We took to sleeping in bed with our grown children, watching their chest rise and fall, listening for their breath, as if they were babies once more.” “It felt to many of us as if the species itself was giving up. “An act of collective surrender,” Hawley writes. An enigmatic symbol - A11 - appears in the vicinity of each death. It starts with 16-year-old Brad Carpenter of Madison, Wis. Teenagers are committing suicide at a fierce rate. Then the narrative leaps to several years after the Covid pandemic. She herself is an American institution - Her Honor - steeped in the power and history of symbols.” The judge spends her days sitting on a dais before an American flag. Hawley writes: “As if this moment - in which her daughter has decided to give voice to the war-torn hopes of a new nation - combined with the surprise of hearing her sing it for the first time, has created a synchronicity of deep spiritual meaning. Margot, who is white, and Remy, who is Black, are members of the “party of Lincoln,” conservative: “Opportunity, wealth, prestige,” Hawley writes of Remy, “these were his ideals.” Margot - or Judge Nadir - was appointed to the federal bench the year before.

Her second husband, Remy Burr, sits with her, and their infant son dozes in a nearby carrier.

Story’s mother, Margot Nadir, glows with admiration in the crowded audience. The book opens with a daughter: In the prologue, set in the financially precarious year of 2009, 9-year-old Story Burr-Nadir sings a stirring rendition of the national anthem during a school recital in Brooklyn. In his sixth novel, “Anthem,” Noah Hawley taps into our existential anxiety - and transforms it into a hefty page-turner that’s equal parts horrific, catastrophic and, at times, strangely entertaining. How do we bring children up in today’s increasingly dangerous and divided world? Will they rise? Or will they fall? With the recent rash of articles about the fragility of adolescent mental health and America’s uptick in teenage suicide rates, these questions are urgent.

Book anathem