The Book Review: Schadenfreude reading!

January 21, 2025

The illustration shows geometric fragments of seven book covers with seven movie or television stills on a light gray background.

The New York Times

	By Joumana Khatib

Dear readers,

Schadenfreude — all the satisfaction of watching a questionable character squirm — is often even better in fiction: There’s no real-life guilt to wrestle down.

That’s partly why I enjoyed Andrew Lipstein’s latest novel, “Something Rotten,” so much. The story follows Reuben, a radio journalist who forgot to leave a work Zoom before seducing his partner, Cecilie, and whose career hasn’t come close to recovering. He, Cecilie and their young son head off to Cecilie’s home country of Denmark, where Reuben is confronted with a series of sucker punches to his ego and his masculinity: Being forced to ask for a cigarette in Danish. Unclogging years of emotional constipation. Downing six-packs of Tuborgs and thinking a Hamlet-inflected tattoo was a reasonable life choice.

With his new book, Lipstein adds to his universe of morally sticky scenarios; since 2022 he’s published three novels full of greedy, venal, pliant and somehow pitiable men. They are oily. They are doofuses. One, who has had a Doolittle-esque awakening to the feelings of animals, stands naked at the Prospect Park Zoo gazing at a red panda, thinking thoughts you’d expect from a stoned philosophy major. You can tell Lipstein’s men are not truly evil because they commit things to writing that no villain ever would (including that tattoo).

“Something Rotten” is out today. With that, I wish you a week of pleasurable reading, even if it comes from the misfortunes of a character you love to hate.

In other news

The recent Nobel laureate Han Kang has a new book available in English, “We Do Not Part,” which dives a bloody episode in South Korea’s history.
A bunch of screen adaptations of literary works are on the way: Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror and the Light,” a new “Bridget Jones” and Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear series.
Here’s an invigorating look at the publishing revolution underfoot in Africa.

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