A Pastor and His Satellite

This was some time ago on a Saturday in New England, in the home of a family of domestic missionaries from the South.

“Quiet,” said Saul, “Father is in there with his sermon.”

“If he’s finished, we can knock,” said Faith, his younger sister.

“No, he’s finishing his sermon. Let’s make him breakfast.”

“Let’s serve pancakes.”

“Do you think he can eat while he works?”

“Have you ever seen him work?”

“No,” said Saul, “but he is so often in there working. It is why we do not see him.”

“I have never seen him reading from his Bible except from the pulpit.”

“Where else would he read from?”

“I hear his voice.”

“He watches his old sermons to prepare new sermons.”

“How do you know he’s preparing his sermon?” asked Faith.

“The door is shut.”

“Have you seen him today?”

“The door remains shut and locked.”

“So you’ve tried the knob?”

“When a door is shut in our home, it is locked. That is why neither of us are allowed to shut our doors.”

“It is not a fair rule for me.”

“It is a fair rule for me,” said Saul.

“It may not be locked,” said Faith, reaching for the knob.

Saul grabbed her hand.

“I would not. He is preparing the third part of his sermon series, called ‘Weakling Parents.’”

“I should not attempt the knob because of the sermon he is preparing?”

“His mood has seemed dark lately.”

“I have not seen him. Is he angry at the congregation again?”

“It must be the material that causes him to brood.”

“Do you mean us?” asked Faith.

“I mean the subject matter.”

“You have an advantage over me,” Faith said. “You attend his sermons. You know what Father is thinking. I learn nothing in children’s church.”

“The lessons are appropriate for you. I heard them when I was your age. No, that’s not accurate. I was older than you when Father saw the light in a parking lot, changing our lives forever. What are you not learning in children’s church?”

“They tell us feeding the five thousand is a lesson in sharing. I suspect it is not.”

“You may ignore that lesson. We share everything.”

They were in the kitchen opening the doors of the refrigerator.

“We have two eggs,” said Faith, “They will make eight pancakes, large and runny. Two eggs making eight pancakes means everyone can have two.”

“Sister, I’m impressed.”

Saul was short and pale, with a stub-nose and one long eyebrow that ran the distance of his temples, making his eyes appear crowded together in the center of his face. His hair was dark and coarse with a part on the left that remained fixed all day, complete with comb marks. Faith had very similar features. Their parents also had these features. They all wore glasses with round metal frames, except Faith who at seven years old did not need them yet.

Their mother entered the kitchen and the children served her pancakes.

“We will be going to the church soon,” said their mother. “We must vacuum and organize the food pantry.”

“We’ll be done very soon then,” said Faith.

“I like when our efforts serve our parents doubly,” said Saul. “By leaving Father alone we are helping him write his sermon and we are cleaning in preparation for it.”

“It is as close as I can be to having my own ministry,” sighed Faith.

“There are many roles for women in the church,” said Saul. “Children’s church leader, for instance.”

“That would give me a chance to reform the curriculum,” said Faith. “It is a small role.”

“It would fit your congregants,” said Saul.

“I do not believe in shrinking the Gospels to child-size. If an adult is to be like a child, a child is also to be like an adult.”

“Your father was on to this point in his last sermon,” said their mother. “You must be where he gets his ideas.”

“In some way I think you are right,” agreed Faith.

“You are further along than I was at your age,” said Saul. “We may even be equals. Is this what is meant by being ‘equally yoked’?”

“Is it strange to consider I was conceived in salvation, but Saul was conceived by you secularly and in sin?”

“It is a little strange,” said Saul.

“I have considered it,” said their mother.

“I have been a Christian nearly as long as all of you. It is why am I so advanced. Can you think of Mother and Father as once being damned?”

“Sister, careful.”

“I am saying I cannot. Does this make me a John Calvinist?”

“Where have you heard of John Calvin?” asked their mother. “Not from me.”

“At the Christian bookstore. In a Little Golden Book.”

Their mother instructed them to leave their father’s two pancakes on the kitchen table, then drove them to church.

The church was tucked in an industrial park. Next door was a paint factory. Across the street sat G.O.D., Inc. trucks, Guaranteed Overnight Delivery. Behind the church was a yellow bus, recently donated.

Every Saturday, while Faith and Mother vacuumed, Saul would pick up cigarette ends outside. They would clean until evening. On this day they stayed at the church into the night to allow Father time to prepare his sermon.

Saturday gave way to Sunday.

The congregants arrived and many were standing outside of the church smoking cigarettes. This was permitted, for it provided Saul his Saturday labor. It was also his Sunday labor to let the smokers know the service was about to begin.

“The service is about to begin,” said Saul to the smokers, and they followed him inside.

Saul sat with his mother on the front row.

“I am ready for the third part of Father’s sermon series,” said Saul to his mother. “I expect it’s his final installment. During the previous parenting sermons, I felt I was hearing something I am not supposed to hear. It’s like how I feel when I hear women speak to each other, when men aren’t around. The next time we go to a church couple’s home, may I stay with you and the wife, instead of going with Father and the husband?”

“It is unclear to me,” said his mother, “how you have arrived at these thoughts from the past two sermons, and in your readiness for the third.”

During the musical part of the service, Saul’s role was to sit in the aisle seat next to the projector and replace the transparent sheets of lyrics, song after song. A guitar played, accompanied by tambourine and harmonica. The music was bright and in contrast to the popular music of the time.

“Time for the next transparency,” said his mother. “The next song has begun.”

“I am laying down the transparency after the song begins but before the singing starts, to build the anticipation. We all have our gifts.”

After a few preliminaries Saul’s father, Pastor Lester, began his sermon:

“The schools have failed us, have they not? We are left with one option if we are to raise up our children in the way they should go and so when they are old they will neither depart from the Lord nor from us.”

“It is strange that Father says this when you were both saved in your middle thirties.”

“Quiet,” said his mother.

“We will form a school here,” said Pastor Lester. “Sunday school rooms will be Monday to Friday school rooms. Classes will be taught by highly qualified teachers coming to us from a satellite on the roof. I will be the Math class facilitator. My wife will be the Science class facilitator.”

“We will be seeing even more of this church and even more of each other,” said Saul. “I don’t know what it will do to our bond. I like things as they are now. Watching TVs with my mother at school — what will we do at home? I see why Father needed so much time in his office. He was planning a school!”

“Saul,” said Pastor Lester, “you are talking while I am talking. Clearly this school will benefit you. Saul is like me, born in darkness, brought to light, like many of you here today. What to do with Saul? Would we like to hear a story about Saul? We were reenacting a Bible story at home as a family . . .”

“No,” said Saul. “Please!”

“The Book of Genesis. Saul played the role of Adam. In his excitement — he has such devotion to the Scriptures and the accurate portrayal of them — there came the moment in our reenactment when Adam and Eve were banished from the garden. I thought he was only going to take off his shirt . . . haha. He ran through our house completely naked! He convinced his sister, as Eve, to join him. Now, this was not an intentional violation of our family rules and so I felt there was no reason to punish him. I gave him guidance, a little correction. Understanding the difference between this and an intentional violation of our rules, that’s discernment. For talking when I am preaching, I will need to spank Saul when we get home tonight. I will tell him I love him very much and then I will spank his bottom. I will not hit him in anger. He will not welt. I will spank him in the same spirit that I teach him anything. I will spank him so that when he is old he will not depart from the Lord, nor also from me. Dear Saul, I have forgiven you already. We will be strict with your children, but we will love them. Now enrolling grades nine through twelve. Let us pray.”

Every Sunday between morning services and night services, Saul and his father would knock on doors. Afterwards, they’d go to church and tell of what happened on their walk, testify if any souls were saved, often have the new converts with them. Then straight home, Saul to bed.

Tonight was unusual in that Saul was to be spanked or shown mercy.

“I am always a little relieved when they don’t open the door,” said Saul to his father, after knocking on many doors, all unanswered.

“I am not relieved when they do not open,” replied Pastor Lester. “I am relieved when they do not slam it.”

“Would it be better if we knocked on Saturdays?”

“These are Catholics. They’re more receptive on Sundays, after Mass.”

“Will you help me understand something?” Saul asked. “You promised me you would not include the Adam and Eve incident in your sermon.”

“That is a sharp tone.”

“I’m sorry. I said I would rather be punished than it be mentioned in a sermon.”

“I admit it was an improvisation. I veered away from the sermon I had in my mind. But why did I veer, Saul?”

“I was talking while you were preaching.”

They reached the last house in this neighborhood, the oldest and the most rundown.

Saul knocked this time. A man in a Marlboro windbreaker opened the door.

“Salvation not through works alone,” Saul began, in medias res.

Behind the man appeared a woman also in a Marlboro windbreaker. Where the man’s windbreaker was black, the woman’s windbreaker was white.

Saul took a deep breath and began again, “Salvation not through works alone but by acceptance of salvation . . . of the Savior . . . of God.”

The man invited them inside.

“I am Dave and this is my fiancée, Dawn. She speaks only a little. I will do most of the talking. We are very interested in what you are saying about salvation. I really have been having a difficult time of late, and I think salvation not through works alone is what I need. If you will just take me through what I need to do.”

“You need FAITH,” Saul said, remembering his father’s preferred method. “F is Forgive, as in ask for Forgiveness. A is Accept, as in accept you are a sinner.”

“You have me there,” said Dave. “I need forgiveness, and I am a sinner. Dawn too, a little.”

Saul proceeded. Dave and Dawn worked their way through the letters, and both seemed to receive salvation.

Pastor Lester invited them to the Sunday night church service.

“At this time,” said Dave, “I am without a vehicle.”

“We’ll take you in our car,” said Pastor Lester.

Dave and Dawn road in the backseat.

“Do you live together?” asked Pastor Lester.

“We all live together in the house.”

“Are you married?”

“We live as if we are married.”

Pastor Lester did not reply but Saul understood his father’s look.

“Faith,” said Dawn. “Faith.”

“Good Dawny,” said Dave.

“You will have to meet my daughter. She is named Faith.”

“It is a word that follows us,” said Saul.

“Look what the Lord hath done,” said Pastor Lester from the pulpit that night. “Meet Dave and Dawn. I have never met a man so convinced he is a sinner and so ready for salvation. As Legion recognized Jesus, so too did Dave. Dawn is shy but she has also professed faith.”

“Dave, I want to talk to you about Dawn,” said Pastor Lester on the ride home.

“I see, Pastor.”

“To live together outside of marriage is sin. You are living in sin.”

“Pastor, you read my mind. I said to Dawn the same thing during the service. Dawn is smarter than people think. She cannot stop talking about faith.”

“Faith,” said Dawn.

“There is something else,” said Pastor Lester. “I must tell you my deacons expressed concern about you and Dawn. About you being with Dawn and Dawn being with you.”

“Pastor, I see you are alluding to what I am about to address. When I tried to marry her before we had a little problem. People think Dawn is not smart enough for me. I consider this a complement. She is plenty smart. Smart enough to be a woman of faith is smart enough for me. The Catholic Church refused to wed us. But Dawny demands we have a church wedding. So, until then, we live together, as you said, in sin.”

“Who is this on the porch?” asked Pastor Lester.

“That’s Dana, Dawn’s daughter. Dana deserves a father. She’s going into the ninth grade this year. She is wicked smart. She’s even smarter than her mother and fully a woman at fourteen. Aren’t you Dana?”

Dana wore a red Marlborough windbreaker and pinched a cigarette.

“I am pleased to meet you,” said Saul. “We would be pleased to have you at church. We would also be pleased for you to attend our school. There will be a satellite on the roof.”

Saul and his father returned home late. Faith was asleep in her bed, having drifted off reading a chapter book adapted from the Gospels.

Saul went to bed not spanked.

Dave and Dawn’s wedding was the next Sunday at the church, between the morning and the evening service. Dawn wore her white Marlborough windbreaker. Dave wore his black Marlborough windbreaker with a tie. Dana wore her red Marlborough windbreaker. The three of them walked down the aisle to the theme song of a popular cartoon about children in precarious situations.

The satellite was installed on the roof and the school year began.

The Church at 19 Lark Industrial Pkwy

It starts with a wedding. My father joins together a man and a half-witted woman in holy matrimony, and with her daughter between them they walk down the aisle (and back) in matching Marlboro windbreakers.

Months later, a phone call. Before I recognize the husband’s name, I accept the charges, pass the phone to my father who for the man’s fifteen minutes says, You’re saying God says to lie? There’s no freaking way I’ll testify!

My father starts a high school at the church. He is principal and teaches Math. Or rather, he facilitates Math and mother facilitates Science because the satellite on the roof teaches the students. But the students have so many questions and transmissions are one way, the lectures recorded in advance.

Father sends back the satellite at the end of the year. The students (the daughter included) must repeat their grade in the public schools they’d been protected from and Father gives a fiery final sermon — never transferred from the VHS, I am not your pastor but a caregiver to a dying flock. You idle people who expect everything . . .

How did I feel about any of this? I was literal-minded. I was young. I was known for hiding. A deacon once found me in the church pantry, considering the cereal, Is your father still outside on that ladder in the dark changing lightbulbs, with it raining? And I said, No, sir, I don’t see rain.

Mitchell Galloway lives in Florida. His writing appears in Forever Magazine, The Panacea Review, R&R (Relegation Books), and Subtropics.

Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works — an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.”

The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.1

Scenebux is a short, snappy novella about a young underemployed writer named Ben Extina who embarks on a modern Pynchonesque tour of “the scene,” or the contemporary online ecosystem of niche intellectual figures. This landscape is primarily focused on a lively anatomical slice of a particular right-coded intellectual subculture backed by A Certain Silicon Valley Oligarch, but isn’t fixated on a single persona or figure — the novella’s center is its rapid momentum and flurry of events, scene changes, and characters.

In this respect, Scenebux isn’t quite situated as an internet novel since the online intellectuals that Smith is referencing are corporeal characters that the protagonist meets in real life. Here the novel encompasses a broader effort to recapture the dynamic, gonzo-style hijinks of 20^th-century protagonists who experienced the world through acts of human agency rather than the graphical user interface of a screen or the surprisingly passive creative-class jobs that seem to dominate book jacket summaries these days.

Smith is at his best when he seizes onto a certain manic Zoomer energy in the first chapter of the book: a tightly-packed, high-energy introduction to our narrator through rapid-fire observational comedy in a decidedly contemporary voice I haven’t encountered among other writers of his generation. Here the book starts off promisingly, and this opening sequence calls to mind Jay McInerney’s breezy Bright Lights, Big City, which captured a certain movement and sense of motion that sustained it throughout. At its best, Smith’s voice-driven prose draws you into a very particular stream-of-Zoomer-consciousness:

I’m a cusper, twenty-five years old in 2025, stuck between Lehman-traumatized Millennial dorks and algo-fried pornbrain Zoomer illiterates. In a way, I got the worst of both, an early childhood on a lawless web rawer and sicker than anything we’ve got today. I like to joke I was molested by the internet. I really think I was. That’s why I quit.

Scenebux is an interesting book and Smith is categorically different from most young indie male writers who typically produce literary fiction with varying levels of quality. He writes quickly and prodigiously, with a rapidly-growing oeuvre that spans literary works, genre books, and even films and screenplays.

What most prominently separates Smith from other writers in this grouping is a lack of dourness. The failure mode of the outsider male novelist lies in the over-reliance on nihilistic repetition: many young male writers without the backing of the professional-MFA-publishing complex over-anchor on a very particular form of grimdark-sex-writing — a circular regurgitation of the sex-addicted male with accompanying existential angst, which has long become tiresome.

The problem with these writers, in contrast to Smith, is an excessive heaviness to their work, insufficiently leavened by humor and left unbalanced as a result. Smith’s repertoire has a wider breadth and is decidedly lighter and, in the case of Scenebux, driven by a persistent wit.

The plot of Scenebux follows the sort of classical madcap adventures of the typical protagonist in a Pynchonesque literary comedy — there is, nominally, a sequence of events here that is initiated by Ben’s altercation with some bikers, but the book rapidly loses momentum after the first chapter. Unlike the persistent narrative thrust of McInerney’s NYC-based novel — the spiritual sister of this book, in my view — Scenebux feels like a chronology of events sequenced together to create a carousel-like effect of rotating the reader through a litany of online/IRL subcultures and their associated characters.

Here the humor lands somewhat inconsistently — the jokes are sometimes impactful, and other times not — but Ben’s internal state remains largely even throughout. Detached irony is perhaps the appropriate tonal voice for the protagonist in a lighthearted literary comedy, but I was left wanting something more from the character of Ben Extina.

It’s not that the execution here is at any point bad, it’s just that a novel reliant on a steady stream of humor-driven narrative beats is exceedingly difficult to execute. There are indeed quite a few gems here, but they’re not tightly packed enough to sustain deep interest in the story, even one of its relatively short length.

But when Smith is clever, he’s clever — and his short, intellectual brand of humor reminds me of Tony Tulathimutte: “On the tenth picture I see the biker who decked me holding a PBR. He looks like a fat Ryan Gosling with eyes a little too close together, like he’s got some kind of chromosome abundance.”

The meat of Scenebux follows a fairly clear structure: there are some hijinks, an interesting character (or two) representative of a particular online/IRL subculture gets introduced, Ben injects these events with a steady stream of internal commentary, and another event rotates the carousel into the next subculture.

Captured are a variety of contemporary intellectual spheres, including various forms of technofeudalism, national-security suits, BAPtist or BAP-adjacent American Dynamism entrepreneurs, EA-Butlerian-Jihad terrorists, and peptide addicts.

The difficulty with each of these sections is a progressive loss of narrative momentum tied to the lack of stakes for Ben as the primary character — his ironic detachment makes it hard to sustain interest in the plot and feels like an excuse to keep rotating the carousel.

That said, there are moments of brilliance throughout these middle sections where Smith’s talent shines through and he captures pearls of interesting ideas into self-contained micro-capsules: a character describing his cuneiform-trained LLM, or the morbid curiosity of an Asian woman explaining why she’s joined a cult of genocidal white supremacists.

Indeed, Smith’s strengths as a writer sometimes feel anchored to the capsular — to short, clever exchanges of dialogue that invert or upend conventional framings or assumption-sets:

“I don’t read a lot of Nazis,” I gripe.

“There were no Nazis in 1922,” she hits back. “You would probably call a Platonist a Nazi. You would probably call your grandparents Nazis. If you take the positions of a failed Central European political party and define yourself entirely in the inverse you are still letting them build your frame of morality, which ironically validates their beliefs as an infallible oracle of goodness, through anti-goodness. You end up opposing things like animal rights.”

Scenebux — if I may partially spoil it for you — ends with an abrupt shift into the more somber and serious, departing from the madcap tone of the first 90 percent of the novel. The critique of the millennial writer is that they have often turned to irony-poisoned detachment as a redoubt from sincerity and a retreat into moral relativism. By contrast, Scenebux concludes with a clear moral thesis, ultimately repudiating the ethnosupremacism of the new American right and the self-ratcheting genocidal logic of racialism taken to its extreme.

Given his rate of output and ability to intermittently reach some literary high notes, it’s tempting to speculate that Smith merely needed to take longer to write this novella — to redraft it a couple more times and to let it cook.

But given the transient nature of the world he wanted to capture — which is already dissolving only six months later — I can’t quite blame him for taking the literary equivalent of a photograph, and for giving us a map to help future readers situate it.

ARX-HAN is the author of the novel Incel and writes the Substack newsletter DECENTRALIZED FICTION.

Very recently, the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wondered where, exactly, book review coverage had gone. “Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics,” Garner wrote. “The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections.”

“Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.”

Indeed, this is something we’ve long lamented at The Metropolitan Review. The collapse of this critical ecosystem is very real. This is why, of course, TMR exists in the first place.

As exciting as it was to read a critic of Garner’s stature diagnose the crisis, it was frustrating too — he doesn’t propose any solutions. The Times could review more books, especially those by authors with independent presses. Garner could highlight, too, the many smaller publications and individual Substacks trying to pick up the slack.

At The Metropolitan Review, we try to be the change we want to see in the world. We bring the best book and cultural criticism to you every single week. We plan to keep doing this as long as humanely possible.

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Artist Molly Crabapple’s monumental Here Where We Live Is Our Country is by and for the dispossessed, including diaspora Jews who cannot now, or never could, imagine Israel as home. For the Jewish Bund, “The diaspora was home,” writes Crabapple. “Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.” A comprehensive account of the Bund threaded with personal history, the book chronicles a vanished organization that few now remember. Yet the people, ideas, and conflicts it describes are still relevant today, as are the questions it compels us to ask: what we believe, why we believe it, and what we are willing to live and die for.

Founded in 1897 and reaching its peak in interwar Poland, the Bund was, in Crabapple’s words, a “sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish.” Bundists “fought the tsar, battled pogroms, exalted the Yiddish language, and built vast networks of political and cultural institutions.” She’s written the Bund’s story to resurrect its legacy and proffer its ideology as a righteous alternative to the Zionism many Jews still believe is necessary to their survival. Although the Bund was “largely obliterated” by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, she writes, its opposition to Zionism “better explains its absence from current consciousness.”

Crabapple is the proudly anti-Zionist great-granddaughter of the Bundist artist Samuel Rothbort. Her admiration for the Bund is refreshingly pure and frank, but it doesn’t blind her to the flaws and limitations of the organization or its members. The book, which features her artwork as well as her words, does what all great works of history aspire to do: it reanimates the dead. She writes as vividly as she draws, and the thoroughness of her research is clear — she spent years poring over archives, learning Yiddish, reading Bundists’ memoirs, hiring translators, and tracking down members’ descendants. In doing so she has transformed the Bund from forgotten heroes, dusty banners, and out-of-print newspapers into a movement so dynamic, thrilling, and palpable that a person living today can imagine joining. Because her subjects are her ideological and literal forebears, she conjures them in careful and loving detail.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country shows how we could build a world in which Jews and all people can thrive in safety where they live, and move freely if they can’t. Crabapple credits the Bund with creating networks and institutions — summer camps, youth groups, sports clubs, a top-of-the-line facility for working-class young people at risk of tuberculosis — that prefigured such a world without downplaying the obstacles to sustaining it. From 1897 to 1948, the main period the book covers, Nazis and other antisemites slaughtered Jews en masse, regardless of their politics. Crabapple believes the Bund was defeated not by its own faults and errors, but by opponents and purported allies who turned their backs on Bundists, and all Jews, in their time of need. The Bund did not fail, she writes; it lost — to the greater force posed by “vast armies of organized killers” and the genocidal indifference of the West, which “paid lip service to freedom and humanity while hewing to the crude doctrines of might” and “played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable.”

Crabapple draws parallels between the Bund and contemporary organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and the resurgent-since-2016 Democratic Socialists of America. But these groups do not advocate violence, and part of what she admires about the Bundists is their willingness to fight their oppressors with brass knuckles, iron bars, homemade explosives, and guns. She is outraged by the erasure of their contributions to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Of Polish Bundist Marek Edelman, who led the uprising after Mordechai Anielewicz died, she writes, “Though he was fêted across the world, Israel never forgave him [for refusing to endorse Zionism]. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin traveled to Poland to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, the uprising’s commander was not permitted to speak.”

Though she wants the Bundists to be remembered and recognized for their courage, Crabapple questions the usefulness of their sacrifices. “Death is not glorious,” she writes. “It is pain, then nothing. There was no grand moral, just the dissolution of an irreplaceable self.” Philip Larkin made a similar point in his 1977 poem, “Aubade,” which is not about martyred revolutionaries but horror at the inescapability of death: “Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Yet as Crabapple points out, whether or not it spares anyone from death, courage can be a form of service to others. She recounts that in 1943, when the Bundist Pati Kremer — then around 76 years old — was rounded up and later murdered alongside other Jews and radicals, she suggested that they sing the Bund’s anthem: “Then death will not seem so terrible.” Edelman, who led an armed uprising, said it was more difficult to accept the inevitability of dying at the Nazis’ hands than it was to resist it. In 1976, he told the writer Hanna Krall that those killed in Nazi gas chambers “went quietly and with dignity. . . . It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.”

It’s difficult to commend those who bravely resist oppression without glorifying or excusing violence, but Crabapple is subtle enough to manage it. Like other political groups that were at times driven underground, the Bund had militias and enforcers who beat and killed their enemies — most often, in their case, in self-defense. But oppressed people are also capable of cruelty. As Crabapple writes, “We all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall.” Here is how she describes a Bundist attack on a rival group that had been violently assaulting Jews and Bundists in Warsaw: “They were not tailors and porters anymore but conduits of vengeance, and the ruined faces of their adversaries did nothing to assuage their rage. . . . [Bundist enforcer] Bernard Goldstein ordered his men to finish, but they didn’t want to. They were enjoying it too much.”

Later she asks, “So why did I write this book about the Bund — who lost, who were failed — and not about victorious killers?” Though she is referring here to Zionists, not Bundists, the answer is telling: “Because I am sick of monsters — whether they belong to my group or any other.”

Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a tribute not just to the Bund, but to the beauty and necessity of upholding the ideal of global solidarity across differences. “Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed,” Crabapple writes, “but it is all we have.” The book is so blunt about the difficulty and cost of defending this ideal, and so unflinching in cataloging its violent suppression, that it can be painful to read. A number of passages caused me to flinch.

The Bundists were prescient and often right. Henryk Erlich warned in 1938 that “if a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs), and eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs).” Fascists and butchers overpowered them anyway. Yet it’s impossible not to be moved by their stubborn conviction that they owed it to all of us to keep fighting, no matter how dire the conditions or high the cost, for a world where all people could live freely and fully where they are, without sacrificing their language, culture, identity, or religion.

Crabapple relates that when W. E. B. Du Bois visited the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949, he credited the ghetto fighters’ “deliberate sacrifice in life for a great ideal in the face of the fact that the sacrifice might be completely in vain” with having “reinforced his commitment to universalist socialism.” Like the fighters they led in the uprising, the Bundists were surrounded by enemies throughout their existence, from the tsar to viciously antisemitic neighbors to traitorous ex-comrades, well-armed Nazis, and paranoid communists. But they never stopped believing in the fundamental brotherhood of man, nor succumbed to the delusion that one group of people can achieve safety and freedom by destroying another.

This book will do for Crabapple’s brand of anti-Zionism what the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto did for Du Bois’ socialism. “The Bund was a Jewish group,” Crabapple writes, “but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity.” At the book’s end, she declares that history is “never settled”: “Bodies rot, but ideas remain. They resurface like land mines or buried gold.” Here Where We Live Is Our Country brings roaring back to life ideas some tried to bury forever. Others will use them to rewrite the future.

Raina Lipsitz is the author of The Rise of a New Left. Her work has appeared in The Appeal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic.

Please enjoy today’s poem from the acclaimed poet Tom Sleigh. His poems explore the human condition through imagery that is both gorgeous and poignant.

If you’d like to hear more of Sleigh’s work, please join him on May 12 for a reading with the Must Love Memoir Reading Series where he will be reading from Rosie: A Memoir of Farewell published by Unbound Edition Press. The event is at 7:30 p.m. at Jake’s Dilemma, which is located at 430 Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.

—The Editors

All Night Waitress

Just her and me: she sits with her legs 
twined ankle to knee, her hand 
hiding the bruises 
on her cheek. She dangles car keys as if thinking 
about escape to some otherwhere without these islands 
of formica tabletops afloat in the neon Sargasso Sea
of two a.m. where I eat as quietly as I can,
not wanting to disturb her privacy
after she set down gently my cherry pie 
and retreated back to the farthest table.

The jut of her jaw multiplied in every pane
sets night’s teeth on edge
in the doppler whine
of truck tires fading far away.

Here be monsters wrote the ancient mapmakers
at the edges of the unknown world,
inking in rumored creatures 
with giant razor teeth, nightmare heads and bodies.

And here be glass sugar pourers, napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers floating, floating as if gravity had finally given up, each of us no 
longer 
nailed to lives that, as we drift away, keep going on without us. 

Do her bruises still radiate their tender heat? 
How edgy things get, every thought sliced so fine...
"Have a nice night,” she says, as I say it back, pay, 
and walk out to the parking lot. 

Back on the road in the insect dark,
giant serpents with lion claws hold up mirrors 
as they rear above the dawn, eyes squinting 
at their own faces which don’t look monstrous, just sad.

