Culture
Book Review: ‘Something Rotten,’ by Andrew Lipstein
Things are complicated further when Mikkel, immoral as he may be, reports a story that exposes a conservative politician as a pedophile. What does this mean for Reuben, who’s developing a view of virtue and manhood derived from his admiration for a man seemingly characterized by his “depravity”? Reuben ruminates on this deeply, even undertaking an audio project in which he purports to interview Mikkel on “cross-cultural ideas of masculinity.”
Decoding Reuben’s (or Lipstein’s) thesis on this topic would take a term paper the likes of which this English major thankfully left behind years ago, but attempting to untangle its threads is part of the fun of the novel: Reuben, like the privileged and morally unmoored men of Lipstein’s previous two novels, “Last Resort” and “The Vegan,” is exhaustingly self-involved, and endlessly self-analyzing. If his revelations sometimes feel a little glib (“the right and the left were just counterweights to each other in the same tired, morally facile system”), Reuben’s plight feels urgent all the same.
The real fun of “Something Rotten,” though, lies in the concentric deceptions that Reuben and Cecilie both uncover and perpetrate. At heart, this is a book about deceit, about double-crossing and discovering the difference between abstract and tangible truth. I’ll not spoil the vertiginous plot turns, but suffice it to say, by the time Reuben declares, “I’m just going to be true to myself,” you’re as convinced that this is as solid a credo for living a virtuous life as you are when Polonius presents the idea to Laertes and tells him to give it a whirl.
The name Reuben means “behold, a son,” and “Something Rotten” asks us to behold many of them, each with a complicated father or father figure of his own. Mikkel is a deadbeat dad of sorts to Jonas and Reuben, but Reuben’s own biological father, absent and unknown, looms large over the proceedings, as do the fathers of Cecilie and her Danish friends.
The jacket of the book depicts a close-up photo of a squalling baby. This could be Reuben and Cecilie’s son, the focus of his parents’ hopes and anxieties. It could be an allusion to Reuben, after Mikkel gets him to shave his head. Or it could be a proxy for any of us, unthinking and needy and crying out over some minor need unmet, blissfully unaware of all the pain and complication to come.
SOMETHING ROTTEN | By Andrew Lipstein | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 340 pp. | $28
new video loaded: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
transcript
transcript
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
David Szalay became the first British Hungarian to win the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh.”
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“I think fiction can take risks. I think it’s one of the things that it can do. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do to the same extent.” “I think all six of the books in the short list really, you know, not — it’s not saying this is the headline theme, but there is that theme of reaching out, wanting a connection.”
By Shawn Paik
November 11, 2025
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
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