Michelle Richmond is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Marriage Pact, Golden State, The Year of Fog, No One You Know, Dream of the Blue Room, Hum, and The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Her books have been published in 30 languages. A native of Alabama, she makes her home in Northern California and Paris.
Silicon Valley novel tackles achievement obsession
My new Silicon Valley novel, THE WONDER TEST, hits shelves today. In a review of THE WONDER TEST for the San Francisco Chronicle, Anita Felicelli writes,
“Contemporary fiction set in or around Silicon Valley doesn’t always reach far enough with its absurdity and speculation.. Richmond’s eighth work of fiction, “The Wonder Test,” hits the right notes. It is a madcap suspense novel with a clever premise.”
In THE WONDER TEST, recently widowed FBI agent Lina Connerly relocates from New York City to an affluent suburb in Silicon Valley with her teenaged son, Rory, to clear out her father’s home and get her life back in order after a series of traumatic setbacks.
After enrolling Rory in the public school, which is obsessed with an annual exam called the Wonder Test that has put the small town of Greenfield on the map, Lina is drawn into a mystery involving local teens who go missing. Meanwhile, colleagues back in New York keep trying to rope her back into and old espionage case that needs her attention.
What a blast this novel was to write! Inspired in part by a move to a small town south of San Francisco 12 years ago, and in part by nearly 25 years as an FBI spouse, this “sharply written, subtly satirical thriller” (Publishers Weekly) imagines high-achieving parents and communities in Silicon Valley willing to put their children through the most extreme paces in pursuit of excellence. Oddly enough, this Silicon Valley novel also pays homage to Shirley Jackson, author of the famous short story “The Lottery”–a story about good citizens committing heinous crimes. Jackson lived and wrote for years in the neighborhood where THE WONDER TEST is set.
THE WONDER TEST is also about grief: how we go on and rebuild our lives after the foundation has crumbled, and how work can be a solid force that helps us survive the worst. Did I mention it’s also a bit of a spy novel?
The most enjoyable part of the book, however, was writing the WONDER TEST questions at the beginning of each chapter, like “Square feet is to cubic feet as time is to what?” and “Provide examples to illustrate the term ‘diminishing returns’ without providing so many examples as to achieve diminishing returns.” The questions were inspired by many years of elementary school homework, during which my husband, son and I attempted to find the “right” answer for a series of increasingly absurd standardized test questions.
“Richmond’s (The Marriage Pact) latest is a two-in-one winner: a gripping thriller set in a Stepford-esque California suburb, and a story of surviving loss and building family bonds. With a realistic protagonist, well-described setting, and an uber-creepy villain, it will please readers who like their stories with action and heart in equal measure.”—Liz French, Library Journal
During our final week in Paris at the end of October 2020, I ventured out for one last walk to Batignolles. Although traffic had returned to the boulevards, the city still felt deserted. Travel from the United States to the EU was still restricted, so the only Americans in town were expats like us. We had lived the first eight months of the pandemic in the City of Light. I had stirrings of affection for Paris I’d never felt before the pandemic. We’d all been in this together for such a long time. Now, when I saw the clerk at the Franprix or the machine-gun toting gendarmes along Avenue Gabriel, our “bonjours” held more warmth, our nods more familiarity.
On that quiet autumn Tuesday I set out from our home in the 8th arrondissement under a gray sky, walking the block and a half along Rue Rembrandt to Parc Monceau. The park had been my oasis in the center of the urban storm, green and vibrant in a city of browns and grays. On countless days, I had escaped our apartment and the book I didn’t feel like writing to walk through the park and order a crepe from the snack stand beside the carousel.
Parc Monceau crepe stand
That Tuesday I skipped the crepe, as I had one thing on my mind: coffee. I exited the park, veered right on Ave. Georges Berger, and crossed Malsherbes, where Berger becomes Rue Legendre. The light caught me at the corner of Legendre and Toqueville, in front of the old brick house on the corner (19 Rue Legendre), so out of place among the whitewashed buildings.
I crossed the busy Rue de Rome, where ugly modern apartment buildings tower over the train tracks. The first time we walked this route, the day after our arrival in Paris, we were searching for our nephew Jack’s favorite restaurant, Crepe Couer. We didn’t yet know that everything closes in Paris in August, and the few things that don’t close for the entire month do close on Sunday.
By the time we reached Batignolles in the 107 degree heat, our son was hangry, and I was regretting the move from Northern California, where beaches are always a few minutes away and the fog keeps a lid on the heat. Crepe Couer was closed. The only open restaurant we could find, Brutus, had a line out the door. Once seated, we sweated and waited and sweated some more, thirsty and out of sorts. Eventually the crepes came, and so did the cider (though not the water, as we didn’t yet know you must request un carafe d’eu if you want water with your meal). It was delicious, and forever after Brutus was our favorite crepe place in Paris.
In Consent, Vanessa Springora delivers a heartbreaking, startling account of her adolescent relationship with one of France’s former literary stars, Gabriel Matzneff, when Matzneff was 50 and Springora was only 14 years old. What stands out in this memoir is the complicity of adults in Matzneff’s crimes. Springora’s mother, famous philosophers, renowned television personalities, politicians, and many in the literary establishment were not only aware that Matzneff was grooming young adolescent girls and boys; these powerful and respected people heaped praise upon the novels and diaries in which Matzneff chronicled his abuse.