Tom Sleigh’s many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King’s Touch, House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees, which recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and East Africa. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award, and both the Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in Raritan, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny, Poetry, Metropolitan Review and many other magazines. His memoir, Rosie: A Memoir of Farewell, will be published on May 5th. And his new and selected poems, Some of What We Talked About, will appear in 2027. A Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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One shouldn’t look to fiction for historical phenomenology, but I’m not sure of another art form better suited to communicating to our contemporary selves what life felt like in the distant past. The philosophical notion of phenomenology was an attempt to understand previous eras on their own terms, instead of imposing our present mores onto them. This would suggest that the best way to get a sense of the past would be to read first-hand accounts from various periods, which might provide a sense of their prevailing zeitgeists. Thus, anyone seeking verisimilitude of the Civil War in America, say, ought to read something like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet unlike diaries or journals or reportage, fiction is affected by its contemporaneous culture in much more ambiguous ways — so mysterious, in fact, that accurately extrapolating insights from novels is practically as difficult as extracting insights from the culture as a whole. Diaries and journals are private forms, still obviously influenced by the world around them, but less public-facing than the capitalistic enterprise of selling books. Journalism, always susceptible to corruption and deception, is based on a power dynamic between the privileged and the general population — sometimes it is controlled by the powerful, sometimes it undoes them — so even unreliable nonfiction can provide fascinating context for complex situations. Novels must sell or disappear, meaning their content is, in part, always filtered through a company’s desire for profit. This can lead to compromised texts, which don’t merely follow its hopeful demographic’s societal decorum but actually depict it — effectively taking prescriptive ideas about how people should live and presenting them as if that was how people did live. Jane Austen isn’t going to dramatize the less presentable aspects of early 19^thcentury English gentry, even though her project was to satirize them.

Max Watman’s Tomorrow, the War is historical fiction, which as a form seems to contradict the very foundation of phenomenology, by viewing the past through a present lens. But as a comparison point to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work with which Watman’s novel is in conversation, it’s fascinating to note the differences. For example, Tomorrow, the War features many elements that contemporaneous novels of the period left out or de-emphasized, creating a more realistic portrait of life during slavery. There are some savage moments here, showing just how pervasive and inescapable the horrific violence of slavery was for everyone. Yet the novel also contains not one use of the N-word, a choice that reflects modern sensitivities but denies experiential reality. Stowe’s novel teems with the epithet, occurring first on the second page. In this regard, Watman’s novel is certainly a bit easier to digest, as the constant use of racist language — even when historically accurate — can be draining and distracting. At the same time, its absence might create a very different impression of its setting, a kind of whitewashing for the sake of digestibility. Then again, who wants to read a white author throw around disgusting slurs?

The plot of Tomorrow, the War delves right into the various machinations of American slavery. In the 1850s, Bodkin’s Hundred, a neglected plantation in Virginia, falls into the hands of Oliver Bodkin VII, a progressive abolitionist uninterested in running the property. He frees the nine people his family had held in forced servitude, but it turns out that two of them, brother and sister Raleigh and Temple, are his half-siblings, a result of rape by his father’s hand. Oliver decides to raise and educate them as free people, eventually teaming up with Rose Knaupf, a widow using her late husband’s wealth to open a school for girls, which Temple attends. Raleigh, meanwhile, learns piano and discovers he’s got quite the knack.

This tenuously content time comes to an abrupt end when a neighboring slave owner named Zeb Newcombe, angry at Bodkin’s disregard for the ways of the region, burns down the property, killing Oliver. The fire is blamed on Raleigh, who flees, though everyone is told that he was killed. Raleigh believes that Temple was also killed, but she was “saved” by Newcombe, who then buys her despite her status as a free woman. When Raleigh ran, he took their documents with him, as he didn’t think Temple needed them anymore. Temple, then, is forced into slavery again, while Raleigh lands a gig with a traveling troupe of performers.

In a separate narrative, a young man named Jeb Stokes sets out on his own, leaving behind a Jewish family who hadn’t ventured out beyond their homestead in a generation. The place is even named after them: Stokes Mountain. Jeb’s father and aunt were killed in an accident, and it seems likely that his mother and uncle orchestrated it. “There’s got to be a real life down there,” Jeb tells them, referring to Richmond, the city where he initially plans to go. A real life as opposed to the Hamlet-y hamlet of his youth.

At first, he camps just outside the city to slowly acclimate himself to his new environment. He witnesses something extraordinary and traumatic. A group of 20 slaves all chained together by their necks and feet are being forced onto a boat, but they stop before boarding and, as a single unit, they plunge into the water and drown themselves. “They had found a moment of freedom,” the narration reads, “in the space between the shore and the boat, and they had decided to stay there.” Jeb winds up volunteering for the Army and, with a fellow soldier and a Native American named Red Joe, robbing a mining camp and murdering a sheriff. He becomes an outlaw, in other words.

The teacher, Rose, who moved to California before the fire, eventually sees an advertisement for a local show featuring Raleigh, who she also had believed dead. In a risky moment, Temple had written Rose a letter in French telling her that she was enslaved again. Rose then writes a letter to Raleigh with this information (which is delivered in an interesting procedural sequence by a moody Pinkerton). Raleigh then blackmails Jeb into helping him break his sister out of her prison. This rescue mission comprises the novel’s finale.

These numerous threads are weaved by Watman with dexterous aplomb, for the most part, with the exception of an extended period when Jeb disappears from the narrative for too long. In a big tale teeming with characters and set-pieces, balance is paramount, and Jeb, already a taciturn and inarticulate person, loses some of his prominence during his absence. Additionally, Watman doesn’t abide by the convention of maintaining points of view within sections or chapters. There are times where the perspective jumps from one character to another. In the beginning of one chapter, the prose reads: “Father Rice, a well-kept man of solid middle age, only slightly worried about how proud he found himself of himself at times.” Then, the very next paragraph, this: “Marie Newcombe felt she could hear him capitalize the pronouns.” A reader may, in such an instance, believe at first that, since it seems we’re in Father Rice’s POV, this line about Marie is not an accurate description of what she thinks as she listens to his sermons, but rather what Father Rice thinks she thinks. The language of third-person narration tends to reflect the thoughts and opinions of the characters. Choosing which perspectives to illuminate and which to withhold and when is what makes novels work. When there are too many shifts, I lose trust in the novelist to make choices. Watman doesn’t do this so often that it sinks his novel, but these slips in cohesion do allow a little too much water onto the ship.

Tomorrow, the War is, ultimately, a wonderful mix of propulsive plot and historical enlightenment, an old-fashioned yarn with more going on than just the momentum of the story, which nonetheless crackles with energy. Watman has clearly done his research, which he’s used to create a believable and humane portrait of a barbaric time.

Jonathan Russell Clark is the author of three works of nonfiction. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, LA Times, and numerous others. He is also the reviews editor for Punk Eek.

Emoji-faced Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House and star of the YouTube-friendly game show What’s My Line?, is no longer remembered. In his lifetime, he was close to Frank Sinatra (a pallbearer at Cerf’s funeral), Truman Capote (declined to be a pallbearer — too waifish?), William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dr. Seuss, etc. etc. etc. Each one easily worth a monumental biography; yet in Nothing Random Gayle Feldman gives Cerf and his publishing kingdom (only after his death an empire) the 1,000-page treatment. Until his death, Cerf was as famous as any of these — even Ol’ Blue Eyes.

The first 10 percent of any biography is skippable. Generally the childhoods of the famous are tedious; Bennett Cerf’s is no exception. He was not Arthur Rimbaud. I confess I fail to care about where precisely he lived or New Yorkers’ prestige-based sub-subdivisions by street address (as Groucho Marx once said to Dick Cavett, he himself was born on 78th Street, “between Lexington and Third”). The least class-conscious people in the world are always the most. Cerf would later change his office’s official address to avoid having the unfashionable Third Avenue on the headed paper. It is good enough for me to know that Cerf was born in Harlem and died in Westchester County. I am not particularly interested in his grandfather’s tobacco business, nor that his father was good at baseball. Feldman has to do this work, and a reviewer has to read it, and it is fascinating to no one. It seems to have been along the lines of the typically slow Jewish tri-generational trajectory: peasant — fur trader — Nobel Prize winner. Or, rather, Cerf’s authors would win the Nobels for him.

Here we go. He had a middle-class and not particularly Jewish childhood and was brought up reading boys’ adventure books. Like everyone born in the 19^th century he put together a childhood newspaper to sell to neighbors. He goes to Columbia; edits the college newspaper. Cleverly, he fails an eye test in order to survive WWI — then the decision is reversed, and he’s shipped out to Virginia to become an officer and artilleryman. The Armistice; Phi Beta Kappa; middlebrow tastes (“Wells, Kipling, Arnold Bennett”); inheritance; Wall Street; month at the New-York Tribune (fired); Vice-President and Director of Boni & Liveright; buys Modern Library from Liveright; travels Europe; names firm Random House. By this point, Cerf is still in his 20s.

Cerf had been mentored by the incredible Horace Liveright, a tragicomic Falstaffian character often found in flagrante delicto at work. His bleak decline is in poignant contrast to Cerf’s whistle-stop ascent. In 1925, Liveright sold Bennett and his colleague Donald Klopfer the Modern Library, a deal which bankrolled the rest of all three of their lives. It produced cheap reprints of books from Europe, and would in the 1990s be responsible for the infamously ubiquitous list, “Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels.” Random House was a start-up imprint of Modern Library, founded 1927, and intended to publish a few contemporary books “at random.” Soon, Random House was an even greater success than its parent.

More than business, less than friendship, the publisher-writer relationship has a peculiar intimacy. I would likely not attend the funeral of a business contact, yet Cerf flies to Mississippi for Faulkner’s. (We learn that nobody in Oxford or Faulkner’s family has read any of his books, yet they insist all businesses close at 2 p.m. for a quarter hour to honor their great son.) Feldman’s real gift is — ironically for a writer of a great, long biography — microbiography. The capsule life of Eugene O’Neill is thrillingly told, as is the longer story of United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses.” Book-chat folk will delight in stories of Alexander Woollcott and Gertrude Stein, of Roth, Mailer (almost assaults Cerf), Rand, Cormac McCarthy. Coups for progressive Random House were Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou; likewise Isherwood, Auden, Spender, Coward, Capote. There is a ceaseless honor-roll of Hollywood, from Cerf’s first wife, Sylvia Sidney, to Anna May Wong, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple, Claudette Colbert, Marlon Brando — etc. There are the Broadwayites: the Gershwins, Kaufman & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein. There are McCarthy & Cohn, and Hoover, and Kissinger. Cerf hated McCarthy, and stood up against HUAC. He was related to Hoover by marriage, and though the FBI kept a file on him, Hoover had it sidelined. In later years he met Kissinger at Frank Sinatra’s house and invited him to his country place, hoping to publish him. My advance copy does not have an index, but it must be incredible.

Half literary and half gossipy, these parts are diverting. The extravaganza of showbiz goings-on, in 2026, reads like the lament of The Wanderer in the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem: Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas? Where has the treasuregiver gone? Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels of the hall? Everyone Cerf meets assumes he cannot really be reading the books he publishes, yet a century before our brainrot age we see him sit up late to read Proust, Faulkner, Joyce. Gertrude Stein playfully calls him “dumb” — but they all respect him. Are our middlebrows now reading Absalom, Absalom! and À la recherche? We who for gods would look to JoJo Siwa and MrBeast?

Yet, as a literary study, there can be no depth. It is about a facilitator, not a real writer. I’m writing this the same day the New York Times has said Cerf is as worthy of Feldman’s 1,000-page biography as New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses is of Robert Caro’s. Yet Caro uses Moses as a bonesaw with which to vivisect corruption. His subject is politics: the amassment of power. Feldman, her Random House biography published by Random House, lacks the wagon she might hitch to Cerf’s star. There is no “motive,” or “idea” — this is a stately, scholarly, expansive, exhaustive and exhausting study of 20^th-century publishing and of the somewhat tiresome Bennett Cerf.

Obsessed with publicity, Noël Coward’s dictum, “Television is for appearing on, not for looking at” might well have been Cerf’s motto. Except that, as Feldman reveals, he used to obsessively watch himself on television, once leaving a party to do so when he discovered the hosts did not have a set (incidentally, ctrl+f “party” reveals 155 matches). News begets news. Cerf was one of the few people who seemed to realize that book sales could be fed by publicity around the publishing house itself. He made himself a celebrity, and it made Random House. He wrote weekly columns that reached tens of millions. What’s My Line? was for a period the fourth-most-watched show on television. And Cerf was himself a million-copy bestseller, writing humor books and anthologies of gags, 24 of them, which were inexplicably adored. There will always be people who vote the wrong way and there will always be people who find New Yorker cartoons funny.

But Cerf, beneath thick strata of frivolity, was complex. He did champion Ulysses, fighting a ban to have Joyce published in a non-piratical edition in the U.S. This is beautifully told in Nothing Random, as it is in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce. It is the reviewer’s privilege to repackage these and other anecdotes as if he has discovered them. Here’s one: Cerf and his lawyer Morris Ernst had to force the customs inspector to search their suitcase and then force him to seize Ulysses. They’d admitted to smuggling contraband and the inspector was too hot and tired to care. Seeing the copy, he said, “Oh for God’s sake, everyone brings in that.” Here’s another: after Finnegans Wake, Cerf wrote to Joyce proposing he do another book in a “more popular vein.”

There’s a book to be written on Jewish American history and how Modernism was sold, and championed, by publishers like Cerf. A brief version of it would be: pre-First World War “WASP family firms” such as Dutton, Harper, and Scribner were naturally more conservative, publishing grand trad types like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder. As Modernism exploded in Europe as a cultural force, it was always slightly too esoteric for mass appeal, or indeed was censored outright (on a scale, say, from the British censorship of Lawrence at one end to Nazi book burning at the other). Modernist writers began to make real money when passionate new Jewish publishing houses based in New York gambled on them: Random House (Faulkner, Joyce, Stein, Auden), Knopf (Lawrence, Stevens, Eliot, Pound). Modernism was the chic way of being a social pariah. Consider that Joyce, Stein, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, and Auden were all expats. Things are really fucking bad if you have to move to Paris. I once did.

And, of those, Cerf met and was friendly with Joyce, Stein, Lawrence, and Auden. He refused to publish Pound, considering him a “traitor,” but reversed his decision after a massive backlash against censorship led by Auden. Later he was prepared to publish Lolita, only relenting when an editor with a daughter the same age as Dolores Haze complained — Cerf allowed himself to be overruled. The same editor would veto Mailer’s The Deer Park (JFK’s favorite Mailer according to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.), which Cerf called “very dirty” but which he would otherwise have published. Cerf was able to contradict himself. He would publish the young Philip Roth, yet he also considered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be a “deliberately pornographic . . . . dirty book.” He was not a crusader for writers’ freedoms, so much as someone with ad hoc prejudices and a hatred of being dull.

Feldman took a quarter of a century writing this biography. It’s a piece of colossal infrastructure: it’s like a very important freeway interchange, from which many other interesting locations can be accessed. Should a biography have novel-like editing, narrative vim, gusto, pep, dash? Cerf’s own memoir, At Random, has. He’s vaguely humorous and fits his high-profile life into 200 pages. Feldman’s biography of him has 200 pages of endnotes. It has achieved comprehensiveness. I now know that Cerf had “always driven Cadillacs” but his wife “lobbied for a Buick convertible.” I’m also not really interested in the exact specification of house Cerf bought in Westchester County (guess what: it’s white, Colonial Revival, with columns). This is not Feldman’s fault — a biographer has to biographize. But am I surprised that a rich New Yorker had a nice car and a nice house near New York City and another in New York City? Compare for example biographies of Saul Bellow, where his house does matter, because it is a central element of Herzog, or where his car matters, because it is a central element of Humboldt’s Gift. In biographies of those who aren’t sublimating their possessions into their art, it’s just forgettable décor. This really is the issue: Bennett Cerf’s personality is not worthy of biography. He is the vehicle — a dignified, high-spec Cadillac, no doubt — to tell the story of Random House.

The best part of this biography is when its subject, Bennett Cerf, dies. The epilogue details in another zippy microbiographical history the last 50 years of book publishing. Dozens of mergers, acquisitions, firings, and hirings lead to Penguin Random House (2013) and eventually the Justice Department quashing PRH’s purchase of Simon & Schuster (2020–22). Such business entanglements are foreshadowed by what Cerf does to Random House, tying up film and Broadway and books, indeed trying to buy Penguin several times, and in this he and his firm are like a genteel, 20^th-century version of the 21^st’s present superficial ghastliness, the Cadillac to our Tesla.

Now that every film is made by Disney or Netflix, and every significant cultural product is controlled at arm’s length by various private equity firms, I long for all-smiling, happy-go-lucky publishers like Bennett Cerf, who really did read the books he was putting out, and really would have you to the Random House “palazzo” to chitchat about novels. When AI focus groups begin to decide, literally soullessly, on the exact formula of profitmaking efficiency for every work of art we are to ever experience, either we lock in, blissed out in the slop, or we decline to, and return to a new primitivism of anti-elegance.

It is simply amazing how the haute-haute bourgeoisie, those who own the magnates, have willingly alienated themselves from their own labor, and will continue to do so, accelerando, as they outsource their opinions to artificial intelligence; which is like feeding your blood into a predetermined Saw trap whose purpose, when full of your blood, is to guillotine you. Three cheers, then, for Bennett Cerf: tedious, inane, kindly, and human. Read this biography, abundant with erring lives, to see how much we have to lose.

Ben Sims is a novelist from London, UK. He publishes Short stories once a month. His debut novel will be released in November.

Susie Vogelman is young, beautiful, loaded, and completely and hopelessly addicted to OxyContin. After her roommate overdoses on prescription drugs and dies, Susie drops out of NYU. We meet her as she’s living in the sprawling Los Angeles mansion that belongs to her father — corporate counsel to the Sickler family, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Sacklers, of Purdue Pharma fame. While our protagonist Susie is dealing with the early stages of her own opioid addiction, the city of Los Angeles is dealing with a string of horrific murders, referred to simply as “the killings,” which are targeting opioid addicts, largely living on the streets. The murderer — or murderers, as the case may be — is killing addicts and mutilating their corpses beyond recognition: beheading them, cutting their bodies in half, affixing their nipples to their eyelids. The killings proceed in the background of Susie’s story, terrorizing the most abject corners of the city as this sordid tale of wealth, addiction, and corruption unfolds in the fore.

I read Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick (2026, Red Hen Press) in the weeks immediately following the brutal murder and maiming of Rob and Michele Reiner at the hands, allegedly, of their son Nick. That family’s nightmarish story was top of mind for me as I devoured Kill Dick over the course of a few days. The book is fast-paced and propulsive. I was compelled straight away by the entitled, drug-addicted, aspiring painter protagonist, Susie. As the plot unfolded, the Reiner family tragedy wouldn’t leave my mind, not only because it was dominating the news cycle then, but also because of how closely their story of drug addiction, wealth, privilege, and ultimately, terrible violence, mirrored the themes of this novel.

Like Susie and the countless victims of “the killings,” Nick Reiner was battling addiction when he allegedly killed and maimed his own parents as the result of what we might assume to be a drug-induced psychosis. Much like Nick Reiner resented his father and his success in Hollywood, Susie resents hers for his work representing the Sicklers and their impossible-to-overstate role in the opioid epidemic. The way the Reiners’ story echoes in Kill Dick is quite eerie. “I fantasized about bashing my parents’ skulls in with the gardening implement,” Susie confesses at one point. At another, she refers to “the Menendez twins who ended the decade and their parents’ lives in a Beverly Hills mansion worth fifteen million.” In both stories, drugs lead to violence, leading to death. Bloody, horrific deaths. Parricide is a unifying theme.

Both the Reiner family tragedy and Kill Dick are emblematic Los Angeles horror stories — warped by money, fame, and influence. Kill Dick, in voice and theme both, reads like a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The author clearly drew inspiration from The Shards and American Psycho, among other of his books. Even the repetition of the generic term “the killings” (always in scare quotes), is reminiscent of how Ellis ominously refers to his serial killer character in The Shards as “The Trawler.” Much like Ellis, the writing here can feel slightly removed, keeping the character’s consciousness just out of reach for the reader. There’s a certain intimacy that’s missing. Instead, the story is plot-heavy and action-packed, which can feel like a refreshing departure for a work of literary fiction.

Also in line with Ellis, Goebel seems to be very concerned with the issue of empire. In Ellis’ 2011 essay for The Daily Beast, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” Ellis argues that American culture and its participants can be divided into Empire (Anderson Cooper, Bruce Springsteen, Fran Lebowitz, Madonna) and Post-Empire (John Mayer, Kanye West, Eminem, the Kardashians). Goebel too, is obsessed with the fall of the American empire (“post-America,” he calls it), as well as with the would-be emperors who rule in this post-empire world. He refers not only to a thinly veiled version of the Sacklers, but to other members of the ruling class, including disguised versions of Jeffrey Epstein’s cabal and a church not too dissimilar from the Church of Scientology.

Los Angeles has a particular type of dark, seedy underbelly that I don’t believe exists in the same way in other cities. In addition to the Reiner family, I’m reminded, reading this book, of a young woman — also dealing with addiction — whom I met a couple years ago in rehab. Originally from Southern Illinois, she’d moved to Los Angeles and found work as a cocktail waitress for an underground poker ring. She quickly became close friends with her fellow waitress, one of whom was then brutally murdered in her own apartment before being sawed in half and stuffed in a fridge at the hands of some brutal Angeleno killers. Right away, my friend’s family summoned her back to the Midwest, far away from the dark, sinister energy brewing in LA. Addiction. Murder of the most heinous variety. Without access to our phones or the internet, she and I would sit together in the common area, glued to the TV, waiting for any updates on her friend’s case. All of these cases — my friend’s, the Reiners, the murders in Bret Easton Ellis’ oeuvre, and “the killings” in Kill Dick — all have a distinctly Angeleno flavor to them.

Goebel’s writing is self-referential in style, even outwardly acknowledging the fact that the narration switches frequently between first and third person. “I hate to talk about my addiction like this in first person,” Susie explains:

It’s not that I can’t tolerate the truth about the addict I was, it’s just such an oversaturated genre. Confessionalism is so cliché in this day and age, and addiction stories are limp. This is about so much more. I’m going to dip into third person, take an asterisks break, and proceed forward in 3-D.

Maybe this is a matter of personal taste — I do love an addiction memoir —but I found the switching of perspectives a bit distracting, with the strongest chapters being told from Susie’s first person point of view. While yes, this is a tale about far more than one girl’s addiction narrative, I believe it could’ve been told all from her perspective, or at the very least, Goebel’s writing process didn’t need to be spelled out so plainly for the reader, taking us out of the story, if just for a moment.

The subject matter of Kill Dick is dark and profoundly disturbing. And yet the writing, packed with pop culture references and rich descriptions of LA, keeps it readable and highly entertaining. In addition to its merits as a serial murder mystery, the novel is highly political. While not concerned with capital-P politics, it offers an incisive criticism of America’s ruling class, in all its greed, corruption, and the surface-level politeness that conceals a world of violence. Neither conservative nor liberal, the political thesis of the book is centered on a critique of the elites at the head of industry, government, the church, and civil life in America. “These people would turn into loser liberals,” Goebel writes, “distracted by race, gender, sexuality — any category of victimhood the DNC could weaponize — while the party kept dodging pharma, genocidal war, and poison food, its leaders stuffing their faces with veal and pills.”

Decidedly unconcerned with identity politics, Goebel instead points his critique at more foundational economic and political power structures. He draws parallels, in the book, with Jeffrey Epsteinian hazing rites. He writes:

In sum total, was the world really owned and run by occult hermeticism, holding perverted orgies like this, like people suspected, in top-secret conspiring societies, who’d taken, a thousand or more years ago, false knowledge to the extreme? Was it all really just sex rituals, entrapment, liberation through perversity and shared excess?

Just as I was reminded of the work of Ellis while reading Kill Dick, I similarly couldn’t stop thinking about the podcast True Anon, and even wondered if Goebel had been listening to the show as he worked on this book. Like Kill Dick, the podcast, which is hosted by Brace Belden and Liz Franczak, defies conventional political categorization. Instead, it takes aim at the neoliberal establishment, the intelligence community, and the conspiracies they orchestrate in order to maintain societal power and control.

There is a strong ideological bent to this novel, often stated in explicit terms, particularly for a novelistic work. Personally, I found myself nodding along to these passages, in complete political alignment with the position the book seems to take on the ruling class and their approach to running institutions and dictating cultural mores. One critique of mine, though, is that Goebel has a tendency to get up on a soapbox, stretching certain plot points to assert his worldview in long soliloquies. These tend to be well written and compelling in their own right, though sometimes they feel a little forced, as if the reader can see the inner workings of Goebel’s writing process, in which these essay-like excerpts don’t always feel completely organic. In spite of that — or perhaps by way of explanation — Kill Dick is an ambitious novel, tackling a vast array of our society’s deepest issues and most entrenched power structures through the lens of addiction and violence. It captivated me, both in plot and in language, and kept my attention through the very end. As Goebel himself explains in the text, this is not an addiction story in the traditional sense, but one that seeks to elucidate some of the systemic harm being done at the highest levels of our post-empire society while never failing to entertain the reader.

Emma Burger is a Chicago-based writer, originally from New York City. She is the author of two novels, Little Rich Kids (2025) and Spaghetti for Starving Girls (2021). You can find her work in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Lit, and The Republic of Letters, at emmaburgerwrites.com, or on Substack at emmakaiburger.substack.com. She is an essays editor at Zona Motel.

Our very first print edition of The Metropolitan Review is out in the wild, and we keep hearing from people who want to snag a copy. We feel your pain — the print run was very limited, and early subscribers got a copy delivered right to their mailboxes. But we still do have copies available. Soon, they’ll be for sale in a select number of bookstores and newsstands in New York City and we hope, in time, to set up an online portal so you can purchase a copy. (If you recently became an $80 print subscriber, you’re already guaranteed issue no. 2. And remember, if you want no. 2 and everything else we publish for the rest of the year, subscribe today.)

If you’re in Manhattan on April 28th, you’ll have a chance to get your hands on a very pretty print copy of The Metropolitan Review. Our very own Editor-in-Chief, Ross Barkan, is holding a little party to celebrate launch day for his new novel, Colossus. We’ll have a big pile of copies for sale there. This is a rare opportunity to get that amazing first issue in your hands.

We’ll be at Nightclub 101 — 101 Avenue A, in Manhattan — from 7 p.m. onwards on April 28th. Celebrate Colossus, celebrate TMR, and hang out for a good long while.

Entrance is completely free. Just please RSVP here, ahead of time, so we can get a proper headcount.

That’s it. We really hope to see you there. And get your print copy before they’re all gone. Only 500 in existence! (That’s a fact.)

See you soon.

—The Editors

I slow down in front of the Snowbin residence. It’s Lon, alone, no wife, no family. He was here when I bought Utopia Gardens and I was warned he was fickle. In particular, the old owners, a consortium of bored energy dealers out of Maumee who wanted to dabble in Michigan real estate, had created a quasi-intuitive internal system of red and yellow cards to denote tenants who proved, over time, problematic. Snowbin flitted between red (most severe) and yellow (rather severe) with no discernible rhyme or reason. He was not seasonally late or early—winter or summer could produce similar lulls—and none of it seemed to depend on work, which he had reliably picked up at Quaker State, where he changed oil on weekends and some weekdays. This is the third time his rent has been late since I took over and this will be the second time I’ve visited his trailer, a gray-striped single-wide with a customized porch in faux oak. An American flag flies on a diagonal from a bracket screwed into a panel next to the framing of his front door. A second flag, that of the Michigan State Spartans, hangs in a neighboring bracket. There is no wind, so the flags are quiescent; from my vantage point behind glass, they may as well be plastic. I step out of the vehicle and head to where I need to be, ready to knock and knock.

The first time I met Lon Snowbin, I was not asking for rent. I was introducing myself at Menard’s, where we were both coincidentally skittering through the lumber section, as his new landlord, though I didn’t refer to myself in that fashion. I used the term property manager and was sure to let him know I was the pastor at Trinity of Pine Haven and he was always welcome. By then, I knew about the red and yellow cards, and considered it a stroke of luck I could strike up a conversation with him in a space shuttle–sized hardware chain. Snowbin had a shag goatee then and purpled rings beneath his eyes; he smiled up at me with ocher-tinted teeth, specks of tobacco plain enough. I shook his hand, thick and calloused, and he held mine a second too long.

“If you have any problems, feel free to come to me,” I told him. “Don’t hesitate to call.”

Snowbin never called and I didn’t expect him. As far as I could tell, he attended no church, and divided his time among Quaker State, his home, and the Log Cabin, Pine Haven’s longest-tenured bar. For a time, I almost prayed for his redemption, that he would be, for me, the tenant who never earned himself a red or yellow. I ended up scrapping the system entirely for a simpler internal checklist, no colors required, and there seemed to be a number of months where Snowbin intuited a system switch and behaved accordingly. He approached the status, briefly, of a model tenant. Then slippage. I’d like to think, contrary to scripture, he wasn’t born with sin.

I reach his doormat, a dark brown monogrammed forty-eight-inch, soft underfoot. If he’s smart, it’s one hundred percent coir. A tongue of beige paint is peeling off the door. I knock, shave and a haircut, adding two bits for good measure. There’s no sound of a television playing. Snowbin’s cranky maroon Camaro is parked out front. He’s here. It’s just a matter of waiting.

