds, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. But no doctor truly understood what was happening to their patients. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in the history of the world: germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind's greatest killers. It was a discovery centuries in the making that transformed modern life and public health.
This revolution has a pre-history. In the late-sixteenth century, scientists and hobbyists used the first microscopes to confirm the existence of living things invisible to the human eye. So why did it take two centuries to make the connection between microbes and disease? As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-trotting history, the answer has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the west, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When scientists finally made the connection by the end of the 19th-century, life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. The next big break came with the birth of the antibiotic era in the 1930s. And yet, less than a century later, the promise of the antibiotic revolution is already receding from years of overuse. Why?
In So Very Small, Thomas Levenson follows the thread of human ingenuity and hubris across centuries—along the way peering into microscopes, spelunking down sewers, traipsing across the battlefield, and more—to show how we came to understand the microbial environment and how little we understand ourselves. He traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored—and hence how human habits of mind can, so often, make it terribly hard to ask the right questions.
Not much about the COVID-19 pandemic could be called "lucky," but the fact humanity faced it in the 21st century—with all modern medicine's tools at our disposal—has made a remarkable difference in how we've been able to respond. Within a few weeks of the virus's emergence, scientists had already mapped its genome; within a few months, the first vaccines were in trials. And within a few short years (however long they may have felt), humans had reined in a global pandemic that had threatened to overwhelm health systems and claim the lives of millions more. Despite the undeniable losses the virus caused and continues to cause, what happened was nothing short of miraculous: the danger abated, societies reopened, and many of us now take for granted the incredible scientific achievements that allow for the current state of things.
Science writer Thomas Levenson, however, is not one to take such things for granted; even a hundred years earlier the story of COVID would have been entirely different. With So Very Small, his latest in a string of popular histories of science, Levenson attempts to educate the rest of us in how good we have things today. The book centers on the history of germ theory, tracing a centuries-long struggle to understand the microscopic lifeforms (bacteria and viruses) that were for so long the unknown root of so much of humanity's suffering.
Levenson begins his tale in London in 1665, during the last major outbreak of bubonic plague before the discovery of microbes, and he ends it in the present day, after the COVID-19 pandemic's acute phase. That is to say, he takes his reader from a time when people believed epidemics to be caused by "miasmas" (some ill-defined putrescence carried on the air) to a time when the medical world bases itself on germ theory: a powerful understanding of infection as a "straightforward sequence of cause and effect"—with the logical corollary being that this chain can be broken. It's a revolution in medicine that Levenson not unreasonably calls "as great a breakthrough as any in the history of science."
So Very Small approaches the history of germ theory through the figures who marked the road to discovery; some achieved fame outside scientific circles (Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming), while others who offered equally important contributions are less appreciated by the English-speaking public (Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Filippo Pacini). What's perhaps more interesting than these case studies, though, is Levenson's central thesis about why it took so long—two hundred years, almost to the day—to go from discovering microorganisms to implicating them in disease processes. The main culprit, he argues, was hubris: the belief that humans sat atop the natural world, only God above them, and therefore couldn't possibly be undone by something as small and insignificant as a germ. It's as much a point about centuries-old arrogance in the face of public health crises as it is about that very same problem today.
For the most part, though, Levenson avoids throwing himself into contemporary debates. His focus is the story and, author of half a dozen history books, he is an experienced and gifted storyteller. He may hold the title of Professor of Science Writing at MIT, but he comes across more like an eager high school teacher with an infectious enthusiasm for his chosen subject. His narration—dotted with exclamation points and "can-you-believe-that?" asides to his reader—ensures the story clips along at a reasonable place, while still reveling in moments of grisly melodrama. At times that enthusiasm can veer him off track, leading him toward topics whose relevance might be a stretch (the history of certain military ordnance, say, or Darwin's theory of evolution). But these lapses in focus are forgivable; more than anything, they seem to speak to Levenson's irrepressible joy in sharing knowledge.
