Novel of the week The Atmospherians

(Atria, $27)

Though “satire is a difficult balancing act,” said Sarah Neilson in The Seattle Times, Alex McElroy’s brilliant debut novel “manages it beautifully.” In a surreal scenario that lampoons the way the internet warps behavior, men are spontaneously massing in hordes and doing manly things like murdering and mowing lawns when our protagonist, Sasha Marcus, finds herself a target of male rights activists. Her friend Dyson persuades her to counter toxic masculinity by founding a cult, called the Atmospherians, which offers men workshops on how to be background characters. In McElroy’s world, if anything can go wrong, it will, and it will also be both strange and strangely relevant, said Bethanne Patrick in The Washington Post. The Atmospherians would be better if it spent less time on the cult’s origins and more on its growth. Still, it sharply dramatizes the costs of society’s fraught gender dynamics. By the time Sasha and Dyson cook up an even grander scheme, “readers will understand that anyone, of any gender, can be divorced from a true, compassionate self.”