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^thcentury English gentry, even though her project was to satirize them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This era is hyperpolitics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia.

A portrait of the artist in 1986 finds him at Woods Gramercy, an upscale restaurant in what the New York Times is calling “the year of the column in restaurant decoration,” and it’s just about the only restaurant right now that’s trying to make a name for itself with vegetables, of all things; in fact the “Steamed Vegetables” is among the most talked-about dishes on its menu and the most affordable (always a good sign), and what we find here, in contrast to the peach-colored walls, striped with steel-blue columns, are what Susan Squires of the Los Angeles Times describes as “the tables of Manhattan’s publishing power lunchers,” all of whom are “spaced discreetly apart” but if we arrange the dolly shot so that it wends a path, and dips down here and there over shoulders, you’ll hear them talking about things like “the veracity of Thomas Pynchon’s vision of Los Angeles,” or whether it’s smarter to advertise a new hardcover by optimizing radio spots versus “store windows,” and finally we settle on a profile shot, paces back, of the writer himself — somehow both man-sized and boylike — sitting aside from the publishing people in a ladder-back chair, chain-smoking, gulping three mimosas in a row. Freshly 21. “Absolute Beginners” just dropped and it’s wafting in from different directions and 40 years later it’ll still be his favorite Bowie single.

If the serious young author looks “lost and vulnerable,” don’t worry — he’s a college senior and this whole Brooding Author shtick is part of the package. Sad-eyed and sleepless. He wrote a book that “disturbed” reviewer Michiko Kakutani and people in the business seem to appreciate that, thank you Bret, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t quibbling about what this kid is: a boy wonder or a fake. Writing a terse talentless novel and calling it “minimalism.” Yeah OK. Two hundred pages long and it’s got, what, 90 chapters? That’s not minimalism. It’s a music video.

The release and subsequent popularity of this debut novel, Less Than Zero, will soon slingshot the author’s body into an emotional wall such that he spends two weeks sobbing in bed, not quite knowing why, panicked about his future, stalled on the second novel for which he’s already been paid a ton of money (in the $200,000 range, most likely) and isn’t even sure anyone will enjoy it. His editor, Robert Asahina (35), is a calming presence. “We figure we’ll get [the second novel] by the end of the summer,” he says, “but if he needs more time, one month, six months, it won’t matter.” His publicist Marcia Burch is another of these adults who is Keeping Bret Calm, asking if he’d be willing to sign books at, say, a Barnes & Noble, and the answer’s yes, and so she says OK, well, how about a reading at one of these —

“No,” Bret’s quick and firm, “I couldn’t, I’m sorry,” explaining — in what reporter Susan Squires describes as a voice that’s genuinely regretful although, she notices, his face is blank — that if he goes and reads at a bookstore or a gallery he’ll feel guilty about the people who just went there to browse, enjoy themselves, not to hear some kid read his book into a mic.

Burch says OK and then lets it go. She tells Squires, off to the side, “I don’t like to push him.”

Bret Easton Ellis at 21 is tall and broad like his halfback father but he’s thin, slouching, not quite filling the sport coat he bought at the Salvation Army. His “thick white socks [are] crumpled into ancient black loafers with chewed-up heels.” Looking around at these publishing people he confesses to Squire that he can only remember one person’s name, and that he doesn’t understand why they’re fretting over him, trying to make him famous, when all he did was write “a sort of a book.”

He is still very trusting of reporters. Saying things like, “I believe in, more or less, humbleness.” At least two of them will write that he had more than multiple drinks during their interview.

“It’s probably presumptuous,” he says to Squire, “to tell them I don’t want to promote [my next book, The Rules of Attraction], because probably no one will want to talk about it anyway.”

Young enough, in other words, to believe that what they’re selling is a book.

“I think he understands that this is a business,” says editor Robert Asahina, “and he’s been a very good soldier. He’s accommodated us, even though it’s made him unhappy.”

Ellis, Squires will write, “has had to grapple with being an icon to some and a cash cow to others, and his manner of adaptation has been simply to submit until he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

The novel came out and he earned lots of money and attention and then had a breakdown and sought therapy and got better. But it wasn’t a one-time thing. Nine years later, promoting his fourth book, Bret Easton Ellis tells a Vanity Fair reporter about talking with professionals but also using exercise as therapy. The reporter confirms that Ellis, 30, is besieged more by anxiety than depression but that he “controls the problem with a drug called Klonopin.”

But in 1986 Bret was already nearly done with his second novel and thank God he didn’t sell it before the first one was published. Less Than Zero was seen as a risk at Simon & Schuster, a likely write-off. One editor, Herman Gollob, famously protested the book by writing, on the manuscript’s in-house cover sheet where editors circulated their opinions, “If there’s a market for callow, fragmentary fiction, about rich, self-indulgent, coke-sniffing, cock-sucking zombies, then let’s buy it.” But there’d be a small printing, with a low advance, and no advertising budget.

Which was fine for the author. “I thought that book was going to sell no copies. I was just happy it was being published.” Hence he took his $5,000 advance with a smile (that’s about $15,000 in 2026) and when it was locked into the Spring 1985 schedule, for a print run of 5,000 copies, he sold the film rights for $7,500.

