We find this passage in a letter written by John Updike to his girlfriend Mary Entwistle Pennington on April 1^st, 1952, sent from the farmhouse he was visiting in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where he had lived with his parents and maternal grandparents during high school before he went off to Harvard where he would meet Mary, a Radcliffe student, in a course on medieval sculpture. They would be engaged by the end of the year, with just over 20 years of marriage and four children ahead of them. In these tender letters to her, before the logistics of marrying obtrude, we can hear Updike’s music, as in this description of Jolson, the Plowville dog: “His hair, cultivated with a diet of raw eggs recommended by the sturdy veterinarian, is luxuriant, curving, gleaming, switching back upon itself in the triumph of brownness and blackness and whiteness.” Notice the clever slip from the intransitive “gleaming” to transitive “switching,” which reorients the slowing body of the sentence, readying it for another push, more life ahead. We also note, perhaps occasionally with disapproval, his easy, nearly promiscuous way with figuration: “Life is just too naked around here at times, and your letter fell like a rose petal dropped into a lion’s cage.” In the letters from this period which went from Harvard’s Lowell House back to Plowville, there are confidences regarding worries, and witty jokes, and nice thoughts about literature, but the language does not, as it does here, shrug off its manners and move rapidly and sinuously, following Updike’s eye, ear, and imagination in their explorations. Updike may demean a “peculiar mixture of loneliness and companionship,” but much is communicated in these letters to Mary besides the usual amorous stuff. It is not just that she was in a particular “face to face” relationship with Updike, but that she would read him carefully, before he had reached all his distant readers through the New Yorker and his many novels. There is some fine writing, with much humor and useful information, in the 750 pages of the Selected Letters, but there is not much in Updike’s best mode, in which he esteems and honors life while transfiguring it.

As we can learn from these letters or from passing comments in Updike’s criticism, he was more concerned than most writers with paper, typesetting, and cover design, so readers will be pleased to note that the Selected Letters is a handsome, sturdy production done on creamy paper, cleanly and efficiently laid out. Editor James Schiff includes reproductions of typed postcards and the occasional illustrations that Updike enclosed with his letters. One written to his not very coy mistress Joanna Brown is reprinted and also shown in its first form, filling out the ample negative space in a full-page ad for the Bell Telephone System taken from a 1963 issue of the New Yorker. Updike was an illustrator before he began writing, and here the photographed office workers have been given facial hair and dialogue in speech bubbles. The mass of correspondence is broken up with three series of photographs in high-quality reproductions, and if a theme or essence emerges in these it is the slightly awkward and diffident posture in any of the posed photos. (In profile birdlike, when smiling rather reptilian, Updike had an essentially comic visual existence. He had a notably consistent haircut, which registered to Martin Amis in 1987 as a “salt-and-pepper turban.” In its convoluted, self-conscious swoopings and swirlings, it gave him, along with the stiff lankiness of the pose, the look of a teenaged boy — early talent arrested, like Rabbit Angstrom, one wants to add.) As for the selecting, it was an unusually extensive task in Updike’s case, since by Schiff’s estimation he wrote more than 25,000 letters, postcards, and notes. Without knowing what was not selected one can only speculate, noticing in any case that in the ’70s, as Updike’s first marriage ends and his second begins, the professional and friendly letters go scarce in favor of all the separating, arranging, promising and sometimes quarreling involved in leaving Mary for Martha Bernhard, a fellow resident of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The footnotes are excellent, and contain their own quoted flourishes and nested treasures, though occasionally, mostly later in the book, public activities such as some kind of ceremony involving George Plimpton and, posthumously, Ernest Hemingway, seem to be missing an explanatory note. Updike’s professional life, as he would sometimes gently complain, did become terrifically complicated, as he served in the roles of lecturer, receiver of awards, grateful speech-giver, anthologist, and critic of not just many kinds of literature but also contemporary art, all while the novels and short stories arrived regularly.

The Updike corpus without the letters is already very large: over 60 books, if the collections with overlapping stories and poems are included. His terrific production has taken on the aspect of a clinical problem. Schiff’s introduction mentions a “compulsion to put his thoughts to paper,” and “graphophilia,” though here it should be noted that fortunately graphophilia is not graphomania. It is not difficult in reading Updike to imagine that he enjoyed writing very much, and from there to somewhat discount terms like “compulsion.” But if one is looking for deep causes, they are not hard to find. Born in 1932, Updike grew up and out of the Great Depression, during which his father Wesley lost his job and had to retrain himself as a high school mathematics teacher. Wesley was stably employed from then on, but according to his son “running scared financially for much of his life.” This could be seen as helping form Updike as the writer who would do so much work beyond subsistence, but then one discovers in these letters that he was once offered $30,000 to play golf with a celebrity and write a profile, but declined. All that squinting and hammering at the desk wasn’t just about the money. The important family figure is really his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who wrote fiction, some of which would eventually be published in the New Yorker with her son’s assistance. Schiff reports that Updike remembered that Linda, otherwise distinctly latitudinarian, once startled him by telling him to be quiet when she was at her desk, teaching him to see writing as “a very momentous activity.” The letters home to Plowville and addressed to the “Plowvillians” in the Harvard years, concerned mostly with reading and writing, are really for her, and later much finely detailed correspondence about his and her works in progress passes between them. Between 1961 and her passing in 1989, she gets 10 stories into the New Yorker and publishes one novel, called Enchantment. He writes to her after reading her story “Unlike Girls” that “[t]he world cries for more,” and perhaps he was answering this call by writing enough for two.

The New Yorker began as a humor magazine, and early in Updike’s career, when he started writing “Talk of the Town” columns, short stories, and poems for them, humorous elegance was the expectation. The stories have a warm, glinting, Cheeverish humor. Was he at least in part a comic writer in all fictional situations? The Bech stories are certainly comic, in the obvious, bumbling way, but even also as they grow metafictional appendages in their collected book forms. Even an awfully serious topical novel like Terrorist has its occasional levity. The Rabbit novels have rich and varied tones, certainly including mirth. Updike eases his way into a looser, more comic mode in the third of them, Rabbit is Rich, in which Rabbit Angstrom, now in his mid-40s, has developed a truculent, bantering style. On the job at the Toyota dealership, even if only in his thoughts directed at imagined consumers, he has a kind of salesman’s catchphrase: “Read Consumer Reports, April issue.” The thematic burdens of the previous two novels (fidelity in Rabbit, Run, counterculture in Rabbit Redux) had lifted only intermittently to allow comedy into a few scenes, notably meetings in bars and restaurants, and the fatal incidents in those plots had a way of killing the mood, too, but in Rabbit is Rich, as critic William H. Pritchard writes, Updike finds a “comic-elegiac” mode, which treats the rusting and emptying of Brewer, Pennsylvania (to be read more or less as America), with a rueful, not gloomy attitude. This discovery in the course of the tetralogy deserves much interest.

One aspect of Updike’s humor is lit up in the Letters. At Harvard, Updike did much writing for the Lampoon. Writing to Plowville from amidst exams in drama since Ibsen and late Romantic poets, he predicts that he will not write “unread masterpieces” and thus consign Mary to poverty, but instead please an audience the way he knows he can with his drawings (which were roughly in the manner of James Thurber). This will be as a humorous writer of some kind, and “if I am going to be a humorist, I must get the idea of infinity out of my head — there has never been a humorist who lived in infinity; humor is manipulation of limitations, a series of contrasts of finite objects.” He would treat the writer’s page as an enclosed world, putting on hold the infinite questions, religious and existential, and working up the laughs from the combination of a few elements. And we see Updike, here and there in the Letters, slowing down his narration to play just that sort of game. A few pages later, again writing to Plowville, he reports being taken along with his new bride Mary by family friends to a nice dinner near Ipswich: “The meal was elegant, but it was chiefly notable for the dessert, which was pecan pie. I had never had pecan pie before. I hope to have it again.” And in the ’90s, he complains about Tina Brown, then editor of the New Yorker: “She conned me into writing about Gene Kelly, of all people, and every time I saw another video I had to go back and insert some sentences so the whole thing is as lumpy as a blueberry muffin. And about as crumby.” This is not the celebrated social comedy, the recreation of manners and speech that Updike’s fiction is known for; it is a precocious young man’s comedy of words (and their referents) as “finite objects,” to be comically repeated (“pecan pie”), launched from towards anything associated (“muffin” to “crumby”), engaging both definitions at once.

Updike was not, of course, to limit himself, either in his seeing, his imaginative journeying, or his learning. His fiction in particular, never satisfied with a “few elements,” takes in much sensory information, his metaphors are sometimes extravagant, and he shows his knowledge of literature, theology, physics, history, music, painting, printing, even cars and golf. And then of course there is his own life, the main subject of the letters, if his work is considered a part of (as opposed to apart from) that life. The wit that treats the Updike life in the Letters is worldly as much as wordy, and grows more weary with the years. A letter to Erica Jong, who was famous for a time, begins by addressing Updike’s embarrassment over a blurb bearing his name on her book: “All’s fair in love, war, and excerptation from reviews for purposes of quotation on paperback editions.” He then quibbles over the formatting (to be seen on the Signet Fear of Flying cover), which deviously conflates someone’s ad copy with his quoted review. A postscript in a letter to Kurt Vonnegut in 2005 elliptically comments on Truman Capote’s public persona: “We saw Capote. Seymour was good, but Capote was even better at it. We once spent an hour with him in Sagaponack.” Such urbane cleverness takes its opportunities in the archly erudite Bech books, for instance, or through the mouth of the devilish art collector Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick, and of course it is to be found in Updike’s several non-fiction collections.

In the Rabbit novels, Updike’s avatar, or locus of consciousness, or whatever Rabbit Angstrom is, cannot be credited with all that much learning or sophistication. We know how much TV he watches. So Updike’s narration, having to render his perceptions in the precise language that would give this world its exquisite life, sometimes seems to be translating Rabbit, as critics have complained. But each time he revisits Brewer, Updike is more committed to the texture and sound of Rabbit’s mind, to be recreated as carefully as his world. In the first novel, Rabbit, Run, at a game of golf with the Episcopalian minister Eccles, Rabbit notices something acutely and Updike writes it cutely, cleverly, with onomatopoeic trickery: “Eccles sinks his. The ball wobbles up and with a glottal rattle bobbles in.” One relishes the Joycean sound effect while having to accept that it is the author’s, not Rabbit’s. Twenty years later in Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit and his wife Janice enjoy their new prosperity by playing golf with friends at the country club. In the midst of a complex sentence with high diction, we are treated in a parenthetical to Rabbit’s memory of his afternoon success, “the wooden gobbling sound the cup makes when a long putt falls.” This sounds like the Rabbit we have known from the beginning in his dialogue, in his living. For him, golf is more than just golf; in fact, it is grace. So this can be taken as an allusion to the earlier novel for thematic purposes, but one that records Rabbit’s idiosyncratic, relatively uneducated way of thinking.

The older Rabbit’s thinking includes clichés that can lead him on to dreamy maunderings. He falls asleep “at the drop of a hat. He never used to understand the phrase. But then he never used to wear a hat and now, at the first breath of cold weather, he does.” And in this gentle, sometimes puzzled way, Rabbit’s mental language plays games with itself, games of definition and repetition. Updike, as Rabbit, is in the curious mode of the humorist who wanted to get the heavens out of his head, but it is more about relaxation than effort. Thus the humor is sometimes broader. Rabbit is allowed to start from the belief that men are from Mars and women from Venus, and see what odd collisions follow. Hearing the hammering from a nearby house whose residents he thinks are probably lesbians, who in any case are avid carpenters, he meditates on homosexuality. He had “always meant to ask them what it was like, and why. He can see not liking men, he doesn’t like them much himself, but why would you like women any better, if you were one? Especially women who hammer all the time, just like men.” And sometimes Rabbit’s thoughts are as enigmatic as they are humorous. He loves being inside when it rains, hearing it on the windows. This for him is an example of “Things that touch and yet not.” The Rabbit novels are increasingly vivid because Rabbit’s life, like the reader’s, is full of such finite objects, and Updike is not in such a hurry to interpret and use them to get at something beyond. He has learned to imagine what Rabbit would make of them, or more simply he has learned to be Rabbit, which may be more a matter of remembering.

The fourth novel, Rabbit at Rest, closes the gaps and brings Updike and Rabbit into closer communion. Now corpulent and retired, Rabbit has lately been reading history in bed while Janice watches TV, exploring the curiosity one always noticed beneath his worrying. He applies a word new to him from his reading, “seigneurial,” to his bathrobe, and half-jokingly fancies that it helps dignify him as the pater familias. The oldish birds now spend half the year in Deleon, Florida, and when their son Nelson and his family visit, Rabbit feels crowded, like an African in his hut, he thinks. He asks himself what Western man has done with his prosperity and privacy, and answers with “nothing much except invent the gun and psychoanalysis.” This is rather droll for a car salesman: he is making a late effort at cleverness, as if winking at his creator. (In a review of the collection Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism, Amis acknowledges Updike’s dogged autodidacticism, undertaken as if for a grade, and says “there’s no need to ask whose approval Updike is after, [God’s].”) Rabbit is not just learning information; he understands himself better, now. He has never had so many years of living and feeling behind him, and even if his memory is less keen, there are new clarities. Golf is his great joy, still, and he knows why, because it is an “opportunity for infinite improvement.” The game, like playful joking, is “manipulation of limitations,” but it points somehow outside itself. The young, restless Rabbit sensed this, and Updike had to suggest it for him, but the older Rabbit is ready to say it, addressing it to the reader:

When you stand up on the first tee it is there, it comes back from wherever it lives during the rest of your life, endless possibility, the possibility of a flawless round, a round without a speck of dirt in it, without a missed two-footer or a flying right elbow, without a pushed wood or pulled iron; the first fairway is in front of you, palm trees on the left and water on the right, flat as a picture. All you have to do is take a simple pure swing and puncture the picture in the middle with a ball that shrinks in a second to the size of a needle-prick, a tiny tunnel into the absolute.

In Updike’s words, Rabbit’s life has been “less defended and logocentric” than his author’s, and this is why he once had to speak for him, but as Rabbit has learned new words, Updike has made himself more comfortable within Rabbit’s limits, and finds from within them that actually, Rabbit is “more sensitive and spiritual” than he. Remembered as priggish, a questionable father and worse husband, Rabbit is incompletely remembered: he has often been nervous, though less sympathetic readers have not noticed, and his avid senses have always been seeking those “motions of grace” mentioned by Pascal in the epigraph to Rabbit, Run. Motions like the swing of a golf club, or gifts of grace like the swaddled granddaughter Judy placed in his arms as “a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive.” Rabbit is harried by himself, Harry, but sometimes calmed by another. In his 50s his heart, after too many Planters Peanut Bars, and, as readers of the Letters will be tickled to see, too much pecan pie, is none too healthy, but it is not totally hardened in the Christian sense. What might first look to a lot of readers like the author’s condescension, toward the tradesman who stayed in Pennsylvania, is affection and even admiration.

It feels odd, ambling along with Rabbit in the sun, so far from Brewer in what the author has called Deleon, Florida, but since Updike’s relationship with his mother, who died shortly after the first draft of Rabbit at Rest was completed, brought him regularly back to his and Rabbit’s Berks County, it is appropriate that the exotic Southern home is named after a man about whom she long wished to write a novel, Juan Ponce de León, the would-be settler of La Florida. The novel, many times rejected and revised, was to be titled Dear Juan. Her interest in the explorer seemed “incongruous” to Updike, as he writes in a letter a month after her death, but he found a place to fit it, like so much else, in his fiction. In her letters to him, she had sometimes likewise neatly linked distant lives, fictional and actual, by using as her salutation “Dear Juan.” While he was at Harvard, which she imagined as “the Salamanca of the twentieth century,” she sent him rather more letters than he her, and wondered if she might save more of her Plowville stories for another use. But she decided against it. “Wouldn’t it be better to spend them now, hoping that the smile they have brought will somehow be carried through the mails to another?” In any case, she would always encourage his writing. “Answer me, John.”

Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His work has been published by The New Criterion, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Spectator World, and The Oxonian Review. He is on Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com.

Some of the most important cultural questions arrive disguised as aesthetic ones. An honest account of contemporary life — including the literary life — requires understanding how our society chooses to see itself. The art it produces, the people it admires, and the styles it emulates are among the clearest records of its values and desires.

Today, we launch our Style section and proudly introduce Savannah Huitema, who joins The Metropolitan Review as Style Critic. Here, with her unflinching eye and sharp sociological range, Huitema reads American beauty — left and right — and argues that, in an age of instability, both sides now reach for a shared end: legibility.

—The Editors

I know her face, and so do you. I know how her Breck-girl blowout falls around the gold cross at her throat. And I know the way she enters a room and approaches a podium before casting a sanctimonious gaze.

Melissa Rein Lively, founder of America First PR, describes in Marie Claire the Trump woman as “elegant, powerful, hyper-feminine,” adding, “Femininity is our weapon, and by being beautiful and elegant, you can get a lot more out of life than you can by looking like crap.”

MAGA beauty — the aesthetic now labeled Mar-a-Lago face or conservative-girl makeup — is expensive, disciplined, and unmistakable. She has “Idaho curls,” false lashes, filled cheeks, plumped lips, and thick, peach-tinted foundation. The Trump woman wears a form-fitting skirt suit, sky-high stilettos, and a $50,000 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona.

Not including maintenance, the cosmetic work alone can cost upward of $90,000. The price of entry is part of the point. Her face belongs to the same aesthetic order as the Trumpian interior: spaces drenched in gold, or aspiring to be. Vermeiled, bombastic, yet eerily hollow. The literalism of gilded Rococo mirrors and a goat statue covered in $100 bills somehow cannot be decoupled stylistically from flash-white veneers and chin implants.

Commentators have already dissected the surface aesthetics of MAGA beauty, a discourse that now circulates broadly as a punch line. The popular impulse to critique the parallels between Mar-a-Lago face’s exaggerated verve and the drag queens that the right disdains is understandable. Yet the more interesting approach isn’t to deride these women; it’s to ask why this aesthetic suddenly feels adaptive, not only on the American right but across American life. It appears that certain styles, more conservatively coded, have become survival traits in a country that no longer feels stable. This is an impulse toward safer, more recognizable constructions of appearance.

Political transformation often appears in fashion before it appears anywhere else. Before America explains itself politically, it arranges itself aesthetically.

In the early ’90s, grunge — flannel, ripped denim, the deliberate rejection of polish — emerged before the recessionary mood was fully announced, before Kurt Cobain’s death, before the cultural fatigue with Reagan-era gloss and its sharp-shouldered powersuits had a name. Minimalism arrived shortly thereafter, bringing along Helmut Lang’s stripped silhouettes and Calvin Klein’s beige and bone.

As America swung into the Obama years, naked dresses were standard fare on red carpets. Exposed nipples were, for a time, almost a status symbol. So was the one-of-a-kind vintage shirt found on a thrifting spree in Brooklyn, because it suggested that its wearer was fully self-authored.

Elite aesthetics prized choice — identity presented as fluid and revisable. The Liberal It Girl aspired to seem ungoverned: sexually free, sartorially experimental, and unburdened by obvious hierarchy or need. Bodily autonomy became its own aesthetic language. Her look was avant-garde and ironic; she dressed like Chloë Sevigny ruling the downtown scene in leopard prints and red leather.

The party couldn’t last — style knew it before the markets or the polls did. Moods reach the body before they reach the ballot. It seems that Fukuyama’s famous 1992 prediction was a hair off after all: the liberal assumption that open societies and cosmopolitan individualism would render the old troubles obsolete began to feel passé. We were nowhere near history’s bookend.

The surrounding culture grew increasingly anxious about sex, gender, and the body itself. Fashion historians discussed a shift toward more conservative fashion — an emphasis on femininity and “romantic looks.”

In moments of societal unease, style often turns toward legibility, gravitating toward clearer markers of belonging. The pop-sociological “hemline theory” is the most basic incarnation of this idea — skirt lengths rise and fall with a culture’s appetite for risk as it oscillates between conservatism and openness.

Milkmaid dresses and tradwife trends did not emerge from nowhere. The old feminine shapes had begun to look freshly useful. Even American Eagle found a way to capitalize on the mood, reducing dated ideals of norms and breeding to corporate packaging in the 2025 denim campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. (Trump called it “HOTTEST.”) And American Eagle isn’t the only one. Nostalgia, tweed, polos, and puffy sleeves have become ubiquitous in storefronts, and even in the styling on popular album covers. (Consider the feel of the cover art on Olivia Rodrigo’s 2026 you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, or Lana Del Rey’s 2025 Henry, Come On.)

It’s tempting to dismiss MAGA beauty as brash costume — even drag. But doing so overlooks its deeper political and emotional function.

The Trump woman visually brands herself as an insider. The look signals fluency in the tribe’s rules and comfort within its hierarchy.

Last year, when former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited a federal detention center in El Salvador, she wore a shiny gold Rolex. Her makeup, perfectly painted, sat immaculately over taut skin. There stood a stone-lipped Noem in front of caged migrants, their heads shaven, their naked bodies exposed in the low-resolution blur of a grim, state-sponsored photograph.

She was marching comfortably through power’s orbit, even in the most dismal of settings.

Noem knew the rules of the tribe and had paid the price of admission. Even as the world outside destabilized, the promise remained that the Republican Party’s order would continue to hold her within its arms — and therefore keep her safe.

The Republican Party would sequester the tangible enemy (them), brazenly showcase where power lies (with us), and explain exactly what a woman is (that).

This is the emotional appeal of MAGA beauty: clarity when clarity feels forsaken. It declares allegiance. It unabashedly acknowledges that cultural desire has shifted from standing apart to being held within recognizable forms. Not necessarily because freedom is consciously rejected, but because ambiguity itself begins to wear heavy.

Liberal culture likes to imagine that it stands outside aesthetic conformity. It is suspicious of visual symbols, because it understands that looks can deceive. Nationalism can lacquer itself in a fake gold gauze. State domination in Latin America can iron its hair into gentle beach waves.

But while mocking MAGA’s blunt performances of belonging, liberal elites have missed how thoroughly their own aesthetics anticipated this very turn.

Liberals idealized the endlessly self-created individual: untamed, perpetually revisable, singular. A daily construction of personhood as ultramodern and splashily-paletted as a 2011 Takashi Murakami painting. But this dance becomes exhausting, even embarrassing, in an erratic world. When things fall apart, how can one suffer appearing messy and unique? How can one bear the burden of constant self-authorship?

The anxiety was stanched by the “everyman” plain tee costing $800 at Brunello Cucinelli, or the ubiquitous Bottega bag lacking a conspicuous label. Nipples were covered.

There was all the individuality and risk of an airport terminal.

Aesthetic identity was no longer discovered; it was curated into coherence and displayed on a social media feed as evidence of moral seriousness and sobriety. The chaotic glamour of the early 2010s gave way to the measured style of self-regulation. Quiet luxury arrived in the form of Loro Piana cashmere, Khaite downtown knits, and understated coats from The Row — clothes designed to signal to those already on the inside. Modeling for these brands, it felt that the more the piece cost, the less it was allowed to say so when I wore it — but if you knew, you knew. (My agent once told me that my diamond earrings looked cheap. “Look expensive, but quietly” was the law of life. I committed many crimes.)

Today, while pointing out the classist, sexist roots of MAGA beauty in the Antebellum South and early pageantry, the Liberal It Girl and her friends can’t help but to innocently dress “Old Money,” or wear 1960s style baby-doll dresses and barrettes, as if they could also evoke their own idealized past.

The tribe signals. Just stealthily.

And so liberalism also wears the times on its skin as a parallel construction. Not by adopting the overdetermined cosmetics of Mar-a-Lago — so reminiscent of the gilded filigree loudly creeping through the Oval — but by clamoring toward its own containment. Softer, cleaner, coherent, and in its quiet way, no less conservative.

The body that had been displayed as proof of freedom has retreated into ballet flats, longer skirts, prairie sleeves, and high necklines. Dressed in a soft pink cardigan, she bakes sourdough bread and gardens out back for the viewing pleasure of her followers — never one to miss a trend cycle.

Makeup has likewise become “clean-girl” minimalism, the innocent face subtly botoxed and deep-pore-extracted into the illusion of having scarcely been touched. But little costs more than looking like you spent nothing. That’s the expensive secret every Tribeca aesthetician knows.

The cool girl, once glitter-specked, wild-eyed, and self-invented, looks composed, almost sheltered. The resurgence in popularity of heritage brands associated with a nostalgic American past and the trend toward more gendered looks is the same political mood speaking in a different accent, even if it’s not, simply stated, MAGA by another name. This year, Ralph Lauren surpassed an $8 billion valuation threshold for the first time in its history.

Plastic surgeons report a recent decline in requests to lie under the knife to attain the aggressively overfilled Palm Beach face. But the exposed bodies at this year’s Met Gala do not necessarily announce liberation — they may simply suggest that containment has begun to feel claustrophobic. Even the metallic breastplates that appeared so frequently suggested that protection, a kind of armor, remains fashionable. Yet no order can hold forever.

When I see the cosmeticized face of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, I can disagree with the policy ideas she imparts. I can feel disdain looking back at images of Noem’s propagandistic misadventure in El Salvador. But it would be dishonest to say I cannot empathize with the Trump woman’s spiritual need.

In a culture unmoored, legibility begins to feel like safety, even when it means permanently altering one’s face — a vow carved into skin that forecloses defection.

Across the political spectrum, it’s long been true that wearing certain forms of beauty means to receive the tribe’s recognition and to earn a sense of safety and belonging in return.

But I wonder whether, decades from now, some of us will look in the mirror with regret. Because certain things cannot be removed once the moment has passed.

We will still know her face. Some allegiances were never just skin deep.

Savannah (“Sav”) Huitema is a New York City-based writer, attorney, and fashion model. She serves as Style Critic at The Metropolitan Review.

At his firm’s annual holiday party, Viktor Petrovich Zadorozhny was gulping down vodka shots, one after another, to build up enough courage to ask his boss for a promotion. He managed to pick what he thought was the right spot and moment, when the boss was walking to the bathroom, and cornered him with a well-rehearsed but casually delivered inquiry. After the boss gave him a vague promise that sounded more like an annoyed dismissal, Viktor returned to the bar and downed a few more shots and then let loose on the dancefloor, wantonly groping and pressing against female staffers, while watching his secret crush, Irina, the round-faced, giggly receptionist, make out in the far corner with the Head of Sales. Peeved but defiant, Viktor stayed until the party wound down, around midnight, chasing the hard liquor with beer — a drinking hack he knew would get him wasted to the point of numbed indifference.

At 12:30 a.m. he watched Irina and the Head of Sales get into a taxi together. “Slut,” he mumbled and trudged unevenly toward the Novokuznetskaya metro station.