No sound, and then footsteps. There’s an unseen rustle and additional movement. I half expect him, cinema-style, to press apart the blades of his dusted venetians and peek one yellowed eye through the window. But the door is shaking and opening and there he is, in an imitation mohair and denim jeans, staring. A swollen pair of black Bose headphones are wrung around his neck. He heard me, to his chagrin, because they weren’t yet around his ears.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to say hello, see how it’s all going, make sure everything’s all right. I haven’t heard from you in a little bit.” Heard from you is the personal check hitting my mailbox. I offer my hand for a shake. He reaches out and shakes back, his grip far looser this time.

“All good over here, Pastor,” he says, his ruddiness almost welcoming. I can’t place Snowbin on any internal ethnicity matrix. English? Scotch-Irish? He’s shaved his goatee, leaving behind a dark starfield of stubble. I don’t smell liquor.

“Well, I am glad to hear it. I really am. I was just over at the Unger residence . . .” I’m not certain why I’ve told him this or why it matters. “And I wanted to check in here. It seems you are a bit behind on the rent. I wanted to make sure everything was well with you and see when we could be expecting the rent.”

“We?”

“The management company. I’m the principal, but we have employees, a board, an accountant, an attorney. I like to think of it as a team and we are one.”

“A team, huh?”

“Like the Tigers, except we can’t all hit quite as well.” I remember the Tigers, from my cursory interest, are playing below .500 ball and are inevitably not hitting all that well. This may be why Snowbin is not smiling. “We’re not fireballers either.”

“What happens if it stays late?”

“The rent?”

“Yur.”

“We assess a fifteen percent late fee, which would be a real shame, since you’re paying a fee you really shouldn’t have to pay.”

“And?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are there more fees, after the fifteen percent?”

“Well, it’s fifteen percent on the month, and another fifteen on the subsequent month until the duration of your lease expiration. It’d also be within our legal rights to initiate eviction proceedings. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I know you to be a good, respectable—”

“Cigarette?”

Snowbin slips out a pack of American Spirits from the front pocket of his mohair. He pinches one and lights up, blowing a small cloud to the side, away from me.

“No thank you, I don’t smoke.”

“A pastor, right.”

“And I struggle with the taste. Once in a while, a good cigar.”

Snowbin continues to smoke. He leans against the siding of his trailer, taking in a scene that might be of more interest to him than to me, his eyes falling to the roadway. He is my height, give or take a quarter inch, and his hard belly gives him an extra twenty pounds. His hair, which I’ve seen pressed beneath ball caps in the past, is an unruly thatch of chestnut.

“A good smoke on a cold morning, you don’t know how good it is.”

“Listen, I really don’t want to intrude. I hate doing this. It’s just you’re very late.”

“And you need the rent.”

“That’s right.”

Snowbin takes another drag on his cigarette. When he’s done, his chest inflates slightly, as if his next point must germinate there first, among the blood vessels and tendons swirling around his breastbone.

“My daddy used to take me to church. Every Sunday. He was a church elder. Maybe you knew of him, Ray Earl Snowbin.”

Snowbin must know I’m barely forty. Few ever assume I’m older than I am. A meticulous skin care regimen and careful sun exposure has kept wrinkles at bay, absent genetic frown lines. My hair has yet to thin. Yet Snowbin imagines I was a contemporary of his father’s. I consider whether to make this point gently, that his curiosity is implausible. A light correction. Snowbin is older than me.

“I didn’t know him, no, though it’s fantastic whenever someone decides to give back to the church community like that.”

“My daddy talked to God every day. Do you, Pastor Starr, talk to Him every day?”

“I do, yes.”

“Talk. Do you talk?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What is it you talk about?”

“Questions of faith and the soul.”

“Questions of faith and the soul,” he repeats, turning the sentence over in his teeth, infusing it with his own syrupy fury. “Those are large questions. You get your money’s worth.”

“I hope you’re talking to Him too. He’s always listening, you know. Even when you think the door is shut. He wants to hear you.”

“God wants his lot rent.”

“There are temporal matters we do have to tend to, from time to time.”

“If I pay now, do I owe you the fifteen percent?”

“Not yet. But very soon, you will. That’s why I try to stop by. I don’t want anyone in Utopia Gardens paying a late fee. I know, sometimes, money can slip anyone’s mind. I know I’ll forget about a utility bill, the water.” I’ve never forgotten any of these bills. “It does happen.”

“Indeed, life does happen, Pastor Starr.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

The cigarette now dangles from Snowbin’s lips, desperado-style, and his left hand is toying with the pack, bopping it against his denimed thigh. I struggle to imagine what it is, right now, he’s actually thinking.

“There’s a smell here, you know,” Snowbin finally says. “A smell all around.”

“I don’t smell anything in particular. Do you mean in the whole park, or inside your home, or a gas leak?”

“All around, man. You smell it once, you smell it always. It’s like the burnt ass of a thoroughbred. You ever smelled that?”

“I’ve never, no.”

“Here’s what we’ll do. You want a check. You’re a pastor who wants to get paid. I can respect that. The last owner, he just sent us angry letters. You come in for the personal touch.”

“Listen, we’re all people here, and I just want to make sure you’re all right, Mr. Snowbin. I want to be of help.”

“You want to be of help, Pastor Starr?”

“Yes, of course.”

Snowbin stubs out his cigarette. He has me in his sights now. No glancing right or left, no surveying a mythical scene beyond my shoulders. His left hand has steadied and the pack of American Spirits is back in his front pocket. A pair of northern cardinals wheel overhead, their feathers a filmic red. The sky is still quite blue.

“Why, you can pay it for me.”

Perhaps I should have prepped for this turn all along. Most tenants understand the logic undergirding real estate enough to never venture such a request, even of a pastor. They are properly accustomed. The Ungers know they’ve signed a binding lease. Snowbin must know too. I would ache for him if I had heard Quaker State decided, one week ago, they no longer needed men to cheerily change oil. I would ache if the job market were so loose that even handy men couldn’t labor at auto shops any longer. I would ache if I were an anchorite locked away from the world, with no comprehension of temporal economics. Lon Snowbin, with his American Spirits and T.J.Maxx denim, would have my charity, and I would rush to the Chevy’s glove compartment and find my checkbook.

But that is not his reality. He believes he is playing from a strength, not a weakness. He has money socked away somewhere, just not for today, just not for lot rent at Utopia Gardens. He’s betting I’ll fold in, that walking with God is somehow a sign that he can have what he wants and get back to his American Spirits and midday masturbation. I’ve met many men like him. They take the church for little more than an assemblage of rubes and suckers, worshipping the invisible, and they profess an interest in God only when it furthers whatever transitory political agenda they may pursue on the expressway to hell. They vote Republican and that, they figure, should be enough. They last opened the Bible when they were ten and they last spoke about the teachings earnestly when they were eight. Their grasp on the matters of the body politic is not any greater than their understanding of Jesus Christ. A pastor who collects rent isn’t to be taken seriously as a landlord; he preaches, so how can he be owed anything? Pastors are too busy unraveling Exodus to understand a land contract in the state of Michigan. Pastors don’t scrutinize pronouncements from the Federal Reserve or consider the ROI on a distressed property.

Pastors don’t stand in your doorway, unmoving. I grin back at him. There’s a band of warm sunlight hitting my neck just right. Snowbin doesn’t know how eager I can be.

“That’s an excellent suggestion. I’d be happy to take a peek into your accounts and tax returns sometime to see whether you qualify for rental assistance. You may be eligible, depending on your prior year returns. And if you don’t want the government involved at all, I can consider a bridge loan. It would be a favor from me to you because you’ve been at Utopia Gardens for a few years now.”

“A peek, huh?”

“I’d have our office review the paperwork and I’d personally oversee it all so we can process you in a timely manner, assuming you’d like to be processed.”

The gleam has faded. He has, like a butterfly forced backward into his cocoon, assumed his natural state, a man with a circumscribed aptitude for the affairs that involve any movement of money. Bar math is easy, and so is Quaker State math. Lon Snowbin is the kind of man who thinks it’s clever to ask your height and then tell you he didn’t know shit could be piled so high. I could save him if he let me, but he will never let me. He will slink through the years, maybe give the wrong state trooper the side-eye, and do a jail stint he’ll have to explain away when he’s sixty.

“I’ll have the money,” he says quietly.

“I very much appreciate that. And you know what? I think I’ll have a cigarette, after all. I’ve heard good things about American Spirit and it’s been so long.”

Snowbin does not want to reach back into his mohair, fondle the pack, and hand to me, the man extracting monthly lot rent from him, one of his prized cigarettes. He silently offers one, a light tremor in his fingers, and I give him the smile of a man with plenty. It’s my curtain-raiser, extra wide and bright, like the one I normally tuck away for the pulpit.

“And if you could give me a light, please.”

Snowbin passes his teal gas station lighter. I hadn’t noticed it until now. Teal is a color that holds your gaze. “Thank you.”

I hold the lighter in one hand, the cigarette in the other. I put the cigarette to my lips and slowly, slowly, raise the lighter. Snowbin is watching and I have to be sure he’s watching, that he doesn’t lose interest or drift behind his door, never to be seen again. But his cigarette is involved—he’ll keep on me, too despairing to look elsewhere. The cigarette is soft between my lips.

“Ah, well, you know what? I think I changed my mind, Mr. Snowbin. This may be rougher on me than I thought. It’s been so many years since I puffed one of these.”

I pass the lighter back and keep the cigarette cool and crushed in my mouth. If Snowbin had the wherewithal, he’d be calculating precisely how much money he had wasted on me. He would torture himself for days.

After the full second passes, I pluck the cigarette out of my mouth. “My apologies.”

I let Lon Snowbin’s worthless cigarette drop to the dirt and walk back to the Chevy, my time with him through.

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They’ve been calling Kristoffer Borgli this year’s enfant terrible, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. I’ve been avoiding all The Drama drama. I’ve fully opted out. Deep within my brittle bones I’ve grown more than fatigued by the cinematic discourse du jour. I’ve started to feel its weight, like a particularly evil germ, haunting my digestive tract. I think if I ever see another critic, instead of reviewing the actual film itself, opine about why some plot point or character or conception is problematic, about why a film should take risks but not those risks, and why a film should disturb the comfortable but not us and our comfort, or a thousand other rhetorical cul-de-sacs I can only ever read in the tone of a person (you know the type) who claps for emphasis with each patronizing word . . . I think if I ever have to see anything like this again, I’ll spontaneously combust.

But now that I’ve seen The Drama — having successfully avoided all discourse about the film or its director beforehand — I find there’s nothing particularly controversial or shocking about it at all. It’s hard to imagine anybody really having a problem with the film; in fact it seems like most of the negative attention it’s received has been solely in the form of online think pieces with titles like “The Backlash to The Drama Has Begun” or “Why The Drama Is Dividing Audiences,” whose real substance appears to be only reporting that a few people on Twitter criticized the film for being tasteless. So low are the stakes in film these days, the idea that a movie could truly shock its audience, could cause a legitimately passionate reaction beyond a bit of griping online — this idea seems like a dream of an older time.

Though surely there’s been enough of that discourse, too. We who carry on stupidly loving cinema spend our days drowning in eulogies over the demise of movies. Yet it’s nearly impossible to avoid adding your own voice to the funeral dirge, when the subtextual undercurrent of film in the past 15 years has been just that — the loss of an older cinematic culture. Like every other art form, our movies feel untethered from actual life, lost in their little discursive bubbles. Television, too (at least the version of television which has fragmented into streaming media), is so overwhelmingly prim and gray and risk-free. There’s nothing at all of the Dionysian: no real risk or sublimity or sex. No bodily abandon. Yet it’s not like we get anything really Apollonian in its place — never anything sheer, elegant, or exquisitely composed. Mostly we get the same overly-refined, liminal, obvious product. There are of course exceptions, because there are singular, visionary artists in any era. But the exception doesn’t disprove the rule.

Even a perfectly entertaining, good-looking, occasionally funny satire like The Drama (which is actually set in something like our present) is curiously muted — it doesn’t have the true texture of our world, nor even of a heightened movie-world, but a kind of inbetweenness, a too-clean mirror of our own. It lacks a sincere belief in its own unreality, or else fails to make us believe. That it sometimes delivers an accurate picture of the ridiculousness of contemporary neuroticism, and of the darker, more disturbing complexities of personality we first-worlders simply can’t bear to acknowledge — for this we can partially forgive it, and enjoy what it has to offer, as a brief commentary. But it’s still only half an experience. It promises a certain weirdness, a depth of black comedy, and perhaps even some good honest perversion, which it never fully delivers.

Something funny happens when a foreigner tries to make a movie about Americans. Sometimes you get an alienist masterpiece like Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Other times an exoticist fantasy like the films of Chloé Zhao. Kristoffer Borgli at least feels a bit less out of place. After all, he’s heir to a Scandinavian film world that includes Ingmar Bergman (note the Passion of Anna poster on Robert Pattinson’s apartment wall) and the Dogme filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and Borgli most resembles these last two. Or rather: his work in The Drama most resembles Succession, one of the few truly great TV dramas of our time, which was itself influenced by Vinterberg’s darting camera and chaotic scenarios. Succession is also practically the only piece of media to capture the real texture of the last decade. Now Borgli brings this chain of influences more or less full circle, handily combining something of Succession’s glassy, droll anxiousness with the numb, low-lit A24 house style. Watching The Drama, I felt haunted by the growing awareness of just how much contemporary film and television could reasonably be termed the aftermath of Scandinavian Modern.

The soft, warmly-lit look of the film slots easily alongside Celine Song’s Past Lives and Materialists, as well as Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World, and Oslo, August 31st. But Borgli’s film wants to provoke in ways those kinder films never could. What Borgli really wants to get at is the narcissism and neuroticism of upper-middle-class Americans — he wants to play the trollish Scandinavian, breaking out of his pristine Norwegian bubble to worm his way into the taboos and unspoken worries of America’s most enlightened, liberal striving class. Hence the way he throws us immediately into the awkward meet-cute of Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), a disaster that has no reason to work, followed by a date so painful it has no reason to progress, followed by a series of intercut conversations with friends Rachel (Alan Haim) and Mike (the great Mamoudou Athie). From the start, we understand that these two beautiful people are not normal characters — in fact they’re barely characters at all, but ciphers who know next to nothing about each other, and who seem to possess few actual qualities beyond stammering, wincing, or laughing awkwardly.

Pattinson and Zendaya play their characters as doggedly and plausibly as possible, yet that’s exactly what interferes with the film. You get the sense watching it that there’s a strange, funny script running along on one level, trying to develop its central conceit into an exploration of empty, anxious modern people; while on another level, the actors have committed themselves to really selling the psychology and fragility of the characters — but all they can do is contort inwards, looking exasperated, or catatonically depressed. The film is missing that hyperbolic, even cartoonish, comical dimension, which a few more heightened performances could have brought to it. It tosses back and forth between brief moments of realist panic, followed by droll comedy, which works about half the time. There’s none of the swagger or charm Zendaya has shown before: she’s forced to play the bewilderingly naive gamine with supposed dark depths, while Pattinson plays a basic, exasperated neurotic as if begging to be unleashed into the weirdo he really is. Only Alana Haim gets to play her role as if she’s really in her own skin — mostly in the same bitchy register as her role in Licorice Pizza, which was such a great performance you can hardly mind the partial reprise.

The conceit is deadly simple and profoundly Millennial — the same sort of brief, nightmarish moment of oversharing that something like Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave is built on. As they approve the catering and wine for their wedding ceremony, Charlie and Emma sit at night with Mike and Rachel, and their tipsy conversation leads each of them to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. The mistake is Emma’s: she confesses that, at the age of 15, she nearly carried out a school shooting, something she’d actively planned and only abandoned at the last minute. The rest of the film spools out in a panic over this revelation, which Charlie and Mike treat as simply unbelievable — and to which Rachel, whose cousin was paralyzed in a shooting, reacts with disgust and horror. From the moment this happens, the rest of the film is simultaneously decided (because its satire wouldn’t exist without it) and cursed by it (because no person in the film, above all Charlie, seems capable of reacting to it like a normal human being).

To a degree this is Borgli’s doing. He wants us to see the jerky, terrified motions of these fragile people as a pathetic, neurotic response to something that should really be entirely understandable. He wants Emma’s revelation to be a kind of challenge to that neuroticism — the terror, the essentially elitist fear of being contaminated by another person’s filth and darkness. The worry that anyone you know might at any time be harboring fantasies of violence (or any other taboo, or criminal vision). The finest part of the film is the long, chopped-up conversation the morning after, in which Emma tells Charlie the full story of her violent adolescent fantasy. Briefly, the film takes real flight, as Charlie imagines the young Emma, moving to Louisiana with her military father, being teased, developing her fascination with guns, and, as she says it, with the whole “aesthetic” of shootings themselves.

The sequence is funny, frank, illuminated with genuine pathos. Everything about Emma’s situation is in fact quite normal. She wasn’t some warped psychopath — only a sad, isolated kid, at an age when every kid feels sad and isolated. She developed a fascination with revenge, and the cult of shootings, because (as Charlie halfheartedly tries to say to his friends later) that’s exactly what American kids do. Teenagers have always been doomy and fatalistic, have always felt like the central victims of the world. In America they are simply provided with a morbid way out, and this particular way is sensational, cultic, and the subject of a secret, shameful fascination to all Americans. This sequence of the film has nothing but sympathy for the trite, pathetic normality of the young Emma, and for the older Emma, now facing the possible dissolution of her marriage only because her fragile fiancé, so disturbed by the possible latent violence in his future wife, can barely stop for a moment and consider how completely basic the girl’s anger and dissociation were.

The real masterstroke of the film — a high point it never quite recovers from — is the further revelation of how Emma’s plan was interrupted. Before she could carry it out, another shooting happened nearby, claiming the life of a kid from her school. Soon she was swept up in a student crusade and in fact became a strident activist against gun violence. All it took was that one sudden shift, and a newfound sense of belonging, and young Emma was freed from her ideas of violence, “like waking up from a dream.” Charlie mordantly compares this to Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien, about a French boy who is rejected from the resistance and joins the Nazis instead, “Only in reverse.” He’s nearly right, though he cannot finally intellectualize it. Of course, Emma’s story reveals how life actually works, which is what’s apparently intolerable about it. We’re not all running on simple, reducible scripts of violence or non-violence; sometimes completely normal people get into very dark, violent obsessions without being total psychopaths; then, just as quickly, they snap out of it.

What really haunts Charlie (and Mike, and Rachel) is the boring universal contingency of all human life, the capacity of every person for committing terrible acts. In this, Borgli gets the mundane absurdity of 21^st-century American professional class morality dead right — since their world is more or less predicated on denying that they could ever be capable of doing or thinking the wrong thing. Had Emma gone through with her plan, she would have been irrevocably marked as evil, and remembered as a tragic psychopath. But she didn’t. So is the person standing in front of Charlie, about to marry him, really a normal, trustworthy person? When Charlie asks his coworker what she would do if she found out something similar about her partner, she blithely responds, “I don’t know, call the police?” It’s a good line. It hammers home just how hopeless we are before the unknown dimensions of those we claim to know. At some point in the past, someone thought about doing something horrible — but what authority now could punish them for that? Do people deserve punishment for things they’ve only thought about? Well, somebody deserves punishment. Otherwise, how do we know it was wrong?

We can see where Borgli is going with this: look at these yuppies, look at this tortured, crumpling man, unable to recognize the abject humanity of his lover. Borgli certainly gleans the hypocrisy of a certain class of young-ish Americans: stridently moralist in temper, while aspiring towards complete inoffensiveness; but secretly very afraid of being associated with the wrong people, deeply concerned with making sure those people get punished. The trouble with all of this is that it feels secondary to the general unbearable, personal anxiousness that grips Charlie, which also renders Emma an equally confused, stammering mess. By the time we get to the finale, and the wedding, the film has long since passed the point at which a normal person would have either abandoned the ceremony, or accepted the tormented past of their partner. It has spun its wheels furiously to get where it was going, while generally losing the threads of deeper questions set off by those early revelations. The ending, after the disaster of the wedding, feels perfunctory and unearned, as if beamed in from a simpler movie. Perhaps this is the point, given the abortive rom-com we were presented with at the film’s start.

With more viewings, it’s possible The Drama will stand up a little better. At first sight, it’s a film that wants to provoke far more than it actually does. On the other hand, anyone troubled by its attempt to make satire out of school shootings should keep far away from movies for a while. One thing the film certainly gets right is that narcissism and moral hypocrisy, though universal and perennial, have a specific flavor in the 21^st century. So many people are so neurotic about art, sex, and emotion, they can barely enjoy them. They wish to be libertines, but worry whether the people around them are secretly thinking bad thoughts, or harboring the wrong desires. This is especially true in literature and film: all many people seem to see in a work of art is their own convictions (which are never as deeply held as they’d like to think), reflected or rebuked in it. Because of this, cinematic discourse these days rarely gets past a childish kind of pseudo-morality. Art is never given any real freedom — never allowed to risk being wrong.

The Drama at least gestures towards the kind of challenging and even offensive work we so desperately need. If I got anything from the film, it’s this: the urgency, the necessity for someone to come along and make a film that actively shocks, angers, and disturbs our miserable moral complacency. We’re starving for it. After the disappointment of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, I felt especially despondent. What’s missing in Fennell’s movies is missing everywhere else. There’s no true vulgarity or excess. There’s no abandon. She wants everything prim and controlled, glossy, wrapped in lurid colors; a candy-colored confectionary feast on a too-green lawn. She apparently believes that kink, vomit, blood, and eggy fluids all add up to some sort of feverish sexual transgression, when in truth it’s as dull and frigid as a dollhouse. After Wuthering Heights, I found myself returning almost reflexively to my beloved Ken Russell, that great maverick of British cinema — particularly The Devils, a masterpiece of true Dionysian excess, so orgiastic and blasphemous it was banned and redacted in countless places. It’s a beautiful, absurd film, filled with medieval violence and pagan riot, genuinely dangerous, genuinely erotic, and cruel. But totally free to offend anyone, throwing itself without reserve at every historical hypocrisy it can sink its teeth into. Russell paid the cost for it. Yet the result makes whatever passes for transgression in art today seem so tame it hurts. How long do we have to wait before cinema gets that brave again?

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

In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up windows made things feel fake-apocalyptic. Then we heard the sound of glass smashing and people screaming. My friend wanted to leave, but I insisted we turn the corner to see what was happening. We stuck our heads past the faux-brick wall and saw no one. The screaming and window-smashing cut to dialogue. It was coming from a television in someone’s apartment. The protest, when we found it, was also an overproduced phantasm. Mainly, my memory is of people with signs marching around a blond and smooth-faced boy who lounged atop a shiny Mustang, phone in hand, chains glittering in the ringlight. As an outlet for collective outrage, the protest was very successful. It endures as a feeling captured in iPhone videos that no doubt garnered millions of views on that blond boy’s TikTok. But other than setting a moral agenda, the protests of the 2010s and 2020s achieved no tangible political outcome. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act never made it through the Senate, and the post-2020 police department budget cuts have been restored, even augmented. Police violence has increased; in 2019, cops killed 1,098 people. In 2024, that number was 1,271. But Jeff Bezos, defender of “personal liberties” in the Washington Post, did (let’s not forget!) redraw the Amazon logo to say “Black Lives Matter” in June 2020.

Anton Jäger, a Belgian political theorist who teaches at Oxford and contributes regularly to the New York Times opinion section, argues in Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences — published in February by Verso — that the spectral nature of protest is a consequence of the spectral nature of political parties, institutions, and social cohesion. From the mid-2010s to now, Jäger identifies:

[A] new mode of interaction between public and private. It is dynamic, intense, and polarizing, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modeled on the fluidity of the online world . . . low-commitment, low-cost, and often, low-value . . . a Carrollian grin without a cat.

This era is hyperpolitics.

Like Baudrillard before him (and de Tocqueville before him), Jäger belongs to an intellectual tradition of Europeans who look to America as a case study in the political present, and as an augury of the global future. The result is a sleek little book that compiles and reworks essays that appeared in The Point, New Left Review, New Statesman, and Jacobin, providing a compelling and ambitiously broad overview of our current political era, gathered from a variety of sources: Michel Houellebecq’s novels, Wolfgang Tillmans’ photos, Weber, Habermas, Putnam, Graeber, Hobswam and Sloterdijk, Fisher and Žižek. All are placed in conversation by Jäger who deftly orchestrates with a dispassionate and perceptive ear.

Baudrillard gets the first word, in Jäger’s preface. In 1986, the French theorist diagnosed the U.S. with a case of hysteresis. America, Baudrillard said, is like a character in the Alfred Jarry story Supermale. It has died mid-bicycle race, but its corpse continues to pedal even faster than before, because sometimes dead systems function better than live ones. Since 1986 ⏤ when Baudrillard published America, six years before Fukuyama declared the “end of history” ⏤ a necromancer has been busy. The 2020s have seen an increase in political activity and a decrease in political outcomes. Voter turnout in 2020 was the highest it’s been since 1900, at 66%. Sixteen assassination plots against Trump plus 13 against Obama is a dramatic uptick from the two against Bush and five against Clinton. Indignation expressed through protests and capitol-stormings is the norm. But this political frenzy comes from an inactive, mushy civic body, whose workplace and community associations have dissolved in the “acid of deindustrialization and triumphant market logic.” No connective tissues ⏤ no political parties ⏤ remain, yet the ghost of politics flailingly animates the dead body politic in a semblance of frenetic activity.

Four eras make up Jäger’s reckoning of the past century: mass politics, postpolitics, antipolitics, and hyperpolitics. The period from 1914 to 1989 marked the era of mass politics. In 1918, Weber offered its definition: “a slow, strong drilling through hard boards.” Politics required a “passion and a sense of judgment” and, for Weber, a populace whose total political involvement, supported institutionally, was a given. Unions, clubs, and party membership formed the basis for political action, especially in the case of workers’ rights in Europe, because these institutions were able to pull the levers of governmental power. Unions were heavily involved in Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, and the outcomes of the Civil Rights movement ⏤ changes to voting law and educational reform ⏤ were protest’s tangible results.

Postpolitics, from 1989 to 2008, followed. The cover of Hyperpolitics is an emblematic photo of the era: a caution-yellow border frames a 1989 photo of a blissed-out woman in a nightclub dimly lit by a moon-like disco ball. Her eyes are closed, lips parted. A man reaches from out of frame, fingers laced through her hair. This moment of lazy ecstasy is called “Love (Hands in Hair)” by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. For Annie Ernaux, another chronicler of the postpolitical era, “in the humdrum routine of personal existence, history did not matter.” In 1989, in this warehouse devoid of the industry whose crashes and clangs inspired the techno that the woman in the photo is dancing to, Tillmans captured revelers in Berlin and London in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a rite of deliberate “collective amnesia,” an “after-the-orgy” in Baudrillard’s terms, when the bloodlust of both World Wars was forgotten, hippie love-ins morphed into board meetings, and the pleasurable tentacles of capitalism began to stroke consumers’ egos on a global scale. The personal pursuit of freedom (to consume) and enjoyment (of products) was everything. An era in which William S. Burroughs starred in an ad for Nike. An era in the U.S. not of Watergate wiretaps or large-scale Presidential child rape-murders, just simple extramarital White House blowjobs. An era of NGOs, consultants, slashes to union power, and shrinking church congregations.

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The erosion of public political life under postpolitics uprooted political institutions, resulting in the mudslide into antipolitics (2010s), landing finally in the hyperpolitical gulch of the 2010s to now. George Putnam, in his 2000 suburban sociological treatise Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, suggests that the end of civic life in the ’80s and ’90s was a result of longer working hours, car culture, shopping malls, and that “tombstone of postwar loneliness,” television. Though Americans were bowling, they weren’t joining leagues anymore ⏤ they were bowling alone. And this dissolution was felt most strongly by the left, an intervention of Jäger’s I’ll return to later. Jäger says that all this bowling alone produced the antipolitical era; Mark Fisher’s “depressive hedonism” and Sam Kriss’ “boozy nihilist perspective” were typical modes of politics in this era. Antipolitics, unlike postpolitics, was also characterized by populism and indignation. The anti- prefixed the status quo, and it manifested mainly on the left: as Sanders and Occupy Wall Street, as the Podemos movement in Spain, as the Movimiento 5 Stelle in Italy, and as support for Corbyn in the U.K. But it also had some right-wing manifestations that have, it seems, surpassed their left-wing equivalents: the Tea Party, Boris Johnson, eventually Donald Trump, and Matteo Salvini. Parties were further hollowed out, supported by external funders rather than membership dues. Now we have politics without parties, hyperpolitics:

[A] permanently volatile, diffuse phenomenon. Whereas populist parties at least made the first steps towards reinstitutionalization, “hyperpolitical” refers to a general atmosphere rather than to specific actors . . . a redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage.

Hyperpolitics is all vibes ⏤ and bad vibes, at that.

