A Mysterious Literary Pattern
· The Atlantic
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Some publishing trends so clearly reflect cultural changes that they are easy to explain: Few readers in 2026 are surprised by, say, a sudden crop of books about artificial intelligence, or a best-selling series of novels catering to young gamers. Other literary patterns are more mysterious. This week in The Atlantic, Julia M. Klein wrote about Robert Kolker’s The Vanishing Family, which adds to a growing bookshelf of new works focusing on dementia. Klein’s essay led me to wonder why several notable recent releases, both nonfiction and novels, have taken on this condition—and how each explores the subject differently.
First, here are six new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- What Vienna lost when it lost its Jews
- The best seller that’s nearly impossible to finish reading
- A dissatisfying apocalypse
- Literature is becoming more like a video game.
- One reason people are spending so much time alone
- “Drawing the Birds Back Into the Sky,” a poem by Trish Reeves
The Vanishing Family follows a clan dealing with an inherited form of dementia that drastically changes the sufferer’s personality. Klein is most interested in Kolker’s emphasis on the “slipperiness of identity” and the “malleability of the self”; are you still the same person without your usual behaviors or your formative memories? As some family members succumb to the condition, the author also focuses on their healthy caregivers, for whom “the sense of loss is ongoing—like witnessing a living death.”
The mysteries of dementia—both medical and personal, for both patient and loved ones—provide rich terrain for writers, as Marion Renault pointed out last year in a different Atlantic essay about the book Valley of Forgetting, by Jennie Erin Smith. We know very little about the condition, but at the same time, it comes with a “grim certainty”—it is largely untreatable, and always terminal. “This tension makes the illness ripe for figurative language,” Renault wrote.
Both Kolker and Smith conveyed this tension in fine writing and painstaking detail, but figurative language is where fiction excels. This year, two novels managed to approach the illness in new ways—one from the perspective of a caregiver and another from a patient’s point of view. Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation is a somewhat surrealist fable about many things—exile, autocracy, the nuclear family, the carceral state. But the greatest stressor in the life of its protagonist, Dilara, is her father’s rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s. Orhan portrays the hard realities of caring for someone you no longer recognize, but also explores the metaphorical possibilities: Dilara and her father were forced to flee Turkey as political refugees, and they both yearn for a past that has become inaccessible, whether or not they remember it.
In her stark new novel, Switzy, Emma Cline gives us the perspective of the sufferer. “Alzheimer’s novels are rare,” Hillary Kelly wrote in an Atlantic essay about the book, “and those told from the patient’s point of view are rarer.” Cline portrays her subject, David, “in a wandering, dreamlike style,” Kelly writes. His mental absence “becomes a startling and eerie phenomenon—like the moment you realize you’ve been driving for miles but don’t recall anything about the journey.”
David is flying to Zurich in a private jet so that he can die by assisted suicide before Alzheimer’s robs him of his agency. As he rifles through half memories and smiles through painful interactions, Cline expertly dramatizes the tension Renault defined between the unknowableness of dementia and its unavoidable end. David is becoming a different person, but for now he is still himself, and he holds on desperately to the single choice he has left. Alzheimer’s novels are not so rare anymore, but like any great novelist, Cline has found a wholly original way to distinguish her work.
Corbis Historical / GettyThe Mysteries of Human Personality
By Julia M. Klein
Robert Kolker’s latest book, The Vanishing Family, tracks the effects of inherited dementia and the many transformations that follow.
What to ReadDad Brain, by Darby Saxbe
Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor, has been “endlessly curious about how fathers tick” since she was in elementary school, when her parents’ divorce—and equal custody split—turned her detached dad into a terrific parent. Now she’s one of the only scientists in the world who researches the neurological effects of fatherhood. Some of her collaborators have already shown that pregnancy alters a mom’s hormones and brain structure in ways that are good for bonding and child-rearing. Saxbe’s work demonstrates that tending to infants triggers similar neurological changes in other parents—and that the more time they spend on child care, the larger these shifts tend to be. She explains her discoveries in chatty, accessible language, mixing in social science that often contains useful tips; for example, greater paternal involvement at bedtime is correlated with better baby and toddler sleep. (Maybe that’s why my 2-year-old always demands, “Go with Daddy tonight?”) But the most thrilling part of Dad Brain is its overall conclusion: that “great parents are made, not born.” — Lily Meyer
From our list: The summer reading guide
Out Next Week📚 The Savage Mind, by David Treuer
📚 Partita, by Barbara Kingsolver
📚 Every Story Is a Love Story, by Imbolo Mbue
Your Weekend Read Illustration by Colin Hunter / The Atlantic. Sources: Raj Valley / Alamy; sasel77 / Getty.Taylor Swift’s Audience Is Growing Up. Her Music Is Devolving.
By Spencer Kornhaber
Some music pulls you out of yourself, jolting you with the recognition that the person who’s singing is just as complex as you are. Some music gets you to surrender to the fact that you’re merely an overgrown baby who responds to repetition and rhyme. And some music strands you in a state of embarrassment at the human condition.
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