Book club?

"Milkman deals in industrial-strength estrangement and depersonalization. And depersonalization is central to its plot—though really it’s less a plot than a setup whose foundations are obsessively deepened over the course of about 370 pages—which concerns a particularly insidious and creepy campaign of sexual harassment and its disastrous ramifications. The 18-year-old narrator is marked out in her community as an eccentric for her habit of walking everywhere with her face hidden in the pages of 19th-century novels. ('I did not like twentieth-century books, because I did not like the twentieth century,' she explains, not unreasonably.) Out of nowhere, like a human malediction, appears a paramilitary potentate..."

The Unnameable:The Booker Prize–winning Milkman grapples with the insufficiency of language to portray an oppressed people. By MARK O'CONNELL