“Hyperpolitics” was originally coined in 1993 by Peter Sloterdijk. As social cohesion dissolves, said the Dutch political theorist, the once steady ship of state has become a high-speed super-ferry “so vast as to be almost unsteerable, plowing through a sea of drowning people with waves battering the hull and anxious conferences unfolding onboard.” Sounds like the annual luxury cruise of The Nation! For Jäger, a failure on the left was responsible for the shift to panicked hyperpolitics. In the U.S., Democrats did not rebuild political parties, but instead made a muddled, consultant-driven attempt at uniting opposing constituencies (becoming, to quote Christian Lorentzen, “the party of anti-monopolists and Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide.”) The second issue is that Putnam’s thesis ⏤ that the dissolution of associative life leads to political atomism in Bowling Alone ⏤ is true more for the left than for the right. A study called “Golfing with Trump” showed Trump trouncing Romney in 2016 in Rust Belt and Midwest counties where golfing and other communitarian associations remained comparatively intact. On the right, there may be a civic renaissance afoot. Could hyperpolitics be history?

Jäger’s book, unsurprisingly, doesn’t end on a high note: “Our patient has awoken from a coma to a state of frenzied activity, without ever coming to terms with the symptoms.” Bouts of mania and melancholy (Jäger is paraphrasing Freud here) are a common response to losing something precious. And we have lost memberships in groups that once made it possible for us to exert some control over our political destinies. Groups ⏤ physical associations ⏤ sustained not only stable political entities but also our senses of self and agency. So, what’s a hyperpolitical leftist bowling enthusiast to do? “The prospects for any renewal will have to be sought in everyday life ⏤ in those circumstances in which people still regularly enter into contact with others.” Where are those places? Daycares and retirement homes, says Jäger. Jesus Christ. That’s fucking depressing. And neighborhoods, adds Jäger, unhelpfully.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Jäger’s book is its gloomy nostalgia; for all his wide scope, packed into fewer than 100 pages, Jäger lacks the mischievous ironizing of a Baudrillard, or the innocent excitement of a de Tocqueville. If social media has made the ultraconservative slope slipperier than ever, it’s because the image the alt-right has cultivated and disseminated online is that it has fun. January 6^th, with its carnival and pageantry, its Wagner horns and facepaint and parkour stunts around the Senate floor, looked like a good time. Pussy Grabs Back rallies? With those floppy pink vagina cat hats? Not so much. QAnon hint-drops were exciting, like the next installment of The West Wing wasn’t. The right has re-enchanted politics in a way that frumpy leftist consensus-pessimism simply can’t. No, my idea of fun in 2020 wasn’t watching an e-boy draped like a showroom dummy over his muscle car, but my idea of fun isn’t sitting in a drab two-hour DSA meeting, either. My idea of a party is, well, a party. Let’s go knock on Zohran Mamdani’s door and see what he’s up to.

Madeleine Adams is a writer living in Brooklyn, whose fiction and nonfiction reviews have appeared in The Baffler, Dirt, and Public Seminar. She is a contributing editor to the journal of literary philosophy, Book XI.

Overkill

Jet-black lager like domino on swan 
Toddler thoughts on the moon’s face 
I wrote a novel during the year I knew you 
Your casino watch and birthmark 
We curved evenings out of rigid anger 
You reminded me of a dead world 
which is to say my childhood 
I knew our time was baby time but I gave 
it away anyway, spewing dollars 
from buildings. As if no one could touch me 
if I closed my eyes

My Dreams Did Not Come True 

Eating peppermints and not fitting in 
Winter light in my cherry hairstyle, 
deerlike in my injury 
The lake froze into whipped cream 
What is the ontological status 
of inexistence? 
Is it science or sauce? 
There’s not literally a horse 
in my head, the horse is in the field 
So you just thought of it? 
Your eyes were like navy slacks 
I pulled on and off 
Is it going to go on like this for a while? 
Sawing the moon into neat pieces 
of Mylanta

Kimberly Lambright is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Doom Glove (PRROBLEM Press, 2024) and Ultra-Cabin (42 Miles Press). She is a MacDowell Colony fellow, and her poetry appears in Phoebe, Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, The Burnside Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

I. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Christmastime in Las Vegas: tinsel on the slot machines, Santa hats on the pit bosses, short days, vivid winter sunsets, balmy nights. Tourist shortages have recently put the city in a nervous mood, as Americans increasingly choose to gamble from the safety of their couches, but you wouldn’t know that making your way through the crowds that fill the plush lobbies and malls and casino floors of the Wynn and the Venetian and the Flamingo, crowds of staggering variety: couples and families from Tel Aviv, from Dubai, from Shenzhen, all there to experience the most American of cities, that strange neon bloom in the desert built on mob money and defense money and the fantasy of hitting it big. That’s where I was, in town to meet up with my girlfriend and her family for the holidays, and consumed with thoughts of The Wizard of Oz.

Consumed because we had tickets to The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, a “4-D experience” at the gigantic domed arena which “harnesses the power of AI, alongside traditional VFX, to bring The Wizard of Oz — a film made in 1939 — to life in an unparalleled way,” or so the promotional copy says. And consumed because, ever since I first saw it as a small child, I have considered The Wizard of Oz, if not my favorite movie, at least the Ultimate Movie, the American Midsummer Night’s Dream or Alice in Wonderland, art and entertainment and joy and tragedy all working as one. It means something that Sphere Entertainment has, at a cost of over $100 million, chosen The Wizard of Oz for its inaugural venture into film (not counting a U2 concert film or Darren Aronofsky’s glorified planetarium show Postcard From Earth) and not Star Wars or Marvel or any other more recent cultural phenomenon. Their bet on this nearly 90-year-old film has been rewarded; as of this writing The Wizard of Oz at Sphere has sold 2.2 million tickets, made nearly $300 million, and been extended at least until December, and possibly indefinitely. This 1939 adaptation of an odd children’s story has turned out to be unfathomably deep and resonant. Though suffused with the spirit of the age, with the old spirit of vaudeville and the sadness and hope of the Great Depression, The Wizard of Oz nevertheless has a strong claim to being the most timeless and endlessly renewable piece of American art.

As you file into the auditorium, the Sphere’s 106,000-square-foot wraparound screen is done up to look like an old Hollywood movie palace, with velvet curtains and an ornate ceiling. The lights dim, the MGM lion roars, the fanfare plays, and suddenly the theater disappears and the sepia Kansas sky over which the opening credits roll is in front of you, above you, behind you, filling your field of vision, bigger than any other screen in the world, bigger than life. The music, newly re-recorded and blended with the original vocals at great expense, fills the hall via thousands of speakers, gorgeously clear. For a few minutes, it is enchanting.

But something’s not quite right. Something is, in fact, very, very wrong. These aren’t the characters you’re used to; they’re jerky and unnatural. Dorothy’s face is TikTok-smooth, her freckles disappear and reappear from shot to shot. Cuts have been made — a line here, a transition there — to bring the movie from 100 minutes down to 80, and the film feels sped-up, with no time to luxuriate in the small moments. In the showstopping tornado sequence, the audience is blasted with powerful wind machines, paper leaves scatter, and seats rumble and vibrate until the house lands with a thump, Dorothy opens her front door and steps into the Technicolor land of Oz. But this isn’t the Oz we know, the psychedelically unreal painted soundstage backdrops of the original. It’s a semi-realistic landscape that resembles a PlayStation 3 game. Look up! There’s a bird going into a CGI flower. Look to the left! There’s an AI-generated munchkin just standing around and waving on a loop. Dive into the behind-the-scenes promotional content for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere and you’ll find that the Google Cloud engineers interviewed sound uncannily like proponents of the roundly derided early AI trend of extending the backgrounds of paintings, so we could see what the rest of the Mona Lisa’s body was doing. Don’t you want to know what the Scarecrow was up to in all those close-ups of Dorothy? Don’t you ever wish, while watching The Wizard of Oz in a theater or on television, you had a bigger frame, so you could see residents of the Emerald City milling about in the background?

If you answered yes, you likely perceive The Wizard of Oz as a piece of endlessly remixable IP, a glimpse into a dynamic world which can always be modified and expanded upon. If you answered no, you perceive the film as a discrete cultural artifact and product of a specific place and time, and the frame as a composed space and a productive limitation rather than a constraint. It is the battle between those two incompatible worldviews that has come to define the modern entertainment industry, and as The Wizard of Oz at Sphere demonstrates, the former is currently winning. Yet the most exciting and delightful special effects in The Wizard of Oz at Sphere are all showman’s tricks as old as theater itself: the magnificent tornado sequence, the fake snow that fills the auditorium during the poppy field scene, the drone-powered flying monkeys that swoop overhead. The overwhelming size and clarity of the Sphere screen is impressive, to be sure. But it’s disquieting to watch these real people made into jerky AI marionettes, put into a new CGI landscape that has little of the beauty or artistry of the original, and much is lost when you take away the guiding hand of the filmmaker, who consciously guides the viewer’s emotions through each frame. At the end of the day, I would have had just as much if not more fun in a packed theater, watching the unimprovable 1939 version.

II. The Genius of the System

I had reached no greater understanding of the film’s unique magic, so I set out to look for answers in the accounts of its creation. To my surprise, the narrative of the immortal human artistic impulse vs. the crude and inelegant hand of the machine falls apart when you begin to study the making of The Wizard of Oz. In the late 1930s, when studio logos meant something, MGM stood for glossy prestige pictures, all swirling strings and luscious Technicolor: musicals, sophisticated comedies, highbrow literary adaptations. Under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (the model for the powerful Hollywood producer in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon), they were a factory, an assembly line that turned these films out by the dozen. The Wizard of Oz is the ultimate example of the studio system at full power, of film-by-committee, and its author is best described as MGM itself, embodied in the Technicolor unit, the costume department, the songwriters Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, and everyone else who worked on the film. Victor Fleming is the credited director, but he was one of four (alongside Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, who worked closely with Judy Garland to develop the Dorothy character, and King Vidor, who shot the Kansas scenes). There were 10 writers, some of whom drafted large parts of the story and some of whom merely punched up dialogue and pace. Auteurism simply doesn’t apply here.

Not to say, of course, that human artistic decisions didn’t play a vital role, as they did when Harburg, Arlen, and producer Arthur Freed intervened to stop Mayer, in the role of know-nothing suit, from cutting “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” But perhaps the alien perfection of The Wizard of Oz comes from the fact that while one can see the evidence of great effort in every frame, from the painted backdrops to the lovingly stitched costumes, the whole thing appears to have been assembled by some overmind, some higher intelligence. It runs counter to the romantic ideal of the individual craftsman, the ideal by which we are taught to understand most kinds of art. And yet, like a medieval cathedral built over hundreds of years by thousands of hands, the film is no less human for it.

When it came out, it was considered neither a masterpiece nor a blockbuster. “As for the light touch of fantasy, it weighs like a pound of fruitcake soaking wet,” pronounced the New Republic’s Otis Ferguson, who also called Garland’s singing and dancing “thumping, overgrown gambols” (somebody kill this guy!). “A stinkeroo,” was the verdict of Russell Maloney of the New Yorker. There were many positive reviews as well, but the film was only a modest success at the box office, and only broke even on its lavish production and marketing budget upon its 1949 re-release. It was television that made The Wizard of Oz a phenomenon; the film was thrown in as part of a package deal for the rights to show Gone With the Wind, and became a yearly event on CBS beginning in the late 1950s, just as color television was beginning to spread.

These facts lend themselves easily to a materialist explanation for the popularity and resonance of the film: a generation of baby boomer critics and filmmakers watched it when they were young (such as David Lynch, whose love for Oz is explored in the documentary Lynch/Oz), showed it to their children, put it in their own films, and it became an enduring classic essentially by accident and circumstance. Yet, watching it, do you really feel that way? Vulgar materialism melts away when faced with its mystical, mythical power. The Wizard of Oz “somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don’t,” wrote Roger Ebert, because “its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them, and then reassures them.” Sooner than you think, it says to the child, you’ll be thrust into the adult world, where you’ll find color, opportunity, and friendship, but also difficulty and terror. Authority figures will turn out to be fraudulent or bumbling. You’ll have to rely on your brains, heart, and courage. As adults, we know this to be true.

It is well documented (particularly in Aljean Harmetz’s essential study The Making of the Wizard of Oz) that no one had any fun making the most delightful film of all time. Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr (the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, respectively) arrived at the studio at 6:30 a.m. every day for their two-hour makeup sessions, and would suffocate for hours under the brutally hot arc lights needed for the Technicolor cameras. Haley couldn’t sit down in his Tin Man costume; he would lean against a board between takes. Lahr ate his lunch through a straw. Buddy Ebson, originally cast as the Tin Man, was hospitalized and put on oxygen for two weeks after inhaling too much of the aluminum powder in his makeup and finding himself unable to breathe (when they recast Haley, they changed the formula). Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch, was badly burned during a stunt. Hollywood lore has it that the 124 actors playing the Munchkins terrorized the set with drinking, practical jokes, and hotel orgies; though this appears to be greatly embellished, it is undoubtedly true that they were financially exploited, their salaries ending up in the hands of unscrupulous men like Leo Singer, who leased them out like trained animals as “Singer’s Midgets.” Even Toto (played by a female Cairn Terrier named Terry) had to take two weeks off after a crew member stepped on her paw.

All this toil, strife, and exploitation must have had some subliminal effect on the final product, because part of what keeps The Wizard of Oz from being an entirely saccharine fantasy is the darkness, sadness, and pain around the edges. There are moments of cruel sarcasm and sadism, such as in the “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” sequence, in which the Munchkins gleefully describe the witch’s death (the falling house was “not a healthy situation for the Wicked Witch / who began to twitch, and was reduced to just a stitch”) and hand Dorothy a bouquet for having “killed her so completely.” There’s the moment no child ever forgets, in which Dorothy, trapped in the witch’s castle, sees the face of Auntie Em in the crystal ball on the table suddenly turn into the face of the witch, mocking her cries for help, or the moment when the flying monkeys tear apart the Scarecrow. And if you know anything about the American entertainment tradition, there’s something melancholy about seeing Bolger, Haley, and Lahr, all of whom came up in vaudeville, playing the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, these creatures searching for a purpose, something to make them whole. The great indigenous art form these men trained in had vanished, utterly destroyed by the very movies they were helping to make, and even in their wonderfully comedic performances, something of this sense of loss comes through.

III. The Brains, the Heart, the Nerve

There’s one major thing about The Wizard of Oz I’ve mostly avoided mentioning until now: Judy, the girl with heartbreak in her voice. Without Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz would be a great film, but only with her does it become the apogee of all cinematic entertainment. As the film critic Brendan Boyle has pointed out, “Of all the special effects the movie employs, there is nothing more immediately upsetting than the image of Judy Garland crying.” By now it’s well known what MGM did to Garland: fed her speed to keep her going and downers to put her to sleep, constantly criticized her for her weight and called her unattractive, employed members of the studio to spy on her, encouraged her to abort her first child, claiming it would ruin her girlish image, and eventually blamed her for becoming a flighty, unreliable addict and cut her loose. When she died of an accidental overdose at 47, many blamed MGM for what they saw as a slow-motion murder. But you don’t have to know any of this tragic background to see the real pain and fear and sorrow in Garland’s performance, her outrage when she first meets the Wicked Witch and when her alter ego Miss Gulch tries to take Toto away, and her essential kindness towards the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wizard. There is something in Garland’s combination of pain and goodness that immediately draws us to her, that makes us long to see her happy, safe, and comfortable again. No other movie star, Golden Age or otherwise, brings out this response.

Then there’s the voice, that inexplicable object. If Garland’s tearful face is the most upsetting thing in The Wizard of Oz, her voice somehow draws those tears out of us, cuts through everything in the world to hit us straight in the heart, as it does in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” (If you want to really turn on the waterworks, listen to her quavering, world-weary, gorgeously-arranged performance of “Over the Rainbow” at her 1961 Carnegie Hall concert; the entire audience pin-drop silent. Don’t listen to it in the office or on public transit, though, if you want to avoid concerned glances.) Tears are a constant with Garland. “I asked some professional musicians to explain what made her voice so great but even they were mostly reduced to mute gestures of love,” writes Bee Wilson in a recent London Review of Books essay on Garland. “No one at MGM could have taught her to sing the way she did.” Halfway through the companion podcast (and LRB podcasts are generally quite reserved affairs), discussing the resonance of “Over the Rainbow,” Wilson, too, starts crying.

But even a talent like Garland can’t carry the film on her own, as anyone who has watched her more obscure films is aware. I began this essay intending to find out exactly what makes The Wizard of Oz so perfect, so heartbreakingly gorgeous, so engineered in every frame to surprise, delight, terrify, and enchant. I have to admit, after rewatching it twice (once at the Sphere and once at home) and reading hundreds of pages on its creation and its impact, I still don’t feel as if I’ve grasped it. Perhaps there is no better explanation than to say that it bloomed up out of the collective unconsciousness, whatever subliminal story it tells us was brought into being because it had to exist, and everyone who helped usher it into the world, from the directors and screenwriters to the costume and set designers to Garland to the Munchkins, were midwives in a process they did not fully understand. You can easily detect the authorial hand or the set of social circumstances that produced other great popular art of the period: Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Citizen Kane. They are wonderful, but ultimately explainable. The Wizard of Oz stands apart — we are still trying to decipher where it came from and what it is trying to tell us. Beautiful, funny, sad, thrilling, electrically alive in every frame, it does for us what we want to do for Garland: it is like a comet, a wondrous, shimmering orb descending upon our bewildered, frightened, tornado-tossed selves to comfort and encourage us. Sometimes one must lay down one’s sword in the war against cliché and reach for a phrase battered and beaten to death by Hollywood’s perennial celebrations of itself, by a thousand Oscar clip shows and smarmy executives and vapid paeans to the power of the silver screen. Sometimes one has to shrug and call it what it is: movie magic.

What are Hollywood movies for, anyway? Are they mere escapism, insidious distractions, showing us beautiful people and places for a while so we don’t have to think about our own circumstances? Are they a cruel dream factory, luring in the young and talented only to destroy them and later strip them for parts to be used in an AI-generated thrill-ride, meant to separate Vegas tourists from their money at the rate of three shows a day, seats starting at $110 with optional VIP Bad Witch Luxury Experience? Or are they that, but also something more? Are they expressions of our will to imagine, to create, to visualize, as the song goes, what lies beyond the rainbow, and then, through months of labor and thousands of people, bring it into being, at least for an hour and 40 minutes at a time? The current moneymen and moguls in Hollywood and the tech industry (but I repeat myself, the two are at this point one and the same) talk of eliminating the human element from filmed entertainment, of a future in which we can all spend our time in a numbed-out haze watching the voices, bodies, and personas of the honored dead ghoulishly reanimated — Mickey Mouse fighting Darth Vader, or whatever. It’s a bleak vision, a kind of cosmic cynicism that makes the likes of Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer look like pure art-for-arts-sake aesthetes, and I shudder to think of it.

Yet watching The Wizard of Oz tells us that the artistic spirit prevails at unexpected times and in unexpected places, and that at a previous moment when studio power was at its most formulaic and tyrannical, when individual expression was crushed and labor was exploited and abused, some combination of forces nevertheless came together to produce this film: a miraculous achievement, a film that, through all its silly costumes and fantastical songs and knockabout vaudeville routines, manages to speak directly to the indescribable mix of joy and melancholy that arises in each of us when we think of the perils of childhood, of the thrills and disappointments of adulthood, and of the perennial longing for home.

Henry Begler, a contributing writer to The Metropolitan Review, writes the Substack newsletter A Good Hard Stare. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

The 20th century variously imagined the end of history: rapture, communism, the triumph of neoliberalism. For the people of the Lamb of God, it was a gust of wind and words. Partly because far-away Jews had recently reclaimed the city of Jerusalem and partly because of our own faithfulness, we believed we were witnessing the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Heaven was “inbreaking,” and before long, it would fully sweep the earth.

It was the late 1980s, and the Baltimore-based Lamb of God was one of dozens of “covenant communities” that had formed amidst the Catholic charismatic renewal. Adults pledged to tithe and obey leaders, then took their families to prayer meetings or festivals at the Farm, a sprawling estate with bonfires, pony rides, potato sack races, and a maypole. Thirty-plus years have not diminished the sensorial clarity of that place: the amber glow on the horizon, the dirt on my feet, the hum of a people who are sure that something big is about to happen.

We took our cues from the second chapter of Acts, where it’s written that, after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, his friends gathered in the upper room of a house, frightened and confused. Jesus had proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, but then the Roman Empire got him. He’d returned only to vanish again. As the apostles fretted about what to do, there came a “mighty, rushing wind,” then “tongues of fire.” Possessed by Jesus’ ghost, and now speaking strange languages, they went forth to proclaim the Good News.

So much of our lives, even the way we kids moved at our community-run school — in pairs, as the apostles did — was an extension of this scripture. We called Jesus “Yeshua,” we shook, cried, and gibbered ourselves silly — often, in the middle of math class. All this, because we were purposed with opening the text, with making prophecy come true.

I’ve never known anyone outside the Lamb of God to live in such a double way, in two places and times. And so, it’s not lost on me why the literary scholar Michael Warner writes that the Pentecostals of his own childhood gave him a “passionate intellectual life of which universities are only a pale ivory shadow.” Nowhere, not even in graduate English departments, has either of us found such a “profoundly hermeneutic” culture.

But if there is a romance to Pentecostalism, it also has a shadow side. In the Lamb of God, we kids were disposed to associate the Holy Spirit with spectacular force. I can remember prayer meetings that turned into mob scenes. Children would lose sight of their parents as someone with a microphone prayed for fire to fall. When people began to shake, they were said to be “slain in the spirit.” Holiness, in our minds, was being massacred by a ghost.

We didn’t know it then, but some of our peers and mothers were being molested, either by the community’s sole priest leader or by another prominent figure. In sister communities, and at charismatic colleges, abuse was becoming even more rampant. Often, it was disguised as spiritual healing.

At Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, a woman was reportedly raped by a campus chaplain who was conducting “deliverance sessions,” he said, to relieve her of lingering demons from a childhood assault. When the woman became pregnant, the priest blamed a demon, then compelled her to have an abortion. Though there’s no evidence they witnessed rape, members of the university-affiliated Community of God’s Love participated in some sessions, dousing the woman with holy water.

By the early aughts, Catholic charismatics were also using “spiritual warfare” against outsiders. In one town, our co-religionists stormed a public library to celebrate Mass, then made their way to city hall to cast out evil spirits there. In another, they helped a Pentecostal preacher drive out a specter named Unbelief, which they believed to be hovering over the area because of a local suicide.

This was my moral universe, one of sublime, penetrative spirits and clearly demarcated boundaries — “us” and “them.” Even though I never knew the worst of it, even though my parents were gentle and kind, I had little sense of the mystery, the playfulness, the extravagance of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, and notwithstanding the community’s weird hermeneutics, I thought of the Bible — of all texts — as closed things. They contained truth; they did not spill over or spin out.

Going back to Acts, I’m struck by the excess of Pentecost. Tongues unify the apostles as one corpus, but they simultaneously multiply them. Tongues mystify the apostles, but they also drive them to the ends of the earth. The apostles know not what they speak — only that this truth does not belong to them.

I often ask myself how then any Pentecostals could become so sure of themselves, landing on this: the Holy Spirit that some understand as possessing humans is, for others, something to be possessed by humans. People mistake a ghost for a thing they can domesticate. They think they can catch that dove and put it in a cage to hoard for themselves or sic upon their enemies. But sooner or later, the ghost makes its presence known. The bird gets out.

I was in graduate school when I first encountered Don DeLillo, the acclaimed postwar novelist known for critiquing consumerism, nuclear war, and paranoia. Sitting around a seminar table with White Noise, my peers and I may still have been figuring out what constituted the postmodern aesthetic, but we didn’t dare let on, dropping terms like “irony” and “late-stage capitalism.” By the end of that seminar, I’d discerned that literary critics associated postmodernism with cynicism, especially about grand narratives. And further that postmodernists viewed meaning as subjective. At long last, it made sense why so many Catholics used the word “postmodern” to mean atheist or Protestant. In their minds, both denied the Truth.

But the more I read of DeLillo, the more I came to understand that the mysterious, leather-jacketed man on the back cover was deeply serious, especially about the transcendent nature of language and ritual. White noise refers to the hum of information and technology that characterize modernity, but it also refers to the chanting, the babble, the “sacred small talk” that forms the daily liturgy of human life.

Literary scholar Amy Hungerford traces DeLillo’s mysticism to his days as an altar boy in the pre-Vatican II Church. The little Italian American from the Bronx spent many a morning listening to inaudible chants as they floated from a priest’s lips to the domed ceiling. He watched incense curl in the same direction.

According to Hungerford, DeLillo inherited from the Latin Mass a thoroughly sacramental understanding of the world, which he transposed to fiction, fashioning characters who spoke nonsense and marveled at objects, then transporting to some higher plane. On the page, and long after seeming to abandon his baptismal faith, DeLillo treated the unintelligible as a means to the divine.

But DeLillo was also inspired by Acts, and his 1982 novel The Names complicates an easy reading of language. It dramatizes a mock Pentecost, where cult members murder people whose first and last names share an initial. If the first-century apostles used language to unify, members of the titular cult use it to sow terror and chaos. Language, for DeLillo, is, then, neither intrinsically holy nor intrinsically unholy. It can free someone from reason, from what Names’ narrator calls the “machinery” of the self, but this is a morally ambiguous project.

By the time I encountered DeLillo, I’d given up prayer — given up God, the idea of a taskmaster in the sky too much a strain on the intellect, especially one yearning to be assimilated by academia. But I must have felt God’s absence, explaining the draw. I must have remembered the strange tongues of my childhood, talking to this artist who created something, not ex nihilo, but ex morte. Not from nothing but from death.

My old co-religionists were wrong about postmodernism — I know that now. It’s more Pentecostal than atheistic. DeLillo and other postwar thinkers lived through God’s demise, or the mass secularization of Western society, as widely proclaimed on magazine covers like TIME. When the old structures of knowledge collapsed and they were forced into an upper room to regroup, they emerged with a “crypto-religion,” in some cases, a post-theistic one. This is not the same as disavowal.

For many postmodern novelists, not just for DeLillo, the aftershock of institutional Christianity is linguistic. What-comes-after is word play. Toni Morrison was also formed by the Latin rite, her ear attuned to hums and chants; and in Beloved, she plays with spoken language as a form of ritual, collective memory, “ripping the veil” between the dead and the living. Then there’s James Baldwin, raised Pentecostal. In his semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the protagonist goes to the “thrashing room” of a church, where the character undergoes an intense spiritual crisis and sexual awakening. This section of the novel is partly written in the style of tongues — for Baldwin, a remembered language and a prophetic one, similar to “Black English.”

Words are surplus, and words are summons. But — and this is the part that still gets the girl from the covenant community — surplus and summons are necessarily impenetrable. This is because we cannot fully know things that don’t exist in space and time. To “do language,” as Morrison once put it, is to do who-knows-what.

I am petrified of this pneumatology, this ghost science. But I am even more enthralled by it. The Spirit is both a danger and a promise, never the one without the other. This is the antithesis of the Lamb of God, with its inflexible orthodoxy. At the same time, this was the community’s underlying grammar, wasn’t it? Not certainty but possibility. Not being but may-being. What philosopher John Caputo calls a “theology of the Event.”

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can see those crowds at the Farm. On the green, adults sway to song. On the hilltop, girls recreate the rituals seen below. We collapse into each other’s arms, “slain in the spirit.” We rearrange until we’ve exhausted all the combinations of falling and catching. Even though some of us lie to get a second turn, we’re joyful. It’s not forced joy, like when our teachers tell us to smile, but the joy of peasants who speak the imperial tongue while plotting an uprising.

I have to resist the temptation to flatten my old community into any single project, theological or political. I have to remember what was going on in the background and around the edges — never as the main event but also no phantom. This is how you combat the prophets of doom: you feel around for the nerves of things. Press an ear against the ground to find where it shakes. Listen for the echo of an event and then give it another chance.

There are many reasons why I ended up on that hilltop, cosplaying as people who were cosplaying as other people. Here’s a big one: in 1961, a man in long robes prayed for God to restore the wonders of the nascent Church in Jerusalem. When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, the world still reeling from the Shoah and the reality that centuries of theological antisemitism had culminated in that genocide, he explicitly asked for the heavenly father to renew the earth “as by a new Pentecost.”

Pope John died before the council could conclude, but that little white dove? Once more in flight. There came a flurry of magisterial documents affirming Judaism and other religions, modernizing the liturgy to incorporate congregants’ vernacular, and admitting that the Church was not a static thing, but a group of people on a journey. Both lay and clergy were electrified, taking to the streets to organize against war, poverty, and apartheid.

Feeling their own exuberance about the Spirit’s work in the world, two men at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh began to pray the Pentecost sequence. Veni Sancte Spiritus, chanted graduate student Ralph Keifer and history professor William Storey. “Come, Holy Spirit.” What happened next was beyond their wildest dreams.

