Reviews of the books mentioned briefly | The New Yorker

Mind rollersBy Frederic de Boer (café). This debut novel chronicles a young woman’s disintegration with ethnographic detachment. Alice, an average student at an Oklahoma state university, drifts from teenage confusion to paranoia and insomnia. Her madness seeps into everyday life: The douche caddy arrangement becomes a clue to the conspiracy, and the breakdown coexists with term papers, ties, and trips to TJ Maxx. Eschewing romance and melodrama, de Boer writes in an affectless register that reflects Alice’s disintegration. The novel’s strength lies in its relentless banality – the mind moves while the machinery of life grinds. During her stalled recovery, Alice develops “deep intuitions” about her medications, which, she suspects, interact “like hot-tempered roommates in the dilapidated apartment of her brain.”

Choose a colorby Sovankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown). “Everyone’s ugly. I should know. I look at people all day long.” So begins this quietly observant novel, by a famous short story writer, narrated by a nail salon owner. The owner, a 41-year-old former boxer, claims he doesn’t care about others. However, she shows herself to be completely attuned to her clients’ desires and fears and to the lives of her employees, four Southeast Asian women whose baleful descriptions include identical haircuts and business cards. With dark humor and brief touches of tenderness, Thammavongsa’s portrait of working-class life casts its stock elements – a damaged narrator, and a workforce made up entirely of non-white women – in an alienating glare.