The book's first half, detailing the scientific landscape in the centuries before any understanding of microbiology, is by far its more engaging. Levenson captures the drama of great thinkers groping in the dark, blind to what he dubs the "microcosmos" and blinded by assumptions about humanity's place in a divinely ordered world. The second half of the book, touching on discoveries in various disease areas after germ theory has been elaborated, proves that what's good for humanity isn't necessarily good for Levenson's narrative. The mystery has evaporated, and with it the stakes: the recounting of breakthrough after breakthrough in chapter after chapter can't help but feel somewhat repetitive.
Still, there is more than enough to enjoy in this engrossing account of what even today could be considered a silent revolution. Within living memory, Levenson writes, humans eliminated "the terror of disease and injury as the constant undercurrent to daily life." It's a change so embedded in our worldview as to be unnoticeable. So Very Small is a celebration of the centuries of accumulated knowledge that got us there—and a forceful warning not to squander it.
Book reviewed by Alex Russell
Thomas Levenson begins So Very Small, his history of the development of germ theory, with an account of the Great Plague that struck London in 1665. Although this was the last major outbreak to hit England, Yersinia pestis, the bacterium which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, has survived—and indeed thrived—well into the 21st century. As recently as 2010, the National Institutes of Health claimed that, thanks to a proliferation of trade routes across the globe, the "plague is more widespread today than it has ever been."
Thankfully, these days plague bacteria mostly limit themselves to the world's rodent population. As Levenson describes, modern sanitation and hygiene practices have ensured that the majority of humans no longer share so much of their personal space with rats—or, more importantly, the fleas which thrive in their fur and can transmit the disease to humans. But that doesn't stop new human cases of plague emerging even today. It might seem extraordinary, but the United States sees an average of seven plague cases every year, and the World Health Organization estimates the annual global figure to be in the thousands. That's a far cry from the tens of millions who died within less than a decade during the Black Death, but the disease can still be deadly. Pneumonic plague can kill within 24 hours and remains fatal in 100 percent of cases when left untreated.
In 2014, for example, plague broke out on the island of Madagascar. Although the spread of the disease was limited—with only 263 cases reported to the WHO—the average fatality rate was still over 25 percent, meaning one in every four people who caught it died. (This rate could be as high as 60 percent depending on how late the patient received treatment.) Similar outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the plague is endemic to certain regions, saw lethality reaching over 30 percent.
As Levenson outlines, the development of germ theory heralded the arrival of modern antibiotics, which can be extremely effective against ancient scourges like the plague. The result is that Yersinia pestis (in its current strain) is unlikely to cause the widespread devastation it once did. But antibiotics can only work in places where they're being administered, and cases can only be detected in facilities with the medical equipment to do so. It's little wonder then that, given what we know about the way the plague spreads, you're more likely to die from it in certain parts of Africa than anywhere else on the globe. What was once the great leveler—culling rich and poor alike—is now a disease of poverty, by its very definition proliferating among the kind of deprivation where its hosts—infected rats and fleas—thrive the best.
As the NIH admits, the plague "cannot be eradicated." Levenson celebrates the fact that scientific progress over generations means we can live more safely even alongside deadly microorganisms—but he also reminds us that progress never spreads itself equally. The story of So Very Small is that humanity has fashioned the tools to mitigate the worst effects of diseases like the plague; the story of plague in the 21st century is that the poorest on our planet also need access to those tools that so many of us take for granted.
Reported Plague Cases by Country, 2013–2018 courtesy of Centers for Disease Control
by Denne Michele Norris
"I got tired of running away from what I should've been running toward."
The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man's name with tenderness.
But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Ohio for a freer life in New York City, won't be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an award-winning violist.
When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has died in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, his fledgling marriage and irresistible self-confidence spiraling into a pit of despair.
In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris's When the Harvest Comes fearlessly reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that, in the end, we are more than the men who came before us.
