Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
*
Ronson has long catalogued a gallery of singular men who seek or assume formal power—whether as adherents of fundamentalist Islam or as military officers)—and who have historically linked such ambitions to what they perceive as maleness. In his latest volume, The Castle, he undertakes a far deeper probe into masculinity and its fragilities, tracing stories of men who feel displaced and respond with behavior that is noticeably peculiar.
There has already been a wave of discourse about “What’s Gone Wrong for Men,” including concerns about a generation of boys lagging in school, supposedly propelled by a flippant misandrist culture, spiraling into harsher, nihilistic offshoots of masculinity reminiscent of Andrew Tate. Yet Ronson does not dive into the manosphere (fortunate, given how wearying that terrain has become). Instead, The Castle offers a sequence of captivating portraits of men from varied backgrounds who, in his view, are unraveling because they share a common condition: a sharpened sense of aimlessness unleashed by a swiftly evolving society.
…
“The Linehan chapter is brilliant: perceptive, candid and moving. I’m still not convinced that any broader crisis of masculinity or male purpose had much to do with Linehan’s downfall, though. He wasn’t adrift or lacking purpose when he began his campaign. He didn’t turn to vitriol because he had nothing else to do. His case stands out for presenting a man with a fortunate life and abundant success throwing it away for reasons that may seem opaque or even deranged to outsiders.”
…
“It will be up to the reader to decide whether the various narratives in The Castle cohere enough to support the idea that we inhabit a world of unraveling men. For me, they do not fully converge, since each instance is highly idiosyncratic. Yet this remains an essential, unmissable work. Its page-by-page merit is evident even before there’s room to address Ronson’s encounter with Armie Hammer. Ronson’s instinct for discovering strange, compelling figures is unparalleled, and the way he ponders them is an even greater gift. It’s rare to find a reporter who is also a thinker, and he’s funny besides.”
–Megan Nolan on Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in the World of Unraveling Men (The Observer)
“Three of Kennedy’s novels—Legs (1975), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), and Ironweed (1983)—have recently been collected by the Library of America as The Albany Trilogy. These novels exemplify what’s best and most distinctive in his work. Kennedy never stopped believing in the power of the novel to provoke and challenge, but journalism taught him that the form worked best when grounded in the telling naturalistic detail, the vivacious rhythm of everyday talk, and a bracing dose of humor. The result is an unruly, delightful hybrid: the modernist novel as written from the metro desk.
…
“Kennedy was now thinking of writing ‘the big Albany novel.’ He envisioned something along the lines of Ulysses, the portrait of Dublin that James Joyce wanted to be ‘so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed’ from its pages. But instead of a single day, Kennedy’s Albany version would encompass two centuries, depicting the Civil War, the growth of capitalism, immigration, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and much else. He imagined a cast of historical figures mingling with ‘a vast crowd of priests, nuns, gamblers, gangsters, mothers, whores, and laboring men, including my father’—all ‘eternally living out their destinies, over and over again.’ This Albany would be a ‘magical place’ making the national as well as the local story ‘visible.’ He made a note to himself: ‘Commit a decade to the creation of this book.’
…
“The time frame of Ironweed overlaps with that of Billy Phelan, and though it retains some of the exuberant malarkey of the earlier novel, it’s a much more somber and lyrical piece of writing. It also steps more confidently into magical realism. Ironweed opens with Francis visiting the graves of his family in St. Agnes Cemetery, unaware that the dead are trying to talk to him. Among them is his baby son, who rests in ‘infantile sublimity, exuding a high gloss induced by early death…. He was neither beautiful nor perfect … but rather an ineffably fabulous presence.’ Francis weeps and prays, then looks up at the sky, where ‘a vast stand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day.’ But the mood doesn’t last. A few chapters on, we see Francis in a friend’s bathroom, smelling his ‘fetid crotch’ and reaching for soap with which to wash his ‘encrusted orifices, crevices, and secret folds.’ Is this the same book? In true Joycean fashion, Ironweed wants both symbolism and naturalism, the elevated language of heaven’s vaults alongside the unadorned details of bodily filth.”
…
“How many readers will complete the cycle? Don’t most of us pick and choose in Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner? And does it matter whether we think of the first three novels as a trilogy or, as Kennedy described them, simply as a ‘trio’ within his larger project? In some ways, there is a strange kind of unity to these three—all are set during the Depression, all feature stylish renegades. In Billy Phelan, the McCall brothers form ‘Albany’s own Trinity,’ while Martin makes a ‘three-horse parlay’ and asks a source who gives him two unprintable statements, ‘Shall we try for three?’ Ironweed has an epigraph from Dante, and its action spans three days, during which Francis reflects on the three women he loved. He was once a professional third baseman, and recalling those days, he thinks of the ‘Trinitarian talisman’ of ‘a hand, a glove, a ball.’ And so on. On the other hand, one of the more frequent recurring insights of these novels is that to be human is to be incomplete.”
–Kasia Boddy on William Kennedy’s Albany Trilogy (Harper’s)
“Novels set in the future aren’t exclusively the province of science fiction; anxious times tend to generate anxious, cautionary literary dystopias, and when was the last time you can remember not feeling anxious? The 20th century in particular abounded in such visions, some of which—The Handmaid’s Tale, or Brave New World, published in 1932 and getting spookier every day—have proved more prophetic than others. They’re best understood, though, not as genuine bets on our future, but as dreamlike unleashings of present-day fear over the blind volatility of the moment. Kurt Andersen, in his new novel The Breakup, does something few such books do (Jon Raymond’s excellent 2022 climate-disaster novel, Denial, comes to mind); he sets his stage not in some distant century when our own problems are the stuff of history, but a mere 19 years from now, when most of his readers are still likely to be around.”
