Book Reviews: Three bangers to start 2025

The first three books I've finished in 2025 have all been absolute bangers, although very different from each other! I feel like the year is off to a promising start in terms of literature, if nothing else.

Playground by Richard Powers: 9/10

This is a slow burn of a novel, which is not surprising from Richard Powers (who has a knack for letting stories unfold at their own pace) but may cause some readers to find it a little unfocused, at least in the first quarter or so. I would urge everyone to stick with it though, because the pay-off is a thing of immense beauty and profundity.

Ostensibly, this is a book about two main themes: oceanography (and more broadly, oceanic life) and artificial intelligence. And it delivers in spades on both these themes. The descriptions of ocean life, in all its variety and abundance and wild strange perfection, are incredibly moving and lyrical. I felt transported at times, a genuine frisson of being somewhere other than where I was, which is a marker of Powers' deft and powerful skill. The portrtait of how an AI grows, set against the backdrop of the social media era, is more subtle, but always ticking away behind the brighter, more prominent ocean story. Both are essential, and both are fully realised.

That said, at its heart, this is also a book about friendship, love, and the vast complexities of which the human heart is capable. It is built around four key characters: Todd the tech genius, Rafi the poet, Ina the artist, and Evelyne the oceanographer / chronicler of the deep. Each of them has a part to play in the messages that Powers is encoding, with increasing urgency as the book progresses, into this text. The messages? We only have one planet, and we're killing it. We only have one life, and we need to live it. And, maybe above all - we crave, we need, connection, more deeply and persistently than we can ever really grasp.

And finally: no spoilers, but the twisty stunner of an ending (which I did NOT predict) changes how you think about the entire story, and makes the book both much sadder and more important as a literary achievement. I honestly believe this novel will become a contemporary classic, and it richly deserves to. I will most certainly re-read it.

Erasure by Percival Everett: 8.5/10

After being blown away by Everett's latest book, James, last year, I'm working my way through his back catalogue. This book, from 2001, was the first to become available from the library, so it was first up in my catch-up list.

At the outset, it's worth saying that this book is at least two, arguably three, distinctly different things. It's a satire / social commentary, and a bitingly effective one. It's an homage, not just to one particular source book (although certainly to that), but to whole schools of literary and philosophical theory. And alongside both of these, it's also a well-constructed and surprisingly affecting family story, that tackles themes such as sibling favouritism, adult homosexuality in non-accepting families, the impact of loss and violence on those who survive, the pain of watching an elder who you love decline with dementia, and the myriad ways that families both sustain and hobble each other.

Everett's fascination with Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel The Invisible Man, and the constant callbacks to its themes, content, and even critical reception, is key to understanding Erasure. I'm not sure if this book would hit as hard for a reader completely unfamiliar with The Invisible Man and its cultural impact (I myself have not read it in its entirety, but I have read extracts and have learned about its literary and cultural significance). Everett even names his narrator protagonist, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, after the author of the earlier book, signalling that the mirroring his text is engaging in is entirely intentional and meant to be read with significance.

The Invisible Man, if you are unfamiliar with it, is a long treatise expounding Ellison's central thesis that being Black in America could mean as rich a variety of things as being white or any other ethnicity. Suffering and deprivation are of course part of the Black experience, but not the totality of it, and to pigeonhole Black writers and thinkers to only ever writing about race, poverty, crime, and the legacy of slavery is, in Ellison and Everett's views, a particularly pernicious kind of intellectual racism. Black (or white) authors who write Black characters *only* in the context of past and present pain, who focus only on the viciousness and brutality and misery of (some) Black lives, are contributing to this stereotypical reductionism, and it has real consequences.

In Erasure, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison is an intellectual and writer from a well-to-do Black family, living an academic life, publishing books that have zero mass market appeal (but are very high-faluting). His deceased father was a highly regarded physician, as are both his siblings (Bill and Lisa). As the book opens, his mother is just starting her slide into dementia, which will serve as the emotional hook for the "family" strand of the story.

Monk becomes enraged at the popular success of a terribly written book called We Lives in the Ghetto, by a Black woman from an equally well-off background to his own who writes it after visiting with extended family in a poorer area of Detroit for a week. His rips at the text are on point, and filled with rage. In a fury, he sits down and writes his own parodic inner-city story, initially called My Pafology but later renamed (in a hilarious sequence) Fuck. Sending it to his agent and telling him to market it under the pen name Stagg Lee, Ellison kicks off a chain of events that culminates in a scene that perfectly reflects The Invisible Man's final insight - that America will only ever see what it wants to see in a Black man and a Black story.

There were beats of this novel that I felt didn't quite hit, although this may be because my literary theory knowledge is not very advanced. I found the family plot (spoiler omitted) to be really moving, which was surprising in a way because Monk himself is not a warm or sympathetic character. I also thought the embedding of the whole text of My Pafology / Fuck into the middle of the novel was brilliantly effective, and strengthened both the caustic wit and the central project of the book.

There is much more I could say about this, but I'm going to leave it there so as to avoid any accidental spoilers. It's a very, very good book, and one I'll likely return to and consider again.

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan: 9/10

All of Claire Keegan's books can be described as "small perfect things", and this one is no exception. The language is so precisely and lyrically deployed, the story so compellingly unfolded, and the message so potent and sad that it just got me right in the gut. It's a story, at its heart, about what everyday, undramatic, non-explosive, not physically violent, misogyny looks like - about how it's grown, how it plays out, and how it hurts everyone, perhaps those who exhibit it the most of all. Cathal is ultimately pathetic - not monstrous, not evil, but small-minded and limited and crabbed, caught inside the cage built for him by a system of thought he's never questioned. I didn't feel sympathy for him, but I did feel its darker cousin: pity.