Breathtaking in its simplicity and elegance, When the Harvest Comes is a story about love, rejection, and queer identity. The novel opens with Davis and Everett about to be married in the privileged enclave of Montauk beach, where Everett's parents own a home. In such luxurious surroundings, Davis is sentimental, remembering who is missing: Adina, his mother. She died when he was five. "I need my mom to tell me I'm making the right choices." Old fears creep in, unfettered. Like that he may not be enough for Everett, who has been married before. Perhaps Everett will eventually toss him aside for someone who is less effete or someone who is white.
A gay black twenty-something from Cleveland, Davis has struggled for acceptance and incubated resentment because of a judgmental father. With Everett as a partner, he finally has privilege that at times mutes the anxiety he has nurtured for most of his life.
"...people like me? We don't get the guy. We don't end up married with 2.5 children and a white picket fence and matching SUVs...No matter how many times the guy tells us he loves us, he leaves us."
Regardless of the depth of the relationship, or its authenticity, Davis, a Juilliard-trained viola musician, was never previously invited to meet the friends of those he was dating or their parents or relatives, and even though Everett's family adores him, the shame of past exclusions has been hard to forget and forgive. The world has judged him by his appearance and mannerisms, by his blackness and by what often goes unsaid: a diminutive man lacks the masculinity required to be taken seriously.
If every novel begins with a question, When the Harvest Comes has a simple one: What if Davis knew his father was coming to the wedding even though he wasn't invited? What if he knew his father was trying to erase their cold war of estrangement? What if he knew that the night before, his father was on a highway in western Pennsylvania driving the car Davis had as a teenager and he smashed it into a tree and it tumbled down a hill?
Growing up, Davis was known as Sunny Boy. His father, the Reverend, noted he was born on the sunniest day of the year. That couldn't protect him when his mother died and he suffered through night terrors. As a teenager, Davis kept his lust for boys under wraps until one day the Reverend spied his son and a white boy named Jake having sex. The Reverend couldn't control his full-throated rage.
"This was unacceptable. He had not raised his son to submit to any man except his father and his Father. He didn't raise Davis to be touched by a man, let alone a white boy, as though that boy possessed him, dominated him, had any claim to his body."
The way the scene is written, the Reverend is reminiscent of a volcano before eruption, when it bulges quietly, and the crust trembles. He turns away in silent retreat and makes a beeline for his office and starts drinking and listens to a rainstorm. But the storm brewing outside and its soothing musicality is no match for the scorn brewing inside him. Immediately after Davis's teenaged lover leaves the house, the Reverend unleashes his rage with a belt, punishing Davis's flesh, yelling, "you think God gave you a pussy, don't you?"
Denne Michele Norris's debut novel is something to behold. Its parts are just as lovely as their sum. While the wedding is a vehicle to build drama about a relationship and a marriage that begins with the best intentions — being in love, having a person — Norris also digs into the forbidden parts of childhood with parents who lack understanding or empathy. As much as I enjoyed the wedding plot, the ensuing marriage story was even more complex and stirring and I was captivated by where Norris took the characters' emotions, from jealousy, to hurt, to rejection.
Caribbean novelist Jamaica Kincaid once suggested that it was her duty as a writer to make everyone a little less happy. Kincaid's stories are about the spectrum of life's difficulties. This is the quiet theme here in Norris's novel. Marriages between men may be mired in challenges primarily because of the damage from years earlier, the pain that both fathers and society inflict (see Beyond the Book).
What really works and gives the story such weight is that Norris builds the narrative of the perfect white father — affluent, successful, accepting — and then dismantles it. And she builds the narrative of the withholding black father — religious, intolerant, judgmental — and then dismantles that. These men, Christopher and John, are shown in ways flattering and unflattering, as similar but incompatible. Their deep flaws shape the insecurities of their sons.