The temperature outside was minus twenty degrees Celsius. Normally, Viktor would cover the distance between the office and the metro with a brisk five-minute walk, but now everything was spinning, and he had to stop every few meters to lean against a wall or a lamppost to regain balance and to fight off the icy sidewalk that threatened to rise and hit him in the face. In his stomach brewed a vicious storm, and as he neared the station, the toxic surge broke through all inner barriers and gushed violently out onto the pile of fresh snow by the station’s entrance. He growled like a wounded bear as the bile spouted out but felt a little better after the purge.

It was long past the rush hour, near closing time, and the Novokuznetskaya metro station vestibule, a grand marble-walled rotunda, was empty and quiet, except for distant echoes of arriving and departing trains. Viktor inhaled the warm air rising from the deep escalator shaft, and it hit his nostrils with the resiny smell of creosote, a smell that he found calming.

He reached for his jeans’ back right pocket where he always kept his leather wallet, but his fingers brushed against a sobering flatness. Quickly, he felt his other back pocket and found the same heart-stopping emptiness. In panic, he rummaged through his front pockets and all the nooks of his puffer coat: there were keys to his apartment and the phone, dead, but no wallet.

There was no time to go back to the office to search for it: the metro would close in fifteen minutes. He scanned the station’s round vestibule and, not seeing any living soul, placed his hands on two adjacent turnstiles, like a gymnast on parallel bars, and lifted himself. He made a weak attempt at a knee curl, gave up, and dangled his feet, contemplating the next move. As he assessed the height of the plexiglass gates before him, the possible angle of attack and the amplitudinal constraints, he got dizzy, and his arms’ muscles trembled and his elbows gave in, folding under his weight. His center of gravity shifted too fast for his feet to secure the ground underneath, and he fell backwards, landing on his back.

He lingered on the floor, gazing up, caught by the sight of the station’s hemispherical ceiling, a Byzantine-style dome embellished with carved-stone reliefs, a relic of Soviet-era grandeur. He wondered why he’d never noticed that pattern before.

“They don’t make shit like this anymore,” he thought. “Say what you will, but we had telos then.” He wished that he had studied architecture instead of business back in college.

Through the ticket booth’s window, Viktor’s loitering and subsequent turnstile acrobatics were observed with silent but intense interest by the station’s security guard Yuri and cashier clerk Lydia.

Now Yuri’s grinning face and swinging baton cut short Viktor’s serene moment.

“Jumping the turnstiles is a violation,” Yuri said.

Viktor rolled onto his side and stood up slowly, groaning and grasping his lower back.

“I failed, comrade major,” he said. (Viktor addressed every man in uniform, even a security guard, as ‘comrade major’ to signal preemptive compliance and to avoid any unnecessary escalation). “So, it doesn’t count.”

“A smartass? Documents, please.”

“Yeah, well, you see, I think I left my wallet in the office,” Viktor said, summoning his best diction. “All my cards are there. Metro pass, too. Maybe you just let me in? The last train leaves in ten minutes. Otherwise, I’ll be stuck here all night.”

“You won’t be stuck here. You’ll be stuck outside,” Yuri said and laughed at his dark humor.

“Oy, Yuri, just let him through,” Lydia said with slight impatience. “I can print him a ticket.”

Yuri briefly mulled Lydia’s suggestion.

“I have a better idea,” Yuri said. He pointed his baton at an ATM-like terminal in the corner of the vestibule. Above the terminal hung a banner that read: Healthy Moscow Initiative. Twenty squats=one free ride.

“Does it even work?” Lydia asked.

“We’ll find out.”

Yuri came to the machine and tapped on the terminal’s black screen. His touch brought the screen to life: it lit up and a blue buffering bar appeared. Then, a message popped up: Please place your feet onto the marked area.

“Look! It’s working,” Yuri said excitedly and turned to Viktor. “It’s your lucky day.”

“Well, come on,” Yuri invited Viktor with his nightstick toward the two steps stenciled in yellow inside a square on the floor in front of the machine.

Viktor complied and placed his feet on the dotted outlines. The screen acknowledged him with a live camera broadcast. Viktor stared at a dolorous middle-aged man, with red, droopy face and hollow cheeks. “This can’t be me,” he thought. He tightened his facial muscles and smiled, and the man on the screen responded simultaneously with a spasmic, demented grimace.

“Begin exercise in . . . ,” the countdown on the screen blinked the numbers 3, 2, 1. “Start Now.” A big zero displayed, indicating the start of the count.

“Go on,” Yuri said. “We don’t want you to miss your train.”

Viktor bent his knees half-way and straightened back up. He glanced at the screen, where his effort didn’t register. The zero remained.

“You’re not doing it right,” Yuri said. “You have to sit all the way down.”

Viktor followed Yuri’s instruction, squatting all the way, and rising back up. He was slow. His knees shook and his back hurt and there was again unrest in his stomach, but the count changed from zero to one. Encouraged by the progress, he continued. On every move up, he assisted himself by pressing his hands against his knees, lifting his butt first and then torso. The count climbed with each completed squat.

“See? It’s working,” Yuri said, delighted. “It’s a smart apparatus. A machine warrants respect.”

When the number hit twenty, a ‘Congratulations!’ popped up on the screen.

Viktor exhaled with relief when a ‘Print Ticket’ prompt appeared.

“Look at that,” Yuri said, and poked on the prompt.

The machine paused for several alarming seconds, and then, instead of a ticket, issued a ‘Data Error’ message.

“What? How can there be an error?” Viktor said.

“Maybe it didn’t like the way you did it,” Yuri replied.

“But it said ‘congratulations.’ That means it did.”

“If it doesn’t print a ticket, it has its reasons. It knows what it’s doing.”

“But it counted to twenty. I did my twenty,” Viktor objected, slurring.

“You were doing it like you were taking a shit. You needed to do it like a sportsman. Quick and light.”

“Maybe we just let him through,” Lydia inserted. There was now a worry in her voice.

“Let’s just do it again,” Yuri said. “And mean it this time.”

Viktor cursed under his breath. He did another twenty squats, puffing and straining. “Thirteen, fourteen,” Yuri counted along, bumping his baton against his palm. Lydia watched the repeat process with a mournful expression.

Upon completion, the machine congratulated Viktor and spat out the same error message.

“Blyad. What fuckery!” Viktor cried. “I’m not doing this again! Shoot me, boss. That’s it. No more.”

“Maybe it’s broken,” Lydia said. “Some glitch or something.”

“Fuck it. I’ll do it,” Yuri said. “Watch and learn.” He shook his baton in Viktor’s face and did twenty energetic squats. It took him thirty seconds.

‘Congratulations! Data Error.’

Lydia went to the ticket booth and came out with a metro pass good for one ride.

“Here. That’s it,” she said sternly. “Enough with the circus.”

She met no objections. Yuri sighed and looked at Viktor with disappointment.

“To fuck with it,” Yuri said, resigned, waving his hand. “Go.”

Lydia swiped Viktor in.

Cursing both Yuri and his fate, Viktor stumbled down the escalator, just in time for the last train.

Thirty minutes later he emerged from the metro at Krasnogvardeyskaya station, on the city’s outskirts, and walked to his apartment building, a gray concrete high-rise. He stopped before the bunker-grade metal door to the building’s entrance, scooped a handful of snow from the ground and rubbed it on his face.

The entrance was recently enhanced with a new state-of-the-art facial recognition system to ward off vandals and homeless people. The software was still glitchy, randomly denying the tenants entry, and the system’s vendor promised a quick fix. In the meantime, the act of entering his home became a stochastic process for Viktor, a hit or a miss, even during daylight, even when sober and on his best citizen behavior.

Now, at 2 a.m., with his features warped by frost, alcohol, and the weight of injustices, he put his odds at fifty-fifty. He rubbed his eyes and cheeks, trying to erase all the emotional stamps of the day to please the fickle algorithm, and cleared his throat.

The system sensed a presence; its interface lit up and spoke to Viktor with a pleasant female android voice.

“Hello. To use access, please say ‘photo.’”

“Photo,” Viktor said, holding up his chin and looking directly into the camera.

“Sorry. I did not recognize you,” the system said after a long pause. “To make a facial recognition, please say ‘photo.’”

“Photo. I said already.”

“Thank you. Please, dictate, clearly, the number of your apartment,” the android voice prompted.

“Twenty-seven.”

“Sorry, I did not recognize your answer. Please, dictate, clearly, the number of your apartment.”

“Number twenty-seven. House number two, apartment twenty-seven.”

“You said: apartment twenty-seven. Please confirm, yes or no.”

“Confirm. Yes. Apartment twenty-seven.”

“Sorry. I did not recognize your answer.”

“Twenty-seven. Yes.”

The system paused.

“To make a facial recognition, please say ‘photo.’”

“Photo, blyad. I already said. Apartment twenty-seven.”

“Please confirm. Yes or no.”

“You mean the apartment? Yes.”

“Sorry. I did not recognize your answer. To use access . . . ”

“Photo! Stop fucking with my brain. Open up. I am Viktor Petrovich Zadorozhny. Apartment twenty-seven.”

The system weighed Viktor’s response for a few seconds and looped into a different sequence.

“To create an account, please stand in front of the camera and look directly into it. In three seconds, I will take your picture.”

“Do it, blyad.” He grimaced.

“Three-two-one. The photo has been taken.”

“Fucking great!”

“To use access, please install My Smart Home app to your phone. Thank you. Good-bye.”

“The fuck did you take my photo then, bitch? What am I . . . I live here . . . Let me in.” He banged on the door.

The android was silent.

“Photo! Twenty-seven! Confirm!” Viktor barked the magic words into the darkened interface.

He wobbled and leaned against the wall.

“Dumb cunt. You don’t want to open? Here.” Viktor swung his fist at the system’s screen. He missed and his knuckles scratched against the rugged surface of the metal door.

“I fucked you!” He turned away from the door and cried into the dark courtyard. “Every one of you I fucked! In the ass! Everyone! I fucked!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Someone shouted back through a cracked window.

“All of you. In the ass. I fucked.”

His knuckles bled. He plopped on the bench by the entrance, slouched, and soon slipped into a reverie. He saw doors, gates, and turnstiles, and all of them opened for him upon his approach. There were also mirrors and screens and smooth surfaces, and everywhere he saw his reflection. He had the classic proportions of a Roman god, the perfect physical symmetry, and it was this symmetry that had imbued him with the power to transcend all barriers.

He came before a large rusty metal door. It opened, squeaking and clacking, and beyond it stood a glowing entity that Viktor guessed to be St. Peter.

St. Peter turned to him, his beatific face emitting divine light and infinite mercy, and spoke with the voice of Vadik, Viktor’s neighbor, drinking buddy, and the owner of a giant fluffy Siberian husky:

“Petrovich, is that you? Well, fuck,” St. Peter said. Viktor felt a dog’s breath and a warm, wet cloth of a canine tongue on his numb face.

“That was you screaming?” St. Peter continued. “I thought it was some drunk. What are you doing out here? You’ll freeze your balls off, you dumb fuck. What the . . . You’re bleeding . . . Got into a fight? What fool, blyad. Well, shit, man . . . Get up . . . Let’s get you inside. I have a remedy upstairs . . . Therapeutic . . . Will warm you up . . . But how the fuck . . . What moron, blyad. Come. Let’s go.”

Katya Grishakova is the author of The Hermit (Heresy/Skyhorse 2025), a debut novel about a Manhattan bond trader who goes through existential crisis. She has serialized her second novel, Euclid Alone, on her Substack. In her former life she used to work on Wall Street.

For decades, the Mexican-born journalist Alma Guillermoprieto has been respected, if not revered, as the preeminent English-language chronicler of the trials and triumphs of contemporary life in Latin America. When she speaks, people in the know tend to listen.

The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, published last year, is Guillermoprieto’s latest and final collection of reportage from the region. There is plenty of bloodshed in the 21 compiled stories — and while there is plenty of life too, these are largely not the kinds of tales she originally set out to record.

“People sometimes ask me why I like writing stories that can be terribly violent and cruel, and the answer is that of course I don’t,” Guillermoprieto writes in her introduction to the collection. “This is not what I expected to do with my life.”

Indeed, Guillermoprieto’s path into journalism suggested a very different kind of journey. Guillermoprieto dedicated the first part of her adulthood to dance, studying with the renowned American choreographer Merce Cunningham in New York and briefly teaching at the National Art Schools in Havana. She began her career in journalism in 1978 in Nicaragua, at a moment when the Sandinista-led uprising against the dictator Anastasio Somoza was gaining momentum. Somoza fled Managua the next July as the Sandinistas poured into the capital, led by the soon-to-be president Daniel Ortega. For many in Latin America, it was the beginning of a heady decade: oppressed people were struggling for their rights, dictatorships were steadily falling, commodity prices were rising, and it appeared the region could be on the precipice of a proud, new democratic dawn. That is, understandably, what Guillermoprieto thought she might spend her career covering. But it did not work out that way.

There is, as a result, a soul-searching, melancholic quality to the questions Guillermoprieto poses in the collection’s introduction. She wonders how she could have been so naive as to think the Sandinistas could have managed to govern in line with their highest guerilla ideals, or to think the peace accord between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) could bring lasting peace to war-ravaged, traumatized El Salvador. “We look back on the dreams of change we failed so resoundingly to achieve and wonder,” Guillermoprieto writes, “What were we thinking?”

Indeed, there are so many varieties of failure chronicled in the pages of The Years of Blood it is exhausting to catalogue them all. Many of the failures are driven by forces beyond the region’s control: Guillermoprieto traces the eruption of gang violence in El Salvador to U.S. immigration policy, and the eruption of drug violence in Mexico and Colombia to U.S. appetites and foreign policy doctrine. Then there are the more anodyne failures of men and women who claimed to represent high ideals but ultimately were devoted to the pursuit and consolidation of personal power; Evo Morales in Bolivia, for example, suffered what Guillermoprieto calls an “enduring presidential vice: he could not bring himself to get off that chair.” The reign of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua has been even more monstrous and ruinous.

There are, in Guillermoprieto’s eyes, two primary consequences of this multidimensional mess: the first is that violence has triumphed as a form of political expression in Latin America. The second is that, after a blossoming of electoral democracy in the last decades of the 20th century, democracy is no longer even an aspiration in the 21st.

Nowhere is this clearer than in El Salvador, where Guillermoprieto traveled in 2011 for a New York Review of Books story and immediately encountered a cab driver with no memory of the infamous slaying of four American nuns just 31 years prior. The trip did not improve from there; Guillermoprieto found a country teetering on the brink of unraveling with a bankrupt government, a 38 percent poverty rate, a stagnant economy, and a profusion of gang violence propelled, in part, by the arrivals of mareros who had been deported to the country from cities like Los Angeles.

When Guillermoprieto was reporting in San Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the 30-year-old president of a branch of the Yamaha Motor Company, was on the verge of entering electoral politics for the first time as the FMLN’s mayoral candidate in the small suburb of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Just eight years later, having been elected mayor of San Salvador and then thrown out of the FMLN, Bukele won the presidency.

Bukele’s approach to the presidency led to an unraveling of sorts. In 2021, Bukele fired the attorney general investigating his government for corruption and replaced all five magistrates on the Constitutional Court with his own appointees, who quickly ruled that he could run for another term in 2024 — despite a constitutional ban on immediate reelection. The following year, the legislative assembly, controlled by Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party, authorized a state of exception that suspended due process and gave the government sweeping authority to combat gang violence. The state of exception is still in place three years later, with roughly 2 percent of the country’s population in prison and a growing number of the government’s critics in exile. In September, Human Rights Watch warned that the country’s democracy was “dying.”

Nevertheless, Bukele’s approval rating remains sky-high, exceeding 80 percent in a poll conducted over the summer. Perhaps more chillingly, just 1.4 percent of respondents said the concentration of power in a single person was a problem. In slashing the murder rate by as much as 97 percent and drastically reducing the power of the gangs that once dominated large swaths of the country, Bukele has given Salvadorans — at least those whose loved ones have been ensnared by the prison state — a benefit democracy seemingly could not deliver.

But democracy was failing in El Salvador long before Bukele began packing the courts and altering the constitution. The corruption of the two main parties — and their inability to curb crime and address inequality — prefigured the emergence of a leader who could make the country’s challenges seem less intractable. As Guillermoprieto notes, “Elections are but the end product of a democratic life.” Bukele is popular now, in fact, much more popular than democracy itself across the region: Guillermoprieto cites a Latinobarómetro poll that found 54 percent of respondents open to a non-democratic form of government so long as it was effective. But Bukele will not be popular forever, and when people eventually tire of his reign, his assault on democracy will make it that much harder to remove him.

El Salvador is a dramatic example of democratic backsliding in the region, but it is not the only place where democracy is imperiled. Nor is a traditional dictator a necessary component of democratic decay: Will Freeman has argued that Peru is a paradigmatic example of a nation where the democratic state apparatus has been left intact but is nevertheless “unable or unwilling to constrain predatory private powers — narco-traffickers, illegal gold miners, human smugglers, corruption rackets — and the officials and politicians who go into business with them.”

Freeman names Mexico as another example of a country where democracy is fading without the presence of a traditional strongman, and the second half of The Years of Blood shows us exactly how this process happens. In “The Morning Quickie,” we see a political associate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then serving as the mayor of Mexico City, captured on film accepting a briefcase full of cash from a rich businessman. In “Risking Life for Truth,” Guillermoprieto tackles the enormous dangers facing local newspaper reporters who report on the drug trade. In “A Voice Against the Darkness,” she pens a searing, moving tribute to slain journalist Javier Valdez. The final two stories in the collection, pieces of investigative reportage on the femicide crisis in Ciudad Juárez and the kidnapping of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, are riveting examples of Guillermoprieto’s mastery of the genre.

All of these stories take place in a democratic Mexico, after the country managed to topple the PRI’s perfect dictatorship at the turn of the century, and they together demonstrate how democratic life can be kneecapped by forces other than tyranny.

Elements of this might sound familiar to readers in the U.S.. Here, as in Latin America, we too are experiencing the corrosive effects of inequality and corruption on democratic life. Donald Trump is only referenced glancingly in The Years of Blood, where Guillermoprieto identifies him as a stylistic successor of Hugo Chávez, but the volume offers a lens through which to understand both his ascent and why Democrats’ appeals to the sanctity of democracy fell short at the ballot box last year.

Trump and his cabinet, for their part, are certainly interested in Latin America. At the beginning of January, the U.S. intensified its neo-imperial engagement with the region by kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela (a man Guillermoprieto variously calls “clumsy,” “goofy-looking,” and a “fool”), with Trump declaring that the U.S. is now “in charge” of the country. The Trump administration has also threatened Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, bombed boats in the Pacific, and appears to have regime change in Cuba next on its agenda. This aggressive posture towards the region comes as Trump and his lieutenants simultaneously attempt to excise Latin America from within the U.S., prosecuting a project of terror against migrants that the Department of Homeland Security claims has already resulted in two million removals and “self-deportations.” After creating and enforcing a hemispheric order that has left much of Latin America beset by inequality and violence, the U.S. finds itself grappling with some of the same issues.

Those opposed to Trump, then, must look to Latin America too. As Greg Grandin has argued, activists and center-left leaders in the region have an intimate understanding that if democracy is to work, it must deliver for people — must be true social democracy. The alternative is chilling.

If you’re concerned that The Years of Blood is a slog, rest assured: what has always made Guillermoprieto such an engaging chronicler of Latin America is her wit, curiosity, gift for portraiture, and sensitivity to the hopes and joys of the regular people who animate her stories. Guillermoprieto has professed not to closely follow politics or even vote, and her main enthusiasms — for food, art, and performance — shine in stories on the cholita wrestlers of El Alto, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film Roma, and a profile of the late English food writer Diana Kennedy, who devoted her life to Mexican cooking. Guillermoprieto writes that when Kennedy moved to Mexico in 1957 with her foreign correspondent husband, she fell in love in the neighborhood markets of Mexico City with “a universe of flavors, colors, textures, shapes, and aromas several light-years removed from her own.”

The profile of Kennedy is notable not just for its delicious descriptions of cactus fruits, hibiscus flowers, and moles oaxaqueños, but because it conveys why an outsider like Kennedy — or many of Guillermoprieto’s English-language readers — might fall in love with Mexico or Latin America. The inclusion of these stories, in turn, animates the significance of the political events Guillermoprieto spends the bulk of her time tracking. The cost of inequality and violence in Latin America becomes clearer the more time you spend with Guillermoprieto, often at street level, immersed in the textures of everyday life in the places she visits.

It is fitting that Guillermoprieto begins the introduction by recounting an interview she conducted decades ago with a 26-year-old Colombian man who was being held in a jail on the outskirts of Medellín. The man, whom Guillermoprieto calls Néstor, was accused of participating in a gruesome massacre in the small town of Segovia. During their conversation, he haltingly filled Guillermoprieto in on the details of his life, attempting to scratch out a living as a freelance gold miner and seeing one or more brothers — Guillermoprieto can’t be sure — gruesomely murdered. At the conclusion of their hour-long conversation, Guillermoprieto tells us she was “so full of Néstor’s mumbling despair” that she couldn’t think and couldn’t write, either. She was supposed to produce a story for the New Yorker about the Segovia massacre, but couldn’t. Guillermoprieto credits Néstor with helping her understand that the story she needed to write about Segovia — the story of bloodshed in Colombia — was not, as she first thought, a story about “evil murderers pitted against innocent civilians,” but rather one of the U.S.’s “reckless exercise of its immense power in Latin America.”

Guillermoprieto has told that story for more than 40 years, all while making space to relate in vivid color “the great, bubbling-over, defiant life” of the region. She ends her introduction by passing the baton, articulating her hope that “in the not-too-distant future a much younger writer will be able to report and write the stories of how peace was consolidated throughout these lands.” We should be so lucky to read those stories. It is only a shame Guillermoprieto herself hasn’t had occasion to write them.

Abe Asher is a writer whose reporting has been published in The Nation, Jacobin, VICE News, and a variety of other outlets.

To live with plants, even if one lives alone, is to not truly live alone. Plants are living beings, with both a genesis and a death; for a while, like us, they are infused with life and then that life recedes. I have wondered whether plants go to heaven when they die. Or whether their life essence, once it leaves their material substance, joins the greater consciousness, and whether we can feel their spirit surrounding us the way we do when a person dies.

“Everything alive is sentient,” Michael Pollan says in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Describing a walk home through a grove of trees, he tells us he is humbled by the sudden feeling that “the kinship of all these sentient others” could finally be “an antidote to our loneliness.” He echoes Wordsworth, who in describing nature spoke of something “deeply interfused.” Nature is infused with consciousness. One imagines, when reading this passage, the trees sensing Pollan’s realization and swaying in gratitude as he walks by.

A World Appears is Pollan’s 10th nonfiction book, and it is billed simply as “a journey into consciousness.” He has also written bestselling books on food, botany, gardening, and psychedelics. An impression of him, even before reading this book, glimmered in my mind as a kind of mysticism-whisperer to the respectable masses — someone capable of introducing potentially inflammatory ideas, such as the connection between mental health and psychoactive plants, to people who listen to NPR and wear slippers from L.L. Bean.

The visionary Book of Revelation in the New Testament speaks of a tree of life, growing on either side of a sparkling river “that produces fruit twelve times a year, once each month; the leaves of the trees serve as medicine.” Plants as sources of healing is a very old idea. Contemplation of a person’s interiority, and what it means to be aware, awake, and alive, is not a new practice either. Pollan is a science writer who looks into these spaces through a biological lens, but A World Appears is steeped from first word to last in spiritual longing.

It is not going too far to suggest that this book reaches toward religion in every way. It is a “re-enchantment” book, even if it does not fit into the contemporary canon of re-enchantment discourse (titles like Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder come to mind). Throughout Pollan’s questioning of what consciousness is, what sentience, feeling, and emotion are, and who or what has consciousness, he speaks with various scientists and brain specialists. Yet his sojourn ends with a stay in a remote cave on a Buddhist retreat property. He expresses resistance to the mind-body dualism that originated with Descartes, and examines the “bifurcation of nature we inherited from Galileo” which places quantifiable abstractions over “immediate experience.” Pollan also considers the meaning of terms like intelligence and cognition, and how we share these qualities with non-human beings like computers.

What, then, is consciousness? There is no scientific consensus. Is it merely sentience? Is it something like awareness of being alive? Is it the ability to think? To perceive? The philosopher Thomas Nagel believes that an organism is conscious if it is “like something” to be that organism (in other words, if it has subjectivity). For years, scientists have tried to crack what is known as the “hard problem” of consciousness. Why does it feel like something to be alive? Why don’t we simply carry out activities with a lack of sensation? Do animals feel what we do? Do plants?

Early in the book, Pollan describes himself as a humanist and a romantic of sorts. He is skeptical of reductive, chemicals-only explanations for existence. He finds in literature a better encapsulation of emotional experience, yet at the same time he is wary of his own attraction to what he calls “magic.” One gets the sense that the author is laying the groundwork so as not to alienate his typical reader — likely a secular, liberal, well-educated, and well-to-do dweller in a largely irreligious community. But there is something very deep in Pollan that yearns for mystic awareness. He is a seeker despite himself. He is masterful in his ability to seduce even the most rational reader into a consideration of what might be beyond — and that there could be a beyond at all. His writing is effective because he does not come across as a frizzy-haired hippie or proselytizing religious fanatic, but as a sensible everyman. He is not mushroom-hunting in purple Crocs, nor is he Bible-thumping. Yet, surreptitiously, he draws the most “trust the science” reader into cosmic territory. He is a contemplative with a willingness to enter into silence, and more than a little mischievous. I found myself glancing at his author picture repeatedly, seeing in his eyes on the back flap of the book a gaze that twinkled with stealthy delight.

The most interesting scientists Pollan talks to are humanists like Antonio Damasio, author of the famed book Descartes’ Error as well as The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. The descriptions of brainiacs in A World Appears are often amusing and provide extra insight into eccentric characters. Pollan tells us Damasio is “a vibrant and charming eightysomething, a compact figure with silvery hair swept back from his broad forehead. He was dressed head to loafer in designer leisurewear, all in black, and wore stylish round glasses with tortoiseshell frames.” He speaks of the neurologist’s “old-world air” and “passion for art, music, and literature.” Damasio is an example of a scientist who grounds his conception of consciousness in the body. Because human beings want to maintain homeostasis, we are aware of delicate changes in physical sensation and interpret them for the purpose of survival. This is a fascinating theory of emotion: we don’t generate tears because we are upset. First, the body generates tears, and our consciousness interprets that we are sad. Our bodies don’t shake because we are afraid; first, the body shakes, and we interpret that we have something to be nervous about. These ideas were first explored in the 19^th century by psychologist William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Consciousness being rooted in the incarnated body makes sense to me, a believing Catholic. I think consciousness would be served by being more deeply identified with the body, not less. Pollan makes a fine point when he notices that “curiously, we speak of ‘our bodies’ as something we own, which is why ‘I am my body,’ strikes the ear as off-key.” But I am my body. I experience a thousand physical sensations every day, some of which I misinterpret. My body is often right when I am wrong. I notice statements from artists throughout time which help me liberate my physical awareness from our analytical culture with its Puritan roots. Martha Graham said “the body never lies.” Lord Byron claimed that “the great object of life is Sensation.” Ariana Grande, in a pop song about sexual desire, references both Elvis and Mariah Carey in pleading for “a little less conversation and a little more touch my body.”

