The Award, by Matthew Pearl (Harper). David Trent, a struggling writer whose behavior steers this blackly comic thriller, exults upon learning that his new neighbor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Silas Hale—“an echo,” he initially thinks, of “Henry David Thoreau living in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s backyard!” When it becomes clear that Silas has no interest in mentorship, though, David contrives to shore up his writerly status in other, increasingly reprehensible ways. Pearl revels in wickedness, presenting a literary world in which a successful writer’s haughtiness is both encouraged and rewarded. At the novel’s heart is an existential question put to David by his long-suffering girlfriend: “Was it better to be happy or to be a writer?”
Analog Days, by Damion Searls (Coffee House). In this diaristic novella by a prolific translator of the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, a narrator records several weeks in the summer of 2016 spent exchanging stories with friends in New York, travelling to San Francisco, and nursing foot injuries. To chronicle their days, Searls’s characters use methods that the internet is gradually rendering obsolete—one friend starts a print-only blog, and another uses archival white pages to track down a shuttered recording studio. Often opening a day’s entry with news of mass shootings, police brutality, and Donald Trump’s political rise, the book’s central character examines contemporary life’s horrors and indignities, and the still emergent technology that is exposing him to it all.
