There is a scene, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, that surely contains the ultimate cinematic statement on Homer’s Odyssey. An American producer has asked the film’s screenwriter protagonist to help rewrite an adaptation of The Odyssey helmed by the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself, beautifully). The writer comes to meet Lang in the studio and watches a few rushes for the proposed film. All we really see is a series of close-ups of actual Hellenic statues, painted over in sharp colors, while Georges Delerue’s famous score swells and the camera tracks around the figures. It’s an extraordinarily moving sequence; I could cry anytime I see it. Just before the producer interrupts, we get to see what Lang (or rather Godard’s Lang) has done with the story: something slightly alienating and abstract, but not enough to let us pretend we can somehow cinematically leap over the gulf between our own era and that ancient Bronze one. In other words, to make an honest film of something as old as The Odyssey would probably entail filming the grandeur of static, ancient figures, worn by time. The myth may be alive and well among us, but the world it came from is a ruin we can’t quite understand.

To be sure, Fritz Lang is one of the few directors who actually could have adapted Homer’s epic for the cinema. The man who gave the world Metropolis and Die Nibelungen — more or less inventing the modern cinematic language of science fiction and fantasy — in his UFA Studio days created images so severe and perfect they sustain a mythic register no other filmmaker has truly matched. The Tarkovsky of Andrei Rublev; the Kurosawa of Ran and Seven Samurai; Visconti’s The Leopard; Bondarchuk’s War and Peace — these films and filmmakers perhaps come closest to the scale, thematically, not just physically, necessary to do it. Among classic Hollywood filmmakers, perhaps only Anthony Mann could have made The Odyssey. His 1961 El Cid, now almost forgotten, may be the best directorial work ever done at that scale: enormous, melodramatic, never tipping into camp, exquisitely composed even while juggling literal thousands of extras. And most importantly: given over to a total belief in the romance and fantasy of its subject. Among contemporary filmmakers, only Robert Eggers can do this, though in a way that’s more or less new to cinema, and so paradoxically very contemporary. Still, it’s hard to imagine Eggers making a sweeping adventure on the scale of Odysseus’ voyage.

It’s usually a critical sin to review a film for what it isn’t. And yet while I sat watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, all I could think about was how many other Odysseys I was missing out on — how many more interesting decisions, even revisions, might have turned it into cinema (even in a cultural landscape as revolted by undiluted myth as ours). Those two or three minutes of Godard’s Le Mépris — a couple of statues and some gorgeous music — are more emotional and intellectual than two or three hours spent with Nolan.

For all its fascinating moments, its grand special effects, good performances, and the occasional, inarguable thrill of seeing an immortal archetype realized on the silver screen, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is an extremely stupid film. If I really wanted to be perverse, I’d say it’s not even quite a film. This may be an unintelligible statement to some readers. But I’ve never been more convinced that Nolan is both the ultimate and the most depressingly influential of modern filmmakers. He practices a cinema almost entirely without images, without mise-en-scène, without spatial sense whatsoever. Only relentless forward motion, relentless montage: one long, exhausting movie trailer for the movie we thought we were seeing, for the movie beneath the movie (which used to be called a film), all of it structured around Nolan’s myopic addiction to the “revelatory moment” of each schematic, puzzle-based plot.

I’ll admit, I’ve generally been something of a humbug when it comes to Nolan. Critics and fans alike often speak of his apparent intellectuality — they see him as a kind of master watchmaker. But I sometimes wonder whether this is what Nolan actually thinks drama is: those supreme aha moments, when he can finally spring the mechanism he’s been winding, when all his previously “disconnected” montage material is finally organized into a “meaning” that retroactively changes the trajectory of everything you’ve just seen. It amounts (as I’ve written elsewhere) to a misunderstanding of Terrence Malick, easily the greatest palpable influence on his work. And it is a misunderstanding, because it takes Malick’s unrepeatable style of associative, scriptless memory-montage and applies it to those very Hollywood conceits — schematic plots, superheroes, action scenes — Malick evolved to avoid in the first place. Rather than unfolding as a true series of related images meant to be experienced in sequence, Nolan’s movies are like fissile material awaiting the endpoint explosion that finally makes them legible; then they end, and that’s it. The man endlessly — perhaps accidentally — metaphorizes himself.

Once Nolan started making superhero movies, he never really stopped making superhero movies. Every film he’s made since 2005’s Batman Begins has felt and moved exactly the same: deadly serious, dour, lumbering, melodramatic. Incredibly heavy, with little warmth, bright color, fun, sex, or sensuality anywhere in sight — it only works (and it generally does work, including in The Odyssey) because each film is based entirely on that constant forward propulsion, most of it a trick of editing and sound. Nolan and his editor Jennifer Lame tend to cut his scenes to shreds. Study an action scene in one of Nolan’s films — even some simple dialogue scenes — and anytime a series of cuts is meant to communicate action in space, the result is usually no more legible than a Michael Bay film.

Nolan’s cinema runs on pure momentum, and this is often genuinely thrilling, particularly in a loud theater. He’s an entertainer, after all, and the box-office receipts suggest he’s a great one. Still, the films themselves rarely have much to offer beyond that surface-level entertainment — and a somber, exhausting, one-note entertainment, at that. If I had to pick just one, I suppose I’d go with Oppenheimer: strip away the Lewis Strauss sections and the black-and-white testimonial time-jumps, concentrate on Oppenheimer’s arc from genius to apocalypse prophet, and you’d have something very nearly great — the greatest thing Nolan’s ever done. Though it, too, is constantly dragged down by Nolan’s usual fixations: guilty men and the wives and girlfriends who judge them; anonymous, interchangeable characters; nonlinearity, ticking noises, pounding scores. Even Oppenheimer’s pipe and hat get a dramatic close-up, as if they were just another superhero’s iconic costume, ready for the suit-up.

In truth, I don’t quite know what to make of Nolan’s The Odyssey. The meaning, the aesthetic residue, the contour of the film itself — it’s all vapor. The film slips out of my hands. It certainly wasn’t important that Nolan be “historically accurate” (call the troglodyte pre-backlash what it was: the internet’s triumph as a laboratory for new genres of human stupidity). And yet nearly every attempt to make it contemporary is baffling, clunky, and more clichéd than a Homeric epithet (“Our age of Bronze is dying . . . ” “The face that launched a thousand ships . . . ” “You’re a lost boy pining for a daddy you’ll never know . . . ”). The demotion of Odysseus from a trickster beloved of the gods to a traumatized war veteran with a guilty conscience doesn’t even feel like a truly piquant “revision” because it’s telegraphed so rotely and literally. The moment we finally learn where his conscience-like visions of “Athena” come from is exactly the Nolan bathos I described above — it’s head-shakingly trite. It would even be silly, if it weren’t immediately followed by Penelope declaring, “You’re the people from the sea!” with astonishment, in a scene that would almost be camp if this were a smarter movie, one that understood how to use Anne Hathaway’s trickier screen talents to better effect.

Certain performances are admirable. Robert Pattinson (the suitor Antinous), Hathaway, and Matt Damon have the elegance and gravitas necessary to make their characters feel like characters — though best of all when they begin to leave Nolan’s numbly “realist” territory behind and start clawing toward a more interesting artifice: Damon wandering with his silly gray beard around Calypso’s beach, genuinely pathetic; Hathaway and Pattinson playing at dueling divas in a two-shot through Penelope’s loom that might be the longest and most memorable shot in the film. The rest of the cast ranges from the very good (John Leguizamo as blind Eumaeus; Samantha Morton as Circe) to the perfectly decent (Elliot Page as Sinon, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen) to the remarkably bad (Tom Holland’s Telemachus). The rest are largely forgettable casualties of the film’s inability to pause long enough for them to matter — though Benny Safdie’s mostly silent few moments as Agamemnon are as iconic and memorable as everyone says, particularly in the film’s best sequence: Odysseus’ descent into a bleary, black volcanic Hades. Yet even there — as they do elsewhere, constantly — Nolan and Lame refuse to linger long enough on any image to let you fully register what you’re seeing.

In a sense, Nolan has simply remade Oppenheimer. The parallels are clear: the Trojan Horse is like the Atom Bomb, both of them metonyms for historical moments when some new human tool or discovery unleashed terrible forces on the world. Both films are heavy-handed parables about the guilt of uniquely Promethean men coming to terms with the old world order they destroyed. In The Odyssey, it’s the apocryphal breaking of Xenia, Zeus’ law, the civilizational importance of which Nolan’s script never stops hammering home. The Bronze Age Collapse mirrors the arrival of the Atomic Age — and, extrapolated forward, perhaps the dawning Age of AI. They’re Nolan’s sentimental warning to the rest of us: be kind to each other, and try not to invent thermonuclear weapons.

Some have read the film as commentary on Nolan’s own guilt, given his leading role in the superhero-ification and IP strip-mining that helped hollow out the film industry over the past two decades. I find this believable. Even more interesting, I recently had a conversation with a friend who considered the film a possibly unconscious allegory of the advent of the Christian idea of sin. For a film so obsessed with one man’s guilt, it’s striking that Nolan’s Odysseus isn’t guilty in any way Homer would have recognized. In Homer, guilt is a public failure to observe a stringent cultural code of honor; guilt comes with the external cultural role and is hierarchical (though no less a luminary than Simone Weil found more than a little proto-Christian pity in The Iliad). Nolan’s Odysseus is plagued by his own conscience — he did wrong, he knows it, and it’s eating him up inside. Of all the anachronisms in this stupendously anachronistic movie, an Odysseus who develops the concept of historical (not to say spiritual) sin surely takes the cake.

Still, speaking as a lover of cinema — which is all I am, not a “proper” critic — I can only say these suggestions sound far more interesting than the film I saw. Because it’s a work of consummate costuming, effects, and art direction — because it moves and moves and sometimes dazzles — Nolan’s Odyssey does largely work on its own terms. I left the theater feeling wrung out and entertained (to call it that). But I can’t shake the feeling that those terms are wrong-headed, unhelpful, and profoundly inartistic. Nolan is our representative contemporary filmmaker; in some sense he is modern filmmaking itself. His Odyssey is exactly what such a man would create in such a time, which may indeed make it one of the characteristic movies of our era. To that sad fact I can only say: thank the gods he didn’t do The Iliad.

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.

Where to begin? At the end.

At the close of The Golden Age, the last novel in his long series of American history, Gore Vidal performs a theatrical trick. The year is 2000. A television crew has come from Rome to Ravello in order to interview Vidal (the writer) alongside Peter Sanford (one of the writer’s central characters) for a program they’re making (about Roosevelt, Truman, and the arming of America in the 20th century). Yes, the man who never misses a chance to have sex or appear on television cannot resist inserting himself into his own final chapter, where he converses freely with his own creations on and off the air. After the filming, the crew goes back to Rome, and Peter and Vidal — character and creator — are left alone together above the Gulf of Salerno. “Our revels now are ended,” says Peter. “Why do you keep letting Shakespeare leak in upon us?” Vidal’s reply is simple: Why not? William, after all, gives names to things, real and unreal.

It’s a fitting moment with which to close his American Chronicles — or, as Vidal more metaphorically calls them, his Narratives of Empire. At the end, Vidal stands as a playwright who is his own Prospero. He sets aside his script, looks back at the long drama he’s just staged: seven historical novels (novelized histories?) measuring the steps of the United States along the path from revolution to world war. Shakespeare pervades the novels. From Salmon P. Chase feeling like Brutus listening to William Seward’s Cassius in Lincoln, to Peter likening the political style of his father Blaise Sanford to that of Coriolanus in Washington, D.C., Shakespeare is a real presence in the Narratives. He has the power to speak directly to what’s happening, which is the power to affect how events are perceived, how stories are made sense of.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare imagines the progress of human life over seven ages. It’s in one of those monologues everyone knows, beginning, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” Each age brings its own version of events, ambitions, and (in)decisions: the infant mewling and puking, the schoolboy creeping like snail, the lover with a woeful ballad, the soldier quick in quarrel, the justice who plays his part, the old man heading toward childish treble, and the “second child” facing death and mere oblivion. This is not a map of human life. It’s a way of seeing patterns of character as people change with time.

In the Narratives, Vidal gives an account of the life of the United States, now 250 years old. Vidal, who died in 2012, once quipped that during his long life he met many people but knew no one. True or not, the curious American master certainly knew a great deal about his country. And countries are, after all, like people. The national character shifts when a country moves through significant moments of crisis or carelessness or confusion. Vidal’s seven novels capture those moments for the American empire, connecting readers in the present to parts of the past and, simultaneously, offering examples that might be useful in the future. What follows is not a comprehensive description. It is an introductory reading of Burr through to The Golden Age, from the mewling and puking of revolutionary infancy to the mere oblivion of a global empire in decline: seven ways into the seven acts that make up the strange, eventful history of the United States.

Act I: Mewling and puking

America’s history begins, in Vidal’s telling, with its most infamous founder. In Burr, the first of the Narratives of Empire, Vidal does something simple yet subversive: he casts Aaron Burr as the hero of the infant republic. Not George Washington. Not John Adams. Certainly not Thomas Jefferson. Burr, the stock villain of American history, is the real hero, the point of view from which many of the stories are told. The novel is narrated by Charlie Schuyler, Burr’s law clerk, an aspiring journalist, and Burr’s illegitimate (fictional) son. Burr is Charlie’s guide through the “true story” of the Revolution, Burr’s vice presidency, and Burr’s fall from grace in the eyes of the American public. Burr is anxious to tell his story in his own words, “before it is too late,” he says, “which is probably now since the legend of those days seems to be cast in lead if the schoolbooks are any guide. It is quite uncanny how wrong they are about all of us.” The extensive passages, in which Burr shares his recollections and Charlie assembles them for a memoir, are intimate and conversational. Vidal’s blurring of the lines between Burr’s perspective and Charlie’s narration draws us in as close confidants. We are listening to a father talk to his son. We hear the birth and early years of the republic retold as a private inheritance.

Early on, Burr gives Charlie his notes on George Washington: “It is a continuation of what you have already read. With some new marginal notes. It is a nice portrait, I think, but I am sure you will find it unrecognisable.” Unrecognizable is precisely the point. The portraits Burr (Vidal) paints are not the ones history has agreed to display. In Burr, we see the founders not as monuments, but as men: all male, all very human. They are complex, a little of this and a little of that — ambitious, proud, and all competing with one another in the climb to the summit. For Vidal, the Revolution is improvised rather than planned: “Washington was not — and would never be — sufficiently competent to defeat the British.” And the republic is uncertain from the beginning, as Burr observes: “I have told you I did not think the Constitution in its original form would last fifty years. Nor has it.” The republic, not born fully formed, is in its infancy — mewling and puking, as Shakespeare puts it — and like any infant cannot know what shape it will take, or what fictions will later be told about its beginnings.

Because Vidal begins the Narratives by unsettling the founders of the United States, the infant republic looks rather different from the one cast in lead and preserved in schoolbooks. Reputation is replaced by recollection. The gap between what is said to have happened and what Burr remembers is the real subject of the novel. The best example of this is Burr’s friendship with Hamilton. “I had always thought of him as a friendly rival,” says Burr. “I ought to have hated him, but did not.” A 1994 edition of Burr carries a subtitle Vidal never gave it: The Man Who Shot Hamilton. Aaron Burr does shoot Alexander Hamilton (Vidal suggests the “despicable” remark that triggered the duel was Hamilton’s charge that Burr committed incest with his daughter), but killing Hamilton is not all that Burr does. Vidal’s novel doesn’t seek to prolong the life of Burr the American antagonist, the man history prefers to remember as a villain, or else not to remember at all. Rather, it recasts the old scoundrel as a marvelous character: brilliant, charming, dignified. Burr does a great deal, is not especially repentant, and finds himself badly misunderstood by history. Burr the novel does not correct the historical record. Rather, it complicates it, introducing doubt where certainty is preferred, thus collapsing the founding myths of the United States.

Act II: Creeping like snail

If the republic begins in Burr as an infant, it survives its boyhood in Lincoln because power is exercised with patience. The story of the 16th president is second in the sequence of the Narratives, but Lincoln stands apart from the others. It’s the only novel that does not directly join the branches of the fictional family tree Vidal plants in Burr and extends to The Golden Age (Charlie Schuyler, his daughter Emma, and her future husband William Sanford play cameo roles before their leading performances in 1876). It’s the only novel that isn’t directly concerned with the expanding empire (though Secretary of State Seward is eager to enlarge the Union, despite the secession of the slave states in the South). And it’s the only novel named after one of the presidents. So, like the man himself, Lincoln is somewhat rare and isolated.

Vidal’s Abraham Lincoln is certain of purpose, and his purpose is different from that which is commonly proposed (or imposed) by history. Lincoln does not fight the Civil War to abolish the institution of slavery, he fights the Civil War to preserve the United States. “I believe in this Union. That is my fate, I suppose. And my necessity,” he says. And the war is not so much fought as it is managed. Lincoln does not rush toward it — “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors,” he says to the Confederacy — preferring peace to war. Nor does he retreat from it when it arrives. Lincoln prefers deliberation to action. Instead of decisive resolution on the battlefield, there is the weighing of legal odds, the sifting of political probabilities, then the execution of office. From the suspension of habeas corpus and the First Amendment, to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s steps are slow and calculated (and often exclude Congress), while the Union’s military defeats are quick and devastating, from Bull Run to Fredericksburg (“We seem always to lose”). Like Washington before him, Lincoln is a president whose mastery of politics goes hand in hand with his shortcomings as commander in chief.

As the novel moves slowly along, with Lincoln creeping like snail toward the Union’s rebirth and his own death, he balances divisions from within as well as from without. To many of those around him, Lincoln is out of his depth, incapable of resisting the current drawing them all toward disaster. His cabinet is composed of men who have opposed him before and would gladly occupy his office. Seward and Chase and the others are Lincoln’s “team of rivals,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin memorably calls them. His generals are replaced, tolerated, and eventually replaced again. Before General Grant’s appointment toward the end of the Civil War, Lincoln has Scott (a fossil from earlier wars), McClellan (who prefers drilling the army to using it), and Halleck (an administrator with epaulets). Even Lincoln’s loyal secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, call him “the Ancient,” as though he is out of place in the present, an inadequate response to what the time demands. Lincoln’s appearance as a provincial outsider, a figure of homespun stories and modest education, fools almost everyone. Few notice Lincoln slowly gaining complete control over the stage on which everyone acts. Finally, the clever and cunning Seward recognizes the nature of his control:

Seward felt an involuntary shudder in his limbs. He was also ravished by the irony of the moment. For nearly three years, a thousand voices, including his own, had called for a Cromwell, a dictator, a despot; and in all that time, no one had suspected that there had been, from the beginning, a single-minded dictator in the White House, a Lord Protector of the Union by whose will alone the war had been prosecuted. For the first time, Seward understood the nature of Lincoln’s political genius. He had been able to make himself absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer, given to fits of humility in the presence of all the strutting military and political peacocks that flocked about him.

Lincoln governs by allowing others to believe that they, not he, determine the course of the Civil War. The Union ultimately survives because he exercises presidential power with a patience and a slowness that’s almost impossible to see.

Act III: A woeful ballad

The events that make up the early adulthood of the United States are deeply undemocratic and dishonorable. The third novel in the Narratives of Empire series concerns the republic’s centenary, a moment meant for celebration: 100 years of independence, 100 years of the Constitution, 100 years of government for the people. After telling Lincoln’s story in the slightly impersonal third person (Lincoln is destined to remain somewhat remote from the reader), Vidal hands the narration back to Charlie Schuyler in 1876. Charlie returns to New York from France to live by his pen, find his daughter a husband, and restore his family’s fortune, lost in the panic of ’73. As Philadelphia welcomes citizens to its Centennial Exhibition, and politicians deliver their speeches about good government, Charlie sees a nation congratulating itself on its survival. And yet, what Vidal writes is something closer to a lament than a celebration: 1876 is a woeful ballad because the song it sings is not of achievement and endurance, but of betrayal and corruption.

What does the son of Colonel Burr make of General Grant, whose second term as president is due to end after the 1876 election? “I suspect that he is as corrupt as those about him; otherwise, he would not have such men as intimates.” Running throughout the novel is a theme, Charlie’s notion that his fellow Democrats ought to be wary of the motives of this administration: “If Grant is not himself a criminal he is a fool. Yet the Republican party protects him, cherishes him, is loath even to let him go now after two terms.” Charlie sees that, having previously put off kings and a wealthy aristocracy, the United States is now developing a greater and greater appetite for plutocracy. The president no longer belongs to the people of the republic, but to the Republican Party. For the most part, the government carries out actions that benefit the party’s financial interests. But any hope that General (and Mrs.) Grant have of remaining at the White House is finally lost. The crisis that the novel builds toward is the contested election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. History records that Governor Tilden wins the popular vote, but there is no President Tilden, is there? The outcome is disputed by the Republicans, and the presidency is handed to their man:

The United States is now on the verge of civil war. During the week since the Governor was elected president, the Republican press and the Republican party and Federal troops commanded by the Republican President have been openly at work trying to reverse the popular vote. It is a truly marvellous scandal, and deeply alarming.

Marvelous and alarming capture the peculiar tone of the moment. The republic, having survived destruction in Lincoln, now discovers a different kind of danger in 1876: that power can be determined not by the will of the people but by the manipulation of process. Deciding that the election is close enough “to fix up,” members of the Republican National Committee direct leaders in Louisiana and Florida (always Florida!) to “hold your state.” In other words: falsify the vote in favor of Hayes. The party that fought the Civil War to assert the supremacy of the federal government now turns individual states against the people for political gain. There are chants of “Tilden or Blood,” but in the end there is neither, and Hayes is elected president by a single vote in the Electoral College. After 1876, the machinery of democracy continues to function, but the centennial shows how easily the inner workings of the republic can be manipulated. The United States does not collapse, but its character has changed. In the afterword to 1876, Vidal writes that the year was the low point in the history of the United States: the outward show of democracy is preserved while its inner substance is compromised.

Act IV: Quick in quarrel

As the republic begins to fall in 1876, so the American empire begins to rise in Empire. At the halfway stage of the Narratives, the fourth novel is symbolic of the historical crossroads facing the United States. It’s 1898. Charlie’s generation, who witnessed the early life of the republic, is gone. The United States, now prosperous and increasingly aware of its own power, is no longer concerned with survival alone. The question that Empire asks is not whether the Union will endure. There’s confidence that it will. It is what the Union will do with its growing strength. As it looks forward to the 20th century, will the United States reach outward beyond its borders to the world?

Vidal answers that question by placing the emergence of empire not in the hands of soldiers or statesmen alone, but in the offices of newspapers. Caroline Sanford, Charlie’s granddaughter, becomes the first newspaperwoman in America. Not only is she the heroine of the Narratives, she is one of the great (and greatly overlooked) female characters of 20th-century literature. Caroline is beautiful, intense, resolute. Like her Shakespearean counterparts — Beatrice, Rosalind, Cleopatra — Caroline stirs both admiration and insecurity in those around her, particularly the male characters (and readers) who are no match for her. Caroline enters, and at times even shapes, a world in which politics and journalism are increasingly inseparable, one in which the line between creating and reporting the news is no longer clear: “[T]he spring and summer were devoted to the expansion of the Journal’s circulation and, incidentally, the American empire.” In this sense, the Spanish-American War of 1898 is not just a conflict between countries. It is the moment the United States decisively stands on the world stage, part of a story carefully constructed for public consumption.

Caroline and Blaise Sanford, half-siblings, compete as publishers because each realizes that newspapers do not merely reflect public opinion, they shape it. It’s a lesson in power born of their encounters (in print and in person) with William Randolph Hearst, who sits at the center of this transformation. Hearst is the original media mogul. And his relationship with Theodore Roosevelt is key to Empire. Hearst, with more money than he knows what to do with, fancies himself the true author of events. Roosevelt, who has inherited the presidency from an unfortunate McKinley, believes he is the rightful master of a new empire. Needless to say, the two men — quick in quarrel — fall out in moments of temper and vanity. At the end of the novel, Hearst is asked to the White House, where he schools the portly president on how the world works:

“When I made — invented, I should say — the war with Spain, all of it fiction to begin with, I saw to it that the war would be a real one at the end, and it was. For better or worse, we took over a real empire from the Caribbean to the shores of China. Now, in the process, a lot of small fry like you and Dewey benefitted. I’m afraid I couldn’t control the thing once I set it in motion. No one could. I was also struck with the fact that once you start a war you have to have heroes. So you — of all people — came bustling along, and I told the editors, ‘All right. Build him up.’ So that’s how a second-rate New York politician, wandering around Kettle Hill, blind as a bat and just about as effective, got turned into a war hero. But you sure knew how to cash in. I’ll hand you that. Of all my inventions you certainly leapt off the page of the Journal, and into the White House.”

All of it fiction to begin with. In Vidal’s telling, an empire is not the inevitable outcome of a properly articulated plan. The early American empire emerges as if by accident, the byproduct of competition and chance. There’s the desire for influence among journalists and politicians, then one thing suggests another. War is not only fought, it is written — the conquest of nations advancing with the circulation of newspapers.

Act V: Plays his part

The art of improvisation in Empire hardens into a polished performance in Hollywood. As the Narratives reach the early decades of the 20th century, the United States begins to reimagine how it wields power. The fifth novel shows the shift away from accidental acquisition of empire toward its deliberate representation, and Vidal reveals how Hollywood is used for much more than mere entertainment. Movies tell a particular story — of war and peace, of freedom and slavery, of light and dark — that differs from the one most people actually encounter. In this, movies resemble newspapers, and men of power prize them for it. If the journalist gets to print the story, the filmmaker gets to screen it. When people stare at screens, they become suggestible; it’s easy, then, to direct their thinking or to demonize an enemy. What matters is not what happens, but how what happens is seen.

As owner and editor of the Washington Tribune, Caroline Sanford already knows what it means to live in a world where politics and performance are indivisible. But now she finds herself in a culture increasingly defined by cinema, and she sees the potential in movies: “Now why not use them to alter the viewer’s perception of himself and the world? Thus, she would be able to outdo Hearst at last. Self-pity was now replaced by megalomania of the most agreeable sort.” Movies reframe real life. Politics is shot, edited, and screened. Where some still see a gap between pretense and reality, Caroline knows that gap has closed. She becomes a Hollywood star, producing and acting in films like Huns From Hell and Mary, Queen of Scots, with what Shakespeare would call a natural perspective. The experience teaches Caroline something valuable. Power, she tells Blaise, lies in representation on screen:

“After all, that’s the only world there is now, what we invent.”
“Invent or reflect?”
“What we invent others reflect, if we’re ingenious enough, of course. Hearst showed us how to invent news, which we do, some of the time, for the best of reasons. But nothing we do ever goes very deep. We don’t get into people’s dreams, the way the movies do — or can do.”

This exchange captures the transformation Vidal traces in Hollywood. Newspapers shape public opinion; movies shape public imagination. If the press influences what people think, Hollywood influences what they feel, and what they take to be real. Because politics is performance, politicians are judged not only for what they do, but for how they appear. Woodrow Wilson recognizes this and uses Hollywood for his own agenda. He even plays his part, appearing in early propaganda films that demonize the Hun and encourage American intervention in the First World War, literalizing the performance of the presidency upon the world stage. The empire that emerges from this process is more than real: it’s a romantic idea that exists in the minds of moviegoers.

Act VI: Toward childish treble

Having passed through youth and middle age, the United States is now on the threshold of old age. Washington, D.C. is Vidal’s sixth and most indirect study of empire. The picture he captures is not so much of a period of time — like the Revolution in Burr, say, or the centennial in 1876 — but of a particular place in time: the capital city itself during and after the Second World War. At this point in the Narratives, a change takes place. The performance of power in Hollywood settles into something subtler and more troubling in Washington, D.C. Washington is now a place where public life is conducted in private arrangements, where a man may affect political decision-making because he lives in close proximity to power. Influence is inherited by a small political establishment that preserves and protects its own wealth. The distance between politics and everyday life widens as a ruling class settles into it.

At the heart of Washington, D.C. is the Sanford family once again, now firmly planted within the ruling class of the day. Blaise, who watches William Randolph Hearst in Empire and Hollywood while competing with his half-sister Caroline, is proof that true power lies in the press. As a leading newspaper publisher in Washington, he exercises political influence without political office. His son Peter, observing his family around him, comprehends the cost of that influence through the course of the novel. The generational dynamics that recur throughout the Narratives are especially pronounced in Washington, D.C. Peter, a version of Vidal himself, looks at the world his father and his aunt have mastered with both fascination and unease. He notices that “news was fiction and fiction, often, history.” Where Charlie Schuyler once contemplated the story of the United States, the Sanfords now create American fiction, sustaining the society they inhabit through the printing of news.

Blaise tells Peter, “There is always a price to be paid for survival.” The line lands harder at the end of the novel than it does here. The price, as Vidal presents it in Washington, D.C., is different from the blood spilled in Lincoln to save the Union: it is a gradual compromise of character. To remain within the ruling class requires a willingness to accept the terms by which influence is maintained. Principles are not abandoned all at once; they are bent by degrees to endure — the journalist who prints a story regardless of its truth, the senator who sells his vote for a bribe, the presidential candidate who passes himself off as a war hero. In the end, none of them are “different from the used-car dealer who makes a profit on a car he knows will not run properly.” A ruling class permanently playing with power begins, without noticing, to exhaust the system it sustains. Then comes the diminishment. The movement toward childish treble is not a return to a child’s innocence; it is the surrender of character to circumstance. Distinctions of individual and national character, once considered concrete, no longer carry the same weight.

Act VII: And mere oblivion

If the United States seems at its zenith by 1945, Vidal insists in The Golden Age that its decline has already started. The seventh of the Narratives covers much of the same time span as Washington, D.C., not only looking inward at the Sanford family, but outward at the turning points of American supremacy. Familiar characters remain — Caroline’s intelligence is undiminished, her instincts as sharp as ever — while other figures are reintroduced from history, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, “who towered even when seated in his wheelchair.” In the final novel, FDR draws the United States closer and closer to dangerous entanglements with Europe and Japan. As America emerges from the Second World War in the ascendant, Harry Truman establishes a militarized economy and society with gusto. Vidal approaches the moment of triumph with restraint. What interests him is not celebrating the achievement but examining the conditions it produces.

