Dear readers, A lot of the ads on the New York subway lately seem to be national campaigns — unknown conglomerates flogging mail-order GLP-1s or vaguely Orwellian office apps — and their sterility makes me miss the days when the stuff being sold to me on my morning commute had a more chaotic old-school quality, a felonious whiff of Craigslist. Between the Comic Sans banners for numerologists, cosmetic dentists and wolfish personal injury lawyers, my favorites were always the bootleg job listings — the ones offering good cash money in exchange for a few hours in the exciting and scantily regulated fields of egg donation or dream studies or untested (until you!) pharmaceuticals. That’s the kind of twilight gig economy the insolvent but up-for-it protagonists in these two books have fallen into, much the same way you might fall down a manhole. Or a rabbit hole, curiouser and curiouser. —Leah “Black Bag,” by Luke KennardFiction, 2026
When we first meet the unnamed narrator of “Black Bag,” he’s an out-of-work 37-year-old actor living in a dilapidated London flat who, for years, has subsisted almost entirely on hope and dried borlotti beans. The occasional gig in murder-mystery dinner theater or corporate consent videos nominally keeps the lights on. But when he responds to a posting for a nonspeaking role — “discretion and devotion to restrictive performance requirements obligatory” — he finds himself in the office of a Professor Paul Blend, agreeing to attend campus lectures twice weekly in what looks like a large leather garment bag with leg openings. The job of black bag, he’s instructed, is to be nothing but black bag. No verbal interactions with Blend’s nonplused students, no identifiable expressions of human want or need. Even a to-go cappuccino must be conveyed mouthward with a sort of limbless vertical wiggle, “like a giant slug absorbing its nourishment.” The pay is great, though, and off the books; overhead is low. It turns out there is freedom in black bag, too, along with unexpected personal and professional opportunities. Another professor, a sleek and ruthless futurist named Justine, finds herself enthralled by the idea of sexual congress with a man who is also “an absence.” The narrator’s best friend, a successful livestreamer, is eager in his own way to explore the beguiling potential of black bag’s anonymous, intangible mystery, though his eyes fill less with heart emojis than with dollar signs. (Like much tech-lord enterprise, the plan to monetize black bag is largely inscrutable but somehow involves NFTs.) Even as he continues to troll job listings — “Professional mourner. Toilet paper hand model. Dungeon scarer” — the actor becomes increasingly attached to life in oblong leather: “As black bag, I move carefully, I notice everything, welcome the consternation and enmity of others and feel alive.” Kennard is a poet by trade and it shows. He gives several flamboyant inner monologues to a Border collie, and an inspired riff on Justine’s “atavastic” personal-hygiene products reads like a description of Ziggy Stardust’s Dopp kit. The plot, such as it is, often veers off in odd and cosmic directions. But I like this book’s verve and style, and I often agreed with the dog. Read if you like: Campus novels, balaclavas, site-specific performance art. “A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories,” by Lucia BerlinFiction, 2015
What a shame that Berlin, who died in semi-obscurity in Los Angeles in 2004, wasn’t around to collect her flowers when this posthumous collection became the darling of post-aughties literati (and later a best of the century, no less). Our critic Dwight Garner sensed the influence of Raymond Carver in these “careworn, haunted, messily alluring and yet casually droll stories,” and he’s undoubtedly right. For me, Berlin’s rootlessness and resilience, her relentless emotional honesty, also evokes a certain kind of shaggy art-house movie from the 1970s; she’d be played by Gena Rowlands, maybe, or Ellen Burstyn. This book is not in fact a manual, though its mostly autobiographical vignettes could be considered highly instructional in the art of itinerant living. Berlin spent her childhood in Western mining camps and her teen years in Chile, and did a lot of bouncing around between Mexico, California, Colorado and New York City. Romance, too, was a flawed experiment attempted with a series of jerks, jazz hounds and heroin addicts. By her early 30s she was a thrice-divorced single mother to four sons, working a series of transitory jobs that included housekeeper, hospital ward clerk, switchboard operator and teacher. Through most of it, she was also an alcoholic. In many of these tales there is raw-knuckled hardship and casual humiliation, bad bosses and worse paychecks. The settings are often emphatically anti-glamorous: detox wards, bus depots, broken-down laundromats. But there’s a lot of levity and wisdom, too, little diamonds tossed in generous handfuls across the rough. In the title story, Berlin recounts her full-service duties as a maid (“I clean their coke mirror with Windex”) and reflects on the compulsion to steal small things, like one of 15 bottles of sesame seeds purchased by a forgetful elderly client: “It is the superfluity that finally gets to you.” This 400-page book does contain some superfluity of its own; as a fan of economy, Berlin surely would have trimmed it if she’d had the chance. Still, what a gem! A lot of these stories are bite-size, too — just right for a subway ride. Read if you like: Night shifts, cigarette machines, willfully misappropriating A.A. mottos. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
|
