Everybody, by Olivia Laing (Norton). In this “book about freedom,” a novelist and critic presents an expansive exploration of topics such as sexual liberation, feminism, illness, incarceration, exile, gay and trans rights, and the nature of protest. Drawing consistently surprising corollaries from history and art, Laing vaults from subject to subject. She returns repeatedly to her own experiences (including as a nonbinary person) and to the life of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose career began with groundbreaking work on bodily autonomy and sexual politics but ended in quackery, isolation, and a prison sentence. Although Laing cannot fully explain the “weird border between self and world” that fascinates her, her paths of inquiry are engrossing and illuminating.
Geniuses at War, by David A. Price (Knopf). Colossus, the first digital, electronic computer, was developed by British intelligence during the Second World War, to decipher encrypted messages between Hitler and his generals. This history places the famous achievements of the computer scientist Alan Turing alongside the work of his mentor Max Newman and of Tommy Flowers, the engineer who designed the machine. Price describes the complexity of the codes produced by Germany’s cipher machines and recounts Colossus’s triumph in obtaining military intelligence before the Normandy landings. Noting that Colossus marked the beginning of the digital age, Price observes that it was the product “not of impersonal forces but of the joining of extraordinary individuals within an extraordinary institution.”
Filthy Animals, by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead). Asked to account for a recent suicide attempt, Lionel, the main character of this collection of linked stories, says, “You know how sometimes an animal will chew its arm off to get loose if it’s desperate enough?” Lionel, a queer Black graduate student, gets pulled into a relationship with a bisexual dancer and the dancer’s girlfriend. This narrative is interspersed with the stories of other characters, whose passivity threatens to give way to violence: an abused woman babysitting a child; a man rejected by his mother for being gay; a teen-ager caught in a web of casual cruelty, who wishes that “he could enter into another version of his life, one in which things have not gone quite as horribly awry.”
The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee (Knopf). This historical novel is partly a procedural built around the murder, in 1903, of Andrew Haswell Green, a force behind the creation of Central Park and the New York Public Library. But Lee’s true project, as he recounts Green’s remarkable career, is to chart the shaping of the self by “the concert of barely connected moments that make up any life”: an early homosexual encounter; Green’s first job in New York, as a store clerk; his time in Trinidad supervising sugarcane workers; his friendship with Samuel Tilden, the future governor. The result is an immersive bildungsroman, whose fluid, regretful protagonist observes that “one’s past was as much a work of imagination as the future.”