What Vidal reveals is that, however cavalier leaders may be about their actions, consolidating a global empire opens a new field of uncertainty. Peter, like Vidal, is reflective and increasingly skeptical of what he sees:

Peter wondered if Joe was serious; if Truman was serious; if the current ‘crisis’ was serious. But if what had already been billed in advance as the Truman Doctrine were to take effect, would a total world empire ever be in anyone’s interest? The war industries, now languishing, would profit. But would the general economy improve? Would . . . ?

In The Golden Age, the United States is no longer preoccupied with its own survival and expansion, at least not as it was in Lincoln and in Empire. It embraces a global role without fully understanding what it’s doing, and Peter’s generation inherits a country shaped by decisions they didn’t make. The republic that Peter’s ancestors observed and helped create has become an empire extending far beyond its original conception of itself. As the novel unfolds, Peter begins to grasp the contradiction at the heart of the new empire: “Peter had just done a piece celebrating Washington as the great necropolis of a nation so furiously dedicated to peace that it was almost never not at war to ensure ultimate peace for all time.” The logic of empire — that the United States must wage perpetual war for perpetual peace — eludes Peter and Vidal, and it ought to frighten any reader.

This last act is not a moment of disappearance. And mere oblivion is a recognition of limits no empire can slip. However secure it may seem, the United States is subject to the same forces that transform all empires. Golden ages are finite. Change and time are real.

*

In the Narratives, history and family are twin threads, like tragedy and comedy, that bind together all seven novels. Beginning with Burr, the most inconvenient of the founders, Vidal spawns a fictional family that opens the history of the United States to his readers. Charlie Schuyler, Burr’s illegitimate and imaginary son, looks on as the founding myths of the republic are dispelled in Burr. With his daughter Emma, Charlie watches from the wings as a powerful president tries to preserve a union at war with itself in Lincoln, and they return to center stage in 1876 as the reconstruction of the republic gives way to the betrayal of democracy. Caroline is Charlie’s granddaughter and Burr’s great-granddaughter. In Empire, she sees the republic become imperial, and in Hollywood she helps shape politics into spectacle. By the time we get to Washington, D.C., Caroline’s family belongs to a ruling class permanently playing with power. In The Golden Age, a new generation — including Caroline’s nephew Peter and her daughter, Burr’s great-great-granddaughter — inherits an empire at its peak but already disintegrating. Gore Vidal’s United States, then, is a family affair. Together with them we witness a strange, eventful history.

Just as the family members have their exits and their entrances, the very structure of the Narratives reflects a sense of recurrence. Washington, D.C. comes sixth in the sequence but was in fact the first Vidal wrote in the series. The Golden Age comes seventh in the sequence and was also his last novel. Vidal ends both books with the same profound meditation:

As for the human case, the generations of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire — so significant to those involved — is not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.

To read Vidal’s Narratives of Empire is to see the United States perpetually becoming something else. Its transformations are not always visible to those living through them. They become clear when we read the stories through which these changes are told. That is why these novels are worth reading now, as the country observes the 250th anniversary of its founding. Surely it is time to reread the Narratives, to look again at the bones of the republic and listen to the ghosts of its history. If the future of the United States lies anywhere, it lies in its past.

Where to finish? At the start.

Michael Preedy is the author of Making Sentences, a newsletter for making sense of the written world. Through his essays, Michael gives readers a clear way into great books, with references from Shakespeare to The Simpsons. He lives by his pen in Norwich, the U.K.’s “City of Stories.”

I guess we moved fast. That’s how it happens though, right? Apparently, there are couples out there who started off as friends and then grew together, realized it was something more, something permanent, long-lasting, but I’ve never met them. Still, it must be pretty common. We’re not pandas after all, are we? Stick us together in a cage long enough and we’ll either fuck each other or kill each other. Or worse.

That’s not how it happened with us. We fell in love . . . I want to say “at first sight” but in the last 108 days we’ve discovered photos of us together before we met. Drunken photo booth group shots at my ex-wife’s company Christmas party, with me grasping two beers in one hand and with the other hand pointing a finger at some guy with a harelip holding up a fake mini-mustache on a stick. She wore oversized sparkle-framed sunglasses, laughing at her ex-fiancé off camera.

Her ex-fiancé was the type of guy her coworkers reminded her — as a single mother — she was lucky to have. He’s not the type of guy you would forget about after a while. He’s the type of guy you would forget about right away. After just speaking to him. I did. His beady, browless eyes and cawing breathless laugh . . . a sort of human blank, an unhatched fetus with a ginger neck beard dressed in a tweed vest like a 19th century bicycle repairman. The only reason I remember his stupid, formless face right now is because I’ve stolen her phone, locked myself in the bathroom, and I’m scrutinizing her photos, messages, and missed calls. Missed calls tell you everything. Why does she keep photos of her ex?

My ex-wife is a beautiful, smart, and independent woman. We were never in love. Using one another as placeholders in our respective lives, we resented each other for not being more, but I can’t really remember what place she was holding or what more I wanted from her. She wasn’t Gwen.

Gwen, a single mother with a series of ephemeral fiancés, perfect collarbones, and a body that dresses are flattered to drape over and hem against. Gwen wasn’t in oversized sparkle-framed sunglasses when we fell in love. No, no, that was later. The love part. Let’s see if she has any photos in her phone from around that time.

I remember she was in a black sundress printed with white and yellow flowers and a deep-cut collar framing her clavicles with slightly puffed shoulders and short frilly sleeves. She drank French wheat ale and pulled on a Wrangler denim jacket when she got cold. She sat in what felt like the center of the bar, engulfed by men clamoring for attention. Her glances skipped across the room and she began refilling their mugs from her pitcher, giving each man his share before moving on to the next. The man next to her had gray, thinning hair and was overdressed in a fur-lined coat. He looked like a sailor or someone from LA visiting Chicago. He complained that he was served less than everyone else and she began topping him up from her own mug when he burped beer up on himself. Without breaking her sympathetic gaze with him, she snapped three napkins in succession from the dispenser and wiped the beer from his beard and neck before dabbing the corners of his mouth. Gwen folded the three napkins three ways before stuffing them in the outside sleeve of her purse. Her eyes rose into mine.

She got up No I walked over No we just stared at each other and locked eyes Yes and I gestured towards the door and Yes we left together and her hands were warm and we ran No skipped No flew down the street and around the corner to the taxi line and Yes there was a lone cab in the rain waiting for us Yes we kissed No we tongued Yes like a mother bird feeding me Yes my body squeaking against the wet vinyl seats Yes a nest made of arms and legs

“That’s thirteen please,” the driver, blindly but progressively, handed her the POS between the front seats while staring at his speedometer. Or maybe I should have paid?

My ex-wife’s apartment looked like any apartment you might find in Toronto or Edinburgh, a late-’70s brick facade with an old front door and up-to-date windows. We had split up on fairly bad terms verbally, but she agreed to give me a week or two to find a new place and seeing as she had only left for Lisbon about five days before, I must have figured Gwen and I would have the place to ourselves, but I don’t remember giving the taxi driver my address.

“I want more children,” Gwen said to the wall while removing her shoes in the entrance way, placing each kitten-heeled pump on the rack next to my ex-wife’s cross trainers.

“I’ll give you five children,” I responded, surprisingly.

I wasn’t lying either. No one had ever suggested breeding with me so casually before. There were always considerations, concerns, careers . . . first this, then this . . . and the final decision had always been: not now. Which was probably good, right? I was always relieved when the conclusion to terminate the pregnancy was reached. I never pushed for it, though. I’d watched enough TV shows to know the only acceptable response to an unplanned pregnancy is to say “What do you want to do? I’ll support whatever you decide,” while reaching an arm around her to pull her close and kiss the top of her head before pulling her even closer with the other arm, now tightly embraced, preferably on a bench or in the sand, both staring off into the twin possibilities of our futures and the infinite spectral shards of the horizon dissolving the setting sun.

“Six kids is a lot,” she said through her dress as I pulled it over her head and off, revealing her giant smile. Then I turned the dress right-side-out before laying it on the chair next to the bed.

“I’ve always wanted a big family for my son,” she scanned the room.

“You have a son? That’s nice. How old is he?” Another line I’ve learned off of television.

“He’s thirteen, but he’s incredibly grown up for his age. Always has been. I knew he was trouble right away . . . he used to go on little dates with our neighbors’ girl. I’d set out a little blanket and a bowl of popcorn for them to sit together in the hallway.” She scooted back on the bed and rested her foot on my shoulder, halting my descent.

“It’s . . . a bit bright in here, clinical. Could you turn off the overhead light and I’ll switch on one of the reading lamps?”

I stood back up from the end of the bed pushing myself up with my arms, hands sunk into the memory foam. I was a bit drunk, but the invitation to start a family was steadying me. I was desirable. Not only me, but my code! She looked at me and had to make more of me. I felt MANLY . . . no, more than that . . . more than some archetypal gender expression . . . I felt ALIVE, biological . . . I felt the call of Mother Nature, her warm bosom beckoning me.

“Are you alright?” She had picked up a book from my ex-wife’s nightstand and was examining it. I must have been glitching out. I do that sometimes. Not only when I am waking up in the morning but anytime really. I retreat into the internal monologue of my mind and get enraptured in my own imagination. “My Brilliant Friend! I love it so much!” she flipped through the pages, pretending to speed read.

“Yeah?” I asked. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Elena, Elena Ferrante . . . I’m on the fourth book of the Napoli series. It’s incredible. I need to visit Naples. Have you been to Naples?” She finally made eye contact with me.

“Italy?”

“Yes . . . ” She turned the book around and I noticed the front cover.

It was a book my ex-wife was reading or had read. It was about two friends, both women, who grew up in Italy and one was really smart and the other was even smarter than that. It was a hard time for them as women but they made it even harder for each other sometimes because of their competitiveness. “It was a series of novels only a woman could write,” my ex-wife had told me in that same bed. “A bestseller and loved by women all over the world. It’s Hillary Clinton’s ghostwriter’s favourite author.” I was glitching out again.

“The Margherita pizza was invented in Naples,” I said, truthfully.

“Have you read this? My Brilliant Friend? It’s the first book in the Neapolitan series. I also loved her novel, Days of Abandonment. I’m excited to read The Lying Life of Adults.”

“Yes,” I lied. “I think the whole point of fiction is gaining access to other people’s lives, other perspectives. I love the dynamic between the two friends. The smarter one is really impressive, but they’re both smart and impressive.”

“I’ve always felt like Lenu, but my friends probably see me a bit like Lila. Guys don’t get it. The competitiveness of women and the ways we bond.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“I read the story of Don Achille to my son. He loves it. He’s even watched the first season of the TV show with me.”

“Wasn’t that made into a movie with Brad Pitt?”

“No. Just the HBO series My Brilliant Friend. It’s shot in Italy and everyone speaks Italian. . . . ” She looks at me, still impressed enough. “Turn off the light.”

Her feet and legs had gotten cold since she first stopped me from going down on her and asked me to get up and turn off the overhead light. I placed my hand on top of her feet to warm them up. I read an article that women find it difficult to orgasm if their feet are cold. With her knees bent and feet flat on the bed, I tried to kiss the inside of her left thigh as I pressed down towards the only tuft of hair on her body. She had gotten ready to go out tonight. I turned my head away from her thigh towards her vulva, wafted with a mix of sweat and self-tanning oil, before coming to a stop, squished between the middle of her thighs. Letting go of her feet, I placed the back of my hands on either side of my face and wedged them in, hoping to spread her legs apart enough for my head to sink down and my tongue to reach her. She squeezed harder, moaning. Was this a game? I pushed down a little more with my head and the friction of her thigh stretched the skin around my eyes into a squint until my right contact lens popped out.

“Be gentle. Do it lightly,” she said, feeling my frustration and loosening the vise of her thighs. The tip of my tongue felt the hood of her clitoris and I traced my middle finger along the groove of her labia until dipping it inside her. “Just your tongue,” she whispered to the ceiling and I slowly curled my finger back and out, noticing a translucent pearl resting on the distal fold of my fingernail. It was my contact lens. I used my tongue to unfurl the lens onto the pad of my moist middle finger and reached the finger towards my eye, pushing down with my head, still clamped on both sides by her thighs and my arm squished beneath my jaw. Without blinking, the distance shrank between my finger and my eye until I could feel the edge of the lens glooping on. “You lie down now,” she said and by releasing her thigh’s grip on my head, my finger plunged into my eye.

“OWW . . . shit . . . fuck.” I quickly lowered my voice to hide my pain.

“Are you alright?”

“Yep, I’m fine,” I lied. I stood up beside the bed, took my shirt off, and unbuttoned my jeans, pulling them down around my ankles. My shoes were still on. I slipped off each one and pushed them under the bed before turning around to sit down and take my jeans and socks off. Gwen had retreated into the fetal position against the headboard.

“I’m just cold. Come here,” she told me as I laid down next to her and peeled off my underwear, kicking them off the bed. “What’s wrong with your eye?”

“It’s my contacts. I’ll be fine.” I leaned over and kissed her. She swung her hips on top of me, grasping the headboard, and coaxed me inside her. She tucked her cold feet under my thighs and draped her hair down onto my chest before arching her back and pressed hard and slow against me.

“Don’t move. I do this.” She pulled her feet from under my thighs and planted them flat on the bed, squatting up and down, balanced with her left hand on the headboard, and masturbating with her right. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. “Shhhh,” she placed her right hand to her mouth, slobbered on her fingertips, and kept masturbating. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. “What are you doing in there?” Gwen said from behind the door. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

“Are you alright?” Gwen says on the other side of the bathroom door. There are too many things open on her phone and I swipe furiously to close everything. She keeps knocking. The door handle turns slowly before stopping. It’s locked. I jam the phone in my mouth, attempting to swallow it whole, but it begins to vibrate and I can hear the Stargaze ringtone echoing in my skull. The handle’s lock disengages. I clamber at the door, pinning my foot against it to block her entry. The door opens a few inches but I manage to stop it from swinging further ajar. She squeezes her head between the door and the jamb, pulling her hair back, her eyes squinted. “What are you doing in here?” She sounds too joyful. I pull my shirt over my head and spit out her phone under my shirt, pop back up out the top, and slap my stomach to stop the phone from hitting the floor. “Is my phone in here?”

“Yeah! I have it! Sorry!” I slip it from under my shirt and pretend to snatch it from my front pocket. “I must have picked it up by accident.” I say this so innocently I almost believe it myself.

“Why is it wet?” She tilts her head.

“Why you all wet, baby?” I say this doing my best DiCaprio impression, twitching and blinking, but she just stares at me blankly. Once again, completely forgetting the movie we watched together the night before. She probably fell asleep. “Oh . . . and you have my phone, I see . . . ” My eyes widen and blink flirtatiously.

“Mitchell . . . we talked about this. I’m pregnant and insecure and I can’t trust you. How does it look with you hearting selfies? With a pregnant girlfriend at home? I feel like I need to go through your activity and unlike everything you do . . . it’s embarrassing,” her voice lilting and sympathetic.

“But you post selfies, sweetheart. Lots of guys like them, heart bomb your Instagram stories, and you’ve been posting pictures from last summer for the last three months. I doubt any of these dudes even know you’re pregnant.” I squint and flex my jaw muscles, establishing indignation. I know I won’t win this, but it’s important to stand up for yourself from time to time. Once a week I choose a classic film, usually a Kubrick or Tarkovsky or Fellini or Cassavetes, and post links to reviews on my Facebook timeline, tagging Gwen: “Ready for tonight, Gwen?” or “Date night with the wifey!” My friends comment “Buckle up!” or “Look at you two!” or “Fellini’s 8 ½ is a masterpiece. A true auteur! Have you seen All That Jazz? Bob Fosse!” After turning 30 most of my guy friends had become cinephiles too. It’s that or Joe Rogan and I’m too tall to pull off being a UFC fan.

“I feel like you’re losing interest in me,” Gwen exhales and drops her jaw. “You used to take photos of me all the time and you haven’t taken any in weeks. Then you go around liking every photo your ex’s friends post. Are you sending them a message? You’re a social media slut.”

“YOU TOLD me not to!” I catch myself raising my voice. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m clueless. I just scroll and like and never think about it, but I can see how this could hurt you. I’m sorry. . . . Hey! We never finished watching the last season of The Americans. We love that couple, right? Why don’t you lie down on the couch and I’ll get the coconut oil and give you a foot massage?”

“She’s so skinny. She’s perfect.” Gwen says while letting me lead her to the couch. “Did you eat onions? I smell onions. You have to stay on the floor, remember?”

“We both eat the same thing . . . everyday. . . . I don’t sneak into the kitchen to eat onions. We haven’t bought onions in months. . . . ”

“Just love me! Why can’t you be supportive? Just once?” Gwen shifts and groans settling into her couch groove and I toss the oversized throw cushion on the floor. “I need that between my knees for my pelvis.” She blows out hard and clamps the pillow with her thighs. “One episode, then I have to go to the ultrasound.”

I can’t go with her to the ultrasound. Her choice. We find out the sex today. I hope it’s a girl. I don’t understand boys. Her 13-year-old son quit talking to me a few weeks ago, but occasionally breaks his silence to accuse me of leaving the toilet seat up.

“Mama! Mitch left the toilet seat up again,” he barked in the middle of the night a couple days ago. “None of the other stepdads did this.”

“Are you awake?” Gwen thumped her arm on me. “You know we don’t leave the seat up.”

I was awake, of course, the 13-year-old had stumbled to the bathroom at 3 a.m. with his phone blasting a TikTok discussing whether a uterus would bounce if dropped on the floor.

“I didn’t leave the seat up. I don’t even pee standing up,” I said sleepily, attempting to stop the inquiry, eyes remaining shut. I had stopped standing up when I pee to avoid such accusations.

“GROSS!!! He pissed all over the place!” the 13-year-old shuffled into our room, switching on the overhead light. Gwen leaves the door open so he doesn’t feel abandoned in the night. He has a condition, enuresis. He wets the bed. If he starts moving around she rushes over to his room and tries to wake him, but it’s usually too late. He wears night pants to bed which are never to be called diapers.

“Are you awake? Did you piss all over the place? Can you go clean it up?” Gwen shook and slapped my shoulder.

“Does he even use a toilet?” I sneered, peeling myself off the mattress.

“STOP!” He turned and boomed flatfooted out of our room and down the hall with his phone TikToking instructions on how to color your eyebrows using lemon juice. Gwen shot after him and I lumbered to the bathroom. The toilet was spotless, but the lid was up — not the seat. There were little puddles of dirty water in front of the sink forming a trail to the bathtub. The shower curtain flapped, bulging out towards me. The small window where we keep the shampoo and unscented body wash was open and when I drew the shower curtain aside my face was plastered with leaves. The bathtub was full of sticks and feathers and covered in acrid slime. I reached down and my arm sank in deep, swallowing me. It was warm and quiet as I floated further and further down into the gooey branches, lulled asleep by the rhythm of the wind.

“Are you alright?” Gwen sat up, smiling at me. Both of my hands glisten with coconut oil, palms up on either side of her feet, which rest on my lap. The 13-year-old shuffles from his bedroom cloaked in his duvet and stops at the entrance to the living room.

“Good morning!” I say with biting stepdad delivery.

“Stop. Mama?” He beams her to him and whispers in her ear. His eyes lock on me. Gwen kisses his head and shrinks down to the floor, crawling towards me. She swings her hip around and places her right foot on my left thigh. The 13-year-old flashes his duvet open. He’s only in night pants and sits next to Gwen, offering me his left foot. I shudder, but Gwen nods encouragingly and I begin massaging their feet. His foot is the same size as hers, but he hasn’t clipped his toenails, and there are clumps of navy-blue sock lint between his toes. I tease the lint from between his toes onto the top of his foot and brush it away. They have the same knees, I notice, and both of them flex and tense as I dig my thumb into the middle of the arch that connects to their kidneys — according to a TikTok I overheard — causing them to hold their breath.

“Ok, I need to go,” Gwen says, claiming her foot back from me. I stop massaging the 13-year-old too. He grunts, lifting his foot up, and slams it down into my thigh.

“Ow . . . shit . . . fuck,” lowering my voice quickly to avoid offence.

“Now Mitch . . . I don’t want you to disappear into our room or hide in the bathroom, okay? I’m going to lock the doors. We’ve talked about this.” She stands up and walks to our bedroom, locking the door, and then steps into the bathroom and comes out with a towel bunched in her hand. “You need to stay in here with him until I get home.”

“What are you talking about? Are we in Palestine?”

“Why do you always bring up places your ex-wife traveled to? It makes me uncomfortable. It’s like you don’t want to be here.” Gwen bows her head, resting her hands on the baby bump.

“She was in East Palestine. Near Lisbon.”

“Portugal?”

“No . . . Ohio . . . ” I try not to shake my head. “What if I have to go to the bathroom? You want me to piss in the kitchen sink?” Gwen looks at the 13-year-old and then back at me and tosses the towel onto my lap, revealing a pair of night pants underneath.

“I want you to wear these,” she extends her arm towards me.

“I’M NOT WEARING A FUCKING DIAPER!”

I’ve gone too far. The 13-year-old jumps to his feet, pulling his blanket up and flipping it behind him. The blanket stretches and bunches as he flaps his arms and stomps his feet. “STOP! STOP! STOP! STAAAWWWWWPP!!! STAAAAWWWPPP!” Gwen draws him to her bosom, shushing him. He twitches around, dragging his chin across her chest before diving under the blanket to hide.

“We don’t say things like that in this family,” Gwen growls at me, rocking the 13-year-old cradled in her arms. “Shush, baby . . . shhhh.”

I stand up and pull my shirt off. I unbutton my jeans and let them drop to my ankles, but my shoes are still on so I slip them off and kick them under the couch. I almost sit down on the couch but remember that makes the cushions uncomfortable for Gwen so I drop to the floor on my ass and pull off my pants and socks before standing up again. I raise my arms above my head and Gwen nods at me, eyeing my underwear. I peel down the boxer-briefs and pick them off my ankles with my feet and reach out to grab the night pants. I slide one leg in and hop on one foot to slip the other leg through. I stomp and pull and twist the night pants over my hips, adjusting the paper wings out from my crotch.

“There! See! See!” I circle Gwen and the 13-year-old, presenting myself. “I’m in. I’m in. I’m in.” The 13-year-old peeks out of the duvet to look at me. Eventually, he slips completely out, Gwen holding the duvet, and hugs me. I feel his naked chest on my pale belly and our night pants rustle against each other. Gwen sets the duvet out in the middle of the living room and the 13-year-old and I collapse playfully on top of it.

“You can watch videos on his phone while I am gone, okay? I still can’t trust you. You might embarrass me.” Gwen tip-toes to the door and slips on the 13-year-old’s Adidas Superstars without socks on. “I’ll be right back, boys.”

The 13-year-old and I roll on to our stomachs and kick our feet playfully in the air. We watch a TikTok where Jordan Peterson tells us that going to school makes boys girly. We watch a TikTok where a famous actress plays chess with her goldfish. We watch a TikTok that explains why cashew farming is a war crime. We watch a TikTok where a young woman jumps rope while listening to Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” and I try to reach over and like the video but the 13-year-old slaps my hand and shakes his head disapprovingly. After a series of TikToks explaining why cardio is for cucks and creatine cures undiagnosed dyslexia, I roll on my back and stare up at the ceiling. The sun cuts through the window warming my shins and as time goes by the beam of light slides onto my night pants, tickling the skin around my waist as it moves closer and closer to my belly button. My head flops lazily to the side and I make eye contact with the 13-year-old. He begins to squint and I squint back, mirroring him. My crotch glows warm and I exhale with a sense of relief.

He mouths the words “I love you.”

“Are you guys alright?” Gwen says as she opens the front door. “Aww . . . look at you two.” She shrinks down to the floor and crawls towards us. “Oh my! It looks like you two had a little accident, didn’t you?” Gwen pulls the night pants off the 13-year-old, tossing them aside, and blows a raspberry on his belly as he giggles playfully, kicking his legs in the air. “And I haven’t forgotten about you!” Gwen pulls the night pants off me and places them behind her. “I have a surprise,” Gwen says through her shirt as she pulls it over her head, revealing a big smile. “Do you want to meet Daddy?” She reaches behind her back, unclipping her bra. Her breasts fall and bounce, green milk drips out from her swollen nipples. The 13-year-old and I sit up from our backs and clamber up her legs, grasping at each tit. He seals his lips around her left nipple and sucks, coughing with green milk dribbling out the corner of his mouth. I latch onto her right tit. It’s warm and sweet with a slight note of onion. I guzzle too fast and choke, burping up the green milk. “You’re alright. You’re alright.” She picks up the corner of the duvet and wipes my chin and neck before dabbing the corners of my mouth. The 13-year-old and I keep drinking and coughing. “Daddy will be home soon. He’s coming. He’s coming,” she coos. I look into the 13-year-old’s eyes and he smiles back at me. I lift my moist green lips from her chest.

I mouth to him, “I love you too.”

At night now, when I’m put to bed, Mama walks with the baby around the apartment, rocking him gently. They fell in love at first sight. They moved fast. That’s how it happens though, right? Sometimes Mama holds my phone over me as I fall asleep. As unknowable and vacant as photographs taken before you’re born. I can see all the notifications for missed calls: friends, coworkers, my gym — but they don’t mean anything to me. Not now . . .

“Shhh . . . ”

York Underwood is a writer and comedian living in Reykjavik, Iceland. He enjoys the tap water there and plays padel on Wednesdays with the guys from the office where he rents his desk. Padel is like European pickleball. He recently tried to buy a Barney Greengrass t-shirt from their website but they have a delivery zone radius based on zip code and he lives in the sub-Arctic . . . so fuck him, right?

Credit to Markús Hjaltason for producing the audio for this piece.

The artists are at a dinner party gossiping about a dead woman. They say it was an overdose. Her mother doubts whether it was a suicide, but the unnamed narrator of Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) never questions it. Rebecca, a failed actress, had been a fixture in the art scene of Dimes Square, the Lower East Side neighborhood where the novel takes place. She acted in small plays, but she never made it onto the big screen like the Old Hollywood actresses she idolized. The last time the narrator had seen Rebecca perform, and they were close once, was a one-woman show in which Rebecca wept in a “faux-vulnerable confessional act about her madness about her troubled past,” already suggesting a panic about precedent. Rebecca confessed that “the entire construction of herself that she had been peddling up to that point was an act.”

People didn’t get it. The show closed after a few performances.

The last time the narrator ever saw Rebecca, tinted bottles of tranquilizers littered the floor of her apartment — meticulously staged, a way to channel “tragedy-era” Marlene Dietrich as she ate dinner off of cardboard boxes. In a psychological crisis, Rebecca asked repeatedly, “How do I know that I exist, how can I be sure that I exist, who is Rebecca, Rebecca, who is Rebecca.”

The actress’ suicidal plight, beleaguered by her compulsion and failure to imitate the past, might be read as the subconscious of Dubno’s novel as a literary project; it’s a remake that has so painstakingly copied Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984) that it is unsure whether it — her novel, as an entity — exists. Dubno takes the same structure and plot from Woodcutters, about a writer-narrator at a dinner party who eviscerates the hosts and guests in his mind as they wait for the arrival of a celebrated actor. Both are comedies of manners for their respective art scenes: Bernhard’s of 1980s Vienna and Dubno’s of today’s New York. Both novels are written in a single paragraph, a trademark of Bernhard’s style. Dubno also copies his frequent and idiosyncratic use of italics for humor. She even replicates Bernhard’s anadiplosis, the use of the last word in a clause at the beginning of the next.

We have seen a lot of these novel remakes lately. Last year, Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection arrived in English, a shot-for-shot remake of Georges Perec’s Things set in 2010s Berlin instead of Perec’s 1960s Paris. Both novels tell the story of a middle-class couple who can exercise their freedom only through hyper-specific consumer choices. But for what reads like dutiful apprentice work, Latronico’s novel, at least, did pretty well for itself. Sophie Hughes’ translation was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, and Latronico himself was profiled in the New York Times. This may hardly have been his intent, but transcribing old novels into contemporary versions seems to be one of today’s surefire roads to literary acclaim.

Percival Everett, whose novel James (2024) is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Justin Torres’ Blackouts (2023), an adaptation of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), won the 2023 National Book Award. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022), an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850), won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. It seems there’s a worry about forgetting. And we’ve got a lot of required reading to do.

Of course, the literary remake is nothing new. Shakespeare borrowed most of his plots. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was an adaptation of Homer, in the way that the Aeneid (19 B.C.) was also an adaptation of Homer. Remakes will have varying relationships to their historical models. With the Aeneid, Virgil sought to preserve what he saw as the best of Greek literature to invigorate Roman national myths. Don Quixote (1605), in which Quixote tries to fashion himself after Amadis of Gaul (1508), explored the inadequacies of history, mostly the comic assimilation of Spanish romantic culture in contemporary Spain. Don Quixote is often considered the first modern novel, not because it’s the first work of narrative prose fiction, which might be something like the Satyricon (c. 60 A.D.), but because Cervantes introduced modern sensibilities of dailiness and realism. In Imitating Authors (2019), a study of imitatio, or writers imitating works of the past, Colin Burrow writes how Don Quixote, the hero, fails (unintentionally) to imitate the knight Amadis in speeches and rituals, and is cornered into becoming his own person. Don Quixote, the novel, fails (intentionally) to imitate the chivalric romances, and births a new art form. Imitation is hardwired into the history of the novel, whose very capacity to innovate is driven by its childlike desire to imitate the old.

Whether today’s remakes present anything new, or whether they care to, depends on their relationship with history. Happiness and Love and Perfection repeat highly stylized forms to create stylistically unoriginal novels. Blackouts takes, as a gesture, the main relationship in Puig’s novel as its scaffold and adds a handful of new gestures, like blackout poetry and uncollected stories from Harper’s and the New Yorker. Yet while these novels are ostensibly remakes of the past, they are also social novels about our time. James uses the container of Twain’s classic to smuggle in contemporary themes like code-switching, the magical negro bias, and reparations. Demon Copperhead attempts to establish itself as a definitive, comprehensive social novel — as Dickens had — of white working-class conditions during the opioid crisis in Appalachia.

A tremor seems to run through these works, as they glance backward toward history. Our political crisis today is often framed as a struggle with the past. The MAGA movement is largely run on nostalgic fantasies of when the boomer generation enjoyed the largest period of economic growth in the last century. Cultural panics about when to date the country’s founding, like Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project (2019), ignited a nationwide backlash against critical race theory in schools.

