Misaimed Kindnesses and Cruelties

CAMILLE BORDAS IS an expert chronicler of misfits. Her first English-language novel, How to Behave in a Crowd (2017), was narrated by preteen Isidore Mazal, the youngest and most average child in a large family of precocious geniuses; 2024’s The Material followed a group of striving stand-up comedians, each of them reckoning with discomfort, anxiety, unrequited love, reputational ruin, and all manner of other human calamity through the course of a single day.