Tuesday March the 28th Two Thousand and 23

New reviews. Paperback news.

Hi all,

For the New Yorker, I reviewed––and raved about, and quibbled with––Kerry Howley's spectacularly sui generis new book, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State. It's so many things at once. It's a deeply reported, stylishly written story about Reality Winner, the young woman who received the longest jail sentence ever handed down under the Espionage Act as punishment for leaking a five-page classified document about attempted Russian interference in the 2016 elections. It's a mosaic of character studies of people (John Walker Lindh, Abu Zubaydah, Julian Assange, and many more) whose stories illuminate the post-9/11 era. It's an associative, writerly meditation on surveillance, knowledge, and selfhood.

Like a lot of the books I've reviewed over the last decade, its preoccupations overlap with the preoccupations of Planes. (See: the post-9/11 mood, the hidden-in-plain-sight security state, classified atrocities as public knowledge.) Seeking out assignments like this felt like an important part of my process: the research I did helped me learn things I wanted to know, and writing them helped me fumble towards the specific contribution that I might make with fiction. Fumbling around in the novel, in turn, informed what I ended up seeing in these books and saying in my reviews.

This is the first piece like this––on a Planes-adjacent, subject, I mean––that I've done since the book came out. It was rewarding to tangle with such a complex and accomplished book, but it for sure felt a little strange. Planes is done now: the old circuit has lost a major node. I think it's likely that I'll keep doing pieces on these subject–– but probably fewer, as I make room for pieces that fill a similar role for my next novel.

***

Actually, that's already happening! (Or, in retrospect, has been happening for some time.) For the recently-revived Washington Post BookWorld, I wrote a short review of Daniel Knowles's Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What To Do About It. If you've followed my writing over the years, you know how much I hate cars and car-centric city planning. But while I thought the "how cars make life worse" part of the book was great, the "what to do about it" felt a little lacking, and exemplary of a certain strain of book that focuses on technical and policy fixes for what are actually (or equally) political dilemmas.

My next novel features, among other things: transit innovations that reshape (and harm) the world and people arguing over what to do about it. So I suppose, as someone always says near the beginning of a horror movie sequel: It's happening again ...

***

Planes is getting released in paperback this summer by Vintage Anchor books, which is very exciting––especially because it gets a new cover:

Amazingly, this was made by my friend Linda Huang, who also designed the hardcover jacket:

I love how the two covers approach the book so differently, while also talking to each other. Here’s the hardcover, so you can see them both together:

More on the paperback release — soon!

--Peter