This groping onto the guardrails of history suggests an insecurity of our times. After stagnant decades of unquestioned American dominance, we have arrived at a time when history is moving again. Does it look like it’s going backward? The acceleration of artificial intelligence is replacing white-collar labor, while cryptocurrency has conjured trillions of dollars out of nothing. Liberal democracy is in crisis. Network states, colonizing land in Honduras and elsewhere, are evolving as a political reality, replacing the republic with something like a shareholders meeting. Conservative political philosophers argue for a return to pre-Enlightenment models of a monarchic and authoritarian rule, directly influencing the ideologies of the Trump administration.

And this is to say nothing yet of the internet. We have seen, from the invention of woodblock printing in China in the seventh century and of the printing press in Europe in the 15^th century, that changes in the distribution of information precipitate radical social, political, and religious revolutions. The downstream effects of internet communication have defined the revolutions of our times. These changes can be read through our novels, which — like fashion or recommended videos on YouTube that indiscriminately span various periods of history — don’t seem to know what year it is. The reason our novels are rehashing the past is because they can no longer tell what the future looks like.

One is tempted to hold Perfection up with Things, and Happiness and Love up with Woodcutters, to see how many sentences were directly lifted from their predecessors, with the nouns swapped out but the verbs kept in place. To copy all the sentences, swap all the nouns, but keep the verbs would be, so to speak, an argument that decades later — four for Dubno, and six for Latronico — individuals and institutions have changed but social relations have stayed the same. This is a conservative view of history. The narrator of Happiness and Love says of Rebecca, the actress who killed herself, “She was a genius for the spectacle,” casting the artist as a fantasy of humanism in a neoliberal society where there can be no human flourishing outside capitalism. Even as early as Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord wrote, “In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system,” conditions that rest on “the institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions.”

We are three decades out from when Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), declared that history had ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the marriage between capitalism and liberal democracy was God’s ultimate masterpiece. Who else in this society but artists and creatives could supply the justifying myth that monetizing one’s life, mind, and work can be fun, and full of quirky personalities, in our forever-times of capitalism (we can drop the “late” already)? Dubno writes that today’s artists know to use the word “neoliberal in a derisive tone,” even if it’s “the exact same rubric of neoliberal achievement they too [follow].” The narrator calls them “failures,” repeatedly — failures trying to follow the script, no longer relevant, of today’s neoliberal economy, itself a failed remake of Reagan-era neoliberalism. Capitalism, long propagandized throughout the Cold War as necessarily linked to democracy, keeps getting remade, but the remakes aren’t working.

György Lukács argued in History and Class Consciousness (1923) that the modern conception of history was invented by popular democracy: the product of the sociopolitical transformations brought about by the French Revolution. Before the ancien régime was toppled in France, peasants in feudal society were excluded from the movements of history, because, without suffrage, they were alienated from the decisions of the state. But after the French Revolution gave many peasants the right to vote and to intervene in political matters, history now included the common man as well as the aristocrat.

Yet today, liberal democracy is in crisis because human flourishing isn’t compatible with neoliberal capitalism. By Lukács’s definition, history has stalled — we’re now in its recap episode. When Rebecca, the actress in Happiness and Love, cries to the narrator, “Do I even exist,” one imagines this to be the cry of liberalism itself, of history.

In James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s novel from Jim’s point of view, the runaway slave (who has learned to read by stealing library books) dreams that he has several dialogues with European philosophers, in the tradition of French writer Lahontan’s Dialogues With a Savage (1703). To Voltaire, Jim says, “You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation.”

Yet what Jim posits to Voltaire is that rights — human or civil — can’t be universally enforced, because they’re dependent upon hierarchy and situation (such as merchant classes, the aristocracy, and civil rights). Yet those civil liberties — of immigrants, trans people, activists — are fraying, because democracy is buckling under societal rank and inequalities. In America today, the Enlightenment separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is getting eroded. In a dissenting Supreme Court opinion for Trump v. CASA, Inc. (2025), Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”

The Hegelian view here would be the optimistic view: that democracy, meeting its existential antithesis in fascism, will die and be reborn as a synthesis of the two. That American democracy needs to die, in order to resurrect through a progress of spirit, is allegorized by Everett in the form of a catfish. While Jim and Huck are on the run, Jim catches a catfish that weighs “fifty pounds” and is “too much for any two people to eat” — like 50 states too many for any two parties to govern. Jim narrates, “When the fish tried to eat my hand I was to shove it down his throat and pull him free of the water.” Jim reaches in and hauls it out by its guts: “The animal popped free of its muddy home and came shooting forth, head, gills and tail, clean out of the water.” Twice, here, we note the conjoining of the word “free” (civil liberties) with the death of the 50-pound animal (American democracy).

As Jim’s arm is in the mouth of the fish, he has a hallucinatory vision in which John Locke tells him to imagine American history not as democratic progress but “all as a state of war.” He replies:

“If I am in a war, then I have the right to fight back. That follows, doesn’t it? I have a right, perhaps a duty, to kill my enemy.”

“Well, now.” [This can be read as, “Well, now let’s be sensible.”]

“My enemy is those who would kill me. Am I correct, John?”

“Well, now.” [This can be read as, “Well, now that’s correct.”]

We are far now from the Enlightenment ideals of free and universal human beauty, shared by what Kant, incredibly, referred to as the “world community.” What James posits here is a world where brutality and strength, not beauty, are the basic premise of the human, and rights are derived from the condition of war. This might align with something like The Shield of Achilles (2002), where the constitutional scholar Philip Bobbitt argues that every major evolution in the structure of statehood has come about by what he terms “epochal wars.” The French Revolution required a large national army, larger than the mercenary forces of Europe’s existing states, to install liberal democracy and then enforce it. If Everett stops just short of advocating armed rebellion, it is because the country is already embroiled in a state of war: class warfare, culture wars, gridlock. In our own epochal conflict, Trump has declared all-out war against immigrants, universities, free trade, Palestine, trans rights, and NATO in one fell swoop. What we might be seeing is a reversion to the warring tribes of the Dark Ages, after the Roman Empire was picked apart by barbarians. During this time, the Roman past was forgotten because its literature was not preserved. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis (1946), tracks this forgetting through the historical literature of the Dark Ages, in its inability to imitate the past. Gregory of Tours, the bishop who wrote History of the Franks (c. 594 A.D.), wrote in unpolished Latin because he wanted to write in classical Latin, but couldn’t. Literacy had vanished because education had collapsed. There was no notion of civic education. There was no notion of a republic.

In Perfection, Latronico presents a view of history where the technological revolution of artificial intelligence will, outside the forces of democracy, render an entire labor force obsolete. These are members of the white-collar creative class who pay for Photoshop. Like an iPhone hitting low power mode by lunch, Anna and Tom fret about their own obsolescence. Latronico cleverly describes Anna and Tom’s jobs as founded upon “the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.” This is of course a description of AI image generation, which trains on and draws from billions of pictures, predictable trends, and results to produce images. Anna and Tom wonder, toward the end of the novel, “how long it would be before a neural network could carry out most of their work.”

Here is the Marxist idea that the material forces of production, not ideology or identity, shape history. In Demon Copperhead, the coal miners in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia have largely been put out of work by industrialization. Demon, who is mixed-race with white ancestors, narrates, “Deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces,” making his land “the butthole of the job universe.” Demon learns this when Mr. Armstrong, a middle school teacher, assigns his students a “Backgrounds” project to look into the history of their people. Mr. Armstrong, who is Black, cites how Virginia had voted to join the Confederacy in solidarity with the plantation owners, but it was the working-class mountaineers, the narrator’s white ancestors, who fought on the side of the Union. Black people had originally flocked to places like Lee County for coal jobs, but when the mining jobs were replaced by industrialization, they moved to places like Chicago, leaving behind the mountaineers who stayed and suffered mass layoffs. This history, shoehorned into an actual history lesson in the novel, shows how Black and white people are historic allies united against business tycoons. It’s also a fable of how the Black working class ascended to become the middle-class and new face of the Democratic Party, which had largely left the white working class behind. The reason Mr. Armstrong arrived in Lee County was to be part of a program “where people from the city come help you out for being poor,” Demon narrates. Here, Mr. Armstrong plays ambassador from an educated, urban, and non-white middle-class to poor white miners addicted to opiates.

Virginia, as Kingsolver’s model minority, has voted blue for the past five election cycles, though the last of them saw record numbers of white working-class voters swinging to the right. Identity politics was quickly scapegoated on the left. “One of the main responsibilities of socialists now is to openly and vocally criticize the woke left,” Vivek Chibber said on a 2025 episode of the podcast Doomscroll. This invective is based on two grounds: one, identity politics placed its concerns on workplace discrimination in middle-class professions, abandoning the labor reforms sought by working-class unions, and two, identity politics alienated the white working class by scolding them for being bigots. “Because the public hates the woke left,” Chibber adds, “it puts socialists on a very difficult footing, because they’re painted with the same brush as critical race theory, as poststructuralism, as postcolonial theory.”

This schism is also reflected in Justin Torres’ Blackouts. To read the novel is to see how, over the past century, the politics of queer people and Puerto Ricans were entangled with workers and migrants but have somehow left them behind over time. The surrealist novel is narrated through conversations between two gay Puerto Ricans. Juan is an older man repeatedly hospitalized for a racist pathology called Puerto Rican Syndrome. Nene is a younger sex worker from “bumfuck nowhere,” who was possibly committed, years earlier, for the same reason. They live, temporarily but indefinitely, in an abandoned insane asylum called the “Palace,” which seems to exist only in dream space. There is no year or country. Money and work are of no concern. Identity is the center of all activity and preoccupation. Juan and Nene’s conversations revolve around a book Juan has found, Sex Variants (1941), which collects oral histories of queer people gathered by the lesbian activist Jan Gay and eventually co-opted by psychiatrist George W. Henry to medically pathologize homosexuality, erasing Gay’s authorship.

A familiar historical trend emerges wherein queer identity tries to declare itself, and is appropriated and weaponized by straight, white, and male culture, against its own best interests. As a way of explicitly recuperating queer history, Torres’ novel is suspicious of queer people’s place in history. The novel is mostly written in vignettes, out of order and without context, in the style of Puerto Rican writer Jesús Colón, who “wrote in vignettes, each a slice of life — the evocation of a single moment — and in this way, avoided the error of dogma and grand narratives.” Dogma and grand narratives have historically been unkind to queer people. Nene recalls, “The straight culture turned its attention to our culture, and the sudden increased visibility of course provoked a backlash.” In the United States, gay liberation has historically been co-opted, and scapegoated, as the cause célèbre for a reactionary right. During the culture wars of the ’90s, conservatives used the explicit imagery of gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe to rally a moral panic during the AIDS crisis. In the last decade, the fight for transition care for minors was mobilized in much the same way to galvanize anti-trans conservatives. The playbook held that class expresses itself through identity, and identity through culture; so if politics is downstream from culture, then culture is where history moves.

And so Torres exhibits an anxiety of being seen. The Palace takes its name from a typo in a memo on Gay’s medical examinations of queer people, miswriting “place of observation” as “palace of observation.” Here, the Palace exhibits queerness as an object subjected to a (straight, male, and medicalized) gaze. Rather than a modality of relation, identity is something to be seen and then trapped in an image. As if to say, this is what that gaze has done to identity: sequestered and alienated it from history into some permanent, ethereal haunting, floating in space. “In the Palace, I lost track of time, not just of the hours and dates, but also of a certain sense of the temporal,” Nene recalls. The culture wars have successfully cut identity loose from relations of production and reduced it to a psychoanalytic matter, privatizing identity into the personal. Out of the coal mines and into the human psyche, identity politics, even if still collective, becomes alienated from the concerns of workers and preoccupied with affective goals like respect, dignity, and self-actualization. This is the right to happiness over the right to property.

Thus Torres turns toward erasure, a politics of retreat. The novel’s title partly refers to his visual blackout poetry, where Gay’s interview transcripts of queer lives are largely blacked out in marker in an effort to obscure them from view, leaving behind an impression or afterthought of dignity. The overall tone of the novel is of mourning, protection, and healing from a traumatic alienation and fragmentation. It is a move to repair, as well as an acceptance of defeat (curiously, nowhere in the novel does Torres refute the pathologization of homosexuality as “variant”). It’s as if Torres wants to say to the world, you can have your history. Let’s leave identity out of it.

Of course it is a family separation in James that sets Jim’s saga in motion. Demon in Demon Copperhead is born to a single mother while she’s high. She marries an abusive man named Stoner, who puts her into rehab after a relapse and sends Demon into foster care. His friend Dori dropped out of school after her mother died to take care of her ailing father. Jan Gay in Blackouts was left by her father to a single mother, just as Nene was also left by his father. Juan was an orphan. Childless and worn down by the permalancer lifestyle, Anna and Tom in Perfection represent the declining birth rates in middle-class marriages throughout the West and East Asia, where children are a luxury symbol. Nearly all these novels are sending a blaring signal: we are seeing a breakdown of family structures across lower and middle-class societies.

The breakdown of the family signals an existential crisis for the novel’s place as a cultural form in American life. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt charted how changing family structures in 18^th-century England, during a period of rapid market growth, were essential for the newly-born English novel to flourish. When the conjugal family (comprising parents and children) moved away from the patriarchal family (where parents, cousins, and children all lived in one house), reading habits changed. While their husbands were working, women isolated in their homes in new suburbs, without relatives to distract them, suddenly had long hours of solitary time, which they spent reading novels. The conjugal family, recast in the postwar United States as the nuclear family, remained largely uncontested in Western society for centuries, the bedrock of how wealth and capitalism operate in this country. Yet in the last 50 years — conjugal or chosen — it has been fraying, both as a statistic and as an ideal.

Only 2% of books published annually sell more than 5,000 copies. A 2022 survey by the NEA reported that 38% of American adults had read a novel or short story in the last year. Over the last decade, students enrolled in English and history majors have declined by a third. It has perhaps always been true that women have read more than men, but even this is declining — from 54% in 2012 to 47% in 2022 — alongside currents already set in motion from the rising costs of living, adding economic pressure for women to delay pregnancy and remain in the workforce. Women don’t have time to read. No one does.

This may signal a fall of solitary inwardness in American life, which means a deficit in dreaming. But it was in solitude that I first read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013), which presented such a glamorous, radical, and romanticized view of the New York art world that I decided to become an art critic just so I could be a part of it. Once I became a critic, I found that the art world was not at all as described in The Flamethrowers. The novel was a fantasy that, even though I didn’t attain it, forced me to create a life worth living in its pursuit. Similarly, the famous actress in Happiness and Love, visiting from Los Angeles, arrives at dinner to the “leftwing horseshoe-theory pseudo-artistic scene” in Dimes Square and learns, after being intellectually humiliated by the dinner guests, that her romanticization of downtown artists in New York who discuss “art and literature and politics” did not reflect at all who they are in reality. Yet it was the romance, now dispelled, that had given her a faith in art. She says, “I feel like a pilgrim who has walked for weeks only to find his holy site littered with trash and covered in graffiti.” Dubno arranges her little artistic scene as various simulacra of artists with no originals, but it is in the actress’ conjecture of an ideal, a trick of their phony spectacle, that she has learned she has ideals at all. Perhaps this is how anyone comes by their ideals. Democracy doesn’t exist, but we have to believe it does — “like a pilgrim” — or it definitely doesn’t exist. To her cynical guests, the actress vehemently shouts an ideal that sounds cringe but is in fact Kantian in notion: “High art reminds us of our humanity.” Again, this is also true of democracy.

The actress misreads the Dimes Square scene, and in turn she discovers the ideals that direct her life decisions as an artist. Here, Dubno is directly responding to postmodern theorists like Baudrillard and Debord, which is to say that Happiness and Love is, at its best, a novel of ideas. Woodcutters is devoid of ideas. But it is perhaps Dubno’s misreading of Woodcutters as a novel of ideas that led her to think she was copying one, when she in fact ended up writing something original. Here, I might call attention to the value of what I call the deliberate misreading. Perhaps it is not in some novel fantasy of the future but in copies of the misread past where originality happens, like accidental mutations in the cultural genetic code leading to the next cycle of evolution. This was true in Don Quixote as it was in Happiness and Love. In Blackouts, Torres deliberately misreads historical censorship — in pages that look like redacted FBI files — as a shadowy space of possibility, privacy, and human freedom. One blackout poem censors identifying or sexual details and reveals a kind of inward spiritual movement in the soul beyond identity: “I felt transported by prayer / a physiological state / a serene situation / when I was / desirous but not understanding.” It is in misreading the past that we chart out the future.

Geoffrey Mak is the author of the memoir Mean Boys. His novel Total Depravity is forthcoming this year.

The short story collection is a difficult and awkward form. It lacks the unity of the novel, and unlike a narrative that stands alone in a literary or cultural magazine, each story seems as if it should somehow be connected to the other stories around it. This, of course, is despite the fact that many of the stories in the collection will have already been published separately in the aforementioned magazines and journals. Elif Batuman, in her memorable essay in n+1 on the Best American Short Story anthologies, claimed that the American short story is “a dead form”; Chad Harbach, in his seminal essay “MFA vs. NYC,” noted that “no one reads short stories” (except for MFA students, who only read short stories); and more recently, Laura McGrath, in her new book on publishing and literary agents, Middlemen, writes that short story collections are the most difficult work for an agent to sell, and that, compared to other genres, conventional wisdom holds that “there are few readers of short story collections.”

At the same time, most readers will have a few stories that exist in their own personal canons, and they may even have their own favorite collections (two that come to mind for me are Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock and Claire-Louise Bennet’s Pond). A fantastic short story, because it can be read in one sitting, achieves a different feat than a novel, and a successful collection of stories, because of the inherent challenges involved, can be a mark of distinction for a writer — McGrath notes that short story collections are overrepresented on literary prize lists and that an agent who focuses on selling short fiction is thought to have “refined tastes,” an “appreciation of fine craftsmanship,” and is “a literary literary agent.” The writer who attempts a short story collection, then, undertakes a thankless and daunting task. Tom Howard has done it twice.

The stories in his new collection, Invisibilia, could be thought of as variations on a theme. Each story exists as an individual, self-contained unit — characters and worlds rarely recur — but taken together certain topics and concerns emerge. Most stories are about families and their possible dissolution. “Heart of Gold” (one of the collection’s best) and “Babel” are written from the point of view of wives who are estranged from their husbands, their relationships mediated by the presence (or absence) of a child. “Invisibilia” and “Cary Grant at the Orpheum Theatre” are told from the perspective of teenagers whose parents are divorced or almost divorced. “The Night Parade” follows a father whose teenage and video-game-addicted son is staying with him for the weekend, away from his mother and stepfather. Other stories — “Disappearing Act,” “Metamorphosis,” and “Swan Song” — are about childless, middle-aged men and their wives or girlfriends who either leave or stay.

These stories could be written in a straightforward, realist style — the material is compelling enough — but Howard likes to sprinkle in elements of magical realism. “Babel,” rather than simply being about a mother’s sense of displacement as an immigrant and her inability to communicate with her taciturn son, insists on analogizing these themes. Petra, the mother, wanders through a spooky apartment building that serves as a portal to a seemingly parallel reality, while her son, Del, and the other kids at school begin to paint their nails, dress in rags, and eventually swap houses with one another before absconding from town altogether. By then the town has transformed from nondescript suburbia into a bombed-out wasteland. It’s a lot to cover in 15 pages. “Invisibilia” performs a similar trick as a couple, attempting to salvage their marriage for the sake of their children, begins to literally disappear: the mother starts to become transparent while the father gradually shrinks to the size of a “large dragonfly.” A collection of preserved butterflies in the father’s shed comes to life and fly away, too. The meaning, I suppose, is that the parents who stay together for their kids end up diminishing themselves, and certain things can’t be preserved but need to be set free. A fine theme for a story, but for this reader, the unreal aspects detracted from the story instead of deepening its effects. “Metamorphosis” opens with the narrator discovering that his eyes have changed from brown to green — rather than turning into an insect, as in Kafka — before the man loses all his body hair. At the same time, his wife is dying from cancer, and the town they live in is rapidly (magically) transforming into New York City, as the events of the story merge with the memories of the dying wife and her past.

These stories are well written, exceedingly readable, and they often make use of clever literary techniques. If the goal of fiction is to convince readers to turn the page and keep reading, then Invisibilia passes the test. At the same time, I kept wondering if many of the stories would have benefitted from playing it straight rather than resorting to magical flourishes. Howard’s “Metamorphosis” invites comparisons to Kafka’s, and while it’s unfair to criticize a writer for not being Kafka, putting the two stories side by side is revealing. It’s impossible to imagine a version of The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa is anything but an insect, and even though his transformation is easily read as a metaphor for the inhuman condition to which drudgery can reduce a person, the story is so well constructed that the unreal transformation and its symbolic meaning are inseparable. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to imagine the narrator of Howard’s “Metamorphosis” with brown eyes and body hair, with little change in the overall meaning of the story. In some cases, the magical elements feel like fairy dust sprinkled atop a story that could stand on its own, rather than as integral and essential to the story itself.

When Howard does hew closer to narrative realism, as he does in “Heart of Gold,” the results are compelling. Here there is no magical shark jumping, but a slow burn as the story grows darker and creepier, the strangeness of real life providing the necessary intrigue. Howard displays his literary chops, too, incorporating both an unreliable narrator and metafiction to trick us into trusting a flawed character, who eventually kidnaps a young girl to replace the daughter she herself has lost. By the time you realize what is happening — after thinking that this couldn’t possibly be happening — it’s too late. Darkness runs through many of these stories, and nowhere more than in “Homecoming,” which follows the return of a young soldier from Vietnam and the atrocities committed there. The supernatural isn’t needed, as the real world is terrible enough. These two stories end on slightly surreal notes, closer in style to Cheever’s “The Swimmer” than Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Another story, “The Night Parade,” reads as Howard’s take on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” as a father and his estranged son attempt to bond by participating in a town ritual in which drug addicts and criminals are rounded up, dressed in black cloaks, and beaten by the townspeople. Howard’s story is an intriguing dramatization of the darkness hiding in quaint small-town America, but it’s juxtaposed with another narrative, that of the father desperately trying to connect with his son by going camping and recreating an experience he had with his own father, as well as an immigration subplot, a meteor shower, and an electrocution. These stories are action-packed, the pace never lagging, but I wouldn’t have minded taking a breather every now and again. This is, of course, one of the main challenges of short stories and an occupational hazard for anyone writing them. Many contemporary stories, as Elif Batuman has noted, are “really novelistic plots crammed into twenty pages.” Howard avoids this trap in other stories, where he achieves a slice-of-life realism centering on minor plots: a failed acting audition and a violent altercation for an aging actor in “Swan Song”; a drifter reminiscing about a childhood friend in “Disappearing Act.”

Across the collection, Howard seems interested in evoking a mythical American past located in small towns and suburbs. The places are all relatively anonymous, but they have names: Covington, Petworth, Millwood, Edgewood, Swedesboro, Glendale. These places can’t possibly exist, which is the point. Old movies are another preoccupation: the husband across the street is “a throwback movie star, Paul Newman with broader shoulders”; the dying wife only wants to discuss Hitchcock films; the mother and son fall asleep on the couch “while an old Jimmy Stewart movie plays on television.” One story, “Cary Grant at the Orpheum Theatre,” takes up movies explicitly, with the teenage narrator working at a revival cinema owned by someone who seems to be his stepfather. His mother, who is possibly a ghost, appears intermittently to watch classics like Double Indemnity and North by Northwest, and the narrator’s own life seems to parallel Cary Grant’s, or perhaps that of Grant’s brother, if he hadn’t died as an infant. Nothing is clear; everything is ambiguous. When this works, seemingly disparate details coalesce and resonate with one another, and apparently trivial information becomes meaningful alongside other facts and events. Cary Grant’s biography, doled out piece by piece throughout the story, comes to resemble the narrator’s own.

Other times, the ambiguity seems an affectation, or a way to gesture at the vast mystery of life without doing the hard work of understanding it. Sentences like this abound:

“We’ve fallen in love. In lust. In something, anyway. In any case, we have fallen.”

“He sounded young, she thought, or old.”

“The wind sinks its teeth into me. Or no, it does not. But I wish it would.”

A character approaches the “center of the building or maybe the center of the earth,” and then “she begins to see, or thinks she begins to see. . . .” These sentences are frustrating because at other times, Howard writes compellingly about the gaps between language and external reality. In “Metamorphosis,” a running joke about the “Early Stage,” the “Middle Stage,” and the “Last Stage” of cancer lets us laugh at the ridiculous ways people attempt to order and sanitize the messy realities of life and death. In “The Long Shadows,” a refreshing change of pace in which Howard ditches realism for a Gothic fantasy tale, a nonhuman narrator begins to learn about language and the way words can deepen one’s sense of life. While observing the ritual of hospital visitation, he comments:

A younger woman comes to visit. She stays for only a short time. It feels obligatory to me. This word, obligatory, I don’t know. But I saved it once and I think this is what it means. For someone to come without wanting to come. To say goodbye without actually saying goodbye. And then the young woman is gone. She is relieved to have finished this obligatory thing she has done. She hopes, not unkindly, that the old woman dies.

This is good and true because Howard has done the hard work of thinking through what our habitual language actually means, and the story becomes an exercise in defamiliarization. Ultimately, Invisibilia is a mixed bag, as are most story collections. The form itself, like many of Howard’s characters, is hanging around, caught between life and death, a ghost and an enigma haunting the literary imagination.

Derek Neal is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. His writing has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Point, and The Republic of Letters. His Substack can be found here.

A good New York City summer is filled with music. I sit backstage in the green room, supporting my closest friend as they prepare to go onstage. Another act, a popular young DJ, is being interviewed by the venue’s social media team. He pauses to seek assurance from the crew looking on that there will be plenty of zero-proof Heinekens available during his set. Someone confirms, and I’m instantly curious.

“Those beers are pretty good.” I interrupt his interview to begin my own.

“Totally. We’ve been sober for six months now. It’s the most connected we’ve ever felt.” He gestures toward his beautiful girlfriend, who nods enthusiastically. No one in the room seems remotely surprised.

I offer a laudatory word and tell them that I don’t drink either.

“Well, that’s much cooler.”

The memory of Sinatra’s jazzy New York and its smoke-filled hideaways was once tantalizingly accompanied by the burn of Jack Daniel’s, ice cube clinking in the cup; bringing a Vesper martini to beautiful lips summoned the charged sexual energy of a rogue spy. A bit of damage, to survive some soft self-destruction, was sexy, even spiritual. But New Yorkers are drinking less and less. Sobriety has become a new status symbol, a badge of adaptogen-infused “cool.”

Most popular restaurants and bars in the city now have major menu real estate dedicated to cutesy “mocktails” — the Phony Negroni, the Not-So-Mule, the Faux-Jito — the kind of names one prefers to order under their breath. At the Odeon, I ask for the Virgin Mary with three green olives like I’m whispering a prayer. Owing in large part to a decline in alcohol sales, establishments in the city are shuttering, and new alcohol-free venues, like Carl Radke’s Soft Bar + Cafe, are popping up. The New York Times’ Alex Vadukul writes that city dwellers “seem to grouse about the closing of old restaurants and bars more than ever.”

Even young celebrities — whose glamorous lifestyle one could be forgiven for associating with indulgence — have dropped the chalice. Tom Holland’s Bero and Bella Hadid’s Kin are part of the new wave of zero-proof drinks meant to be enjoyed during a guilt-free night on the town. At $39 per eight-pack of Kin, one can buy into the elevated, fashion-model-filled world of this health-conscious alternative. It’s a “sparkling, herbaceous blend of bright ginger, orange bitters, hibiscus, and citrus” that will “ease you into a higher state.”

Disillusioned by the morning after one too many G&Ts when my brain serves as both judge and condemned — replaying my own perceived shortcomings and sins for a jury existing only in the mind — I too have stopped drinking. “First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald has been quoted as saying, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” But the trend cannot simply be chalked up to a reckoning with one’s depressive hangovers. And if economic expense were the sole barrier, sales of celebrity-backed non-alcoholic cans wouldn’t be soaring.

In a viral Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe, Miley Cyrus said that sobriety “is like my God.” Each day sober becomes a small win as the tally increases, a victory on the liturgical calendar, borne of a similar impulse driving the popularity of bio-tracking jewelry and running clubs. We seek a sort of purifying organizing principle, and so we call the drink “virgin.” But it’s a theology without grace. One drink, and the devotee must begin the count anew. Those stakes are part of the point — we fight to draw closer to something divine. We’re a spiritually hungry culture that now prefers David Lowery’s Mother Mary and Rosalía’s saintly album Lux to Britney and Tarantino. “I hunger and thirst after true righteousness,” Amanda Seyfried’s character, a Shaker, sings in Mona Fastvold’s latest film, The Testament of Ann Lee.

There was once a sort of curious shame around professing one’s sobriety, because addiction was not a disease, but a character defect. An image of the down-on-their-luck miscreant in the street was called to mind, or a cruel 2000s tabloid image depicting Lindsay or Paris as badly behaved and “back to rehab!” An inability to handle one’s liquor and enjoy the “good life” was their own moral failure — alcohol has long been a symbol where sex appeal meets celebration and reprieve, a coming-of-age birthright. Our cultural inheritance is awash in these images: George Clooney riding his motorcycle down a rogue dirt road in an ad for Casamigos; model Milla Jovovich as the face of Johnnie Walker. There’s a renegade masculinity that comes with bellying up to the Polo Bar and ordering an Old Fashioned, a deep romanticism to dining in Il Buco’s cellar and uncorking the first vintage bottle.

Yet there’s an emerging sense that it’s not the late night out that holds the appeal, but the phoning it in early after a $14 can of Bero in order to make the 6 a.m. hot yoga class. Holding a conspicuously expensive, non-alcoholic drink at the party signals an aesthetic of elevation, the posh renunciation of the secular sin of toxins. The cleanliness of the inner landscape remains, perhaps, the last domain within one’s control. If one cannot govern the world, they still may govern themself — for a price.

After two glasses of wine this spring, his first drink in over a year, a famous lifestyle podcaster tells an audience of millions that his sleep score was ruined. His life was shot to hell “for three days.” This lapse was, to him, catastrophic, and only through public self-flagellation could order be restored. (The podcaster is not in recovery; he is sober for reasons related to health and productivity.) The increasingly large crop of sobriety influencers was quick to repost the clip of the tangent — “[sobriety] was the greatest gift of my career,” one messaged me. I empathize, but the podcaster’s reaction feels disproportionate to the act itself. A rise in health consciousness, a newfangled obsession with quantifying one’s biological metrics married to the capitalistic instinct to optimize, cannot really be the sole culprit of this attitudinal shift and its unforgiving intensity.