The story goes that at a weekend retreat, Keifer, Storey, and some undergraduates were reading a book about tongue-speaking when the depicted events sprang to glorious life. One young woman described a burning sensation. Others began to laugh, cry, or tremble as unknown words hit the air. “What is the bishop going to say when he hears that all these kids have been baptized in the Holy Spirit?” Storey wondered aloud.

With this, the charismatic renewal was born. To be sure, things quickly went awry. Others took charge, conceiving of covenant communities and using geopolitical moments, such as Israel’s recapture of Jerusalem, to grow their ranks. But events leave ripples in their wake. This is the mystery of Pentecost, or one of them: when someone or something is gone, their absence can be felt so deeply as to become a kind of presence. And this presence — call it memory, call it a mystical body — can change the world.

A spirit did move through the Lamb of God, only it wasn’t the one that leaders claimed. This spirit gave rise to customs like “crashing,” where an entire family would show up unannounced at dinner. Without asking questions, the residents would add place settings. The idea was that it is good to practice spontaneity and make more room at the table. Certainly, there were homes everyone knew never to crash, and there were times when people rolled their eyes to see a car pulling up to the curb. But it was special to have so many families who had your back.

Even at school, we had rituals to practice charity. If someone forgot a lunch, he or she was allowed to pick one thing from others’ boxes. While this usually meant that person ended up with all the chips and Fruit Roll-ups, it was a lesson in Catholic social teaching: the poor tell the rich what they need, not the other way around.

Then there were the tears. If one of us was hurting, the others would gather and lay a hand to take some of the load off. Once, during class, a boy remembered his grandfather had just died and began to weep. Seeing this, we dropped our pencils, walked over, and let his sorrow enter into us.

Listening to the stories of the old community members, I sometimes get the feeling that the millenarism enabled this fraternity. The talk of an event, of something imminent, inspired people to live more spontaneously. The background noise of rupture inclined them to be interrupted, to hear voices they might otherwise not have heard. And far from hardening their hearts against outsiders, it gave them the courage to notice the widows and orphans. “It was in community that I really learned to serve,” one ex-member tells me.

Lamb of God dissolved in the late 1990s, not long after it was absorbed by the Archdiocese of Baltimore in an apparent effort to subject it to oversight. Dozens of other covenant communities met the same fate. Today, many onetime charismatics can be found at the Latin Mass. They’ve traded tongues for the other old language. I wince to see some of them proclaim contempt for “modernity,” migrants, even Pope Leo, for recentering the gospel around the poor. But I also know that when these cynics sign offline, they go staff soup kitchens or otherwise expose themselves to the needs of strangers. If many of my political allies would have me write them off for their words — and certainly, their votes — I can’t help but marvel at the power of the Holy Spirit, compelling people to incarnate the “good news” in ways that even they do not comprehend. Ghost language is body language. Action without full understanding. What DeLillo once called “automatic writing.”

A child of both Pentecost and postmodernism, I cannot believe that anyone is turned to stone, nor that any of us have arrived at any final understanding. The story — of the Spirit, of America, of democracy — is still unraveling. “There is nothing outside the text,” Jacques Derrida famously said, meaning both that human agency has limits and that the work of interpretation goes on and on and on. In this, perhaps, an echo of John’s gospel: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

At this hour, Americans seem disenchanted with secularism, sensing that it does not have the moral language to combat the crises of the 21st century: rising authoritarianism, technological change, and the near-total reduction of humans to data, then capital. We’re told that people are turning to religion because they yearn for answers and stability. I’m not sure it’s clarity that people seek — or that they’ll find — rather than a world that is haunted and strange.

This is now my prayer: for the arrival of something I cannot begin to predict. When I’m all alone, I ask for the courage to see what is moving across this fruited plain, especially in those spaces I’ve damned. I remind myself that the future does not belong to me but to the Event. And then I recite that old chant known as the Pentecost sequence: Veni Sancte Spiritus. Come, Holy Spirit.

Audrey Clare Farley holds a PhD in English literature and is the author of The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters. The latter won the Michigan Notable Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors’ Pick.

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On October 7, 1955, five poets stood on a tiny stage at the back of a small art gallery in an unfashionable part of San Francisco and read their most challenging work. The result was an astounding success that no one expected. It was the right collection of poets reading in the right venue at the right time to the right audience. Against all odds, their work resonated with the approximately 150 people in the crowd and sparked a literary revolution. That night is widely considered the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance as well as the moment when the Beat Generation dramatically expanded and began to go public. Four of the five poets who read were complete unknowns when they stepped onto the stage, but two years later they were being talked about across the country. Before long, Allen Ginsberg would become the most famous poet in the world, and the successful defense of Howl and Other Poems by publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti would radically redefine what was considered art, and thus what could be published in the United States.

It was Ginsberg who did most of the organizational work for the reading, but the idea had come from artist Wally Hedrick, who was one of the six founders of the 6 Gallery, a relatively new and extremely small-scale artistic enterprise. The co-operative gallery had been founded a little less than one year earlier at 3119 Fillmore Street and from the outset it had been about the arts rather than just art. They showed not only paintings and sculptures, but experimental films, photography, dance, drama, and poetry, as well as events that blurred the lines between these forms or which were too strange to even categorize. At some point in the summer of 1955, Hedrick approached Ginsberg and asked him to put together a series of poetry readings, but Ginsberg refused. At the time, he did not know any good poets in the city and he was losing confidence in his own work.

In early June, however, Ginsberg was in bed with the painter John Allen Ryan, another of the 6 Gallery’s founding members. He had a vivid dream of Joan Vollmer, a close friend who had been shot dead in a tragic accident in Mexico City four years earlier. He spent most of the summer trying to turn this dream into a poem, and in the process he produced a number of his most important works, including “Howl,” which he began around August 10. Work on that poem consumed him as he frantically drafted this monumental work, expanding it from a single line in his notebook into three long sections, each of which was radically altered over a great many drafts.

Ginsberg’s letters from August 1955 show how enthusiastic he was in this poem. Although he would change it substantially over the next eight months, he knew from the first days that this was something special and he sent it to various friends and family members. He even took a copy to City Lights Bookstore to show Ferlinghetti. The responses he got were positive enough that he began thinking not just of publishing it but reading it aloud in front of an audience. Ginsberg soon went back to Hedrick and told him he would organize a program of poetry readings for the gallery.

Although he was confident in his new poem, he still faced a major problem. The New Jersey-born poet had been living in San Francisco for one year, socializing and attending literary events, but he did not know anyone whose poetry he genuinely admired. Who would he invite to read? He wanted his friend Jack Kerouac, who was traveling up from Mexico and would soon arrive on the West Coast, to read with him, but Kerouac was and would remain cripplingly shy, so he refused. He turned to Philip Lamantia, another friend. Ginsberg did not particularly like his poetry, but he was the most highly regarded young poet in the city, championed by the likes of Henry Miller and André Breton and published since his mid-teens. However, Lamantia had recently undergone a religious conversion following a near-death experience and disavowed his entire body of work. He refused to read, but after some coaxing said he would perform the work of John Hoffman, a close friend who had died several years earlier. Ginsberg then turned to Michael McClure. They had met in late 1954 at a W. H. Auden reading and although Ginsberg also disliked McClure’s work, he enjoyed his company (and found him extremely handsome). Both Lamantia and McClure were also popular in the city’s arts scene, which Ginsberg knew would help to draw a crowd.

Ginsberg then turned to the most famous poet in the city, Kenneth Rexroth. Originally from the Midwest, Rexroth had been in San Francisco for a few decades and had established himself as its “cultural minister” (in his own immodest words). He knew and had mentored most of the best young poets, and writers passing through the city often paid him a visit. He had an influential radio show, chaired several literary and political events, was published in major magazines and newspapers, and often advised James Laughlin at New Directions about whom he should publish. There was no one better to recommend exciting young poets, and Rexroth knew just the man for this event: his current protégé, a young Buddhist from Oregon called Gary Snyder.

Ginsberg set out to meet Snyder on September 8th and found him fixing his bicycle outside his tiny, monastically furnished house in Berkeley. The two men got along immediately and remained close friends until Ginsberg’s death in 1997. Although Snyder was younger than Ginsberg, he played an older-brother role due to his knowledge of things Ginsberg wanted to learn — Buddhism, Asian philosophy and language, the outdoors, indigenous cultures. He was currently preparing to leave for a 10-year stint at a Zen monastery in Japan and had just gotten down from a summer in the mountains, where he both worked and traveled. His poetry was filled with images of the natural world and drew upon his experiences in logging camps whilst mixing forms borrowed from Japanese and Chinese poetry, painting, and drama.

Snyder recommended to Ginsberg one more poet: his best friend from Reed College, Philip Whalen. Although not an outdoors-type like Snyder, Whalen was currently working as a fire lookout in the mountains after being pushed into the job by Snyder, and the experience would influence his poetry in various ways. Some of his William Carlos Williams-inspired poems had been passed around San Francisco thanks to Snyder and now he was accepted for the line-up at the 6 Gallery. He wasn’t asked whether he wanted to participate. He merely returned from the mountaintop to find a letter from Snyder informing him that he was going to read. Again, Snyder played the older brother to Whalen in spite of being seven years younger. “This town and these new people will do Philip much good,” he wrote in his journal.

The line-up was finalized. With Kenneth Rexroth acting as “introducer” for the five younger poets, there would be six poets on stage at the 6 Gallery. Ginsberg used this when putting together the text for a promotional postcard:

6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY

Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John Hoffman-- Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new straightforward writing-- remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry. No charge, small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.

Kenneth Rexroth, M.C.

8 PM Friday Night October 7, 1955

6 Gallery 3119 Fillmore St.

San Fran

These postcards were disseminated via the 6 Gallery mailing list and also left in hipster hangouts throughout the city, including City Lights, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, and The Place (which was the bar for artists in the mid-’50s). A poster was made by painter Peter Forakis and copies were put up in a handful of locations, too. Nothing appeared in the local press but it’s likely that Rexroth mentioned it on his K.P.F.A. radio show, although no recordings exist from that year, so it is hard to know for sure. In any case, this was to be the debut reading for McClure and the second public reading for Ginsberg, and Snyder and Whalen had each given one or two readings in Oregon but had little experience. With such a lack of experience, there was no good reason to suspect it would be a tremendous success.

The poets arrived at the 6 Gallery and were surprised to see it quickly fill to capacity. According to McClure, “There were poets and Anarchists and Stalinists and professors and painters and bohemians and visionaries and idealists and grinning cynics.” Elsewhere, he elaborated:

There were elderly women in fur coats who were radical social leaders of the time, and there were college professors there, young anarchist carpenter idealists, artists, poets, painters associated with the gallery. So it was a broad spectrum, intensely radical, and intensely hoping for a change to take place.

It was not a ticketed event and the 6 Gallery was awful at record-keeping, so we cannot know exactly how many people showed, but estimates range from 100 to 250. It seems likeliest that about 150 people crammed into the long, bowling-alley-like building at 3119 Fillmore. Kerouac sat and sometimes lay on the floor next to the stage, and in a chair next to him was composer Jack Goodwin, who wrote the only detailed account of the reading from that era. Neal Cassady was there with his date Natalie Jackson, who died just two months later. In fact, a great many poets and painters and professors were in attendance, but perhaps most important were the absences. Three writers who had previously been considered among the most important in the city — Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser — were all out of town at the time. They would return in mid-1956 to find San Francisco completely changed by these outsider poets and their runaway success.

Perhaps because of his experience, Lamantia read first. No one seems to recall much of his performance and years later he could only remember one of the poems he picked to read. He also disappeared from the scene soon after, and when attendees later recalled the reading, they tended to talk about “Philip,” referring to Whalen, forgetting that there had been two Philips on stage that night. McClure went next with a very successful reading of a number of nature poems. His standout work was “For the Death of 100 Whales,” which lamented the butchering of orcas at the hands of bored G.I.s in Iceland a year earlier, an event gleefully reported in the American media. Whalen then followed with a number of short and extremely difficult but witty poems. Kerouac dismissed them as “too incomprehensible to understand” but most people recalled them being understood and enjoyed by the audience.

After an intermission, it was time for Ginsberg to read. He was — like his audience — very drunk by now. Kerouac had been encouraging people to drink from big jugs of homemade red wine and it was now rather late in the evening. It seems Ginsberg read one or two short poems first and then launched into “Howl,” but given the impact of this particular poem no one ever recalled what he read first. He began the long poem slowly and quietly, building up to a prophetic frenzy, his audience utterly rapt. By the time he finished, many people were in tears and most were on their feet cheering. Everyone wanted to congratulate him and it seems that already people understood that something had changed. The world was no longer the same place it had been a half-hour before. McClure recalled it years later:

In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before — we had gone beyond a point of no return — and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective voice — to the land without poetry — to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.

It is tempting to imagine the reading finishing on that high note, but in fact Ginsberg was not the last to read. He was followed by Snyder, who performed work from the in-progress Myths & Texts. He was a stunningly gifted reader and managed to captivate his audience in spite of having the unenviable task of following Ginsberg. Those who later recalled the reading said that he managed this challenging feat. Certainly, it impressed Kerouac enough that Snyder became the focus of The Dharma Bums, immortalized for better and for worse as the “Zen Lunatic,” Japhy Ryder:

His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of old-time American heroes and orators. Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about him, while the other poets were either too dainty in their aestheticism, or too hysterically cynical to hope for anything, or too abstract and indoorsy, or too political.

After the reading, Ferlinghetti allegedly went home and sent a telegram to Ginsberg asking for the manuscript of “Howl.” It is unclear how true this is, for the telegram was never found, but certainly the reading pushed him to move forward with its publication. Others, including Bern Porter, were now interested in publishing what was clearly the poem of the era, but Ginsberg had had some kind of oral agreement with Ferlinghetti since late August and he would stay faithful to that, allowing City Lights to publish his masterpiece. It went on to sell well over a million copies and is one of the best-known poems of the 20th century.

Over the next few months, the poets — except for Lamantia, who thereafter shunned fame — all read frequently around San Francisco. The city’s literary scene had changed overnight. Snyder claimed that “from that day to this, there has never been a week without a reading in the Bay area.” Certainly, there had been poetry readings before the 6 Gallery, but they were very different. They were relatively sedate events, but now the city was overwhelmed with young hipsters imitating Ginsberg and the epic poem that captured the sentiment of a generation. Everyone wanted to hear the incendiary poem that grew and changed as audiences responded to it. By March 1956, the poets were local celebrities and they performed for a packed crowd at a Berkeley “repeat performance,” which was recorded and distributed across North America. Howl and Other Poems was published in late 1956, coinciding with a number of major articles in the national press. In 1957, it was defended successfully in an obscenity trial. And then came Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. The Beat Generation was soon a nationwide obsession, spawning the beatniks and the hippies, and influencing a great many countercultural movements of the late 20th century. It’s hard to see how all that could’ve happened without the astoundingly unlikely success of the 6 Gallery reading.

What is strange about the 6 Gallery reading is that in spite of its importance, hardly anything was known about it until quite recently. The fact that it happened and was an immensely important event has never been disputed. It is mentioned in many hundreds of books and countless articles, essays, blog posts, and documentaries, but the information contained in these is sparse and shockingly inaccurate. Even the date is wrong in about half of the written accounts. The best sources are upfront about the fact that it’s hard to know what happened that night or how it came about, but most are more problematic in that they simply repeat hearsay without questioning it.

This stems from the fact that the reading was not well documented at the time. In fact, it is not just the reading that has been misreported but the history of the gallery and the building and the personal interactions between the various central characters. We know lots about Allen Ginsberg’s life around this time but not during those pivotal months, and the same is true of the other key players in the story. Many of them were obsessive chroniclers of their own lives and frequently kept copies of letters to friends, but during this period they were too busy enjoying themselves and writing poems to note what happened to them. The few documents that were created were later destroyed, including a long, descriptive letter by Kerouac and a journal by Whalen. One incredibly useful source stayed hidden in an obscure archive, overlooked by almost everyone who wrote about the reading. Dozens of writers quoted from this letter but none of them had actually seen it. They merely copied a few lines from one writer who had found it more than 30 years before, and all of them repeated the same unlikely transcription error. A few other letters by eyewitnesses have similarly been overlooked in spite of their tremendous importance.

With hardly any contemporary documents available, the people tasked with writing about the 6 Gallery reading have had to rely upon a shockingly small number of often very flawed sources. The first was a promotional article that Ginsberg wrote in 1957 and did not put his name on because it was so unashamedly self-congratulatory. (He called his performance “the most brilliant shock of the evening.”) Then came Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, published in 1958. Although a work of fiction, its depiction of the reading is reasonably faithful, but at the same time it is very brief. If you read all the later accounts of the 6 Gallery reading, you will notice quite quickly that these mostly rehash Kerouac’s description.

Almost nothing else was written about the 6 Gallery reading until the 1970s, at which point there was a sudden interest in the Beats among more learned people. During their heyday, the Beat writers were typically scorned by the academy, but following Kerouac’s death and the decline of the counterculture, there was some begrudging respect paid and a number of pioneering young historians began to produce important works. These people naturally went to Ginsberg, Snyder, and others for firsthand accounts, but when you read their recollections, you realize that they are shockingly inaccurate. I do not mean to insult these people by questioning their memories. After all, it was now about 20 years later, and I would not be able to give an accurate picture of poetry readings I attended back in 2006. Human memory is more flawed than people generally like to admit — and that is true even for people like Ginsberg, in whom we sometimes place too much trust when it comes to historicizing. Yet one only has to look at the various interviews to see that these writers not only contradicted each other, but themselves.

With all these different and flawed versions of the 6 Gallery reading, historians, biographers, and other writers have tended to choose the details that sounded best or placed the most focus on their person of interest. They have ignored those claims that did not fit their narrative and gone with the others, regardless of whether or not they were true. Sometimes they have made assumptions based on unclear statements or added small details for the sake of a more colorful description. Later historians have tended to repeat these claims and then distort them in various ways. Over time, the 6 Gallery reading has become increasingly myth-like with various obvious falsehoods believed simply because they have been so frequently repeated. Several years ago, I set out to write the first ever book about the 6 Gallery reading. No one else had put together more than a few paragraphs about it in spite of near universal agreement over its importance, so it was a formidable challenge. However, I believed that with the right approach and the modest goal not of proving every fact definitively, but rather approaching history honestly in order to determine the likeliest of facts, I could write a reasonably comprehensive account. That was published on October 7, 2025, corresponding with the 70th anniversary of the reading.

But how does one approach the unknowable? After all, without the unexpected discovery of something like a previously lost videotape or audio recording, surely it is all but impossible to say exactly what happened that night, or for that matter in the weeks before and after the reading. I knew it would not be easy, but at the same time it was too important not to try.

To begin with, I read and compared all available accounts of the 6 Gallery reading whilst tracking down the sources they provided. I was amazed by how many contradictions jumped out when reading these books and how much was confidently stated but not referenced. The more I read, the more obvious it became that people were repeating dubious assertions and making assumptions without informing the reader these were not based on hard evidence. Even the most scrupulously researched books had reference sections almost devoid of sources when it came to their few paragraphs on this one event. There were hundreds of books, so it was a long but essential process. I was able to roughly divide given claims into those that were plausible, possible, or unlikely. By tracing these publications back over a period of 50 years, I could begin to see who had invented what detail and where it was repeated. A great many well-known facts could be very easily disproved.

Most importantly, I came to realize that almost every account had been based on a tiny number of contemporary sources, coupled with the aforementioned process of selectively choosing details and then repeating other assumptions. I dug up those few sources to scrutinize them and then searched for others against which to check later claims. This perhaps sounds obvious, but particularly regarding events of great countercultural importance, there is an unfortunate tendency to let myths stand or to place too much faith in the memories of people we admire. To question them might seem like an accusation of dishonesty, when it is merely acknowledging that they are human and their memories are — like all of ours — fallible.

Finally, I was able to direct my research toward overlooked archives to prove or disprove the claims I had identified as possible and then find a great many new details. This process went on for several years and led me to write about 100 years of history and dozens of characters, finally establishing a reasonably detailed history of the building in which the reading took place and the galleries that existed there. I cannot say that every single detail was established, but that was never the goal. The goal was to go far further than anyone had before to write as honestly as possible, so that others can build upon my research, putting an end to a half-century of speculation.

Wally Hedrick — who was responsible for some of the most absurd falsehoods — said once that “it’s all gotten kind of myth-like. Everybody remembers what they remember.” He’s absolutely right, but that does not mean we should give up excavating this part of history. Its allure stems from the fact that it occurred well within the modern era and should be much easier to know than it really is. People tend to like these sorts of stories, of outlaws, outsiders, and their improbable successes. But we should not allow mythology to triumph. Parts of this story will probably always remain unknowable, but it is important to approach these mysteries and probe them honestly and thoroughly, to figure out what really is unknowable and chip away at it as we would with any other historical event.

[1] Most texts refer to the “Six Gallery,” but the founders preferred the numeral form.

[2] In the end, Ginsberg would organize just one reading for the gallery but even late in the year the founders considered him in charge of poetry readings and seemed to expect more.

David Willis is the editor of Beatdom literary journal and the author of books on William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Haruki Murakami, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Bud Wiggins Jr., a stubborn sixty-one and stubborner fifteen pounds overweight, was in the perma-crawl of LA freeway traffic when he ready-steadied for a bit of the old Mounjaro ultraviolence. From base camp, he heard thunder on not too distant slopes.

Through the ages, men learned tricks to stanch ejaculation but when it came to tummy trouble, all strategies were a loser’s game. In a cold sweat, he scanned grassy onramps and adjacent knolls like a doomed pilot surveilling urban landing strips that would kill the least amount of civilians. Plan D was to leap from his truck in a single bound and uncork on the bramble like a honey bear — voyeurs’ cursory dashcam videos be damned.

Being high season for roadside encampments, it was understood he wouldn’t be greeted with the same courtesy extended, say, to a Mr. Rogers. Still another concern was that fine line between tragedy and comedy — it was one thing for a normie to be mauled by a pack of reanimated zombies, but quite another for a trespassing, aged-out Jewish novelist to be stabbed then set on fire as a consequence of cuspy Xer thinmaxxing. His crucifixion in social media’s public square had a shot at dwarfing the Coldplay jumbotron fiasco of a few years back. Worse, it might launch a thousand Substack dissertations that began with a smirk and ended in the heady acrobatics of weltschmerz.

Too late.

In a mudstream of consciousness, somewhere near the 101 South and 405 North interchange, the narrative unspooled in fits and starts before its denouement in the debris field of Bud’s signature jumpsuit. It should be noted that the romper was a more stylish version of his dad’s; the venerable satirist Bud Wiggins Senior was half-known (if at all) for sporting a proletarian boiler festooned with vintage gemmed brooches and pricey Hermes scarves. Wiggins fils liked his jumpers “neat” — no ice.

Forty minutes later, having biohazarded the Dickies into double leaf bags before tossing it in the dumpster, Bud emerged from a blistering shower naked and reborn. He ambled to the couch to peaceably scroll through the iPad, as was his wont after the unwanted snows of Kilimounjaro.

A friend sent him a video link to a New York Times interview with George Saunders. He’d never delved into the great writer’s celebrated short stories but had read his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (five or six years ago, when Bud was still able to get to the end of a book). He was knocked out by how good it was, how moving, how gorgeous, which completely took him by surprise. A consequence of Bardo’s phenomenal popularity, bravura premise, and poetic beauty was that it won the Man Booker — thus, the canonized author was kicked upstairs by adoring critics and public alike. As if overnight, a one-time nichified SciFi-adjacent storyteller not only became a deserved giant of the craft but got branded as Saint Saunders, living relic and King of Kindness. MFA pilgrims crawled in a hajj to his altar (scattered with the gods of common and uncommon things), knee by bloodied knee with subscribers of The Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. What a piece of work is man! thought Bud. This foul and pestilent congregation of vapors . . . yet it couldn’t have happened to a better man. Or humbler scribe, anyway.

The NYT interview was cringe. The “journalist” was so far up his subject’s ass that he took a left turn at the Bardo, raced past Nirvana, and spun off the Wheel of Samsara entirely.

He scrolled down to read the video’s intro.

He has also taught fiction to countless laypeople: His 2021 nonfiction work, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” was a book-length distillation of his teaching that, to the startled delight of his publisher, became a bestseller. In 2013, Saunders gave a convocation speech to Syracuse graduates in which he extolled the life-altering virtue of practicing kindness. That speech went viral and was repackaged as a book, which also became a bestseller, thrusting Saunders into a public role as something close to a guru of goodness.

Bud mused on the whole graduation-talk thing.

David Foster Wallace did one in 2005 at Kenyon College, later published as an homily about living a compassionate life. The now legendary rap to undergrads, which began with a parable about fish, spawned a seasonal cultural grunion run of true believers edging for empathy and its thousand-page novel spinoffs. In the aughts, the boyish, brainiac DFW was the go-to Astroglide for the dry Wheel of Dharma anxiety. Same as it ever was: the wacked-out end days of these troubled times — the gory, whoring Twenties — was rife with defeated Baby Boomers getting their house in order and mending the fence of messy breakups with Kindness. Bloodied by impotent, performative activism, they threw in the towel and began rehearsals for the death of their physical bodies, a finale closing in like a stuttering Uber Comfort avatar just a few blocks away on the neighborhood map. While doomsurfing, pornhubbing and ragescrolling, memes featuring the haloed boho royalty of Compassion and Empathy sprung up on their devices like empathogenic mushrooms: as Patti Smith, Rick Rubin and Nick Cave sermonized on grief, impermanence and mindfulness, the weepy acolytes got nauseous (in a good way) for the sacred. The thirty-second hits were perfect recruitment tools when viewed in the waiting rooms of shrinks and pain management specialists, or in the wake of cuckold hookups (after the well-paid black bull made his courteous departure). Chicly minimalist panaceas for any sleepless dark night of the senior soul.

It occurred to Bud that his putative manager might have ties to an agency with an “author booking” department. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, a reviewer wrote that one of Junior’s novels “made a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace.” Didn’t that rate him a slot at some lib arts gown-out? He too had written on Buddhism, compassion, kindness — the whole woo-woo megillah — years before Saunders and DFW. Bud decided to corner Zuk the next time he was in LA. He’d huff and puff and blow the Convocation Cathedral door down, revivifying his career. He might even publish a book of his own collegiate gabfest, like his forebears1, and call it “In the Future, Everyone Will Be Kind For Fifteen Minutes.” He’d wow them with Gen Z slang and gunslinging parables, sharing raw personal intimacies while peppering his spiel with zingers from Chappelle and Chekhov before bringing it all home with mystic, showstopping heartbreak.

The little shits wouldn’t know what hit ’em.

Bud learned from experience that losing weight, along with a daily glass of pomegranate juice, lowered his cholesterol enough so that he felt justified in not taking statins. He’d heard a lot of horrible things about statins; Big Pharma was not your friend But more than weight loss, he longed for word loss; he was convinced that the plaque in his arteries wouldn’t kill him — it was words themselves.

In the end, whether running your mouth at a thousand commencement ceremonies2 or locked up in dementia’s Tower of Babble, the stained garment of language inexorably would drop, showing what it was made of: the Emperor’s new words. Yet they were all Bud had. Words were his muse, his lover, his eternal return, just as they were for his father. They birthed the six children of Bud’s novels and their sight and smell still mesmerized. But something had changed.

On a day now forgotten, words stopped quickening his blood.

Ten years ago, the gothic portmanteau “deadnaming” gave Bud an erection — now, he couldn’t give a shit about RSVPing to the newfangled orgies thrown by seductive arrivistes like bonesmashing and longhousing. Instead of rabbit-holing neologisms’ origins and meanings, he preferred to just make them up like a child sitting crisscross, lazily dreaming. He’d rather rot his brain with snuff reels — serotonin-jacking wait-for-it, watch-till-end CCTV medleys of baby-faced cops slaughtered at traffic stops or non-AI tigers gorily dragging safari tourists from open-air buses or crossing guard schoolkids launched airborne by drunk drivers like a spray of time-lapsed flowers blooming as they dissolved to Infinity.

As he drifted to sleep, Bud riffed on the Times piece.

“Saunders’ clothing, befouled by an errant skinny-jab, was bought by a consortium members Peter Thiel, Bono, and Noam Chomsky for an amount a university docent affirmed was ‘more than what was paid for the Kerouac scroll.’ The workaday outfit, freezer-stored to neutralize bacteria, is now on display at the college’s Shaffer Art Building. When told that the exhibit has become a kind of companion piece to Rothko’s Chapel, the dry-witted Saunders parried, ‘The Shroud of Turin it is not.’ To the startled delight of his publisher, the show has become a runaway bestseller . . .’”

In the morning, Bud valiantly tried another The Sound and the Fury break-in. He’d been picking the lock for ten weeks.