In fact, many of the impressions and objections Pollan shares, whether he’s conscious of it or not (and I don’t suspect he is), could be seen as leading to a Catholic worldview. The only Christian he mentions in his book is the unorthodox gnostic Blake Lemoine, who was formerly an engineer at Google, and the only spiritual figure we see him consulting is a Buddhist abbot. But his indignation at the view of consciousness often espoused by the AI community — “bloodless, bodiless, and utterly oblivious to biology” — could be soothed by immersion in the ritual of the Mass, in which we hear the words body and blood before our sacrament. He mentions that Damasio, the elegant neurologist, stands by “the premise that human feelings owe their existence to our vulnerability,” which echoes the Catholic idea that meaning is found in suffering.

A strong feeling for the sacredness of life can be evoked by varying quotations Pollan provides. He speaks with a psychologist named Arthur Reber who says that a single cell can sense its environment. “When some event is sensed, it is felt. It is experienced. It is encoded as a subjective phenomenal state — even when the organism doing the sensing is unicellular,” Reber explains. A philosopher named Evan Thompson tells Pollan that “my hunch is that sentience is woven into life from the beginning.”

By far the topic I’d most love to discuss with Pollan, if I got the chance, would be animism. Animism — the idea that everything in the universe is alive and has a spirit (anima in Latin means soul) — is close to the traditional Catholic belief in the sacramentality of nature, or the view that nature is infused with God. Both ideas are related to something Pollan calls panpsychism — “the ancient idea that everything . . . is conscious to some infinitesimal degree.” Pollan laments that Western science has given us the idea that other than human beings, “the rest of the world is more or less dead,” and that “the dead-world idea has helped the West prevail over traditional cultures that believe the world is alive with consciousness.” He sees psychedelic medicine as one way to overcome this learned anti-animism. But an animistic view is to be found within our Western tradition too.

In a 2019 episode of the podcast Strange Familiars called “A Monastic View of The Other,” host Timothy Renner speaks with a Franciscan friar named Brother Richard Hendrick who lives in Ireland. Brother Richard, a monastic who works closely in his community with neighbors needing prayer and healing, talks about the idea of the anima mundi, or world soul, and how in early Christian thought there was an “infinitude of steps on the ladder of consciousness.” Believers thought of the world as a “vast ecosystem of spirits,” and that originally, “all of this consciousness was able to communicate in various ways.” Although “our ability to communicate with creation” has been “broken,” he says, it is possible to reach this state of dialogue again through contemplative practices.

Saint Augustine introduced the idea of the world as a book offering messages to those willing to read or listen. If the Bible was the book of Scripture, the world and nature made up the “book” of creation. It is perfectly apt, Brother Richard explains, to combine strong Catholic faith with an older “understanding of the land as something alive, and living, and active.” As human beings, we are ourselves a “mix of consciousness and physicality.” He talks about other theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventure, suggesting that “every species, every individual plant or animal has its guardian spirit,” and brings up the idea of panentheism, or the notion that “the divine is present in everything that exists, in every aspect of nature . . . everything is a communicative word of the divine, so reality itself is sacramental.” This is different from pantheism, which sees nature as God. In panentheism, nature is a point of contact with God, while God transcends and is beyond nature.

In one of the most fascinating moments of the conversation, Brother Richard speaks about messages from God taking shape in animals or other beings when a person would otherwise be frightened and shocked by a more direct divine encounter. Is this what happened to Pollan when he decided to eat “a handful of magic mushrooms,” an experience he has described in detail? The author sits in his garden and, under the influence of psilocybin, is suddenly “certain of the sentience of the flowering plants.” They “returned my gaze,” he remembers writing in his journal, and beyond this, even “wished [him] well.” Is it possible that God gave Michael Pollan this taste of the sacramentality of nature, this inherent aliveness of all things, because he was open to another being — in this case the mushrooms? It does say in the Book of Revelation that healing will be provided through plant medicine. Some people are not open to the idea of God. In fact, the word “God” itself brings up massive blocks in many. But my sense is that God uses any opening possible in order to draw people toward belief. Since Michael Pollan was open to mushrooms, they were used as a portal to communicate, however briefly, this divine knowledge.

In a chapter called “Feeling,” Pollan writes about his meeting with a young scientist named Kingson Man, once a student of Damasio’s. Kingson tells him about his own experience inhaling a psychedelic derived from a toad that lives in the deserts of the Southwest. It was “the most profound experience of my life,” he shares with Pollan. “I disappeared, fell out of time, and then came back with the realization that everything in the world is love. . . . As a scientist, there’s no reasoning about it. But I understood for the first time that everything is connected by the same substance, and that substance is love. Afterward, I was overflowing with love. For every person on the street! . . . I came out of it convinced there’s a spark of the divine in us.”

This testimony, given to Kingson through an animal messenger, sounds remarkably similar to the American monk Thomas Merton’s account of a mystical experience on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, about an hour from his monastery in 1958:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs. . . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Merton, of course, was open to this experience because of his monastic practice. But God reaches people in various ways. The host of Strange Familiars, Timothy, at one point tells Brother Richard that he has always thought of himself as a “Marian animist”: a person for whom the Blessed Mother of Christ, Mary, has been deeply important, and who also believes in the living nature of all created things. Would it be too daring or expansive to suggest that Michael Pollan is, or has the capacity to be, a Marian animist as well? In the most boundless vision of the Blessed Mother lies the notion of Blessed Mother Earth — something Pollan obviously has feeling for, given his many books about gardening, food, plant medicine, and building himself a writing hut far in the Connecticut woods. His intuition that “everything alive is sentient” is not too far removed from William Blake’s “everything that lives is holy.”

It can be frustrating to watch Pollan search for answers to the question of consciousness in everything but the religious wisdom of our own Western tradition — like watching someone try to put a nail in the wall using a hairdryer instead of a hammer. Seeking deeper knowledge about the Christian understanding of consciousness, I contacted Luke Dysinger, a Benedictine monk and expert on Catholic bioethics living in California. He forwarded me a paper called “The Spirituality of Human Consciousness” by a theologian at Providence College named Terence McGoldrick. Of course, from a religious perspective, the idea of consciousness is inseparable from the idea of the soul. McGoldrick illustrates how the Catholic understanding of the soul grew out of Judaism and Greek philosophy, as well as the New Testament. While scientific inquiry is useful and worthy of respect, he insinuates, it can never fully account for nor penetrate the profound mystery of human consciousness. “Vital signs are measured daily in hospitals around the world, but life is more than the functions that always accompany it,” he explains. “The believer is not satisfied with the materialist’s reduction of intelligent and conscious life to biochemistry, because it does not account for this spiritual human experience of life.”

In many ways, McGoldrick sounds like a romantic himself:

Reducing human consciousness to an aggregation of cellular “desire to live” and a concert of neurons does not explain the wonder of human freedom, genius, love, virtue and intelligence. . . . Theories in biology of emergence and dynamic systems are compatible with belief in the human soul as the principle of conscious life only insofar as they recognize that consciousness is not reducible to the metabolic parts. The wonder of two people falling in love cannot be explained by gravity and the Big Bang theory and, similarly, human conscious freedom, from which the act of love in its noblest form arises, cannot be reduced to neurons. Without the self-conscious human soul, humans lose their individuality and become nothing more than accidental and temporary collections of atoms.

Perhaps a New Science is needed, one capable of taking into account the spiritual dimension of human life without reducing it to a solely materialist view. McGoldrick intriguingly calls this interdisciplinary approach neurotheology. What else could it be called? Mystic biology? Enchanted somatology? Pollan speaks excitedly of such an idea, suggesting that we will “have to broaden our conception of science.” He mentions that Evan Thompson, the philosopher who studies sentience, has collaborated with Buddhist thinkers. “A new science of consciousness will likely be a hybrid enterprise,” he contends.

In April of this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order meant to accelerate access to psychedelic drugs and develop “innovative research models” for the benefit of people with “serious mental illness.” The president explained that these drugs are a hopeful solution for the many veterans struggling with suicidal ideation, but another fact is worthy of note: psychedelics have been known to cause religious conversions. In his 2024 book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Rod Dreher confesses to having tried LSD during a period of despair in his college years. Although he is embarrassed to admit to this experience, it directly led to him becoming interested in Christianity. “Though I regret it, I must admit that it pulled me out of depression and opened my eyes to the fact that God was real,” he writes. Dreher maintains, and I agree, that it is possible and far more preferable to reach a similar state through “prescribed prayer and religious practice.” But perhaps some of us moderns require a substantial intervention to be able to accept a truth Dreher describes in The Benedict Option as obvious to the medieval Christian mind: “the world is charged with spiritual force.”

Pollan is an effective nonfiction writer because of his own sentience. Like a plant, he is able to sense his way toward the light, and to climb along the edge of what is life-giving to the collective unconscious. Like many great writers, he has a premonitory quality. His books How to Change Your Mind (2018) and This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021) preceded Trump’s executive order by eight and five years, respectively. If these titles presaged a collective turn toward psychoactive plants as healers, A World Appears may signal a coming shift toward a spiritual understanding of consciousness.

It may also add to people’s acknowledgment and acceptance of the sentience of plants and animals as far more similar to our own than we have assumed. This is something that many people intuitively know, but a great writer can crystallize in words what lies beneath the surface of shared awareness, ready to emerge. I remember a time in my own life when plants healed me. I was a younger woman then, suffering from panic disorder and awakened several nights a week by severe nausea that enveloped my whole physical being. I had tried therapy and many kinds of medication, but the attacks did not subside until I went to live on the farm of a man I loved. There, on long walks through his fields, my nervous system came down to earth, and I lay for hours in a grove of trees just beyond a stream at the edge of his property. Would it be too much to say that the plants were ministering to me in that moment? Hour by hour, my consciousness blended with theirs, until I saw everything as it is — infused with transcendental power. The anxiety subsided.

Some of the most beautiful sentences in A World Appears come in the last section, when Pollan describes his stay in a remote Buddhist retreat in the mountains of the Southwest. His lodging is a kind of monastic cell carved into a hillside that faces a meadow and has a sliding glass door. He has come here because, on some deep level, he senses the need to think of consciousness “less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice.” One night, after several days spent meditating and doing simple chores around the lodging, he looks up at the sky and sees it differently.

Instead of dotting the same black scrim, like pinholes in a two-dimensional theater backdrop, the stars were scattered through space at dramatically varying distances, a vast swarm of them filling every last corner of an even vaster, more numinous, and emphatically three-dimensional darkness. Even stranger, the negative space between the stars had flipped to positive, forming a soft, almost palpable blackness that embraced the stars and reached all the way to earth, enveloping it and me in the same intergalactic blanket. For the first time I could see — no, could feel — that the stars and I shared the same infinite space.

Pollan spends the majority of the book speaking to scientists before finally turning toward what he was looking for all along: the spiritual. The word “religion” means, at its root, to “re-tie”: ligare means to bind. The purpose of spiritual practice is to re-tie us to our source. It is possible to question consciousness, or even practice it; our deepest aim may be to enjoy it.

Emma Collins, a contributing writer to The Metropolitan Review, is the author of A New Heaven on Substack. She has written for the Washington Examiner, RealClear Books & Culture, and The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression. Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in Washington, D.C.

Please enjoy these poems by Beth Brown Preston and Alex Palmatier. These imagistic poems have a wistful quality as the present tries to make sense of the past. What are the things that we notice? What are the memories that stay embedded in us? And, perhaps most importantly, how do those memories shape what we notice today?

—The Editors

Once the Night 
 
Once the summer night fell over the sky like a dark cloth,
or a black evening dress thrown across heaven's starry bed.
The hoo-hoot of an owl's complaint echoed from the branches
of a maple tree in the front yard. All else was silence.
The neighbor's unruly dog lay hushed beneath the porch. And a gentle wind, so unlike the fierce winds of winter, combed the leaves of the maple like so much hair. 
 
We had solace for our grief inside talk about love. 
You do not understand: my life always has been a puzzle,
a rune, a card player holding an unlucky hand. 
 
You drank what remained of the red wine 
knowing it was time to remember our dead. 
 
What I meant to say is: the music of your voice filled 
that stillness. And, in a moment of sudden, yet quiet revelation, 
a presence I knew to be my own dead father arrived to sit beside me. 
 
There were so many words I could have said to escape 
the labyrinth, your prison of language. 
 
I lean into the hour of yet another sweet farewell. 

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction. She has published three poetry collections and two chapbooks of poetry. Her recent poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025). Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals. 

Natural History 

I come at an an odd hour;
Before midday on a weekday.
I wander through the cavernous halls, 
The comforting wooden benches at the center, underneath the elephants, 
Beside the dioramas of apple orchards,
The white tailed deer,
The black rhinoceros, 
The rings inside a cut redwood tree,
I listen to my echoing footsteps—laughter from a school group somewhere not far off.

I was here once as a child.
I remember my mother, with her disposable camera,
My pigtails swinging
Her hands on my waist and then up 
Up on the platform in front of the woolly mammoth that
Wasn’t a woolly mammoth but was just
Organized bones
Looming.

I remember the photograph, now lost
And the voice of the attendant telling me to get down from there
I think of all the photos of dead things next to living things
Walking along the porpoises and penguins suspended in epoxy
To sit beneath the great blue whale.

I imagine being swallowed like Jonah 
Or crushed by the falling figure itself
Or buried under all of it
Buried, not erased
Bones on display
Just a skeleton in a photo 
While the living press on.

Alex Palmatier is a poet and educator from New York. When she’s not in the classroom, she can be found knee deep in her garden or at the playground with her husband and son.  Her work has appeared in Chronogram and Blood + Honey.  

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We live in an unprecedented moment for booksmaxxing. I don’t know how I could otherwise make my way through authors like Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard — the latter of whom surely wrote not to be understood. With ChatGPT to help me sentence by sentence at times, Wikipedia, and the ungodly profusion of podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and other internet rabbit holes, I feel that I could read almost anything.

Given everything we have at our fingertips, naturally we should be producing the most sophisticated readers in human history. Makes sense, then, that in this golden age, we’d be living through a massive wave of book bans, self-canceling authors pressured by mobs who haven’t even read their books, and outrage over fictional characters whose ignorance is the whole point.

Wait, what?

In an interesting turn of events, it appears that the first generations with unprecedented access to human knowledge don’t understand the most basic things about thought or art, like that a depiction of something is not the thing itself, nor is it an endorsement of it. A lot could be said about their ignorance; at the very least, we could say they don’t know how to approach a book with nuance.

Against this backdrop, Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books? or Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), a call to arms for reading the great works of world literature, feels like a timely and welcome intervention.

Yet Kanakia’s defense of the Great Books isn’t quite what you’d expect. In the introduction, Kanakia lays her cards on the table, outlining exactly how she’s going to make her case. Rather than waxing rhapsodic with the lofty rhetoric of her academic forebears in the Great Books movement, she takes a characteristically methodical and thoughtful approach, where chapter by chapter she addresses the most common questions and objections from those she sees as her audience: left-leaning types.

Some questions are serious foundational questions like “What do you mean by ‘The Great Books’?” and “Where did your list of Great Books come from?” Other questions are distinctly of our cultural moment: “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?”; “When we say, ‘The Great Books are worth reading,’ do other people hear, ‘White men are inherently superior’?”; and “Can’t reading the Great Books be psychologically damaging for marginalized people?” These latter questions might seem as intellectually uninformed to some people as “Can I catch HIV by hugging someone?” Nevertheless, Kanakia engages with them fully and in earnest.

As a subscriber to Kanakia’s Substack newsletter, Woman of Letters, I was already accustomed to her honest, forthright style and willingness to carefully consider other points of view. But I’m not going to lie: the idea of approaching these questions systematically one by one seemed kind of boring and made me think I already knew where the book was headed. And designing it around some of the most common questions about and objections to the Great Books (I was already pretty sold on the concept — English major, Classics minor, I read Arendt and Baudrillard “for fun”) seemed tiresome at best.

Indeed, as I began to read Kanakia’s book, it was like traveling back to college when a professor takes up another student’s obvious question in class, and you slouch in your seat, roll your eyes, think to yourself, “Here we go,” and resign yourself to mentally checking out. Except that, as Kanakia’s book proceeds, the professor takes up their question with such thoughtfulness, patience, and respect that you stop fantasizing about the hot junior next to you and start to pay attention. Before long, you realize you’re crying, so moved that you have to excuse yourself to the bathroom, where sniveling and red-faced and puffy, you give yourself a good, hard stare in the mirror. In that moment, you vow to become a better person — one more like your professor — and, inspired not just by their intellectual integrity but their humanistic empathy, you change your life forever.

Yeah, reading Kanakia’s book was a bit like that. With her dialogic structure, Kanakia models the very intellectual generosity that she argues is part of what makes the Great Books great. And while engaging deeply with these questions, she invokes Homer, Socrates, Kant, William James, Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, James Baldwin, and many others, and brings free will, aesthetics, postmodernism, decolonization, cultural capital, and all your other favorite liberal arts suspects into the conversation.

Sound dry? It’s lively as hell, actually.

While Kanakia apologizes for her lack of academic pedigree (“Even now, I’m almost ashamed to be writing this book — who am I to write about the Great Books — I’m not a professor or a PhD!”), it’s probably one of her greatest strengths.

Unlike the tomes in the Great Books genre, which are written by and for academicians, Kanakia writes as an accomplished reader for the common reader, or the aspiring one. She wasn’t an English major. She grew up reading sci-fi, and despite her rare humanistic education at her Catholic high school, had very little interest in the Great Books until after college, when she took it upon herself to read the great writers so she could become a better writer of science fiction.

As she works through the questions in her book, Kanakia explores competing arguments from multiple angles, freely admitting her own doubts, uncertainties, and confusions. At one point she confesses, mid-thought: “I face a terrible, hopeless muddle, to the point where I am not even sure what I’m talking about anymore.” While most writers might try to conceal these moments, Kanakia follows them through. Such honesty only reinforces the book’s intellectual seriousness.

That’s not to say that Kanakia doesn’t have convictions. She reveals her 17 years of serious reading in her clear, finely weighed judgments and discriminating sense of taste. But she doesn’t just draw from what she’s read but from her own experiences, including her efforts to reconcile, as a trans person, the recent movement among the right in favor of teaching the Great Books. All of this adds up to something rarer and more compelling than a conventional defense of the canon: a consciousness. Kanakia offers not a dissertation, but, as in literature itself, an individual viewpoint.

But while Kanakia’s book avoids the abstraction and well-meaning yet ivory-tower loftiness of other Great Books proponents, it’s not without transcendence. Kanakia grants that the books won’t necessarily change your life and that some people may have better ways to spend their time (she offers up the example of her wife, an HIV research scientist looking for a cure). Yet her most compelling argument, which might also be the least fashionable, lies in defense of aesthetics.

Aesthetics are under attack in late capitalist digital America. Part of the reason is that, thanks to the democratization of aesthetic production and distribution through tools like Canva, as well as the very nature of the simulacral digital world, genuine aesthetic experiences have been replaced by brand signaling and instant interpretation. While we’ve had the democratization of the elements of aesthetics, we have yet to democratize deep thought.

As Kanakia reveals with the help of Great Books authors, it is nuance itself that characterizes aesthetics. While the manipulation of aesthetic elements is part of its practice, so is moral complexity.

Kanakia introduces Marxist critical theorist Terry Eagleton’s “ideology of the aesthetic,” which she defines as “the idea that our aesthetic sense gives us higher truths than human reason can.” It’s a seductive argument for aesthetic ideologues — and it’s been my own. Yet even though Kanakia admits that it’s at the core of her own position, she acknowledges its “fuzziness” and occult qualities. She proceeds, however, to ground the concept in a way that made me realize just how fuzzy my own notion of this has been.

An aesthetic sense isn’t some mystic faculty but the ability to make, as Kanakia writes, “finer distinctions in morality.” It’s through this lens that she explores books like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch. Why are some aesthetic works great while others fail? Why do we return to certain books while others disappear just as soon as we finish them? Kanakia suggests an answer:

[T]he Great Books tend to share one quality. They have a lot of integrity. They tend to be unflinchingly honest about whatever their subject happens to be. And this means that even when they come down on one side of a question, they usually make a fair case for the opposite side.

And here we come to the T-word. While she may not be capitalizing it, she’s most assuredly talking about Truth with a capital T. Not only that, Kanakia invokes yet another T-word — Taste, which it turns out isn’t just the inability to enjoy a Netflix original movie:

The Great Books are, more than anything, marked by their tremendous rigor, their drive to hold their own ideas up to scrutiny. And in that rigor, that paring away of what’s easy and facile, they bring us closer to the world-in-itself — the true, objective world that we can never know through reason alone. And it’s my contention that this rigor and honesty and care is synonymous with taste.

In our household, we don’t censor movies by violence and adult themes but by what I call “quality.” While I never explicitly explained this notion, by the time my kids were seven they seemed to grasp it intuitively as I shared with them what made the cut and what didn’t. Under our dictatorship of taste, my daughter recently got into replaying Terminator 2 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off while I was reading Kanakia’s book. We knew these were unquestionable inclusions on the “Quality” list, but I finally had the vocabulary to articulate why. Formal considerations aside (there’s also something to be said for the other capital word, Beauty, and Kanakia takes that up as well), they give a fair shake to opposing viewpoints. In Terminator 2, how can all machines be evil when the Good Terminator is able to form a stronger connection with John than any human has? Is it really worth all of Sarah Connor’s sacrifices for humanity’s future savior when she won’t even accept the french fries he saved for her? As for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while Ferris seems to be saying that life should be enjoyed, in the case of Ferris’ BFF Cameron, it appears that sometimes it’s about confronting painful and scary realities. True freedom doesn’t mean playing hooky from life, but if you focus on making a good little boy or girl out of everyone, like Rooney or Ferris’ sister, Jeanie, you risk missing the very thing that gives Cameron the courage to claim that freedom for himself.

For all her efforts to pin it down, Kanakia understands that a conversation about taste only goes so far; a work of true taste can never be reduced to explanation (sorry, book review reader). As Kanakia writes as she compares reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

Proust is indeed the superior author. To find out why, you simply need to read and appreciate him, because what you learn from reading him is something you need to read him to learn! If it could be conveyed without reading the book, there’d be no need to read the book. The answer is distinctly unsatisfying, and yet it is true.

It’s in Kanakia’s own pursuit of moral truth through nuance that her strength as a writer lies. She doesn’t use the showy language or inflammatory élan of other popular internet writers, but then, do we really need more of that anyway? There’s a strong aesthetic sense behind her clean, clear prose.

As for the rest of What’s So Great About the Great Books?, I’ll let the book do the talking for me. As Kanakia suggests when she argues in favor of reading Proust, there are some things you can’t do justice to in summary — even in a long-winded review. A testament to its own greatness, the same is true of her book.

Who knows? Perhaps one day sensitivity readers, self-canceling authors, outrage mobs, and ideas like the belief that you can catch someone’s “evil” by reading their work will seem as quaint as the old fears about hugging someone with HIV. At least for now, Kanakia gives us reason to believe that the tradition of nuance, generosity, and integrity passed down through the Great Books may help get us there.

Jesse Relkin is a fiction writer and critic. She publishes The Dreaded Word, a Substack on literature and culture.

Military life has long served as reliable fodder for American literature, which should come as no surprise: something about stories of men from all corners of the country facing danger as a team is inherently dramatic. From Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, authors have mined the ups and downs of military life not just to shine a light on what makes those institutions — and the people who work them — tick, but also the American experience as a whole. Sometimes this even takes a comic turn, as seen in Joseph Heller’s satirical masterpiece, Catch-22, or Neil Simon’s autobiographical play Biloxi Blues, which documents his stint in the U.S. Army (with plenty of gags thrown in for good measure).

It is from this very established tradition that Yannick Murphy’s new novel, Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really emerges. As the title suggests, the story focuses on a group of submariners — aka bubbleheads — in the U.S. Navy, and if you skip the mini-foreword, you just may think the book is a memoir. It certainly reads that way, as Murphy yanks you deep beneath the ocean’s surface and straight into the “big steel tube of dumb” that the sailors call home. You’re then immediately delivered into the head of David Sterling, a radioman in his early 20s as he nears the end of his five-year stint underwater. His racing thoughts make up the book’s story and play out as if he himself had committed them to the page.

This book, however, is very much a novel, and it’s a credit to Murphy’s considerable powers as a writer that she may trick you — at least at first — into thinking you’re reading a true first-person account. As is briefly explained before the story starts, all three of Murphy’s children are submariners in the U.S. Navy: one is retired, while two are active duty. Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really is said to be “a work of fiction blended with her children’s stories from overseas phone calls and underway emails,” and in lesser hands it could read as an inauthentic pastiche. Murphy, however, is an accomplished, award-winning novelist, and the claustrophobic, often crude, mostly male world she builds never rings false. The writing is also full of enough Navy slang, acronyms, and abbreviations that you may find yourself — like me — consulting Google every three or four pages.

Our protagonist, David Sterling, is obviously bright, but he was a shiftless, poor student in high school. Facing few options after graduation, he joined the Navy because he “liked submarines” (a passion instilled by his father, a full-blown sub geek), but now that his time is almost up, the prospect of college looms. His parents are constantly pushing him to enroll in a university when he gets out, but Sterling wonders “if there is a shit ass college for me out there. Is there one that admits students with high school grades more like their shoe sizes?” His ticket to college is the G.I. Bill, but he fears he’ll self-sabotage before claiming his reward by mouthing off to an officer and ending up with the “Big Chicken Dinner, aka dishonorable discharge.”

Sterling has never had a girlfriend, a secret he confessed to his comrades during sub school. One reason for this is his weight. This doesn’t go unnoticed in the confines of the submarine, where every physical flaw is the target of ruthless ribbing. “The gay guy Manning . . . tells me I’m fat,” Sterling says, “and he’d never do me, and I’m actually relieved for once to be fat.” On several occasions he refers to his “ba-donk-a-donk ass,” and this, plus the “Bigfoot is Real” bucket hat he often sports, paints the picture of an overgrown nerd in a poopy suit — the jumpsuits that serve as the uniform for enlisted men onboard.

Like any good military book, it’s the supporting cast — all referred to by surnames or nicknames — that really breathes life into the story. Baitz is from South Carolina and “thinks that North Carolina is in the North.” Tintin is an Iowa farm boy named after the comic book character on account of his greasy ginger cowlick. Grenadier hails from the mean streets of South Chicago and admits to gangbanging before enlisting. Bortlein is called “Borderline” because of his tendency to violently flip out, while Cordova “has one of those hook noses that makes him look like he just came running down the steps at Chichen Itza in a loincloth.” Their captain sounds like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, and every time he signs off on the sub’s P.A., Sterling and his buddies respond in Texas drawls with “Alright, alright, alright.” Doc — the boat’s medic — is an intense loner from NYC and a known woman-beater, and Sterling — due to failing his role in a fire drill — comes to be known as simply “Dead Man.”

