That day, a portal seemed to open that would take me into a new reality. Of course, I was recently accustomed to looking for portals into new realities.

Maybe a movement is what happens when a story of injustice gets told enough times that suddenly, hearing it again, we recognize it.

This 2014 pandemic-dystopia isn’t cynical; rather, it simulates humanity doing more than just surviving.

What this kind of trouble does, Burns shows us, is chill not only the outer, real, perceptible world; it chills our inner worlds, too. It makes us put up fences in our own minds.

I see now that this is not just an allegory. It is also a story, plain and straight, of how disease can ravage our best laid plans.

Whereas victims and villains in A Little Life are easy to spot, trapped in unthinkable cycles of harm, and painfully without justice, The People in the Trees widens our lens, honing us in on the more subtle brutalities whose cause-effect relationships aren’t as clearly identified.

It’s a novel that explores what happens when someone with power exercises, as in exerts, employs, trust: exercises it in order to cross a boundary. And it’s also a novel about why, when that boundary gets crossed, it’s so hard for us to talk about it: why, when a trusted figure abuses power, it is so hard for us to hold them accountable.

While overhearing the stories that Faye is privy to in these novels, you start to sense — vaguely, even uncannily — that you are learning about Faye, too.

As a quiet, awkward stranger in a strange land, Stoner feels most in touch with his true inner self when he is reading English literature.

I’ve decided that I can only like Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, if I am allowed to classify it as a satire.