Faulkner was getting a lot of action from large and small presses because some of the author’s titles had recently entered the public domain. A Russian artist was publishing an illustrated version of Fury and asked Bud to write the introduction — an invitation he thought was likely due to the fact that in bygone days, a devoutly Catholic, alcoholic professor (and drinking companion of his father) boldly nominated Junior for a PEN/Faulkner Award, months before dying himself. A plenary indulgence, Bud joked at the time.

The novelist humblebragged to an old college chum about the offer, feigning that his mind wasn’t yet made up. The eccentric former roommate, comfortably adrift after retiring as a production manager at Scribner’s, said, “Well, why not? It’s kind of dignified . . . and keeps your name out there. God knows, we need our names out there!”

“So you think I should do it?” Bud said coyly.

Part of him shrunk at what he was about to hear; there was a reason he called his friend The Great Cynic.

“Well, it’s not exactly a money grab — not for you, and not for whoever has the idiocy to publish it. Safe to say no one’s going to make a killing. See, PD books — public domain — sadly don’t make great Christmas gifts. Which eliminates yet another revenue stream . . . but fuck all that, you might just get a new reader or two. Need I repeat, old friend? Novels as we know them are being carted to the charnel ground en masse. Literally! You have heard of Chatbot Claude, no? The devouring A.I. dakini? Her makers bought millions of books and fed them into the craw of that ravenous wood-chipping bitch — real Texas Chainsaw shite. Tore off the spines and dismembered the pages, chapter and verso, then burned the bodies while she belched, picking her teeth after the satanic binge . . . oh, come now, Bud, don’t look so pained! Libraries around the world are doing that anyway because they can’t afford to store the excess inventory. The Big Fives has warehouses and warehouses teeming with returns, costs them a bloody fortune. They’re running the largest morgues on the planet and you can’t keep those refrigerators on forever . . . Now, don’t be so sensitive, be a good boy and don’t take any of it too seriously! The whole world is burning — so we may as well have a little Fahrenheit Four-Five-Fun! Let them pay you to do the audiobook instead, ever done one of your own? Lord, you’ve got the voice for it — what’s the quote about Springsteen, ‘I saw the future of books and its name is Audible!’ We Boomers are all going blind . . . but Gen A.I. don’t even know what a book is. Nietzsche was right: ‘Book Is Dead!’” The Great Cynic sniggered at his dumb wit. “Brother, the game is o-vuh. ‘Something wicked this way comes . . .’” — he segued into an awful, zany English accent — “ . . .and what a right rough beast she is! Her name is Claude, by the way — l’Claude! L’chaim!”

The shrewdly prescient Saunders packed his audiobook with stars playing over 160 characters: David Sedaris, Miranda July, Lena Dunham, Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon — even Saunders himself got in on the act, the result being that Bardo won the 2018 “Audie.” Some PT Barnum over at Penguin Random House even submitted the monumental production to the Guinness Book of World Records for most individual voices on an eBook. Why not submit for most deli platters and throat lozenges? The logistically complex production was not only a flex of showmanship, but a massively generous act of Kindness to both cast and listeners.

Bud doffed his cap.

He sat in his special chair — the one sanctified as his magic Return to Reading Chair — and skimmed through The Sound and the Fury. It was like holding a manuscript written in a dead language; absolutely nothing held his attention.

To refocus, he watched a few snuffers, to no avail.

Never a voracious reader, Bud was more like a dunce with the gift of absorbing and synthesizing what he read by an act of osmosis.3 His difficulty in processing the written word, a kind of journeyman’s alexia, grew worse with age — far worse. Of late, with spotty career acclaim far enough in the rearview to appear as a mirage, a panicky conviction took hold: Bud’s excommunication (how apt the word) from the work of other writers had cratered the quality of his own books. He dimly remembered a time when the interplay of reading the classics and the occasional exceptional peer had been an accelerant to his own creative endeavors. Could it be that his novels — the last, released six years ago — were catastrophically maimed by the embargo?

A quote from Faulkner himself soothed Bud’s agita:

The writing of it [The Sound and the Fury] as it now stands taught me both how to write and how to read, and even more: It taught me what I had already read. Because on completing the novel, I discovered in a series of repercussions like summer thunder, the Flauberts and Conrads and Turgenevs — which as much as ten years before I had consumed whole, with all the understanding of a moth or a goat.

I have read nothing since; I have not had to.

Then wouldn’t a handful of the Dickens he read in his early thirties do? A smattering of Genet, Kipling, Kafka and Twain, old friends from his adolescence? Wouldn’t an arduous, years-long reading — to the finish line! — of Don Quixote count? Did it even matter that Nabokov and Martin Amis despised Quixote, as had Conrad, Lawrence, Turgenev, Hemingway, and Henry James?

On the other hand, Bud was plagued by Nabokov’s assertion that by definition a “good” reader — a “creative” reader — is a “rereader.” Another pundit wrote that one’s first read of a treasured novel is a youthful pleasure; the second, a coming of age; the third, a consolation in the despair of dotage. Yet what if one had unearthed only a slim shelf of treasures to begin with? For the handicapped booklover, to speak of rereadings was a mockery, an abomination.

He resolved at last to seek professional help.

He struck up a conversation with a Gen Z glamourpuss in Echo Park. Bud was at the club for a party hosted by a new literary magazine called The Big One. He occasionally got invited to those sort of things, usually by young bibliophiliacs — wisenheimer fans of his Dad who sleuthed their way to Bud’s books, as they had to Jan Kerouac’s and that other Junior, the son of William S. Burroughs.

When he introduced himself — he looked for a flash of recognition in her eyes but there wasn’t any — she gave her name, which he couldn’t hear above the din. Bud was in the middle of his shtick about his neurodiverse reading beef. He was feel-good drunk and making her laugh (sort of).“It’s a phobia,” he said.

“Well that’s awkward. For a writer, I mean.”

“The experts call it an ‘orthographic processing deficit.’”

“Easy for you to say. I wish I had that problem,” she said. “It’s crazy but my dad actually taught me how to speed-read when I was in middle school — he was an Evelyn Wood guy. I whipped through House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, and The Corrections in one week. And I pretty much retain fucking everything, which is a nightmare. I’m rereading Houellebecq now and he’s pretty great.”

Glossing over the progressive politics of the region (East Sunset Boulevard), Bud clapped back in a too-loud terrorist accent, “For me, all books haram now! Leaf House haram! Franzen, Houellebecq, DFW — haram!”

He watched the flirt flame out, its ash coiling cold and dead before his eyes.

The next morning, Bud had a weird hangover. His mouth tasted like it had sucked off a Tesla Bot and stayed like that, even after the throw-up. He couldn’t hold his words or his liquor anymore.

While he grunted along the old, borrowed, blue treadmill of a superannuated novelist’s life, A.I. found him a cognitive behavioral therapist for his troubles. In the prompt, he said to please avoid the Vyvanse/Adderall route — the magic meth bullets any respectable, quick-draw CBT practitioner kept in their ADHD arsenal. He’d been addicted to prescription speed before and once was enough, thanks much. Chat cheerfully informed that EEG-biofeedback was a helpful, non-invasive technique used not only on dyslexic kids but great for adults with the same issues Bud described in his intake assessment.

After another Chat incursion, he decided to lay off Mounjaro for a few days before his appointment.

Yes, diarrhea and other gastrointestinal (GI) issues can be triggered by, or occur as a side effect of, neurofeedback sessions. While neurofeedback is generally safe and often used to treat stress-related conditions, it can, in rare cases, trigger involuntary, transient physical responses.

Her office was modest. She wore high, stylish boots, and was youngish. The writer had his doubts but as the saying goes, the woman seemed to know her shit, and where to put it.

“From everything you’ve told me,” she smiled, “the act of reading has become . . . aggressive. And for that reason, it is not pleasurable. You’re no longer reading the words — you’re in mortal combat.”

After a bit more informal analysis, it was time for the brain mapping, a technique Chat had already familiarized him with.

She fitted him with a skullcap and attached electrodes. The twenty-minute exam was divided in two, half with eyes closed, half with eyes open. When Bud asked what he should be thinking about or visualizing, she said it didn’t matter. “Your brain will do the work.” A week later, it was back to the skullcap but this time she had him watch a reality show — a plastic surgeon was selling his house in Brentwood Circle. As Bud stared at the monitor, the images randomly faded in and out, the light growing dimmer then brighter again until stabilizing. The therapist said that the seemingly haphazard cycle was a call and response to whatever secret messages his gray matter was transmitting.

“The goal,” she said, “is to strengthen parts of the brain to reduce general anxiety and enhance reading skills. It’s like going to the gym. Pretty soon, those lobes of yours will have muscles.”

Between sessions, he dipped a toe back in the reading waters.

It wasn’t lost on Bud that the book he’d chosen to formally break his long reading fast — the book that chose him — was probably the most challenging in the American canon: The Sound and the Fury. As the therapist suggested, he laid down his weapons and went with the flow, and for some reason it worked. When he victoriously turned the final page of the Faulknerian mêlée of grammatical, gender, racial, and chronological confusion, the critic in him found no sound (other than dissonance) and no fury, other than that which befell the reader. The whole enterprise struck Bud as a self-congratulatory parody dressed up in the defunct academic conceit of “experimental,” when in truth, it was slapdash and sadistically obscure. Dull and abstractly corny, TSATF was a hackneyed fantasia with no discernible poetry in it; whatever inklings of beauty were of the even-a-broken-novel-is-right-twice-a-day variety. And so annoying! He kept stubbing his eyes on the clumsily rendered Ebonics of the blacks — “hit” for “it,” “tech” for “touch” — not because it offended his left-leaning philosophies but because it was crude, aesthetic amateur hour. The slobbering, bellowing retard Benjy was an all-night diner sign that vulgarly blinked the dog-eared outcome of incest. To Bud, everything about the thing was fake and asinine, and sinfully so, given that it masqueraded as High Art. All his years of worship . . .

What had he been thinking?

Trying to make sense of his misbegotten loyalties, reminiscing about that virginal roll in the hay with Fury, Bud was able to recapture his charmingly solemn teenaged vow: “I must write with his scope, his poetry (the name the gullible boy had affixed to Faulkner’s contorted semantics) — I must dare everything, or be damned.” The grown Bud made peace with the realization that if such was the only gift Faulkner had given him, he would be forever grateful.

The regaining of paradise was followed by another revelation: though his output had been relatively slight, Bud Wiggins Jr. realized he had done what he set out to do, and fulfilled the quixotic, heroically naïve promise he swore to decades ago. But the world remained clueless because no one had read his work. The ultimate irony was that the multitudes for whom his oeuvre was unknown included Bud himself. He had forgotten that he’d already written out his dream — in disappearing ink.

He mused over other imagined titans in his life.

What about Hemingway, what about Gertrude Stein?

What about Voltaire, what about Rabelais? And Sade and Celine and Genet and —

Like everything else, reading and writing was lunacy.

Books and the words that made them truly were haram.

He met his manager for lunch at the San Vicente Bungalows. Bud called him that, though there was nothing left to manage.

Occasionally (very), Zuk was able to cash in a favor to get him the script work that allowed Bud to have health insurance. The novelist used to hold a grudge about not being properly exploited. Now, with a mature, clear-eyed perspective of what the poor man had been up against all these years, he simply enjoyed Zuk’s company. The dynamo’s bullishly rose-colored spirit was contagious — for all Bud’s tempered bravado, Zuk knew that his client was on the ropes of a business that was punchy itself. But more than that, much more, Zuk wasn’t just simpatico, he was genuinely respectful.

When the hostess led him to the table, Zuk stood, reverentially holding out his arms. “There he is! The legend.”

They sat a while before the manager jumped up to table-schmooze with friends and clients: Michelle Yeoh, Sydney Sweeney, and DC3, who sat with Kendrick Lamar. On his return, they chitchatted and the server took their order.

Then, with usual anodyne aplomb, Zuk announced, “We’re moving to Paris!”

Bud winced. He felt a rumble in his intestines, not via Mounjaro, but rather the donkey kick of abandonment from the linchpin whose psychic and geographical presence had allowed the novelist to believe that things would be all right and luck was just around the corner.

“France is amazing. Europe is where everything’s happening — people would get you in France. Here’s the plan: I want to have a big dinner for you there and introduce you to everyone. They’ll fly you over! James Ellroy is huge in France. Isn’t he a buddy of yours?”

“We had a falling out. That’s how it goes with James.”

“Didn’t Ellroy write the foreword to one of your books?”

“For a French edition — ”

“That’s perfect.”

“That was twenty years ago, Zuk. I’m sure it’s out of print.”

“It’s a great calling card! And don’t be silly, I’m sure people know who you are — you’re a legend! But the Ellroy book — with his introduction — is an amazing reminder. It must have sold really well . . .”

“I doubt it,” Bud snickered.

“Really? What makes you think?”

“Well, for one thing, because people don’t read — and when I say ‘people,’ I include myself! The ones who do are rare as pink sheep. That everyone ‘reads’ is kind of like the Big Lie.”

The manager guffawed. “Legend! My wife Lisbeth’s a huge reader . . . but do you really think that? Do you really think it’s true?”

The question, almost plaintive, was asked with stagecraft earnestness. Zuk had a way of presenting himself as a naif, belying a deep knowledge and ferocious instincts about the inner workings of all entertainments — a guileless stratagem that put interlocutors at ease while gaining Zuk access to valuable intel. He wasn’t doing that with Bud though. With his old friend and art outlaw, he really did think he could learn “new things.”

“People do listen to audiobooks,” Bud said grudgingly.

“I love audiobooks!” Like a consul general with marching orders, Zuk said, “I’m flying back tomorrow. I’ll track down the Ellroy book and we’ll get you to Paris. I’ll introduce you to the mavens — these amazing Millennials ruling the culture there now.” Bud knew it was theater but none of that mattered; he really did love the man. “And it’s a huge plus that you’ve written a few screenplays . . .”

“That was twenty years ago too.”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t be Debbie Downer! Because some of the people you’re going to meet have things they want to adapt.” Squinting at Bud, he said, “You look really good, by the way. Have you lost weight?”

“Doin’ it old school — countin’ calories.”

Zuk shook his head in admiration.

“That’s legend,” he said.

A few days later, Bud got a text from his manager about “a stack of the Ellroy books” being delivered to his door in Paris.

His assistant emailed, “While he’s away, Zuk said please use the pool. If the realtor stops by to show the house, you can totally keep swimming! Zuk’s team said no problem.”

She sent him the gate codes.

On the way up, he ruminated on the chillingly casual “to show the house” — ugh. He stopped for gas at the fancy 76 in Beverly Hills. Someone on the other side of the pump was filling up a McClaren and talking on his cell. Bud heard him say, “I’d eat a mile of that girl’s shit just to see where it come from.” He wondered if the wiry young thug who was gassing up listened to audiobooks. The gal he was talking to his friend about probably did.

In Bud’s duffel were swim trunks, a towel, a book of Chekhov stories, and some expensive swag bag headphones from a party China Chow invited him to in the 90s; they still worked. Lolling on the chaise, he listened to a Spotify playlist of Sibelius (Zadie Smith loved Sibelius) and daydreamed. It was easy to imagine this was his house, his pool — that he, Bud Wiggins Jr., was the new owner of 1624 Blue Jay Way. Easier still to imagine no one had ever lived there but him.

Then a strange thing happened.

The luxe mise-en-scène — pool, terrace, foliage and skyline beyond — intermittently faded out then dialed back up like the images during his brain mapping. Was something wrong with his eyes? Bud didn’t think so . . . the cataract surgery in 2024 went well. He did have a couple of incidents after the procedure, mostly while driving, when the world began to subtly pixilate, not in a dramatic way but enough to cause some concern. The first time that happened, he pulled over to call the doctor’s office. The RN said it was an “ocular migraine” and if it lasted more than 45 minutes to “come see us right away.”

This felt like something else. He rolled around his tongue and tasted burnt marshmallows. Even weirder, when he took off the headphones, the music persisted — fading out, fading in — with Sibelius nudged out by a church organ hodgepodge of his beloved Beach Boys. As if suddenly having unencrypted access to all the celestial things Brian Wilson composed in his head but never set down.

Then, it was over.

He dipped in the pool to wash it all away. Toweling off, Bud loitered at the glass door of the house and peered in. He slid it open. Grabbing a Diet Dr. Pepper from the fridge, he sauntered through the house to the cozy library office. He idly surveyed the shelves: Malcolm Gladwell, Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within — and to his surprise, a paperback Lincoln in the Bardo, which reminded him of the Chekhov in the duffle. He picked it up at a secondhand store in North Hollywood because of a story called “Gooseberries” that Saunders went on and on about in the NYT interview. (Bud liked it well enough, but it didn’t give him gooseflesh.) It was so smart of Saunders — so kind — to recommend a lesser known work by his hero. Who wanted to be told for the thousandth time to read “The Kiss,” “Ward No. 6” or “The Lady with the Little Dog”?

He pondered how many Chekhov volumes were sold as a result of Saunders’ flogging . . .

Standing there, mindlessly thumbing Bardo’s pages, he got an idea that almost made him spit-take. He could pole-vault from the remainder bins by writing a slim novel called CHEKHOV: Collected Stories by Bud Wiggins Jr. — his name in a smaller font and far enough below to appear that he was the editor. He wouldn’t even have to ask a lawyer if that was legally something he could do because the Master had been dead more than a century.

He took a few steps and sat behind Zuk’s desk. He couldn’t picture his manager spending any time there — that just wasn’t Zuk’s thing. Bud thought the PC was a prop, part of the realtor’s home staging, but when he touched the keyboard it lit up. No password required.

Hi, Zuk.

What would you like to do?

Below the greeting were five little boxes in a row. The first said Book Search; the second, Market Overview; the third, Bestsellers; the fourth, Collections; the last, Report Builder.

The frisson of a phantom Santa Ana gusted the hairs on his neck as the flabbergasted novelist apprehended where he’d landed . . .

BookScan!

To certain ears (Gen X being the last of the herd), “BookScan” conjured the Ark of the Covenant, the golden chalice, the Masons, the Illuminati. For in its darkly alchemical hidden recesses, the secret society contained the infernal mechanism that tallied and sorted the number of books each author had sold — Camelot to publishers but Mordor to living writers. To inquisitive scribes, the tote board may as well have been graced by the signage of a familiar motto: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Why would Zuk subscribe to such a thing?

Then of course it made sense: the Business relentlessly sniffed for IP truffles that might sprout into streaming second-screen juggernauts. On the brink of misdemeanor espionage, Bud paused like a beggar at the gates of an impregnable palace.

He had a bad feeling . . .

And why would Zuk have left behind his computer anyway? He’d probably never used it; he must have had a dozen of them and this one resided in the library, that’s all, like a piano in a living room. Yet what if the realtor burst in and caught him in flagrante delicto? Just when Bud realized he was being a drama queen, he got another jolt — for all he knew, his manager had just been awakened in Paris by a cellphone alert: “Hi, Zuk. Welcome back!”

Throwing caution to the wind, he boomeranged back to . . .

BookScan!

He was on a whistleblower mission now. Somehow, he had been chosen to expose the Mother of all Lies — that people read, that books sold — and would use the scan’s algorithmic numbers and sacrilegious Deuteronomy to topple the whole house of marked-deck cards. In one fell gonzo journalistic scoop, Bud would reveal that the anointed of American and World lit, from effete famousoids to the newbie wunderkind fetishized ad nauseum in fawning profiles and divinizing reviews — that the golden bookfest calves of Frankfurt, Edinburgh and Jaipur, shot in elegant monochrome with their mouths japing in whip-smart, cool kid hysterics while clutching ribboned medallions in Air Mail, The Washington Post, and Vanity Fair — that all the consecrated Margot Channings, the not long for this world vampyric attention-whore Addison DeWitts who’d won everything but the Nobel, the NYRB clit-bait Eve Harringtons who wrote their way to the top . . . had sold no books at all. (Or nothing to write home about.) He felt like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show — Bud actually didn’t much remember the movie but the nonstop essays on Reddit, spangled with production stills, kept his familiarity of it sharp — once he stepped outside the studio set to pry open mouths, the real book sale numbers would show themselves like rotting crack whore teeth. Ripping off the mask, Bud Wiggins Jr. would live up to Zuk’s epithet and truly become legend, with the side benefit of sparking a major reappraisal of his work. Make room, Snowden and Assange — when Junior was done, no fish or penguin would be safe . . .

He clicked the cursor on the search bar and typed in George Saunders.

Bud expected a highish figure, something close to 20- or 25,000 copies sold; he had won the Booker. A number appeared: 237,495, hardcover. The paperback sold 228,882.

Too high, to say the least — must be some mistake.

Refreshing the page, the figure actually rose.

He squinted in confusion at the numbers, then allowed himself to at least entertain the possibility of their accuracy. Might it have something to do with the star-studded audiobook?

In a tizzy, he did a search for the first few authors who came to mind.

A friend had recently suggested a new novel-in-stories called Rejection by “an incredible genius” with the odd name of Tony Tulathimutte. It had blurbs from Dwight Garner, WSJ and NPR, and even Jonathan Franzen, who praised the author’s first book. Bud never heard of T²; it was definitely a name he would have remembered. BookScan had Rejection at 25,124 — all hardcovers! Dizzied, he moved to someone he had heard of: Emma Cline, an ingénue he’d actually met who claimed to be a fan of his first book, written before she was born. (Fan or not, it didn’t matter, because she’d graciously made the effort to acknowledge him.) Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, sold 178,679 hardback and another 146,303 in soft. Her latest, The Guest, was a tidy hundred thousand and rising . . .

He sat back in Zuk’s chair and did a breathing meditation he learned on IG..

After searching more desultory samplings, the veil slowly lifted to reveal the obvious:

Bud had been pranked.

Rolling back the Herman Miller, he marveled at the artifice. Well-played! The conspiracy was magnificent. Like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, Bud tore off his mask, only to reveal that it was the redundant face of his own that lay beneath. All that he’d been told, all that he’d heard, all that he thought he knew — that no one was reading, that publishing was dead . . . that was the lie. The star of The Truman-Wiggins Show had been redpilled into a world that was bluer than the skies of Heaven.

But who had been telling him this? And why?

As a reset, he walked to the shelves and fingered a few volumes, then raced back to punch in Malcolm Gladwell and Tony Robbins.

Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference sold 2,626,909 hardback; Robbins’ Awaken the Giant rang up just 572,932.

When he entered David Foster Wallace’s hardcover transcript of his commencement talk at Kenyon College, the graph dipped encouragingly, plummeting to 182,857. (Hanging himself the year before its release would have helped sales — but still.) Saunders’ stand-up act at Syracuse, “Some Thoughts on Kindness,” logged in at only 78,675. Loser! he muttered. Get thee to a backyard lawn chair and bathrobe noose, good, kind Professor . . . The drop from seven figures to five gave Bud a second wind.

He could understand the Gladwell’s and the Robbins’, the Stephen Kings and JK Rowlings too. He even understood the giant-killer flash mob takeover of Romantasy . . .

Rising from the inky depths of memory like a fortune in the Magic 8 Ball that was one of his father’s prized childhood possessions, came a name: Mark Danielewski. Danielewski wrote a cult novel called House of Leaves (one of the books that the girl Bud met in Echo Park had speed-read) in the year that BookScan was born. Rife with multi-font styles, blank pages, and upside-down typographical anarchy, the author trumpeted his design for a cycle of 27 books, each 800 pages long. Bud recalled reading interviews with Danielewski back in the day; his messianic ambition belonged not to a littérateur but rather to Olympian-visioned earth artists like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson — or Donald Judd, who, God of ADHD that he was, lined up 100 perfectly spaced identical aluminum boxes in hangar-sized sheds in Marfa, Texas, of all places.

Bud entered the title, rubbing his hands together like the gleeful Hardback of Notre Dame — he couldn’t wait to hear the pitiful ring of this bell. When the clangorous number chimed, he gasped and covered his ears.

House of Leaves had sold 1,105,798 copies.

The second visit to the hillside house was sans the flush of Bud’s premiere and more like returning to the scene of a hazing, or a dog to its own vomit. Armed with a scribbled notepad resembling a deranged hit list, Bud numbly fed author and titles into the search engine with the flattened affect of an accountant who was late for dinner — one who, after humming while washing the dishes, calmly slaughtered his wife and kids then took his own life.

Zadie Smith (600,000 hardbacks between On Beauty and White Teeth) . . . Ottessa Moshfegh (416,281 for My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with the rest of her books relaxing in the high fives) . . . David Szalay’s Flesh (43,036)4 . . . Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (50,233) . . . Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (319,930) —

It was time to set a lower bar.

On a whim, he spied on Dennis Cooper, whose best in show was 21,614 (The Sluts). But the rest were in the 2-, 3-, and 4,000 range. Heartened by the paucity of sales, Bud murmured, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” He coasted through a few more — Houellebecq’s hardcover numbers were meh but his trade editions were in the twenty- and thirty-thousands (the savage detective kicked himself for not having left on the high-note of low Coopers). In a kind of seizure, Bud fed the furnace until the kindling was gone and his mind was charred and dormant.

Inevitably, he dredged the name of a river corpse, freeing it from the killer’s deadly ballast:

Bud Wiggins Jr.

When he typed in the name, only the titles of his father’s books appeared.

The novels of Bud Wiggins Senior predated BookScan, though the sales of Dad’s motley reprints — the fits and starts of comebacks that never came — ranged from eighteen- to thirty-five hundred. Seeing his patriarch laid out like that was almost like visiting his grave. There was something honest and straightforward about it that moved him.

Scrolling down, he accidentally lit upon the orphan, crying in its crib in the haunted nursery at the bottom page: the numbers affixed to Wiggins the Lesser.

Bud’s last novel was published in 2020, the year the pandemic began and Lincoln in the Bardo won the Audie. A few inches to the right of the title, beside the RTD (Release To Date Sales), was “78.”

Next to that was the WTD sales (Week to Date) — 0.

Next to that was the YTD sales (Year To Date) — 0.

The old phrase “goose eggs” echoed in his head (with a cackle, Bud revised it to “Gooseberries”). He sat there, forlornly shaking his head. It could not be 78 . . . the software must have glitched, amputating the number. True, the timing of Book Number Six couldn’t have been worse, with Covid and all; also true it was completely ignored by the press, excepting a pair of benign, salutary thumbnail reviews in the trade magazines. As good fortune happened, a few Booklist and PW staffers were aging fans of Bud Jr.’s early work.

The novel he wrote before “78” scanned at an RTD of “363,” and the one before that, a cumulative “691.” Even though it was a downward trend, if a trend at all, there was solace in seeing his name and titles — even the obscene numbers — writ small. Somehow that mattered. Despite everything, Bud Wiggins Jr., in threadbare, freshly laundered waitstaff clothing, had cordially been invited to attend the dollhouse gala. With head held high, he watched the graceful dancers glide by in dinner jackets and evening gowns, their jewels sparkling, and laughter like wine. None of them looked his way — but attention had been paid.

As a parting shot, he pivoted to the $17 Random House trade paperback of The Sound and the Fury: The Complete, Definitive edition. Year to Date: 380,391. He brooded about oversaturation and wondered if the Faulkner he was writing the preface for would sell.

When Bud returned to the house a few days later, the computer was gone.

He went to lunch with the retired old Scribner’s salt who regaled him about the book-eating demon. With self-effacing charm and high humor, Bud recounted his Excellent Misadventures in BookScanland — before playfully chastising the Great Cynic for bullshitting him about the death of belles-lettres.

“A report,” said Bud, “that seems to have been greatly exaggerated.”

“Friend,” said the salt, “we hear what we want to hear — that’s me, that’s you, that’s Lydia fucking Davis and Pico Iyer too. And yes, guilty as charged — maybe — but with an explanation: I just don’t see those ludicrous numbers — number our days! — the way you do, friendly friend. How could I? Let me tell you what this veteran knows — and as you’re well aware, I had boots on the ground for thirty-odd years — books on the ground — and ‘odd’ years they were . . . I hate to use that deckchairs-on-the-Titanic cliché but that’s what it fucking is. He who dies with the most deckchairs wins? I don’t think so, Mr. Wiggins . . . scratch Titanic, it’s deck chairs in a leper colony — there’s a phrase you don’t hear anymore. Our dear mother used to threaten to drop us off at one if we didn’t behave . . . Now, you listen to me, ya big, underappreciated, oversensitive genius: all these chart-topping punks and poseurs — not you, Wiggins, you’re the real deal — they’re just sad fucking lepers. ‘Kiss me quick! There goes my upper lip! There goes my fingernail into your ginger ale!’ But here’s what will save you: when ye come to realize that in the end, ye friendly friend, lepers we are all. Orwell said it best, didn’t he? The man said everything best, everything that counts anyway. ‘All lepers are equal, but some lepers are more equal than others.’ Point being, shill ten copies or ten million and the result shall be the same: that incinerating whore with steel teats Claude is going to have her way with us — ‘Oops there goes another rubber tree plant!’ — everyone’s goin’ to the fucking mind hive, tout suite. And how suite it is!” He jigged in his chair and sang, ‘We’re off to see the mind hive, the wonderful mind hive of Oz . . .’”

