Context

We asked editors at various New York publishing houses to write about forthcoming books that are of special interest to them.

Gerald Howard | Random House

I am particularly excited by Stephen Amidon’s The New City, which Doubleday will be publishing in January 2000. Tom Wolfe has been scolding American novelists to put more of the stuff of the world in their books, and this book delivers on that score, and several others. Set in a planned suburban community in Maryland in the year l973, with the Watergate hearings and the end of the Vietnam War as background music, the novel lays out the psychic and political economy of the suburban places we built to resolve the conflicts and contradictions of race and class. It pits the two leading families of Newton, one white, one black, in Dreiserian fashion, becoming by degrees a genuine and entirely believeable American tragedy. I believe The New City does what the best realistic fiction does: give conceptual shape and moral clarity to our common lives.

Robert Dreesen | Harcourt Brace

Michael Faber’s Under the Skin

A first novel that defies categorization, a surreal representation of contemporary society run amok, set in the very real beauty of the Scottish Highlands.

Isserly picks up hitchhikers with big muscles. She, herself, is tiny—like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. She has a remarkable face, wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. Her breasts are perfect; perhaps implants. She is strangely erotic yet somehow grotesque, vulnerable yet threatening. Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch—trailer trash and travelling postgrads, thugs and philosophers: all male life is here. But Isserley is only interested in whether they have families and whether they have muscles. Then, it’s only a question of how long she can endure her pain—physically and spiritually—and their conversation.

Michel Faber’s work has been described as a combination between Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka, as Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan. What we see on the surface in this highly unusual novel is deceiving. At once humane and horrifying, Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory—our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion. A grotesque and comical allegory announcing the arrival of an exciting talent.