These men represent the regional and racial patchwork that is the modern U.S. military — which Sterling describes this way:

Sometimes I think of our submarine as the Noah’s ark of all different types of humans. If we were to sink to the bottom of the ocean and be found hundreds of years later, there would be no shortage of a diverse gene pool with which to start colonizing the planet.

The submarine is based in the island territory of Guam in the Western Pacific, and while their supposed nemesis in those waters is the Chinese navy, the biggest enemy they face aboard the boat is boredom. Sterling and his buddies in the radio room — known as “the Goon Squad” — do anything they can to pass the time. They argue about whose mother makes better pancakes. They speak in mafia accents. They scuffle, wrestle, and put each other in headlocks at the slightest provocation. They watch old movies ranging from Cool Hand Luke to Pretty in Pink, and Sterling entertains them all with stories from home:

The guys on the boat want to hear the story about the time the heavy snow on the powerline cut the electricity, so my father went out with the shotgun and tried to shoot the snow off. They want to hear about the calls I went on with my father, the veterinarian, to treat horses and cattle. The time we pulled out a newborn calf, but it was dead, and all we pulled out were the legs that had broken off from the body that was still inside the mother.

As the book progresses, it’s clear that Sterling comes from a different social class than his boatmates. After all, his father is a veterinarian — hardly a proletarian occupation — and the family home in New England comes complete with a private pond. This — plus the fact that he has a college education in his future — makes him stand out from the rest of the enlisted guys on the crew. Grenadier is aware of this, and encourages Sterling to grab the opportunity in front of him. “Go to college,” he says. “I’ve never been, but I bet it’s dank. Chicks and shit. You don’t have to stand watch. You don’t have to live in a metal fucking tube. Besides, you’d be good at college. You’re smart and shit.”

Sterling’s buddies clearly grew up rougher and poorer, and their current life choices put them on a vastly different trajectory. Grenadier is married to a stripper back in Chicago. They have two kids, but when it becomes clear she wants to leave him, it sends him into a tailspin. Tintin is in love with another stripper named “Kitten” from one of the clubs they frequent back in Guam, and — despite Sterling’s repeated warnings — is determined to tie the knot with her.

Murphy’s prose shines best when she’s describing the day-to-day passing of time on the sub, with illuminative passages such as this:

I start whistling riffs from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. Baitz reaches his hand up to his face and starts squeezing a zit on his cheek between two fingers. Wonton cracks his neck, and we all agree that it sounds like fucking popcorn being cooked.

She also keenly describes the unwritten rules that govern sub life, especially when it comes to the crews’ bunks known as “Rackistan”: “Pulling back another guy’s rack curtain when it’s closed is grounds for all-out-war, and even if you think your rack mate is on his deathbed, you do not open the curtain to his inner spanktum.”

While the mundanity of sub life may be enough for a slice-of-life story, Murphy manages to inject enough drama into the proceedings to prevent any narrative navel-gazing. There is a suicide attempt. Doc becomes convinced that one of the crew is spying for the Chinese, and attempts to enlist Sterling as his eyes and ears. A group of Navy SEALs launches a mission from the boat to recover a submersible device captured by the Chinese, who respond by shadowing the sub with one of their own. Finally, during a crew swim session on the surface, known as a “steel beach party,” one of their numbers never makes it back onto the boat.

All of these crisis-laced sub stories certainly elevate the stakes in Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really, though they do feel shoehorned at times, as if Murphy didn’t trust that a day-to-day examination of submarine life where nothing extraordinary ever happens would be sufficient fodder for a novel. Maybe she’s right, but the book works best when it’s not trying too hard to drum up some Hollywood action.

The actual submarine scenes occupy just the first half of the novel. Due to a conflict with a superior who seemingly has it out for him, Sterling is grounded to the base in Guam while the sub returns to sea without him, pondering his soon-to-be civilian future while taking a resume-writing class, which includes penning college-entrance essays, igniting a new passion. He soon is discharged and makes his way back stateside, where, after a stint with his parents in New England, he finds himself enrolled at a nameless midwestern university. Supported by the G.I. Bill, he immediately feels out of place, surrounded by bright and shiny, much younger students with stridently woke sensibilities and very little life experience. “I’m wearing my boat T-shirt with the name of our sub on it,” he remarks on the day of his arrival at the college. “The T-shirt’s dark shitty brown with black lettering, and the shorts I’m wearing are also brown. I look like a muddy river trout in a sea full of neon tetras and paradise fish.”

This sense of alienation is made worse in his creative writing class, where his first story — an account of visiting a legendary brothel known as “Four Floors of Whores” on shore leave — is savaged by fellow students for running afoul of current sensibilities. “Nobody talks about the story, instead they talk about how I shouldn’t call women whores and that I’m being derogatory toward women,” he laments. “On the first day of class, the teacher said we should write about what we know. That was my mistake.”

Despite the fact that Sterling is thousands of miles away from the sub, sub life can’t seem to quit him. He thinks about the Navy constantly, longing to be back underwater with his old crew of misfits. Some send him occasional emails filling him in on sub gossip and encouraging him to re-enlist, which tempts him as his college life feels empty. The one quasi-friend he’s made (his video-game-playing partner) seems hopelessly naive and unable to understand his previous life, and it’s also the same with Taloe, a girl introduced as a possible love interest.

Most notably, Sterling suffers from hearing voices in his head in the form of his comrade who went missing during the swimming break, who at times berates him for going civilian and turning his back on his bubblehead buddies. Whether this is a specter of his guilt or an actual mental break is never made clear, but once Sterling settles more and more into the rhythms of regular life, the voice fades away.

His final encounter with sub life happens when his old buddy Tintin, in the midst of a drugged-up psychosis, appears at his doorstep on a bug-eyed quest to track down his ex-fiancée, the stripper-turned-student at the university (it all seems a bit too convenient plot-wise, but hey, sometimes writers need to keep things simple). Just when Sterling is finding his groove as a respectable civilian, Tintin acts as a tornado from his past, almost blowing him completely off the tracks. Tintin also acts as a potent reminder that sub life wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, and that we tend to romanticize our pasts.

This seems to be a big idea in Things That Are Funny on a SubmarineBut Not Really: that our memories define us, at least for a while — especially when formed in our teens and early 20s. This is why the once-great high school quarterback will still tearfully wax poetic about his glorious game-winning touchdown 30 years down the road, and why so many military guys can never really shed the armor they once donned. The bond created between humans who wear the uniform is stronger than lifelong civilians such as myself can ever really fathom, which is why it’s remarkable that Yannick Murphy — never having served herself — captures these feelings so clearly. I suppose it’s because, as a mom, she knows a thing or two about mutual love and obligation, and that greatly aids the telling of this story.

Chris Tharp is the author of The Cuttlefish and two other books. He has been a regular contributor to National Geographic, The Telegraph, Asia Times, and plenty of fancy travel mags. He lives in Busan, South Korea with his wife and a pack of animals, and his Substack is called The World According to Tharp.

One of the most irritating things we learn in Ted Geltner’s new biography of Denis Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, is just how easy it all was for Denis. Not that Denis’ life was easy — anyone who’s picked up Jesus’ Son is at least dimly aware that DJ blasted away his 20s careening between dope and booze before he got his act together — but the writing, if we’re to believe Geltner’s reverent account, came to him with blissful, galling ease. It began at the University of Iowa, where a 19-year-old Denis (“It was always Denis, not Denis Johnson,” Joy Williams insists) showed up to his freshman year seminar with a poem that left his classmates dumbfounded. “Nobody was able to manage any suggestions for improvement,” Geltner reports. Dejected, the class slinked off to “go listen to some Bob Dylan records.” Poor, defeated hippies. For the next seven years, as Denis muddled through an MFA, he routinely shocked professors into slack-jawed awe and drove students into paroxysms of envy with his immense and inexplicable talent. By 1974, “Well, it’s another Denis Johnson poem” had become a weary refrain around campus.

“Immediately,” “promptly,” and “quickly” are the adverbs that pepper Geltner’s breezy summary of Denis’ college years: Denis’ poems were “immediately” put on track for publication, and once that happened, Denis — restless and in search of further worlds to conquer — turned his attentions to Iowa’s fiction workshops. The first short story he ever wrote, “The Taking of Our Own Lives,” was “promptly” accepted by the North American Review. The next landed at The Atlantic and provoked Houghton Mifflin to “quickly” make Denis a deal for his not-yet-written debut novel. It’s enough to make the reader, who’s probably a writer, squirm with jealousy as they consider the drafts, rejections, “in-progress” submissions, fragments, jottings, and half-baked ideas clotting up their desk and their desktop.

That the audience for a Denis Johnson biography is likely to consist of writers themselves is obvious. It’s not that Denis can be comfortably labeled a “writer’s writer” (although Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures comes enthusiastically blurbed by Jenny Offill and T. C. Boyle, who claims, erroneously, that it’s a “biography with all the fluidity and thrust of a novel”), but that he, even more so than his mentor Raymond Carver, can be held responsible for the applications of at least several thousand young writers to MFA programs across America. The truth is that Denis wrote marvelously, and, crucially, he produced the kind of effortless prose that seemed imitable, the sort of writing that made one think, “Maybe I could do that.”

His formula was deceptively simple: take the minimalism and subject matter of Carver (“The Savoy Hotel was a bad place”), add a dash of Whitmanian lyricism (“I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth”), and presto, you had yourself a heartsick little gem like “Work” or “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” Of course, try to do this at home and you’ll find that it’s teeth-grindingly difficult work. So one cracks open Gestures determined to find answers. What made Denis tick? What was his routine? Was he a Balzacian, sustained by endless gallons of coffee, or did Denis draw his inspiration from some deeper interior well — heroin, followed by religion? We want to know how, exactly, he wrote those novels, and those stories, and those sentences. Reading about his life, we want a little of his power for ourselves.

It’s pointless to try and answer these questions — we’re almost better off knowing nothing about him — but Geltner sets himself to the task patiently. Denis left no instructions for a potential biographer before he died, so it’s up to Geltner, a professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, to track down the usual grab-bag of friends, lovers, ex-wives, colleagues, former instructors at the U of I, writing retreat buddies, barflies, gadflies, and hangers-on, all of whom seem as mystified by Denis as we are ourselves. The result of all this pavement-pounding is a diligent, respectful account of Denis Johnson’s life, from birth to death, addiction to sobriety, and obscurity to (sadly truncated) literary fame. Relevant interviewees are quoted throughout, appropriate historical context is provided, but ultimately Gestures is long on detail, short on insight, and although a tone of quiet worship is struck throughout, one finishes the book with the strong sense that Denis would not have wanted it written.

If the writing came naturally to Denis, it was the business of living that he was ill-suited for. “I can’t remember very many situations,” he told the LA Times, “where I had even the tiniest idea what the heck was going on. Meanwhile, you humans, you Earthlings — you all seem right at home.” We roll our eyes reading this — a clever writer’s folksy self-mythologization — but one of Gestures’ great revelations is that Denis Johnson, in addition to being one of the more graceful prose stylists of the last half-century, was also a complete buffoon. Newly arrived at the University of Iowa, Denis quickly took up with Nancy Jo Lister, an Iowan who found Denis “an exotic, romantic figure.” By sophomore year, Nancy was pregnant with his child. Denis reacted to this news by getting drunk and chucking a bottle of whiskey out of the cafeteria window. The couple moved into a two-bedroom and prepared for the arrival of their first child. Nancy’s parents bought them a crib and Nancy decorated the nursery. For his part, Denis, the boy-poet, decreed that if the child “was a girl . . . she should be called Tangerine.” If it was a boy, he would be christened “Changer D’avis.” Geltner earnestly explains that translated from the French, this means “change your mind,” but the effect, when spoken, is more Appalachian than French — closer to Breece D’J Pancake than Guy de Maupassant. The child was a boy. Fortunately, his parents had recently seen the 1966 slapstick comedy Morgan! starring Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner. Having enjoyed the film, Denis and Nancy decided to name their firstborn after it. Morgan would be Denis’ only biological child.

More examples of his dumbassery ensue, each less charming than the last. As Geltner put it, Denis was “middle-class gone crazy,” which meant that he was a sloppy alcoholic and a druggie who spent the better part of the ’70s embarrassing himself. Geltner dutifully records each one of Denis’ moronic misadventures. These range from the risible, like when Denis, a new hire at Lake Forest College in Chicago, decided that instead of grading each student’s work by hand, “he would throw the entire pile of essays down the stairs” and assign grades based on where they fell, to the repulsive, like when he encouraged his seven-year-old son to make friends in a new neighborhood by passing out porno mags.

Much of the flavor of these sodden, peripatetic years is contained in Jesus’ Son. The hangovers, the driftlessness, the mornings waking up dead broke and hitchhiking to the next crummy town, countless days weathering “the common humiliations of a human life.” This period makes for grim reading, but one realizes, raising an eyebrow, that Denis had a dim idea that all of it — the pain, the homelessness, his addictions — was necessary research. He was hungry for any kind of experience, the seamier the better. Pills, guns, needles, burglary, drunk driving, unplanned pregnancies, general disreputability: Denis hoovered it all up. “You’re only hanging out with us so you can write about us later, aren’t you?” one of Denis’ pals at the Vine, a favored dive in Iowa City, asks him. Right he was: the Vine — “a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere”— would appear in Jesus’ Son, along with its regulars. It becomes laughable how often Geltner, having just described another sordid scene, magnanimously concludes that it “would lead to some memorable stories down the road,” or at the very least, promises us that “Denis observed and took notes.”

But by the late ’70s, Denis had realized that his powers of observation and “even his ability to write poetry . . . had abandoned him.” Finally scared straight, he retreated to his parent’s house in Arizona, where he sobered up with startling alacrity. In the span of two pages, Denis goes from a “bloated and pale” lush to a hearty and hale all-American. The reader’s head spins. At this point, Geltner might pause to reconcile Denis’ recusant youth with his newly sober and monkish 30s, and to explain the congruence between his life and his art. Instead, he plugs on, and Gestures becomes a dull catalog of novels published, fellowships won, and plaudits received.

It’s a pity, because there is fertile ground here. A shrewder writer might have seized the opportunity to become an English department’s resident Denis Johnson expert — all it would take is a chapter on his relationship to his class of lyrical realists and some plucky assessment of his oeuvre. But Geltner is strangely timid when it comes to evaluating Johnson’s work — the wrong tack for this biography, because after the derangements of his 20s, work was all Denis had left. Sober and clear-headed, powers of observation recovered, Denis started writing and never really stopped. First came Angels, written in two spurts separated by a decade and not quite so convincingly soldered together. Next, emboldened by a grant-winning streak, Denis pumped out Fiskadoro, a puzzling post-apocalyptic daydream, and the Robert Stone homage Stars at Noon. Both novels are only ever fitful displays of Denis’ talent. He seemed aware of this. “Actually [Fiskadoro is] kind of a weird book,” he wrote to a friend. “But who cares?” Denis certainly didn’t.

The ’80s pass by in a productive blur of plays, poems, stories, and essays, but Jesus’ Son, Denis’ 1992 collection of highway-side missives, is the star attraction here — indeed, it’s the book upon which Geltner’s argument for his greatness hangs. In his fabulistic retelling, Denis was looking for a way to pay for his divorce from Lucinda Johnson when he happened upon some short stories he had written 30 years prior stashed in a drawer. All he had to do was staple them together and mail the packet off to Jonathan Galassi at FSG, who promptly pronounced them masterful, had them published, and gave Denis the biggest success of his career. All that’s left for us to say, hopelessly, is “Well, it’s just another Denis Johnson story.”

Geltner, so far, so reticent, devotes a fulsome chapter to Jesus’ Son. According to him, the book “directly tapped into the vibe of an era” — the ’90s — and “fill[ed] a hole in a new generation searching for touchstones.” Vibes and touchstones, like much of Geltner’s writing, sound suspiciously vague. Jesus’ Son was certainly the book that established him as a serious, unusual writer, but by now the reader, becalmed in a sea of drab facts, longs for Geltner to express a bold opinion or make an interesting claim about Denis’ life and work. This is the first biography to be published since Denis passed away nine years ago; one feels that it should go some way to tidying up Denis’ place in the American literary canon. He was not a titan like DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy — although at times his work shared some of DeLillo’s Americana or the flinty spirituality of novels like The Crossing — nor was he (as his detractors would have it) a mediocre prose-poet, someone like Richard Brautigan. The cliché, in this case, is true: his influences were often obvious, but what he did with them, when it came time to sit down and do the work, was anything but. There’s Carver of course, along with Graham Greene, Leonard Gardner, and Conrad, yet at its best Denis’ prose seemed peerless.

Post-Jesus’ Son, Gestures begins to lose steam. Simply put, Denis’ life became sort of boring. He wrote, he taught, he accepted occasional assignments from Esquire or Salon, he bought 200 acres in Idaho and a pad in the Bay Area, where he married Cindy Lee, his third wife. But Geltner is a Denis fan, and as a fan, he has a fan’s quiddities, his bêtes noires and pet topics. We’re treated to a chapter on Denis’ dalliances with literary journalism (“It was Denis’s first published work of journalism. It was also his masterpiece of the form”), even though Denis, who once described journalists as a “pack of lemmings,” clearly saw his trips to Kabul or Liberia as paid opportunities to gather material for his fiction. He suggests that Denis should’ve received a National Book Award for Jesus’ Son — the “creation that the gods of literature had actually chosen to preserve for eternity” — rather than Tree of Smoke. (I disagree: Tree of Smoke, Denis’ 700-page Vietnam War epic, is his masterpiece and the gods of literature, wherever they are, were right to bestow one of their highest honors upon it.)

Elsewhere Gestures can be repetitious, unclear, listless, sterile, and excitable: “Much of the work of transforming his experiences from the trip with Messer into literature would take place at an ideal location for such work.” Or this passage: “It was now part of the wider ‘human experience,’ and Denis believed he had a calling to write stories from that human experience.” And when Geltner does reach for some verve, we’re confronted by sentences like “Denis dined with Somali fighters high on chhaht, the warrior’s drug of blood and ecstasy.” Besides the bizarre spelling of khat (qat or qhat are also acceptable), it would be more apt to characterize the leaf, a mild stimulant chewed as a social pastime in the Horn of Africa, as the loafer’s drug of zippy conversation and slight insomnia.

“Nobody could ever possibly imagine how clumsy, silly and stupid that great man was in his youth,” Baudelaire wrote of Balzac. “And yet he managed to acquire . . . not only grandiose ideas but also a vast amount of wit. But then he never stopped working.” So it goes with Denis: first we get the idiot, thrashing around the heartland; then we get Denis the weathered and weary mystic — as Jonathan Franzen grandly put it, “the God I want to believe in has a voice and sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s”; and finally we get Denis the writer. Yes, he was uncommonly talented and unreasonably lucky, but what Gestures ultimately reveals is what we already half-suspected about him: each effortless sentence required slavish devotion, incessant tinkering, and a steely focus. You’re left admiring Denis — his creative powers, his reserve, his mulishness and determination — but he remains a remote figure, a kind of wonderful savant adrift among the earthlings. Only once while reading Gestures did I feel noticeably close to him. Right before he died, before the liver cancer took over, he asked his wife, Cindy Johnson, “Is it ok if I stop writing now?” Everybody knows that feeling.

Max Callimanopulos is a writer who lives in New York City. He most recently wrote about the singer Αkon in the London Review of Books.

I got one half of the two-part equation from each of my parents. My father was an editor and writer and my mother was a commercial artist.

In the beginning, drawing was dominant because it came naturally while writing had to be learned. But writing represented the ultimate power, embodied in a pile of typed or printed pages like one of the manuscripts in my father’s office or one of the dense books without pictures in it on his bookshelf.

Illustrated children’s books (the kind on my bookshelf) especially Howard Pyle’s King Arthur — his fine-line drawings of knights, armor, chainmail, banners, swords, stone walls, the grass where the men were fighting — made an early and lasting impression on me, forming my lifelong taste for pen-and-ink drawings combined with text.

I imitated Pyle’s drawings in style and subject matter and put my initials at the bottom of the page in imitation of his signature. I practiced penmanship, calligraphy. Drawing was my route into writing. Handwriting is a bridge between the two activities. To this day, I use the same pen to write and draw, a Pilot fineliner, the same model my father stockpiled at home for marking up manuscripts.

When I was five, I tried to write a novel. I managed a page of nonsense that began “Dear Reader” and ended “The End.” My sitter saw it and laughed. Later, wanting to write but not knowing what to say, I simulated text by drawing pages of squiggly lines and made-up symbols.

Another line-drawing illustrator, Edward Gorey, that depicter of hapless Victorians suffering curious mishaps, introduced me to captions. His were darkly humorous. I eventually made a book of captioned drawings notable for their perversity. I would draw a drawing first — it was the problem — then think of a caption, the solution.

It took me decades, until my early forties, to produce a first novel. I wrote it by hand. Of course the book wasn’t illustrated, but I made a conscious effort to write with images.

Drawing went on hold during the all-consuming effort of a second novel, when I was trying to prove that the first one hadn’t been a fluke. Seven years later, when I could see light at the end of the tunnel, I started drawing again. The pictures here are from that time (2020-21).

I was trying to solve a different problem: the stereotyped image produced by muscle memory. To break through, I drew from life, sometimes using myself as a model, forcing myself to observe what I actually saw.

Paglia appears because she had been a patron saint of mine for years. Her big-tent view of art, embracing everything from cave painting to rock ‘n’ roll, had helped free my pen from rules my editor-father imposed, which I felt were too narrow.

In this picture I seem to be asking her for something — maybe sympathy, wisdom, or her blessing in support of my struggle to complete The War for Gloria.

But it is someone other than Paglia, someone who asks not to be named, who has proved to be my most reliable guide. This friend gave me the single best piece of wisdom about writing that I’ve heard from anyone anywhere: it’s a process.

I think this statement applies across the board to all fine, serious art: it is a process of finding what to represent, what should be in the painting or the literary scene, what the drama should consist of. The process takes place through trial and error and involves stirring the deep well of instinct, emotion, imagination, and dream, which has its own cyclical timetable. The artist sails on the sea of the subconscious until images come up from nature itself.

While I have devoted myself to writing novels for the past eighteen years and will continue, I consider myself an artist, not a writer. My favorite art form is the novel.

How important are words? How important are pictures? Both are important; I don’t see that either should banish the other. The artist should honor — and stimulate — both eye and ear. But his first task is to conjure people to life and, like a medium channeling spirits, let them speak and act through him. The novel can be sung, chanted, mimed, painted, filmed, animated, printed in braille, carved on the wall of a cave. What matters is the art act, the mirror of human life.

Atticus Lish is the author of two novels, PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE (2014) and THE WAR FOR GLORIA (2021), and a book of eccentric cartoons called LIFE IS WITH PEOPLE (2011). He lives in California with his wife Beth of 31 years and he’s working on his third novel.

Two short story collections by trans men were released in 2025, CRAWL by Max Delsohn and Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik. (A disclosure: Max Delsohn is a friend of mine.) Both collections are humorous, and both collections feature a lot of pink on their covers. I’m fond of these color schemes, as if together these covers wink at their contents’ ironic approach to representing masculinity. One might expect the covers to assert their authors’ identity more firmly, considering how rarely books are released by trans men. To my knowledge, no organization is publishing statistics on trans publications, but I would be surprised if more than a handful of literary fiction books by trans men are published each year; expand that to other genres and you might, optimistically, number more than a dozen. So as a trans man, I was quite excited to have two literary story collections in one year, and I’ve wanted to write about these two collections together. Although they’re different in style and tone, their commonalities signify a refreshing direction for transmasculine literature.

And yet, discussing identity in Realistic Fiction and CRAWL feels like an essentializing act, pigeonholing both works as “trans guy books.” This is the trap of representation discourse: noting the significance of identity risks portraying the work as relevant only to those with a vested interest in said identity, or worse, as an obligation; reading for representation makes reading a political duty, like eating your vegetables or calling your senators. There is also an evaluative element, as the lens of representation inevitably calls up the specter of positive or negative representation. This limits the scope of critique and devalues the work’s artistry.

While I did feel personally “represented” by some of these stories, in that I recognized experiences and feelings from my own life, reading these funny, crude, imaginative, and absurd collections should be no one’s homework. These stories should be read because of their quality, not because of what they do to represent trans lives. Yet writing about these books as if how they depict trans life has no bearing on their quality would be disingenuous.

Aid comes to me through a definitional theory of short stories that predates our modern representation discourse, hailing from the 1960s: Irish writer Frank O’Connor’s language regarding the short story’s “submerged population.” In the 20^th century, O’Connor was regarded as one of the preeminent short story writers of his time. He elaborated on his submerged population theory in a 1961 lecture series at Stanford, lectures that have been collected in The Lonely Voice. To O’Connor, the chief element which distinguishes the short story writer from the novelist is that, while the novel is primarily concerned with how a character relates to society, characters in short stories don’t have the option of relating to society; they are remote, set apart, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes.” It is this focus on the outlawed figure that gives the short story writer license to articulate “an intense awareness of human loneliness” and gives the short story its particular lean towards characters whose isolation and absurd framing make them ill-fitting to be novel heroes.

The short story draws its outlaws from a submerged population, by which O’Connor does not necessarily mean a group marginalized on some identity axis, but rather any group the writer feels an affinity for and in which there is potential for alienation. In The Lonely Voice, O’Connor writes:

We can see in [the short story] an attitude of mind that is attracted by submerged population groups, whatever these may be at any given time — tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers, and spoiled priests . . . the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community — romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.

Gogol had his officials, Turgenev had his serfs, Chekhov had his doctors and teachers, Joyce had his Dubliners; some of these groups, yes, we’d consider to be marginalized or oppressed using today’s vocabulary, but almost all of the writers O’Connor analyzes through this lens are cis-heterosexual white men, and we don’t think of their bodies of work as representing the underrepresented. Instead, their work is generally acknowledged as universal, but they achieved this universality through dedicated focus on alienated groups.

Opting for the language of “submerged population” over the language of “representation” is not a picayune difference in word choice, but an ideological difference. Representation discourse presents a utilitarian argument, one that fundamentally elevates a story’s political utility over its artistic merits. Recognizing a writer’s attention to their submerged population is an artistic analysis that both recognizes the importance of the submerged group to the writer’s craft, and gives craft primacy over political utility. For O’Connor, when a writer brings a submerged group to life — and, crucially, when the writer gives their submerged characters full autonomy to act out their own values and culture, independent of those dictated by their society — this is the mark of a genuine storyteller. Far from pigeonholing marginalized writers to a niche audience, this framework correctly places them beside Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Joyce, et al.

