“Help me find a new author with the same vibe as my old favorite”

Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here.

I’m a person who wants to read more fiction, but I get regularly (not a bad thing I guess) sucked into the big nonfiction book for the policy/chronically online zeitgeist. For example, I am reading On the Edge by Nate Silver now, and I read Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here and Recoding America before that. But I was a big fan of I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel.

For we, the chronically online, I can only recommend Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, the great novel of what pre-Musk Twitter looked like. Lockwood, a poet, was an early adopter of what we used to call Weird Twitter, and that’s the mode in which she writes her novel: perverse, darkly funny, unnervingly sincere when you don’t expect it to be.

No One Is Talking About This features an unnamed narrator who has become famous for having tweeted, “Can a dog be twins?” Now, her project is to write a book about “the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own,” a consciousness “that you participate in, but that also acts upon you,” which is to say, the hive consciousness of Twitter. But the narrator is forced off the internet when her niece is born with severe birth defects, and her entire life is shaken up with love.

This book is tender and beautiful, and it will have the side effect of not making you feel guilty for being online so much as aware of it — aware of how it feels, why it pulls to us, and how it molds our minds and bodies.

I love books with unconventional female narrators, whether they are morally compromised or socially awkward/strange. For example, I’ve recently read Yellowface, Convenience Store Woman, and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. While these range in subject matter, I’d love recommendations for books that feature strong first-person narration (the stranger and believably unlikeable the better) and the kinds of critiques on societal expectations these had.

I keep having to rewrite this sentence because I am so excited that I can’t stop myself from lapsing into capslock, but GET READY for Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. WHAT A BOOK!

It’s a tricky one to talk about, though. Let’s keep it as simple as we can. In part one, Trust Exercise is a lovely little bittersweet tale about a high school romance gone wrong between two theater kids in the 1980s, told by both lovers in alternating perspectives. In part two, we learn that much of what we read in part one is heavily fictionalized from the events that our new narrator assures us really happened, which were much darker. (You’re going to love this narrator, by the way — incredibly spiky, incredibly angry, all the while constantly asserting that she is absolutely not mad.) In part three, we finally get to something that might resemble the truth, and it is devastating. (It is also infamously confusing, but rest assured, we’ve got an explainer for that. Don’t read it until you’ve finished the book!)

I’ve really enjoyed a few Jennifer Egan books recently — Visit From the Goon Squad and its sequel Candy House and most recently her debut The Invisible Circus. I’m wondering if you could recommend another author or book worth exploring with similar vibes. I’ve been in a bit of a rut with reading until this trio of books and had been falling back on murder mysteries as a crutch. Don’t get me wrong, I love a cozy murder mystery in the winter. But something that’s literary and readable is more the mix I’m aiming for right now. Thank you!

When I think of Jennifer Egan books, I think of: formal experimentation, a deep interest in how technology shapes human connections, and a preoccupation with time and its ravages and redemptions. For two other perspectives on these issues, your best bet is probably either Gary Shteyngart or George Saunders.

Of the two, Shteyngart is the cynic. His protagonists tend to be losers, middle-aged men who are either beaten down by capitalism or have so internalized its logic that it has destroyed their minds. Shteyngart is never shy about making jokes at their expense. Their subsequent attempts to form connections forms the core of his witty, tricky novels. Start with Super Sad True Love Story, the 2010 dystopian novel that has only become more plausible with time.

Saunders is a more straightforwardly empathetic writer, particularly in his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. (The bulk of Saunders’s work is in short stories.) Lincoln is about Abraham Lincoln’s son, 11-year-old Willie, who died of typhus while the Civil War was raging and who has, in this novel, become trapped in the bardo, the in-between place straddling life and afterlife. Willie must pass on to the next stage of being or lose his soul. It is only the great empathy Lincoln feels for the dead — as the man whose decisions have meant death for so many — that rouses the other ghosts of the bardo to guide Willie onward. It’s a beautiful, word-drunk novel. If you like it, go from there straight to Saunders’s great short story collection The Tenth of December and then just keep going.