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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, let’s put these books in conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such approaches to editorial change are common in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

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

and Nico was blonde

and Dylan was found

in a pit he alone had descended

and there he unfurled

for the sake of the world

the bright flag so long undefended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

Or as “Cold Irons Bound” begins:

I’m beginning to hear voices

There’s no one around.

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

I try to remember how I got here

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

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

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

But not tonight and it won’t be here

There are things I could say but I don’t

I know the mercy of God must be near

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

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

Insanity is smashin’

Up against my soul

You could say I was on anything

But a roll

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

My heart’s in the highlands

Gentle and fair.

Honeysuckle bloomin’

In the wildwood air.

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

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

Things are going to slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world

Has crossed the threshold

And it has overturned

The order of the soul

When they said repent, repent, repent

I wonder what they meant

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

4.

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

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

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

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

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

Honeybees are buzzin’

Leaves begin to stir

I’m in love with my second cousin

I tell myself I could be happy forever with her

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

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

You do so at the peril of your life

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

I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife

My grandfather was a duck trapper

He could do it with just dragnets and ropes

My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth

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

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

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

I left all my dreams and hopes

Buried under tobacco leaves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.

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

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

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

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

you can’t? Of course you can.

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

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

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

There’s an evening haze settling over town

Starlight by the edge of the creek

The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down

Money’s getting shallow and weak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love

I think it’ll fit me like a glove

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

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

And then went down to the ship,

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

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost John’s sitting on a railroad track

Something’s out of whack

Blues this morning fallin’ down like hail

Gonna leave a greasy trail

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

Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore,

And my happiness is o’er

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

I loved you then and ever shall

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

The world has gone black before my eyes

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

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

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

No one on earth would ever know

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

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

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

6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eastbound going 65

The desert wind is blowing

My dog is sitting by my side

He don’t care where we’re going

Taking the south route this time

Back from California

Stopping in the old mine town

Bisbee, Arizona

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

Then a chorus,

It’s a fucked-up world

Why must everything be conquered, gutted?

It’s so beautiful

I’m going to the center of it.

Then, an encounter, and maybe a revelation:

Standing there feeling tripped out

And just wanting to cry

And that disconnected sharpness where everything is dry

I hear the ratchet of the call

Two wheels turning in the dirt

An old man on his bicycle, out of nowhere

Soaking through his shirt

He gets down and he comes over and says

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

I said, “It’s nice to meet you, Bob.”

And then I took his hand and shook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1

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

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

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

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

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

#2

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

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

Two days later, I read Calculation.

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

#3

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

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

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

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

#4

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

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

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

#5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we told them we would move forward.

#6

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he says no.

Tara is alone.

#7

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

#8

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

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

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

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

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

#9

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

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

#10

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

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

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

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

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

The embryo transfer was not successful.

#11

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

#12

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

#13

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

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

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

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

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

There was a boy in postwar Liverpool, and his name was Mike. Mike had a girlfriend named Celia, who once let him borrow a record by an American folk singer who pretended to be a lonesome hobo, though he was really just a middle-class kid from Minnesota, but with an exceptional musical talent. Mike went home to 20 Forthlin Road and played the record. Mike had a brother named Paul, who didn’t think much of the music.

“What’s that crap?” Paul asked.

To which Mike answered, “A bloke called Bob Dylan.”

You’ll never guess who Paul was. Okay, maybe you already did. In which case you probably also know that Paul McCartney’s band, the Beatles, would dominate the sound of the 1960s alongside Dylan, making them the two most foundational acts in postwar pop music. But there is much to the relationship between band and bard that has lingered in the background, which is why Jim Windolf’s surprising and delightful Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World manages to say something new about some of the most written-about people in the history of culture.

Dylan’s eponymous first album hit the shelves on March 19, 1962. Exactly one year and three days later, the Beatles came out with their debut album, Please Please Me. In the years to come, they grew so close that Dylan was sometimes called the “fifth Beatle.” I would have gladly swapped George Harrison for him, but since Mr. Tambourine Man was not exactly a team player, maybe it was for the best.

They were comrades and competitors. “They got drunk and high together and shared meals at one another’s homes,” Windolf writes. “They played advance pressings of their albums for one another, and on those occasions the sense of rivalry bubbling beneath the surface was apparent.” The writing here is crisp and cliché-free. Windolf does not make the mistake, frequently committed by music writers, of attempting to be as lyrical as his subjects.