When they said their goodbyes on the street, the cynical wizard sneered, “BookScan!” before disappearing behind the curtain.

Bud made a pitstop to properly digest his smashburger.

Stories was a wonderfully curated bookseller, a place where one could still make magical discoveries, just as he did in his boyhood — a real cabinet of wonders. Eyeballing the usual suspects, RTDs rose from their covers like steam: this one, 563,912 . . . that one, 4,396,448 . . . like walking into a concentration camp (they tattooed Bud with “78”) surrounded by Sonderkommandos overseeing the Selection. Numbers under 10,000 signified the old, the disabled, and mothers with children.

They went straight to the gas.

He sat in a nook, tearing little hunks from his chocolate croissant. The taste of burnt marshmallows returned, this time with an acridness the sugary pastry couldn’t dilute. Jolted by a screech of electronica, Bud violently swatted his ear like a bear in an old cartoon. He scanned his neighbors, looking for a culprit without earbuds — How rude! — before realizing the noise was coming from inside his head. He tried to identify the importunate melodies as they performed their vertiginous murmurations before retreating to quieter hills. Yet their artifacts remained, a purgatorial undertow of alien Muzak.

He was spooked.

To distract himself, he glanced at a studious, nose-ringed girl at the nook’s sole other table. Her laptop had a pile of books beside it — Martyr!, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds.5 He finally looked at her face.

“Hey!”

“Hey.”

“Bud Wiggins Jr. — we met at a party. For The Big One.”

“Oh my God, hi.” He was relieved that his drunken haram faux pas appeared to be water under the bridge. “I googled you and ordered one of your books! They’re kinda hard to find.”

“And harder to read, say the critics.”

“Ha! Why don’t you have a Wikipedia page? Your dad does. Everyone does but me. You need to get someone on that.”

“Right away!” he saluted.

“Your father was actually pretty wild. I think I read one of his books when I was at Emerson.”

“That memorable, huh.”

“I was doing a lot of drugs. What’s with the ‘Junior’ thing? Is it weird to be a junior?”

“We’re a pretty big group, you know. We have a convention every year. We call it the Junior Prom.”

She threw back her head and overlaughed at the dopey joke. The throat sounds were musky and carnal and he wanted to grab her up and carry her off like a loaded gun. But to where? It was a year since he’d slept with a woman — through Zuk’s urging, he went on a dating app but deleted it an hour later. He didn’t feel like a sexual being anymore; he didn’t even feel like a being.

“The Junior thing was a goof of my Dad’s. Jews aren’t supposed to give their sons the suffix — it’s haram.”

He winced at the self-sabotage.

“So, you’re a Jew,” she said, blanching the comedy stylings of his callback with a lukewarm smile before deciding to let it go — she’d lobby against Israel another day. Because how many times had she met a real live published novelist?

“A Jew, not a Zionist,” he said. “How ’bout I take the Fifth? On the whole topic.”

With a smile, she said, “Leave the gun, take the Fifth.”

“Oh, that’s awfully good,” he said, cackling as he tore at the croissant. . “But how would you know about that movie? Aren’t you fourteen?”

“Twelve.” A crumb flew from his mouth when he laughed. “Actually, I’m twenty-two. And — Pop-pop — there’s a crazy new thing called ‘streaming.’ Only a few people have heard of it but it’s going to be really big. With ‘streaming,’ you can actually watch all kinds of moving pictures on your handheld device of choice. Even ones from the Seventies — ”

“Don’t break my balls.”

“ — and there’s these wild, off-the-beaten-track places that show old movies . . .”

“Pop-pop thanks you for the tutorial.”

“Tarantino owns one — the New Beverly.”

“I’m sorry to ask your name again.”

“Can I take the Fifth?” she asked.

“Why not? It’s much better the next day, especially with cannoli. Really though, what’s your name? Give me a fake one.”

“It’s Caddy.”

“Is that fake or real?”

With ironic formality, she thrust out an arm. “Caddy Wool — pleasure to meet you, Bud Wiggins Junior.”

Enchanted, he shook her hand. “The pleasure is all yours.” Her bicep was sinewy, toned from book lifting. “And by the way, I like ‘Caddy.’ That’s the name of the girl in The Sound and the Fury.”

“Exactly,” she said, with nuanced appreciation. “My father loved that book. He named me after her but Mom wasn’t having it, not even a little. She finally caved, as long as ‘Cadence’ was the name on the birth certificate. But only Pop-pop calls me Cadence. And Mom, when she’s mad.”

“Cadence is really beautiful and perfect,” he mused.

The delicacy of the simple sentence gave her a nod to an underlying, disciplined intelligence. “Ya think? I love it too.”

“Claude is a lovely name. The question is . . . How many books do you reckon you’ve murdered with those steel teats?”

He smiled blankly, waiting for a response.

She wondered if he was quoting something . . . Was she missing a literary allusion? Glossing over the remark, she said, “The Faulkner ‘Caddy’ was actually short for Candace — yikes. I really can’t stand that name. I’m pretty sure Candaces were the Karens of their time.”

“Can’t dance,” he said.

“Affirmative. Candaces can’t dance for shit.”

“Benjy tech hit. Benjy tech the fence then run along to watch the hitters.” She grinned, nonplussed. “Dilsey mouth smell.”

She struggled to decode. “Dilsey — wasn’t that the maid? From The Sound and the Fury?”

“Da sapphire dark-rush da magnolia — be droppin dem verboten gooseberries from da tree of uncommon prayer all da lib long day.” His voice went ludicrously basso-blackface. “Gooseberries be preparations for tenderness. Chekhov pickem from the groan, pickem all da lib long.” He swatted his ear again with renewed force and his elbow sent the latte crashing to the floor. The room turned to look while Bud’s voice boomed, “Caddy taste da marshmallow gawd roilin in de roofmouf o’ Dilseyland starwhirl.”

He stood, as if hoisted to attention by the Unknown.

The table and the world overturned into blackness.

The day was a metal machine blur of being lifted, this time by the strong hairy arms of the Known.

Bud awakened in a hospital bed. Out the window, palms demurely blew, the first guests at a wild party. Bud wondered about his phone then noticed it was conveniently in his hand. By habit, he pressed the YouTube shortcut — at the top of his search history was dua lipa george saunders interview. He was ten minutes into watching when his manager appeared in the door.

“Hi Zuk,” said Bud, with angelic passivity.

“How goes the legend?” asked Zuk, sweetly diffident.

“Supposedly I had some kind of stroke.”

Zuk gently nodded. “I know. And thank God they brought you here right away. They’re so great with strokes now — but it’s all about how fast they get to you. Have you seen someone? I mean of course you have but did any of the doctors say more about what happened?”

“Not yet.”

He wondered if Bud simply didn’t remember. “Isn’t it great that we got you some work last year?” With mild trepidation, Zuk added, “The WGA’s covering this, aren’t they?”

“A woman stopped by from the whatever department — said my Blue Cross kicked in three days ago. Our Lady of Vanna White was more thrilled about the news than I was.”

“That’s amazing.” Zuk was genuinely relieved.

“If this happened on Tuesday, she said I’d have been severely fucked. In so many words. How did you know I was here?”

“From the woman who was with you.”

“Oh?” he shrugged. “My memory’s a bit . . . whatever. It’s like someone took an eraser and . . .” He pantomimed using one on his head. “But this eraser was made of fucking steel wool.”

“It’s actually kind of amazing,” said Zuk. “I got a frantic call on my cell from a really smart young gal — does she work at the bookstore? She said that she scrolled through your phone . . . am I listed in your emergency contacts as ‘Dad’?” Bud smiled wryly. “That’s legend! Thank God you don’t have a password — what kind of maniac doesn’t have a cellphone password?”

“Prometheus Unlocked.”

The reference went over Zuk’s head. “Anyway, she’s the one who said they were taking you to Hollywood Pres.”

“You came all the way from Paris to see me?”

“No, but I would have. There was an emergency, a business emergency, so I had to be back. But the timing’s perfect because now I’m here to help!”

“Did you sell the house?” Bud was trying to get his bearings. “Is that why you’re — ”

“No no no. Lisbeth wants to keep it. It’s not about Paris, she loves Paris — our son’s at St. Andrews and it’s great to be so close. Dublin’s amazing. But we both have such strong ties to LA, plus my folks are in Palm Springs. You know my mom’s French, don’t you? So we’re going to lease Blue Jay out for a few years.”

“What was the emergency?”

“Just silliness. Starz is doing a miniseries of All Fours — the novel by Miranda July.6 Miranda’s a client, you’d love her. I’ll get the two of you together. We had a little bump along the production road but everything’s perfect now.”

“I heard great things about All Fours,” said Bud magnanimously. “A big bestseller, no?”

“Not at all. No one is buying books — they’re relics, like the movies. Writers are happy to sell 500 copies . . . bought by friends and family!”

Another man stood in the doorway now with a pale-faced intern by his side. He interrupted without the usual fanfare of apologies for interrupting.

“Mr. Wiggins, I presume?” He was charismatic, jocular, and immensely self-assured. “I’m Dr. Khudsiani but everyone calls me Dr. K. I’m your neurosurgeon. Forget me not!”

Bud cheerfully gestured to his friend. “This is Zuk Taittinger, my manager.” He thought the nod to a “team” might get him VIP status.

Ever the diplomat, Zuk asked the doc if he should step outside.

“Please stay,” Bud implored.

“Yes, do,” said Dr. K. “That’s fine. Mr. Wiggins” — he enjoyed saying the name — “do you have family?”

“None to speak of. Or speak well of.”

“Ha!” Turning to Zuk, the doctor said, “The man is witty.”

“He’s legend.”

“‘Or speak well of’! That’s quite good.”

“My manager is my family,” said Bud, in an affecting aside. Zuk was touched and laid a hand upon his hapless client’s.

“All rightie then,” said Dr. K. “We have family here that you do speak well of.” When the physician pulled up a chair, his demeanor changed entirely. “I want to speak to you now of what occurred. And why you’ve been having the recent problems you spoke of during intake.”

“We’ve already talked?”

“Oh yes — and not to worry. It’s quite common not to remember too much so soon after the onset.”

“Onset?”

“You had what we call a tonic-clonic seizure.”

“Tonic-clonic?” said Zuk, bemused.

“Thank you, sir, may I have another?” joked Bud, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

“Not on my watch,” said Dr. K. “And I must say you were extremely articulate during the interview.” Turning to Zuk, he said, “Manager, what does this gentleman do for a living?”

“He’s an amazing writer,” said Zuk almost gravely. “A novelist.”

“Famous?”

“Don’t answer that,” said Bud.

“Yes,” said Zuk, with no trace of irony.

“I should have guessed.” Turning back to Bud, he said, “The details you gave were really quite remarkable — and very helpful. I wish all my patients had your talents.” He folded his hands together like a man of God. “The results of the MRI indicate a tumor. I of course want to do a spectroscopy — a different sort of MRI that maps brain function in the localities near the tumor.”

“Tumor,” echoed Bud.

“Yes.”

“Is it malignant?” asked Zuk timorously.

“Not at all.”

With a glimmer of optimism, the can-do manager said, “So, that’s something you’ll remove?”

“Well,” said Dr. K. “At this moment, it’s not easily resectable — but that may change. GBMs are tricky . . . this one is for sure.”

“GBM,” said Bud, in another blank echo.

“Glioblastoma Multiforme. It looks like you have what we call an Astrocytoma, Mr. Wiggins. Grade 4 — which is quite a high number. But I have a plan. How does the saying go? ‘There’s more than one way to skin a neoplasm.’” Silence fell upon the room. “I know it’s a lot to process but we’re going to run a few more tests before we reconvene.” To Zuk, he said, “Will you be here next week?”

“I have to be in Paris.”

“We were there in the spring.”

“I can definitely do Zoom.”

“Très bon,” said Dr. K.

“Done,” said Zuk, all problems now solved.

The physician returned his gaze to the patient. “Again, I know it’s a lot — and that you’ll want to consult with ChatGPT.” There wasn’t a hint of sarcasm to the presumption. “Having said that, Mr. Wiggins, are there any questions? Anything come to mind? Hmmm? Timelines for treatment or . . .” He trailed off, allowing for that movie moment when the lead asks how much time he has left. “If you need to think about it, that’s fine too. Your ‘family’ and I can get a coffee in the lounge.”

Bud sat up in a formal way.

“Doctor . . .”

“Yes?”

“Is there anything — is there anything that would have — could have triggered this gin and tonic or this whatever it is that I have? I guess what I’m try . . . what I’m trying to say is — is there anything in the literature or anything you’ve heard of, that, uhm, anecdotally links or may link this whatever-plasm to a side effect or consequence — however remote — of . . . Mounjaro?”

Bud didn’t need a chatbot to tell him that any condition with a “4” after “Stage” or “Grade” wasn’t good.

In fact, the tumor was among the most aggressive Dr. K had ever encountered. Only a few weeks later, the novelist was in hospice with visible swelling at the front of his skull due to pressure exerted by the growth. (Lisbeth knitted him a cosmetic beret and DHL’d it from Paris.) Auspiciously, Zuk was in LA to close a deal on a Netflix series based on David Szalay’s Flesh, with Ben Stiller to direct.

The manager was caught off guard by the unfathomed depths of compassion he plumbed for the star-crossed man he’d been unable to do much for in life — and resolved to do his utmost for in these last days. He moved Bud into a high-ceilinged, sun-drenched guest room of the very place where the novelist had his first, seminal scan.

On a rare, clearheaded afternoon, the client asked Zuk if he happened to know Dua Lipa.

“I’ve been thinking that a writer with my kind of . . . issues might be a good fit for her book club. She has an insanely popular podcast, you know. Those Albanians know how to move product, if you gather my meaning. It’s on YouTube — you should watch!”

Zuk thought the idea wasn’t so much delusional as far-fetched. Plus, he didn’t know Dua . . . but did know Katy Perry. AI Claude told one of his assistants that Katy and Dua had a close, almost sisterly relationship. As a fifteen year-old, she worshipped Katy, who went on to become her biggest cheerleader when Dua teleported onto the world stage. Zuk decided to reach out — what harm could come?

Katy was in Greece. When he told her about the situation — and made the Dua proposition — she was moved to tears. During the call, she emailed Cutie (her nickname for Dua) a heads-up, copying Zuk by way of introduction. That night, he carefully crafted a letter to Dua recapping the whole story, attaching some old, praiseworthy reviews of Bud’s books. Her warm response came in the morning but was cryptic because she didn’t say anything about the podcast request. “Katy thinks the world of you,” wrote Dua. “Which now means I do too! Let me take you for a cuppa next time you’re in Londontown.”

Two days later, serendipitously in the UK for yet another showbiz emergency, they met. (As it happened, she’d written a number of songs for the streaming version of All Fours, but the fire Zuk was putting out had nothing to do with the Miranda July project.) The singer-songwriter was unguarded and beyond sweet but grew sad-faced when voicing her hesitation about Bud appearing on the show. “I’m actually not sure it would work — bit on the fence about that.” (Zuk’s translation: Not gonna happen.) “But I’m immensely flattered you thought of me.” He was disappointed yet understood.

Sidetracking to the Starz project, she said, “I had dinner with Miranda and Florence Welch just last week — three witches at a cauldron! Oh, you’d have loved to be a fly on that kettle . . . adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting! A night to remember! Miranda was on the Book Club, you know — Service95.”

“Why do you call it that?”

“I was born in ’95 — and am ever in service to my fans.”

“That’s lovely.”

“I’ve been a bonkers fan of Miranda for ages.” Slyly, she added, “George Saunders was a guest too.”

“Yes, I know!” he said brightly. “Your show’s so great. And so important.”

“Thank you!”

“It’s fantastic how you introduce your demographic to serious writers — such a gift. And you’re an amazing interviewer.”

“Well, it’s been great fun, and I’ve really learned so much. Alas, the fun and the learning carry on.”

“Bud actually saw your interview with George around the time he got diagnosed — ”

“Really?”

“ — before he got so terribly sick. In fact, I wish I could take credit but it was Bud’s idea to do your show!”

“Oh!”

“He’s older than I am but a huge fan of your music. And of course a fan of George as well.”

“Aren’t we all! Well. George and Paula — his wife, who’s lovely — have become great friends. I called George about Bud, you know.”

“Oh my God.”

She was cannily saving the best for the last. “When I told him about what was going on with your friend, he got very quiet, in his George-like way. And . . .” Fluttering her eyes, she said, “Hang on to your Cheshire Cat.” She opened them wide. “As it turns out, George is a great fan of Bud Wiggins Senior — ”

“You’re kidding.”

“ — and is genned up on the works of Bud Junior as well.”

“That is crazy! Dua, that’s amazing!”

“Hang on to Cheshire Cat Number Two. George said that he actually prefers Junior’s work to his papa’s . . .”

“Unbelievable. Bud is going to be so happy to hear that.”

“Anyway . . . he’s going be in LA quite soon, doing events for Vigil — ”

“I hear Vigil is amazing.”

“ — it is, though George does feel a bit clobbered by certain snarky reviews that shall remain nameless — but he suggested popping in on Bud for a visit. Is that something he’s in well enough shape to do? Do you think he’d be up for it? How far has the tumor progressed?”

By hospice time, Caddy had sampled some of Bud’s books.

The one she ordered from a third-party seller on Amazon never arrived but she read pirated excerpts of his work on the web. Though it wasn’t really her thing (she was in the middle of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend and loving it), Caddy was convinced the novelist’s brief, dramatic entrance into her life was an important spoke of her karmic wheel. In some ways, Bud evoked a far less toxic version of her estranged father, with the added bonus of being an elder of a tribe that her soul longed to call its own: the sacred clan of writers. For all her quibbling — she cattily told her mother, “He’s good but he’s minor” — she knew Bud Wiggins Jr. had suffered for his art and been lionhearted. With audacious, reckless transparency, he’d etched the chimerical dreams and embarrassing agonies of his life on the stained glass pages of his novels, each a grimoire of what it meant to be that holy, pornographic thing: human. That was a writer worthy of the tribe.

A few days after Bud collapsed, she listened to a cuspy centennial novelist on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast. Some kind of chord was struck when the guest shared that when she was very young, her mother was an end-of-life doula who cared for nuns at a monastery near the Getty. After a pep talk from her mom (who knew all about her daughter’s chaste tango with the fading “minor artist”) she phoned Zuk Taittinger.

“Hi — this is Caddy Wool, the girl who was with Bud when he fainted at the bookstore.”

It took a moment for things to jog. “Hi Caddy!” he said convivially. “I remember when we spoke . . . How are you?”

“Fine. How’s Bud?”

“Could be better.”

“The reason I’m getting in touch — and if it’s not okay, that’s totally fine — but if it’s at all possible, I’d really like to come see him.”

“You know what . . .” Her heart sank at the long pause. But instead of “Now is probably not the time,” Zuk said, “That would be great, that would be amazing, and thank you. What a lovely thing to want to do! I’m crying, Caddy, I really am! He’s staying with us at the house. Can you come up?”

“Yes! Of course.”

“Fantastic, I’ll put Emilia on and make a time.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re a good person, Caddy — I cannot tell you what that will do for his spirits. Not too many people have visited. They just haven’t, for whatever reason.”

Instead of using Lyft, she took her first driverless ride. It seemed appropriate no one was at the wheel. As eerie as that felt, there was something lushly theatrical about it, and fated too. (She thought of the Warren Zevon record her dad listened to night and day, “My Ride’s Here.”) In the passenger seat but utterly alone, winding through destiny’s hills, a profanely lyrical, elegiac meditation was born — Charon’s Waymo, the haunting title story of the eponymous collection that won her the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award six years later.7

With dreamlike suddenness, she stood in front of the hospital bed staring at Bud, who looked gone. Through the panoramic window, someone cleaned the tropey Hockney-blue pool while gardeners busied with their work. She knew a housekeeper had led her to the novelist’s room but remembered nothing else.

A caregiver with a warm smile rose from his chair.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me — it’s my lunch time. Just give a shout if there’s anything you need. And it’s fine to wake him up! The man sleeps more than ten cats.” He looked back at his charge from the door and wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think he’s asleep at all. Just pretending.” Before leaving, he asked, “Are you an author as well?”

“Not yet,” she said wistfully.

She moved close to the window to look at the vista. The workers had left and Caddy felt like a trespasser. Overcoming her nerves, she stepped close to him, pinning down the enigma of her emotions like a champion wrestler. She grabbed a tissue and daubed a tear drop that fell from one of Bud’s eyes — was it because of the swelling? A macabrely comical beret cocked up on his crown like a sidewalk warped by a tree root.

The nauseating thing inside his head was trying to break out.

She shut her eyes and pictured herself as a girl, opening books from her parents’ shelves to inhale their scent before splaying the pages against her bare, flat bosom. The sense memory returned — the mysteries and pregenitality of it — yet here, in the fading pages of the tribesman’s household ICU, the only smells were the vicarious ones of the nunnery. A dying sister had given Mom a piece of paper with a quote that she occasionally recited to her daughter (“Instead of perfume there will be rottenness; instead of a belt, a rope; instead of well-set hair, baldness; instead of a rich robe, a skirt of sackcloth; and branding, instead of beauty”), acting out the words in vulgar burlesque or stoic earnestness or Shakespearean caricature, depending on the effect of the wine she took like a sacrament to purge herself of the bacterized hospice death funk. But no matter how Caddy’s mother stylized them, the sentences were always freaked by sorrow.

She saw his eyes open, roaming here and there in neutral curiosity.

“Hi, Bud! It’s Caddy.” She paused. “I wanted to come see you — Zuk said it would be all right to come see you.” When he smiled at her, Caddy’s heart and mouth broke open. “Well, hi there! Hi! How ya doin’, Mr. Cannoli? It’s me, Miss Gun.”

A mischief maker, he blinked like Harpo Marx. “Miss Gun?” he clowned. “Either take the Fifth — or say hello to my little friend!”

“Tony Montana! I just saw that at the New Beverly!”

His smile quick-changed to a bewildered grimace. “Are you here?”

There was fear in the look, and something else that she called sorrow.

“Yes,” she soothed, touching his arm. “I am here.”

The answer calmed him. “You were here earlier, for lunch,” he said offhandedly. “You’re back? Are you here now?”

The riddle hung in the air as she choked on the world.

On the afternoon George Saunders was due, in another movie moment, Dr. K told Zuk “Our friend could go any time now.” The manager was in denial. “But I just spoke to him,” he exclaimed, beaming like a loon. “He was so with it — a hundred per cent! Like the old Bud! The legend . . .”

The dying writer insisted that Rosa dress him in his trademark jumpsuit for Saunders’ visit. “And fragrance,” he jubilantly commanded. “We must have fragrance! Fragrance must be worn in honor of our esteemed guest.”

Zuk’s assistant picked up a bottle of Rose Tonnerre and Bud stretched out like a dog for a belly rub while the giggly housekeeper went to town. Giggling himself, Zuk finally shouted, “Enough shpritzing, Rosa, enough!” and confiscated it. He knew the perfume carwash would be comedy gold for his eulogy.

A few days before, Bud happily agreed to Zuk’s brainstorm that a camera crew attend “the Saunders Summit,” something he had already cleared with George. Documenting the event was important for posterity — and a definite asset in negotiating the sale of his client’s literary archives. An author need not be a superstar to get something in the low six figures; it wouldn’t make the nightly news but every dollar helped. Medical bills had mounted, with significant portions not fully covered by the WGA health plan. (Whenever the manager suggested crowdfunding, Bud shot it down.) Finally, Zuk’s wife gently cautioned, “Darling, you’ve been incredibly supportive and generous — you’ve been heroic. But there’s a limit.”

Of course he knew she was right.

Dr. K was thrilled to be making his film debut as “Mr. Wiggins’ personal physician, not his costar,” he joked. In all seriousness he added, “I do have a SAG card, by the way.” But as it turned out, Saunders caught a bad flu and his West Coast trip was postponed; Bud Wiggins Jr. died a few weeks before the Booker winner’s rescheduled event.

At the moment he passed, Zuk was dealing with more hijinks on the set of All Fours and the caregiver was on a smoke break. But the housekeeper, who’d grown immensely fond of her employer’s guest, was with him during his last breath — a blessing. She hadn’t wept so hard since her beautiful boy revved his motorcycle out of the world.

There was no memorial.

Not long after the funeral, Caddy visited his grave at a small Westwood cemetery. His manager paid for the interment; many of Zuk’s famous clients and associates were buried there.

On the ground in front of the bottom drawer, she sat cross-legged and smoked, like a truant schoolgirl. After a while, she strolled through the park with a map from the mortuary office, hunting celebrated writers. He wasn’t too far from Truman Capote — she thought Bud would be pleased. Ray Bradbury was a short hike away, as was Rod McKuen, a poet she’d never heard of. After snooping on her gammy’s favorites, Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins, she ran out of steam. Jackie’s epitaph was SHE GAVE A GREAT DEAL OF PEOPLE A GREAT DEAL OF PLEASURE. She laughed, wondering what dark variation Bud would have come up with for his own stone.

On the way home, Caddy stopped at Stories. As a tribute, she sat in the same alcove where Bud was felled by the tumor.

At the party where they first met, he had spoken of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumously published The Pat Hobby Stories — the book that inspired Bud Wiggins Senior, who “saw himself on every page,” to begin his own journey as a writer. Bud told her that the autobiographical tales of woe about a washed-up, alcoholic movie hack were sold to magazines to pay his daughter’s college tuition “and keep Zelda in the nuthouse. By then, at just 44 years-old, poor F. Scott had been effectively deleted from public and critical memory. You know, those Pat Hobby stories are hack jobs themselves . . .” He crinkled wet eyes. “But so mordant and transcendently sad — the horror of being upright just blows right through them like a slapstick Santa Ana yowl. But oh, the spirit . . . the spirit remains! You must read them someday. Will you promise? I command it.”

Leaving her scarf as a seat marker, Caddy went in search of a book to bring back to the table. On tiptoes, she pulled down an omnibus of Fitzgerald stories. None of them featured the broken-down Pat Hobby.

An adjacent shelf was bedecked by oversized Post-it prayer flags — STAFF PICKS — each written in different-colored calligraphic pen. Her eyes landed on a book with a blood-red cover and two side-by-side flaps taped beneath.

This beautifully illustrated new ed. of Faulkner’s audacious gangsta dream novel THE SOUND & THE FURY is notable for the SMASH ‘N’ GRAB intro by underrated niche novelist Bud Wiggins Jr (recently deceased), who, AS HE LAY DYING (literally) let it R.I.P. - i.e. carved the mad-overrated gothic bugger a serious new one. The intro went viral because it was slipped in by a guerrilla typesetter & was about to be pulped by the pub before Houellebecq substack-rhapsodized on Outlaw Wiggins Junior & web-fire spread faster than a Karen Bass INFERNORAMA - moving a S-ton of productivo. What a twist! Unlike FURY (that hoary, turgid “splendid failure” — ol’ alkie Bill’s phrase hisself, btw — beloved by Boomer Faulksingers and Zoomer phonies alike), you’ll breeze through Wiggins’ profane takedown and LOSE YOUR WIG-gins as you watch him take a scary transgressive dump on Mr. Bill’s corpse whilst dragging it thru the polite streets of Amerikan Sacred Cow Lit. The man (WIGGINS) is LEGEND. As Nabokov said, ‘Down with Faulkner!’ — & as I say, Kill the Booker Buddhas! Kill twee writer workshops! Reissue the books of Professor Wiggins Junior! The KING is DEAD, LONG LIVE THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING - BWJ!!!!!

She sent a photo of it to Zuk, who wrote back “LOL!” One of his assistants posted the image on his company’s Instagram.

The trolling foreword that became known as The Sound and the Fury: The Wiggins Edition burned its way into the vernacular. “They got majorly Wigginsed,” “Don’t Wiggins me!”, et al were ubiquitous; punk monographs and subversive critical essays proliferated with titles like “Did Bud Wiggins Jr. Say the Quiet Part Out Loud?” and “Things We Talk About When We Talk About Faulkner (and Bud Wiggins Jr.).”

The last time Zuk checked BookScan, Year To Date Sales were 376,478 — and because of Houellebecq, Zuk was able to get Bud’s back catalogue published by Gallimard .

The manager was starting to think biopic.

Years went by before she spoke to Zuk again.

When Charon’s Waymo won the Flannery O’Connor, he sent a congratulatory email and suggested a lunch — “What about adapting something from CW for Netflix? They did G. Saunders Spiderhead and Margot Robbie’s company LuckyChap is developing tons of Ottessa stories” — but nothing came of it.

Whether strictly deserving, “minor talent” Bud Wiggins Jr. became a major part of Caddy’s literary coming of age story. On podcasts, she poignantly reminisced about the odd couple’s brief season, an affaire de coeur she called “The Old Man and the She.” Caddy lived in Brooklyn now but returned in the middle of spring for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She was the star attraction of a short story panel.

