Staff Picks: Spells, Cephalopods, and Smug Salads
Sarah Moss.
Around Christmastime, which seems as far away as the late Iron Age by now, there were whisperings of a book that was as yet hardly known on our shores: . The slim novel by Sarah Moss is about a small knot of students doing extracurricular research credits for their college archaeology course by living like Iron Age Britons for a few summer weeks. They are joined by an amateur enthusiast and his family, and I set the book down at first for being too pedantic. Even the fierce loyalty of our grade school narrator toward her father can’t hide her nascent skepticism—or is it the author’s?—regarding his monomaniac devotion to a pure British past. A large left me feeling fine about food co-op bulletin boards and Dan Barber books, but the real treat of the novel is the fucking desecration of all men. The men in the book are bad—all of them. They are bad because they are abusive or objectify women or are complicit in these crimes. They are undeniably bad, and it is women who plot and pilot their escape and the rescue of other women, and it is women who provide nourishment, comfort, and, in the distance, the sweet, warm light of sexual gratification—finally.
