How to find middle ground when your partner wants kids, and you don't

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Ginny Hogan on JD Vance’s Communion, Fintan O’Toole on Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change, Kathryn Hughes on James Lasdun’s The Family Man, Lily Meyer on Simon Paré-Poupart’s Trash!, and Dwight Garner on Amy Edelman and Chris Begley’s The Emergency Playbook.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

“I got a colonoscopy on Friday. If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading Communion, J.D. Vance’s new book. Communion is ostensibly the story of the vice-president finding his way back to Christianity, specifically Catholicism, though he only briefly touches on the distinction. The book starts off autobiographical, but by the end it devolves into heavy-handed defenses of policies and his Trump conversion. Apparently he only pretended to hate Trump so he could fit in with the big, mean, judgmental liberal elites. And in one hilarious chapter, he explains why economic data is all fake. Very convenient, sir. I see what you did there.

To an extent, Communion is nothing new. Vance has always invoked religion for political gain. He once famously lambasted Trump with the words ‘God wants better of us.’ Still, I’m still not sure why he wrote this book. Most VPs wait until they leave office to publish their memoirs, but considering the near-fate of Mike Pence, maybe Vance doesn’t think he has that kind of time. Communion does him no favors, though, mostly in its sheer banality. It’s not even incendiary, tonally, the book is more akin to Hillbilly Elegy than to his public appearances, though he can’t help but hide his contempt for liberals (one woman is smeared for the mortal sin of wearing a beret).

Communion and Hillbilly Elegy are the same story: A lousy man gets saved. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D.’s grandmother saved him. And, sort of, his wife. In Communion, Christianity saved him. And also his wife, who is arguably the book’s main character. Like all women who identify even loosely with the term feminist, I compulsively mutter ‘giiiiirl’ upon learning any new fact about Usha Vance. And I muttered ‘giiiiirl’ a lot while reading Communion. Mostly, I marveled at how much he could say about Usha without saying anything at all.

…

“There’s nothing fresh about a story of a guy learning a lesson and somehow reemerging on the other side supposedly fixed. But the tale of the shitty guy who uses his ‘saved’ status to avoid scrutiny of his current choices? The guy who willingly turns out one pocket so you don’t inspect what’s in the other? Even worse. In Communion, Vance puts on a show of fake humility in describing the circumstances that led him to his faith, but at no point does he take responsibility for all that is still wrong with him. Everyone he continues to hurt, everyone harmed by his administration, everyone whose life has been upended in the last 18 months, we are all just more collateral damage on the path to the enlightenment of the great J.D. Vance. Vance’s hypocrisy alone makes Communion nearly unreadable. You don’t need me to tell you this, but he is not a good Catholic.”

, Ginny Hogan on JD Vance’s Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (The Cut)

“In January 2026, The New York Times asked Donald Trump why, having told his family not to make new business deals in foreign countries during his first term as president, he was permitting them to do so now. He answered: ‘Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.’ In Regime Change, the New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s riveting and richly textured narrative of the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, the authors include this reply as part of a coldly devastating account of how the Trumps have added more than $1 billion to the family fortune.

By ‘nobody,’ as Haberman and Swan make clear, Trump meant those who enable his impunity: the sycophantic courtiers with whom he has surrounded himself; the Republican majority in Congress that abandoned its duty to check executive power; the tech moguls who rushed to pay homage to him; the MAGA base that venerates him. So long as none of them publicly objects to his actions, he has permission to do whatever he wants.

All this presents a profound challenge to journalism. The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus’ (or Richard Nixon’s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With a few notable exceptions, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?

Haberman and Swan have spent more than a decade covering Trump’s political career and the events they portray are in themselves well known: the excesses of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the chaos of Trump’s tariffs, the vampiric return of Jeffrey Epstein, the militarization of American cities, the unleashing of ICE on migrant communities, the abuse of the justice system to go after Trump’s perceived enemies, the assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve, the headlong stumble into war on Iran.

What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.”

, Fintan O’Toole on Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (The New York Times Book Review)

“When James Lasdun, a British novelist who lives in the US, began his research, he was not certain that Murdaugh had done it. Big Red might be a braggart, a bully and rotten to the core, but Lasdun invokes Thomas De Quincey’s neat point about how a man’s capacity to rob says nothing about his propensity to murder. In addition, there is something about the crime that Lasdun, who is himself married with children, cannot countenance. How could a man with no history of domestic violence or even bad temper bring himself to shoot loved ones merely to delay his own imminent financial exposure?

This kind of ethical audit calls to mind Janet Malcolm’s distinctive approach to writing about well-known criminal cases. Indeed, Lasdun tells us that he ‘reveres’ Malcolm who, like him, typically tried out her ideas in long-form pieces for the New Yorker before expanding them into books. Yet here the similarities end. Malcolm’s approach to writing about celebrated murders was to avoid getting into the narrative weeds in order to retain space for her own psychological and ethical explorations. Lasdun, by contrast, insists on delivering a meticulous retelling of the Murdaugh case, complete with byzantine subplots involving the suspicious death of the family’s housekeeper and the murder of another local teenager.