As for the rest of the characters — Everett's mother Charlotte, his brothers Conner (his twin, younger by thirty-two minutes) and Caleb, and Davis's doctor sister Olivia — they seem to defend the right of gay men to be gay men. Yet it's not clear if this acceptance is limited to family or given to gay men at large.
I particularly liked how Norris plots her story, how patient she is and the restraint she uses. Included in the narrative is Davis's talent with the viola, which she spends time educating the reader about, and no, the viola is not just a baby violin.
The story elements of When the Harvest Comes feel contemporary, with mention of Trump. Embedded within is a strong message about facing your past demons. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking novel and inspiring, too, for what it reminds us about marriage conflicts and life. Marital happiness depends upon vulnerability. Sharing sorrows is how you manage a painful past and begin the hard work of loving yourself.
Book reviewed by Valerie Morales
The night terrors began when Davis Freeman was five years old, after his mother died of lymphoma. While he lay in the dark, his body felt like straw. His screams, catastrophic and haunting, echoed throughout the house, prompting Davis's father, the Reverend, to sprint into his room to comfort him. To tell him it was okay. To dry his tears and pin his body in place even if that meant slapping him to erase the terrors.
Davis cuddled into his father's chest and eventually his normal breathing pattern steadied his pulse. He was relaxed, though fatigued and emotionally drained. All would have been well if not for how Davis, in an impulsive moment, kissed his father's lips.
Davis and his father are fictional characters in Denne Michele Norris's debut novel When the Harvest Comes. Yet their struggle to understand each other mirrors many gay sons and fathers who opt for absence in lieu of communication and healing.
According to sociologist Michael Kimmel, an expert in the field of male sex roles, the perception of gayness being a threat to manhood hovers around masculine and feminine ideals: "To be gay is to be powerless, weak, unable to break free of Mommy, and these characteristics are incompatible with real manliness."
After Davis tenderly kissed his father's lips, his father pushed him away: "Disgusted, he peeled Davis from him as though he was someone other than the scared and grieving child he actually was. The Reverend stood from the bed and went to close the door. 'Go back to sleep, boy. Under the covers. Now.'" When Davis began to cry, the Reverend said, "None of that."
"A boy growing into a gay man will get the message loud and clear that he is weak, dirty, and, perhaps worst of all, less than a man," explains Dr. Kimmel. The disapproval of fathers is hurtful to gay men. "[D]eep down they yearn for their fathers' love and approval, but fear disappointing them by not being the man they expected them to be."
The overarching point that many sons receive from their fathers is that homosexuality and masculinity are opposites. You must choose one, preferably what the father chose. When sons admit they are gay, the expression upon the faces of their fathers can be overwhelming, and in the black community, it is often devastating.
As Michael LaSala of Rutgers University says he found in a study he conducted, upon coming out, white gay boys are told by their parents, "You have everything going for you – and now this!" While black parents tell their sons, "You have everything going against you as a black man. This is one more strike against you."
The study, "African American Gay Youth and Their Families: Redefining Masculinity, Coping with Racism and Homophobia," authored by LaSala and Damien T. Frierson (Howard University), was published in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies and focused on "gay black males, ages 19 to 25, and their families." It illustrated the powerful dual oppressors of racism and homophobia. According to LaSala's research, young black men feel the pressure to be seen as strong black men regardless of sexual orientation. They are charged with fighting racism while simultaneously being exposed to hypersexual images of themselves through advertisements, social media, and television.
Referring to her concern about expectations in her community, a black mother in the study told LaSala, "…being a man does not mean you sleep with other men…Being a man means you have a woman and you procreate and continue the family name."