Our movies, music videos, and magazines taught us that to be desirable was to emerge from the taxi at dawn with mascara under the eyes. Beautiful unraveling — cigarettes and booze, Kate Moss’ 4 a.m. chaos, Ke$ha’s music video bathtub blackouts — was the culture’s aesthetic of cool. While at Gucci, Tom Ford preferred his models looking hungover. There was a freedom to this way of being in the world, a sexy, anti-establishment irreverence. Even the tortured writers who drowned themselves in alcohol — Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy Parker — were alluring because of their vices, not in spite of them, as if the Muses could only be expected to bang on the doors of the sick and suffering.

What we decide is cool is so often a countercultural kick in the guise of innovative thinking. The idolized addict can’t be cool when everyone is addicted — to a drink, to a feed, to a fantasy, to a feeling. In self-mastery, one paradoxically becomes the rebel. Every sip, each excess, spells failure.

For months, I would roll over each morning and check my sleep stats, right before the torrent of baffling news alerts on the screen impinged upon consciousness. I’d vow to be a better woman with better numbers, and I’d contour my life around this promise. A high Oura score and green detox juice, glassy, glowing skin, the Pure Barre body, the minimalist gym temple, the Kin, speak the coveted language of self-possession. Sobriety is a chic shorthand for composure and spiritual maturity. There is a seduction in the discipline of refusing excess, a sacred weight to this proclamation of abstinence as ritual that cannot be reduced to the latest instantiation in the quest to better commodify the self.

I will not be the first to tell you the world is ravaged by crisis, war after war, threat after uncontrollable threat, all unfolding against the backdrop of the slow torture that is an awareness of the impending climate collapse. Tending to one’s emotional life is suddenly a feat of endurance, and one must monitor their inner sanctity vigilantly. There is nowhere else to turn.

Putting our human appetites on display — imbibing the anesthetics of drink, of sex, of food — feels like exposure, and sobriety is the one refusal still on offer (if you have the force of will). And that refusal, even for a young DJ playing a drugged-out Brooklyn festival deep into the summer night, feels like the coolest thing to do. Neither the Saint nor the singer betrays their hunger, though they’re the hungriest of all.

Several “quit lit” books are now populating the space, tracing a path even for those not in recovery and driving home the thesis that we will be better, more forward-looking artists in sobriety. If we’re strong enough to stay clean, we will be armed with a new vision with which to tap into the Spirit, to rigidly distinguish the sacred from the profane, and it begins with what we imbibe. When I sip my first Elton John Zero sparkling wine (launching in the U.S. very soon), I hope to feel divinely inspired — even if Elton may simply be capitalizing on the feeling in the air tonight, as it were.

America doesn’t appreciate moderation in any form, so it ricochets between Prohibition and the fraternity basement, glut and excess. Perhaps this moment will allow room for a reconsideration of our relationship with the substance — our inability to treat it as rite rather than anesthesia, or else shun it outright — as a symptom of something deeper.

In our haste to surrender ourselves completely to the regimented Apollonian, we forget that Dionysus was never merely the god of wine. He was the god of ecstasy, theater, transformation, and sacred disorder. The god of music.

The ancients understood that sometimes we needed to go mad to ensure we kept our sanity. To fall down once did not mean to shatter, but to be reborn. Somewhere along the way, we kept the chaos and lost the ritual.

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

Don't Talk to Me in a Cab

The man driving my Uber  
apologizes to me  
for being on the phone  
as we speed through the Tudor 
towers  of Forest Hills after 
midnight  and past  
a glowing LaGuardia 
Airport  and there’s no way 
for me  
to adequately explain  
to him  
that if he weren’t on the 
phone,  I’d rather walk 
myself  
in the dark  
through four neighborhoods  
all the way home.  

Ilana Weinstein is the author of When I Became Light (2023), a poetry collection chronicling her own coming of age in the city she loves most. Her work examines confidence, growing up, friendship, and love. Ilana believes that poetry is for all to enjoy, and you can connect with her on LinkedIn, via email at poemsbyilana@gmail.com, or at @poemsbyilana on Instagram.

Is politics downstream of culture? Not in the publishing industry.

This is evident in the recent publication of two books on editing and publishing, Karen Yin’s The Conscious Style Guide (2024) and Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! (2025). The first is a call for editors to advance social justice through equitable language while the second reports from inside the publishing industry on the outcome. It would be blithe to say that the second book is sufficient condemnation of Yin’s project, but Szetela’s analysis of moral panics in literary culture is far from the only evidence that the search for, and imposition of, correct speech can be socially and politically ruinous.

The authors’ opposed views on editing philosophy and language politics have made small waves, and reception diverges in their book reviews. Yin’s are entirely positive — consistent with her popularity among editors — while Szetela’s are mixed.

From the Editor’s Desk, Andy Bechtel declares that Yin’s style guide gives the reader a “process to achieve editing enlightenment.” Sharon Cozens, writing for BoldFace, claims that Yin’s guide will “increase the chance that readers will recognize themselves . . . and connect with [books].” These reviewers assume that the conscious style demonstrates enlightenment and authenticity. Rather, this editorial style might be characterized as designing Frankenstein’s monster by committee.

Szetela earned positive reception in a Leonardo review, where Jan Baetens calls the book a “wake-up call” to the consequences of political correctness on literature. For Baetens, Szetela does the hard work of chronicling the moral panic that has led to canceled publications when a writer is accused of “moral and political flaws (racism, homophobia, ableism, Islamophobia, fat-shaming, ageism, eurocentrism — ‘white supremacy’ often functioning as the shortcut for all these evils).” Because of the heat of such accusations, most of Szetela’s industry insiders demanded anonymity.

Emmet Fraizer, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, is less receptive to Szetela’s argument, presenting cancellations, like Amélie Wen Zhao’s, as all smoke and no fire. In “The Cancel-Culture Canard,” Fraizer critiques Szetela’s study by taking the usual tack: Szetela is hurting the oppressed. This critic’s canard is the usual refrain from those who object politically. You should have written a different book! Invariably, that other book (Books Under Fire: A Hit List of Banned and Challenged Children’s Books) already exists.

While Fraizer correctly reminds us of the books banned for conservative reasons, on the order of “23,000 book bans since 2021,” the argument against this type of censorship is as old as John Milton’s Areopagitica in 1644. Szetela musters a who’s who against such “purist” censorship, including titans like Toni Morrison. But the rise of a censorious left — contra its historical support of free speech — has introduced new criteria for sensitivity and harm. Already infamous, this censorship has resulted in backhanded erasures in Roald Dahl’s new, sensitive editions, effectively transforming a low-class female clerk into a high-class CEO, a literary girlbossing.

Fraizer acknowledges Szetela’s doubt of “moral entrepreneurs” who impose identity filters on shrinking industries, stating, “He is, of course, correct about this.” But Fraizer then bizarrely situates Szetela in a rogue’s gallery of fascist collaborators, conspiracy theorists, and alleged sexual abusers. Fraizer’s review amounts to the tagline of a decade of political polarization: my side isn’t censorious, but if it is, then it’s a good thing.

Now, let’s put these books in conversation.

Yin, author of The Conscious Style Guide, grounds her editing primer in religion, politics, and philosophical assumptions about language. She refers to her book as a style guide, although the traditional guide is closer to a list of rules than Yin’s “system” or “movement.” The editor won’t find an accessible list of terms here because a politically correct lexicon “would be outdated before it hit the presses.” Thus, the editor is encouraged to think deeply about the role of the editor in making a just world.

The editor does not follow her conscience but rather calculates which specific words oppress, asking, “Whose oppression does this perpetuate?” To move beyond copyediting words in the dismantling of privilege, the developmental editor should know that “equity requires the exclusion of overrepresented or frequently represented groups.” That is, choosing writers, characters, and story subjects based on race, sex, and sexuality. This crystal-clear politics leads Yin to recognize the popular insult “Karen” is “a slur,” but one she supports. “Right now, it does more good than harm.”

It’s a messy game, but that’s the politics of language, baby.

You might disagree with her logic or even her stated politics, but you’re in good company, for Yin reveals that conscious language is a battlefield. Throughout the style guide, the reader will discover signs of conflict, like loose fur after a cat fight. Yin hopes “you can be charitable in your reading despite [her] flaws,” hiding behind the book for cover. She acknowledges that practitioners of conscious language will “disagree vehemently,” that the language will sometimes “do harm in the long run,” that one must learn to apologize (there’s a section on how) or, like the author, confess “what a jerk I am.”

The fur really starts flying when Szetela documents the consequences of equitable language in That Book Is Dangerous! Reporting from the frontlines of young adult and children’s literature, Szetela chronicles the cancellations of precisely the kind of underrepresented writers Yin champions. One case is the short-lived self-cancellation of Amélie Wen Zhao’s book Blood Heir because, according to detractors, many of whom had not read the book, it represented slavery without racism, criticism centered on a character whose race is ambiguous at best. Another case was the campaign against A Birthday Cake for George Washington by writer Ramin Ganeshram, illustrator Vanessa Brantley-Newton, and editor Andrea Davis Pinkney, all women of color with garlands of industry awards.

Perhaps Yin envisioned this double-edged nature when recognizing that “adoption of equitable language is not evidence that our society’s deepest prejudices have eased.” This lamentation, which might be enough to scupper the project, is revisited elsewhere, with Yin declaring, “Conscious language is no panacea for societal ills.” One feels that Yin has struggled mightily on the road to linguistic utopia. Is the struggle worth it? The fact that the rise of conscious language is coincident with falling standards (life expectancy lagging, literacy rates falling) and rising costs (housing, food, medical care) might cause the reader to itch furiously. Surely, conscious language must provide some benefit, even if it’s only aesthetic?

Szetela offers insight into the philosophical roots of the new politically correct speech. He is primarily concerned with the leftist politics that smoldered in the mid-2010s, gained heat with the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, only to have the Covid lockdowns poured on them like accelerant. If the reader expects a biased treatment, then Szetela will surprise with his evenhandedness, recognizing early the lack of representation for non-whites in publishing houses (as writers and editors) and inside books (as narrators and characters).

The cure offered by Yin et al., however, is worse than the ailment, a bitter tonic made of two ingredients: presentism and essentialism.

The first, Szetela explains, is to “rewrite the past in terms of the present,” something that Yin recommends explicitly, asking, “Why be accurate with slurs, outdated terms, and stereotypical portrayals when every other detail of a historical world is conjecture and fantasy?” She likens narratives set in the past to building a house out of asbestos — the past is so contaminated, only a fool would handle it without a respirator. Szetela summarizes essentialism as the “link between identity and an ‘authentic’ perspective . . . premised on the idea that . . . people are bound together by their identities.” Accordingly, Yin recommends that writers, dwelling on identity, ask, “Are you an appropriate messenger for this content?”

Szetela cuts to the core of the moral panic by documenting the social effects of these modes of political thought, but an analysis of the style of conscious language is needed because it represents more than online shit-flinging. Correct speech is political — its reasoning should be grounded in rhetoric. What effect will this language have on my audience? The conscious language style is a formal register of English that is Latinized, nominalized, verbose, ahistorical, colorless, internally incoherent, and hypertextual.

Book publishing has increasingly become home to college-educated writers and editors. They have brought a higher register to their work, one that is considerably more Latinized and nominalized (turning verbs into nouns). Recall the year 1066, when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons. The English language, since then, is a Germanic root upon which the Romance languages were grafted. This change is evident in the difference between the names for livestock and their butchered meat: sheep (Germanic) and mutton (Latinate). This fact of our language has not changed; our college Normans tend toward a higher register.

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell laments the inflooding of Latinate words (adding syllables but not sense) and nominalization (adding -ism), discovering that, in the end, “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.” Conscious language injects ambiguity and partisanship, as Orwell astutely noted 80 years ago. Perhaps it is her fluency with this rarefied language that leads Yin to declare that academic neologisms are an “organic solution.”

The register shift from a Germanic English to a Romance one is present in the recommended terms that are (again for emphasis) not presented in an accessible list. From spokesman to representative, craftsmanship to artisanship, tone-deaf to insensitive, mankind to humankind, landlord or landlady to rental property owner — in each case, the shift is from the Anglo-Saxon root to the Latin branch. Some of these terms may be preferred, even well-advised, but the tilt of conscious language generally is away from plain English. Like the lone speaker of Esperanto, Yin wonders why we’d bother with our natural language.

To paraphrase Szetela’s portrait of the equity brigade, there are three levels of language bureaucrats: the true believers, the carpetbaggers, and the complacent. Most of us reside in the third category, picking up the correct terms as they cascade down from our moral betters. Yet there is a natural economy to language. We resist convolution when the direct term is simpler by a good margin. When Yin recommends equitable synonyms, the verbosity of conscious language becomes apparent. From disabled to differently abled is only an expansion from three to six syllables, yet other locutions are inflationary marvels. Instead of Black police officer, why not a police officer who happens to be Black? Certainly, we can go further. Stretch your legs! Instead of a Latino, why not a light-skinned person who looks Latine? Still got some gas in the tank? How’s this for you: instead of white people, try people with roots in Europe, the Middle East, and/or North Africa who identify as White.

This is seeing the euphemism treadmill as an opportunity for cardio.

Languages brim with historical accidents in the form of idioms. My favorite in Spanish is calavera no chilla, or skull doesn’t whine (to pay the piper, usually with a hangover). Watch a foreign-language speaker smile when you try to explain that to die is also to kick the bucket. Lest we offend the milkmaids among us, we’d best remove the arbitrary history of our language, like dethorning a rose. Conscious language asks that we strip our language of history, excluding such idioms as low man on the totem pole, in favor of the limp noodle that is person of least influence.

Goodbye, old wives’ tale! Hello, nonbinary life partner’s ways of knowing!

On White, as a description of race, it is dizzying to realize that both anti-racists and white supremacists wish to raise racial consciousness through capitalization, something Yin certainly knows because this is addressed in Nancy Coleman’s article “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” which she quotes. The lack of internal coherence goes much further than this example, but it’s important to point out that Yin insists on endonyms (groups naming themselves), except for her politically preferred exonyms (groups named by others). When I studied in the Amazon with the Huaorani nation, I learned the group’s name came from the usual root, their term for people or men. Outsiders called them Auca, however, an exonym derived from the Quechua for savage. Among other examples, Yin recommends we refer to pro-life activists as anti-abortion, despite what they call themselves.

It is no surprise that concerns motivating editorial change are often textual. We learn this in Yin’s support for graphical changes, like Latinx and dropping from Asian-American the hyphen, which we are told “serve[s] to divide even as [it is] meant to connect.” The author of the article “Drop the Hyphen in ‘Asian American,’” Henry Fuhrmann, insists that the hyphen “can connote an otherness.” This otherness doesn’t emerge from speech. It’s a graphical quibble, hypertextual. Fuhrmann bases this observation not on consistency, instead building from a novelist’s offhand comment. Fuhrmann describes the hyphen as if it were a semicolon; yet the hyphen’s common use is to combine modifiers, in a punctuation-cum-sinew manner. The objections to traditional forms of style consistency are so personal as to be utterly unique.

Even Yin justifies her use of White by way of the editor’s primary concern for consistency. So, while Anglo-Americans may suffer under the otherness of their hyphen, Asian Americans are liberated from the graphical foible by celebrity authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen, who popularized the whole crusade.

Such approaches to editorial change are common in America.

The traditional reason editors use italics for foreign words in English manuscripts is to avoid confusion: no, querido lector, you’re not having a stroke. It is a question of readability; one might even call this reasoning accessibility. The novelist Junot Díaz launched the war on italics as “a political move” because italics connote “otherness,” or as Yin puts it, “may signal that [a foreign word] is not normal.” Se pide al lector tomar un momento para reflexionar sobre lo normal en una narración en inglés. Editors have traditionally butted horns with writers in defense of the reader, but because this language change is attached to identity, conventional reasoning fails. Yin’s book is bristling with accessibility, to the point of including sub-tables of contents and section summaries. Yet all consistency is dropped when a hunky celebrity author makes an appeal to authenticity.

You might feel that I object to conscious language kit and caboodle, but that’s simply not true. We should respect the ways people speak about themselves. Yin assures us that conscious language is distinct from the prescriptions of political correctness because hers is a perpetual revolution. There has been a long push for descriptivist literary instruction, where language comes out of common parlance. This emerged as a populist counter to prescriptivist models, language imposed from classical, one might even say, patriarchal sources. Yin’s conscious language is still prescriptivist, but the prescribers have changed: college-educated, middle- to upper-class professionals raising a standard with professors, activists, nonprofits, and NGOs. You can be certain that the activist organizations informing conscious style are not conservative, religious, fond of gun ranges, or even the majority.

There are admirable achievements in PC language, such as the preference now for firefighter, unequivocally cooler than fireman. Others failed to catch on, like the use of the hypertextual s/he in the ’90s — a contraction of she or he. What I don’t agree with is Yin’s reasoning: we are simply never told how a hyphen performs the opposite of its primary function, how italics belittle or other, how English speakers removing gender from Spanish will liberate Spanish speakers (against their will, apparently). Any given reason is contradicted by the next, resulting in a logical series so fraught a list of terms would make the failed prescriptivism too readily apparent. It is no wonder that, in a linguistic context where personal meaning is everything, Szetela neatly documents wars of authenticity and identity.

At its core, conscious language demands of the editor two things: language guidance must come from activists, and the editor must know the balance of equity. First, taking guidance from activists inevitably arrives at contradiction. For this reason, the “Disability Language Style Guide,” quoted by Yin, declares, “We are no longer offering advice regarding a default.” One group demands identity-first language, another group demands person-first language, each declares the justice of their language is self-evident rather than a matter of arbitrary taste. Yin insists that editors “can use language to reach into minds and shift perceptions,” but Szetela reveals what that mind-bending results in: venomous struggles, politics that are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

The question of correct speech and its political fallout is of increasing importance since the success of the 2024 Trump campaign, nudged into the White House under the low-register, anti-academic slogan “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” No matter your voting preference, the efficacy of this language is clear. It is a classic American thumb to the nose for academic scolds and moralizing elites.

After the last election, the centrist think tank Third Way published “Was It Something I Said?” to analyze Democratic linguistic style, discovering a gap between the party’s big-tent goals and its language, which makes Democrats sound “like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory enforcers of wokeness.” This language is characterized by therapy speak, seminar-room language, organizer jargon, gender/orientation correctness, and shifting racial constructs. The language is plainly off-putting to the beer-and-pretzel crowd.

Perhaps the emergence of this style of language is not so much out of righteousness as desperation. In “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” Tyler Austin Harper reveals that, contrary to the “go woke, go broke” adage, the humanities “went woke in large part because they were broke.” The grantmaker Mellon Foundation is to financially strapped academics a poisoned chalice: money in trade for political allegiance. For the publishing industry in kind, anemic growth, lower wages, fewer men, and byzantine political postures may result in more of the same. My own students — smart and sensitive editors, wanting to do the right thing — have expressed grave concerns, asking me if it’s even possible for a white editor to edit a Black writer. One paranoid student assumed that the noun Jew was offensive.

What is the effect on editing when the purpose, as Harper puts it, is not wisdom but advocacy? Guests on the recent New York Times Opinion podcast episode “Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?” declared, in a maximally catty way, that half of “woke” language is dead or dying. Szetela’s book provides a moving image of Yin’s project: a brigade of language cops, increasingly isolated, secure in the purity of their efforts, deaf to good sense, blind to the ruin in their wake.

The editor’s relationship to language is a high-wire act. With her audience on the far side of the chasm, she steps forward, the balance pole in hand, tradition on one side and innovation on the other. Yin’s strategy is tantamount to baiting birds to land on only one side of the balance pole, the innovations of advocates. These are greedy birds because they are self-righteous. The greater the number of these birds, the harder it is for our tightrope walker to reach her audience. Our editor is perilously close to falling into the gap. The absurdity that Szetela documents is that a good portion of the bird-baiters are happy to provoke the fall.

M. D. Bennett is a freelance writer and editor living in the Pacific Northwest.

1.

In The Flame, Leonard Cohen’s posthumously published collection of late lyrics and poems, I came across this lone stanza:

and Nico was blonde

and Dylan was found

in a pit he alone had descended

and there he unfurled

for the sake of the world

the bright flag so long undefended.

Drafted into one of Cohen’s notebooks, the passage leaves a strange aftertaste, like a question not quite asked.

Bob Dylan turned 85 in May, and as of this writing he is still on the road. This year and counting he has played 27 shows — that’s six more than Geese in roughly half the time: his spring tour opened in Omaha on March 21 and closed in Abilene on May 1. As he says: “What could be bad about traveling places, seeing different things, moving? It keeps you alive.” Dylan has played over 3,000 live shows since 1993. For him the songs and his singing them seem to be the only thing that really matters, that night after night, around America and the world, in big cities and half-forgotten towns, he be “playing on the stage in front of live people, feeling hearts and minds moving.”

If Dylan remains cool it’s because, as Robert Harrison has said, “cool does not crave, and our age is craven.” All the things we bemoan as direly absent from contemporary culture Dylan embodies, even when he sells his publishing catalog to Universal Music Group and his song catalog to Sony for $300-odd million per piece; even as he decides to contribute a cover of the cowboy classic “Don’t Fence Me In” to the deplorable 2024 biopic Reagan. Every year, he finds new ways to baffle. Most recently this included launching a Patreon account with the Poe-esque title “Lectures from the Grave.” It’s billed as “curated by Bob Dylan.” It purports to be “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories,” all posted under pseudonyms, or no name at all, sparking accusations concerning the AI voicing (and, perhaps, the AI origin) of much of the material. He is also on X, formerly Twitter: “I ran into one of the Buffalo Sabres in the elevator at the Prague Hotel. They were in town to play the New Jersey Devils. He invited me to the game but I was performing that night.” In a sweeter world than ours he’d be on Substack.

Over 2,000 books have been written about Dylan. Among 20^th-century musicians, he is the most marked by “eras.” You can chop his life and work up in a dozen different ways, but one particularly clean view splits it into two. Dylan’s second half commences around 1992, 30 years on from the release of his self-titled first album.

The key to the second half of Dylan’s legacy is that he stopped worrying, as he clearly had during the 1980s, about how to keep being “Bob Dylan,” a personage whose real existence he has repeatedly denied. Instead, he refocused his target on the muse. Covering old folk songs. Making paintings. Co-writing and starring in a neglected, fascinating movie, Masked and Anonymous (2003). Writing an elliptical memoir, Chronicles (2004), and an impeccably weird theoretical text, The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022). Recording 100 episodes of his Theme Time Radio Hour (2006–2009). Releasing six albums of new songs and dozens of others (covers, live, bootlegs). Touring, touring, touring.

Poet and critic Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace is a look at this “second act” of Dylan’s career from 1991 through 2024. Polito stresses that there is no “accounting for” such a revival, “the most sustained, intelligent, and startling second act by an American artist.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage about there being “no second acts in American lives” was clearly premature.) Dylan somewhere found the will to pull himself from his slough of 1980s despondency, which reached its depths in a “harrowing performance at Live Aid in 1985 with Keith Richards and Ron Wood,” where he appeared as “the glazed zombie version of himself . . . a sweaty pub trouper from a forgotten war in a Pogues lyric.”

And Dylan’s later work still has an air of obscurity about it. If Spotify plays are anything to go by, the combined number for all of the songs on Love and Theft (perhaps the greatest of his later albums, which Johnny Cash called his best of all) is less than a mid-tier mid-’70s song like “One More Cup of Coffee” (39,862,746 and counting). There are obvious reasons for this: the voice is harsher, the songs often longer, and the narratives behind them labyrinthine.

Polito, who has written studies of several poets including James Merrill, uses a form borrowed from Merrill’s Book of Ephraim, the first installment of a trilogy of long poems in communication with the dead and the “other world” over a homemade Ouija board. Constructed as an abecedarium (“alphabet book”), After the Flood’s 26 chapters take in 26 focal points across 30 years of frantic creative activity, from N (Dylan and noir) to X (Dylan and social media) to M (Dylan and death). Generally the choice of form works, and there is fun in its approach to Dylan’s profusion of activity, sometimes using “a telescope, sometimes a microscope.”

Although there are no pretensions to exhaustiveness or definitiveness, this book will probably remain the account of Dylan’s “second act” for a long time yet. It is also full of deep, original scholarship. Polito had unprecedented access to the recently opened Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He scoured its vast array (over 100,000 items) of lyric drafts, hotel stationery, and alternate takes. It wears its research lightly, containing none of the tiresomely opinionated “accounting” of Dylanologists who have, generally, had none of the grace of Polito’s style, nor his poetic insight. Polito is both a poet himself and a scholar of American modernism — both useful assets. The book is personal, informed by the experience of a “second chance of my own, after an ominous illness, corrosive treatments, and multiple radical surgeries.” The author, like his subject, has endured.

And, like me, Polito seems to feel that we are yet to really understand Dylan, who seems to agree: “I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. I don’t think anything I’ve done is mildly hinted at. Nobody’s come close.”

2.

In Polito’s telling, “Dylan’s ‘lost’ 1980s should comprise his official second act.” During “this slow debasement,” he wore droopy pirate earrings, made overpowered, undercooked records that forlornly chased trends, and increasingly resembled a Saturday Night Live version of his former self. “I’d kind of reached the end of the line,” he wrote in his memoir. “Whatever I’d started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in.” His muse had fled: “You get caught up in wondering if anyone really needs to hear it. Maybe a person gets to the point where they have written enough songs. Let someone else write them.” Still not enough artists ask themselves whether “someone really needs to hear it”; the fact that Dylan does says something about his sense of calling. In 1991, when presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (a sure sign that you’re safely a part of history), Dylan came the closest he ever has to a public confession — or breakdown:

Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me too much, you know, he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he did tell me was this — [long pause] — He said so many things, you know — [nervous audience laughter] — He did say, son, “you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.” Thank you.

Polito writes, “as a lapsed Catholic, I instantly recognized his torment, his despond, his guilt . . . he confessed his artistic decline as a spiritual failing.” It was that speech which “seized my attention, and I immediately started listening closely to him again after a decade.” In 1992, the year after Polito began listening again, Dylan released Good As I Been To You.

This album of folk-country-blues covers finds a solo Dylan with guitar and harmonica once again, re-exploring the territory of songs first covered in the 1920s and ’30s. These are songs he first heard in the weird old world of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music — and, as he describes in Chronicles, at the folk music collector Alan Lomax’s Third Street loft in the early ’60s. Here the astonished, spongelike Dylan soaked up all he heard, performances by the neglected likes of Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Mississippi John Hurt, and, particularly, Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers. He describes these performances as “spiritual experiences.”

Dylan had been here before, at an earlier crossroads following a motorcycle crash in 1966, which took him away from a speed-fueled touring schedule into the idyll of upstate New York. He concentrated on his young family and played around in the basement of a big pink house nearby, where The Band was living. Over about eight months, with “the windows open and a dog lying on the floor,” as Dylan recalled, Bob, Robbie, Garth, Richard, Rick, and later Levon played to their heart’s content — jamming on whatever songs had blown through Dylan’s brain that particular morning, a jumble of ’40s and ’50s ballads, classic country, contemporary folk, blues, and R&B.

The Basement Tapes contains the sound of true musical liberation. At the same time, as the late Robbie Robertson remembered, Dylan “was taking us to school.” To these apparent mess-arounds, he began to bring new songs: “Lo and Behold,” “Tears of Rage,” “Nothing Was Delivered,” “I’m Not There,” and dozens more, which seem to somehow both emerge out of and recompose the musical America that the Band and he had spontaneously discovered in Rip Van Winkle-land, among sleepy hollows and whispering pines. These mysterious, old-new songs sounded, as Elvis Costello said, “like he’d just found them under a stone. They sound like real folk songs — because if you go back into the folk tradition, you will find songs as dark and as deep as these.” Or as Robertson experienced it: “We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn’t tell.”

This is the story Greil Marcus tells in The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Originally published as Invisible Republic in 1997 (and republished since to capitalize on Marcus’ now ubiquitously perverted coinage), this impressionistic fantasia on themes from that basement remains the most revealing Dylan book there is. It is the only one the man himself has blurbed (with characteristic ambiguity) and in Chronicles, he even seems to acknowledge his debt to its vision of his own work, describing the old folk material as “my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” Marcus describes the Tapes as “palavers with a community of ghosts. . . . These ghosts were not abstractions. As native sons and daughters they were a community. And they were once gathered in a single place: on the Anthology of American Folk Music.”

An invisible and liberated republic. Whether Dylan imbibed this crystallization from Marcus or not, his view of folk music as historically transcendent, beyond any one time or place while containing all of them, was borne out by the music he would go on to create, and for which his self-directed early-’90s folk revival prepared the ground. Both in the basement and the early ’90s Dylan was “learning to go forward by turning back the clock,” or (as he scribbled on a piece of paper now in the Tulsa archive) “fire a few random shots at the clock itself.” In the Basement Tapes, Dylan quit being the embodiment of the bleeding edge of hip modernity, instead tunneling for timelessness.

“What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic,” Guy Davenport writes in his landmark essay “The Symbol of the Archaic.” “The archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century . . . the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization. Laocoön was Michelangelo’s touchstone; the redstone Kouros from Sounion was Picasso’s.” As Dylan put it, recalling his schooling in the folk clubs of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, “These songs sounded archaic to most people. I don’t know why they didn’t sound archaic to me . . . [they] sounded like they were happening at the moment to me.”

“I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music,” Dylan stated in a 1996 interview. “I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ — that’s my religion . . . I believe the songs. They are my lexicon and my prayer-book.” This is no pedestaled tradition-worship; Dylan’s vision of American music is of a living tradition with names, addresses, details, and bloody compromised history all rolled into one. It includes Stephen Foster, Blind Willie McTell, Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, himself, and innumerable poor pioneers (“all Shakespeares,” he once called them) as much as some vague combination of “Anon.” and “Trad.” These authors are as much a part of American history as Civil War battlefields and dead presidents. As Justin Smith-Ruiu recently put it in Romanticon, “It is a grave mistake to suppose that the political history of America is its only history. You can hear a different history in its music . . . a more promising one for thinking about American collective identity and its possible futures.”

