Salvation CIty by Sigrid Nunez

This is the first novel Sigrid Nunez has written from the point of view of a male character and, while she does a great job, there are so few fiction writers that are as good as she is at writing female characters that I felt a little sad to be missing out on that aspect of her work this time around. But so what, right? She is a writer and her job is to tell stories and this proves that she is getting better at it all the time. Salvation City takes place after a flu pandemic that wipes out a bunch of people. Cole is a teenage boy whose parents die. He ends up living with some wing nut Christians who want to raise him in accordance with their belief system. He tries it out for awhile. A bunch of stuff happens to make him understand how the world actually works and he grows up some. Watching Take Shelter and then Melancholia sort of reminded me of Salvation City...maybe cross that with Naked if it had been created by Flannery O'Connor instead of Mike Leigh.

Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez is one of my favorite living novelists. It turns out she briefly dated Susan Sontag's son David when they were very young. Her memoir of that time is fascinating and lets you get to know Sontag more than reading Sontag's own diary does, which is stiff and does not feel true to life or intimate in comparison. The glimpse into Sontag's character was memorable but this is mostly interesting to me in terms of Nunez's own journey whose accomplishment as a writer of terrific fiction grew to overshadow this moment in her life.