I finished two books this past week and enjoyed them to varying degrees. One was by a favorite author, another by an author I’ve struggled with in the past. Let’s get to the latter first since I like going in reading order…
We Are Watching****
I’ve always felt cold toward Alison Gaylin’s work. She’s a very good writer and yet, there’s an emotional distance in her books that I can’t land with. It’s the same issue I get when watching most Christopher Nolan movies: yeah it’s good and well executed but why should I care? I’ve often said I don’t really care how a story is written, I just need a reason to care about what’s happening. And that reason usually falls on whether or not I find the characters interesting.
With some distance, I do find the characters in this one to be less interesting HOWEVER what stood out to me this time and what helped deliver me to finish it is the mother-daughter relationship central in the text. It brings me closer to Gaylin’s characters (who I still find to be emotionally distant). Perhaps fatherhood is changing me in this regard but it helped the stakes to feel real.
And it was aided by how well Gaylin delved into the cultish aspect of the novel. Given these fringe-types are now running the country, this felt real and frightening. This will mostly get a suspense/thriller tag but to me, it reads more like social horror. At a time where I’ve slowed my news intake to a trickle mostly out of protection for my mental health,* it’s fascinating to encounter this scary reality in fiction. The reveals of the cult are kind of meh and the comic book ending required of all thrillers made me roll my eyes at its familiarity and predicability but overall, I liked this one more than I thought I would.
(*I don’t anticipate this happening here but on social media, folks tend to jump in about how this is a privileged perspective and I want to head that off. While there is a degree of privilege here, both of my children have special needs, my wife works in healthcare and I’m in grad school. Large portions of our lives are on the chopping block. I promise I have plenty of skin in this moment and not refreshing CNN every five minutes is indicative of nothing more than protecting my own house and my self. If someone wants to clear their throat to argue, please do it elsewhere. You’ll get a good fight on Facebook or X.)
Saint of the Narrows Street*****
While I remain partial to A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself as my favorite William Boyle novel, this is undoubtedly his best, the book he’s been building up to his whole career. It’s like reliving the reading experience of Laura Lippman’s growth all over again. A painful, elegiac noir set over decades about how secrets tear us apart and our community cannot make us whole. I read an interview where Boyle wrote about how he wanted to explore Catholicism and his mixed experience with it. I think he does it in a way that is tasteful and insightful. Everyone assumes it comes back to guilt and that is a part of it but, like Martin Scorsese, Boyle is able to tell a multivalenced tale about how Catholicism impacts a community both institutionally and through belief. This is probably the best thing I’ve read in 2025 and it will be tough to top. I thought I’d have more to say but I’m really just gut-punched by how it built to its conclusion and am sitting with that. Bravo.