In sessions for Good As I Been To You and its sequel, World Gone Wrong (released in 1993), Dylan recorded around 50 “traditional” songs. On songs like “Blackjack Davey” and “Arthur McBride,” Dylan’s voice is like a needle dropping into the past; a plain acoustic guitar never sounded more chisel-like. In reverently describing Mike Seeger in Chronicles, Polito intuits, Dylan might be describing his own aspirations at that time: “He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, played in all the genres and had all the idioms mastered — Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel.”

It was through this self-reschooling that Dylan sought to rebaptize himself as a performer. As Marcus perceives, the “engine, the motor, of Dylan’s best work is empathy.” Nobody inhabits a song in the way Dylan can. He “burrows down deep into the syllables,” Polito enthuses, “and stresses as though no one has ever vocalized the songs before, and he is articulating the lines as occasion and necessity require.” Dylan’s commitment to this material, to disappear into it, led him to a fruitful vanishing point. For Polito, “the marvel is the fluent magnitude of spirit in this music that [Dylan] hears, frames, and enunciates for us — myths, allegories, and magic alongside history, religion, economics, technologies, sensibility, other tunes, and restless phantoms — even as he vanishes into that music.” If Dylan knows the land of song better than anyone, it’s because no one else seems to have quite his need for songs: to play them, to revisualize and relive them, returning and revisiting, over and over. As he wrote, he had something of a revelation around this time: “I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.”

3.

“I’m walking through streets that are dead” is the first line of Dylan’s “comeback” album, 1997’s Time Out of Mind. “Love Sick” has a wispy opening of organ chords and Dylan’s half-choked vocal, and immediately we are shown the essential image of the album: a wasteland and a wanderer. Polito, in one of his many pithy encapsulations, notes a misty atmosphere of “erotic grief” and “metaphysical noir,” sung in a voice consumed with a desperate regret. This singer has no time left to waste; he has realized all his mistakes and feels, unbearably, the weight of a wasted past. He’s also no longer alone with his thoughts:

Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone’s distant cry?

Or as “Cold Irons Bound” begins:

I’m beginning to hear voices

There’s no one around.

Polito buried himself in the Tulsa archive to resurrect the process of the album’s creation, a unique, ghostly, wholly fresh sound-world of “intensive spiritual desolation.” It was painstakingly crafted by Dylan “draft by draft, fragment by fragment” in notebooks, on notepads, hotel stationery, napkins, floating phrases hovering between potential songs:

I try to remember how I got here

The night is coming down and I just won’t be able to get far enough away from myself

Here is a man at the very bottom who has just begun looking up:

Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’t

But not tonight and it won’t be here

There are things I could say but I don’t

I know the mercy of God must be near

The record’s centerpiece is undoubtedly “Not Dark Yet.” Its sound is vast, groaning, and heaving in guitar reverb, the trembling hiss of cymbal and faint background organ, humming a strange comfort behind everything. Dylan hits long, slow nails through words full of “prickly aphorisms” and “glints of biblical revelation” in the voice of one who, as he sings, has “Been down on the bottom of a world full of lies.” Time Out of Mind, writes Polito, is “the country blues record Beckett might have made had he made country blues records: those magnificent sentences telling you all those dire things.” There’s the need to keep moving, that equally Beckettian refusal of speech, yet there’s nothing of the Irishman’s imprisonment here. Dylan sounds full to bursting with despair, dread and enervation — more human, in other words — than he ever has. It’s an album as wild and bewildered as it is dark and dire. As he would later write in his tender eulogy for Johnny Cash, it is “the voice of the wilderness of your head.” The door had opened onto the real existential territory of late Dylan: “Feel like a stranger in a world of mystery.”

My favorite song, however, is a sublimely unserious blues chug, the slow-burning closer “Highlands.” Dylan once joked that every song of his “signs off with good luck,” but it’s certainly true that he likes to turn albums on their heads at their endings. The song unspools, like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, as a long ramble of a pseudo-story with a quiet, self-puncturing humor.

Insanity is smashin’

Up against my soul

You could say I was on anything

But a roll

Dylan meets a waitress at a restaurant “in Boston town” — she doesn’t have any hard-boiled eggs for him, she says, then accuses him of not reading women authors (“at least that’s what I think I hear her say”), to which Dylan replies: “I’ve read Erica Jong.” Over 16 hypnotic minutes, the terrible load with which the album has been freighted is gracefully shrugged, before the singer proclaims the source of his strength. His heart will go on — because after all (and after Robert Burns):

My heart’s in the highlands

Gentle and fair.

Honeysuckle bloomin’

In the wildwood air.

All the late Dylan signatures emerged here, and with Daniel Lanois’ production, in its twangling, shadowy depths, it sounded like a new rock language. Recounting his first reading of Dylan’s drafted lyrics, Lanois declared as much: “Bob had written from a perspective that few had seen. Decades of life experience and testimony lay on the pages in front of me. The myth that rock ’n’ roll belonged only to youth was about to be shattered by the steel blue eyes of the man himself.”

It should be remembered that when it came to expressing the regret, failure, and despair of an older guy in (albeit “soft”) rock music, someone got there before Dylan. Polito mentions “a computer printout of Leonard Cohen’s ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ dated to January 13, 1999” in the archive. Cohen and Dylan spoke many times of their delight in each other’s work; Cohen, a decade older, had explored late-middle-aged personal-political despair (caught amid an all-encompassing swirl of “erotic grief”) years before, in I’m Your Man and The Future, respectively released in 1988 and 1992. Just take the chorus to the latter’s title track:

Things are going to slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world

Has crossed the threshold

And it has overturned

The order of the soul

When they said repent, repent, repent

I wonder what they meant

In 1983 on “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan was already singing of a world where “power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.” Later he would speak of the world he and Cohen had aged into as “a Machiavellian world, whether we like it or we don’t. Any act that’s immoral, as long as it succeeds, it’s all right.” Whatever handwringing may be carried on today about the collapse of civil international order, listening to late Cohen or late Dylan can often feel like digging up some prophetic Old Testament tablet time-capsuled shortly before Bill Clinton’s sunny inauguration in 1992, the same year Cohen would avow, “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder.”

4.

Dylan released Love and Theft on 9/11 — just as, runs a line in “Mississippi,” the “Sky’s full of fire / And the pain is pourin’ down.” If on Time he has never sounded as raw, on Theft he has never sounded quite so threatening; where Time Dylan rasps and groans, Theft Dylan barks and growls. Until the next vocal retooling he was to undergo during his mid-2010s Sinatra micro-era, that voice would sink deeper and deeper into the rocks and the gravel. Dylan doesn’t make much music you can really dance to at the best of times; the songs on Love and Theft aren’t songs you can really sing along to either. Enjoying most of them fully demands hard listening.

Producing himself for the first time (under the moniker “Jack Frost”), Dylan crafts a bright sound, sometimes radiant (“Mississippi”), sometimes glaring (“Honest With Me”). To me, the sound resembles nothing so much as Blonde on Blonde: which is simply to say, it sounds like nothing other than itself. Dylan is channeling the energy of his 24-year-old self on “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” and “Summer Nights”; through the lyrical and musical grandeurs of “Mississippi,” “High Water,” and “Sugar Baby”; via “Bye and Bye,” “Floater,” “Moonlight,” and “Po’ Boy,” often in lilting Southern parlor mode. In the press, Dylan evoked “Southern Air”:

It’s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They’re all screaming and forlorning. It’s like they are all caught up in some weird web — some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can’t rest. They can’t live and they can’t die. It’s like they were cut off in their prime, wanting to tell somebody something. It’s all over the place. There are war fields everywhere . . . a lot of times even in people’s backyards.

These dead — ghosts, spirits, morals, images — they’re “wanting to tell somebody something,” and to be present to us still as teeming intelligences, minds, or impulses or ideas or intentions, shaping our actions and thoughts, while showing us how little we know of ourselves and what we have truly come from. They are the real singers of Love and Theft. Rough and rowdy types, all of them American, tried and true, grifters, scoundrels, innocents, fools, boors, victims, and villains float between the songs, exchanging strong words: competing, lying, declaring their ambitions, letting slip subconscious fears. They come costumed in music from country swing to Tin Pan Alley ballad, jump and slow blues, echoes of the minstrel and parlor song, sometimes fully embodied and revived, sometimes merely gestured to, hovering melodically somewhere beyond. Nostalgia as timelessness. “Have you ever seen a ghost?” the singer will ask us on Dylan’s next album, Modern Times. “No, but you have heard of them.”

There is an analogous effect, alienation and part nostalgia mixed into one, in those films of David Lynch that render American dreams apocalyptic. Another parallel might be the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick’s The Shining: swarming spirits with unknown intentions, transplanting the past into the present, the present into the past.

Honeybees are buzzin’

Leaves begin to stir

I’m in love with my second cousin

I tell myself I could be happy forever with her

There is a spooking humor in the opening verses to “Floater (Too Much To Ask).” Dylan’s singer lazes around, complains, threatens, reminisces and regrets:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again

You do so at the peril of your life

I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound

I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife

My grandfather was a duck trapper

He could do it with just dragnets and ropes

My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth

I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes

I had ’em once though, I suppose, to go along

With all them ring dancin’ Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves

I left all my dreams and hopes

Buried under tobacco leaves

“Summer Days” gives us snatches of Fitzgerald and Hemingway (“What looks good in the day at night is another thing”) rubbing shoulders with Abraham Lincoln (“Sucking the blood out of the genius of generosity”). For “Lonesome Day Blues,” we get an early hint of a Roman ghost in a line from Aeneas’ father, Anchises, put into the mouth of Dylan’s bluesy boaster: “I’m going to teach peace to the conquered, I’m going to tame the proud.” “Po’ Boy” mixes Baudelaire and Blind Willie McTell in the same couplet: “Time and love has branded me with its claws / Had to go to Florida, dodgin’ them Georgia laws.” And, of course through all this, an invisible spine, those oft-untraceable, effectively eternal, “deflected vestiges of folk, country and blues.”

Accused of plagiarism on many fronts in the aftermath of Love and Theft (presumably by people who had never heard of T. S. Eliot or Picasso), Dylan had a waspish retort to those literal or unliterary enough to find the use of other writers, especially “the laureate of the South” Henry Timrod, objectionable: “If you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help you with your work, do it yourself and see how far you get.” Polito notes the “amplification of folk process” in Dylan’s collage strategies. He calls them “strategies of embodiment” that “lodge the legacies of empire, slavery, criminality, sin, the body, desire, and his own autobiography in volatile verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations.”

In Chronicles, Dylan describes his first intensive immersion into American history in the early 1960s:

I began searching in the New York Public Library . . . reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn’t so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. . . . I couldn’t exactly put in words what I was looking for. . . . You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. . . . The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.

If the South and the Civil War pervade the atmosphere of Love and Theft, its subtext is stated plainly in its very title: itself a quote in scare quotes in an album stuffed with them. Love and Theft is the title of a book by the historian Eric Lott, published in 1993. Lott’s Love and Theft is a now standard study of the history and legacy of the minstrel show, the first distinctively and uniquely American form of popular theater, with a musical legacy just as far-reaching. The minstrel show and the music that emerged from it grew in popularity through the pre-Civil War years, such that, as Polito writes, “in the late 1840s minstrelsy came to seem the most representational national art.”

“Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear,” Lott writes, “the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class” — who were its core audience. The “terrible pleasures” of minstrelsy not only “became a site of conflictual intensity for the politics of race, class, and nation,” they went into decline in the decades following the Civil War. But their afterlives include the “race” and “hillbilly” records of the early ’20s and ’30s — many of which found their way onto the Anthology of American Folk Music and so inspired both the younger and elder Bob Dylan.

Without slavery, no minstrelsy — without minstrelsy, no Bob Dylan. Of course, Dylan has been aware of this probably for a very long time — at least ever since he performed wearing whiteface throughout his Rolling Thunder tour in 1975 and ’76. But on this album, and in future ones, he engages fully — acknowledging not merely the historical legacy of this compromised form, but its dramatic one. In the classic minstrel show format you had the “Interlocutor” in whiteface, seated between his “endmen,” both in blackface: “Mr. Tambo” on the tambourine and “Mr. Bones” on a pair of clappers. The show evolved into a fixed three-act structure mixing comedic drama, dance, and music. More than once, Dylan has recalled his childhood fascination with the visiting carnivals in Minnesota, watching “weird Shakespearean things” likely descended from minstrelsy’s faux-Shakespeare parodies, broad archetypes and stock figures, bizarre shadings of miracle and mystery that seemed out of the Middle Ages. Not merely the music, but the drama of Love and Theft are inescapably linked to a very old — and very American — tradition.

5.

“I can see what everybody in the world is up against,” declares the singer in album-closer “Sugar Baby,” finally homing a stray thought Dylan had first drafted for Time Out of Mind. He had taken the new, largely interiorized territory of feeling unearthed on that album and turned (or, as a radio antenna, tuned) it outward, in conversation with the dead, both great and forgotten.

There is a glorious irony in the trajectory of Dylan and his own legacy. He invented the singer-songwriter archetype, the romantic who plays and sings songs they have written — lived experience in lyrical form. He has also left the overriding contemporary impulse toward the “autobiographical” or the “lived experience” far in the dust. In Dylan there is the modernist’s preference for the “mask” (to use a favorite term of Yeats) as “escape from personality” (Eliot’s view of the poetic impulse). In an interview from 2007, he said: “I never opened up my own thinking. My stuff was never about me, per se, so everybody who . . . thought it was about me . . . they took the wrong road.” And yet, here he was in 2009: “I’m not a playwright. All the people in my songs are all me.”

If Love and Theft was, as Polito writes, a “consummate vanishing into tradition and history,” what was the real purpose of Dylan’s efforts? “It’s me using everything I know to be true,” he has said. Perhaps then under this new logic, the album form itself could, in such hands, become its own space (Polito’s formulation) of a “timeless classroom, perhaps a model for the vaulted human brain — might such moments, then, mirror how we learn, remember?”

She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t?” What do you mean,

you can’t? Of course you can.

Re-spoken by Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in “Summer Days,” Dylan’s ironic drift is echoed by Guy Davenport: “It is man’s worst ineptitude that he has not remembered his own past.” Davenport admires a particularly modern archaic, Heraclitus, for his saying Ethos anthropoi daimon, “which may mean that our moral nature is a daimon, or guiding spirit from among the purified souls of the dead.”

In one of his World Gone Wrong liner notes, Dylan refers to “these modern times (the New Dark Ages).” The modern is that which consummately forgets, and hence, must always believe itself, will itself, to be “modern.” (Thus, per Rimbaud, the necessity to “absolutement moderne.”) Modern Times, released in August 2006, was the first number one album Dylan had scored in the United States since Desire exactly 30 years before. At 65, he became the oldest artist to achieve such a feat. It’s no stretch today to locate the specter this album summoned up at the start of this young and already very long century: it’s all around us, and we are increasingly anxious that it is anti-human at its core. As Dylan sang in “Love Sick”: “My sense of humanity has gone down the drain.”

As Elizabeth Nelson writes in an essay on “Bob Dylan and the Border,” the younger Dylan also “recognized the tortuous distortions of modernization and the medicine-show false promises in the emerging dominance of free-market capitalism. He felt it in his bones; didn’t and couldn’t possibly have understood the full sweep of it, but pointed it out like a man gesturing at a UFO.” The notion that Dylan ever stopped making protest music is wrongheaded (“that’s all I ever do, is protest,” he drawled to an interviewer in 1966) but by the time of Infidels in 1983 he could write songs like “Union Sundown” (“Well, it’s sundown on the union / And what’s made in the USA / Sure was a good idea / ’Til greed got in the way”) and “License to Kill” (“Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth / He can do with it as he please / And if things don’t change soon, he will”) so that by “Workingman’s Blues #2” in 2006, he can even do a Marxist put-on:

There’s an evening haze settling over town

Starlight by the edge of the creek

The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down

Money’s getting shallow and weak

By the album’s end, Dylan is looking (as one of the song’s titles has it) beyond the horizon, which seems to be historical, American, human. In his description of the place our modern moralities have gotten us to, there’s no ambiguity:

People’s lives today are filled on so many levels with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don’t survive. We don’t see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it on a daily basis — everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life and the mockery of it, everywhere we look.

“Vice,” let’s note, is one of the stock characters out of medieval mystery plays, “the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up.” Dylan referenced these in his MusiCares award acceptance speech in 2015: “I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now.” In listening to Modern Times, it helps to remember Dylan’s overlooked references to mystery and morality drama, a form that (quaint though this might seem to any modern playgoer) traded on the commonly held, real presences of good and evil.

If Love and Theft took some of the spiritual absurdity and broken-clock chronology already present in Time Out of Mind, Modern Times opens them wider. Less specific characters, grander and more elemental voices, a staging of America — past, present, future — as spiritual drama. A verse from “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” simultaneously declares the impulse haunting the entire album and Dylan’s response:

The night’s filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom

The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom

I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs

That refrain is Henry Timrod again, and throughout Modern Times, this stealing impulse winds all the way back to the ancients. One of the gems of Polito’s digs among the “stray, inchoate notes and sketches” of Dylan’s archive is the discovery of “a sort of scribbled note to self” on a stray piece of hotel stationery: “Read Ovid.”

I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love

I think it’ll fit me like a glove

So Dylan sings on “Thunder on the Mountain.” Not merely the Amores and Ars amatoria but snatches — Polito dubs them “reverberations” — from the Roman poet’s Tristia, Black Sea Letters, and Cures for Love through almost every song on Modern Times. Born in 43 B.C., Ovid, the poet of imperial Rome’s birth throes, was also one of its first free-speech casualties — exiled to the Black Sea city of Tomis for Carmen et Error (“a poem and a mistake”) on the orders of Augustus. Thus, writes Polito, Ovid “grew up during the violent death throes of the Roman republic” and subsequent civil wars while running afoul of the new, censorious authoritarianism. He knew empire and exile.

Dylan’s use of Ovid is redolent of Ezra Pound covering himself with the mask of another Latin poet, Sextus Propertius, through poems composed in London during the crumbling of another world order around 1917. And while we’re on Pound — here’s the beginning of “Canto I,” the best known, probably, of all 700 pages of The Cantos, if only because that’s where most readers stop:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Pound is translating The Odyssey, Book XI. Except that Pound is in fact not translating directly from Homer at all, but from a merely serviceable translation of The Odyssey into Latin, published in 1538 by an obscure scholar named Andreas Divus, a dusty copy of which he happened to pick up one day from a bookstall by the Seine.

Pound will later mention Divus directly, but not before he has rendered extended passages from the Latin (one linguistic remove from Homer) into an English colored by the rhythms and tones of Anglo-Saxon poems such as “The Seafarer” — another degree removed. The passage’s subject is ostensibly Odysseus’, or Pound’s, shamanic journey into the realm of the dead as described in the Nekuia episode of the Odyssey, but Pound has also brought in his own poetic autobiography (Vorticism, Imagism) to reorient to the task ahead of him. Hugh Kenner dubs this sinuous twisting and bending of tradition “a chord” struck “to comprise four of history’s beginnings: the earliest English (‘Seafarer’ rhythms and diction), the earliest Greek (the Nekuia), the beginnings of the 20^th century Vortex, and the origins of the Vortex we call the Renaissance, when once before it had seemed pertinent to reaffirm Homer’s perpetual freshness.” Pound said that “all times are contemporaneous in the mind.” Dylan’s music, as he says, “is always speaking to times that are recent.”

As he wrote more Cantos — “each more obscure than the last” as he triumphantly wrote to his father, Homer, back in America — Pound was also developing them according to his evolving conception of the “ideogram.” To cut right to the chase, Pound’s “ideogram method” means that his cantos are less lone-authored poems than layerings of disjunct time periods, actors, events, myths, and voices, with the intention that any “why” will eventually become clear simply by letting image, sound, and sense interplay — “keys in the wind / t’unlock my mind” as a young Dylan once suggested in a poem. From a seemingly jumbled diversity of concrete images, elements, ideas, and allusions, the mind might abstract out a vision wherein history and mythology appear as images in the mind, images of knowledge on an equal plane, as we read or listen, composing, perhaps, new ways of knowing altogether. “The reader, reading, dreams the dream of the deserving page,” wrote William Gass.

“Folk songs were the way I explored the universe,” Dylan observes of his coffee house days. “They were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say.” Dylan’s ability for merging with the songs he writes or sings is best shown in his prose poem-song criticism (if that’s what it is), first in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, and later in his Philosophy of Modern Song, published in 2022. In the 60 short essays on individual songs that make up the book (the majority from the 1950s, the era of Dylan’s childhood), the song as an experience of ideogramic empathic vision always shines through. Take Dylan’s account of Marty Robbins’ 1959 song “El Paso”:

Gunfire, blood, and sudden death, seems like a typical western ballad, is anything but. This is Moloch, the cat’s eye pyramid, the underbelly of beauty, where you take away the bottom number and the others fall. The cowboy chosen one, bloody mass sacrifice, Jews of the Holocaust, Christ in the temple, the blood of Aztecs up on the altar. This song kicks you down, and before you can get up, it hits you again. This is the stuff to live for, and what you make of it all. This is mankind created in the image of a jealous godhead. . . .

El Paso — the passageway, the escape hatch, the secret staircase — ritual crime and symbolic lingo — circular imagery, names and numbers, transmigration, deportation, and all in the cryptic first person, the primitive self. The stench of perfume, alcohol, a puff of smoke, the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper, and a love that’s stronger than death, and other things. The black knight and the white knight, the good luck charm, and the evil eye. Five mounted cowboys, twelve more on the hill, and there’s more — queen of sin street, diseased prostitute, an apparition that’s solidly real. . . .

In a way this is a song of genocide, where you’re led by your nose into a nuclear war, ground zero, New Mexico where the first atom bomb was tested. Land of witchcraft, Crazy Cat Mountain, and the El Paso gate of death. Tierra del Encanto, near the white sand missile range, the devils’ highway, down Jornada del Muerto.

The apotheosis of the fruitful contradictions in Dylan’s “relentless collage” may be Modern Times’ “Nettie Moore,” a gorgeous ballad that nonetheless keeps us hanging, suspended.

Lost John’s sitting on a railroad track

Something’s out of whack

Blues this morning fallin’ down like hail

Gonna leave a greasy trail

The first and third lines of this opening are from Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Long Gone Lost John” and Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail,” respectively, and interspersed with Dylan’s commentary. “Something’s out of whack,” and as the singer — is he young or old, Black or white? — attempts to sing the blues, there appears the specter of “a greasy trail.” Greasepaint and blackface, slippages of exploitation. As the song goes on Dylan will summon “Yellow Dog Blues,” “Frankie and Albert,” “Moonshiner,” “Two Soldiers,” and other standards, “. . . blues signals,” writes Polito, “disrupted and blocked, and the rueful commentary overlays defensiveness, aggression, apology, and self-reproach.” As the voices, images and tones layer, we get to the chorus, and everything is complicated further:

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore,

And my happiness is o’er

Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise

I loved you then and ever shall

But there’s no one here that’s left to tell

The world has gone black before my eyes

The opening couplet of the chorus (and the song’s title) are from “The Little White Cottage, or Gentle Nettie Moore,” Marshall S. Pike and James Pierpont’s popular 1857 minstrel ballad sung by an enslaved man whose “charming Nettie Moore” was sold to a Louisiana master who “shackled her with chains / Then he took her off to work her life away.” This twisted minstrel’s song is Dylan’s “prompt and frame” as Pound’s is Homer and Divus. Ovid slips in there too, in the last line of the chorus, and elsewhere: “I wish to God that it were night.”

In the historical-musical reverberations the late Dylan songs collect around themselves, we return to this refrain — who is singing, to whom, and why? As Polito asks of “Nettie Moore”: “Who’s staging the suffering?” And who is the loquaciously silent hero-villain of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the song which shatteringly closes Modern Times? Polito correctly identifies something in the music, “a sonic intensity” almost unique in Dylan’s work. It is at once pre- and post-apocalyptic. Here, we have minstrelsy’s echoes (lines from “Ole Dan Tucker” and “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane”) alongside Ovid (“I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned”), alongside (as on “Nettie Moore”) a chorus half-composed of lines from another song called “Highway of Regret” by the Stanley Brothers with half its lines (emphasized here in my italics) replaced by Dylan:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

No one on earth would ever know

Except one of those lines (“world of woe”) is from the gospel standard “The Wayfaring Stranger,” that American archetype already embodied in countless Bob Dylan songs.

As Greil Marcus remarks: “walk, talk — it’s not a phrase, it’s a gesture, a posture, a way of carrying yourself, that speaks of foreboding and escape . . . embedded in the rhythms of American experience.” It’s that rhythm, that trajectory, a circular swinging between moral vision and vengeful resentment that the song enacts. It is, as Polito writes, both “Old Testament” and “classic American . . . the stuff of Winthrop, Mather, Edwards, Brown, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville.” Dylan’s fugitive exile is keeping the frail flame of an unbearable, unspeakable historical memory. He is also hobbling “with a toothache in my heel” as far away from it and as fast as he can. As you listen to a song like this, it composes, as Marcus writes, “a complete world”:

. . . a world made of morals and emotion, the emotions that fester, then rise up when the morals are broken; as you sense the world the theme makes, you sense in the music that the world is also being judged, and that the judgment isn’t final. All of that is happening.

6.

Dylan once pondered that Love and Theft might be “the beginning of a trilogy,” a claim which seems borne out by Modern Times and Tempest, which was released in 2012. The album’s bold scarlet cover is adorned by a photograph of a bust of Pallas Athene. The Greek goddess of “wisdom, war, craft, and skill” was also present as a traveling bust onstage with Dylan and his band as he toured through 2012 and beyond. He also references Poe’s “The Raven” on the album’s opener, “Duquesne Whistle”: the Raven which perches, in the poem, on a bust of that very same goddess.

It was the beginning of a self-reflection by the artist on himself as bard. Between Tempest and the next original album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), of course, Dylan also happened to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Salman Rushdie tweeted: “From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is a brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.” Through all the songs on Tempest, Homer shimmers as a “sentinel” in Polito’s words, while the album’s “crux” is, instead, a “poignant identification with Odysseus.” Pallas Athene is Odysseus’ patron.

At the very opening of No Direction Home, Dylan declares:

I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey, goin’ home somewhere, I’m set out to find this home that I’d left a while back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. . . . I was born very far from where I was supposed to be, so I’m on my way home, you know.

One of the few things Dylan is unambiguous about is his sense of despair, not least at an America “drugged into a barely functioning torpor” as he writes in his Philosophy. Fortunately, the “home” of his America exists between times, not bound by our present moment. In these songs is an otherworld America that Dylan knows, and (as he himself said of Johnny Cash) it “will always bring you to your senses.”

It’s an experience perhaps related in an unreleased Big Thief song by Adrianne Lenker, who has a healthy dose of Dylan lyrically, even more so vocally. In “Beautiful World” she sings something of a Dylanesque shaggy dog story, with a drifter and a dog starting out lost on the highway.

Eastbound going 65

The desert wind is blowing

My dog is sitting by my side

He don’t care where we’re going

Taking the south route this time

Back from California

Stopping in the old mine town

Bisbee, Arizona

They drift to where there’s “no power out here,” only “the wild grass and my desert ass,” and then a sinister border patrol informs her: “That’s a camera and it’s tethered to an invisible string.”

Then a chorus,

It’s a fucked-up world

Why must everything be conquered, gutted?

It’s so beautiful

I’m going to the center of it.

Then, an encounter, and maybe a revelation:

Standing there feeling tripped out

And just wanting to cry

And that disconnected sharpness where everything is dry

I hear the ratchet of the call

Two wheels turning in the dirt

An old man on his bicycle, out of nowhere

Soaking through his shirt

He gets down and he comes over and says

“I’m on a long journey. I’m riding my bike clear across the country. I’m 85. My name is Bob. I’m gonna make the Guinness book.”

I said, “It’s nice to meet you, Bob.”

And then I took his hand and shook.

Gus Mitchell is a writer based in London. His work is featured or forthcoming in the Stinging Fly, Jacobin, Plough, Commonweal, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other places.

The Metropolitan Review’s big summer bash is less than a week away, and we want all of you to be there. We’ve got an incredible lineup — , , , , , , and — and you’ll have the chance to meet the TMR team, grab a drink, and make a night of it.

Writing and reading are often solitary pursuits. But don’t believe the hype: reading ain’t dead. What makes TMR special is the vibrant literary community that shows up, in the flesh, every time.

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—The Editors

That Bluechew one is on, having modified its vertically formatted clips to our TV by shouldering them with thick black bars or, in the case of one woman, multiplying her image across the screen in many-headed tile mode, and Helen, on her phone, scrolling, tilts her head up from where it rests in my lap.

— We need this

she says, and shows me: this one a woman describing the miracle of her dog feeder, and like the Bluechew sirens she too has adopted a soft pornish tilt of the body and voice. This dog feeder changed her life, she tells us, and describes the feeder, its camera, which connects to an app on her phone and captures live video feed of the dog — the dog, barking, begging, degraded in pixelation — and allows her to dispense food remotely or communicate with the dog through the feeder’s two-way audio system:

— Good girl

— I love you

and I look now at Héloïse in the corner, curled up like the wet end of a mop, her bed mangy and chewed through and who, in the month since we brought her home, has already inspired talks of dog Xanax cached in peanut butter.

Helen straightens and stills.

— What?

I ask, but she’s only waiting for Face ID to autofill her credit card information.

Our show has come back on. I try to back up to where the ads ended but scrub too far, accidentally invoke the Bluechew women who reappear, now, shiny-haired incantating their chorus without rest, forever always asking only that I, and others like me, become the best men and lovers we might be.

It comes. We put it in the corner, where its white obelisk body obfuscates the food, dispensed at our command into the bowl at its base. On its surface the camera is round and black.

Watching the feed I am at first disturbed by the emptiness of Héloïse’s independent time and I wish for her a rich interior life as she walks from room to room staring blankly through objects or assuming complete stillness with the prolonged scrutiny of a monk, other times apparently taken by strange spirits as she barks and whines, whimpers, runs across the living room, rolls and spasms along the floor. Helen watches the feed more than me and often, if Héloïse is not pictured in the frame, calls out to the footage of our empty apartment

— Baby

— Here girl

— Héloïse

— Where are you poopie

— Come out

and, when Héloïse does not come, becomes edgy and fretful and wants to go home.

