Girls go missing in Julia Phillips’s début novel.
A dead or missing girl is such a common device in crime fiction that its use now prompts raised eyebrows. In “Dead Girls,” Alice Bolin writes about television series, like “Twin Peaks” and “True Detective,” in which “the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” The girl is merely an opportunity for the detective to confront and to redeem his own capacity for violence: confront it by discovering the identity of the culprit (often an authority figure, not unlike the detective himself ) and redeem it by capturing and punishing the culprit. The violence redoubles; her loss is just the means to his gain.
Women novelists have been ingeniously dismantling this convention of late, both within the crime-fiction genre (Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”) and outside of it, as in Julia Phillips’s invigoratingly hard-to-classify new novel, “Disappearing Earth” (Knopf ). Each of the novel’s thirteen chapters is told from the perspective of a different female character, beginning with eleven-year-old Alyona Golosovskaya, who is looking after her younger sister, Sophia, while their mother works during the day. At the beach, the two girls meet a man and, out of innocence and admiration for his magnificent car, accept his offer of a ride. This chapter, titled “August,” ends with him driving the panicked girls off to parts unknown.
Esta historia es de la edición May 20, 2019 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición May 20, 2019 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.