CRAWL gives attention to its submerged population through studied realism, its characters feeling like they could have walked into fiction from real life. Most of the collection’s trans men have ties to queer and trans community, but these ties generate more angst than succor. In “Same Old,” a character must wrestle with the responsibility that he has (if any) to another younger, suffering trans man. In “Geeks,” Ray is tortured by his unspoken love for another trans guy, one who calls him “brother” and whose emotional unavailability seems tied to his transition. “Don’t Be Boring” examines the friendship and exploitation between a trans man and a cis gay man as vicious as he is gorgeous. And in “The Bubble,” Delsohn’s most direct confrontation with an idealistic vision of community, he exposes the thorny intricacies of trans community over the course of one summery afternoon in a public park. We find the protagonist of “The Bubble,” after he’s spent hours attending to the emotional wounds of his fellow trans dudes, discouraged by the utopian ideal of “community.” Any trans person who has tried to live in community with other trans people will recognize his disillusionment: “[That] ‘trans family’ speech was a pipe dream. Or it was one big family of babies. Just babies smearing shit all over each other and calling it ‘community.’” The story ends with its narrator, despite his cynicism, choosing once more to reach out to a trans person, after witnessing how they’ve been mocked by a cis crowd.

This scene, in which a non-binary transmasculine person is laughed at for being absurdly “tiny,” gets at a recurring theme in both collections, a contradiction at the heart of transmasculine experience: we want to be taken seriously, for our manhood to be taken seriously — yet there’s something inherently ridiculous about masculinity, so there’s much to laugh at in the desire to become a man. CRAWL is a riotously funny collection with jokes on every page, and often humor itself becomes Delsohn’s subject matter. One of his characters, a stand-up comic, reveals that he can’t stop joking about his shortness. “I thought if I kept talking about how short I was, I could somehow exorcise the shortness from me, or at least prove I had some sort of handle on the situation. . . . Onstage, my short jokes rarely failed. On dates, cis girls loved them.” This reveals a classic tendency among trans people, the urge to make ourselves the butt of every joke, pre-empting a cis person doing it for us. (When this character starts dating a trans woman, she has moved past this urge and doesn’t think his height is notable nor funny, telling him, “You hang out with cis people too much.”)

If CRAWL draws humanistic, realistic portraits of trans men to bring its submerged population to life, Realistic Fiction leans into absurdity. Solomonik’s title is tongue-in-cheek: these stories are not “realistic” as we usually understand that term, or perhaps they lean so far into literalism that they come out the other side, into the surreal. There is something deeply weird and almost uncanny about Solomonik’s characters. They’re crushingly self-conscious overthinkers with absurd motivations and goals, and their language is too precise and overly literal, making the reader both laugh and cringe away. Solomonik’s prose is lethally funny, with sentence constructions that defamiliarize both interiority and action. Take how he writes about sex in “How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community Out of Nothing”: “Making sure, swift, rhythmic movements, he began to manually stimulate his, at first, only semi-erect genitals. He made rapid progress.” A different character declares that he’s finally figured out what sex is for: “[I]t’s essentially a form of networking.”

In this same story, Solomonik exposes what’s funny about the idea of “representation” for white trans men. Ashton, a trans man, seeks to become New York’s first trans congressional candidate. “I’d be the perfect figure for these, like — troubled times, or whatever. . . . Kind of like a member of a disadvantaged group, but not. Kind of like a white male, but not.” We laugh at this, but it also articulates the awkward way white trans men fit into the paradigm of marginalization: the least disadvantaged members of a disadvantaged group, a submerged population in the sense of being invisible, whose invisibility makes their marginalization difficult to see. White trans men should, theoretically, have access to the very top of the social hierarchy, but that “theoretically” conceals a wide swathe of experience, and the tension created by this gap also creates humor.

The tone of this collection is satirical, but what exactly is it satirizing? Satire is meant to punch up, at targets that have political power, yet cis people are not Solomonik’s primary focus. Instead, like Delsohn, Solomonik’s humor interrogates positive portrayals of trans acceptance and community. While CRAWL questions trans community and assimilation through realism, Realistic Fiction’s satirical tone presents characters too strange for either assimilation or kumbaya notions of in-group acceptance. In The Lonely Voice, O’Connor posits that this quasi-satirical mode might be unique to the short story form. Regarding Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” he claims it “uses the old rhetorical device of the mock-heroic, but uses it to create a new form that is neither satiric nor heroic, but something in between — something that perhaps finally transcends both.”

There is something affirmative in achieving this transcendence, though it’s not the kind of “affirmation” demanded by our representation discourse, which requires that stories by marginalized writers provide some overtly political uplift for the represented identity. Often, the question of affirmation determines whether representation is judged as positive or negative. In “Enamored of the Abyss: On the place of affirmation in art,” Garth Greenwell argues for a concept of “affirmative art” that allows affirmation to come through form’s beauty, rather than solely through subject matter. “The value of art can’t lie only in the particulars of a story. . . . It has to lie also . . . in that province particular to art; it has to lie in significant form, in style charged with feeling and meaning.” Through attention to form, we can find affirmation in subject matter which may imply negation, such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which Greenwell acknowledges as operating on homophobic logic. Yet the novel’s formal qualities, the beauty of its prose, provide an “amplitude of expression” about love between two men, suggesting that even through tragedy Baldwin’s work made the lives of gay men intelligible and lifelike, and gave them meaning.

With this definition of affirmation, the irony within both Solomonik’s and Delsohn’s collections — that both write about trans men’s yearning to be taken seriously, yet their trans men are often laughed at, undermined, even humiliated — takes on a different meaning than the disempowering, abject stance it might seem from a superficial reading. Solomonik’s characters have a rigorous self-awareness, reflectinggranted dysphoria’s lethal compulsion to minutely examine and evaluate every desire. In “The Meaningful Ex,” the protagonist is caught up in an unhealthy, BDSM-like relationship with a cis man, continuously arguing with his ex about whether this relationship is exploitative. He’s painfully aware of this argument’s consequences: “My whole identity as a man depended on my being able to make the distinctions I was now making.” The more legible affirmative approach would be to say that this character’s manhood is innate, valid regardless of any sexual dynamics; but in depicting the internal traps and tests that trans people set for ourselves, Solomonik gets at a deeper truth, which is that to be a man is to recognize that manhood is forever contingent. This is not affirming to trans masculinity because it suggests that our genders are neither fixed nor invulnerable, but in his honest portrayal of trans male sexual hang-ups and embarrassed yearnings, Solomonik gets to affirmation through abjection — and, crucially, through absurdity, through characters so stilted and obsessive they become defamiliarized. It’s like seeing the real social dynamics of trans life captured accurately through a funhouse mirror.

In CRAWL, “Maude” meticulously details the psychological journey of one character’s decision to transition. Our narrator is trapped in rumination for the story’s first seven pages, mired in recursive questions about their own transition, stuck in OCD spirals:

I’ve gone on and off testosterone twice. Nothing feels certain; nothing feels truthful or inevitable or right. So it’s a decision after all, a choice, just like everything else, just like moving to a new city or leaving a relationship or staying right where you are. There are pros and cons, costs and benefits.

This rumination defies the talking points of mainstream trans politics, which prefer, for political reasons, to depict dysphoria as innate and fixed and transition as almost mystically inevitable, definitively not a choice, particularly not one wracked with uncertainty. But “Maude” illustrates a transition that I recognized from my own life, wherein I did not “just know” that I was a man. Instead I adopted male pronouns and started testosterone while I was still indecisive; I lacked “proof” that I was really a man, and instead had to make a leap of faith, not knowing if my mind might change in the future. It’s precisely because “Maude” does not strive to empower its protagonist that I felt affirmed — affirmed by the care Delsohn takes in exploring this kind of transition, one in which uncertainty isn’t quelled.

With the release of these two collections so close together, transmasculine literature may be starting to define its trajectory. This is not to say that from here on out every short story by and about trans men should be funny, or surreal, or horny, just because those attributes apply to many of these stories. But in rejecting the self-serious expectations of identity-focused literature, these collections sidestep the burden of proof of trans validity; rather than taking trans masculinity at face value, they give their characters freedom to act beyond the constraints of purely political affirmation. I hope that this freedom will encourage other trans male authors, and perhaps even men, in general. I’m not saying that these collections can solve the male loneliness epidemic or rescue masculinity from its constant state of crisis, but I’m not not saying that.

O’Connor argues that we can’t understand great short stories by whittling them down to the “point” they may be making:

A work of art . . . is not only something more than the point; it is by its very nature different from the point. . . . [T]he surface of a great short story is like a sponge; it sucks up hundreds of impressions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the [point].

This quote makes me think of Delsohn’s prolonged psychedelic descriptions in “The Geeks” and “Same Old,” in which badly-timed mushroom/acid trips prompt disaster; and of Solomonik’s “Moving to Boron,” which features a roommate named Punk Skunk and a protagonist obsessed with a 1980s anime about Alexander the Great. Both collections are rich with the tangential, O’Connor’s “hundreds of impressions” that animate their submerged groups and convince the reader to embrace the absurd. Rather than serving some political utility for marginalized groups, these short stories achieve universal deep feeling through their outlawed figures, embracing the legacy of the short story’s great masters.

Caio Major is a graduate student in the MFA-Fiction program at Syracuse University. Currently based in Syracuse, he has strong attachments to Salt Lake City and New York City. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Electric Literature, trans rag, and Reading Into Culture, among others. You can read more of his writing at his Substack, Second Adolescence.

Obsession is a nifty little horror movie. Genuinely disturbing, and exhausting, it seems destined to become a midnight movie classic, if we still have that kind of thing anymore. That the film was made for a pittance (less than $1 million) and has just become the least expensive movie since 2009’s Paranormal Activity to top the box office is an obvious victory for buzzy little movies, and a hopeful sign that audience interest can still accrue somewhat naturally around a tiny film like this. Of course, it’s still 2026, so said film must almost inevitably be a horror film and some kind of conversation piece. But even as a conversation piece, and a distillation of a specific contemporary mood, Obsession makes good despite its limitations. For a few brief stretches of the film, I found myself frankly exhilarated, as I realized I was watching the rare horror film that could — for those moments — leap past the usual pressurized, claustrophobic world of contemporary horror into something unpredictable and (almost) out of control.

Which is not to say that Obsession is necessarily a great film. At its least interesting, it tends to lapse into the Ari Aster school of smoothly roving and rotating camera, alternated with an overly-controlled stasis — while director Curry Barker’s script occasionally teeters too far away from mystery into the realm of rules and explanations. It’s one of the peculiarities of contemporary “elevated horror” that so much of it has been so compactly logical at bottom, many of its key directors and writers seemingly obsessed with making the pieces of their film fit together in coherent allegories — a tendency nowhere more apparent than in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which essentially reverse-engineered the schematicism of the usual art-horror fare until the mystery of its first half could be meticulously unveiled in its second (a strategy that worked only because Cregger managed such a giddy catharsis with his ending). We’re still not out of the woods as far as the overproduction of that vague genre goes: many horror films still struggle to balance their basic need for universal ambiguities to exploit and anxieties to plumb, with the burden of social seriousness, the expectation that the films will serve as allegories for our current cultural fixations. Yet we may just be on the way out.

What keeps Obsession from growing tiresome, as it flits around obvious buzzy contemporary themes — themes like female bodily autonomy, nice-guy cowardice, the terror of appearing cringe, general male neediness, our period’s ambient heterosexual resentment — is that it locates something universal (the nightmare of getting exactly what we desire most), while the rest emerges naturally from that central conceit. When Bear Bailey (Michael Johnston) breaks that little One-Wish Willow novelty item, wishing his friend and crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) would love him “more than anyone in the entire world,” it happens as an offhand tag to a cringe-inducing moment that’s still essentially innocent. The way the movie manages the lurch from this innocence into immediate queasiness is skillful. It’s cut well, directed and written so the switch seems clear, while the exact effects of the switch can still remain ambiguous. The scene in which Nikki first changes — lying about her dying father, teasing, suddenly crying, acting in completely unreal ways — is a difficult scene, and a lesser film might not have managed it. Its sudden off-kilter tone sets up the best of the later scenes between Bear and Nikki, in Bear’s house, which are so thrillingly unpredictable.

To be sure, a lesser film would also not have contained a performance like Inde Navarrette’s. Plenty of critics have been rolling out Oscar-lauding superlatives — yet it’s hard to disagree with any of them. It’s clearly one of the breakthrough performances of this decade. She’s certainly aided by a script that’s intriguingly circumspect about just what’s going on with the apparently wish-possessed Nikki, allowing her to cycle through fits, overreactions, and moments of real terror with the kind of pin-drop accuracy actors love, since it gives them such a buffet of ranges to show off. Meanwhile the rest of the performances are adequate, even banal (which usually ends up working well, as a contrast), and Michael Johnston goes to some heroic lengths to convey his nice-guy everyman’s essential spinelessness. But Obsession is obviously The Inde Navarrette Show: the whole film exists as a canvas for her to run riot, and the rotating scenarios of escalating mania in Bear’s apartment — which are so galvanizing and difficult to forget — are exactly primed for the kind of heightened performance she gives.

And yet her performance elevates the film even beyond that, from the moment Nikki appears again at Bear’s door a second time, after their first bizarre night together, her shiny eyes beaming out of the darkness at him. It’s an unforgettable image, and Navarrette knows exactly how to play with and against her own uncanny beauty — there are moments where her face is itself a special effect. Occasionally the film does too much to suggest some submerged conflict between the original Nikki and her wish-made double. But the sequence on their second night together — as Nikki watches Bear sleep from the corner, moaning and crying about disliking her dreams, and moving in ways completely inhuman — is one of the eeriest and most memorable scenes I’ve ever encountered in a horror film. From there, Barker handles the escalation of the possessed Nikki’s unpredictability in ways that feel organic and dreamlike, not overly thought-through. And Navarrette lets her performance flow into the same essentially ambiguous space, which is why it works so well. There’s a real sense of control giving way to loss of control, of moments spiraling out of the normal range of human sounds or actions — frequently recalling Isabelle Adjani’s infamous performance in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, the bar for this kind of unhinged maximalism. There is also perhaps some debt to Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me, though more likely to the ghosts of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, considering the way Barker stages Navarrette in near-darkness, and tasks her with such unreal choreography. Still, for the most part, her performance (and its presentation on screen) feels authentically original.

It’s hard to criticize the look of the film. Yes, it’s made out of a familiar kind of bland digital bleariness, which makes its daytimes unreal and gray (though the nighttime camerawork makes for a richer contrast); yet a film with this small a budget is more or less bound to minimal exteriors and low-lit interiors. These days, it almost has to be cheaply digital, and that means the ubiquitous ARRI ALEXA 35 camera, which Barker and his cinematographer Taylor Clemons push to some interesting extremes. The ensuing pale, numbed-out look actually works here, tempered by the spectacular effects they get from shadow — which only complements the movie’s ambient nausea and strip-mall drabness. That it’s frequently ugly as hell actually ends up making sense of the film’s visual universe, unremittingly bleak as it is, stripped of brightness or sharp color. This is a film that undulates with an electrical and digital hum (again, a probable influence from Kurosawa, transmuted through the ubiquitous impact of David Fincher’s hyper-composed digital style): its themes of possession and heterosexual repression, and the general muted emptiness of contemporary personality, all proceed holistically out of the atmosphere and palette of the film. It’s profoundly numbing and unpleasant — and such is the point.

Many literal-minded critics are sure to insist that Obsession is “about” things like inceldom, or the male loneliness epidemic. Yet the film is really powerful insofar as it isn’t directly about these things, or even subtextually about these things: instead the film is at its most beguiling when it’s about a very basic (if pathetic) wish, and its nightmarish fulfillment, and the way this subsequently reveals the pettiness and opportunism of a certain kind of timid, self-hating young man. You could take that initial conceit — part folktale, part mid-century morality fable à la The Twilight Zone — and apply it to any time you like, and it would still serve as a solid archetypal beginning for the nightmare. Our particular time just so happens to be that of the Greater Gender Relations Upheaval — the vast antisocial mess we’re all constantly being convinced by the internet to subject each other to. So this naturally becomes one of the film’s most obvious keys (and, to be clear, the film is deliberately playing in that key — among others).

Only look at the name of the film. Not “The Obsession” or “The Obsession of Nikki” or “Bear and Nikki’s Bad Night Out” — just Obsession. The concept itself, a giant idea behind a simple word, is what the film has on its mind. And for a period like ours, abounding in categories and classifications, running amok with pseudo-therapeutic terminologies for every minute romantic anxiety — it’s certainly interesting, and timely, that one of the most memorable genre films of our moment is able to reduce all of that back down to a single essence, one universal and abstract idea, which still haunts us. It’s a great title.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is an Associate Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

Please enjoy these two poems from Bart Edelman, which use wry humor to explore the questions we often ask ourselves. Is life about distraction or reassurance? How can writing both create and destroy? Take a look and see what this ignites in you.

—The Editors

For Sanity’s Sake

Tried controlling my life—
One poem at a time—
And it seemed to work.
But then a random stanza
Came to me in distress.
Said for sanity’s sake 
It needed more blank space—
Something about conformity,
And that was that.
Soon I found trouble
Everywhere I turned.
Caesura came calling in a cab.
Scared the dickens out of me.
I was a metonymical mess—
Alliteratively speaking, of course.
Chaos closed the door
Before I could even warn
The couplet kissing in the dark.
So I gave up verse entirely.
Never wrote another word again.
Not any worse for it—
Give or take an ode or two.

What I Can Do for You Today

Offer to dial it back.
Listen with my good ear.
Create a new diversion.
Predict the upcoming storm.
Do my impression of Churchill.
Agree not to sing.
Purchase a lottery ticket.
Play the piano backwards.
Take out the garbage.
Whip up a tart.
Wax the neighbor’s cat.
Fetch the Ouija board.
Joke about the stiletto.
Mix a White Russian.
Call off the goons.
Reveal a secret of mine.
Promise it will all be okay.

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023. He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Last year, while at a literary magazine party at a big Greek restaurant in New York City’s Financial District, I saw Alex Karpovsky mingling in the crowd near the bar. I walked over and let him know that I’ve watched Girls, start to finish, about eight times. He said something like, “Wow, that must be a world record.” I couldn’t tell if he was flattered or alarmed.

Karpovsky is an actor who played Ray, one of the main supporting characters in Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls. But of course you knew that, or else why would you be reading this? Then again, Girls and Dunham have become such American cultural touchstones that people don’t need to have watched the show to have an interest in what a memoir like Famesick is all about.

The book is an incredible read, especially the first half, in which Dunham memorializes her dizzying ascent from making her first scrappy student film to helming and starring in the definitive prestige TV show of her generation. We get an early-twentysomething Dunham running around with various as-yet-unknown people in her filmmaking milieu, and then you realize how much time has passed when those people are now famous. It’s like reading John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse but featuring the Safdie Brothers, Greta Gerwig, and Ti West instead of the luminaries of the Lost Generation, if it’d been written by Gertrude Stein and not an outsider who might’ve made the whole thing up.

For dedicated fans of Girls, there are many intriguing behind-the-scenes bits. Those who cherish the final heartbreaking scene between Hannah and Adam in Kellogg’s Diner (when they realize they will never work as a couple) should skip the part where Dunham reveals her tears were mostly because of her broken elbow. There’s the laugh-out-loud part where you see just how wrong some initial hypothetical choices would’ve been, like a Taylor Kitsch type as Adam. “Hey Horvath. Brooklyn forever.” That would’ve ruined both Girls and Friday Night Lights. I was also surprised to learn that Dunham hadn’t always been meant to play Hannah from day one, and that her casting was more due to necessity than design. Knowing what the show would do to Dunham, it reads like a monkey’s paw moment.

There are beautiful passages that also bring a little heartache, not just because we know that things won’t be happily ever after for Dunham even with the show’s success, but also because they invoke a bygone era where all the artsy kids were still running around with their relatively bulky film cameras, without a care about the algorithm, or worse, AI. There’s a part where Dunham describes walking around with Adam Driver, still a nobody in Hollywood, early in the morning on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade after a long night’s shoot as they share their hopes and dreams:

To this day, I still get a pang every time I watch a documentary about an artist and they talk about this very moment, when they first become part of a creative community but nobody was doing it for the cash yet, when nobody had yet betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout.

Here, Dunham sounds like Bongrand, the successful older painter in Émile Zola’s The Masterpiece, who gives a poignant monologue to a rabble of young artists living in glamorous squalor in Montmartre about how they’ll never be happier than they are now, still anonymous upstarts with nothing but ambitions and dreams — success will only bring misery.

Dunham’s finely tuned, self-deprecating humor shines through, never fishing for reassurances. When her medical treatments cause her hair to thin, she references her “three Homer Simpson hairs.” She describes how she tucks her stomach into her pants “like an undershirt.” There’s a darkly funny moment where she witnesses the hatching of baby sea turtles and is so inspired that she drafts a conciliatory email to Jenni Konner (her producer and surrogate big sister), only to realize via a quick Google search that a mere 1% of those baby turtle hatchlings will make it to adulthood.

Most readers will likely designate Konner as the villain of the story (her saying “I’m really trying to like you again” to Dunham doesn’t help). She comes off as callous at best and as a user at worst, someone with few gifts of her own other than recognizing (and exploiting) Dunham as her cash cow. But while Dunham does air her grievances about Konner, she also acknowledges that Konner must have felt a lot of pressure overseeing and producing Girls while Dunham attended to her health issues. I was also expecting the book to be harsher on Jack Antonoff, since many have claimed that the heinous ex-boyfriend character in Dunham’s 2025 Netflix show Too Much was based on him. But Antonoff comes off more like a well-meaning guy who just couldn’t handle having a sick and depressive girlfriend, especially when his career was skyrocketing and he must’ve had all the dating options in the world. That doesn’t make him a leading man in a romantic comedy, but that doesn’t make him evil either.

The weakest part of the book is when Dunham underreports her actual role in initially defending Girls writer Murray Miller against Aurora Perrineau’s rape allegations, and overreports her explanation as to why she acted the way she did. All she has to say is that she was in a terrible mental and physical state, and that our desire to protect our friends can heavily influence us.

However, I’m not as interested in evaluating the merits of the book. Is anyone surprised that Dunham is an excellent memoirist? I’m much more intrigued by what spawned the hellish hatred she received for most of the 2010s, what’s led to the public turnaround regarding her image, and what that says about us.

Upon Famesick’s release, there’s been a slew of mea culpa pieces by Dunham’s generational peers admitting that their harsh criticism of her was based on little more than envy. This isn’t revelatory news — even back then, it was obvious that there was a deep, rotten layer of personal animosity in the attacks on Dunham. A telltale sign was that the most bitter criticism came from her own ideological and cultural peers.

Dunham writes about how much this friendly fire affected her — more than any proto-MAGA chuds ranting about how she represents everything wrong with modern women. Dunham could’ve worn — and did wear — such attacks from cultural foes as badges of honor and her cultural allies would’ve circled wagons around her (the all-women Ghostbusters was released in 2016, and thus began the era of “Watch the movie that the creeps don’t want you to see!” marketing). But what can you do when an ostensibly feminist publication like Jezebel puts a bounty on un-retouched Vogue photos of you under the flimsy pretense of social progress?

Still, there are moments in Famesick that do make you sympathize with those who must’ve felt that they could’ve been Dunham, had a few life circumstances turned out differently. When Dunham decides to make Tiny Furniture, the breakout movie that fast-tracked her to HBO, her family offers to vacate their Tribeca loft apartment for a whole month so that Dunham can shoot her film there. And to raise money, Dunham’s mother solicits her family friends as if she were helping her daughter move boxes of Thin Mints. How many artists, or those who once dreamed of being one, had to fight their parents every step of the way, warding off discouragement and even outright hopes of failure not just from the cruel, uncaring world but also from their own kin?

There’s a little anecdote that Dunham throws around casually that even I had to pause to sit with for a bit. She recalls a summer she and her family spent in Italy because her father (a reputable artist in his own right, just like Dunham’s mother) wanted to learn glassblowing: “I have mostly tender memories of this time—three of us to a bed in a little palazzo, playing in the fountain and eating thick slices of focaccia.” This sounds like something out of a Wes Anderson movie, back when Anderson was cooler than he is now.

There’s been a long-standing debate about how much Dunham benefitted from nepotism. On the one hand, she had industry connections that are unavailable to 99% of the public. Early in Dunham’s career, her mother offered to reach out to the lone Hollywood connection she had, which turned out to be the founder of United Talent Agency. On the other hand, it’s not as if her parents were superstars with legions of sycophants. How much weight did the names Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons carry in the cutthroat entertainment industry?

What is less discussed is how people were likely envious that Dunham enjoyed the perfect amount of nepotism. She had enough of it to take glassblowing-centered childhood trips to Italy and the phone numbers of Hollywood agents (or at least, a phone number of a Hollywood agent), but not so much that every stage of her life had been ruthlessly public. The Jaden Smiths, Lily-Rose Depps, and Brooklyn Beckhams of our world may grow up with fantastical amounts of privilege, once only available to children whose fathers conquered at least one civilization, but they are also burdened by the fact that they will never quite live up to their parents. Dunham didn’t have to deal with such overshadowing, and one of the most uncomfortable parts of Famesick is when she describes how her own parents, especially her mother, became envious of her rapid success.

While it’s nice that many people have come around to appreciating Dunham and her work, I’m not impressed with the timing of it all. Of course it’s easier to be kinder to Dunham when she’s no longer a threat to making the generation-defining show about twentysomething New Yorkers that you yourself wanted to make. When Dunham was an upstart force, her future must have seemed agonizingly limitless: she had the buzziest show, the buzziest boyfriend, the buzziest friends. Now that she’s gone through public heartbreaks, serious health issues, and a post-Girls creative period that still seems unsure of itself, she suddenly becomes more likable, doesn’t she? The apologizers are less like penitents and more like gloaters: we hobbled her good, didn’t we?

I’ve often wondered what a contemporary Lena Dunham would look like and whether she would get the same amount and type of hate. The answer to the second part is undoubtedly yes, the caveat being I don’t think a genuinely new Dunham could exist. There will be those who somewhat mimic her. However, “Hannah Horvath but in wide-legged jeans” is not a genuine reincarnation. Dunham was the last of her type, arriving at the perfect intersection of monoculture and online culture, where the latter had yet to cripple the former: a Goldilocks era of new and old media, where more people than ever before felt they had a shot at becoming famous — magazine-cover famous, not Twitter lolcow famous.

Dunham recalls how she and her family looked down on “the commonness of wanting to be seen.” However, it was fine to want one’s work to be renowned. If it just so happened that some of that renown spilled over to personal celebrity, then that could be acceptable. A nice little side effect that can’t be helped. In the introduction, Dunham states:

I didn’t start this looking for celebrity. Instead, I’m here because of an almost unrelenting drive toward self-expression, which manifests as workaholism AND single-minded obsession that actually runs counter to a skilled manipulation of fame.

