Harper’s Magazine turns 175 this month, but New Books is only twenty-three—too young to rent a car without incurring an additional fee. It feels older, doesn’t it? Those two imperious monosyllables, unsullied by anything so profane as a subhead or search-engine optimization, sound as if they’ve always been there. Granted, today’s column has its predecessors. The New Books, which sometimes dropped its article, ran from the late Thirties to the late Sixties and resembled the column we know today. Buried deeper in the archive you’ll find Among the New Books, which ran from 1924 to 1938; its name makes the books sound like a secretive tribe infiltrated by an anthropologist. That’s something of the spirit in which Guy Davenport, who wrote the inaugural New Books reboot in August 2001, approached the assignment. He did seem to live among the books. Writing with a mix of dégagé authority (“All books on Kierkegaard are tedious”), handsome metaphor (“They create associations the way soap bubbles pack into cubes and hexagons”), and outlandish anecdote, Davenport made his three chosen titles sing together in unlikely harmony. In his final column, from November 2002, he reviewed a book about “the science of affection” and reminisced about a visit to B. F. Skinner’s lab at Harvard:

“What are all those white rats doing?” I asked, and was told that they were isolated, and had been all their lives. They had never snuggled against their mothers or another rat. When the room was momentarily empty, I took a rat out of its cage, cuddled it, and may even have kissed it. The rat seemed overjoyed. . . . When my sins and kindnesses are weighed by Osiris, I hope to see a white rat on the scales.

All subsequent New Books columnists have aspired to their own white-rat moments—to a criticism so curious and capacious that it can go anywhere. Of course we fall short; that’s part of the job. “Being a columnist,” writes one blowhard character in Shuang Xuetao’s story collection Hunter (Granta Magazine Editions, $18.99), “forces me to think deeply rather than fob people off with the same clichéd phrase—though I suppose you could say columns are kind of fake too.” Yes, I suppose you could say that.

Like Davenport’s rat, Shuang’s characters are shut-ins who could do with a good nuzzle. They’re struggling writers or “fifth-rate” actors who approach their professions with passing interest, invariably undercut by indifference or exhaustion. (It’s hard to muster enthusiasm when you’re facing unemployment, ennui, aging parents, and the occasional brush with arson.) Many of them live in S——, a desolate city in China’s deindustrialized northeast that, according to one character, resembles “a completely bald head.” This setting has defined Shuang’s reputation. He is a laureled member of the Dongbei Renaissance, a cultural movement in China’s languishing Rust Belt, as it’s sometimes called, though that term feels narrowly Western. How much does a city like S—— resemble, say, Detroit? It may be that each unhappy former manufacturing hub is unhappy in its own way. Shuang’s disaffected young men don’t listen to Joe Rogan or eschew seed oils; they play soccer, or take up night fishing, or murder.

Toilet Lake, by Thomas Deaton © The artist.

One narrator, explaining why he moved back to S——, writes, “After getting a literature degree in Beijing, I realized there was nowhere to go from there. Anything I did would involve living like an ant, forced to carry loads several times my body weight.” Bodies, when Shuang describes them, are ill-proportioned and restive. At least four of his characters, in four separate stories, are called out for their short legs, as if they’ve been reduced by life’s burdens. Three others walk, talk, or shadowbox in their sleep. And when they’ve gotta go, they’ve gotta go—this is a collection in which nature calls with unnerving frequency. In “Heart,” a man accompanying his unconscious father on a long ambulance ride discreetly relieves himself on his dad’s pee pad; the father awakes in a peremptory mood (“Help me get rid of this pee pad, it smells revolting”) and promptly dies. In “Up at Night,” the narrator needs a pretext to search some tall grass where his friend has hidden a murder weapon—a leisurely piss is just the thing. And the title story follows a Method actor stumped by his latest role: a rogue contract killer who starts gunning down public urinators. Dutifully, he memorizes such dialogue as: “You shouldn’t be living like this. Build yourself a nice bathroom in your house, and go enjoy it whenever you feel the urge to pee. Pass this habit on to your children.”