About the only thing the brooding young man from North Country and the four mop tops from Liverpool shared was a profound reverence for Little Richard, whose piano playing galvanized rock music in the 1950s, and postwar Black music in general. But as Windolf argues, they constantly pushed each other and, in doing so, forged a new path for rock-and-roll. A lifelong music fan, he assembles this story from “scattered piecemeal across biographies, out-of-print memoirs, and long-buried articles,” turning it into a brisk and enjoyable read for anyone interested in the creative explosion of the 1960s.

Their musical intersections were frequently edged with competition. As “I Want to Hold Your Hand” began to dominate American airwaves after a broadcast by a Washington, D.C. deejay, Dylan dismissed the Beatles’ music as “bubblegum” for “teenyboppers.” But as the journalist Al Aronowitz, an important source for Dylanologists, observed, “I somehow wanted his lyrics to enlighten the same teenyboppers then trying to claw the clothes off the Beatles.”

Especially after their landmark appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, Dylan recognized that “folk music wasn’t what it used to be,” according to his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo (famously captured by photographer Don Hunstein walking with Dylan down Jones Street for the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival the following year, in what proved to be a key career move. (Windolf points out that Dylan was as much a teen icon as the Beatles in the 1960s, if for a slightly different demographic.)

Having gotten over his long-ago dismissal of Dylan, McCartney introduced his bandmates to Bob Dylan, Dylan’s first album, and Freewheelin’ while the band was on a three-week Paris engagement in 1964, right before the famous Sullivan appearance. “Right from that moment, we recognized some vital energy, a voice crying out somewhere, toiling in the darkness,” George said.

Which is to say that this is really a book about art and artists, about competition and collaboration. Forget all the groupies and drugs (or, if you can’t, or won’t, the 1983 book The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines is your best bet): what is truly irrecoverable from that era is the freedom and foment. It’s a milieu impossible to imagine today, with our collective creativity flattened and molded by algorithmic conformity. Movies and books are “IP.” Influencers are the new intellectuals. Silly dancing goes viral and is forgotten, and then comes another dance. Have you heard of the Bushwick bolero?

Windolf limns a legendary scene captured by the documentarian D. A. Pennebaker, a 1966 limo ride shared by Dylan and John Lennon. They are both edgy, literary frontmen with titanic ambitions and egos to match. They regard each other’s work with admiration, but not flattery. “They adored each other,” Pennebaker would later say. (The New York Times recently excerpted the limo ride passage, topped with a short clip of Pennebaker’s footage, which isn’t readily available.)

The apotheosis of their cross-pollination arguably comes in 1967, when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a radical break from radio-friendly rock that they had already teased, but not yet fully realized, with Revolver and Rubber Soul. Time magazine praised the band for “absorbing and extending Bob Dylan’s folk-rock hybrid and sowing innovations of their own.”

Dylan answered at the end of the year with John Wesley Harding, a folk throwback that nevertheless showed how far he’d come since his days singing in the coffeehouses of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets. “This is not a better record than Sgt. Pepper, but it should have better effect,” the influential critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time. (Sgt. Pepper ended up being the more influential record, by far, though some of us insist that John Wesley Harding is the superior effort.)

With music criticism having descended into moralized cheerleading, there is diminishing incentive for an artist to take risks, to push themselves or their peers in a new direction. Do something original, as when white country crooner Luke Combs brilliantly covered “Fast Car,” by the Black folk singer Tracy Chapman, and you might find yourself engulfed in a firestorm. (As if to show how far music criticism had deviated from music itself, Combs and Chapman performed together, with transparent and mutual joy, and to our collective benefit, at the 2024 Grammys.) Safer just to stick to the algorithm. It knows all the catchiest tunes.

Windolf accomplishes an especially rare feat in resisting the lure of fangirling over two of the greatest acts in pop music history. He clearly admires both, but his style is cool and restrained, as befits a longtime New York Times editor and writer. (Disclosure: I’ve written for him.) He never descends into geeky arcana, another trap of the pop culture writer. Nashville Skyline, the great Dylan album heavily influenced by Johnny Cash, “was the kind of thing you might have heard coming from a room behind a general store in some frontier outpost of the previous century.” You don’t need to know what a slash chord is to know what Windolf means here.

He lays out his case calmly and persuasively, so that by the time you’ve finished the book, you wonder why it had not been written much earlier. In fact, Where the Music Had to Go concludes with a transcript of an interview Windolf conducted with McCartney, who recently released a new record of his own, The Boys of Dungeon Lane.

McCartney told Windolf that he’d tried to initiate conversations about a collaboration with Dylan, but those conversations never got anywhere. But it’s not too late, Paul. Tomorrow never knows.

Alexander Nazaryan writes about culture, politics, and science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In many ways, McGoldrick sounds like a romantic himself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—The Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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^th -century 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.