Dunham isn’t some trend-hopping clout-chaser, and Girls endures because it’s a work of art with a singular vision. But claiming not to seek fame when your “unrelenting drive toward self-expression” revolved around putting your extremely personal thoughts and experiences into the spotlight is a distinction without a difference. For artists who want to be celebrities but won’t admit it, making art about themselves is an ideal roundabout way to achieve that gauche goal of being seen. In her essay for The Cut entitled “I Was Caroline Calloway,” Natalie Beach writes:

It was 2013, and the internet felt like the future of writing, at least for girls. The boys from our classes were churning out different versions of Fear and Loathing in Bushwick, but I believed Caroline and I were busting open the form of nonfiction. Instagram is memoir in real time. It’s memoir without the act of remembering. It’s collapsing the distance between writer and reader and critic, which is why it’s true feminist storytelling, I’d argue to Caroline, trying to convince her that a white girl learning to believe in herself could be the height of radicalism (convenient, as I too was a white girl learning to believe in herself).

What an intoxicating idea that was, that the pursuit of celebrity, the creation of art, and the advancement of social progress could all be blended together to form an ideology whose core tenet was that the more of ourselves we put out there, the better the world would be.

Had Girls been set in the past, or been a murder mystery, or been about alien invaders — or a combination of all three — the resentment against Dunham would’ve been much less. But because Girls narrowed the gulf between art and artist to almost nothing, the show’s very existence on America’s most prestigious cable channel was seen as the specific promotion of a specific person, a specific demographic, and a specific culture that many of us knew all too well.

At first, I too was reluctant to pay attention to all the things that Girls represented. A funny detail I’d discover about the show in one of my many rewatches is that Hannah and Marnie were born the same year I was. I’d known girls like them — and the guys in their cliques — in college. I did not like those people, so why would I want to watch a show that apparently glorified them? In Famesick, Dunham references a snarky Gawker piece where all the main actors were identified as daughters of their famous parents (e.g. Allison Williams would be called “Daughter of Brian Williams”). I remember reading that piece and having a good laugh.

But in early 2014, I was visiting NYC and, because I had some free time, I figured I should at least hatewatch the show about the city that everybody was talking about. It only took me a couple of episodes to realize I’d been wrong, that the show wasn’t some auto-romanticization by and for snooty twits. Instead, it was an incisively (even viciously) self-aware examination of a cultural cohort that seemed destined at the time to make Obama-style liberalism a permanent American reality.

In stark contrast stood something like Master of None, a show I began watching at around the same time and immediately called bullshit on for being so smugly clueless about its own blind spots. Consider the persistent criticism of Girls for its lack of racial diversity. Girls had far more insightful things to say about race, precisely by accurately reflecting the predominant whiteness of its world. That spoke volumes more about the reality of race relations, even in self-consciously progressive and gentrifying Brooklyn, than the wishful diversity in shows like Master of None. Dunham is also far too sharp a social observer for it to have been an accident that among the Asian American characters, the straight female and gay male characters were more enmeshed in the culture depicted in the show (Soo Jin is Marnie’s gallerina frenemy and Chester is Hannah’s classmate at the Iowa Workshop) than the straight male ones (Yoshi lives in Japan and Byron comes from a more yuppie crowd, and both are love interests to Shoshannah, the biggest misfit of the main characters).

But though Dunham refused to glorify her Girls characters, she also didn’t stoop to sneering at them. Hannah, because of her well-realized flaws, remains a deeply relatable character to many, including myself. When I first began watching the show — I would’ve been about Hannah’s age — I felt compelled to write this email to my closest high school friend after watching the season three scene where Hannah quits a relatively well-compensated job as an advertorial writer at GQ because she is insecure that it makes her a sellout, especially when Adam and Marnie are seemingly having their breakout moments in their creative careers:

I remember being at college and wanting so badly to be a writer but being so scared of starting because then, I could’ve ended up failing. That’s why I was so depressed on my 21st birthday, because it felt as though time was flying by and I was never going to accomplish anything. And every time my parents tried to talk me into being a lawyer, it felt as though they were telling me that I’d never be able to accomplish my dreams, so I might as well fall in line like everybody else. Of course that’s not what they meant, I now realize. But at the time, that’s what it felt like, which is why I had periods when I wanted to be a journalist, magazine intern, or a theatre intern, or even just a retail clerk for a bit. ANYTHING that would’ve loudly told the world that my dreams weren’t dead or stupid.

Furthermore, writing meant being alone. I wanted to be liked and loved. You can’t be liked or loved if you’re in a cafe or library for hours a day while writing something that may end up supremely sucking. I have to admit that one of the reasons that I loved the idea of becoming a writer is because of how much I loved writers. I imagined myself receiving that love from lots of people and it made me feel good about myself, which is something I often didn’t feel at that age.

I understand the desperation and insecurity that creates the need for such external validation. Because you lack such self-esteem (you’re not that attractive, you’re not that popular, you’re not that smart, you’re not that athletic), you think that the only thing that can redeem you is your writing. Perhaps if you could jujitsu your neurosis and turn it into literary gold, perhaps then people will like you. Maybe even love you. And because so much of yourself is riding on this lone ability, you’re petrified of finding out that you can’t actually do it that well. Your lack of confidence extends to your One Chosen Craft as well. Hence, the constant need to seek signs that you are indeed that good without the risk of putting your work out there.

At the end of “One Man’s Trash,” an episode in which Hannah spends a weekend with an affluent older doctor separated from his wife, Hannah breaks down in front of Josh — the doctor, played by Patrick Wilson — and laments how happy she is playing house with him in his beautiful townhouse with its tasteful furniture, backyard grill, and soft sheets. She says she’d always vowed she would take on every experience in the world, especially the bad ones, so she could write about them like some nobly suffering saint. Then she confesses that maybe she just wants to be comfortable and content like everybody else.

The little speech is meant to make Hannah look comically self-aggrandizing. But Hannah is just expressing a desire to be special. She’s deduced that she’s not part of the lucky few predestined to live exceptional lives by virtue of their great wealth, beauty, or prodigious talent. But she still wants such a life, and she’s accepted that the only way to have a shot at it is to subject herself to all life’s horrors and humiliations.

Had Girls been a bad show, Dunham would’ve had fewer, not more, haters. She would’ve been easily dismissible as yet another undeserving rich white girl, the latest exhibit proving that the system had to be disrupted. It’s interesting that for all of Dunham’s real-life and fictional insecurities, she was never seen as a relatable figure. I have to wonder if that’s because, for all her publicly declared body image issues, she never acted like a loser.

When I hear people say they want to be in creative circles, I suspect what many of them mean is that they want to be around beautiful, rich, and cool people (creativity being optional). Dunham, in real life, ran in such circles. That must’ve drawn the ire of those who also wished to belong to such cliques. Had Dunham been Hollywood Hot or even Hollywood Cool, then that could’ve been the explanatory factor. But she seemed to be there almost entirely on talent, the one currency almost all outsiders believe is their ticket into the exclusive club. Dunham even speaks the language of the one who’s never quite in the innermost circle. “It was only when fame entered the equation that the party came to me,” she writes. But instead of eliciting feelings of “She’s just like me!” this provoked “Why her and not me?”

In retrospect, people in the 2010s simultaneously acted as if they were living in a period of abundance and scarcity. My friends and I refer to this time as Zero Interest Loan Culture Heaven, or ZILCH. A thousand Gen Z YouTube video essayists wax wistfully about Millennial optimism during that era. Traditional media may have been dying, but the internet was going to save us somehow. And everybody, if they just worked hard enough, was going to get a TV show or a book deal. That created more opportunities, but also much more competition. And a generation only gets a few shots to define itself. Maybe only one.

Deep down, we all knew it was bullshit, about as authentic as an Amherst grad cosplaying as a lumberjack in the most expensive city in the country. Subconsciously, we knew it was unsustainable, but we dared not say it out loud, in case the utterance would accelerate the demolition of this gigantic playground we’d built for ourselves. But Dunham, from the inside, recognized this bullshit and called it out for all to see.

Millennials are vintage now. Our prime is over. Everyone who thought they could do a better Girls has either tried and failed, or had the opportunity window closed and accepted that. All we can do now is look back at what was made and evaluate it, free of personal agendas. The 2010s aren’t that long ago, but so far, Girls is standing the test of time, only getting better with age as the Obama Era becomes harder and harder to remember. Even younger generations are embracing the show as their own.

I was happy that Famesick is such a good book. “She’s still got it,” I thought, because I’d watched Too Much last year and found it disappointing. Sharp Stick has its charms, but it could’ve been made by any number of directors. If Dunham never comes close to replicating Girls, would that be such a terrible fate? Is one outstanding achievement better than five merely good ones? How about 10? Famesick is great, but it still relies heavily on Girls to be meaningful to its readers. Should that matter, though? If I were Dunham, while I wouldn’t coast on Girls for the rest of my life, I also wouldn’t feel like a failure if I never made anything of that quality and relevance again.

Even the title of the memoir is an olive branch, as though Dunham is telling her former haters that this fame they all coveted nearly ruined her life, so they can relax. “Never mistake maintenance for care, attention for love, or even love for empathy,” writes Dunham in the most neon-sign-worthy quote of the book.

I think of Jessa’s tearful apology to Hannah in the penultimate episode of the show, something that the otherwise stubborn Jessa would never do, except that she has realized their friendship is, if not over, then forever frayed. Hannah cries too and says she’s sorry, that they were both just trying their best, as terrible as their best turned out to be. Both are ready to move on.

Dunham’s admirers and haters alike are also ready to move on, and so both can say: “We had it pretty good, didn’t we? And nobody captured us like you did, Lena.”

Chris Jesu Lee lives and works in New York City and has previously been published in The Metropolitan Review, The Believer, The Cleveland Review of Books, and Current Affairs. He writes the Substack newsletter Salieri Redemption.

Adjectives cling to Ben Lerner like cockleburs. He is “subtle and sinuous,” per James Wood in the New Yorker. His work is “virtuosic,” in the words of Tao Lin for The Believer. The MacArthur Foundation bestowed a fellowship upon him. Of or pertaining to the intellect — these are the descriptors that pile before his feet. It predated his turn into fiction, too. Back when he was exclusively a poet, his post-Language melding of theory and lyricism was similarly feted for its erudition. C. D. Wright declared that he possessed “an unfettered mind” when his first book of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, was published in 2004. (Lerner was only 25 years old at the time. He was precocious too!) The praise is accurate enough. His books contain dense paragraphs on Spanish prosody and historical trauma. But that misses the most important aspect of his work, the one that provides much of the pleasure his books offer. Lerner, you see, is funny.

Take his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station.1 It’s the story of Adam Gordon, a twentysomething guy who bears an extremely strong resemblance to Lerner himself. It is 2004, and Gordon is studying in Madrid on a Fulbright fellowship. He is there to research the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, with the aim of composing some elegy or tribute to the brave souls who gave their lives in the struggle against fascism. He does no such thing, however. He mopes about in his room, smoking and Gchatting. He tries to woo a young Spanish woman with a truly bizarre pickup method, claiming that his father, an even-keeled psychiatrist, is actually a cruel and unremitting fascist. It is the sort of senseless, patently absurd fabrication one could imagine Larry David committing on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the prose, Lerner plays it completely straight, never once winking at the reader to gain their sympathy, which only makes it that much funnier. It is a comedy about youth meant for adults.

Lerner has written three more novels since then, including the just-published Transcription. They are all strong in particular ways. The hype is real. But none are quite as funny as his first. The plight of youth made for ideal comic material in that one. But Lerner writes novels that are highly steeped in his own biography, which means that his protagonists age at roughly the same rate he does himself. The effect recalls a film like Boyhood, which was filmed over the course of a dozen years to capture the time-lapse growth of a young man, or the Up documentary series, which begins with a group of seven-year-old children, then checks in on them every seven years in perpetuity. Time is Lerner’s medium as much as language. Time has made him an adult, with responsibilities and children, and that simply is not as funny as lying to girls when you’re in your 20s.

Lerner’s highly autobiographical fiction puts him in league with other practitioners of autofiction, like Karl Ove Knausgåard, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti. The protagonist of My Struggle is even called “Karl Ove,” which heightens the queasiness endemic to such a personal mode. Lerner is slyer, however. As mentioned, Adam Gordon is the protagonist of Leaving the Athocha Station. The narrator of 10:04 seems to be Lerner himself, or a version of him. Adam returns in The Topeka School, along with several other characters, including his parents and a childhood friend, a troubled boy named Darren. The slipperiness owes much to Lerner’s origins as a brainy poet, one enamored with the ways identity can slip in and out of different registers. Transcription is arguably his most poetic novel, and not just on account of that slipperiness. The entire structure of the book, the way each section compresses its material while balancing against the other sections, recalls the deft architectural thinking of modernist and postmodernist poetry. Think of the five sections of The Waste Land, or the way Lyn Hejinian wrote My Life with 37 sections when she was 37 years old.

Open Transcription and you’ll see that it’s organized into three sections: Hotel Providence, [Hotel Villa Real], and Hotel Arbez. The brackets: so chic! Even before you open the book, you’ll notice that it’s slim, like a volume of poetry or a European novella. The first section opens with our narrator, yet another authorial alter ego, arriving in Providence, Rhode Island. He is there to interview Thomas, one of his former professors. The university in question is clearly Brown, where Lerner studied, and which has long been home to a distinguished constellation of experimental writers and artists. Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, the husband and wife avant-garde poets, taught there for decades; the character of Thomas appears to be based partly on them. Other luminaries who have taught there include Robert Coover, Brian Evenson, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The interview looks to be one of those Paris Review situations, where a writer talks to a more esteemed author further along in their career, discussing early influences while noting the afternoon light slanting through the window and illuminating the tasteful furniture. Indeed, Lerner himself has twice conducted interviews for the Paris Review, with Rosmarie Waldrop and Eileen Myles. Our narrator settles into his hotel room, preparing to walk the familiar undergrad streets on the way to interview Thomas. Before he can do that, though, he suffers a particularly modern pratfall: he knocks his phone into the sink. It’s ruined. He was going to use it to record the interview, then transcribe it later, hence the title. But he can’t do that now that he is, in a wonderfully distinctive phrase, “deviceless.”

The bricked phone is a welcome instance of Lerner’s humor, though it suggests a harried sitcom dad more than the caustic, desperate wit of his earlier work. It also elicits more of that patented Lerner prose: swooping clauses of thought that glint with insight and humor.

I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting.

Maybe he can explain the situation to Thomas, and they can do the interview later, once he’s bought a new phone from the Apple Store? But our narrator is unable to pull it off, for two reasons. First, he is a neurotic mess incapable of broaching awkward topics; and second, Thomas is a torrent of speech, launching into lectures and tangents from the moment the narrator enters his home. There is simply no stopping him. And so our narrator sits, and he listens.

The second section finds the narrator at a conference in Madrid. A memorial conference, it turns out. Thomas has since died. Colleagues and admirers from across the globe have gathered to offer tribute, including our narrator. We learn that he did publish the interview with Thomas, by recalling Thomas’ words as best he could and adding his own extrapolations. He told no one about this, however. It ended up being the last interview Thomas gave, and thus acquired a retroactive elegiac air. During the conference, the narrator reveals the true circumstances behind the interview, thinking Thomas would have appreciated the irony.

He may well have. The gathered mourners, however, do not appreciate it at all. They feel betrayed. This is a familiar Lerner dilemma, wherein our narrator prioritizes literature and art over human connection, and expects others to do the same. Will this conflict reach full boil in the third and concluding section?

Not directly, it turns out. Our narrator barely plays a part in the third section. Instead, he listens to someone who we learn is Thomas’ son, Max. Max and Thomas had a difficult relationship. It’s not easy, after all, to have an arcane wizard for a father. Through a switchbacking, Bernhardian monologue, Max describes his struggles as a son, and as a father, too. His own daughter experiences nutritional difficulties, declining to eat almost any food. Thomas calls her “the hunger artist,” recalling the Kafka story. Evocative, yes, but not exactly helpful parenting advice.

The humor glimpsed earlier in the book mostly recedes by this point, and in its place we have emotion and loss, as Max’s twin roles as son and father tug at him, and at our narrator, who listens throughout. It is genuinely affecting. I’ll admit it: I cried. Coming as it does at the end of a short and succinct book, the final pages feel less like a poem and more like a concerto’s satisfying resolution. Yet I also missed the earlier humor, enough that it compels me to ask a different question.

Let us consider, then, the case against Ben Lerner.

The usual evidence in such a prosecution consists of identity markers. Lerner is a privileged white man who moves in, and writes about, spaces of immense privilege: hip New York neighborhoods, European conferences, art colonies in the Southwest. He writes about those enclaves and their denizens as if they all constitute one immense graduate seminar, ready to cite just the right experimental artwork with just the right $20 word.

All of that is true enough. Yet it does not bother me at all. Lerner writes so well, with such a knack for phrase-making, that I’m perfectly happy to read his navel-gazing accounts of his quotidian existence. Gimme gimme gimme. No, where I sometimes find myself growing impatient with Lerner, as I’ve followed his career for two decades now, has more to do with his own excess of patience. His increasing insistence on doing the right thing, or perhaps, being the right person.

Every poet is tempted to pander to their audience, to emote just the right lyrical aside about the state of the world to elicit that self-satisfied sigh. Lerner is no different. The most egregious instance of this occurred in his last novel, The Topeka School. That novel mostly takes place in the 1990s, telling a kind of origin story about what one could call “toxic masculinity.” That material is highly compelling on its own. Yet the final chapter sees a jump in time to the present day, where the Lerner stand-in attends a protest against the Trump administration, all but begging the reader to pat him on the back. And I resent it. Transcription thankfully does not feature anything this cloying. The references to the pandemic carry a more bemused air. Yet one can still sense Lerner calibrating his lyricism just so, striking the appropriate balance of awareness and concern.

Moments like that make me wish Lerner would stop caring so much about what others think. Strange as it is to say, I wish he would act a bit more like his contemporary Tao Lin. Lin has spent the past decade curing his own autism, ingesting psychedelic drugs, and cavorting with feral pigs. Some people consider him a joke, or even a fraud. Lin does not let that bother him, because he does not care what others think of him — at least, not enough to calibrate the traits that others find irritating. He continues on his own way without worrying what judgment others might pass on him.

I want Lerner to follow that example. I want him to quit caring what I think of him. I will continue to read every word he writes, for his felicity with language is extraordinary, and I hope that doesn’t matter to him at all.

Adam Fleming Petty is a writer living in Michigan. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Commonweal, and many other venues. He is the author of a novella, Followers. He maintains the newsletter Very Distant Lands.

It’s perhaps not surprising that American poetry’s A-listers have come, of late, to espouse sincerity as both writing practice and a way of discoursing about writing. Plenty of developments seemed to clear a path for this new wave of earnestness. There was Marc Kelly Smith, arguably the first “slam” poet; the proliferation of spoken word, or “performance” poetry; and the subsequent transformation of the open mic into the gestic, roaring soapbox that it is today. There was, beginning in 1996, National Poetry Month, which drew inspiration from Black History Month and Women’s History Month. And now, in a nod to all three, there is Amanda Gorman. There was always good and bad poetry, of course. But the tradition of making such judgments jarred somewhat with the new rationales. Out to tweak the dusty old guard sensibilities, some gestured at a kind of democratic protest: that poems of the day should serve a “shared social struggle” toward some abstractly better world, as in the 95¢ Skool. Others brought sharpened, thesis-ified manifestos and a litany of demands: that poems should register identity solidarities, resist oppression, tyranny, and the “delusions of whiteness,” as Cathy Park Hong once argued in the journal Lana Turner.

But the long arc of American sentimentality claims an altogether different purpose for poetry: clicks, snaps, growth markets, a little “Gin & Juice,” big feelings and even grander statements. Consider that poems, which are perhaps better suited to the attention economy than any other piece of written art, have become yet more fanciful gizmos of therapeutic earnestness — that everywhere radiating force which could be said to include things like self-help, spirituality, health and wellness, diversity, social justice, good vibes — a way to spiritedly sell that most time-honored of American brands: authenticity. Our true selves.

The point here isn’t to rehash that old debate between, on the one hand, a crusty, fizzled-out po-mo irony, and on the other, an ascendant clarion earnestness of feeling. One problem is apparent by that very sentence: the whole conversation has become so muddled that nobody knows what anybody’s talking about anymore. Just listen to Ocean Vuong, one of poetry’s darlings-turned-Late-Night-stars, whose public waxing about language, assimilation, and authorial rectitude during a recent book tour reveals his thinking about sincerity. In one recent interview, he describes the kind of writing he claims his students are up to, and the impediments they face:

They are absolutely scared of judgment. And so . . . they perform cynicism, because cynicism can be misread, as it often is, as intelligence. You’re disaffected, you’re too cool, you’ve seen it all. And so they pull back; but in fact, they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort. They often do it privately; they don’t want to admit to each other that they’re actually trying really hard to do what they want to do.

Vuong goes on to say his students are afraid of “trying” — the thing he means by sincerity — because of an epidemic of “cringe,” apparently fueled by online trolls, critics, and other passers-through. It is then the teacher’s job, he says, to instruct the students essentially to be themselves, and not to judge the results. Let’s zoom in on this. It is true that every person who assumes the mantle of expert — who has something to teach — finds themselves offering moral support on occasion, even posturing about it. But if the very pressing issue at hand is about merely “trying,” and about liberation from others’ embarrassment, that whole line of thought trivializes what the students are there to do. What’s more, there’s something tangled up about it. They’re in the room, aren’t they? What’s insincere about that? And it would be odd to suggest that what Vuong calls “cynicism” and gestures thereof are any less sincere than what he imagines “underneath.” How does he know, exactly? It’s not clear from this snippet. But it makes you wonder. Has the elite workshop become one elaborate polygraph test, designed to sort fact from fiction, the truth about ourselves from elaborate projection? Taken at face value, all Vuong really manages to communicate here is the circular idea that writing craft needs to somehow reflect a writer’s naked grit and fanatical interest in being a writer. Whatever the stated goals of creative writing programs in the production of literary art, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to take his comments as further evidence of some perversion of purpose, for better or worse. They at least warrant further investigation.

One encounters this kind of doughy talk in myriad other places. Poet Kaveh Akbar, whose 2024 debut novel Martyr! won him acclaim comparable to Vuong’s, was asked in The Believer about why he thinks “spiritual and religious writing” — which, the interviewer couches, “offers some of the deepest considerations of the ineffable” — is “taboo” in our current secular moment. To which Akbar replies:

It’s out of style, certainly. The standard belief is that if you’re smart, you have to be cynical. There’s an equivalency of skepticism with intelligence, and of belief with naivete, which is the height of hubris to me — as if we have suddenly landed upon an intelligence heretofore unavailable to Milton or Rabi’ah.

Even as they attempt to dispense with “conventional wisdom,” both poets end up reconstructing the binary opposition between the skeptic or cynic, represented by a fancy intellect and aversion to feelings, and the earnest truth-teller who “speaks his passions.” Old foes, Akbar would appear to suggest, engaged in centuries of pitched battle. Faced with a Matrix-style choice, today’s young writers need only turn to the light. Sure, you want to make space for reverence, for a little bit more raw feeling — an understandable effort. But don’t throw out the proverbial baby, then say it’s the rest of us with the blood on our hands.

Elsewhere, writing about so-called “sacred poetry,” Akbar invokes sincerity so directly as to be bowled over by it: “What matters is the making of music and the sincerity of the making.” Whereas a rhetoric of sincerity serves, in Vuong’s case, as a way to safely mark his own classroom authority among vetted friends, it is, in Akbar’s estimation, a means of accessing the spiritual beyond. The irony with Akbar, of course, is that his own sincerity-speak pitches quickly into a parallel ether of mushy nonsense. He concludes the 2025 Blaney Lecture on Poetry and Spirituality, an annual series, with this bit of finery: “Embrace the mystery of earnest, mellifluous language. Embrace its infinite potential to thin the partition between us and the world we seek.”

To my mind, these mellifluous campaigns can be traced to the full-scale invasion of internet performance poetry, which happily marries Cathy Park Hong’s poetics of “social engagement” to an attention-content era’s fondness for quick-hit schmaltz and run-of-the-mill vanity. These poems are everywhere identifiable for that particular shine. And with all these literary brands running around in the media, the anointed poets increasingly find themselves as dispensers of cheap wisdom, producing, as part of a combined output, poems of fast-acting inspiration, and an accompanying misty side-gloss — the sort of fuzzy public commentaries that tend to pass for poetic insight. If it’s truly all vibes and delivery, per a certain content model, the poet, as part of his media training package, intuits that he is more mystic than littérateur, dishing out plastic profundities in a sugary catharsis of group kumbaya. If this sounds unfair, consider that other critics have noted as much. “Consumers are offered the image of art-making as a subgenre of celebrity,” writes David Schurman Wallace, adding that “the works of art themselves are allowed to remain laudable but forgettable byproducts.”

Vuong is a model of these forces scaled up, someone who’s plenty programmatic as a Hong torchbearer, but equally capable of being honeyed into sweet-sounding incoherence. In a 2017 interview with Literary Hub, he endorses a project of “questioning how the ways we value art can replicate very oppressive legacies we strive to end.” In that same interview, Vuong says he is interested in writing about the “physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being,” a statement so disinfected of irony that it might have been written on a medical intake form. I suspect poets were never this forward; not until this latest crop came to see poetry as stage performance, where gestures, displays of conviction, overt spectacle, and compelled visibility garner the kinds of attention, in our digital culture, that the quieter, less marketable techniques and innovations of the page never quite could. It is perhaps free verse taken to its logical conclusion.

Social media ushered in this sea change in the 2010s, cutting through the now-defunct blog-based subculture that often produced thoughtful discourse about the fragmented direction of American poetry. While academic schools and aesthetic traditions jockeyed for command over a slightly torpid avant-garde, “the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media,” writes Jasper Bernes. Displays of earnest self-disclosure and performative sincerity found their way into poetic modes popularized through the genre’s first real viral moment: the televisual spectacle of Button Poetry, “an independent publisher of performance poetry” that cultivated a less specialized audience with the stated corporate mission to build “new and powerful markets” for poetry. In this rapidly expanding digital pageant wagon, “performance” poets could be regularly seen on the tube, standing upright, yawping and kvetching, breaking down and fuming out and nailing oppressors to their cloying word-portraits. Responding to clear market signals, literary publishers, grant-making foundations, and prize committees quickly moved in to grab a piece of the action.

Indeed, it was Button Poetry that first propelled Vuong to prominence as the timidly earnest, always-on-the-verge-of-tears persona you can now find in the literary presses and their publicists’ hands. That’s thanks, in part, to recent appearances on Oprah, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and in such far-flung organs as Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s program with Sarah Ferguson. In an interview with the New York Times’ David Marchese last year, things got so soppy when describing his experience working on a tobacco farm during his teenage years that Marchese — who ordinarily radiates the podcaster’s coached air of urbane, if slightly eggheaded fascination — asked Vuong if he could give him a hug.

