What They Do in the Dark

Amanda Coe

Norton

This arresting and disturbing debut novel focuses on two 10-year-old girls in a gritty 1970s Yorkshire town. Middle-class Gemma buys comics and candy, wears her hair in perfect pigtails, and is entrusted with special jobs at school. She imagines herself with the colorful, comical life of the girl in her favorite TV show, a girl who exists “without parents, but looked after,” but when her mother leaves her father to move in with another man, Gemma is, in some crucial ways, as little looked after as her schoolmate Pauline, a monstrously uncared-for bully. Coe’s rendering of the casual way in which adults continually put their own interests ahead of the children who depend on them rings chillingly true; and if the horror that results when Pauline’s amorality and violence combine with Gemma’s rage and despair is extreme, it’s not unbelievable. The grubby hardness of the 1970s, with its pervasive cigarette smoke, its greasy foods and sugary drinks (“the so-called hot chocolate, with its sweet, powdery bottom layer and topping of tepid purple foam”), is an ideal medium for this story’s underlying creepiness. Coe underscores her themes with a second layer of plot—a movie featuring the child star of the TV show is being filmed in town—and, although she clearly knows moviemaking, the novel falters in the sections devoted to an American producer whose vapidity, suspect in the hands of an English author, makes her tedious. Coe has many credits as a screenwriter, so the tight structure and exquisite tension-building throughout might be expected, but her pitch-perfect, unsentimental evocation of the pleasures, confusions, yearnings, and vulnerabilities of girls is what makes this a stunningly accomplished novel.

Pastoral Capitalism

Louise A. Mozingo

MIT

This frequently observant and discerningly illustrated chronicle of the post-war era’s corporate campuses, estates, and office parks probes a hitherto overlooked subject in the history of American business and architecture. The corporate move to the countryside reflected and accelerated a series of related socioeconomic and design trends—including the celebration of the genteel, leafy suburb as the pastoral ideal; the shift in the focal point of American business from manufacturing to management and technology; the growth in the educated, white-collar workforce; the elevation of the car’s role in daily life; and the embrace of Modernism as the dominant corporate style. Mozingo, a professor of landscape architecture at Berkeley, skillfully and clearly connects these developments. She’s especially sharp-eyed in her appreciation of the beauty of the buildings and landscapes created for Bell Labs, General Motors, and Deere & Company, and in her analysis of the stylistic and ideological fusion of business and the academy in such corporate campuses as Research Triangle Park and the Stanford Industrial Park. Just as the Seagram Building and Lever House, those Modernist triumphs of urban architecture, spawned a host of bland glass boxes that blighted the city landscape, so too the corporate pastoral masterpieces of the Olmsted Brothers firm, Cliff May, and Eliel and Eero Saarinen spawned a host of third-rate imitations—as a humane and idealistic aesthetic was transformed into today’s exurban landscape of sterile office parks girdled by blacktop. Although Mozingo perceptively traces that downward evolution, she suffers from the predictable and preening academic hostility to suburbia, which mars her otherwise incisive history.