…
“It’s a good setup. What’s puzzling is that more than 300 pages of the novel go by before the engine of the Zimbalist family car, and thus of the novel’s plot, finally turns over, and the much-touted road trip begins. Before that comes a vast and dramatically static stretch of what speculative-fiction circles often call ‘world-building’— a full, inventive, elaborately detailed portrait of Andersen’s vision of the next 19 years of American history. It’s fun to read, particularly since it involves the imagined fates of a great many present-day famous people. (Among the many dozens of such cameos, surely one spoiler won’t hurt: Elon Musk dies of an overdose en route to Mars.)
As a novelist, Andersen—whose works of nonfiction include Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America— is more philosopher than plot maker. The will-they-or-won’t-they domestic drama of the Zimbalists, when it finally gets out of the driveway, is less than suspenseful; it is very much like spending a week in a car with three people laughing at a series of inside jokes and then explaining to you why those jokes are funny.”
…
“Readers will decide whether the book’s various narratives cohere into a single, persuasive view of a near future that feels both perilous and survivable. For many, Andersen delivers the kind of dopamine hit that has driven his previous successes. In his imagined 2045, there’s still room for a fresh Sally Rooney novel (with a title that can’t be ignored), and the government even offers tax credits to publishers who hire real people as editors instead of letting AI do all the work. How dystopian can it get?”
–Jonathan Dee on Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup (The New York Times Book Review)
“When Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss was published in 2021, it seemed to capture the public imagination. The New Zealand author’s third novel—following quieter entries that slipped into the world—sold hundreds of thousands of copies, earned prize nominations, a screen option and a fanbase among the A-list. At its core was the heroine Martha Friel, a sharp, beautiful British journalist who methodically dismantles her marriage on her fortieth birthday. The book was sharply observed, balancing midlife regret with an unromanticized portrayal of persistent mental illness. Mason managed the feat of rendering clinical depression legible and domestic breakdown funny, and by Christmas it had become a touchstone of the so-called ‘sad girl lit’ lineage, with Martha joining that lineage’s cast of fractured female protagonists.
Sorrow and Bliss propelled Mason into publishing royalty. Yet this status seems to have saddled her with a relentless cycle of literary festivals, for her new semi-autobiographical novel Fixates on the minutiae of its inner workings. It is a bold, if baffling, artistic choice to highlight the procedural purgatory of soundchecks, mic packs, and green rooms.
…
“The narrative largely crawls on the fumes of trivialities dressed up as importance. Pages dwell on cheeseboard-level dilemmas. You know: should the protagonist choose ham or cheese? When and where should she refill her water bottle? How long should she microwave porridge? Does her phone have enough juice? Water bottles, smartphones and microwaves are meant as emblems of contemporary isolation, but Mason lingers on them until they become padding. Where Sorrow and Bliss felt sharply direct, Sophie, Standing There reads as a study in pedestrian sentiment. Sophie comes off as a damp cardigan of a character—limpid, devoid of flavor, and so lacking in personality that most conversations with her best friend revolve around an actual missing cardigan. Readers of Sorrow and Bliss may recall how Martha’s dark past gave her despair a compelling logic. Here, one discovers that a dull girl can be dull for a reason. The long‑drawn trauma that hovers like a raincloud over a drought‑stricken landscape finally trickles into the last pages, leaving ravenous readers needing more nourishment.”
…
“I found myself torn between despair for a publishing culture that allowed this to print, and a strange, joyful relief at encountering a book so genuinely, humanly gauche that it couldn’t have been authored by AI.”
–Johanna Thomas-Corr on Meg Mason’s Sophie, Standing There (The Times)
“Unlike most contemporary accounts of Silicon Valley,The Nerd Reich is not a biography, an audit of a single company, or a true-crime dossier; it is an urgent intellectual history of a political moment that’s taking shape before our eyes. Durán’s project links the relentless pursuit of profits with the drive to dominate our political, economic, and social lives, revealing that the tech magnates’ fever dreams are rooted in a eugenics‑tinged, totalitarian current that has been simmering beneath the surface of high tech for years. The difference today is that the nerds have stopped pretending they must answer to anyone besides themselves.
…
“What truly ties this movement together is a belief in freedom from nation-states, or at least in the supremacy of a class of elite coders and engineers, coupled with a wholesale rejection of any obligation to social responsibility or equality before the law. ‘For many years, these ideas—that nations would collapse, that democracy would become obsolete, that a tech‑powered elite would rule through technology—seemed like fringe science fiction fantasy to most observers,’ Durán writes. ‘But they have now become the operating principles of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world and have spawned a movement promoted by a rotating cast of venture capitalists, fringe philosophers, and political operatives who took these ideas from obscure blogs to the halls of power.’
…
“When it comes to the Pentagon, readers may be stunned by how thoroughly the government has handed the reins to AI companies: Durán details the creation of ‘Detachment 201’ in June 2025, which led to four executives from Meta, Palantir and OpenAI being inducted into the U.S. Army Reserve at the rank of colonel. These firms now essentially design American defense policy on AI software, autonomous weapons, and the future of warfare. The fox, indeed, has moved into the henhouse.”
…
“What helps the book endure is Durán’s steady, principled method and a consistent point of view: he avoids the common trap of chasing access at the expense of accountability, a pitfall that has ensnared many journalists over the years. Tech reporters remain vulnerable to adulation of the industry, a vulnerability that has colored works like Kara Swisher’s decades of industry‑friendly commentary or Jonathan Weber’s City on the Edge, which, despite its ambitions, left some readers puzzled by gaps in the account. That isn’t the case with The Nerd Reich, which clarifies the overarching structure behind the region’s wealthiest power players—and the gravity of the moment.”
–Ali Winston on Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (The Baffler)
