Our lineup of rich critiques this week features Anahid Nersessian on Ashton Politanoff’s Dad Had a Bad Day, Peter Beinart on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line, Jennifer Wilson on Lars Anderson’s Brady, Sanjena Sathian on Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon, and Jeff VanderMeer on China Miéville’s The Rouse.
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“Here are sad dads and washed-up jocks, suburbanites in their thirties and forties dipping their toes into the manosphere by embracing its protocols of relentless self-optimization (also known as ‘maxxing’). They lift weights, chug shakes, and play tennis until they puke, then drink too many beers at the club’s restaurant. Many of them, including Ned and his childhood friend and rival, Roland, are scarred by their time as youth players, haunted by memories of the sadistic coaches and cruel, competitive fathers who terrorized them both on and off the court. Masculinity, in this novel, is an inheritance of anguish and misadventure—one battle after another in which boy is pitted against boy and then man against man, all of them vying for a phantom ideal of total immunity from the frustrations and injustices of ordinary life.”
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“Politanoff himself was once a Division I tennis player, and his terse, ominous prose is stippled with technical terms and sports slang, whizzing by like so many Dunlop ATPs. Players will hit ‘a slice, a drive, a heavy ball, a drop shot’ or ‘a nice ice-cream floater.’ His unnumbered chapters are short, but a lot happens in each one—not unlike, you might say, a tennis match, where the governing tension between a compact field of play and balls that can reach speeds of more than 150 miles per hour creates an environment at once tightly contained and incredibly volatile. In the space of a few paragraphs, Ned will abandon and recover his child, bungle an extramarital affair, win and lose, experience ecstasy and dejection. He is high on his own poor choices, which, for all their stupidity, seem to bring a much-needed urgency to his disappointed life.”
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“Ned aspires to be an Übermensch: a superior human specimen whose body has been engineered for excellence, supercharged by nut milks and purged of undesirable elements, from foot fungus to negative thoughts. It is an identity in conflict with his role as a twenty-first-century parent, which requires him to be a gentle, endlessly patient caretaker who apologizes when he yells and stays in the bathroom with Freddie while the boy shits—a ‘mother bird,’ as Ned puts it, instead of an alpha male. There is no question that disagreeable, even dangerous attitudes toward masculinity play a significant part in Politanoff’s novel, which is propelled by Ned’s realization that he can no longer bear being a stay-at-home dad in a sexless marriage. But in its preoccupation with what Politanoff calls the ‘abject-adjacent features’ of manospheric culture, Dad Had a Bad Day also has something in common with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (2024), books that similarly test the boundary between self-care and self-destruction.”
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“For all that it satirizes male delusion and middle-class ennui, Dad Had a Bad Day stops short of political critique, which allows it to maintain its light touch. There are moments, however, when it seems to point toward a better life than the one Ned feverishly pursues, riven as it is by competition over women, resources, and self-respect. Some of these moments involve Ned’s imperfect yet still undeniably loving rapport with his son. Others foreground his tenderness toward other men. Ned calls this tenderness ‘a kinship,’ but occasionally it seems like erotic interest . . . These sensual glimmers are no match for the antagonistic sociality of straight male relationships, which, in this novel, quickly convert sympathy or desire into rivalry and aggression. Inevitably, the camaraderie between Ned and his teammates will sour, sometimes turning violent; just as inevitably, his secret hobby will be discovered, his marriage imperiled, his delusions exposed. All the same, his carnal curiosity about other men feels far more urgent than his frustrated longing for his wife, who brushes off his advances and masturbates in the shower, or the female club member with whom he almost has an affair. Other than Ned’s love for his son, it is the only thing in his world that isn’t ugly—or expensive. Perhaps in another lifetime, or another novel, Ned would find a way to nourish these intimations of benevolence or even love, refusing to let them be spoiled by his own aspirational machismo. Unfortunately, he is not that kind of guy.”
–Anahid Nersessian on Ashton Politanoff’s Dad Had a Bad Day (New York Review of Books)
“If one photograph can symbolize the tremors now shaking the Democratic Party, this might be it: in November 2023, hunger strikers gather outside the White House with a banner urging Biden to attend to Gaza. Among the crowd stands Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman in a gray suit and black shirt. The image exposes a rift between the party establishment and a left‑leaning insurgency that views Biden’s Gaza policy as symptomatic of a deeper rot. In his indispensable new book, Crossing the Red Line, Akbar Shahid Ahmed explains how we arrived at this moment. He not only chronicles the choices that led Biden and his aides to arm Israel and defend those actions, a stance now questioned by major human rights groups and scholars, but also analyzes the habitual mindsets that framed those choices—habits that may demand nothing less than a political upheaval to uproot.”
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“Approaching the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of national strategy and moral calculus reveals that framing Israel’s struggle as another global counterterrorism campaign did not stop the Biden administration from criticizing certain actions; it did, however, shape the scope and fierceness of those criticisms. When Biden spoke in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, he urged Israelis to learn from American “mistakes”—a softer phrasing than the human-rights community’s growing labels of war crimes related to the blockade and evacuation orders. Ahmed also lifts the veil on how closely the White House worked with lobbyists and donors who sought to preserve Israel’s freedom to maneuver. Notably, one morning on Oct. 7, Biden’s team consulted Anita Dunn, his political strategist, who helped found a public-relations firm that later began working for AIPAC and other pro‑Israel groups. And in the following year, Maggie Goodlander—Sullivan’s wife—launched a congressional bid that drew six figures from pro-Israel fundraising circles.”
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“This misstep in the political calculus, paired with a moral blindness that many argue persists, has unleashed an internal backlash within the Democratic Party with only two close historical parallels. The first is the Vietnam War backlash that contributed to McGovern’s 1972 nomination—whereas the second is the Iraq War backlash that helped Obama ascend in 2008. McGovern did not win, Obama did, but neither reshaped the foreign‑policy establishment in the way his administration’s choices would later determine U.S. policy. The challenge facing Zohran Mamdani and the other hunger-strikers is whether they can break with that failed precedent.”
–Peter Beinart on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza (The New York Times Book Review)