Maybe the men in Shuang’s world are simply too well hydrated. Or their power to “let rip” is one of the last they can freely exercise. Or rampant public urination represents another snag in the threadbare social fabric. I don’t know. In these stories, as one character says of feeling drunk, “Everything seems ridiculous, but also understandable.” I enjoyed Shuang’s sick, sad sense of humor and his left-turn endings. In “Hunter,” for instance, the movie about the assassin is abruptly canceled after the director drowns during an afternoon swim; the actor has wasted his days pretending to be a sniper, but he can’t quite shake the role and winds up chasing a stranger with a knife. Occasionally, and to no apparent end, Shuang breaks with realism altogether: in “Mars,” a wax-sealed letter conceals a talking, slithering length of rope, which strangles a woman. I sometimes felt like I was reading Jesus’ Son with the drugs replaced by magical realism. Still, Shuang’s prose, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, is hypnotic and taut, and cultural differences aside, S—— is a familiar city, gutted by globalism, its blank-faced sleepwalkers at once idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable. “Now everyone in the ambulance had their eyes shut,” Shuang writes, “and we entered a common darkness.”

Guy Davenport’s first New Books column hailed Anthony Bailey as “one of the most civilized of the old New Yorker writers”—a phrase that it would never occur to me to use. But I’ll trot it out for John Seabrook, who by now qualifies as an old New Yorker writer (on staff since ’93), and whose memoir The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty (W. W. Norton, $31.99) argues that his family was, if anything, excessively civilized.

The Seabrooks, long of South Jersey, made their fortune selling vegetables, fresh and later frozen. They started with fifty-eight acres and eventually had fifty thousand under their control. By the end of the Second World War, their frozen lima beans accounted for 65 percent of the U.S. market. In the mid-Fifties, Seabrook Farms was the lifeblood of a company town in Cumberland County, with its own post office, water tower, and power plant; the corporation employed some eight thousand people. It brought veggies into the space age. Adopting a new polyester film developed by DuPont engineers, it packed frozen creamed spinach in a Mylar Miracle-Pack, so you could boil it right in the bag. Every Seabrook Farms item came emblazoned with Seabrook’s grandfather’s signature and a guarantee: we grow our own—so we know it’s good—and we freeze it right on the spot. In 1959, this motto also appeared on John Seabrook’s birth announcement. “I am shown emerging from a peapod,” he writes, “a newborn brandling.”

Such is life when you’ve been sired by the Spinach King. Seabrook was—for a time—the heir apparent to “a sort of feudal kingdom ruled by Seabrooks, to be passed down according to the law of primogeniture for the next five hundred years.” He lived regally—or rather, he watched his father, John “Jack” M. Seabrook Sr., live regally. From the Sixties on, Seabrook père, who was briefly the company’s CEO and later chaired a utilities corporation, enjoyed a domestic staff of twelve, including a butler and two stable boys; a cavernous wine cellar with a secret room inside another secret room; a stable of white Lipizzaners; and a carriage house in which he actually housed carriages, along with phaetons, buggies, and surreys. He practiced four-in-hand coaching and commissioned an oil portrait of himself with his “left hand drooped languidly over his top hat, while his right hand grasped the whip and the calfskin driving gloves.” Clothes make the man. Seabrook describes the Jolly Green Giant, his family’s sworn enemy in the freezer aisle, as a “bean-green Adonis sporting an off-the-shoulder Roman tunic of pea plants”; by comparison, his father was a “sleek mid-century fashion plate.” Jack’s wardrobe, mostly tailored by Savile Row’s Bernard Weatherill, hung on a motorized carousel with a control panel:

Jack could use the directional arrows to browse . . . or punch in a three-digit code for a specific garment. A numerical key below the control box divided his clothes into nine categories: Dressing Gowns, Overcoats, Country Clothes, City Clothes, Odd Jackets, Odd Trousers, Formal Evening Wear, Formal Day Wear, and Odd Waistcoats. Under each category were subcategories based on patterns, colors, and fabrics. Odd Trousers, for example, were subdivided and labeled Colorful, White, Linen, Gray Flannel, Tan, Checkered, Extra Heavy, and Corduroy.

No amount of frozen lima beans could have paid those dry-cleaning bills. Against his mother’s advice, John Jr. dug into the family lore, unearthing all manner of fraudulence—enough to inspire this book. It turns out that Seabrook’s grandfather Charles had run the farm with his father, ultimately cheating him out of his half of the partnership. In 1920, with the farmwork increasingly automated, Charles became New Jersey’s highway commissioner, enabling a lucrative two-year phase of self-dealing. Later, he used his experience to bring in contracts for Philadelphia’s celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, eventually billing the city $9 million—a markup so gratuitous that he was permanently banned from bidding on Philly public works. To keep the party going, he went to the U.S.S.R. to build roads for Stalin. But the asphalt he used couldn’t hold up to the Moscow winter, and he went broke.

