Forgettable: Famed book designer Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys. This is Kidd's first novel, and it received rave reviews ... but don't be swayed by them. The book's design is in many ways the most interesting thing about it--it's funny, fussy, filled with little things to notice if you like to notice that sort of thing. The plot itself is flat, a trying-too-hard campus novel set during the 1950s that tells the story of a freshman discovering the joys of graphic design. The graphic design parts are fun philosophically speaking, but because they are not well narrated, and because Kidd insists on packaging his ideas about what makes design come alive in a thoroughly bloodless story populated by cartoonish, unrealistic characters, things never really come together.

Compulsively readable: Fernanda Eberstadt's The Furies. At first blush, this novel looks like chick lit with unwarranted aspirations; that's very much not what it really is, though. The Furies is about a specifically modern mode of bitterness--the kind that arises when you learn that your partner does not exist to confirm your own narcissism. It's a novel about how far we will go--how emotionally cheap and grandiosely self-excusing we will be--in order to protect our own precious selfishness. It's about the psychic cocoon that modern thirtysomethings live in because they have been raised to live in it, and it's about what happens to love, to family, and eventually to self when that cocoon unravels (which it is almost guaranteed to do when two unsuspecting egoists attempt to love one another).

Eberstadt writes with remarkable empathy for some remarkably unsympathetic characters--her novel is in many ways an experiment in what a narrative that cares more about its characters than its characters care for one another will look like. It's also, in this regard, a narrative about self-deception, as the novel's two main characters are utterly convinced that they are themselves unimpeachably emotionally correct. The Furies is one of those rare novels of manners that dissects modern mores not in order to mock them (a la Tom Wolfe) but in order to mourn them.

I agree wholeheartedly about _The Cheese Monkeys_! I couldn't even finish it, and that's a big deal for me. Thanks for the recommendation, too.

Considering Eberstadt is with Martin Amis--maybe I don't want to read this.