Staff Picks: Utopia, Lapsed Christians, and Artificial Intelligence
It may be the humidity this week, but I’ve felt as though in a fever dream while reading R. O. Kwon’s remarkable novel, . Every page blooms with sensuous language—“paper-lantern strings pearled the lawn”; “plates leaped from the shelves, white fragments like giant teeth gnashing toward us”; “lawns floated wide, like magic carpets”—and the book’s mood is otherworldly, even if its setting, a wealthy college in the Northeast, isn’t. Chapters are distributed among three characters: Will Kendall, a scholarship student and lapsed Christian; Phoebe, a wealthy student guilt-ridden over her mother’s death; and John Leal, a would-be cult leader. Each plays out a different form of fanaticism, one no less dangerous than another, and Kwon weaves her characters’ lives together with one hand while unraveling them with the other. These are
