The Year in Briefest Review: Four Picks
December 30, 2025
Books
I long, and search hard, for books and movies that manage to be sad, strong, thoughtful, and wicked funny all at the same time. This is quite a hat trick, one that Rabih Alameddine pulls off better than most. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) manages to be genuinely funny, even against the bitter backdrop of the Syrian civil war, all thanks to Raja’s bossy, adorable mother. This is a story that begs to be filmed, if only to watch her come alive on the screen. That said, she is already alive in Alameddine’s deft, slightly autobiographical story. You know her, instantly, through the self-deprecating, weary voice of her sweetly gullible son, who is as thoroughly under her spell as we are. Maternal love is a force that can outtalk a war.
P.S. I loved this book long before it won the 2025 National Book Award, so there. It has the purity of a single point of view and a clean flashback, not the jangle of cross-cuts and alternating points of view we have come to—expect? Demand? Suffer? They work when they work. But the emotional impact of going deeply into a single point of view is, I suspect, built into the way our brains work.
Film
Predictably, Hamnet. I had read and loved the book. Before seeing the movie, though, I chanced on a few self-important “think” pieces about both. These critics deplored the emphasis on the mother’s grief and Shakespeare’s loss of a son as too simplistic an explanation for so complex a play. Good Lord. Maggie O’Farrell was not trying to do literary criticism when she wrote this book. Hamnet is not an attempt to “explain” all of Hamlet. O’Farrell was exploring, through the play’s overlap with a father’s otherwise unspeakable grief, a marriage, and a crisis of loss. In the film adaptation—stripped of rich detail but visually spellbinding, with consummately good acting—we come close to that convergence. And though we hear a bereft mother’s raw shrieks of pain, it is Jessie Buckley’s quiet moments, as the grief enters her bones, that are the most powerful. Director Chloé Zhao is not afraid to be patient, and the camera is brave enough to linger. Today’s films fire content at us like automatic rifles; this one carefully sets down something fragile, dark, and beautiful, and lets us see it.
P.S. Hamnet had half the theater in tears—and later made me wonder how much of today’s loneliness comes from our pace. Not only are we moving too fast to hang out and enjoy just being alive, but could it be that we do not feel close to one another because we never linger in quiet, absorbing another person’s presence?
Reporting
In “Doughnuts and Bullets The agony and absurdity of working for RFK Jr.,” Kerry Howley does a masterful job of covering a phenomenon that has only come to us bit by bit, with tiny jolts of adrenaline but no context or vantage point. Howley gives us the big picture. Or rather, she lets the people who are living this moment describe it. Instead of trying to shock us (are we even still shockable?) by throwing a succession of reported facts at us like balls from a batting machine, Howley unfolds the consequences as they were lived, in the words of individuals we can understand.
P.S. This is “intimacy journalism,” coyly named but still my favorite sort. I used to have a scrap of paper stuck on my computer: “If it’s not working, you’re not close enough.” Howley brings us painfully close, with a story it is impossible to shake off.
Short Fiction
I was ten minutes late to meet a friend, which is not like me, because I could not stop reading “Mother of Men,” Lauren Groff’s gem of a short short story in a recent New Yorker. We can say what it is “about”—violence against women, stalkers, men and how women see them, husbands and wives and sons—but that does no justice to the subtlety of her writing, the details where she hides love, and the way she sneaks the fear into us and casually orchestrates the climax. The piece is cathartic, whether you have ever experienced this sort of fear or not, because it is also about a wider-spread terror. Groff pauses the narrative to let her character remarks upon the way other, “distant men, men who are growing fat on their own cruelty, are making the sky collapse on our heads; every day the sky comes a bit closer, oppressive, so low in some places that it has been swallowing people up out of their lives.” A page later, she notes, “There is nothing more frightening than when the extremely gentle among us, the peacemakers, are pushed until they snap.” All told, the piece proves what high school English teachers have been trying to explain for decades: the particular contains the universal, and one person’s situation can stand in for a much larger crisis.
P.S. Thanks to its centennial, its pleased documentary on Netflix, and the usual critical sniping, The New Yorker is being alternately feted and written off as irrelevant. True, the magazine does not “break” news anymore; how can anyone break anything, when everybody’s camera is in their hand at all times, and the news streams past their pillow? True, the New Yorker voice might still be a wee bit snobbish, in that self-satisfied way of every New Yorker, but what do you expect when you combine an iconic city with a dying but elegant literary subculture? The New Yorker is defying today’s odds, and there is at least one essay, poem, joke, or news feature I want to tear out of each issue. So here’s to another century.