After decades of torment and stalking, seeing her name and likeness used in book after book to enhance her abuser’s literary reputation and fame, Springora finds the strength to tell her own story and take hold of the narrative. A clear picture of the toll sexual abuse takes on survivors, and a stark rebuke of the ingrained culture in French intellectual circles that condoned and celebrated the abuse.
Lately, I’ve been drawn to personal narratives–particularly memoirs of the writing life. I keep coming back to books that are not about writing so much as about the daily experience of being a writer, the act of making one’s way through everyday existence (children, roof leaks, marriage, moving) while attempting to inhabit a life of the mind.
When my writing comes to a halt, personal narratives by writers help me get back to that coveted interiority, the quiet brain space necessary for the act of making something. Every one of these books tripped some invisible wire and sent me back into writing.
I discovered Deborah Levy while living in Paris, thanks to a tweet by a fellow expat from California, Summer Brennan. When I say “discover” I really mean I came upon her very late, after apparently everyone had already been reading her books for years. Brennan’s tweet inspired me to seek out The Cost of Living at Galignani Bookstore on Rue de Rivoli. I devoured it in the way I devour a very specific kind of book: the kind that I have to stop reading every few pages because it inspires me to sit down and write. If I remember the timeline correctly, soon after I bought The Cost of Living, Paris shut down for our first lockdown (or was it our second?). Paris was so tightly locked down that Galignani, Shakespeare and Company, and Red Wheelbarrow weren’t even shipping books, so I had to wait for things to reopen to go back to Galignani for Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing.
When I recently saw that Levy had *a new book on the way I did backflips (not like Simone Biles, more like backflips in my mind). In her latest volume, a companion to The Cost of Living and Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy muses on the “unreal estate” she dreams of owning—a rambling home overlooking the sea, with pomegranate trees and all sorts of diversions. In reality she lives in a small flat in London and writes in a damp shed (this book finds her in a different shed than she used in Things I Don’t Want to Know.) Her Best Male Friend returns in this book, acting in ways that may disappoint the reader (cheating on the long suffering Nadia, for example), but never fail to entertain.
Taken as a set, these three books allow the reader to enter Levy’s life at different moments, as though looking through different windows on a moving train. Through her engaging, self-deprecating, wide-ranging voice, one glimpses intimately the sweep and tilt of one woman’s literary life. A joy to read.
It is hard to live an intellectual while literally attached to an infant, a truth the author discovers while simultaneously breastfeeding and preparing for a panel in a bathroom stall abroad. Zambreno writes beautifully of the universal struggle–how does one make art while caring for a family?–in this spacious mediation on reading, literature, and friendship. Central to the story is the author’s former online friendship with a poet/novelist from San Francisco. I read this part with great interest, scouring the internet for clues, as Zambreno and Alex Suzuki (the alias for the friend with whom she corresponded) spent a lot of time in Readerville, a community in which I was also active while living in San Francisco at during the same years.
Undertaken at a time when the author is struggling to write a different book, for which she is on contract–a study of Herve Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life–the book concerns friendship, the friction between writing and making a living, and the disruptions of the body. While revisiting Guibert’s chronicle of his life (and death) with AIDS, Zambreno is contending with shingles and other mysterious illnesses.
I read the book not long after returning from two years in Paris, a city that is central to Guibert’s work. Had I not read To Write As If Already Dead, I would not have read Guibert, and reading Guibert was a joy. Books speak to each other across genre and geography, just as authors speak to each other and to readers across time, so I am always fascinated by the way certain books come to you at the moment in your life when they are most relevant. We rode out the first year of the Covid19 pandemic in Paris. Guibert was caught in the turmoil of an earlier virus. His work is especially interesting to read at this moment in history.
With references to the works and lives of the likes of Baudelaire and Foucault, Zambreno examines what it means to write and to attempt to live a life of the mind in the midst of life’s complexities. Wonderful, thought-provoking, and unexpected. If you want to write and read but find that your mind is always pulled elsewhere by something or someone else, this book is calling your name.
A worthy addition to any writer’s bookshelf and a joy for those of us who return again and again to Camus. Through these deeply personal essays one glimpses the person and mind behind The Stranger and The Plague, the inner workings of a writer’s mind at work. We see his childhood in Algiers, and learn how that experience formed the moral basis of his work.
In her latest collection, Minot rages artfully against distraction of political and romantic varieties. The stories are as sharp and elliptical as the sentences. If you’ve been a fan since way back (Lust & Other Stories), this one won’t disappoint.
Anyone who has been young, female, and broke, full of longing for love and a creative life, will likely see herself in this novel. Absorbing and at times sharp-edged, a raw look at what it means to move through the world as a young woman with big dreams. Every sentence feels close to the nerve endings. I read it in two sittings.
In prose that is at once concise and evasive, filled with blank spaces and unanswered questions, Yiyun Li speaks movingly of the need for privacy and the absence of a sense of self, laying bare intimate details of her life and psyche. A contemporary companion to William Styron’s classic Darkness Visible.
Michelle Richmond is the author of seven books of fiction, including most recently the Sunday Times bestseller The Marriage Pact. Her new novel, THE WONDER TEST, will be published by Grove Atlantic in July.
*Thanks to Netgalley and to the publishers for making several of these books available prior to publication in exchange for an honest review.
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