Soon Héloïse has completely isolated Helen and me from the feeding experience, no longer seeks us to beg but sits expectantly before the camera. From bed Helen might hold the phone to her face and coo at video Héloïse who, from the other room, can be heard whining both through the door and the phone in a tinny delayed duet.

— Oh my god look she’s tweaking

Helen might laugh and in the feed see Héloïse’s dark wet nose pressed to the camera or sniffing around her empty bowl, and in her eyes some endless well of wanting or in her eyes, black, nothing at all, and Helen taking screenshots waits to feed her for interminable minutes until, finally hitting the button, she allows Héloïse to feast.

I worry about the implications of this. Without scooping her food, who are we to her? And the voices that come through the feeder’s warped speaker, can she possibly ascribe them to us over the murmured endearments of the machine itself? How to communicate to her that we are her keepers, her providers: We’re the ones who scroll, who pick the food, who select a delivery window, who confirm the photo of the food placed before our door is indeed of our door and who opens this door to find the food always there? And I think I see it sometimes, in the park’s concrete dog run while the other pets bound sunnily toward their owners Héloïse wanders, lost, looking up at each person as if assessing whether or not they are hers, and it is only when, desperate, I call her name and extend a treat does she, maybe seeing something of the feeder in me, come.

The train’s packed. Standing, I watch the guy sitting beneath me scroll headphoneless — boob stuff, body check, CCTV footage of a woman on all fours, in a dog mask, being attacked by a real dog, hair regrowth, bullhorn, rubble, ad for ass-augmenting leggings, ad for ass-augmenting leggings, ad for ass-augmenting leggings — and as the train stalls between stations the video freezes, the woman’s legging-augmented ass arrested in time, and he navigates now to the next app, encounters at the bottom of its feed the buffering wheel so checks his email, the email loads to empty white nothing, and texts, no new texts, scrolls through an old conversation, in which he has sent a large block of text unanswered — I struggle to pull upside down more than a few lines

— its POISON what we do to ourselves we let it happen its in the drink we its in the food

— it breaks my heart to see whats happening with ur sister

— i found ur earring if u want it

and opening another conversation, wherein again unanswered, to an unsaved number he asks plaintively, simply:

— what’s up

and here a voice arrives from the train’s speakers as only muffled feedback, wordless, a dark and distorted message, our conductor possessed, and through the window black tunnel nothing, and with increasing urgency he flicks at the screen, the interrupted video now something else, now a woman’s face, rigid, lips parted mid-thought, and looking around I see only the same, all of us arrested, when with a groan and a lurch the train resumes its slow service, and we crawl into the next station, where the video loads and the woman reanimates, finally, breathlessly rushes through her delivery

— THIS IS YOUR SIGN

she implores — but he swipes up, casts her away, and she dies.

I glance at the woman next to him. She’s watching me, so I look down. I feel her continued attention and look again. Now, intent, she points at my pocket. I hear it, the whining. Obediently I retrieve my phone from my pocket and find it opened on the feeder app, Héloïse whimpering and watching me with her murky inscrutable eyes and I wonder for how long she has been crying into the dark of my pocket, and had she heard the train’s low wail, the reticent murmurs of my rustling fabric, delivered to her through the feeder’s speaker like messages from a cruel god. In the length between stations her image freezes but the sound continues.

At home Héloïse lies prone before the feeder, which still has food in it. I smell it first: a doleful puddle in the walkway, diarrhea, and upon entering the apartment find the second spot by her bed. I crouch at her side. Her body moves with heavy breaths. She looks animatronic. She looks like a puppet. I pet her raggedy fur and remember liking the shelter’s post, thinking she looked like some busted beloved stuffed animal run too many times though the wash. She turns her head back toward me and I see myself in the watery glass of her eye and I look so old all of a sudden, like a stranger, like I’m playing pretend, leaned over her, petting her, and whose dog is this? — mine, now, and it’s my job only to feed her, and when she dies it will be permanently recorded on the chronology of my life, and until then I have to do everything I can to keep her from dying and there’s no covenant demanding she love me.

— I love you!

from the speaker. Helen’s distorted voice.

— Shit. Helen? Can you see me?

I lean forward as if bending to eat from the bowl. I stare into the camera.

— Hi girlie girlie. You’re so pretty baby.

Héloïse sniffs toward the camera enchanted.

— Yes poopie.

— Helen?

— Hi.

— How’s dinner? Keni? Can you see me?

— She’s in the bathroom.

— Héloïse had, like, diarrhea.

— Héloïse!! Did you shart yourself stinky?

Héloïse, quivering, draws closer.

— So should I take her to the vet or something?

Héloïse tilts her head. I lean forward. I listen. The feeder, unspeaking.

— Helen?

I peer into the camera and see only myself, dark and fisheyed.

— Helen?

Héloïse pushes her body toward the feeder, nuzzles between my arms, and I can feel her heart beating rapidly against my chest, and I think of Helen choked dropped dead at the table, Helen anaphylactic having ingested trace tree nuts, Helen still there, silent, watching us clamor for her voice and taking screenshots.

Per my phone I boil white rice and chicken. Héloïse has retreated to her earlier despondency, sprawled before the feeder and turned away from the world. While the chicken boils I clean her diarrhea. Of course she does not know this.

— Here’s some yummy chicken

I say, placing the new bowl beside the feeder, and I wonder if Helen hears me.

I turn on the TV and scroll. This one a man filming himself with a newborn baby, in the hospital and still scrubbed. Text over the video reads

— When y’all ask me if Bluechew really works

I search their faces for visual echoes, the man and the baby. I monitor for changes in Héloïse’s demeanor. She moves through intervals of great darkness and sudden rapture in which she sits up and cries to the feeder, sniffs it, and still will not eat. I look at my phone. I wait for Helen to text me. I idle on our messages. Héloïse whines desperately. I look into her eyes and wonder if she wants to tell me something, if this is the expression of a dog about to have diarrhea on the floor. I put the leash on and carry her down the stairs. In the street’s artificial light she pisses gracelessly onto the cigarette butts, looks up at me and I understand that she has at least identified one of my functions, shuttling her meekly from container to container. Back inside Héloïse returns to the feeder and I return to my couch hole, stare at the black TV. I check Helen’s location, the restaurant, I open our texts and type

— ETA home? No rush jw

delete that, write,

— she still won’t eat but no more diarrhea (fingers crossed emoji)

delete that too, scroll to our early texts just to read them, the careful flirtation we would never employ now, the attentive punctuation, the cadence of the emojis, a borrowed voice like a dream journal written in the half fog of sleep only to be reread and forgotten in daylight.

— Helen?

I say to the feeder, noncommittal. I look up how long it’s okay to leave chicken and rice out. Everything elicits destruction and death. I pack them in a tupperware and put it in the fridge, open a beer, do the dishes, hear the door and Helen’s keys drop in the bowl. I meet her as she slips off her shoes. She’s drunk and happy, and we kiss, and she talks to me in a baby voice and kisses my cheeks, calls to Héloïse who does not come.

— It reeks in here

she says, and

— Did you make chicken?

— She wouldn’t eat it. It’s in the fridge.

She kisses me again, says

— I’m starving, is that gross?

and in the kitchen takes out the tupperware and douses it in hot sauce, sticks it in the microwave, goes

— That place was so stupid. No food. I hate Keni sometimes.

— It was just you two?

— And this guy. He was so weird though.

— Like they were together?

— No they’re friends or something. It was so stupid.

The microwave beeps and she retrieves the chicken, stirs it quickly and eats standing, releases the hot air off the chewed food through her open mouth, asks

— What did you eat?

and I realize I haven’t. She holds up the fork, I go to her and eat from it. When the tupperware is empty she scoops her finger through the hot sauce and chicken juice and licks it.

On the couch she kisses my neck and presses her hand to my stomach, beneath my shirt. Her hands are cold. She feels my dick through my pants, probing for hardness.

— Sorry

I say.

— For what?

she says, and kisses my cheek, and calls to Héloïse who turns her head briefly before snuggling back into herself beneath the feeder, and Helen opens the app to find her blissfully framed in the camera, takes a screenshot, disperses it adequately and falls asleep on my chest.

I’m at work when the notification pings. Motion detected. I take my phone to the bathroom and open the feeder app. The living room is empty. I scan for visually apparent diarrhea. I wait for the jumpscare of some masked intruder or my own pixelated evil twin assuming my domestic life in my absence. I bend and check the stall for feet. I call, quietly. I think I hear her — a faint whimper, or a whine. She does not come. Something moves, by the couch. Cut off I see only Helen’s arm, hanging off the couch, the slope of a shoulder, the camera too low to capture anything else. The angle’s weird, she’s lying down, and it’s her, the sound, and as her hand flexes and stretches out she conjures a low moan, a growl, I can barely place it as hers, and she’s panting. Helen, I say. The hand stills. It reaches and retreats. I enter the stall, lock the door, and sit, bend again to check for feet, listen for the door, hold her breathing close to my ear. I undo my belt, her hand reaches for nothing.

When I get home she’s peeling garlic at the counter. She smiles. Me:

— You came home at lunch?

Her:

— Checking my location? Obsessed.

— No, well. You know.

— What?

Is it a game? She wants me to say it? Me:

— I liked watching you. It was really sexy.

She puts the garlic down, doesn’t look at me. Her:

— What are you talking about.

— You know. On the couch. Right? I mean, I didn’t — like, I couldn’t really — but you knew, right? You knew. I mean, you heard me. Right?

She looks at the garlic. She picks up the skins, crinkling delicately in her palm, and tosses them. I reach toward her and she nudges away, is at the door and grabbing her keys, says

— I need a walk.

I turn to Héloïse, in her bed, kicking her foot in the throes of an anxious dream, ask

— Does she need to go out?

— Can you?

she says, and adds

—Later?

Helen’s looking at her phone, one hand on the door.

— Um, sure. Look, I mean, I’m sorry. I thought you knew.

— It’s whatever. I’ll text you

she says, and leaves.

When I walk toward our room I smell it and look down, and there it is, perfectly placed in the doorway like a sick green reflecting pool.

On our block Héloïse stops in front of the deli. The cat eyes her behind the door. She whines and pulls on her leash and without my resistance I know would rail stupidly against the glass. I drag her away, wait to pass Helen, coming home with a plastic bag of takeout for both of us, or bending to hold and kiss Héloïse’s face, slipping the leash from my hand into her own. I check her location. She turned it off. Her contact photo hangs suspended in a vast gray flatland, has crossed the veil into a realm unreachable by the little blue searchlight of my being. I call her, get voicemail. At every curb I wait for Héloïse to go and she only sniffs at the tires of parked cars and stops on the sidewalk, attracts the affected admiration of passersby and chews on garbage I have to then pull from her teeth. I call her again.

I’ve seen her masturbate before. Times I try to go down on her it usually ends like this anyway, her saying she’s too in her head, and

— Maybe we can just watch each other?

and if it’s so private to her why would she do it on the couch, knowing the camera’s there? Is she into this, all of it, had she staged an elaborate scheme to feel objectified at my voyeurism and turned on by her own objectification, and now, her anger, her leaving, are still the fulfilment of some desire: am I being good?

I think back to the recording, her hand, her hand, the sound, the moan — and hadn’t it been someone else’s voice — something darker, deeper — and a shadow? We sit at the couch all the time and the app never sends a notification. Motion detected. Héloïse’s absence from the feed could only mean sequestration to our bedroom, these days any time I open my phone she’s there staring at the camera, and why else would she have had diarrhea in our room if not shut in there. I imagine him: interested in it, monolithic in the corner, crouching in front of the camera before Helen could steer him away. It was the guy from dinner. She didn’t even like Keni, why stay for so long?

— Come by tomorrow

— My partner’s in the office tomorrow

— Come by at lunch

Does he know about me at all? Keni was never in the bathroom, it was him, returning to the table, when she abruptly cut off at the camera. Keni was never there at all. Helen hates conflict, this is exactly what she would do, I’ve pictured it. Because she’s always saying stuff like this

— If we were to break up and I’m not saying we are but you know

— I love you of course oh my god but sometimes and I don’t mean this bad but I guess I feel stuck or like trapped

— I don’t know if I am, or if I feel like, the best version of myself

— Don’t you get bored, don’t you feel bored, or boring, or frozen, like all the time is going by and nothing happens, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it

and when I ask what this different version of herself looks like, or does with her time, she doesn’t know

— I don’t know

she says

— But I’ll know it

— Like, like

and Héloïse, uneating and loose-bowelled Héloïse, we’ve been walking for half an hour and she still hasn’t gone.

At home I put Héloïse in our room. I lie on the couch and hang my hand from its side. Check my phone, no notification, I move and writhe. I open the app and look at the camera, try to recreate the circumstances of the video, hang my hand how I saw hers, she was on her back then, here, no here, and him, there, probably, above her, had to be, and I navigate to the billing plan page, click on storage. When we first got the app there was an option to opt in to a data plan which saved the videos privately within the app. We didn’t get it. I see it now, a monthly payment, totally secure, it says, to save those precious moments, and for our own peace of mind.

If I buy it now Helen might be notified. And I have no way of knowing if this could restore the lapsed videos anyway. I try to look this up, read reviews by a spurned customer having purchased storage to the premium tier whose videos, believed to be saved, suddenly disappeared from existence — is there any way to recover this footage? Where did the videos go? And I find next the brand’s separate line of 360 degree pet cameras, advanced technology to track movement and alert owners to escalations in noise, aberrations in behavior. Some cameras might dispense treats when prompted as if from a thrown hand. Gifs of sample footage fill the reviews, a faceless owner seen sometimes in the background walking through a kitchen or hallway like a captured spirit, suddenly displaced and cast back to repeat the sequence as the gif loops.

I read about the camera’s other offerings. One feature, billed against separation anxiety, activates when it detects more than two instances of barking in the same 15-second period. The device then plays a series of noises intended to calm or distract the dog — regulating music, assuaging messages recorded by the owner, six second clips of whistles, tinkling metal, or crinkling plastic bags. I think of some of Helen’s most depressive weeks, back when we first moved in, how she couldn’t go to sleep without her phone on her pillow playing videos of this woman trailing feathers along another woman’s inner ear or massaging viscous creams into her hair or trying on crunchy gloves. I think of my mom who said she used to get sad too until she had me and my brother and then she didn’t have any time. Héloïse cries at the door, her dark nose and white fluff pressed up to the crack. In the kitchen the pitiful fridge, the cabinets, the still life of Helen’s discarded garlic, I scroll dourly to the pits of Doordash, I open a can of tuna and stick a fork in it, sit against the wall by our bedroom door, hold my finger to Héloïse’s sniffing nose. I open the door and she appears in the space. I scarf the tuna in seconds. I offer her the can to lick, and then my hand. Her discipline is persistent and practiced. I nudge my fingers up under her lips and bare her teeth.

The next morning I’m standing on the rush hour train, Héloïse tucked into the tote on my shoulder, her face behind me poking out of the bag in my blindspot. She hasn’t eaten, pooped, peed, anything since last night, when I took her out she blinked numbly through the storefronts and went rigid, eventually had to be airlifted and carried home. Passengers smile endlessly at some point six inches to my left. I feel their smiles on the back of my neck. I imagine Helen opening the feeder app to an empty apartment, Helen calling out into her phone and begging Héloïse to come. I open our texts — eta home? no rush — at least turn your location back on im just worried — helen?? hello??? — and add now: checking in. The text stalls between the stations, loads slowly, is marked as unsent. I try to resend and it turns green. I imagine it delivering twice, three times, my echoes, my chants. Sorry on the train if texts are sending weird. Send. btw this is really immature and selfish at least let me know you’re ok. I try to delete that one while it idles inert in mid-delivery purgatory, red exclamation mark, text not sent, goes through, out of order, green. hey I’m just worried if this is like last time — if I need to get in touch with someone — call me — when I’m off train like 15 min — I forgive you idc how long it was going on or whatever or who he was just proof of life please — pic of Héloïse looking very cute from last night — doesn’t send — emphasize Call me — question mark if I need to get in touch with someone — Helen I’m sorry and I love you, and I’m here whenever you’re ready to talk. I’m not mad. I miss you. The train stops between stations. The engine falls quiet. My texts roll their boulders toward delivery. btw, I type, Héloïse got pretty sick again last night and I’m at the vet with her right now they think it might be best to put her down if you want to come say bye, my thumb hovers over the send button, I read the text, I read it again, I watch it load, load, load. I look up, through the window, and in the black find the reflected specter of the girl behind me with her phone lifted, angled beneath her face, taking pictures of Héloïse on my shoulder. Then her phone points down. And I look down at my own phone, in my hand, open to our texts, and I look at the girl’s reflection, and she’s taking pictures of my phone, the texts, all green, and what if it’s not the service, what if Helen blocked my number, and where do the texts go then? And I see myself in vertical format, on this girl’s phone, the video, zooming in, imagine the post, as I scroll, type, send, unsend, Héloïse quivering over my shoulder and her sad eyes a kind of divine collage, her prophetic blank stare, all of her restraint and refusal an allegation against my character, and the camera zooming in on this look, and Helen meeting it, the video, on her feed, and swiping, casting me into the chasm, or else multiplying my image, dispersing it, degrading it, the collabs she could make, the ads, and I think of Héloïse and me both of us left behind, needing to eat until we die, and I turn to face the girl, who does not look up, first, and I say, Delete that, and she glances at me, confused, plucks out one earbud waiting for me to repeat myself, Delete that, I say again, whatever you took, the pictures, the video, and she blushes and says Sorry, your dog, he’s so cute, and I say She, and I say, I saw you, taking photos of my phone, delete them, and she’s like What? and I’m like Bullshit, delete them, the videos, please, whatever, I saw you in the reflection, and she glances at the window, and her face is red and still, she ignores me totally, looks down, her phone at her side, evaluates the packed car, Hello? I say. What the fuck? and someone else eyes me and I know that look, like I’m a pit unleashed in the street and they aren’t sure how to proceed, and they consider the girl, the train silent and fixed, Please, I say, just show me your phone, and I move toward her, barely, but the train jolts and she stumbles forward, rides the momentum to push now through the other passengers, and when the train finally pulls into the next station she darts out the far door and through the window I see her appear in the next car, head for an empty space in the crosscurrent of bodies, and as she pulls out her phone she eyes me briefly through the glass before looking back down.

Sophie Paquette is a writer from Indiana based in New York City. Recent work can be found in Expat Press and The Whitney Review of New Writing.

There exists such a thing as a “poet’s novel” — that is, a novel written by a writer who is primarily a poet. Notable examples include The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell, and The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz. These aren’t just novels that happen to have been written by poets. They are novels that express a certain poetic sensibility. They dwell lovingly on description, whether of landscapes or clothing or furniture. Style seems to exist more as an end in itself than as an instrument of storytelling. There’s a good reason for that: often there isn’t much of a story. Instead of a traditional plot, we get moods, atmospheres, character sketches, and essayistic digressions. A poet’s novel is usually not a page-turner; it’s a book that invites you to linger on the page.

Emmalea Russo is a poet, and her new book, The Moon Papers, is a novel. In some respects, it fits the above description of a poet’s novel. In others, it doesn’t. Basically, it tries to be three things at once: a science fiction story, a satire of the art world, and a character study.

The first element — the science fiction — is the weakest of the three. Russo admittedly sets up an intriguing premise. In the California desert, a mysterious art collective known as the Center for Constant Creation (CCC) is engaged in its most ambitious project yet: the launching of a new, artificial moon. This object, which is supposedly made of thousands of recycled plastic bags, will be towed by a “space tug” into place, launched from a giant silver can on a summer night, and will be one-eighth the size of the already existing moon.

This is a science-fictional scenario, but we can already see the art-world satire poking through. Its edge, however, remains blunted, largely because of the unsolved mysteries that surround the collective and its projects. There is a definite air of creepiness about the CCC. It has an unusual “Artist in Residence Program”: pregnant female artists are kept there in a coma until they give birth. Members of the collective who maintain contact with the outside world are regarded with suspicion. It is almost impossible to find images of its buildings on the internet. Rumors circulate about its backing: the government might be behind it, or a sinister corporation, or both.

The main problem is that we are not given much to go on. The question of motivation remains obscure, starting with why anyone would want to launch a fake moon in the first place. We learn almost nothing about Voortelle, the shadowy corporation that may or may not be sponsoring the CCC, and that may — or may not! — be in cahoots with the government. Moon2, the free-floating referent at the center of this novel, is such a cipher that it can mean all things to all people. This leads to endless speculation and worry: Moon2 will have a positive effect; it will have a negative effect; it will affect menstrual cycles; it makes horses lethargic; it causes psychological problems in people; it’s about mind control; it’s nothing to worry about; it’s something we should all be worried about.

We live in a world where viruses rage across continents and force lockdowns of entire countries; where floods drown villages and fires ravage even upscale real estate; where billionaires who resemble Bond villains develop technologies that threaten to make homo sapiens obsolete; and where the threat of nuclear war has never really gone away. To put it mildly, this list is not exhaustive. Yet the characters in this novel are concerned, almost obsessively, about the effect that a fake lunar replica — a Christo-like art project — could have on the world. It’s hard to take these worries seriously when real-world horrors clamor for our attention.

The satire, while not as pointed as it could be, does provide some bubbly if rather predictable entertainment along the way. It would be hard to go wrong here: the art world is so full of pretension, self-importance, and high-flying but meaningless rhetoric that the jokes practically write themselves. Transcripts of the CCC’s meetings are full of statements like this:

What we’re launching is a change of energy and vibe, a vibrational shift. Obviously. A different era entirely. There will be the times pre-Moon2 and the times post-Moon2. The before times and the after times. This means that Moon2’s launch is an event. . . . Simultaneously, we continued working on avoiding the terms “real” and “fake.” We don’t want the original moon to be considered the “real” one and Moon2 the “fake” or the “imitation.” Rather, we want them to be viewed as different, but equal.

The first half of the book alternates between “West” and “East” — those are, in fact, repeated chapter titles. East is rural Pennsylvania, which is populated by a cast of strange, quirky characters. Many of them are holdovers from Russo’s previous novel, Vivienne. Velour, the late Vivienne’s daughter, and Vesta, her granddaughter, both live in this picturesque country setting, in a richly imagined landscape full of animal life and animal death, nosy neighbors, traditional towns, and gentrified new developments with names like the “Residenz.” The discovery of a bat colony in Velour’s furniture-cluttered house, where she lives as a virtual shut-in, serves as a way of introducing other characters, most notably a young bat conservancy worker named Radko Toth.

While a rather surprising degree of sexual energy gradually builds between Radko and the 68-year-old Velour, Vesta — now an artist herself — conducts a long-distance quasi-affair by phone with Dean Konig, a dissident member of the CCC. This affair connects the two locations of the story; we see much of their lives through their screens, a manifestation of this book’s interest in surveillance and control. To complicate things, Vesta is married to Lars Arden, a gallery owner about 30 years her senior. She spends much of her time painting in her “secret studio,” located in a house owned by a 90-year-old man called Ziggy, whose senile outbursts provide some edgy humor.

Structurally, the story is marked by doubling, symmetry, and contrast. We get two moons. We get the harsh Western desert and the green bucolic East. There’s the artist-in-residence program that is actually a birthing program, and there’s a colony of female bats and their offspring. There is full-sized furniture and there is miniature furniture (Velour is excited by the idea of creating a diorama out of the latter). There are multiple relationships involving large age gaps.

Stylistically, The Moon Papers is a potpourri, with vast amounts of “found” material — a hallmark of much modern art — interrupting the flow of its narrative. In addition to CCC transcripts, we read discussions from an “anti-Moon2” forum, full of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking. The book reproduces two complete articles, one each on Vesta and Lars, from New York-based art periodicals. We are treated to recorded sessions with Chloe, the rural psychotherapist. Naturally, there are text message exchanges, with their trademark truncated language. The second half, in which the camera is turned more strongly on Vesta and Lars, features numerous monologues labeled simply “Voice.” Some of these Voices are easily identifiable within the context of the story, while others are not. They are meant to give us further perspectives on the main characters and other elements of the story. I found some of them illuminating, others superfluous.

The found material contains extensive quotations from a journal kept by Lars; he calls these notes — you guessed it — “The Moon Papers.” I found Lars to be the most interesting character by far. Luckily, in the book’s crazily fragmented second half, he gets a couple of solid chapters to be himself. Lars is a guy with a lot on his mind, and it weighs him down. He’s the curator of his wife’s work and that of her family, and the art business, with its demands for commercial viability, can be aggravating. He haunts the anti-Moon2 forum, frets about what the CCC is up to, and worries about Moon2, which he considers to be “the work of the devil.” Lars has a mystical streak: he finds inspiration in Christian saints, having a particular affinity for the desert hermit St. Anthony of Egypt, whom he regards wistfully as a sort of role model:

Like Lars, Saint Anthony was born into upper-class Catholics. Unlike Lars, Saint Anthony had renounced everything. . . . Somehow, he had lived to be 105 years old. This fact impressed and surprised Lars, who planned to live as long as possible. Perhaps the saint lasted so long because he only ate bread and whatever stuff his fans and followers would throw over the fence. Lars wondered if he, himself, could figure a way to alter his dietary habits to match the saint. He had skipped breakfast. That was a start.

I read the book twice, and both times I had the same overall reaction. Russo excels as a creator of character and an inventive prose stylist, but the book tries to be too many things at once. I thought there was too much about rumors, speculation, and conspiratorial thinking, and not enough about skipping breakfast. I appreciate the author’s willingness to take risks throughout the work; it’s something I wish lit-fic authors would do more often. Some of the risks pay off, while others fall flat. At its heart, The Moon Papers is largely a comic elaboration of insider lore. The extent to which you enjoy it will probably be a function of how interested you are in the contemporary art world and the outlandish personalities who populate it.

Scott Spires is the author of the novels Abandon All Hope and Social Distancing. He writes about literature, culture, and geography at Lakefront Review of Books.

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Child of Light, a novel written by the artist, poet, and playwright Jesi Bender, has certainly received its fair share of love. One reviewer likens the prose to Nabokov’s and calls one passage in particular as “concise and devastating an illustration of inherited trauma as you’re ever likely to see in print.” A cursory glance at most commercial reviews suggests this genre-bending literary novel — about science and spiritualism in the Gilded Age, and one privileged family’s toxic dynamics — is well worthy of love, praise, and attention.

At its core, Child of Light is about Ambrétte Memenon, a 13-year-old French immigrant whose ailing spiritualist mother, Maman, and taciturn scientist father, Papa, are both obsessed, in equal measure, with being anywhere but their unhappy household. There is also the brother, born Modeste but later referred to as Georges, representing the grotesque mutation of a privileged boy into a violent man.

The Memenons have recently arrived in Utica, New York, where they live in one of the few homes powered by electricity. Electricity is a primary surface-level theme of the novel, for Papa has worked with Nikola Tesla and Lucien Gaulard, one of the forefathers of the modern transformer. Various sections of the book are written in a historical style detailing Gaulard and Papa’s workaholic exploits, but the more intriguing energy coursing through Child of Light comes from Maman, a devout spiritualist slowly dying of a mysterious illness, who tells Ambrétte that spirits never die, for “the dead are near us at all times. . . . Some people can read what the spirits share. You had that gift as a child.”

So begins the tale of Ambrétte’s experimental coming-of-age story, as our young protagonist struggles to make sense of the world and her parents’ abstruse dealings. Child of Light strays away from a traditional plot-driven narrative through shape-shifting chapters chock-full of multilingual passages, esoteric spiritualist texts, fables and short stories, historical fiction sections, a few instances of sheet music, and enough wordplay to make Gertrude Stein proud.

When it comes to literary fiction, however, linguistic complexity isn’t synonymous with merit, and while Ambrétte’s use of anagrams is refreshingly naive, it’s rarely enlightening — more dimly flickering than genuinely illuminating. The overall effect is an ambitious pastiche that, while admirable in its scope, falls short of the brilliance Papa and his scientist friends hope to capture.

There is a lot of partially translated French in Child of Light, alluding to Ambrétte’s partial knowledge of French. A generous reading of the stylistic choice to only translate certain passages acknowledges the nebulous contours of language and complexity of intrafamily communication itself. But readers who don’t read French would be wise to have a dictionary on hand — for the record, this reviewer lives in France and speaks French fluently — because many translations are simply impossible to make sense of unless you speak much better than Ambrétte: “Non. Georges et moi irons encore chercher du bois pour les cercueils. [No. Georges and me … … … … … more of … … for the ….the................]”

Much like the pubescent anagrammatic wordplay, the fragmented translation approach is a clever but ultimately ineffective means for moving the plot forward or revealing character, more of a structuralist mind game than an effective literary device.

There is a rare moment in Child of Light that considers the lives beyond the Memenon family’s walls. Quotes like the one above betray a certain flatness at the novel’s core, an ignorance of the world beyond the novel’s central, white middle-class characters. This is not an issue in and of itself, as the book is heavily focused on Ambrétte’s interpretation of the world, but given that the book’s publisher, Whiskey Tit, is — according to its mission statement — interested in “devious, melancholy, devastating, experimental, smart, playful, and/or wild” writing, with particular attention to uplifting “POC and LGBTQ+ individuals, poor and working class people, and other underrepresented groups,” the novel’s inclusive aspirations miss the mark. While Child of Light certainly checks the publisher’s stylistic boxes, none of these aforesaid subjects feature much in the novel, but are rather paid lip service to in a way that sometimes smacks of a writer merely covering her bases in the zeitgeist.

Given that Ambrétte’s best friend is Celeste, a poor orphan, it is striking how few pages are devoted to Celeste’s personhood, psychology, or life within the orphanage. For all of Ambrétte’s wishes to be better friends with Celeste, having a poor friend is not the same as giving the working class a voice. Instead, Celeste functions as a vehicle to displace Ambrétte’s guilt, and when Maman bans Ambrétte from seeing Celeste because of her lower station, Ambrétte abides. In a particularly telling moment, which seems to capture the privileged guilt that hums beneath the book’s pages, Ambrétte tells Celeste, “I can’t live with the idea of you hating me.”