Now, slam aesthetics have so thoroughly mixed with poetry meant for the page that much of what passes through reputable literary journals and magazines is imprinted with stagecraft, transforming literary experience into something akin to watching Broadway on television — or on an iPhone — instead of live. For some years now, the credo of “lived experience” has served as an aesthetic battle cry for conflicts once treated with far more subtlety under the confessionalists, and with a channeled reticence found in the epoch-defining work of John Ashbery on the heels of Elizabeth Bishop. “Ashbery’s natural shyness provided a corrective,” Wallace writes, to the drippy excesses of self-disclosure at the height of confessionalism: “The aesthete’s eye took over, and the collaging and curation of language became an original way of writing.” Charles Bernstein is more on the button in The Kinds of Poetry I Want: “His [Ashbery’s] greatness is connected to his poetics of aversion, deftness, deflection, humor, and above all, privacy.”

It is true that Ashbery famously resisted reading in front of audiences. The whole enterprise of translating page craft into public spectacle required a kind of ironic detachment, not least because Ashbery found his own work so outré. There are more than a couple of ways to think about Ashberian reticence, its origins, and ultimately its literary import. Here is Wallace again:

From one vantage, Ashbery’s indirections are a vestige of a less tolerant society that dissuaded him from more boldly claiming his sexual orientation. But maybe there is more to it than avoidance: there is a realization of the worth of experience not made too easily available for consumption.

Poets of the new digital front have little use for Ashbery’s aesthetics of privacy, just as they have little use for a generationally acclaimed artist who refused to “more boldly claim his sexual orientation.” Ashbery was, indeed, a “registered homosexual,” as John Vincent once put it not so long ago. Yes, let’s not erase the homosexual “content” from his poetry, but let’s also not flatten him so completely into a face you could print on a Pride shirt. Here is Vuong again, in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Harold Bloom praises John Ashbery’s work but in many ways ignores, or at worst rejects, his homosexuality, his queerness. We would know by reading the work that those things are intertwined — how can you separate one part of a writer from his text?” You get the sense that, for Vuong, Ashbery’s queerness has to be undivorceable from “the text.” That any “separation” risks a collision with the strange but sublimely indeterminate quality of Ashbery’s poetry, which, Bernstein notes, “is a kind of politics.” If the poet’s reticence is more a product of his temperament than a cover for queer anxiety, it might scare the britches off someone like Vuong to consider that Ashbery’s poems are about everything and nothing in particular — and that you could find enough pleasure in them without having considered the subtexts.

Roughing out the long, complicated birth of the New Sincerity is a task best left to those equipped to do so — the Stephanie Burts of the world. I’m thinking of two events in particular from the larger backdrop that I want to discuss. One involves Robert Hass’ oft-cited “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a poem about the way abstraction feeds desire for the real (“one of the poems that can save you,” writes Pimone Triplett.) Hass was notably criticized by Michael Robbins in the pages of Poetry for his grating “preciousness.” (The poem, Robbins contends, “succumbs to [Hass’] fatal need to elevate everything to the phosphorescent plane of longing.”) More than just a precocious dig at the old master, this was a striking example of a much younger poet coming out and saying: “Actually, that made me cringe.”

Preciousness about the business-end of sex has attracted new practitioners, like Richie Hofmann who, following the erotic example of Richard Siken, leans heavily on what one critic describes as a kind of “lavender-scented aesthetics” — a sense of a little halo hovering above every word, with fragrant epiphanies to be found in each crevice. But Hofmann’s erotic frankness is marked by his own particular stagecraft. When I read the lines, “It’s not a tragedy that we couldn’t have a child. / I had a pain inside me / and I needed you to deepen it,” I think, The poet never intended this to be read without recourse to his vocal cords. Hofmann’s velvety reading voice, which so often accompanies his published poems, does the commendable work of making these lines palatable, guiding the reader’s attention away from the page to the physical poet-person. Hearing Hofmann is almost — but not quite — the explanation required for such treacle: the effect a good jingle has on bad lyrics. Again, you need a fearsome, surefire gimmick to carry you through lines like:

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,
we gargled the water, we threw it from our hair—

I washed my limbs in the waves,
and I heard him calling.

I didn’t want the other boys to see.

The other event I am thinking of is the publication of Claudia Rankine’s seminal Citizen: An American Lyric, a meditation on structural racism in America. No one disputes anymore that Citizen marked a turning point in American poetry: it put a stamp on the oblique protest lyric, obliterating a purely hedonistic reading for a shared, weight-of-the-world-type communing of sensitivities toward the plight of oppressed peoples, cultures, and traditions. (See, also, Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry, for the full effect.) To be sure, this kind of thing complements the open mic era’s brand of knock-’em-dead, stick-it-to-the-man balladeering: it likes to mutedly think through the various personal and structural infelicities the performance poets sound off about, only Rankine and her imitators don’t make nearly as much direct fuss. Rankine, in a quiet litany, illustrates this in trademark fashion:

The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

Rankine’s range is more expansive, so it would be unfair to peg her exclusively as the poet of antiracism and other forms of structural bad luck. But this act of inviting open inquiry into the state of things as foreclosed (“The world is wrong”) — that’s what the academics like to do when they take such and such as their object. Rankine is, if anything, an academic poet; and so, a great deal of what came next, and is still coming, under her influence — her seminal book-length poem, it should be noted, narrowly preceded Donald Trump’s golden escalator ride — is a poetry of bland erudition and smokily intoned analysis. At its most convincing, poets of this persuasion give us a huff of graduate seminar intellection. At its most unbearable, they convert, or rather regress, into full-blown dissertation-speak.

Take an example, from a recent issue of American Poetry Review, a poem titled “Future Grief,” which begins: “In late capitalism, we harvest our grief, / boil it down to the salt, which we keep / in glass jars and sprinkle on our meat.” After some noise and kumbayas, the poem ends: “In late capitalism, the bees almost disappeared / before we remembered their barbed stinger, / the work of being stung.” The poet, here Susan Nguyen, demonstrates she’s at least heard of Fredric Jameson, gathering extinction symbolism into a world-anxious metaphor (an obvious one at that). We see this a lot out there in the world of contemporary poetry: the personal “I” adopts the “critical-theoretical lens” as an exercise in signal-boosting. But Nguyen, eager to signal her sophistication, cramps her own style: the poem is just objectively better without the qualifying jargon. Many lyric poets feel compelled to layer on that little bit of discursive expertise over the personal and call it know-how. It’s more suggestive of bad imitation.

The tendencies of the last decade or so have had all the ingredients for a dominant, highly commercialized poetics that swings, on one end, from what Paul McAdory once described as “weepy disclosure and self-serious sentimentality,” to an equally dour, flavorless, theory-inflected essayism — one that operates in both hybrid-prose and the lyric line and hardly ever compromises the stakes for levity. Both modes are well-represented within the New Sincerity: one performs its earnestness in a mirage of life-or-death stagecraft, the other deals earnestly in the new troubling sociologies — the status of the “contemporary subject,” the “white canon,” the legacy of American racism (no doubt real and troubling), the potential for seemingly innocuous speech to perpetuate systems of oppression, and so on. It’s here that arguments for poetry’s social utility take form. (Recall Rankine’s own stern utilitarianism: “Not everything remembered is useful. . . .”) If a poem, much like an off-color greeting card or GIF, can contain microaggressions, then it must also possess the power to remedy the apprehended harm.

What are we talking about when we talk about sincerity and earnestness? If you tried to nail down Vuong & Co., you might hear something like this: the earnest writer strives for honest self-expression, avoiding, as they must, needless subterfuge and ornamentation. It’s that neat package of associations handed down to us, as Lionel Trilling pointed out, from that hot minute in Hamlet, in which Polonius, speaking to his son Laertes, delivers this famous bit of counsel: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” If we’re to follow the logic, it means somehow, despite all the trouble, getting at how to be authentic, honest, true to our feelings and ourselves. It means not running to the “métier of poetry,” as Eliot put it, to “literariness,” to the kind of depersonalized sophistication that is the basis of artifice, and which now could be said to evoke the hazy suspicion that one is concealing the plain truth, a truth we are all, as agents of the Sincerely Yours spirit of the age, called to keep watch over.

It’s a tall order coming after Trilling, who noted that the public practice of sincerity often leads paradoxically to inauthenticity; after Louise Glück, who demonstrated that sincerity and authenticity don’t necessarily follow from one another in the poetic line — that there is, perhaps, “an anxiety for formulas” driving our special interest in unmasking the speaker as the biographical poet; and especially after Christopher Lasch, who observed that irony had become the dominant cultural tendency (the “age of irony,” as the self-absorbed protagonist declares in Martin Amis’ debut novel, The Rachel Papers) in the postwar period. Lasch more than implies that postmodern irony is maladaptive excess; but 50 years of mass culture and consumption, of corporate consolidation and branding, has shown precisely why the ironic sensibility has had such staying power, and why performative sincerity — itself a cultural product — fails to persuade, let alone cohere. Irony is, if anything, sturdy equipment for living, a way to get to the truth of the matter and ourselves when sincerity is no longer an option. As the painter Eric Fischl once observed: “There’s nothing insincere about irony.” It’s precisely why so many of us prefer our daily dose of reality rinsed in Late Night laughs. It’s why we’d rather be sent memes than poems.

The paradox grows ever more monstrous in the age of social media, where brands appropriate the language of sincerity to sell all manner of products — not to mention, books. It seems to me as good a time as any to question the substance of folk like Vuong and Akbar. Whatever it means to embrace or embody the sincerity they gesture at involves “standing in complex relation” to the whole spectrum of human emotion which, to put it mildly, is mixed company at best.

Robert Frost had his own theory about sincerity, writing: “It is hard to define, but it is probably nothing more than your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves.” That “probably” is the most ironic part of the sentence — and the sincerest. A shrug of mystery, it transmits that shared sense of we really don’t know anything about it. But it precedes a phrase of such wrought specificity and quality (“your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves”) that we must double back, seized by the recognition of a complexity born of mixed feelings. Frost’s admission readies the ground for an educated guess, one permitted a flourish in the act of defying expectations. Without it — that is, the humility owed the subject — we’d know Frost was faking it.

Earnestness is no more a matter of turning up the bass to thump your brand of shred than it is participating in a creative writing workshop at, say, NYU, or choosing your daily wardrobe. It’s based, as Peter Campion once suggested, in the act of writing itself. In other words, it’s priced in, “it comes with the territory,” put it how you will. That doesn’t mean we, as writers, should have to forfeit sincere effort to get the feelings across: in art, those come through anyway, in every conceivable form.

To paraphrase Olivia Laing, cynicism is a way of protecting a cherished thing from those who would proclaim it too easily. If the cherished thing is literature — or politics, or family, or the idea of culture — then we might rightfully risk the charge of cynicism, of nostalgia, of whatever else, to maintain a deadly seriousness about it. That feels sincere enough.

Tanner Stening is a poet, critic, and journalist. His work has appeared in The Drift, Chicago Review, Fence, Poetry Northwest, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. He works at Northeastern University and is rarely, sometimes occasionally, found (on X) @tstening90 and associated platforms.

We’ll keep this one short on what is a gorgeous Sunday in Gotham. Our next big Metropolitan Review party is upon us, as you might have heard. There will be reading and revelry, and you’ll get to meet all the amazing TMR writers and editors. Come grab a drink, hang in the historic KGB Theater, and have an unforgettable night.

If you want to attend, all you need to do is RSVP. Grab your ticket now. We’re getting close to capacity! We want to see all of you there.

Have a pleasant rest of your day, and get ready for Tuesday.

—The Editors

You’re unhappy, she said, you’re unhappy because you’re an adult, what adults like most of all is being good at something, and what’s easier to be good at than being unhappy, at least at first, with time it gets complicated, the truth is there’s a thin line between simple, adult unhappiness, and total, endless, despair, it’s this line that adults absolutely love to tread, what adults like best is to seem, in public, to be just about coping with their complex realities, by means of a highly sophisticated balancing act, adults love to be apparently occupying a sort of magical middle ground, sure, I’m funny, but I’m not too funny, sure, I’m serious, but I’m not too serious, the older you get, she told me, the more obsessed you get with this craze for moderation, until a certain point, and then none of it matters any more, you’re sixty, death starts taking on a pseudophysical form, it’s in the rocks especially, in the minerals, she said, that you start to see it, like an eye of some kind, you want to peel up its lid and see for yourself, when you get to sixty you want to turn over every stone you pass in the hope of seeing what death looks like, from the inside, under the stone, you know it’s very unlikely you’ll find it there but what the hell, you’re sixty, you’ve no time for calculation, twenty-nine to fifty-nine, those were the years of calculation, moderation, expectation, but after that, well tell me how to moderate death, what’s moderate about your life ending, your future turns against you, it doesn’t like you any more, it used to stretch out in front of you, it used to taunt you with perspective, now it’s snapping at your heels, it’s virulent, it’s psychotic, it’s already inside you, let me tell you about a friend of mine, she said, my only friend, in fact, but that’s by the by, a few days before he went he said he felt like he was being fucked to death, by what, I asked him, by death, he said, that line you see over there, he said, pointing at the horizon, don’t pretend you can’t see it, that’s the future, it’s been gathered into a thin steel instrument and it’s being inserted into me, all the way through me, it will come out the other side, he said, on a certain day, but I won’t, there’s no other side for me, she trailed off for a moment, and started shifting her weight from one foot to the other, doing some elementary warm-up exercises, my God, I thought, are we only getting starting? But all I could do was stand there, in the damp, until she started up again, adults seem to be coping, she said, but in truth they’re not, not even a little, adults don’t know the first thing about coping, even a child is more reconciled to death, to even just walking down a street, than an adult, the simplest pigeon will die in peace but an adult, having fake-coped their life away, will suffer acutely from discovering, however gradually, that it’s quite impossible to fake your own death, what you realise, just before you die, is that you can’t fake it, it’s an inscrutably real event, the first and the last for a typical adult, even when it happens gently in the night, with masseuse-like softness, even if it slips in unseen, like a ninja masseuse, with your best interests at heart, even if you greet it in the hall, like an old friend, even if it looks exactly like your mother, it will make no difference, the unfakeable fact of it roasts them alive, she said, even if the actual process is painless, it doesn’t matter, the truth is most people die several years before they’re dead, they die of the idea of it before it even gets a chance to touch them, with its icy glance, icy hands, etc., it finds them pre-frozen, like a sack of peas, she said, but that’s not your problem, my friend’s dead and I’ll be dead too, shortly, but it’s not for you to worry about, you’re a young lad, I see your latte, your transparent desires, oh if you could see yourself, how transparent it is, to be young, it’s almost funny what time does to the body, the comic timing of death is really incomparable, and its special effects, she said, haha, yes, the way it undoes you, from the inside out, very clever, it’s so . . . smarmy, she said, but we love it all the same, you have to love it, what’s the alternative, tell me what you think the alternative is, she said, go on, give me a hint, tell me your opinion, I hoped she wasn’t expecting a reply, it’s most likely a rhetorical gambit, I told myself, or perhaps she needs a breather, from her death spiel, she’d appeared out of the mist about five minutes previously, first her hair, brown with ice-blue streaks, a full six inches below my eye line, I’d been staring at it ever since, increasingly moved, I hadn’t seen a single person over thirty-five with these blue metallic highlights, they had spread through my generation like a disease, an insular disease, old people were protected from dying their hair in streaks of cold blue by years of experience, and yet here she was, seventy-five at least, standing in front of me in the mist, and pulling it off with aplomb, raising the bar, as if the streaks instantiated an electric current, now flowing from her generation into mine, by all accounts the worst generation yet, but nonetheless she was reaching out towards it, her wizenedly diminutive stature, and my height, increased the effect, the sacrifice of her tough-nosed post-war sensibility burning up on the altar of participation, a heart open to the contemporary, however debauched it was, at least that’s what I felt as I listened to her speak, and I didn’t want to ruin the moment, it was the first moment I had experienced in years that I didn’t want, as soon as possible, to ruin, anyway I’d lost the knack of talking to people, I had been drifting deeper and deeper into myself, on my father’s advice, never give the slightest, smallest thing away, to anyone, ever, that’s what he used to say, albeit with a little variation, give him a little credit, every suppertime it seemed my father came up with an ever more radical variation on his theme, the theme of not doing anything, just keeping to yourself, out of trouble, my father would never speak during the first half hour of a meal, something about the state of hungriness made him timid and opaque, and then slowly, as he became less and less hungry, he would get more and more excited, you could see it in his face, the hunger going down, the excitement going up, but he wouldn’t be quite ready to speak until all the food was gone, and then he’d begin, never a new topic, always picking up on his undying theme, a man should live with a forest in easy reach, he’d say, or something similar, a body of water will do the trick, so as long as you have the means to traverse it, you have to get, he’d say, to the centre, and then lean down into it, down into your little wooden boat, no matter if you’re still visible, no matter if all the ladies of the town are watching your slow but steady progress with the latest model of binoculars, it’s you and the water, he’d say, that’s what counts, of course when you’re rowing back into town you’ll need to start thinking again, about how to rise to the very top of the town’s social ladder, but only if you’re able to completely forget about this while you’re out there will have you any desire to do it when you get back to the shore, if you think about a thing too much you’re making a big mistake, he’d say, we’d all be silent, we’d done our talking already, in the first half of the meal, while eating, we’d exhausted ourselves, our topics, our themes, our queries, and entered an almost restful state, but it was then exactly that he’d strike, a man, a boat, a river, a forest, those were the words that the rest hung on, those proud and lonesome nouns, it’s not that he’d ever owned a boat, and it’s hard to see where it came from, this boat fantasy that he’d slip into, at around eight in the evening, while I was clearing away the plates, yes, a little wooden boat, he’d say, and then for a moment, just a moment or two, lie back beneath the lip of the boat, disappear right down into it, right down into your little wooden boat, you need a zone of untouched selfhood that you can return to, when things get too much, that’s what the main idea was, but what if things get too much while you’re already in that zone, what if the zone of untouched selfhood is the most overwhelming of all possible zones, what if you want to retreat from the retreat, I had walked out, right into the mist, in exactly this state of mind, with an acute sense that there was too much of myself in myself, suddenly it seemed an entirely useless object, his little wooden boat, if he wanted a little wooden boat so much, why didn’t he just buy one, why did he never do any of the things that he spoke about, what terrible secret was he hiding, which had nothing to do with boats, or escape, or freedom, of course you have the impression, during childhood, that you’re learning a great deal, just from observing your parents, the interlaced patterns of their activities, but actually it’s all nonsense, once you leave the house you don’t know anything, you even forget, within a couple of weeks, everything about them, if you’re lucky, but I’d stuck it out, I’d taken him far too seriously, rather than see him as a man wracked by regret and confusion, in short, a normal, everyday man, keeping his head just about afloat by means of this meaningless suppertime spiel, you think your parents are trying to hand down some hard-won wisdom but actually it’s a personal reckoning that’s going on, you’re a witness, not a participant, in their project of slowly dying in front of you, it wasn’t advice he was giving, the last thing he wanted was for me to start following it, because it had no practical application at all, except in the act of being said, my God, the years I’d spent trying to retreat into every smelly body of water I found, on whatever decayed vessel I found, or just swimming, right into the middle of another pathetic English lake, there’s nothing worthwhile about an English lake, it’s not a zone of untouched selfhood that you find but a zone of complete personal defilement, it was only when I got the shore that I felt remotely like a person again, he didn’t mean that lake, he must have had a different lake in mind, I told myself, the problem any child has is that they believe the things their father says, somehow underneath it all the father desperately wants to say but don’t believe a word of this, but he can’t quite say it, because what then, once you’ve instructed your child not to listen to a word you say, what are you supposed to do next, love them, spend quality time with them, in the gaping, untrammelled silence that would surely emerge? No, you can’t knowingly sabotage what you have, which is meaningless noise, for something you don’t have, which is love, you have to lie to your child as much as possible before the dark truths of life begin to take hold, it’s at suppertime above all, when the whole family gathers around in expectation, that the father fulfils his sacred duty, to lie ceaselessly to everyone, imagine a little wooden boat somewhere, he’s compelled to say, that you can disappear into, whenever you feel like it, in place of any general truths what a father must do is bitch vaguely about their unresolvable existence, to refer repeatedly to adolescent dreams they never had any interest in following, dreams which they abandoned quite deliberately, and with good reason, dreams which they don’t even remember having, but it doesn’t matter, in most cases, the dreams are sufficiently stale that they wear off soon enough, since the child, of course, grows up, enters a critical, distrustful phase, but perhaps my father was more inventive, or more insistent, or more insane, than most fathers, he was able to keep the whole universe at bay with this strange talk about a little wooden boat, what was really on his mind, of course, was dying, the dying he was getting closer to every day, but he couldn’t talk about that, he couldn’t invite me into the community of the coming dead, with his body as the ladder, or the door, because he didn’t want me to go there, understandably I suppose, he could die as well as anyone, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t want his death to be the beginning of mine, instead he jammed his declining body against what he perceived as the exit from this world, but what he didn’t realise was that the way out was also the way in, I can’t blame him, of course, since I didn’t realise it either, I didn’t have the slightest inkling that the way out was the way in, until she appeared, straight out of the London mist — a bolt of intergenerational lightning, a cross-hatched bob-cut at my neckline — and initiated me, with almost digital shamelessness, into the ever-lasting community of the human dead.

Philip Traylen writes the Substack oldoldoldoldnew.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, is a cop out.

Rhetorically, it’s clear, easy to agree with, and safe to pronounce in even the most banal contexts. But if anyone besides me or Charles Dickens uses it, feel free to ignore the rest. They’re most often trying to run out the clock.

To the best/worst of times view, one might respond: pick a fucking side already. Few will.

In the novel Grime, Sibylle Berg picks a side and argues that we’re in the worst of times. Grime is the rare contemporary novel that can make you feel like a conspirator for reading it. This is a book that must have taken real rage and a strong stomach to write, and for the author to put their name on. It demands the same strong stomach and rage from the reader.

GRM Brainfuck was the original title of the book, first published in Germany in 2019, then renamed for U.S. audiences. The book gets up to that same pitch quickly enough, carrying the fondest wishes and sweetest hopes of its characters with sandpaper gloves. Its terse, hard-boiled tone is reminiscent of James Ellroy, who writes largely about professional fixers and killers. Through its main characters — four kids entering puberty in Rochdale, England, and then London — Grime indicts our global civilization from top to bottom. Berg’s style is as unforgiving as their worldview, with no heroes, no safe spaces to pause in and feel good about what’s going on. The book resides in what’s left after you boil it all down. It occurs beyond euphemism or politesse. As in Ellroy’s books, there’s no interpreting our way out of any of it — what happens happens.

So, what happens? Our four protagonists all begin in Rochdale, where Karen is seduced, drugged, and pimped out for a month in an abandoned building by her boyfriend. Hannah’s mother dies in an understaffed ER when the doctor prioritizes a whiter, better-heeled patient, and her father is coaxed to suicide by a bad-faith euthanasia website. Don’s father flees and her brother dies of a poverty-related pulmonary disease, then her mother and brother are killed in a high-rise fire. Peter is raped in a flop house for migrant workers.

Our four protagonists find one another in squats, homeless shelters, and around Rochdale, and they vow revenge. They improvise ways to support and protect one another. They move to London.

The global society, whose footsteps are heard only at a distance in Rochdale, becomes ever-present once the characters relocate. It appears in the immigrant workers displacing the poor, the planetary elite displacing the merely rich, and the oblivious tourists.

The four kids find a squat in a section of the city that’s been forced to pause its condo-building. If hell is other people, London is just a bigger hell. London is where the controllers — the programmers, secret police, oligarchs, and fading aristocrats come into sharper focus.

Just as they arrive in London, a larger social shift occurs as the government starts offering universal income. After a moment of euphoria, the scheme shows its teeth as a carrot and stick attached to a new regime of surveillance and control, along with decreased services and opportunities. The people continue to be ground down economically, but with greater consequences for speaking out, and an officially sanctioned perspective that their misfortune is their own doing.

At every turn, Berg eschews opportunities for false comfort. There are moments in the story when the characters have a chance to do the right thing — a family might find common cause after a parent flees, or a father and daughter might grow closer after the death of the family’s matriarch. There are ample occasions for the characters to rise to the occasion. But except for our four protagonists, they never do. They’re too tired or harried or distracted, or they just have something better to do. The small failures that define the lives of the protagonists are endemic to the world of Grime, which illustrates the ways these failures are engineered into the very fabric of society through overwork, incessant entertainment, and ridicule.

Contemporary fiction is uniquely difficult these days. The world in 36 months (about the time it takes to write and publish a book) doesn’t seem like it will resemble the present. The best bet, for many writers, is just to interpret the present into the future.

This is one reason that dystopias are popular these days. And Grime occupies a dystopian near future, replete with AI-run governments, universal basic income, shallow digital sleights, voluntary self-surveillance by the population, and vertiginous social inequality. Is this the near future, really? Or is it simply that the present is slippery, hypersensitive, and litigious — making it safer to slide on the prophylactic of fiction?

Grime, while very much of the present moment, is also antipodal to much popular fiction. It’s no murder mystery set in a series of Architectural Digest houses. There are no young people in sweaters with existential crises who never wonder where their rent is coming from. No cats or dogs or simpering younger siblings get saved in the name of likability. No, Grime is a sharp implement to scratch a boil. And like when you draw blood from the boil, and have to accept that it’s really there, that it’s a real problem, the book hangs around and colors your perception afterwards.

The four main characters are all wounded and betrayed by people they trust. The misanthropy of Grime is one characterized by a child’s pain, which stands in sharp contrast to the opportunistic misanthropy of the technocrats. The book spends a lot of time with programmers, politicians, and patricians — and their unique brand of pessimism. They hate human beings because human beings don’t obey like machines. They hate human beings because they can’t be purchased outright, and because they cost so much to rent. They hate human beings because human beings don’t appreciate like assets, and because they take some trouble to dispose of.

Grime captures the shared sensation of barely hanging on as we plunge headlong into a future that promises lower costs and higher efficiency by shitcanning a lot of people who seem quite a lot like us. It captures the loathing and optimized indifference of a self-service portal whenever something goes wrong with health insurance or our travel plans or our career trajectories. (One of the last cogent conversations I had with my mother was a maddening back-and-forth about how to navigate just such a portal.)

The book is fiction. And maybe things aren’t entirely fucked. But it sure feels good to hear someone say in detail that they are indeed as fucked as we dare imagine. Grime does this without hitting a false note.

There’s quite a lot of child prostitution in the book. It’s employed as more than just a provocation. Over the past 20 or more years, as the market has usurped more of daily life, it’s comforting to think some things are sacrosanct, like children. But kids have an exceptionally hard time of it in Grime. Berg positions systematized child rape within the landscape of the book as a natural outcome of a global marketplace that has abdicated all moral authority with which to shame its winners.

