Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Blob: A Love Story, by Maggie Su (Harper). In this slyly self-aware and gently comic novel, a twenty-four-year-old college dropout, Vi, who is stuck in a dead-end job and getting over a bad breakup, discovers a blob on the ground outside a dive bar. She takes the blob—which to her recalls “the slime I made as a kid”—back to her apartment and shapes it, golem-like, into her ideal boyfriend, whom she names Bob. Vi is chubby, socially awkward, and uneasy with her own “otherness” (she is the child of an Asian father and a white mother), and she seeks conventional perfection in Bob, who develops washboard abs and movie-star looks. But problems arise when Bob starts to feel desires of his own—a turn that both accelerates the novel’s sharp plot and enriches its examination of the complex relationship between longing and identity.

The Dissenters, by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf). This novel, the first written in English by one of Egypt’s leading authors, takes the form of letters from a man in Cairo to his sister, who lives in America. In the letters, the man interweaves their mother’s story—involving a failed first marriage, female genital mutilation, an affair, and transformations from secularism to religiosity and back again—with reflections on his own life, his experience of her recent death, and the wider history of his country. Designating himself “a truth-seeker, a lover, a revolutionary,” the man notes that he “could never be any of those things if I didn’t understand that I was an Egyptian woman’s son.”