Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person and Other Stories ***

The story "Cat Person" was a viral sensation when it appeared in The New Yorker back in 2017. It's the story of a tentative courtship that leads to a bad date or worse depending on your interpretation. The fact that it was published at the height of the #MeToo movement in a magazine whose readership skews older than the protagonists probably accounts for the controversy it engendered.

Most of Roupenian's stories deal with the constant shifting of power in relationships, especially in the early stages where each person is unsure about how to interpret the others' actions and insecure about what they want. She captures this dance beautifully, but I often found the narrative uninteresting. 

My favorite story was "The Matchbox Sign" with its portrayal of a married couple dealing with the wife's unexplained illness.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary *** 1/2

Did you like The Martian? If so, then you'll like Project Hail Mary. It has the same nerdy smart-ass narrative voice, the same lone-guy-solving-science-problems plot, and the same concern for accurate hard sci-fi. I really think Weir should have made Project Hail Mary the second book in a series: The Martian's astronaut Mark Watney would make more sense in every way than the junior high-school teacher Ryland Grace.

The scientific challenge is far more consequential than the one in The Martian. The fate of all humanity is at stake. An alien organism is gobbling up energy from the Sun. An international research mission heads to the nearest star that appears to have evaded the organism. Only our intrepid narrator survives the trip, and he is just recovering his memory of the mission's purpose when he encounters an alien spaceship apparently on a similar expedition.

There are three major storylines:

• Research into the existence and properties of the alien organism Astrophage, with the goal of finding a "cure" to eliminate it from our solar system
• Learning to communicate and collaborate with the other intelligent alien species
• Designing the spaceship and planning the mission

I've listed the storylines in order of plausibility, or perhaps I should say ease of suspending disbelief. The success rate for Grace's jerry-rigged experiments is too high, and I felt that he ignored the Astrophage problem for too long while learning to communicate with the alien, but these nits didn't undermine my enjoyment of the story. On the other hand, the flashbacks to mission planning on Earth are entirely unbelievable, starting with the teacher being given a central role in the project over literally every other scientist and astronaut in the world. Project Hail Mary would be far better if Weir found a more realistic way to convey the necessary backstory.

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves ***

Strangers to Ourselves presents five case studies of people struggling to cope with mental illness. Aviv is most interested in how people's understanding of their condition affects their sense of identity and the course of their lives. How is your experience different if you attribute your distress to a chemical imbalance versus a spiritual crisis?

The stories identify various potential sources of mental anguish, such as repressed trauma, chemical imbalance, societal pressures, or religious experiences, and shows how they offer at best a partial "explanation" of the person's behavior. However, individuals typically latch on to one or another of these factors to incorporate into their personal identity, and their choice impacts the type of treatment they receive. For example, Naomi comes to believe that "the ruling elite" were targeting undesirable elements of society such as her and her (Black) children, and since racist elements do in fact exist, doctors initially diagnosed her as righteously angry rather than paranoid and psychotic.

The topic is fascinating and important, and Aviv clearly empathizes with her subjects. However, her journalistic writing style is at odds with her desire to present people's experience with mental illness from the inside. She describes her subjects' behavior and reasoning in a flat "just the facts" manner and seems reluctant to make explicit conclusions (perhaps because explicit diagnoses are what cause problems in the case studies). I would have appreciated a more imaginative account of each person's "reasoning" coupled with a more forceful set of arguments for a phenomenological approach to what William James calls the "unclassified residuum" of their experience.