The exploitation of children is the line at which the authority, majesty, and power of the one, Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church faltered and collapsed to a laughingstock where no one’s laughing. To let the same offenses slide for a fat-faced prince, politician, or billionaire would seem to make a sad joke of the human race. This is why a distracted public won’t let Epstein go. And it’s a point Grime returns to repeatedly.

More generally, sex and sexual arousal is one form of intoxication that is always pernicious, if not fatal, in Grime. One interesting subplot in the book is the introduction of a virus that neutralizes testosterone, diminishing the confidence, aggression, and sex drive in the men of London. This change brings about a calmer, less violent society in Grime, but also a duller populace, less equipped to stop the tightening controls being imposed on it. The removal of testosterone also brings about an acute state of crisis among the male villains, who have arranged their lives around aggression and sex, and now can no longer make sense of the world, or their place in it.

Disgust with the human condition is a more vibrant strand in European than American literature. The most prominent practitioner these days would be Michel Houellebecq. His unforgiving vision of human conventions, illusions, and desires across all the possible ends of the political and sexual spectrums has made him some enemies. But, as with Berg, his books are a breath of fresh air amid the smarm and happy talk that suffocates too many conversations these days.

Houellebecq’s perspective in Submission and Serotonin differs from Berg though, because all the things he hates in humanity are rather active — if not predominant — in his own desires. First and foremost, his narrators want to smoke, eat well, and fuck, and won’t pretend otherwise.

Berg — writing Grime in the third person — isn’t willing to make such concessions. Berg is straightedge, meaning they neither drink nor take drugs. And that relentlessness shows up in the prose. The point of view is locked in. The intolerance of hypocrisy is more or less absolute. The hedging, hemming, hawing, and hypocrisy that I allow myself is partly the result of the fact that the world often seems very different to me from one moment to the next. And being occasionally intoxicated has something to do with that. The perspective of Grime is a hard one to stay in. As the song goes: “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” The answer in Grime is to burn down the world.

The protagonists do get revenge. But in the exacting landscape of Grime — the world of what it all boils down to — is that a triumph? Or are they just moving the nightmare around? Is this retribution or redistribution? This may sound like karma, but it also sounds a little like the logic of a truly global economy. In a global economy, there’s no place outside to exploit — no frontiers. There’s no place outside to dump waste. There’s not really any growth, so much as a series of schemes to move the poverty, drudgery, and misery around to another corner.

Outer space is a possibility for something, though we’re not sure what. The sections of the book set on Mars are full of billionaires sullenly golfing and trying to get excited about the colony’s stable of prostitutes, while awaiting guests who never arrive.

AI, the other supposed frontier of innovation, shows up in Grime as the buggy, Adderall-and-PowerPoint fever dream of a costless administrative gulag. It’s not magic, or even particularly advanced. It’s just a new excuse to forego the debts we owe one another in a functioning society.

The world the book shows us is one where we’re stuck with ourselves. Finding people to do the grunt work depends on the ancient and nasty business of capturing or persecuting another set of invisible, or at least deserving victims. Not that that’s ever stopped anyone. We all exist inside the walls of the same endless siege, and the same siege mentality. Cannibalism is a question of when, not if.

Grime leads the reader to ask if the global order upon which we all now rely is an inhuman zero-sum regime of cannibalism. Maybe “cannibalism” is uncharitable. We all live in a society. Give a little and take a little. The difference between cooperation and cannibalism may simply be a matter of a few percentage points. It may be a matter of morale. I work for a living most days, and my morale fluctuates. A big part of morale, though, is the big picture of what you’re working for. The big picture that the characters in Grime inhabit is one where a plausible concept of a decent collective future has vanished, and where the better-adjusted kids are an equally lost cause, largely because the grown-ups have sold off the next generation’s mental capacity to imagine a future to the tech and social media folks.

Is it the worst of times? There are plenty of people who say the world today is as good as it’s ever gotten, and we’re one iPhone upgrade, two vaccines, and an interest-rate tweak away from heaven on earth. They have a version of history to support them. They have statistics around things like life expectancy and infant mortality to support them. What’s not to believe? What’s not trust? I’m not sure, but there’s something wrong with their tone. If things are so great, then why are they so loud? Why do they seem so scared of letting a word in edgewise?

Berg gives these perspectives an airing, usually in the form of political or marketing rhetoric, whose subtext is “just stop squirming and this will all be over soon.”

In 2024, Berg became one of 720 Ministers in the European Parliament, having won election as a German representative in 2024. At the time, Politico named them one of “The 23 kookiest MEPs heading to the European Parliament.” Thanks, guys.

I’m not one to lionize politicians. In my opinion, the best of them are the ones who take constituent services seriously. But there’s something to be said for the author of such an aggressively bleak book wading into the hands-on frustration of a legislative body.

Grime settles several scores, and sets up more to come. My main gripe with the book is that after so much action, sensation, and scheming, it ends unresolved. The main characters grow up. Childhood ends. They begin to settle into the unsatisfactory rhythms of their adult lives and to drift apart. The end. But no!

There are two more books in the trilogy, waiting for either a translator or for me to learn German. Regardless, after reading Grime, you may need to take a break before diving back in.

Colin Dodds is an award-winning author and filmmaker who lives in New York City, with his wife and children. His essays appear regularly at No Homework, and his latest film, The Demon Core of Fresh Kills, is currently in production.

In one week, we will hold the next Metropolitan Review reading and party. You absolutely will not want to miss it. We’ll feature, among others, Emma Collins, Harold Rogers, Stephen Adubato, and Daniella Nichinson. Stick around afterwards to meet the writers, hang with the TMR editors, and have a fantastic time. Tickets are available, so get them now.

—The Editors

Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades removed from its heyday in the Gen-X literature of the 1990s, Doyle writes in the stylistic lineage of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. The aesthetic legacy of this “postmodernism” was a recuperation of certain elements rooted in the literary “avant-garde” extended to the level of pastiche, and alluding to ideas more elevated and profound than what was actually communicated at the level of text. Ellis was virtuoso in this regard, a novelist of pure instinct and “vibe,” possessing an almost unmatched ability to imply some underlying profundity, intelligence, and depth that was more often than not absent. Most of his oeuvre, superficially brutal and unpleasant, also seems in retrospect to be curiously sanitized despite the depravity of its subject. It was a literary equivalent to concomitant processes within cinema and television that has resulted in the normalization of gratuitous violence and explicit sex even within the most staid, pedestrian, and uninteresting cultural outputs. Indeed this was avant-garde ‘transgression’ for the ordinary punter, the middle-brow aesthete, the general reader: the normie.

Ellis’ novel Lunar Park centered on the exploits of a fictionalized protagonist who bore the same name as the author, and Rob Doyle’s Cameo — and his previous novel Threshold —adhere to a similar narrative conceit. I remember going to see Ellis read Lunar Park during its promotional tour in 2005 at Oran Mor in Glasgow. It’s hard to believe now that this was a sold out event, packed to the rafters with hundreds of people. However, I don’t remember the crowd being particularly ‘“literary,”’ and in retrospect seemed more comparable to the “Influencer” meet and greets of the present, albeit for a more rudimentary internet age. My most distinct memory was that everyone wanted to have their copies of American Psycho signed. I suspect that when most people think of American Psycho they’re mostly thinking of the unintentionally comic (and surprisingly seductive) nihilism of its film adaptation, which, like Kubrick’s The Shining, is a vastly superior work of art to the literary original. Ellis’s Lunar Park was a good example of the peculiar redundancy of 90s postmodernist transgression, and the fundamental inadequacy of its aesthetic possibilities, namely, the failed attempt at a meta-fictional transgression of the self. In the end, this strategy always highlighted the author’s paltry narcissistic impulses as opposed to any real attempt to question their providence. No author has really succeeded in truly transgressing the authorial self, which in any case is an uninteresting artistic goal, and one which was effectively exhausted by the Nouveau Roman in the 1960s and 70s. Subsequently, the failure of the 90s attempt to expel the Self has had the unintended consequence of causing a manifold proliferation. This impasse is what, I assume, Rob Doyle’s Cameo is attempting to re-visit — but it is difficult to be sure to what end, if any.

I admired Doyle’s previous novel Threshold (2020), a work of autofiction. I first read it during the pandemic, when everything was in a state of flux. Threshold more overtly concerned transgression as a means to transcendence, albeit through the clichéd avenues of drugs and excess. It is temperamentally and intellectually in accordance with Aldous Huxley’s insights in The Doors of Perception (1954), refracted through the compulsory irony and dark humor of the Xillenial writer. Nonetheless, Doyle ultimately reproduces the fundamental philosophical misapprehension of Huxley. Upon re-reading Threshold, I’ve come to realize that my original admiration was spurred less by its specific aesthetic qualities (the style itself is modest, familiar, earnest — like if Nick Hornby had written about piss fetishists in the Berghain toilets). Rather, it appears that I was taken in by its frequent instances of “relatability;” a pathos inextricably bound up in some familiar imagery, or a sense of commonality felt with the author’s tastes and cultural referents, or the experiences recounted and their similarity to my own. These things are a solid basis for friendship, but less so when it comes to an honest appraisal of artistic merit. I have, no doubt unwisely, opted to pursue the latter in this review — which, amidst the general dishonesty of contemporary criticism, I will foolhardily attempt to re-brand as “radical honesty.” In retrospect, as much as I am loathe to admit it, the cumulative effect of Threshold was very much “affirmative” in the facile identitarian logic which governs much of contemporary cultural discourse, even if we allow that it was an understandable response to the negligible amount of contemporary fiction concerning the male heterosexual experience. The admiration felt was analogous to the pride of a small village towards the local boy come good, and the author of Threshold was for all intents and purposes notre homme infiltré; our man on the inside. Needless to say, I gave little thought then as to why he might have been permitted to be on the “inside” in the first place. Indeed, of all the myriad indiscreet fantasies of literary celebrity which Cameo invokes, the most implausible is also the most modest: the idea of a critical culture in which the primary considerations are artistic and intellectual, where there exists some interest in giving a writer’s aesthetic and philosophical project its proper due. In this particular vein, I have attempted to take this work seriously.

Rob Doyle is nominally an Irish Novelist™, but one who is clearly ambivalent towards this designation. His palpable discomfort provides one of the more interesting aspects of Cameo; an underlying contempt towards the idea of Irish literature as global brand, comparable in certain ways to the ubiquitous Irish pub, paradoxically provincial and cosmopolitan. Every man has two countries, Henri de Bornier once proclaimed: his own and France. But many people hate the French, whereas the Irish are an almost universally beloved people. They are, however, loved for specific reasons; openness, kindness, humor, warmth, conviviality … abject historical suffering. Such attributes make it difficult to cast oneself in any role that goes against the national stereotype, such as imperious literary enfant terrible. I suspect that this is a source of great frustration for a writer such as Rob Doyle, and one painfully evident — to an intentionally comical effect — in the speculative autobiographical elements of this novel’s alter-ego Ren Duka.

The basic philosophical conceit of Cameo is given to be Nietzschean. The final section — an interview with the “author” — attempts to convey some hint of this overarching framework:

To quote an author I long ago stopped reading, Friedrich Nietzsche, I can say that the entire Duka series stands as a monument to a crisis. Only, the crisis turns out not to have been mine alone, as I imagined it was when I wrote the first pages of the original novel. Ren Duka is the window through which I’ve viewed the world’s catastrophes and mutations. He’s the microcosm that contains the macrocosm.

The actual author may attempt to claim some semblance of ironic distance here, echoing the customary and inadequate defense of the 90s “post-modernist,” but the later reference to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo seems to confirm a specific connection. It was this text which our man Friedrich was composing when he had his mental breakdown in Turin. We may assume that the enfant terrible Doyle is similarly attempting to parse what he believes to be a comparably profound philosophical crisis: being a middle-aged bohemian hedonist. It is here that the outline of a rather crude intertextual pastiche emerges, a book which was also famously invoked the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche. The Turin episode also constituted the most powerful fixed ideas in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and “Ren Duka” appears also to be a perfect anagram of “Kundera.” If this level of meta-textual detail seems a tad on the nose, it also appears quite apposite and logical in sum. For despite some initial appearances, Cameo is itself very much a recurrence; a continuation of the auto-fictional thematic focus of Threshold. Fredric Jameson, writing in 2018 about Karl Ove Knausgaard, described his work as “surface writing” for “surface readers:”

We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them. . . . (Jameson, London Review of Books, 2018)

On first glance, the exasperating itemization of quotidian reality employed by Knausgaard seems to differ significantly from the narrative apparatus of Cameo, which is largely comprised of book summaries of Ren Duka’s novels, written in the flat prose of a synopsis one might email to a literary agent. These summaries become more and more outlandish and picaresque as the narrative progresses, and we are to assume that many of these themes and plots could, in some parallel universe, have been written by Rob Doyle himself. But this conceit is quite similar in affect to the itemization Jameson describes. As such, its “estranged” effect is no more salutary for being ostensibly more “literary,” since it does nothing to lessen the “distressing unoriginality.” Indeed, a writer can attempt to transgress the “self” through verisimilitude, through honesty (“radical” or otherwise), through banal diarization, or through the invocation of shop-worn literary devices, but ultimately one must possess sufficient means to actually transcend the ‘self.’ This is where Cameo ultimately comes up short.

In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov was writing his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, on a typewriter balanced on top of the bidet. It was the only place he could work in a cramped Parisian studio apartment without waking up his infant son. They had recently fled Nazi Germany because of his Jewish wife, and a recent affair with another woman had come close to ending his marriage. Desperately poor, and looking for a way out of the European mainland to either England or America, he sensed that switching to English would allow him to keep working as a writer. The son of a Russian aristocrat and anglophile, he’d learned English as a child before he knew Russian. However he was deeply attached to the Russian language, in which he had written nine novels that were well regarded within the emigration. Though fluent, he was so unsure of his English prose that he had several acquaintances proofread the manuscript for him. The novel concerns an attempt by a narrator named V to write a biography of his recently deceased half-brother: a Russian-English novelist named Sebastian Knight. He had little contact with Sebastian since their childhood, and V’s overriding purpose is to counteract the effects of another, flawed, biography written by his brother’s former literary agent. V wishes to understand his brother’s books as a means to discover the mysterious truth behind his tragic “real” life. Needless to say, this undertaking is doomed to failure. Sebastian Knight’s novels are summarized in not entirely dissimilar ways to Ren Duka’s novels in Cameo. Interspersed with the descriptions of these non-existent books, and within the wider narrative, are various elements of Nabokov’s own ‘real life’; the pain of exile, the assassination of his father, the prospect of losing his language, the hate and resentment he felt toward the Bolshevik revolution which had deprived him of his motherland, the antipathy he felt towards his homosexual brother who would eventually die in a concentration camp, the passionate affair with another woman that caused him to contemplate suicide, and all of the other ways that his life had come perilously close to resembling the tragedy of Sebastian Knight. Was Nabokov then writing autofiction? Indeed, personal memory, the singular and subjective vision, was for Nabokov inextricable from his essential conception of art. But the “absolute solution” to the overwhelming effects of an undesired historical reality was for Nabokov a defiant restatement of the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. He would remain faithful to this ideology until the end. It was, however, a thoroughly modern aesthetic autonomy which abhorred regurgitation and pastiche, scoffed at cliché — one that strived constantly to attain an uncompromising uniqueness of style. Taken in this context, the hidden presence of such intimate and traumatic details from Nabokov’s own life begin to cohere. To write such intensely personal work at that particular historical impasse, when the majority of other writers and artists were swept up in the world historical political conflicts of the era, attests to the unrelenting individualism at the very core of the Nabokovian aesthetic. Yet it was individualism that was always in the end subordinate to the aims of art, that always transcended the self. He excoriated the programmatic literature of ‘social intent,’ yet possessed a gift of style so unique and persuasive — across two languages — that no one, not even his enemies, were capable of denying it. For Nabokov there was only one school, that of talent. If one wished to be a writer of style, and not of social intent, it was necessary to be a writer of pure style.

I’m unsure if Doyle aspires to be such a writer. However, it was a strongly held motivation for Martin Amis — whose work is a clear influence on Doyle. Amis’s strategy was extra-literary and more related to public relations and advertising than literature itself — partly involving name dropping Nabokov constantly and hoping that an association repeated and parroted by compliant journalists might somehow realign the cosmic order. In the actual practice of “pure” style, Amis always in my view fell tragically short: the most he could muster was the very English reliance upon “humor” and a torturously “correct” prose. Amis also wished to be an enfant terrible, to perform transgression for the middlebrow reader, but he could scarcely rise above the role of teacher’s pet turned ‘naughty’ public schoolboy. The Doylean strategy similarly takes recourse to this associative method, a form of manifestation and conjuration intended to deflect from the actualities of a rather familiar and ordinary style. This comes specifically from his constant invocation of “avant-garde,” which is repeated like a mantra throughout Cameo, when not hinted at through various hackneyed tropes.

This fantasy of the “avant-garde,” which bears little resemblance to actuality, is evoked throughout Cameo’s bourgeois bohemian landscapes. It is one redolent of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (published in 1918), but unlike that book — Doyle’s avant-garde fantasia, though at times ironic, is far from satirical, and is even at times painfully earnest. Much of the aesthetic touchstones of this fantasy are obvious and cliché, revel in the valorization of cheap transgression, and unsurprisingly — the geographic and spiritual focus doesn’t seem to have shifted too far away from Berlin, the contemporary bourgeois bohemia par excellence; a grimy and increasingly expensive theme park of drugs, techno and kink filled with mendacious mediocrities, where lifestyle and excess is seen as an adequate replacement for genuine artistic vitality.

The writer Adam Lehrer coined the term “Crypto Transgression” as a theory of how work within mainstream culture can show a superficial adherence to the lexicon of progressive liberal politics, whilst allowing for certain elements of cryptographic aesthetic subversion and transgression. It must be admitted that such a theory could only occur to a critic for whom transgression is the end goal of any worthwhile artistic activity. It’s difficult to disentangle the causes and motivation behind such a conviction, which appear to be the by-product of more than half a century of aesthetic revolutions that promised some radical departure — social, political, ontological — but in almost every instance, failed to deliver on its promises, and betrayed those who believed in them. There is a family resemblance between this Crypto-transgression described by Lehrer, and the normie transgression practiced by Rob Doyle — but they differ on the level of provenance. The former maintains some defiance, since it retains elements of plausible deniability, of legitimacy through covert oppositionality. But the latter is markedly more obsequious and compliant.

There have been many contemporary writers and artists in the “normie” transgressive mode that have managed to carve a niche for themselves within the liberal cultural apparatus because of a certain calculated cynicism. This exists alongside their putatively transgressive impulses; a careerism, political reliability, and a public neutrality or deferment of judgement towards what has become an utterly compromised, incoherent, and morally bankrupt centrist liberal consensus (“Slava Ukraina!” but: “it’s complicated” in Gaza). Nevertheless, even if we allow that Lehrer’s fixation with transgression is also, at base, rather unsophisticated — his own take on the auto-fictional genre Communions (which I edited and published through Hyperidean Press in 2021) was more interesting than most. It had such an unwieldy, energetic, and shamelessly egomaniacal honesty, was so un-ironically self-regarding and megalomaniacal that it was difficult to believe it was not parodic. The effect was quite thrilling; an unashamed and unapologetic work of “ego-fiction” as opposed to “autofiction,” one which dispensed with the flimsy pretense common to the ’90s postmodernists. Furthermore, Lehrer seems genuinely committed to transgressing and offending sensibilities, to highlighting obvious inconsistencies and blatant hypocrisy. Over the years he has gone from vocal Bernie Bro to irascible MAGA fanatic in the blink of an eye, only following energies and instincts, never holding back or moderating his oppositionality of expression. Despite the clearly protean nature of his views, how silly they might appear at times, and the distinct possibility that they will likely change in the future: he is nevertheless a faithful acolyte to the prevailing ideological aesthetic and “vibe” of any given moment, and an unfiltered practitioner of “radical honesty” in criticism. What is hard for most to admit is that this attitude — though foolhardy, absurd, indelicate, and at times cringe and embarrassing — is much more purely transgressive than the polite, calculated, media-trained careerism of most journalist/novelists. I’m unsure as to what Lehrer actually believes in other than himself, but I do believe in his commitment to the principle of transgression. If one must be transgressive, isn’t it better to commit to it fully? As far as transgression goes, isn’t it better to be an intensely loathed pariah, than a mildly tolerated prankster? Isn’t it better to be among the barbarian hordes of swinging dicks marauding against the battlements, than some solitary giggling eunuch within the hermetically sealed harem of contemporary culture? But transgression — whether “crypto” or Normie — is ultimately an infantile pursuit when pursued as an artistic telos. It is the mark of an impoverished and unrefined aesthetic sense that is, paradoxically, more compliant to the existing order because it is so easily satisfied and contented. The unruly child, after all, is easily and swiftly quieted when his irrational desires are indulged.

I believe the most salient expression of Rob Doyle’s philosophy of “normie” transgression is to be found in the following:

I wrote a story from the perspective of Mr. Manly; in a dungeon of hell, he recounts his last night on earth as a suburban echo of Christ’s ordeal at Gethsemane. I kept quiet about all this at school, but a strange tenderness, even a kind of love, grew inside me for Mr. Manly. In my final school year, under the influence of transgressive French Literature, I developed a private mythology that venerated the paedophile as the last existential outlaw, thrown into a world where he is universally despised, an object of revulsion whom the community can hate without restraint. I imagined Mr. Manly as an abject saint who dwelt in a zone of truth inaccessible to the human family from which he was a born pariah.

This is the darkest and the most representative example of the essentially “normie” transgressive aesthetic and philosophical qualities of Cameo. These are the adolescent musings of a Doyle alter-ego Henry K. Dillon, author of the Ren Duka novels, writing about a pedophile teacher at their school who committed suicide after his crimes were discovered. The adolescent context is intended to dissuade any outright judgement. But this puerile quality is essential to the novel’s counter-cultural and avant-garde pretensions. In its weak allusion to transgressive French Literature, almost in the manner of a product placement, we cannot help but note a characteristic indolence that pervades the novel. The entirely deliberate and reflexive lack of specificity anchors the text firmly within the realm of the middle-brow. What transgressive literature is being alluded to exactly? To be specific here would risk alienating the intended audience for this work, who are content with the half-hearted allusion, and the broadly deterministic narrative implications (if one reads weird French books, one starts to have weird ideas!). More significantly, it might also risk revealing the extent of the author’s own apprehension of the value of transgression, thereby revealing its lack of sophistication. It is apparent nonetheless.

According to this contrarian logic, one should admire the pedophile because of his status as “bad subject,” as an outsider, because he’s hated by society, by “the man,” by the establishment; he is an “abject saint,” somehow an echo of the original and most profound scapegoat, Christ himself. He is misunderstood, hated and loathed, but permitted access to some profound and divine truth. What is this truth? If one follows the determinism also hinted at in the above, it appears to be an ultimate commitment to individual egotistical desire, loyalty to the passions of the self at all costs. But the great paradox of a narcissistic personality is that its excess of ego is merely a symptom; evidence of a compensatory procedure that attempts (unsuccessfully) to unite the disparate fragments of a fundamentally divided self. It is a pathology born from a fatal uncertainty.

It occurs to Ren that Augustine’s secret motive in writing his Confessions was to promote celibacy among the young so as to lessen the goading evidence that others were getting what he no longer could. Confessions might have been a better book, Ren decides, if Augustine found no respite in God but mediated ruthlessly on erotic regret, on being banished from the garden of earthly bliss as his biological organism underwent the cruel process of dissolution — in short, Confessions would have worked better as a Ren Duka novel.

As elsewhere, the knowingly ironic and absurdist elements of fantasy do not obviate the earnestness of these unseemly delusions of grandeur. Thus, what could have potentially redeemed this work is continually foreclosed. Doyle is ostensibly an authentic seeker of higher truths, but always reverts to a comforting projection of subjective pathologies; dismissing the divine, the “eternal recurrence” is a boundless fascination with the motivations of the Self.

On the level of Philosophical enquiry, Doyle is to some extent in his natural element. An unmistakably sympathetic facet of his fiction is the disarmingly earnest status as a seeker. But a seeker is only sympathetic insomuch as he preserves some degree of naivety and unknowing. This was the case in Threshold, but is less so in Cameo. Aside from the Nietzschean meta-text, there are references to The Bhagavad Gita, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nagarjuna, among others — all hastily grouped together as philosophers of the “void.” Nevertheless, there are certain points within the work which approach something resembling revelation and insight. In one scene, the alter-ego Henry K. Dillon, who works as a taxi driver, has an exchange with a visiting German composer about the nature of art. This section, without a doubt the best in this novel, was the moment at which I came close to apprehending some overarching purpose, since it concerned a philosophical and fictional allegory that I have also been pondering lately vis a vis the “liberal” political worldview. At first I began to rack my brain, to remember if in our discussions and conversations we had touched upon this specific parable, and what Doyle’s attitude towards it was. A very wise man, who is now sadly quite far gone, once told me that this parable concerned the fundamental question that determines what type of morality an individual follows. Stumbling upon this section, I momentarily felt the pull of comparability I had on reading Threshold, an echo of some mutual intelligibility and affability. However, the resolution only seemed to reveal how divergent our artistic sensibilities and loyalties might actually be.

Like the frequent incantation of “avant-garde,” a similarly indolent allusive technique is used by Doyle to convey the grandest philosophical questions of life and existence. Perhaps the intent is to convey these complex metaphysical questions at a level comprehensible to the general reader, an admirable quality for an artist, an act of noblesse oblige and grace. But in order to be successful in this regard, one must have stared into the burning bush and come away with some perennial and esoteric knowledge, some singular truth. However, there doesn’t appear to be any monomaniacal obsession propelled by any such knowledge, no singular adamantine resolve, hard won or otherwise. What remains are a few askew glances at the mirror, refracted relentlessly through different angles and viewpoints across the fictional threads of this work. In the end, there is only one truth, that of the persona of Rob Doyle; the sum of a single life and existence, past and future, contemplative and speculative, presented for our consideration through indiscreet fantasies. In place of hard truth there is flaccid contingency, a flailing around, and an impotent grasping for profundity. Doyle’s potential as a philosophical novelist is still to be fully realized. And yet if the style had been pure, in any way virtuoso, if it was actually avant-garde instead of content to mimic the most obvious poses, we may have been able to forgive Cameo its fateful contingency. I make allowance for the philistine pedigree of those who may have had undue influence in the final shape of this work. But one cannot be on the inside and claim to belong outside; be both arrière-garde and avant-garde. In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside.

Udith Dematagoda is a writer, musician and scholar from Scotland. He is the Editor in Chief and publisher of Hyperidean Press, and writes the Substack Immanent Dissolution.