In families similar to Davis Freeman's, a gay son is met with revulsion. Norris writes of the immediate reaction of the Reverend when he spied Davis and his high-school lover: "He thought he might throw up in his mouth so he backed away from what he saw. He stalked through the kitchen and the downstairs hall and…went downstairs to his office, where he pulled a bottle of whiskey from his desk and poured several shots into a tumbler…"
Many fathers raising sons who identify as queer, like Davis's father, are present but unavailable. Gay men abandoned by their fathers may be more emotionally detached, more insecure, more prone to addiction, and more likely to find themselves in toxic relationships. LaSala emphasizes the importance of fathers' participation in family discussions and their sons' lives. What is hopeful as time moves forward is the many stories of fathers who don't want to lose their gay sons. Consider what one concerned father wrote on a message board: "The boy is afraid of me and it is my fault. I am to blame. I want to make it right."
by Nghi Vo
Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He's good at watching, and he's even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he's forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.
On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone's been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face at a club one night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn't done with him.
In all paper there is memory, and Nick's ghost has come home.
Fitzgerald evoked his most iconic character from the novel's title, but took a while letting him out on stage. For about 50 pages, the reader only knows about Gatsby what others say about him. Nghi Vo uses the same trick in Don't Sleep with the Dead: Gatsby is summoned before he appears, because, though set almost 20 years after the events of Fitzgerald's classic (including Gatsby's death), the millionaire has come back to haunt Nick Carraway.
Although Don't Sleep with the Dead is marketed as a standalone, readers expecting to dive in without prior knowledge may find themselves lost. This novella of only a little over 100 pages feels more like an extension of The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021), Vo's retelling of The Great Gatsby. Vo, a Vietnamese American writer known for speculative, queer, and revisionist fiction, weaves the supernatural into Gatsby's core themes. In The Chosen and the Beautiful, Jordan Baker is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese adoptee with powers. The subtextual tension between Nick and Gatsby in the original takes the shape of an overt romantic and sexual relationship. But while that first installment maintains the glamour and indulgence of the Jazz Age, this novella strays too far from its source material to remain potent.
Here there are no glittering parties, flapper dresses, or music. Instead, Don't Sleep with the Dead unfolds in the late 1930s, in a world mired in depression and on the brink of war. Stripped from the historical setting that gave Gatsby its atmosphere and context, it seems to cling only to character names and echoes of themes: it is no longer a reimagining, but the continuation of a reimagining, and it just doesn't hold together this time.
The setting, dark and gloomy, emphasizes the most explicit theme: the return of the dead. Ghosts are not metaphorical here; they are not memories hunting the living, but real ghosts, demons with claws and teeth. "The dead are coming back over here, haven't you heard?" Jordan says to Nick at the beginning of the novel.
In Don't Sleep with the Dead, Baker steps out of the spotlight and Nick Carraway takes on the central role, as in Fitzgerald's original, to be haunted by Gatsby. Only it's not Nick Carraway, but someone—or something—that took Nick Carraway's life, body, and memories some time before the events of the original novel. There are also people who swap faces, hearts ripped out and replaced by paper surrogates, demons, Agents of Hell, etc. The result is confusing and underdeveloped: the book aims for a unique world, but lacks the worldbuilding necessary to fully support it.
Vo counters this shortcoming with fully controlled prose. Her sentences are balanced and precise, and with elegant pacing she manages to convey the emotional states of her characters, especially the narrator, with well-executed moments of beauty and emotional intensity.
In Fitzgerald's work, the past lingers like a fog: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" is its famous last line. Vo's characters, too, are trapped—haunted not just by memory but by the literal dead. In this setting, the dream, elusive in Gatsby, is even more unreachable: "You're the American Dream, if the American Dream is a broken thing, smashed up on the side on the road and left behind by people in better cars with more secure fortunes."
These are Nick's words to Gatsby during their long-awaited encounter. As in Fitzgerald's novel, Gatsby's presence is constructed through absence and through the fascination of others: "I had been telling myself stories for a long while about Gatsby, and now I no longer trusted them, either his voice in my head or who I knew him to be." But where Fitzgerald gave us careless people, Vo introduces careless demons, blurring the line between metaphor and reality. This choice might have worked better in a fully original story rather than one tied to the shadow of Gatsby.