Poor Celeste’s actual humanity remains a mystery throughout the novel, as does the humanity of other “underrepresented groups.” In the Memenon household, Italians are consistently denigrated as working-class parasites; as for other minorities, the terms “negro” and “negress” show up exactly six times in Child of Light, most notably when Ambrétte hears her mother speaking:

Maman was angrily talking about the Irish and the Negroes, “which means plaçages and bastards” (Ambrétte recognized the latter but not the former). But, worst of all were “all the Italians up here,” how loud and uninhibited they were, pedestrian, prosaic. To Maman, those were the ultimate insults. Pedestrian. Prosaic. Italian.

In and of itself, there’s no problem in quoting a bigoted character speaking in 1896, but context is important and reflection essential, and referring to the bigotry of yore isn’t the same thing as giving voice to the oppressed. That there are no characters in the novel whose skin is darker than an incandescent lightbulb is a missed opportunity at best and a glaring blind spot at worst, both for the narrative and the publisher whose mission statement is uplifting underrepresented voices (and you can guess the pigmentary hue of the vast majority of authors on Whiskey Tit’s roster).

Similarly, regarding the actual representation of LGBTQ+ individuals, whatever Maman’s potentially gay relationship is with Lizzy, the nursemaid, all of it happens behind closed doors. Maman and Lizzy’s relationship is forever kept at arm’s length throughout the narrative, perhaps to convey the impossibility of ever really knowing what goes on out of view. But not delving into the relationship between a female spiritualist and her younger nurse feels like a missed opportunity in a novel intent on subverting mainstream narratives. Like Maman’s spiritualist obsession with communicating with “the other side,” deeper literary investigations about her relationship with Lizzy — and Ambrétte’s burgeoning sexuality, for that matter — remain elusive.

And then there’s the ever-present critique of chauvinist patriarchy and its effect on domesticated women. Not all men — but always a man. Yes, the patriarchal heteronormative world is a shitty one — we get it — but if fiction can help transcend the patriarchal boundaries that have for so long enclosed the breadth of the human experience, the oppressor as well as the oppressed must be offered the opportunity for redemption. To reduce antagonists to gendered, monstrous caricatures is to uphold the very myths that literature is intended to destroy — namely, that we are, all of us, human first and foremost; that gender, like sexuality, is largely a social construct; and that in the spirit world, we are all more alike than we think.

The more a villain is humanized in a story, the more they can be held to account for their inhumanity, but Child of Light’s two male characters are one-dimensional caricatures that represent all that is wrong with contemporary tropes about masculinity: the father, a sexist workaholic who doesn’t speak his daughter’s language and subjugates Maman in increasingly brutal ways, and the brother, a boyish buffoon who used to be called Modeste but is now called Georges because he wants to be a man, a transformation that leads him to commit an unspeakable atrocity, which he dismisses at book’s end with, “I was a young boy and young boys can be … Rabelaisian. Ribald. Indelicate.”

The main source of trauma in Child of Light is patriarchal society writ large: the cold, terse father, the sexist, brutish brother, and the domesticated mother who believes women are only good for bearing children. All of this only serves to caricaturize the very real and pressing nature of contemporary patriarchal toxicity and capitalistic chauvinism, falsifying a deeper investigation into the structures that limit gender equality and equity in a predictable way.

Instead of illuminating Ambrétte’s ability to remain human in an inhuman, chauvinist system, Ambrétte, like her mother, and like the orphan Celeste, ultimately succumbs to the patriarchal world without much of a fight. The feminine spirit in Child of Light is simultaneously mystified and infantilized throughout, but only in the context of female characters. Male characters are simply essentialized and demonized as aggressors, leaving little hope for anyone, let alone humanity as a whole, to transcend the gendered, ethnic, and economic categorizations that continue to plague much of the patriarchal world today.

In fiction, once characters are dehumanized, there’s little hope for evolution or humanity, and throughout Child of Light, the caricatures loom heavy: the orphan, the chauvinist, “the Italians,” “the negroes,” the mental patient, the patriarch, the little girl who just wants to please her mother. All of this potential humanity is relegated to categories that, while certainly of the 19^th century (and still today), are not the be-all and end-all of the human experience. The reader is cheated of a deeper understanding of Maman, Papa, Ambrétte, and Georges — not how they became who they are, but why the world is so intent on caricaturizing human beings in the first place.

Ambrétte’s character is ultimately tragic because the women in Child of Light are necessarily tragic characters, forced to submit to a world where men are obsessed with their own brilliance, forever keeping women in the shadows through sexism, violence, and the institution of marriage. At the novel’s end, Ambrétte reaches a disheartening conclusion: “She could refuse to live as the punished. She was as free as a little bird in her nest.” But Ambrétte is not free. For a bird to be free, it must relinquish the need for the nest. Lines like this belie the discomfiting and prevailing assumption of the novel: that however bad things can get, privileged middle-class comfort is still preferable to life “on the other side” — of town, that is — leaving the reader to imagine what lives characters like Lizzy and Celeste might have lived outside of the Memenons’ privileged walls.

Like the electricity that hums throughout the historical fiction sections in Child of Light, there is great potential in the novel — sparks often found in the polished prose, polyglot experimentation, and compelling history of spiritualism — but the connection falters. Child of Light is an ambitious novel, and its author should be applauded, but this tale about a supposedly innocent white girl in a big bad patriarchal world misses important opportunities to investigate deeper questions about whiteness, privilege, “the other side” of town, and what it means to be happy in a privileged family — father, brother, mother, and daughter included.

Samuél Lopez-Barrantes has lived in Paris since 2010 as a novelist, musician, and literary tour guide. He holds an MA in social theory (UCL) and an MFA in creative writing (VCFA). He is a member of the pop/americana band Slim and The Beast, is fiction editor at SOUVENIR Magazine, and is the co-founder of Kingdom Anywhere, an independent anglophone publisher in Paris. His latest novel, The Requisitions, is a historical metafiction set during the Nazi occupation of Poland about how to remain human during inhumane times. Find out more: ifnotparis.substack.com.

At The Metropolitan Review, we follow the ancient work hard, play hard ethos. You’ll find, in our pages, some of the very best critical and creative writing in any magazine anywhere. We’re immensely proud of the book reviews, film reviews, literary essays, fiction, and poetry we’ve published since our founding, and the historic first print issue that is now available for purchase. And we love a good party. Since the start of 2026, we’ve held regular soirees in New York City, bringing together a new class of reader and writer who, like us, aims to fully reinvigorate our literary culture. We took June off, but we are back for July. There’s nothing quite like summer in the city.

We’ll be at the wonderful Francis Kite Club in Manhattan on Friday, July 17. Festivities kick off at 8 pm. We’ll have a roster of exciting TMR readers for you, and then stick around to grab a drink, meet our writers and editors, and hang out deep into the New York night. All you need to do is reserve your slot. Please RSVP to the TMR summertime bash.

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1. God invented strawberry [sic]
2. God invented the lie I told my grandpa right before he died
3. God invented the letter ‘m’
4. God invented my bed sheets being dotted with weird yellow crust that never sleeps and slowly appears wherever it pleases
5. God invented static electricity
6. God invented marrow to fill up my otherwise empty bones
7. God invented slaps to the face
8. God invented the unidentifiable white linty pill I swallowed that I found under the rug I hadn’t cleaned in four years that my mom’s friend whose name I forgot had given to me as a gift I begrudgingly accepted because she was moving to a new apartment after she lost her job and didn’t want to throw it out
9. God invented Norrbotten County, Sweden
10. God invented my triumphant achievement that everyone else either didn’t notice or doesn’t remember
11. God invented logic
12. God invented the lone beer all the way in the back of my fridge’s top shelf that I keep as a reminder to myself that I “don’t really drink anymore”
13. God invented Tic-Tac-Toe (also called Noughts and Crosses)
14. God invented swearing in foreign languages I don’t understand but pretend to
15. God invented rhombuses
16. God invented the moment when I found out that my best friend who didn’t actually like me had transferred to a different middle school
17. God invented 1946
18. God invented the sound of me sloppily chewing and swallowing cheddar and sour cream flavored potato chips while posting about it on social media
19. God invented motionlessness
20. God invented me marrying the love of my life and then took it back after deciding it was a bad idea
21. God invented chocolate
22. God invented you listening to me singing the wrong words to a song that I’m making up as I go along
23. God invented doorknobs
24. God invented lawless tech billionaires so that nobody in my condominium will run out of laundry detergent ever
25. God invented ugly hats
26. God invented my dog who isn’t real
27. God invented eggshell blue
28. God invented my six-year-old self becoming so terrified of a particular shoreline roller coaster that when I would return two dozen years later I would clench each of my muscles as tightly as possible holding my breath and trying to scream so hard all at the same time so that my brain might drive an impenetrable mental wedge between my senses and the world around me and hopefully knock me semi-conscious onto my ass where I would remain in a heap burning badly atop a scratchy beach blanket beneath the destructive rays of the July sun for the rest of the morning and three-quarters of the afternoon
29. God invented metal sulfide ore, in which selenium partially replaces the sulfur
30. God invented my bathroom
31. God invented onomatopoeia
32. God invented the woman whom I would see on the subway platform every so often on my way to work who leaped in front of a moving train while I was standing nearby trying to lick my elbow
33. God invented sea foam
34. God invented bumps so that things don’t have to be so damn smooth all the time if I don’t want them to be
35. God invented trust
36. God invented me over the course of 13.772 billion years
37. God invented the Id
38. God invented my mind’s capacity to tirelessly and regularly generate indelible nightmares but he didn’t invent the nightmares
39. God invented the planet Jupiter
40. God invented me getting everything I ever wanted just to watch me realize that none of it was bringing me any closer to happiness
41. God invented vanilla

Ben Bar is a New York City-raised project manager, personal trainer, singer-songwriter, and chessboxer living in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

If it seems odd to call Steven Spielberg a 21^st-century filmmaker, that’s surely because Steven Spielberg has had an odd 21^st century. On the surface there’s been little consistency to his choice of projects. Yet look closer, and some themes emerge. There are the weird one-offs (The Adventures of Tintin), hokey throwbacks (War Horse, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), a remake (West Side Story), and weird vanity projects (The BFG, Ready Player One). The rest seem to fall into a large, omnivorous category that he has pursued from an apparently genuine interest in confronting this moment, thinking through the ways America ought to see itself — in a classically Spielbergian, fantasist way, of course. It’s this broad field of films that have made Spielberg (though it does seem strange to say) one of the most important American directors of this century, even if his major landmarks and legacy still belong to the last one.

Consider that across just five years, from 2001 to 2005, Spielberg released six films: A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich. Without hyperbole, this is the longest consistent run of films the man ever had. Aside from The Terminal, a merely pleasant piece of well-made Frank Capra treacle, they’re all grand entertainments of the highest order; even if they’re not masterpieces, together they represent quite possibly his finest work as a director. They’re also remarkably timely for a director usually entranced by remote fantasy. A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a blindingly manipulative and cruel work of real brilliance, which has gained more than a few passionate acolytes in recent years. Minority Report, War of the Worlds, and Munich are as definitive as post-9/11 films get — all three astonishingly dark, brutal allegories of surveillance, paranoia, technology, the War on Terror, and conflagration in the Middle East. Where in the ’90s Spielberg had made Saving Private Ryan and Amistad as gestures towards America’s hopefulness at the close of its century of successes, these films are an existential panic attack, in which the great Boomer mythologist began to grasp what a morally gray mess American power really is.

The later American civics lessons of the 2010s — Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post — are his subsequent attempts to claw back a few caveats after all that tempered pessimism of the Bush Era. Spielberg pursued them because they allowed him to take a hard-nosed look at those rare moments when our morally gray mess actually produced serious moral victories (this is the man who made Schindler’s List, after all). Lincoln was especially like this. Yet because the film’s lecture on a historic congressional compromise was written by Tony Kushner, a genuinely great dramatist, it works well as a kind of theater piece. But the same need to turn source material into civics lesson is a large part of what sank Spielberg and Kushner’s West Side Story re-do: it also couldn’t save the film from the dour sheen with which Spielberg and his beloved cinematographer Janusz Kamiński covered over all the vitality and musicality of the original.

I may be alone in saying this, but despite there being a few real classics among those, the best Spielberg film of this century is his least characteristic: the Kushner-mediated psycho-biography of The Fabelmans. It’s one of the great films of this century, and one of Spielberg’s greatest films, period; though few critics or audiences seemed to understand just what was going on there. It’s rare enough that an autobiographical entertainment fashioned from midcentury melodrama parts gets to be that disturbing. But it is: it’s fiendish, sentimental, fucked up, Freudian, Spielbergian, ultra-Spielbergian, meta-Spielbergian. Lying on Kushner’s couch, Spielberg unspooled the sadness of the American nuclear family, dueled with the secrets of his own mother’s sexuality, made clear his obsession with WWII (his father’s war), and came finally to the nub of that American Dream — as it could only ever be conceived by a nerdy Jewish boy from Arizona. What other film, by what other filmmaker, could ever climax as The Fabelmans does, with its subject discovering a terrifying, unparalleled power for cinematic manipulation, one we know will end in him beaming the achieved cultural ideal of the entire American Century out to the minds of billions of human beings? Has anyone had more of an impact on what our world thinks of American art than Steven Spielberg? The Fabelmans is the haunted origin of the wunderkind himself. That it’s also a beautiful, classical piece of entertainment makes that deep suggestiveness all the more perfect, and confounding.

Following up a career-capper like that could only ever render a film like Disclosure Day some kind of disappointment. Yet regardless of the hemming and hawing I’ve seen over the film’s apparent failures (despite my best efforts, I couldn’t entirely avoid the discourse), I found that Disclosure Day worked on me like an old charm. Absurd newsroom finale aside, it’s a dazzling work of movie art by a late-period master, whose blocking and image-making remain so creative and fluid, he can spin something this completely nonsensical and idiotic into a thrilling, dynamic experience. I find it difficult to argue with images. Sense or nonsense, films are composed of movement and rhythm and the juxtaposition of frames with other frames; in Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s style and precision with these elements is still the work of an obvious genius. But as with all Spielberg films, that genius is still peculiarly at the mercy of whatever vehicle he happens to be driving. His famous and unparalleled ability to play on the basic emotional reactions of his audience is always placed — blindly, even amorally — at the service of whatever action he’s trying to convey. A Spielberg film has to fight hard to communicate through more literate tools, like subtext, allusion, or even thematic subject itself; since it’s always battling for the attention of an audience constantly hijacked by pure, active form, produced by the greatest, most shameless artificer American cinema has ever known.

Like his most obvious progenitor, Hitchcock, Spielberg is not exactly an “art film” director, and he almost stands outside the distinction: what he’s great at is finding efficient, clever, and original ways of conveying information. With Hitchcock, information is conveyed in a way that’s intimately exact, usually macabre, so precise it becomes comedic. And in Hitchcock the thinking of the film lies in the observations made about the fundamental strangeness of human psychology. This is one of its great features — that sheer interest, the squirming fascination always floating abstractly in the movement of figures through his films. And yet the subtexts of Hitchcock’s greatest works remain so suggestive and powerful, they sometimes become art films despite themselves, which is how they developed into such objects of fantasy for other directors. Brian De Palma’s main canvas is a technologically expanded version of Hitchcock’s, overlaid with a sort of giallo operaticism; David Lynch’s films turn over Hitchcock’s subtexts in their unconscious, dreaming between the lines, finding in the interstices of Hitchcock’s images a world of sub-rational madness. The works of both directors are clues as to what may have been going on in the deepest, strangest parts of the master’s mind. They are also, crucially, what is missing from Spielberg’s cinema.

Spielberg will try every trick there is, and happily invent new ones, executing them all just as precisely. But as a director he almost subordinates thinking entirely. He’s addicted to process itself, so his plots and scenarios have to do the thinking for him. Which is why he chooses — as Scorsese does (though Scorsese is essentially a moralist) — the material he believes can best convey his immediate interest, as he grafts his style atop it. This doesn’t mean Spielberg isn’t emotional: his gift for sentiment is legendary, he’s the last heir to Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin. But in the end emotion for Spielberg is just more pure cinematic effect, something many other filmmakers would avoid making so conspicuous (or, if inferior, would handle less dexterously). Spielberg wants the audience involved and is interested in any method that can make this happen. When he starts to get interested in messages, too, his desire to entertain erupts in a paradox.

Such was the issue with Schindler’s List. It’s technically astonishing, emotionally overwhelming, unflinching, and totally committed to displaying its violence as realistic, quick, and cruel. It does a great deal of work to empty its bloodshed of any traditional catharsis or eroticism, which is what it gets right: it often shocks its audience out of their usual relationship with on-screen violence. But the dictum remains: stay interesting. Entertain. The smuggling of the workers to freedom, the moments of suspense in which Jews are saved from almost certain death, the sequences of mordant humor — they’re there to create suspense, to generate audience involvement, to play on viewers’ emotions. Plenty of critics have found much to distrust here. Is it really doing justice to the horrors of the Holocaust to create suspense out of the gas chamber? Spielberg gets away with it — barely — because he’s so intent on counteracting our normal cinematic relationship to history and violence throughout the rest of the film.

Fortunately for Disclosure Day, there are no such textual paradoxes to worry about. If there is a paradox, it seems to stem mostly from the film’s being a rather grand personal fantasy — one which doesn’t have much to do with our actual world. Most of the criticism I’ve seen of the film gets hung up on these foibles: on the magical alien devices, or the unstoppable digital tracking apparatus of the movie’s omnipotent evil corporation WARDEX; but also the heavy-handed “empathy” angle, or the impossibility of reaching the whole population through a cable news network in Kansas City, or the idea that the revelation of clandestine UFO recordings would be treated today as anything other than a spurious fabrication. The whole thing smacks of an unmodern, sentimental misunderstanding of the contours of our braindead, media-addicted world. What we’re left with really is a pure fantasy. And yet the vague sense that going to the movies right now is all a bit passé, only to watch something so out of touch and blithely unrealistic, spurred me into still greater admiration of both the film and the filmmaker.

True, it features one absurd plot point after another, depending entirely on a magical confluence of actions, on characters having constant chancy intuitions, guided mystically towards the film’s final denouement, the titular disclosure. The plot concerns the attempts of engineer Josh Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and newswoman Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) to find each other and Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who, like Josh, absconded from WARDEX with a plan to inform the world about everything the U.S. has kept secret since the 1947 Roswell incident. WARDEX is run by big baddie Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who first kidnaps and later mind-controls Kellner’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) through the magic of the aliens’ handheld devices. Much of the film consists of Josh and Jane on the run from WARDEX (beginning, refreshingly, in medias res, with a hand-off at a wrestling show), before lying low at an abandoned farmhouse; meanwhile Margaret blunders her way into the chase after suddenly discovering she can speak multiple languages and see people’s lives just by looking at them.

The sequences in and around the farmhouse contain some of the cleverest and smoothest set-piece work Spielberg and Kamiński have ever done, including one of the better car chases in films of late, and a perfectly timed nail-biter involving a crushed car and two speeding trains. Hewson is excellent in an incredibly difficult part, though O’Connor — usually one of the most interesting actors alive — is a bit too soft and muted (it’s a thankless square hero role). Emily Blunt gives perhaps the best performance she’s ever given, in a part that’s mostly technique, though she still manages to summon inspired notes of guilelessness and genuine fear. Josh and Margaret discover that they were both abducted by aliens as children — in what’s surely the most benevolent child abduction this side of Close Encounters of the Third Kind — then blessed with magical intuitive abilities (him, math; her, empathy; so goes the silly formulation). They find themselves eventually in Wakefield’s reconstruction of Margaret’s house, reliving her abduction by wonky CGI animals, leading her child self to an actual fairy-tale house, which ends up transforming into the glowing white interior of the alien spaceship.

Here Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp go off the deep end like neither has ever quite done before. The sequence is far from perfect, yet it has the unmistakable, giddy rush of filmmakers finally getting to show things they’ve only suggested before — as the The X-Files once did, as other Spielberg films have done — while milking that eerie picture-book scene of the animals and the girl in the snow for all it’s worth. Few scenes in recent movies have required so much suspension of disbelief from the audience, and the sequence will probably test the patience of any audience member already a bit tired of the film’s absurdities.

Yet, watching it, I couldn’t help but be carried along. Far from feeling hit over the head with “wonder” and “awe,” I felt the creaky old magic whirring to life — memories of a choreographic rhythm, a surrender to pure archetypal imagination, of the kind that once marked Hollywood’s greatest cinematic dreamworlds. It made me mourn for a medium that feels so stranded now — either in a constant chirpy pseudo-irony or else in a relentlessly grim pseudo-realism, either of which usually unfold across the same discolored and computer-generated vistas. American film has mostly lost its ability to create a true rhythm; it has lost the touch of organized and timed unreality, along with much of its gift for choreography, and much of its faith in artifice. These are now arcane arts, practiced by a few auteurs here or there, while general audiences slowly lose touch with the original cinematic feeling itself.

But enough eulogies — all art forms wax and wane. Disclosure Day is a mess of a movie made by a historic practitioner of the form, elevating it above most other blockbusters by nature. Yet it’s also a reminder that logic, plot, and reality are nothing compared to remarkable images. That the film can’t quite stick its landing may hobble it in some viewers’ minds, but there’s enough real movie magic throughout to remind them of what that actually looks like on the screen. It’s extraordinary that Spielberg has continued this far into our century, while remaining this expert and this relevant (and despite the protests you hear, he’s very much still relevant): that fact should move us to take better stock of how much territory the art form still has to regain, if it’s going to finally pry itself out from under the weight of these last few fallow decades.

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.

Welcome to IP Hell

After an eight-year hiatus from feature films, actor and comedian Mike Myers shocked audiences around the world with a surprise return in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, playing a fictional record executive who rejects the titular song for its length and perceived radicalism. Myers’ appearance remains one of the more bizarre facts of his late career, given that his character is wholly made-up and the struggles presented on-screen for Queen are entirely fake, which does raise the question of whether he simply wandered onto set and started messing around. In Michael, the latest film from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, Myers once again plays a record executive, this time the very real Walter Yetnikoff, who ran CBS Records from 1975 to 1990. That Myers is the best thing in both films tells you everything you need to know.

Michael, released in April from Lionsgate, follows Michael Jackson from his childhood success in the Jackson 5 through his attempt to break free from his abusive father and launch a solo career. It is not, technically speaking, the same movie as Bohemian Rhapsody — though it may as well be. Both are cynical exercises in IP-maximization dressed up as celebration, both are edited by enemy-to-all John Ottman with what can only be described as hostility toward the audience, and both exist not to tell the truth about their subjects but to present the story approved by their living estates, business managers, and friends. In Bohemian Rhapsody’s case, that meant turning Freddie Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis into a tidy third-act surprise and presenting his sexuality as a poison on the otherwise strait-laced members of Queen. Although all the band members did drugs and partied, Bohemian Rhapsody launders the violently homophobic suggestion that Mercury, genius though he may have been, could not overcome the sin of a homosexual life. In Michael’s case, an equally dark retelling of history is presented. But first, let’s review the film. Spoiler alert: it’s bad, bad, really, really bad.

Michael is a tortuous effort that moves too fast through almost 20 years of story, edited with such glib disregard for the audience’s ability to orient themselves to the carousel of images, songs, and transitions that at times Michael Jackson, a real human being, seems to exist in a kind of mythical vacuum where cause and effect do not apply. When Bohemian Rhapsody won Best Editing at the 91^st Academy Awards, a decision that was met with widespread bafflement in the film community, it seemed to signal a new Hollywood standard, namely that more cuts are always better because we cannot trust audiences to follow a movie, and the more coverage a director gets, the more control the studio can have. With Michael, Fuqua and Ottman take that lesson to its logical conclusion. I counted at least 65 cuts in one scene: Michael’s famous performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25 concert, which is a clip that is still available online and that anyone reading this review can watch right now, unobstructed, for free. One has to wonder why Fuqua would go to the considerable effort of recreating an already world-famous performance, and then edit it with such malice that even the moonwalk is buried under bizarre audience reaction shots, inserted as if to remind us that Michael Jackson was, in case we had forgotten, famous.

The performances are, to be generous, a mixed bag. Colman Domingo plays Joe Jackson, Michael’s abusive father, and is certainly trying his best, though he ends up coming across as a cartoonish villain, all scowl and menace with none of the psychological texture that might make the character worth watching. The film’s genuine bright spot is Juliano Valdi, who plays the 10-year-old Jackson with a charming and at times genuinely moving innocence, and the early scenes built around him are the film’s best: a young star unable to make friends, relying on characters like Peter Pan and a pet rat as his only companions, performing in adult nightclubs while his father watches from the wings. The effect of stardom on a child that young is a story rich with tension and emotional weight, and Michael, which features all living Jacksons as executive producers (except Janet, who does not appear to exist in this universe), is not willing to tell it.

Jaafar Jackson, who plays Michael in adulthood, is, on a technical level, good. He has the movements, the voice, and the alienating aura down, though as the son of Jermaine Jackson, Michael’s literal brother, one has to wonder how much of that is craft and how much is simply genetics. Of all the roles one could land as a first film appearance, playing your own uncle is probably near the bottom of the list in terms of difficulty. Jaafar does look quite a lot like Michael, though that seems to have more to do with their blood relation than any formal craft. Born in 1996, he likely spent considerable time with his uncle growing up, and though it would be unfair to say that dancing like MJ is easy, it must be somewhat easier if you were raised around him. The voice, which is genuinely the most impressive element of the performance, is not Jaafar’s at all but rather high-quality master recordings of MJ himself, lip-synched with reasonable precision, which is a detail the film does not exactly advertise. Ultimately, Jaafar’s performance comes across as the image Jackson’s family would like you to have of Michael, an attempt at brand management all too familiar by this point.

None of this would matter much if Michael were simply a bad film, because bad films come and go and the world keeps turning. What makes Michael worth discussing, what makes it in fact genuinely enraging, is what it is doing underneath the schlock.

By following the exact formula perfected in Bohemian Rhapsody and since employed in what feels like every biopic greenlit in the last five years, Fuqua seems to be acknowledging, consciously or not, that Michael is not really a film at all but rather a piece of franchise infrastructure, the musician biopic as IP-maximization. There is no need to manufacture cultural relevance when your subject arrives with a built-in global audience of hundreds of millions. In a society that has lost any semblance of a monoculture (there is genuinely no one like Michael Jackson alive today for reasons that go well beyond talent), studios are rushing to adapt the stories of world-famous stars before the window closes and the nostalgia curdles. What does it say about America that our cultural icons are being reduced to paint-by-numbers comfort food for a weary public? With Michael, that question becomes genuinely disturbing, because this piece of comfort food has a specific job to do, and it does it with grim efficiency: it is a machine designed to rehabilitate Michael Jackson’s legacy and allow the Jackson family brand back in the mainstream.

According to reporting in the Hollywood trades, Michael originally intended to confront the allegations of child sex abuse directly, with the original script allegedly opening in 1993 with Jackson reacting to the police raid on his Neverland Ranch. After the film was completed, however, it became clear that both the Jackson estate and lawyers for his victims would not allow it, and the allegations were removed. What remained, apparently without anyone noticing the problem this created, were all the scenes of Jackson with children.

Jackson is constantly surrounded by children in this film. He goes to a toy store in one scene and, after buying a cartful of toys for himself (this is treated as normal, and cool even), spends time signing autographs for a line full of kids. In another notable scene he sits alone in a hospital room with a young child who appears to be suffering from cancer, for what feels like a very long time, at one point calling the boy “Doo Doo Head,” which is a nickname that appears throughout the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland in letters and voicemails Jackson sent to two of his accusers. This name is such a specific detail that it simply had to have been a remnant of a prior script that addressed these allegations head-on. The fact that it remained in the final film shows a level of callousness that boggles the mind.

The film’s explanation for all of this — its alibi, if I may — is Peter Pan. All throughout Michael, Jackson’s inability to grow up is the film’s central metaphor: the boy who never grew up, stunted by his father’s abuse, forever seeking the childhood Joe Jackson stole from him. It is, in theory, a coherent reading of his life, and in a different film, made by different people with different intentions, it might even be a moving one. In this film it is a cover story. The Peter Pan framing does not exist to illuminate Michael Jackson but to make his proximity to children feel poignant rather than predatory, to transform a pattern of behavior documented in extraordinary detail by his accusers into a symptom of trauma rather than evidence of anything else.

The film is full of dropped threads that gesture toward a more honest version of itself that will never exist. After the famous Pepsi incident, in which Jackson suffered severe burns while filming a commercial (that the film suggests his father pressured him into), a doctor tells him he will need Demerol for the pain, and Jaafar’s Jackson resists, visibly frightened, before the doctor insists and the scene moves on. We never return to this idea again, not once, the suggestion that his drug dependency began as a direct consequence of his father’s exploitation, dissolving quietly into the carousel of images like everything else the film raises and abandons. His drug use, his decline, and his death do not appear. The film simply ends during a performance of “Bad” and text fills the screen: “His Story Will Continue.”

After sitting through the two-hour straitjacket that is Michael, this feels more like a threat than a promise. The estate is not done making money off his image, and they would very much like your cooperation with this effort.

No matter what you think of Michael Jackson, or where you come down concerning his criminal allegations, Michael is a boring slog that mutes or neuters anything interesting about the artist into a pre-packed exercise in branding. Hopefully, the musical biopics stop here. We’ve got enough.

Max Bolen is a writer and critic who runs the Substack The World Outside Our Window. They are interested in film, politics, and culture.

There’s Something Haunting the Backrooms

There’s something haunting the backrooms. Not the creatures that may be roaming its halls, not the repeating yellow tinge of the wallpaper, or the hum that permeates every inch of the place. What’s haunting the backrooms is the past itself, calcified and embodied in the very halls. Though the backrooms sit as a space unmoored from time and reality, the film takes place in the ’90s. The flicker of the camcorder and cable TV ads, the anonymous office spaces, and cropped shirts calling for the end of apartheid all mark it as a product of the era. Yet director Kane Parsons was born in 2005. I’m a year younger, and we do not know this time or place, though we recognize it. As Parsons explained to Vice: “I mostly remember that time through little glimpses of memories here and there and then family photos. . . . The flash is always on, the lighting is gross looking, there’s yellow walls, the white balance is all off.” Just as everything in the backrooms is a memory of real things that once existed, captured as images within its many rooms, Backrooms as a film captures the same memory of the ’90s. It is a distorted mirror, a damning image of both then and now in its fragments. At just 20, Parsons has captured a distinct and unique feeling of dread, one that deeply and clearly understands and resonates with the fear of our generation.