A rainy day — her favorite kind. He was buried just a mile away from the event, so after the Q&A and book signing, she spontaneously walked over. Approaching his grave, she noticed a camera crew heading in the same direction. One of them held an umbrella over a balding man in a blazer — it was Zuk. He made a beeline when he saw her.

“Oh my God, Caddy!”

“Hi Zuk! What’s going on?”

He gestured to his entourage. “They’re from La Grand Librairie — a hugely popular show in France that’s all about writers. They’re doing a short piece on Bud!”

“C’est fantastique.”

He shouted to the crew, “Voici Caddy Wool, une écrivaine extraordinaire qui a remporté de nombreux prix. You need to do a show about her!” Turning back, he said, “You have to do it, the French will love you. They will absolutely fly you over!”

“I’m so sorry I didn’t return your email, that was just rude. It was so sweet of you to think of me . . .”

“Listen: I have an amazing idea — do you want to do this with me?”

“What do you mean?”

“The interview! Come talk with me about Bud on camera — ”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Zuk.”

“Why not? It would really sell the segment. And it’s so interesting that we ran into each other, don’t you think? I mean, here? Now? Bud must have arranged it! It would add so much . . .”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t,” she said ruefully. “I have to say no.”

“No worries! How long are you in town?”

“I’m actually leaving tomorrow.”

“Next time then. And I am so happy for all the success you’ve had.”

As the rain abated, the crew was already on their way toward the columbarium to prep the shot. Zuk was going to talk about George Saunders being a great fan of his former client and how Bud was too sick to appear on Service95, which broke Dua’s heart. He would end with his crowd-pleaser — the time Rosa hosed down the moribund writer with Rose Tonnerre.

Zuk called out as she left. “Did you see the grave?”

“Not since right after the memorial.”

“Then you haven’t seen it — ”

She nodded toward the Parisiennes. “I’ll come back when it’s not so crowded!”

Zuk went into headmaster mode.

Racing over to grab the hand of his rebellious student, he began power-walking to the crypt. “They are not going to film you, I promise. But you have to see it, Caddy. You’re the one who gave me the idea!”

“What idea?”

“We didn’t have an epitaph and it was driving me crazy. Because it had to be brilliant. Brilliant and witty and dark — it had to be worthy. Lisbeth finally said, ‘Why don’t you just put on there what you always called him? “Legend.”’ And I thought, That’s it! I ordered the stone. But the night before it was ready, I had a dream. I’m telling you, Caddy, I actually had a dream! I dreamt I was at that bookstore, showing Bud the Faulkner book that he wrote the amazing introduction for. Remember the photo you sent me? With a review from someone who worked there? When I woke up from the dream, I knew. So I had them redo the inscription . . .”

As they arrived, the crew ignored them.

Zuk crouched down to show her the plaque:

BUD WIGGINS

1964 - 2026

“Staff Pick”

Bruce Wagner has written fourteen novels, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” — I’m Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I’ll Let You Go, and Still Holding — and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist Chrysanthemum Palace. His more recent titles include Amputation, ROAR: American Master and The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. He lives in Los Angeles.

Around the corner from where I’m writing this in southern Stockholm, clean center at the dark heart of suburbia’s placid, unquivering normalness, lives a young couple who wake up every day and pretend it’s still 1929. She dresses in Hooverettes and rayon slips, he in a top hat and double-breasted British Warm. She reads housewife magazines from the late ’20s, he polishes the vintage silver sconces. At night she executes 1930s recipes while he sits in the “smoking room” listening to Artie Shaw. Occasionally, when I go out for walks, I can see them strolling along the street. One needn’t squint or look twice. The piled fur lapels are hard to ignore.

Sure, one could be a little suspect of it all, but at this stage of life in the 21^st century, theirs seems about as sensible a way to live as any. Don’t care for contemporary life? Don’t like its banality, its ugliness? You could hardly be blamed for locking the doors, hoarding a trove of relics, putting on the Gershwin brothers and drifting off into the past. For the many of us not yet content to give up on the future, we’re stuck with the unenviable task of figuring out how we ended up behind Lewis’ doors of hell, locked from the inside.

Inglorious fate had it that we were born to a century shrunk solemnly beneath the towering shadow of its predecessor. With every sallow year of Hawk Tuah girls and Bob Marley biopics, it’s becoming ever clearer just how badly we miss whatever was going around in 1967. The 20^th century was a kind of new renaissance, a breadth of excellence not seen since the days of the Medici, which means that now we’re condemned to find life a little wanting. W. David Marx certainly feels that way. “The profundity of cultural invention in the twentieth century gave us a false faith in its permanence,” he writes, in his introduction to Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, a book whose title attempts to give name to a concept that all of us must, in one way or another, instinctually recognize. That formless ennui, that sour smell of dissatisfaction, that unshakable impression that whatever we’re interacting with — song, film, book, painting — seems hardly worthy of comparison to its forebears. Why, O muses, have you forsaken us? Why, mother of Art, do you make us want so much yet give us so little?

Weeping at the altar of the past is nothing new. Eighteen centuries ago, St. Cyprian was chastising the unacceptable social and cultural decline of his age, longing for the good old days to return. With the death of Michelangelo in 1564, the Italian culturati shuddered at the thought of what fruitless, insubstantial attempts might be made to surpass the unsurpassable perfection of the previous century and a half. Even in the early 20^th century it was thought by some that modern life was irretrievably ossified, inert, cast dead by immovable images and well-worn words; that nothing short of revolution would do. Humans, in other words, have forever indulged in a graceless penchant for hyperbole, vague discontentment, and ahistorical whining.

But it’s fair to say that the enormous legacy of the 20^th century has somewhat upped the ante on our dissatisfaction. Now, every hour in every country, inboxes fill with the latest cultural lament. Blank Space may take a slightly girthier form, but its impetus comes from the same place: a nebulous feeling that something is deeply wrong, that our culture is sick, that our art is worthless and that, crucially, there still appears to be a way out. Marx’s method of charting the malady is to turn over almost every name-recognizable American cultural product of the last 25 years — “a cultural history of the 21^st century” is what he subtitles the book — to locate the signs of cancer. Maybe it’s still in early-stage progression; maybe, if we catch it in time, we can tame the malignancy.

And yet it soon appears that this sort of optimism belongs to a bygone era. What Blank Space instead becomes, and in rather short order too, is a glowing exemplar of the aesthetic ignorance, the intellectual sterility, and the moral confusion that has led us, in a kind of slow dismemberment, to today’s legless travesty of a culture. Those desiring to find more than vibe-based consolatory conclusions and threadbare generalizations should be warned away; Blank Space has nothing for you. That you ever expected it to is perhaps a cautionary sign, a suggestion to step back and see that if you’re still looking for a skerrick of self-aware criticism in a prestige hardback, published by a Big Five imprint and written by a Harvard-educated, cosmopolitan, pop-culture-addicted, too-online, oh-so-well-meaning liberal American “culture” journalist, you need a wake-up call, maybe a stiff drink, better yet a lobotomy. If it’s true that we need books of Blank Space’s ambition more than ever, we can no longer afford books of Blank Space’s self-conception. With a misconceived frame of reference, its anti-art premises, its penchant for paralogisms and rhetorical bluster, and a slew of feebly-drawn conclusions, Marx’s book brings us no closer to digging our way out of the shithole. If anything, it exemplifies just how hard it is to get the stink out of a good man’s clothes.

If you set your mind to the stars, the moon will only disappoint you. “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space. Over the past twenty-five years,” writes Marx, “culture has prospered as a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.” Straight away we encounter the first flaking of Blank Space’s chintzy carapace. Though based in Japan for the last two decades, Marx has done little to dilute his West Atlantic attitude towards novelty with the regard for longevity found in his adopted home. He still has a fetish for originality, a kink which turns out to be, over the course of Blank Space’s 384 pages, more than a little masochistic. He longs for the days when “cultural inventors” and artists “challenged convention,” “advocated new value systems,” and “re-shaped established culture at its symbolic core, tweaking human consciousness to reveal new ways to perceive the world.”

What exactly it means to “tweak human consciousness” is a question perhaps not beyond what Marx can think of, but certainly beyond what he can in this book. All W. David can do is spurt out a few dusty vagaries about re-shaping culture and then spend a few hundred pages trying to figure out what exactly he means by that. The book’s mechanism is fairly straightforward: take one cultural product, trend, or “moment”, juice it for a light dribble of pulp, reach a tendentious conclusion, and then proceed after a paragraph or so onto whatever comes next on the conveyor. Flaccid prevarications abound: a song “re-shaping” this, a news outlet “revolutionizing” that, all sense of causation and direction drifting into exactly the kind of airless forgettableness Marx so laments in the book’s opening paragraphs. Among the cats Marx pulls from the bag, we read that “with the iPhone’s arrival . . . anyone could now be online, anywhere, at any time,” or that “despite their chaotic nature, stans contributed significantly to online culture.”

Instead of honing in on the few cultural products he personally considers most consequential — instead of dispersing with the illusion of objectivity and lending a personal version to this “history” — Marx surveys, with treacly and temperate professionalism, the breadth of the cultural swamp. (Maybe, instead of its originality fetish, this attitude of philandering expediency is the book’s most American quality.) From Glee to “Get Lucky,” Steve Aoki to the MCU, Luigi Mangione to Paris Hilton, Tidal to Stüssy, Gwen Stefani to Vanity Fair — it’s a span of references meant to impress, connoting a kind of voracious pop sensibility that would make Marx, theoretically, the ideal intellect to comprehend and synthesize the high-paced eclecticism of culture in the internet age. What intrepid terrains this sensibility won’t cross are hinted at in the book’s opening chapter, which muses on the Strokes, Terry Richardson, VICE, and the rise of Hipsterism — a taste of the book’s real frame of reference. If it didn’t make it to Bedford Avenue or the Lorimer L, it isn’t worth mentioning.

Hipsterism had a two-fold significance. First, it was the earliest sign of a burgeoning Millennial culture, borne of post-9/11 disillusionment, suckled on Fisherian capitalist-realism, reveling in a LARP of bohemian decadence, an attitude of me-first hedonism without the white-dust traces of iniquity nor an ounce of the political mettle one found in the Boomer movements of the ’60s. Secondly, it was arguably the last “movement” that drew its essence from life in a physical location, meaning it was the last movement that could have feasibly belonged in the 20^th century. Henceforth we were in the new millennium, stuck with the indignities of its namesake generation.

2002 saw the first pangs of Millennial self-consciousness. Ten years later they had become a professionalized class of strivers and decadents, distilling their cry for help into a self-serving whimper of virtue. Eschewing the Ruskian idea that a society channels its highest desires and aspirations into its art, or the softer, Jewish version that culture could be the religion of the nonbelievers, the Millennials opted to assume en masse the notion that work, which for many of them meant tech, should be a force for good. Along with the Gen X litter-runt too geeky and “techno-optimist” to belong amongst their own kind, the Millennials had, in the span of only a few years, brought us Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, Tinder, Twitter, and, of course, Facebook, whose IPO in May 2012 created the first class of Millennial billionaires. Apple, the dream factory “connecting” us all, had displaced Exxon as the world’s most valuable company. Jonah Peretti’s early experiments with tailored HTML and keyword-exploiting headlines at the Huffington Post were suddenly de rigueur among the media class. YouTube had figured out the bones of its monetization program, inaugurating the “content-creator” who regularizes his posts like an old mill-worker punching his timecard. Corporations were the culture. This was Millennial reality. We are still living it.

Once market value was conflated with moral value, it would only be a matter of time before aesthetic value fell by the same sword. Soon art became ensnared in its own desolate tunnel: on one end, freaks, eccentrics, and nostalgics; on the other, corporate raiders and the self-styled cultural “elite” dreaming of making art their living. Corporate culture having hoovered up the last crumbs of a selling-out taboo, the artists and audiences began synonymizing commercial and aesthetic success. In Marxian parlance it’s called “Ultrapoptimism,” and it signaled art’s accedence into its lowly Faustian dilemma. There were endless pools of cash to swim in, if one could accept that the art itself would be at best a pleasant diversion, but probably a niche irrelevance. And there, in the halls of decadent privilege, real art has mostly stayed.

I have always rejected the idea that art, film, persona or music becoming commercial means it cannot also be considered cool. The rejection of commerciality “just because” is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever.

So writes Charli xcx, the world’s “realest” pop star, in a long, unedited Substack post entitled “The Death of Cool.” She continues:

My fascination with the combination of high and low has always been a big driver within my work. People who are interested in things deemed as high brow or high art or left of centre seem to feel that undercutting art with something low brow or mass produced degrades the work and people who are more interested in things deemed as low art or popular or utilizing a directness in language seem to find the acknowledgement of theory or history as pretentious. I enjoy the in-between space that this creates.

One imagines Charli gleefully whirling down the vortex of that “in-between space,” together with Andy Warhol (who she mentions), Taylor Swift, and George Lucas. Once her slickly-produced pop slipped into the algorithm and combusted into virality, it made its creator an apostle of the 21^st-century concept of artistry: poptimism pure and ascendant. Having now toured every corner of the globe, discovered her political heft (“Kamala IS brat”), and banked a lifetime’s worth of money — in other words, having become a kind of corporation herself — she wants to believe she can return to the silos of cool that she always imagined she’d inhabit. But Charlie has no interest in being David Lynch or Brigitte Bardot. The goal of her art, she now writes, is to find “the apex of cool and commercial.” Staunchly her image eschews the kind of grubby fingerwork of the corporate masseuse we see in many of her contemporaries; in oh-so-lightly-edited Substack posts she plays up her approachability, her willing descent from the stars back down to earth. Marx calls her a “pop rebel.” It’s hard to call it cynical, easy to call it “self-aware” and “too real.” Most of all it’s just naïve. Whatever chance there was that cool could coexist with corporate aesthetics, technology took up the scythe and laid it clean. If there are two things that are the antithesis of cool, it’s tech and corporations — which are our culture.

Perhaps the only thing giving them a run for their money are the insert pages of legacy media, of which W. David Marx is another oily product. Blank Space resounds with the thundering echo of the establishment, not only in the cultural products it references and tastefully readable voice it adopts (Dave Eggers, eat your heart out), but in the class of commentariat it seems to deem authoritative. Its touchstones are Gawker, The Face, Pitchfork, The Atlantic; NPR is sacred gospel. It quotes commentators with their titular qualifiers — “the internet culture critic Katherine Dee,” “novelist Will Leitch,” “political analyst John Ganz,” “journalist Marisa Meltzer” — to legitimize a class of culturati who we otherwise wouldn’t know, like, or care about. “The film critic A. S. Hamrah” (former stalwart of the hallowed pages of n+1) assures us that Hillbilly Elegy was considered “one of the worst films of the year by pretty much everybody who saw it,” and because he’s a film critic from n+1, we can believe him.

For many of us who no longer consider Pitchfork relevant or that writing a book about Sassy Magazine makes you a “journalist,” Blank Space reads like a ghost story, a white-on-white drawing, a genre tableau populated by nonentities. Marx’s appetite for pop culture may have predisposed him to research the 21^st century, but his establishment rectitude makes him among the least prepared to understand it. Making clearheaded sense of Blank Space’s immense disparity of references would require, among other qualities, a stronghold philosophy or viewpoint — aestheticism, nihilism, spiritualism, anything will do really — buttressed by a sense of historical sweep, a knack for insight, and, if only for the reader’s pleasure, a decent aptitude for turning a fresh-sounding phrase. In other words, everything you’d never find in your weekly Vox newsletter. And if Marx didn’t learn to analyze, to write, or to come up with an assertive attitude, one can’t help but wonder what the four years at Harvard were for anyway.

Whatever wisdom Blank Space can muster is used up in its sections on fashion and Millennial malaise. The rest of the book quickly becomes a chore, all hyperbole and stiff-lipped liberal earnestness. Considering the cast of characters and events it assembles, Marx’s book is almost impossibly unfunny. Only when the humor almost writes itself can Marx generate a laugh, like when Paris Hilton names her two business idols — Trump and P. Diddy — or when, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Baz Luhrmann tries to meet the moment by fast-tracking his ridiculous Gatsby adaptation. Otherwise Blank Space goes by without a giggle, reminding us that if you’re not going to have a philosophy, you can at least have a sense of humour about it all.

The nearest Marx comes to an overarching principle is his kink for originality, but even then he’s more than a little flaccid. He is so ambulant is his terminology — “pure artistic innovation”? — that one begins to wonder if Marx might’ve benefited from a long evening with the Merriam Webster. Lengthily he expounds on the cultural impact of “manifesting, astrology, and other mystical practices,” movements that have been floating around Western consciousness for three quarters of a century and occupying a central position in Eastern life for millennia. On music, where he seems most keen to venture, Marx labels the balefully ordinary Chappell Roan a “daring new voice” but later completely misses on hyperpop, one of the very few uniquely 21^st-century aesthetics, so that 100 gecs, who, all reservations aside, could reasonably be called “cultural inventors,” get one sentence in Marx’s “cultural history.” Perhaps he was warned off when he realized hyperpop hadn’t been covered in The Drift.

Strangest and most misbegotten of all is the book’s wonky scope. It may be that writing a book styled as a long-viewing chronicle yet only spanning 25 years discourages you from grasping a few hearty truths. A fuller context of human and especially art history might indicate, for example, that originality is startlingly rare and hardly the only sign of auspicious creative happenings. If originality, novelty, or “invention” were the hallmark of a blossoming culture, how many more than a handful of epochs, between the age of Aeschylus and the days of Delacroix, could be said to have reached their spring? Why, in other words, would we keep condemning ourselves to disappointment?

Ask your average Substacker and they’ll give you a Levitical tractus of reasons why they believe culture has come to its shuddering nadir: overexposure to the achievements of the past; the fatigue of content overload; a sense of all art and culture immediately drowning in its antecedents, giving everything the silvery smack of meaningless; a relentless pressure to keep releasing work, even if it’s not fully realized; a lack of cool; the total assimilation of art and commerce; and “social media.” Most of it, naturally, has to do with the internet.

But the sense of a nadir — here I go with the time frames again — predates, by several decades even, the World Wide Web or the Commodore PET. In a 1959 interview with Georges Charbonnier, Claude Lévi-Strauss went on a lengthy and rather compelling fulmination against the paucity of the era’s cultural achievements. “We have reached a sort of impasse, and realized that we are tired of listening to the kind of music we have always listened to, looking at the kind of painting we are used to looking at every day and of reading books written according to the patterns we are familiar with. All this,” he said, “has given rise to a kind of unhealthy tension.” More depressing was how counterproductive our attempts to break the gridlock proved to be. Having become “too self-conscious” in our “determination to discover something new,” we had forgotten that these crises never, ever, find their saviors in “people . . . trying deliberately and systematically to invent new forms.” All efforts were not only futile — they were ruinous.

And yet somehow things feel worse today than ever. Lévi-Strauss, an art aficionado named after Claude Lorrain, looked back on the evolution pictorial art had undergone since his namesake’s epoch and yet could not, by 1959, see clearly whether it was a sign of construction or destruction. Now that question has been answered, resoundingly, in all art forms and media. Marx’s “blank space” has less to do with originality than it does the slow and systematic deconstruction of the boundaries we used to use to understand and classify art and culture: genres, disciplines, formats, institutions, and, most critically, standards of taste. This is what Marx calls “Cultural Omnivorism,” the total inverse of the old Greek derivation of critique — krisis — meaning choice.

The irony of Blank Space is that, generally, Marx’s own tendency is not omnivorous enough. His demonstrable preference for fashion and music prejudices him against other forms of cultural production which a 21^st-century recapitulation ought to include. He’s mute on literary matters, glaringly apathetic to podcasts, and after claiming Vin Diesel “remained” at the end of the 2010s a “cultural fixture,” his curt glances at cinema feel mostly merciful. Given the attention he lends it, he seems to feel that music is the key to understanding the culture, but in his writing he shows almost no sensitivity for musical elements besides a beat, a lyric, a vibe. He chastises Lady Gaga for laundering conventional pop appeal through the illusion of “radical creativity” and a “glamorous, boundaryless life,” but sees nothing so suspicious in the “pioneering” achievement of “Old Town Road.”

Here Marx’s book concretizes one of many damning revelations about the current state of cultural commentary. Marx, and almost all of his media cohort, seem to be functionally art-illiterate. Weaned in the shallows of pop culture, the voices quoted in Blank Space take the kind of credulous approach to art and entertainment that belies a mind looking not for the subterranean spirit of a thing but for its baldest, most comprehensible “message.” Analyses of shows like Gossip Girl and Glee demonstrate a willingness to nourish oneself only on first-order interpretations, narratives, and characters being taken always for what they “represent.” Rich kids having fun means an endorsement of “aristocratic” politics, and queer romances and “subplots” featuring characters with Down syndrome “expand representation.” It’s undergraduate stuff, and the inverse of Marx’s intemperate cultural appetite: a short temper for the possibility of abstruse readings.

By the end of Blank Space, a flummoxed Marx, having persevered through the kampf of his diagnosis, tries to summon the clarity to recommend a few amelioratory avenues. Mostly he’s on point, especially when arguing that standards of judgment need to be reaffirmed and “critics and tastemakers” championed. “To have great poets,” wrote Whitman, “we must have great audiences,” and, as the book’s conclusory chapter reveals, W. David Marx agrees. But how hollow it all seems after almost 400 pages of his own aesthetic confusion and critical dilettantism.

Which is, in part, what makes Blank Space so infuriating and depressing. How will we ever extricate ourselves from this morass if we can’t name its form? Some generations ago it would have been unthinkable to analyze a Gothic church by focusing only on its pillars and windows. Now, matters of the spirit, the inchoate, have slipped into obsolescence; everything is rudimentary content, a bare-faced declaration of intent. The collapse of critical apparatuses is not excuse enough; we have also forsaken almost all critical faculties, educated our way out of them, sewn virtuous ideologies into our eyes instead, and finally convinced ourselves that taste with too high a brow is not democratic enough and that all preconceptions pale against the need to be inclusive. But who ever believed that true art, or cool, or vision was inclusive?

Call it an archive of ephemera, call it a survey of stagnation, but if it’s not a history of cultural aesthetics — how things look, sound, and present themselves — what is Blank Space but a history of cultural morals? If one sounds like a much more exhausting and hectoring experience than the other, let me assure you, it is. The incurable malady of Blank Space is its indifference to any distinction between the truths of life and the truths of art. That the two might be worth differentiating seemed more or less obvious to a few centuries of artists yet apparently didn’t occur to the author, nor the editor, nor the fact-checkers who brought us Blank Space. But it should have, because when the book inevitably finds its way to the really critical stuff, it is found utterly, brazenly wanting.

Here we come to the big two, the events that most devastated and revolutionized 21^st-century culture: 9/11 and Trump — neither of which Marx seems, in any remote way, to “get.” His curious blindness to the impact of the first is an innocent foretaste of his willful blindness to the realities of the second, culminating in the reader’s dazed wonderment at the book’s end, at how someone so resolutely determined to ignore Trump could possibly believe he was ever qualified to interpret the 21^st century.

But first came 9/11, which for many of us came to mind as our bloodthirst was being perturbingly sated by the death of Charlie Kirk, in what functionally amounted to a live-streamed assassination. Here, it was almost impossible not to think back to the glittering image of the world’s largest pair of towers, in the heart of the world’s most iconic skyline, exhaling their final sinister plumes. Warhol had prefigured it with his Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963): the voyeurism, the violence, the disgusting allure, which, just as it drew our eyes to the extraordinary terror of Flight 175, drew our gaze, a quarter-century later, to videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder or Vince Zampella’s fatal car crash. Violence we had seen, but nothing with the scale and definition of 9/11. Its dreadnought symbolism was broadcast everywhere, inescapable, in full color and in devastating detail, gawked over almost instinctively. All over, for free, horror in high-definition: this was the 21^st century.

It seems bizarre and somewhat negligent to write a book about images, media, and commercialism, and to let 9/11 go almost entirely unmentioned. If the will to transgress got the better of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who called 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,” the heart of the statement — that 9/11 will live on as perhaps the most indelible, extraordinary image many of us will ever see — seems not without its prescience. Yet W. David Marx, with good right-thinking rectitude, quotes Stockhausen not to ponder the undercurrents of his assertion but to inform us that, in the wake of his utterance, all performances of his music were cancelled. Just as those who “‘got’ Pop . . . could never see America the same way again,” our culture divides between those who see the Warholian realism they’re living in and those who don’t. It’s all a bit lost on W. David Marx, who in 9/11 sees almost nothing and in Andy Warhol sees only the guy at the centre of a “downtown scene.”

Why Marx keeps his discursions on 9/11 tersely forgettable shortly becomes apparent: he was saving his ink for Trump, about whom the author has reams to say, all in the kind of language that recalls something of a Hollywood liberal righteousness and something of the CNN chyron. Those who get past the ladling of rhetorical platitudes one perhaps naively thought we’d moved on from — “decency and progress,” “dystopian absurdity,” “male-oriented ecosystems,” “steamrolling over ethics and morals” — are then greeted with every sort of woo-woo trick of discreditation and disrepute-by-association Marx can muster from the #NotMyPresident playbook. In two marathon chapters, one in the middle and another that provides the dénouement, he activates Deplorables mode in a tour de force of proper-noun accusation. Proud Boys, Pizzagate, Kanye, Bronze Age Pervert, Milo, Azealia Banks, Louis C.K., Kyle Rittenhouse, 4Chan, Peter Thiel, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Pepe, Martin Shkreli, Ariel Pink, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and “slovenly Steve Bannon” — this inculpation, the stuff of “Trumpism,” is just one great fetid lump of political excrement, which apparently, in the world according to W. David Marx, slid straight off the wall. “Despite wielding maximal political power,” he writes, “Trumpism struggled to make a cultural dent in the late 2010s.” It’s an extraordinary conclusion for a professional thinker to make, and one that, in light of Louis’ return from cancellation, the exporting of the edge-right’s conspiracism into the mainstream, the continued ascendancy of The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, or Peter Thiel’s associations first with the intellectual dark web and then with the Dimes Square mandarins, seems more than a little revisionist, and certainly less than candid.

Trump once said that Hilary didn’t have “the Presidential look,” a phrase which, like the Warholian litmus test, perfectly delineates the haves and have-nots in the Trumpian world. There are those of us who understand what Trump meant symbolically, and there are the W. David Marx’s, still taking every utterance literally, bloomers clasped in the name of “liberal decency,” a phrase Marx uses unironically. But then, it’s hard to see something clearly when you’re still in a state of shock about its happening. Marx has yet to quite accept the Trump paradigm — yet to “get Pop” — perhaps because he is still so blinded by a Trumpian aesthetic he finds barbarous and uncouth. It’s a downstream consequence of the incapability — here I go again — to separate aesthetics from ideology: the same incapability that made Pharrell offer an oleaginous mea culpa for his song “Blurred Lines,” which he “didn’t realize” had “catered to . . . chauvinist culture”; the same one that encouraged Vulture to conclude, apropos of Hamilton, that “in order to dislike it you’d pretty much have to dislike the American experiment.”

Naturally, Marx’s “conclusions” about Trumpian culture are a little askew; so too are his presuppositions. The jig is up as soon as he diagnoses Trump’s base as a group of people who merely want “higher cultural standing,” who, in other words, are just as culture-brained as Marx is and thus want only to be able to afford a shack in Santa Barbara and be “celebrated” for their love of Pabst Blue Ribbon and maybe permanently substitute Chappell Roan with Reba McEntire on the Billboard charts. Of course, all of this renders Marx hopelessly short-sighted about the nuances of post-Trumpian culture. Cancellation, for one, is a topic he doesn’t even bother thinking about, perhaps because it’s not culture like Charli xcx is culture. With a blithe equivocation he dismisses it as an age-old phenomenon, one that was just as active in the ’60s when record producers and film studio bosses practiced “cancellation by taste.” Later, in the backlash against Trump, Black Panther garnered guffaws from the critical establishment and made a billion dollars, which Marx predictably views as a triumphant demonstration of “the commercial and critical potential of progressive filmmaking.” Or, to put it in the Vulture formulation: to have an aesthetic or artistic problem with Black Panther, you’d pretty much have to dislike civil rights.

All of it smacks of that fungal, fetid, corrosive idea which got us here in the first place: that art’s job was not to make beauty but to make the world a better place. Not only is it tiresome beyond words, it’s a philosophy that has encouraged a class of over-educated, overly-online, virtuous “culture” journalists to pretend that using phrases like “progressive filmmaking” will take us anywhere. W. David Marx, who, in his desire to make culture new (again), ignores any separation between art and content, performative morality and true virtue, aesthetics and ideology, society and politics, imagined he was writing the great indictment of our inauspicious age. But in reality, no matter how justly he might castigate the moneymen and the fellow-travelers, he failed to wonder what his own part in the story might be. Blank Space should have been a book that helped us clear away the dead leaves and catch a glimpse of spring. Instead, the detritus seems as immovable as ever. For the moment, the rot remains.

Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia.