Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter (Hogarth). The precipitating event in this novel of COVID and comeuppance takes place on a hike, when a married couple—who have fled Brooklyn for a cottage upstate—have an argument. The wife, who is pregnant, throws hot tea at her husband; then, as he remembers it, he “let his wife dangle, if only momentarily,” over a cliff. After the wife runs away, the husband files a missing-persons report, and he becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance. Porter’s story has the signposts of a mystery and the economically stratified ensemble cast of a social novel. In chapters centered on characters whose lives are disrupted by the couple’s drama and by lockdown, people sift through pasts whose cruelties match those of their pandemic present.

Grown Women, by Sarai Johnson (Harper). Four generations of Black women are at the heart of this tender and expansive novel, which begins in the nineteen-seventies. When Charlotte, eighteen years old and pregnant, flees her wealthy family’s home, she is determined to do better by her unborn child than her mother, Evelyn, did by her. But Charlotte’s choice leads to a life of poverty; eighteen years later, her daughter, Corinna, also gives birth to a girl. For Evelyn, Charlotte, and Corinna, the baby represents an opportunity “to move, if not on, then forward,” to break from patterns of physical and emotional violence carried out by the men in their lives, and by their own mothers. The three women endeavor to raise the girl together—a journey that leads them to discover the limits of forgiveness, and to reassess what it looks like to raise a “grown woman.”