The backrooms live within Francis Fukuyama’s conception of the end of history, its own liminal space. At the uncomfortable threshold between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror that would define the early 2000s, the liminality of the backrooms asserts itself in the gap left by history. Though liberal democracy had triumphed, history nevertheless continued without any promise of renewed fortune. The Cold War’s end did not mean anything particularly different for American life as people knew it, and no better future lay around the corner for having won it. With any potential challenge to capitalism defeated, global capitalism sat in stasis, awaiting the next challenger to its order as globalization took its course. As a space of transition, the ’90s become the empty hallways of the office spaces that adorned American victory, the absence of a future expanding into a promise of a future beyond the Cold War that never came. As a liminal decade, it makes for the ideal setting for a film about the token image of the liminal space itself.

The fear and fascination generated by the liminal space are born of the tension between recognition and uncanny rejection. There’s something to be found in these spaces that is familiar, but not quite right, normally comforting or banal images reproduced in a way that alienates their sense of homeliness. The movie is full of reproduced images that aren’t quite authentic, be it the still-life people or the camcorder aesthetic. We’re looking at people who have been copied, but they’re not quite right in their distortion. We view camcorder found footage that has been shot on digital and filtered with distortion to produce an analog effect. A barely remembered Christmas sits deep within the maze, glowing with nostalgic memory of a past that’s found in photographs, but that Parsons and I can never live.

The film’s climax features Clark and Mary reenacting a scene that already happened.

Everything that exists within the backrooms carries the incomplete qualities of memory, logic jumbled but the image reproduced nonetheless. Parts are left behind to fit the reproduction, but the reproduction nevertheless continues. In one of the most striking shots of the film, we are transported through the floor, through degrading versions of the same house, mirroring generation loss in analog recording. As the same thing is copied over and over again, the image on the tape itself is destroyed. Without a future to advance toward, the past repeats on the same principles. Though the end of history was not actually the end of historical events themselves, it was the end for a distinct era of hope for the better future, to which nostalgia can only return. As things continue only in memory, they fade farther and farther away from anything until they are imitations of something that never existed. The backrooms are a horrific approximation of how nostalgia takes physical form in the world, playing at the edges of memory without a view forward.

The horror underlying the backrooms seems most aptly diagnosed by British writer and cultural critic Mark Fisher in his conception of hauntology. Building off the earlier work of Jacques Derrida, Fisher refers to hauntology as the inability to imagine new futures, the haunting of the present by the spirit of the past. “What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate,” he writes. The backrooms exist in the same anonymous and interchangeable space as the cul-de-sac, born from one of the digital cul-de-sacs Fisher describes. The backrooms are a non-place, one akin to the many interchangeable “airports, retail parks, and chain stores” that, lacking their own characteristics and sense of place, “resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces.” The backrooms, in pulling from disparate elements across space to contain within itself regardless of context, act as the ultimately globalized non-space. It is no wonder that the corporation lingering on the sidelines of the film is the sole resemblance of order to be found in this space; the miles and miles of office space and inoffensive lighting are to their comfort. As Fisher states, the “ominous proliferation” of these non-spaces is a general product imposed by the “erosion of spatiality” caused by globalization and the end of history. At the end of history, profit is the last frontier and only future. The backrooms represent the final form of this phenomenon, a space finally devoid of all character and origin, truly anonymous, containing within itself only what has been remembered in the far off days of the past. It is a void of culture, a cardboard cutout greeting whoever may view its homogenized scenery in many global languages. Ready to be sold.

Further linking the film together with Fisher’s hauntology is the appearance of music by the Caretaker, whose music was a frequent point of discussion for Fisher around hauntology. In the film, the Caretaker’s song “B1 - All that follows is true” ushers Mary through the final memory of her agoraphobic mother being wheeled away in a mental hospital. Even beyond the halls of the backrooms, this too is a lifeless non-space. The backrooms are horrific because, though a decayed memory, they are a recreation of that which already existed, made unreal and uncanny through repetition. Just as Parsons deploys the camcorder and the visual language of the ’90s to create the past, the Caretaker does the same in music with “the crackle,” creating, musically, a coherent texture for it. Both the film and the Caretaker take care to show the degradation of memory and the process of nostalgia at work in the brain, with media left as the sole archaeological record for a life that has been left behind.

Where the music of the Caretaker and Everywhere at the End of Time look back to the ’30s, Backrooms does the ’90s. The horror in the backrooms comes as the product of a nostalgia run rampant, an entire banal and lifeless alternate reality in which there is neither change nor confrontation with the possibility of it. Before Clark is consumed by his own image at the climax of the film, finally conceding to the backrooms, he reassures himself that there is no need to change. Unwilling to move forward, he is consumed, the profitable avatar of his now forever commodified self nursed back to health by the corporation Async as he himself dies alone in the backrooms at the film’s end. The backrooms will continue on regardless. As Fisher himself states, the acceptance of hauntology means “the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing,” history a place trapped and littered with what has come before in eternal avoidance of any future that could have been. At the end of history, the only thinkable thing left to do is rewind the tape, to play for and populate the world with the same horrors of the past.

In a culture dominated by pastiche and reboot, Backrooms’ suspicion of nostalgia and its indulgence — in the same weeks that the likes of The Mandalorian and Grogu, Masters of the Universe, and Scary Movie take up space in theaters and box offices — is tremendously refreshing. They are still-life films. Culture is still stuck with the bloated franchise corpses of what came before, haunted by generations who embraced the sentiment that they didn’t have to change, and that the box office of their childhood and decades past should still necessarily be the box office of today. In this cyclical culture, the revolving reboots, remakes, and reimaginings of the same tired franchises are the yellowed wallpaper of a trapped culture looking for a way out. The same things take shape, over and over, nostalgia growing more and more distant from the reality of things, lingering in front of any potential future beyond it. At some point the skeletons will outpace the necromancy, and something new must be found. Nostalgia is by nature brittle in the long term. Though brittle in construction, I’m scared of being stuck with this corpse of things I never experienced, never buried, continually haunted by the same things my parents’ generation loved forever. For this reason, it’s heartening to see original films from young directors like Backrooms and Obsession do well. Wading through the mess of nostalgic junk that’s come before, we are truly in a great artistic age for cinema, and what a joy it is to actually be around to experience it.

Grant De Micco is a Boston-based writer born in Arizona and currently attending school for creative writing at Emerson College.

Tracy said capitalism was like anal sex — hostile, unnatural, pleasurable for men at women’s expense.

She said that and a whole lot else, like “whenever we’re around my mom I feel like I’m suffocating” and “your brother talks way too much about wanting to see Winona Ryder’s tits.”

I wasn’t listening. I know that now. I should’ve been. And especially to that comment about Winona, who, it was true, my brother Colin desperately wanted to see nude. Maybe if I’d been listening I’d have known when to shut up, and what to keep to myself.

When I was nineteen I slept with a woman I met in a bar in Vancouver. She’d just wrapped a day of shooting on The X-Files. Esther — I think her name was — had been an extra in some scene where Mulder chastised Scully for being too rational. I hoped to meet and sleep with many women as I got older, but women had different plans. My experiences have been few, which might be why I couldn’t shut up about that one from so long ago.

Thirty years later, Tracy and I, married for almost two decades, were lying in bed watching old episodes of The X-Files. She loved the show, but I’d never seen it. It took me much longer than Tracy to grow out of my pretentious artist phase. I agreed to watch it reluctantly, then discovered, as has always been the case, that my wife knew better than me. It’s a great show. One day I’ll be able to watch it again.

It was Season 1, Episode 10, “Fallen Angel.” Mulder and Scully were walking through a hallway at the FBI headquarters in Quantico on their way to be upbraided by Chief McGrath when I saw her, and just blurted it out.

“I fucked that girl when I lived in Vancouver!”

These are things you keep to yourself. That was what Tracy’s face said, and I knew she was right. We didn’t talk about it, but the bell couldn’t be unrung. During the next commercial break Tracy said she found the episode boring. I suggested we skip to the next one, but she was tired and went to bed early.

I loved Tracy in a real corny way. I love her that way still. We met at CalArts when we were both grad students. On the night of our third date, both of my parents were killed in a car accident. Tracy spoke to people at the funeral when I couldn’t, then invited me to spend the summer in Georgia with her family. We were married that August and haven’t been apart for more than a week since. Until now.

During the weeks following “Fallen Angel,” whenever we watched television, Tracy would ask if I’d fucked anyone on screen, just like you’d expect. No, I’d say, I didn’t fuck The Nanny, and no, I didn’t fuck Carla — or Diane, or Rebecca, or Lilith — on Cheers. I’d asked for it, really.

The truth — and I’m pretty sure Tracy knew it — was that beyond her and Esther in Vancouver, you could count the number of women I’d had sex with on two hands and still have fingers to spare. I’ve been married to Tracy long enough not to be an idiot about certain things. It wasn’t that Esther was an actor that bothered her. She was an extra with a non-speaking role. It was — I think at least, I could be wrong, and often am — that Esther was nineteen on The X-Files, while Tracy, like me, was forty-nine in our bedroom. In an explanation I was smart enough not to vocalize, I told Tracy that it wasn’t like I thought nineteen-year-olds were hot, television had just rendered Esther permanently young.

“I bet you wish you could fuck her again,” Tracy said one night, during an argument about something else. This was the first real thing she’d said about it. I didn’t wish that. From what I could remember, the sex had been unremarkable — probably because I’d been involved. If I wished for anything, it was to be the age I was when “Fallen Angel” was shot. Tracy and I were both experiencing the humiliation of aging, and seeing Esther on screen likely reminded me of a time before knee pain, ear hair, and unforgiving mirrors.

“I don’t wish that at all,” I said, and reached for her hand, which she pulled away. The next day it was forgotten. We had sex, which was very good, despite my being involved.

I could always be myself around Tracy, which speaks to her tolerance for bad comedy, bad style, and bad taste. When she wasn’t around I felt awful, uncomfortable in my skin, like something was chasing me. Each time I heard her entering our apartment my shoulders dropped and my breathing slowed down. Maybe that was unhealthy, or felt to her like pressure. If I get the chance I’ll ask.

Months passed and Tracy stopped poking me about who on television I might’ve fucked. We’d abandoned The X-Files and were deep into the third season of The Sopranos, a show I’d also resisted watching initially, suspicious of its popularity. We were watching Season 5, Episode 2, “Rat Pack,” holding hands, our dog Fuckface asleep at our feet. During a commercial break Tracy hit mute, then turned to face me.

“I’m in love with Christopher,” she said, then looked away.

Christopher Moltisanti, played by Michael Imperioli, was a degenerate heroin addict, a violent criminal, and worst of all, short. But he had aspirations to something larger than mob life — he wanted to make movies. I almost threw up in my mouth. I knew not to say anything negative, not after the whole Esther affair. I would’ve preferred she’d fucked Imperioli. Being in love with his character I couldn’t wrap my head around.

“In love with him?” I said, unable to not sound baffled.

“In love with him,” she said, this time looking me right in the eyes.

And then I did it, I laughed. It was beyond my control. The next part wasn’t though.

I remember that every day.

“If you’ve gotta be in love with anyone on The Sopranos,” I said, “it should be Tony. He’s complicated. Christopher is so fucking obvious. What are you, some kind of Adriana?”

We fought that night. The following morning I woke up in an empty bed. There wasn’t a note, but I knew she only had one place she could go — her mother’s, which, considering that being around her made Tracy feel like she was “suffocating” helped me realize how serious things were.

I really didn’t get it. I’d fucked a girl decades earlier and was dumb enough to bring it to my wife’s attention. She was in love with a fictional character on television. The two weren’t the same.

It would soon make sense. I went to our computer to see if Tracy had emailed me. Our browser was open to IMDb. She’d seen me searching for other shows Esther had worked on.

Brad Phillips is the author of Essays & Fictions. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, Vice Magazine, Granta, Purple Fashion Magazine and others.

#1

Solvej Balle’s book series On the Calculation of Volume is all about waiting. This waiting extends to its readership. Though it’s cast as a septology, only six of the books are published, and of those, only four have been translated into English. Book V is scheduled to be released in English in November. Book seven does not have a release date, not even in its original language.

The books follow an antiquarian bookseller named Tara Selter, who is trapped in the 18^th of November. Her first 18^th of November is a normal day. She wakes up in her Paris hotel, eats breakfast downstairs while reading a newspaper, buys a few books around town, and chats with a local bookseller. She accidentally burns her hand on a heater in his store. She goes back to her hotel to sleep. The next day, she goes down for breakfast once more. A hotel guest drops a piece of toast in the exact same manner as the day prior. The newspaper says November 18. Her receipts say November 18. The bookseller has no memory of their interactions from the day before. To everyone else in the world, the day is November 18, and the previous November 18 that Tara lived through did not happen. But the burn mark is still on her hand.

Some call it a time loop story but it is not quite that; even as November 18^th repeats itself, Tara continues to age and move through the world. Her burn mark festers and heals, her hair grows, and her skin, given enough time, will wrinkle. Balle takes great care to lay out the rules and lack thereof as the narrator herself tries to make sense of them. Tara can accumulate objects during the day, but they disappear overnight, put back where they came from. That is, unless she sleeps with them underneath her pillow. If she purchases food from a grocery store, it does not reappear on the shelves the next day. And when she writes in a notebook, the words are preserved the next day. “The paper remembers,” she writes. “And there may be healing in sentences.”

Is this a story about time, or something else? Hernan Diaz has said it is about isolation. But the Washington Post called it the “great modern novel of depression.” Others have said it is about the importance of creating meaning “within a system that feels arbitrary” and about “the remarkable richness of each moment.” Or perhaps it is about scientific inquiry?

All of these readings are correct in their own way, especially as the series is still in development. Yet there’s one interpretation I’ve not yet seen, one that feels undeniable to me. Our main character is a youngish woman of unspecified age, married not too long ago, who was happy with life until she was thrust suddenly into this purgatory. Now she is stuck and desperate while everyone else around her seems perfectly fine. She wants to live a normal life but something beyond her control is holding her back. Even though she is not old, she fears aging. These books are about infertility.

#2

It took two uterine surgeries, a cross-country move, three doctor switches, and countless tests to learn that I would never be able to conceive children naturally. This diagnosis was due, among other things, to aggressive uterine polyps. Luckily we live in a world of scientific miracles, so conceiving children was (and is) still theoretically an option through in vitro fertilization combined with additional (and frequent) uterine surgeries. After two and a half years of effort (and drugs and procedures and pain), we finally got a date on which it might happen. A positive pregnancy test. We had created 10 genetically sound embryos, scheduled a final uterine surgery date to prepare my body to receive them, and received our plan for an embryo transfer and the formal pregnancy test that would follow. In 58 days, we thought, we might finally be out of our purgatory (to enter another, more common nine-month purgatory, before the ultimately desired new life phase: parenthood). Fifty-eight days.

This was February. I wrote down the number. Fifty-eight. It wasn’t a guarantee but we finally had hope. I wrote this number down in a notebook 58 times. I counted from one to 58 aloud and timed how long it took. Twenty-five seconds. I could do it in one breath if I said the numbers fast enough. I opened up my daily tracking spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet each day I would catalogue what I wrote, what I read, which tarot card I pulled, how my uterus was feeling, whether or not I cried. I added a new column and typed: “58.” The next day, I typed the number 57. I decided to start writing down interesting facts about each number. Fifty-seven is the atomic number of lanthanum, soft enough to be cut with a knife. Fifty-two is the atomic number of tellurium, one of the rarest earth metals: needed for solar panels, gives you garlic breath. It is also the number of cards in a deck, white keys on a piano, weeks in a year. Somewhere in the world is a mysterious whale known as “52 Blue” because it is the only whale ever recorded to sing at 52 hertz, a much higher pitch than every other whale, so it is dubbed the world’s loneliest whale because it is only ever singing to itself. This is how I spent my purgatory.

Two days later, I read Calculation.

In these books, time is not counted by days of the year but by the number of times November 18^th has repeated. The first book starts on day #121 and stretches back to record those first days. The narrator is focused during her first year on getting to day #366. But in the meantime, she makes the most of her purgatory. She counts the days and catalogues her existence: “The movements of the birds, the sound of the wind in the trees, the rain tailing off and intensifying, the sound of a plastic plant pot being blown around the cobbles at the corner of the house.”

#3

Calculation is not literally about infertility. At least, this is not the only thing it’s about. But I imagine it was one of the things on Balle’s mind. She first conceived of its premise in 1987, but didn’t start writing the book in earnest until 1999, after she was divorced and remarried. She gave birth to her only son in 2002, when she was 40 years old, after five years of being married. According to a New York Times interview, she and her new husband discussed having a family pretty much right away. Did it take five years to achieve this?

Either way, it is clear that Tara is of an age where children are a reasonable possibility. In Book II, she goes to her family’s house and speaks of it with her mother:

Did she dream of grandchildren? Did she dream of getting the high chair down from the attic? She didn’t know. More than anything she wanted her own children to be happy. . . . One day, she said, she would like to have grandchildren, of course, but right now she was content with the children she had.

Tara has to explain over and over again to the people she loves what’s happening to her. It is a private disaster that no one notices. An hourglass ticks too quickly inside her body and no one cares. Why should they? It’s her problem, not theirs.

#4

Sometimes you read a book and it feels as if the author somehow peered into your head and wrote down what you could not say. This is how it felt to read Calculation. “I don’t know why the days have to be counted, but I don’t dare not to,” she writes. “I tell myself that I have to hold onto the days. Maybe there is help to be had from the columns of numbers. Like a rope you could use to haul yourself out of a well if you fall in.” The setting was completely alien but I was trapped in Tara Selter’s world, an endlessly repeating day, with the pressing need to catalogue everything because what else can she do? She is alone in the battle against the greatest enemy of all: time. She can fight, she can cope, but she can never win.

Still, occasionally, she allows herself a small bit of hope. She believes there is an end in sight. The end will be day #367, after a full year of purgatory, plus one day, the new November 18^th. She has no reason to believe this except that it feels right. On day #349, she leaves Clairon-sous-Bois and heads for Paris. The goal is to recreate her starting conditions. She spends day #366 revisiting old haunts. It goes uneasily, imperfectly, but the book ends on a note of hope: “The eighteenth of November is almost over. A year has passed and I am ready to make room for the nineteenth. I leave the day open. I go with the day. I flow with it wherever it may go. I let myself be carried along by the current. Now I swim. Dive.”

It’s not a spoiler to say: she does not escape. This is a seven-book series. The counting failed. It was all for nothing.

#5

It might have been a warning. On day 35 (the atomic number of bromine) of my countdown, the doctors found a new, unexpected problem. I would need a round of aggressive antibiotics and everything would be delayed by three weeks. The next day, my count jumped up, rather than down, from 35 to 55 (cesium). Still, there was a number. I could handle 55 days, I had done it before, I could do it again, there was still an end in sight. But my hope faded a little. I stopped writing down facts about numbers. I noted the countdown every day in my spreadsheet but otherwise I tried not to think about it.

“I am not saying I have lost hope,” the narrator writes midway through Book I:

It just doesn’t come by so often any more. It has moved away. It was quite undramatic, it did not slam the door behind it, it is more as if, like an animal, it has found new hunting grounds, like . . . a plant that has scattered its seeds where they are more likely to grow.

Hope becomes a thing that mocks her. In one scene, she has a flash of hope because she’s certain the moon looks different than it did before. But when a cloud passes over it, she realizes it looks exactly the same. She feels as if she’s been caught by some prank. “As if the moon had altered its appearance just long enough for me to imagine that there really was a difference, only then to act all innocent just hanging there in the sky, totally deadpan.”

Days passed and 55 became 35 again, then 30, then 25 and 20. But on day 15 of the new countdown — phosphorus — we received more bad news. Fluid in the lining. Odds of pregnancy success were reduced by half, from 65% to 33%.

Our doctors recommended postponing the embryo transfer. They wanted to run more tests, maybe do another surgery, and try again later. This would take months. But they said we could still try now if we wanted to. We had to let them know by the end of the day.

My husband and I had just a couple of hours to make our decision. I did not count the moments in those hours but they were excruciating. Why was this decision given to us? But it was. We’re both Jewish but did not pray. This was a question of logic. My husband felt optimistic. A 33 (arsenic) percent chance is still a chance, and a better chance than we’d ever had. We had several healthy embryos banked and decided the low odds were worth it, that it would be okay if it didn’t work. If it failed, we would face several more months of purgatory — the same outcome postponement guaranteed — but proceeding still offered a small possibility of success.

So we told them we would move forward.

#6

The first book of Calculation is largely about love. Tara and her husband first try to figure out her predicament as a team. Such exploration brings them closer together:

I remember those as the happiest days. Ever. I felt loved. I felt loved on the sofa in the living room and on the floor. I felt loved in bed and when we sat at the dining table in the evening. There was nothing unusual in this. It was no different from before the eighteenth of November, only stronger, and there was nothing we had to do. This was a time that did not run away with us. It was like the time after we first met, only more intense and possibly — or so it seems to me now — with an undertone of quiet desperation, but that is not how we saw it. There was the feel of electrically charged skin, the way our sentences flowed together when we talked. There was something in the air between us, an intensity, a dense network of connections. I felt understood. I uttered sentences that were heard and heard the words that were spoken. We were living in two different times. That was all. Two times that had flooded their banks. At a place where rivers meet and converge, a kind of temporal Mesopotamia where the Euphrates and the Tigris are merely two different names for water. We were doing fine in Mesopotamia.

But their bond is breaking as they fall further apart in time. After 76 days, the distance has grown too great. So she hides herself in the spare room and pretends she is not there. They are both happier this way.

For a time, while she is in hiding, she still feels connected to her husband. She knows his patterns and can fit herself into them:

When Thomas is in the kitchen I can hear the connections between us. He sends messages and plays music all through the house. He sends messages I understand. They sound like running water, like metal on metal, like fridge doors bumping against countertops, but these are concerts he is playing and I play too, very softly.

But then as day #366 approaches, she reveals herself to him once more. She re-explains her predicament. He believes her; he always believes her. She tells him she plans to go to Paris. She wants to escape November 18^th and she wants his help.

But he says no.

Tara is alone.

#7

In dark times I sometimes ask my husband if he regrets marrying a woman with a broken body. He says no, obviously — what kind of monster would say otherwise? Yet I believe him. He explains that this is simply something terrible happening to both of us, through no fault of our own; my condition matters only insofar as it impacts the life we had imagined together. But more than his logic, it’s his presence that convinces me. Even though he is a night owl, he comes to every seven a.m. appointment just so he can hold my hand when I get my blood drawn. He watches every ultrasound so he can ask the doctor questions. This is not necessary. We’ve spent hours in these waiting rooms. There are plenty of women there on their own. Their spouses stay at home. Not mine. Perhaps they would come if they could, but their jobs and circumstances keep them away. Ours have allowed us to be together through it all. In many ways, we’re lucky. If I asked him to come with me to Paris, he’d say yes.

#8

But love is just one part of it. Tara’s husband receives little mention after Book I as she moves on to explore more of this world and the nature of reality. In Book II, the narrator starts talking about containers:

When I sit in my backyard I can tell that my time is a container. That is how it is. It is a day one can step into. Again and again. Not a stream which one can only dip into once. Time doesn’t fly anywhere, it stays still, it is a vessel. Every day I lower my body into the eighteenth of November. I move around but nothing runs over the edge.

Writer Rebecca Lowe has written that the references to containers continue to increase in Book III, suggesting that the book is exploring Newton’s “container theory” of time and space. In this theory, time and space are background containers that exist whether or not anything happens inside them. At the time it was proposed, the opposing theory came from German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who posited a “relational theory” of time instead, wherein time is composed of the relationship between its events. One event always happens before a different one, and time arises from the relationship between the two. If nothing happened, therefore, time would not exist. In the container theory of time, such relations are unnecessary. Time is an independent entity that does not care about what happens inside it. In Tara’s world, relations between events have become jumbled. The hotel guest drops her toast both before and after Tara returns to her husband. The hotel guest is continually dropping her toast before and after Tara moves through the world. The relationship between those two events doesn’t matter. All that matters is that time moves forward.

Of course, both theories were superseded by Einstein’s theory of relativity, with space and time as a continuum affected by mass and energy. Time and space are inextricably linked to the physical universe. Is this the more apt analogy? Two different people can experience two different rates of time depending on their velocity. Tara is moving at a different rate from everyone else. Is she moving too quickly, so that time slows to a stop? It doesn’t seem that way. The books (critics sometimes complain) move slowly. But it’s possible she alone could have stumbled onto an event with such mass that it’s pulling her beyond its event horizon. If this is the case, she truly can never escape. But what might have happened to pull her in, and (or so it seems at first) only her? November 18^th was a normal day.

Implications for physics and scientific progress aside: What does it matter if time is a container or a fabric or a series of relations? What difference does it actually make in our lives? Perhaps nothing, if you decide it means nothing. It may not change the physical construct of our days. Yet it can change our mental fabric, and the mental becomes the physical, as it drives our decisions for how to act. The container theory of time may not be true, but it can feel true, and this is what fiction does: turns an ambiguous feeling into a palpable story. So let’s say time is a container. Even if nothing is happening, no events are changing, time still moves forward, and it can be filled. Tara can fill her life with meaning. She can try to understand.

#9

And so her journey must cover more space. In Book II, Tara seeks a change in weather. She is tired of the same rainstorm day after day. She seeks weather and seasons. If the seasons will not change in a single day, they can still change in physical location. So first she travels north to find winter. Then south to find spring. Further south for summer. Then autumn in Germany, land of Oktoberfest. And so she settles in Düsseldorf. The year does not reset. “A year of seasons, I think to myself, but they weren’t seasons. They were wreckage, fished out of my stream of November days . . . I try not to think about years. It isn’t easy, but now I will think about days.”

She is back to filling each day as it is, a day to be considered on its own terms.

#10

I was obsessed about counting down because I wanted my purgatory to feel manageable. Something touchable. Numbers one through 58 don’t take up much space on the page of a journal. Once written down, I could see it all. I was putting my numbers into a container. Putting this period of life into a container. Telling myself it was finite.

But then the numbers started changing and rearranging. Thirty-five to 55 and then down again and then there were more numbers to keep track of. The lining check. The embryo transfer. And finally, nine days after the transfer: the pregnancy test.

These nine days were hateful to me. I didn’t need to write down the numbers to feel them in every neuron.

I had to act as if I were pregnant, even though I was certain I was not. This meant no drinking, of course, but also no running, no gardening. No writing, not because it wasn’t allowed, but because I was too distracted. All of the things I loved in my day-to-day, taken away, all for the inevitable “no.”

There was a physicality to this waiting period. There were the physical symptoms of the medications I was taking: shots in my legs that left painful baseball-sized lumps in the muscles, making it difficult to bend or walk, and hormone levels through the roof. But also a physical sadness beyond anything I’d felt before. I’ve had hormone swings before, I’ve had pain. This was something different. The inevitable “no.” Nine days of “no.” I did not and could not pray. It felt like a lead balloon in my chest. I kept thinking about this lead balloon growing bigger. I didn’t care if the metaphor didn’t make sense, it was something I kept coming back to. Swelling up and filling with . . . what?

The embryo transfer was not successful.

#11

I felt a weight lift. My balloon disappeared and I could run again, and I’ve never run faster. It helps that the days are long and the weather warm. It helps to sow seeds and watch them sprout and to buy plants and put them in the ground, even if half get eaten by rabbits. It helps that every day the ecology of the landscape is a little different, a little more of itself. But my husband found his own sadness. We’re never sad at the same time. Sometimes I think that should make me feel lonely, but it doesn’t. I need his optimism when I’m sad. He allows it of himself when I’m doing better; then I get to cheer him up instead. We may swim in different rivers, but our waters always come back together.

#12

In Calculation, Tara is counting up her days. They add together and grow. At the end of Book II, we reach day #1142. Maybe my problem was trying to count down, rather than up. I’m writing this shortly after the Jewish holiday Shavuot, which celebrates the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. This holiday comes seven weeks after Passover because the Israelites received the Torah seven weeks after escaping Egypt. Between these two holidays, the Torah commands we count each day, from one to 49. We count up, not down. Why? Because each day allows the opportunity for further spiritual growth. Each day is fuller than the last. It took 49 days of counting before the Israelites were spiritually ready to receive the Torah. Each year we need that reminder. We prepare ourselves to read it again and again.

#13

The world is made of numbers. Atoms and equations. They turn from concepts to real and back again. This essay has a certain number of letters, sentences, paragraphs. Thirteen sections. Some think 13 is an unlucky number. I disagree. It is the atomic number of aluminum, one of my favorite elements. Lightweight and reflective, extremely useful in space. You can put it in the oven, bake 10 loaves of bread, and touch it afterwards with your bare hands. In Judaism, 13 is the age at which a child becomes an adult. There are 13 Jewish principles of faith and 13 attributes of mercy. Read the Hebrew letters and add up each number to find the sum total of a word, and you’ll find 13 applies to “Oneness” and “Love.” The fundamental equations of the universe can fit on a T-shirt. We are trying to create something physical: life. Until then all we have are numbers.

On June 26^th, it is day #1036 of our journey to conception, a number so high there is no atomic element. And there is no end in sight. We have another surgery scheduled for the end of July, and will learn our timeline for another embryo transfer attempt after that. If it goes badly, this months-long cycle will repeat. After that, we switch to the search for a surrogate, which could take years.

From the very first pages of Calculation I knew I would write about these books. I hoped to write something at the end of all the waiting, once there is a child in the world. Now I know that may be years away and until then I will be waiting and waiting and I’m tired of waiting and at least with this, the only thing holding me back is myself. This book series has become a container to process this waiting because it tells my story better than I can tell it myself. And it tells a dozen other stories, too. I’ve been loose with the spoilers here because the plot elements don’t matter as much as the gifts every page provides. Let these books be your container for sadness, hope, despair, dreams, all of the things that fill our lives more and more as we move through the world.

We are living within a literary phenomenon and no one knows how it will end (perhaps even Balle herself). I haven’t gotten past Book II because I insist on receiving these books from the library, only ever after a long and ambiguous waiting period. But I’ve purchased both afterwards because they will be with me for a long time, as a testament to this period of life, when they found me at the right time. Now I’m on the waitlist for Book III and I’m not counting down, I’m counting up.

Denise S. Robbins is the author of The Unmapping, a speculative climate fiction novel published in June 2025. Her stories and interviews have been published in The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Review of Books, and many more. Find her on Substack at denisesrobbins.substack.com.

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