…

“Yet while it does not reveal anything substantively new about the case, Lasdun’s prose is pure pleasure. His resistance to going full southern gothic is particularly admirable, although the hovering stink of rotting jelly fish caused by one of Murdaugh’s failed side hustles is too good to leave out. Likewise, Lasdun’s refusal to come to an iron-clad conclusion about Big Red’s guilt turns out to be remarkably prescient. On 13 May 2026, by which time his book had gone to press, the South Carolina supreme court sensationally overturned the murder conviction, citing ‘shocking jury interference’ by the clerk to the court. It turned out that Becky Hill, ’Miss Becky’, had been nudging the jurors to find Murdaugh guilty. One witness testified that she was writing a book about the trial, and needed narrative closure for the project to really pop. In the process she has, ironically, blown everything wide open again. Murdaugh’s retrial is likely to begin sometime next year and, chances are, Lasdun will be there to see it.”

, Kathryn Hughes on James Lasdun’s The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (The Guardian)

“Paré-Poupart takes Francophone literature to particular task for leaving his colleagues out of the cohort of ‘”working-class heroes” celebrated in popular culture, from Quebec’s novels of rural life to Émile Zola’s miners. Nobody writes novels about garbagemen.’ He seems to be writing for those who need to imagine, not remember, what it’s like to take an accidental “shower in compost bin juice” or have the man whose garbage cans you’re wrangling sneer at you, ‘I went to school so I wouldn’t have to do a job like that.’

Trash! is an intriguing attempt to broaden the parameters of this kind of book. Paré-Poupart has a distinctly 21st-century knack for swirling together theoretical and visceral language: René Descartes on one page, and grubs ‘wriggling and swarming in every garbage bag’ on the next. His grab-bag writing is reminiscent of the internet at its rare, educational best. Paré-Poupart’s style gives his book a rambunctious spirit, a sense of a hungry, catholic mind at work. All sorts of dilemmas come together in Trash!, which reveals them to be expressions of the same core issue. Paré-Poupart shows readers a society whose members, with too few exceptions, seem to treat both their belongings and the workers who ultimately handle them as disposable.

…

“Paré-Poupart describes this man, and others like him, with grace and admiration, though he can veer into idealization. Of a 52-year-old nicknamed ‘Beaujeunehomme’ who generally arrives at work ‘in a state of inebriation that would make even the hardest drinkers stagger,’ Paré-Poupart writes, ‘Everyone in the garbage business accepts him just the way he is, unconditionally, few questions asked.’ And then he adds, ‘Beaujeunehomme is a castoff who feels right at home surrounded by garbage.’ Trash! regularly expresses this vision of garbagemen as rebels united by their work, which can be unsettling when Paré-Poupart is writing about men with much less social mobility than he has. He doesn’t convince me that Beaujeunehomme is accepted, not trapped.

If Trash! were exclusively stories of Montreal’s Beaujeunehommes alongside that of Paré-Poupart himself, it might seem unsavory. Its author’s education, and, more important, his power as the lone narrator of his world, already risks creating too much of a divide, on the page if not necessarily in person, between him and the men he writes about. Its intellectual components are the reason it works. Even though I’m skeptical of Trash!’s account of Beaujeunehomme, I can appreciate its analysis of, and anger at, the conditions garbagemen deal with on the job, which Paré-Poupart often puts in cerebral as well as anecdotal terms. It’s when he combines these two modes that his argument grows most convincing.

…

“Paré-Poupart’s constant need to connect and contextualize can be a little exhausting, as I imagine his dumpster-diving lifestyle might be. Still, the book is exhilarating (also like dumpster diving?) on every page. Paré-Poupart’s hyperactive, genre-mixing writing suggests that writing about contemporary labor and its place in consumer societies may benefit from being associative and capacious.”

, Lily Meyer on Simon Paré-Poupart’s Trash!: A Garbageman’s Story (The Atlantic)

“Begley is the author of a (very good) previous survival book titled The Next Apocalypse (2021). It argues that ‘lone hero’ fantasies in the wake of catastrophe are moronic. Community rather than gonzo individualism will likely be the key to survival. (Although a community of gonzo individuals might do pretty well for a time.) The Next Apocalypse is philosophical. It draws from historical examples, notably the collapses of the Roman and Mayan empires, and contains a good deal of nuts-and-bolts prepper information.

This new book is basically a condensation and a dumbing down of those ideas. It tries so hard to be upbeat and reader-friendly that the audiobook could be narrated by Peppa Pig. It’s ridiculous at times. (We’ll get to that.) Yet it’s a handier book than Begley’s original one. It has umpteen to-do lists and sidebars. It’ll get you started.

What most interests me about The Emergency Playbook is how, beneath the sunny tone, there’s a calm but insistent moral outrage on display. The usual scenarios are covered: blackouts, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, floods, pandemics, bioterrorism. But this book leans heavily into the notion that, as American democracy dissolves into kakistocracy and worse, we may be already up to our knees in societal ruin.

This isn’t an original notion. But the authors rake the details into a towering pile and, in the context of contingency planning, set them on fire. When the worst happens, we’ll realize what it means that the budgets of NOAA and FEMA and the C.D.C. are being gutted. That we have a government that mistrusts science and suggests outlandish untruths, like the joy of injecting disinfectant into one’s veins.

…

“Now that I’ve built this book up, I’m afraid I must tear it back down a bit. The Emergency Playbook is repetitive. It’s like one of those grilling cookbooks in which every recipe starts with the same three paragraphs about starting a fire. The essential information (this is true of nearly every self-help book) could probably be condensed onto two index cards in nine-point type.

Corny jokes, frequent lists, hoary quotations and an uncanny evenness of tone make the writers sound a bit like A.I., or like someone riding A.I. as if it were an A.T.V. This is a comment, not an accusation. We’re all paranoid now.”

, Dwight Garner on Amy Edelman and Chris Begley’s The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation (The New York Times)