A photograph by John Collier of a child picking beans in a field, Seabrook Farms, Bridgeton, New Jersey, 1943. Courtesy Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, Rutgers University, and the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Back on the farm, Charles suppressed wages and flouted child-labor laws. As the Depression raged, he resorted to violent union-busting tactics: tear gas, blackjacks, pistol whips, fire hoses. He locked strikers in the company’s freezer and recruited the local KKK chapter for additional security. Seabrook’s uncle Courtney once drove a truck into a picket line, sending a worker and three women to the hospital. In the Forties, Charles hired Japanese-American workers straight from internment camps, finding them less likely to defy him.

Even for WASPs, the Seabrooks were waspish. Charles, as he grew infirm, yearned to annihilate his sons: rather than see Jack take over the company, Charles sold it to complete strangers. In his will, he left Jack and his brothers a fraction of what they had expected. But John Jr. never could get his dad to open up about it. “You know we Anglo Saxons just don’t do that,” Jack said, describing his old man as merely “a tough character.” Jack was down but not out: he kept two Swiss bank accounts, though it seems he used only one for money laundering. In the Seventies, when the Wall Street Journal got wind of an SEC investigation into Jack’s abuse of corporate “perks,” he promised, like one of Shuang’s guys, to piss on the reporter’s grave.

The Spinach King contains a Mylar Miracle-Pack of intrigue, with everything you’d expect from a long-submerged, intergenerational blue-blooded drama. Along with the succession battle, it’s got phenobarbital addiction, involuntary commitment to a mental institution, boardroom humiliations, sexual predation, and a full century of functioning alcoholics. But its real business is the peculiar blood sport called filial love. Jack once taught little Johnny how to build a fire. Before lighting it, he sprinkled a few extra matches among the logs and told his son, “Pretend they’re people.” “I thought we were going to save them,” Seabrook writes, “but we didn’t. We watched as one by one their heads exploded into flame and their bodies shriveled and turned black.”

Such an apocalyptic vision may have greeted William LeMessurier in July 1978, when he realized that the New York skyscraper he’d engineered—open to the public for less than one year, and already bustling with tenants—had a one in sixteen chance of collapsing during hurricane season. His must rank among the all-time most devastating spells of actuarial despair. Shame broke out on LeMessurier like a rash. It occurred to him that he could drive into a bridge abutment at one hundred miles per hour. Instead, feeling “vanity, power, but almost joy, too,” he decided to confess to the mistake.

In The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower (New York University Press, $27.95), Michael M. Greenburg goes into compendious detail about the debacle. Manhattan’s Citicorp tower, at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street, was designed as a “skyscraper for the people,” whereas its contemporaries, the architect claimed, were only “symbolic expressions of the Machine.” It seemed to rise from the earth on stilts like a hypertrophied beach house. (To accommodate a long-standing church at its base, it was cantilevered on all four sides.) Its top was slanted like the mouth of a whistle, and it distributed its weight through a latticework of braced chevrons along its fifty-nine stories. The structure was so sleek and light that, to weigh it down, LeMessurier garnished it with a “tuned mass damper”: a four-hundred-ton block of yellow concrete, skating on a thin bed of oil. “Citicorp’s first building manager would affectionately refer to it as ‘that great block of cheese,’ ” Greenburg writes.

The base of the Citicorp tower, 1978 (detail) © Norman McGrath

It wasn’t enough. The steel braces had been bolted instead of welded, and the engineers, following industry standards, had failed to account adequately for “quartering winds”—i.e., those that blow diagonally rather than head-on. LeMessurier discovered the problem only after a college student working on a paper called his office to ask why the tower’s columns had been placed so unsafely. To avert the crisis, construction crews worked overnight welding steel plates onto the building’s joints, their torches lighting up the skyline.

This story will never become a movie, because everyone remained calm, nothing fell over, and no one was evacuated or even sued—and yet what a story it is, girded by hubris and hope. Greenburg’s writing is technical, and never especially artful, but I was held in suspense. Then again, I thrill to details about reinforced brackets and wind-tunnel experiments. If a whole book feels like too much, check out the great article about LeMessurier that ran thirty years ago in The New Yorker. I hesitate to recommend a rival publication, but what the heck. I’m told they’re celebrating an anniversary, too.