Don't Sleep with the Dead is ambitious and sometimes beautiful, an interesting choice for fans of fantasy and queer fiction, but ultimately uneven. It tries to channel the spirit of The Great Gatsby while building something entirely new, and in the process it loses clarity and cohesion. The result is a strange, confusing, and at times compelling tale that leaves the reader wishing for firmer ground beneath the magic.
Book reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández
In 1925, a few months after the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from T.S. Eliot in which the poet—already renowned for The Waste Land—described the novel as "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." Fitzgerald received the praise with enthusiasm, especially since Eliot's was one of the few favorable opinions in that first year of publication, and in those that followed until Fitzgerald's death in 1940.
Although Fitzgerald did not hesitate to call it "the best American novel ever written" in a letter to his publisher, The Great Gatsby enjoyed neither commercial success nor great critical acclaim during his lifetime. Its second printing never sold out.
But by the end of the twentieth century the novel had become one of the pillars of American literature. Once considered secondary to the work of Fitzgerald's contemporaries like Hemingway or Faulkner, Gatsby now occupies a central place in the literary canon. Its sophisticated structure, use of meta-narrative, unreliable narration, symbolism, polished prose, and evocation of the American ideal have made it a favorite among critics and scholars. The backdrop of the 1920s—with its effervescence, fashion, and jazz—alongside unforgettable characters like Gatsby, with his air of mystery; Daisy, with her hypnotic voice; and Nick, with his innocent gaze, have nurtured the popular imagination for generations.
The Great Gatsby has been adapted and reinterpreted in all formats, including theater and film—from the 1974 classic starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow to the more recent Baz Luhrmann version with Leonardo DiCaprio released in 2013—and even in popular music, with references in lyrics such as Taylor Swift's "Happiness" (2020), which alludes among other motifs to the iconic green light at the end of Daisy's dock.
But where its legacy is felt most is in its original format: the novel. There are dozens of versions, which find not only in Gatsby, but in the rest of the characters, various interesting threads to pull from. This is especially true since the copyright expired in 2021, meaning the work is now in the public domain and thus free for anyone to use, adapt, and publish.
In January of that same year, Michael Farris Smith published Nick, a novel that explores the life of Nick Carraway before the events of the summer of 1922. Numerous writers have imagined what happened before or after the events depicted in the original novel. Some, like Farris, focus on the protagonists; others prefer to give voice to secondary characters. Such is the case in Beautiful Little Fools, where Jill Cantor reframes the story through the women closest to Gatsby—Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Catherine McCoy—transforming the classic into a mystery story. Similarly, Claire Anderson Wheeler reimagines the Gatsby world as the site of a murder investigation in The Gatsby Gambit (2025), where Gatsby's younger sister Greta acts as sleuth.
If 2021 sparked a wave of reinterpretations, the novel's centenary in April 2025 has only intensified the publishing interest. Nghi Vo has followed up her 2021 novel based on Gatsby, The Chosen and the Beautiful, with the companion novella Don't Sleep with the Dead. Both take place in a fantastical universe with demons and ghosts. The former is centered around a queer Vietnamese version of Jordan Baker, while the latter, set 20 years later, delves into the emotional and sexual relationship between Nick and Gatsby.
Vo is not alone in reading a homoerotic tension between the two characters. In 2022, Anna-Marie McLemore published Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, where Nick is a 17-year-old Mexican trans boy who falls for a young Gatsby figure. Other authors draw freely from the original dynamics to create new worlds, as in Tell Me My Name (2021), a young adult novel that reimagines Fitzgerald's archetypes in a contemporary setting with the genders flipped, and The Great Mann, which places the story of Gatsby in 1945 within the Black Hollywood neighborhood of Sugar Hill.
A century after its publication, The Great Gatsby continues to reinvent itself, suggesting new readings and inspiring new stories in new genres and configurations. And it will almost certainly keep doing so for many years to come.
Cover of The Great Gatsby, courtesy of Scribner
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