The Maris Review, vol 49

Maris Kreizman

08 Apr 2025 — 5 min read

Who hears a bunch of songs about working dead end, soul crushing jobs and is like, voila! The world needs a business book about leadership!

What I read this week

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura is one of my favorite contemporary writers partly because she makes me feel so disoriented. In her novels catharsis comes at unexpected times or not at all. Sometimes when I feel a little lost in a narrative, I wonder if it's because I've missed something, or even if the author has unintentionally led me astray. Not so with Katie. Her prose is incredibly sharp and precise; she knows exactly what she's doing and I'm happily adrift in her capable hands. I realize that if you're reading for escapism, this is not the feeling you may be seeking. But if you're reading to explore what a novel can be and how it can make you feel, Katie is a master.

The protagonist of Audition is an actress, and the novel is an exploration of all of the roles we're all forced to play even if we're not prolific performers like she is. The plot structure of Audition is audacious; halfway through the novel there's a sudden change that calls into question everything that came before. I won't say more because I don't want to ruin it for you.

But the plot twist (if you could call it that) in Audition made me think of how, many years ago, when I was the editorial director of Book of the Month, I fought so hard to make Katie's 2017 novel A Separation a selection. I was so captivated by that book, a mystery that gets solved halfway through, and then there's so much more to go... I was told that our BOTM readers wouldn't like it, and there was only so much I should try to challenge them. Fair enough, even though my taste was what I thought they were paying me for! A Separation now has a 3.03 rating on Goodreads, so my boss's instinct was probably right, but it rankled. Ruth Madievsky wrote an excellent essay about why some excellent books by women get low Goodreads scores, and I say hell yes to her thesis. But I would add that the more the novelist experiments with form, the lower the Goodreads rank will be. Still, if any "difficult" writer has a shot at breaking through I would bet on Katie.

So let me challenge you in the way I couldn't challenge BOTM members: read Katie Kitamura and let the feelings wash over you. It's okay if you occasionally feel adrift, just enjoy the journey. There is so much to love.

Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani

What a week for smart new novels that challenge the literary conventions to which so many of us are accustomed. Liquid: A Love Story is a rom-com so brainy and funny it got a blurb from Paul Beatty, my hero of brainy fun, who calls it "hirsute, heuristic, and humorous."

The unnamed narrator of Liquid is an Indian and Iranian American who spent her teens and early twenties in hijab "as a fuck-you-too to post 9/11 America." Now, she's in her thirties, with a fresh PhD and all of the lingo that accompanies an academic career. Let me let her tell you about her studies: "My research, put in academic terms, existed at the intersection of queer theory, feminist histories and Iranian studies to analyze the ways the modern, Western-inflected institution of companionate marriage... helped structure and reinforce the codependent systems of binary gender and heterosexual in pre- and post- Revolutionary Iran via international literature and film." Put more simply, she says, "this amounted to calling out the bullshit that made life so insufferable." Now she has to figure out how to put all she's learned to use.

So what do you do when your fancy education yields just about zero job opportunities, and your dating life isn't going so great either? You listen to your best friend Adam, a nice Jewish boy with bad taste in women, who tells you that marrying for money might just be the answer. A marriage plot ensues, one in which our unnamed narrator who clearly isn't as good at statistics as she is at literary theory, decides that by going on 100 dates (she has a spreadsheet) she might find a (rich) spouse.

So our narrator gets on the apps and dates, all the while thinking about friends-to-lovers romantic tropes, hoping to use her doctorate to teach a course about rom-coms like Love & Basketball and When Harry Met Sally. Could this mean Adam is her true beshert??? Could it???

The novel veers off its traditional rom-com path when an emergency brings the narrator to Tehran, and for a moment I thought the narrative would end with an unexpected realization about who our heroine is and who she wants to be. But this is a novel about the particular expectations of European and American audiences. Everyone knows we can't bear to end a rom-com without a happily ever after.

Is... is this what Badlands is about?

Not since Ronald Reagan co-opted "Born in the USA" for his nefarious purposes has Bruce been so badly misused. Do you know how much money it costs to have seen 100 Springsteen shows? And to not even walk away with an understanding of what the songs are supposed to be about? Who hears a bunch of songs about working dead end, soul crushing jobs and is like, voila! The world needs a business book about leadership! The sad thing is I'm sure there will be an audience for it, some wannabe CEOs who only read books about how to get rich and want to download to their brains all of the supposed lessons that The Boss could teach them about management. My bet is that the author refers to his employees as "my people."