The Great Mrs. Elias, by Barbara Chase-Riboud (Amistad). Using hitherto overlooked documents, this novel reconstructs the life of Hannah Elias, who was born in poverty in Philadelphia in 1865 but became, at the turn of the century, one of the wealthiest Black women in the country. In this telling, Elias, confident that she is destined for greatness, joins New York’s “sisterhood” of sex workers and meets a rich client whose pillow talk consists of finance lessons. Putting her unorthodox education to use, Elias amasses a real-estate fortune, but the empire teeters after her unexpected connection to the murder, in 1903, of the civic leader Andrew Haswell Green. Chase-Riboud’s narrative challenges us to confront the ways in which race, class, and gender inform whose lives are deemed worthy of remembering.
Last Resort, by Andrew Lipstein (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Caleb, the protagonist of this novel of literary-world chicanery, is an aspiring Brooklyn writer who discovers his voice by pinching someone else’s story. An acquaintance, Avi, tells him about a torrid affair in Greece, and Caleb, abandoning his own lacklustre project, fashions the material into something that neither of them could have produced alone. This gets him a lucrative book deal, but Avi and others quickly recognize themselves in the story. In the ensuing acrimony, Lipstein gleefully scrutinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much on vanity as on financial gain. The book’s command of contemporary-hipster details is wincingly precise, and Caleb’s voice, initially charming, gradually reveals his incompetent careerism.
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, by Brian Cox (Grand Central). The author of this memoir, best known for his role as Logan Roy, on “Succession,” offers a bold, funny account of his path from an impoverished boyhood in Scotland to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and Hollywood. The narrative is punctuated with gossip (“Did I forget to mention that I got touched up by Princess Margaret once?”), frank appraisals of industry bigwigs (Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”), and reflections on his own shortcomings as a spouse and a father. At its core, though, the book is a meditation on craft and a paean to acting, which is, for Cox, “an almost spiritual experience. . . . about reflecting back to people how we are.”
Index, a History of the, by Dennis Duncan (Norton). In this engaging study, the humble index emerges as an unexpected site of anxieties and tensions. From its beginnings, in the fifteenth century, it was viewed as both a miraculous time-saver and a threat to depth and concentration. As indexes gained in popularity, appearing in novels, poetry, and political writing, fears about their misuse intensified, sometimes justifiably; in the eighteenth century, the Whigs and the Tories produced mock indexes of each other’s literature. Duncan draws rich parallels to anxieties surrounding our own “age of search” and makes an impassioned case for the continued relevance of the human-crafted index, which he calls a “child of the imagination.”