Then the book was published.

Less Than Zero sold 70,000 copies in hardcover over the next two years. Then Vintage (an imprint at Random House) acquired paperback rights for $99,000 and sold 200,000 of those.

If he’d waited until after publication to sell the film rights, he might have earned a lot more money. But maybe it wouldn’t have become the minor cult classic it is today, with a young Robert Downey, Jr., and maybe the Bangles would never have recorded “Hazy Shade of Winter” for the soundtrack.

You never know with these things.

The Less Than Zero movie was released in 1987 starring Andrew McCarthy and Jamie Gertz and Robert Downey, Jr., and by then the second novel was released in hardcover with a neon book jacket designed by George Corsillo; it wore a motif of horizontally slatted neon collage, very similar to Less Than Zero, which now made the “Bret Easton Ellis” on the cover into a kind of brand name.

Critics took it as more of the same.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: “His characters are so sketchily defined, so uniformly jaded and drugged out as to be indistinguishable from one another, and we’re left to echo their own refrain: ‘It’s all so boring.’” The book didn’t sell nearly as many copies as its predecessor but the author was developing a style. As a teenager he’d fallen in love with Ernest Hemingway, reading The Sun Also Rises in one day or, depending on the version you hear, twice in one day, and the bigger flashpoint came when a high school teacher assigned Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Susan Squires saw the influence and called it out in that profile from 1986, saying Less Than Zero reads “like a pubescent version” of Didion — “less artful, more shallow, but similar in style and with an equally anesthetized protagonist.”

Rules of Attraction has three central characters who narrate alternate chapters about the same love triangle. It’s an exercise in voice this time. Modulating a sentence to convey the emotions that a character is too fraught to articulate. He’s experimenting with this idea that the prose style, more than the language, is the medium for communication.

Critics were mostly annoyed but the reviews didn’t matter because the book had done something way more important than cement his literary reputation, or win friends, which was to set him up financially so that, once he graduated, Ellis could finally escape Los Angeles. Find a place in New York. A continental remove from his father.

The former realtor.

Now, in 1982, a general partner in the Robert Martin Ellis Company Incorporated. Selling skyscrapers. Recently separated (her request). Bret tells the New York Times that this is when Bob Ellis “bought a Ferrari and a condominium and wore ‘age-inappropriate clothing,’” chasing younger women but also veering back toward Ellis’ mom, half-successfully, on-again-off-again with perhaps a little more leverage after brokering a sale of the US Steel Building, for which his fee (as Bret recalls in Lili Anolik’s Once Upon a Time . . . at Bennington College podcast) was in the millions.

This is when his son was reaching college age, wanting to study music, but Robert said no, he wouldn’t finance a liberal arts education. “My father just said, ‘It’s a fucking waste of time. You are flushing money down the toilet. I want you to go to business school at U.S.C., regardless of your grades, I can get you in.’ Because he was so connected to whatever.”

This is when Bret’s paternal grandfather stepped in, R.C. “Red” Ellis. A hotelier in Nevada. One time when his mom found pot in his bedroom Bret had to go spend a punitive summer at the ranch, bussing tables at one of his grandfather’s “kinda shady hotels,” and this is the semi-mythologized summer when a 14-year-old Ellis took his first real stab at writing a novel. He’d written a children’s book at age 10, or thereabouts, called Harry the Flat Pancake “about a boy who wakes up one morning to find out he’s a pancake,” an amusing premise that, as he explained to Jaime Clarke in 1999, “also ended up being a study in chaos and corruption for some reason.”

This new one, written in Elko, was about a boy like himself, doing the sorts of things he himself was doing. It was precipitated by a feeling of displacement and marked a point of change in his life.

These are the circumstances under which all of his subsequent novels would be written.

“I’m fairly certain,” he would later write in a semi-autofictional horror novel, “the reason my grandfather paid [my] outrageously expensive tuition had to do with the fact that it would upset my father greatly, which it did.”

Red Ellis was tall and broad like his running-back son but wasn’t such an athlete himself. His sport was buying and running hotels. Bringing entertainment to Elko. He owned the still-operating Stockmen’s Hotel and then he bought the Commercial Hotel and gave it a “$250,000 facelift,” according to Elko’s Daily Free Press, that included a gigantic taxidermied polar bear. White King. Rearing up on its hind legs in the lobby. Ten feet tall in a glass coffin. Sort of a conversation piece. And then later, when business was steady and the purchase practical, Red bought a second taxidermied polar bear, this one for the cafe. He hosted celebrity performers. Resurrected the years-dormant Elko Rodeo. Floated around outdoors like the mayor, tall and red-haired and hazel-eyed and freckled, grinning with his box-candy teeth, tipping Stetson back, when somebody came up to tell him thanks for sponsoring the local baseball team, or giving jobs to folks in need.

A long-ago visitor wrote on Facebook about sitting in the Commercial Hotel’s cafe with his family when Red Ellis stopped by to say hello and lavish attention on the kids. On leaving he reached into his pocket and presented them with a trademark treat:

Two pairs of bright red dice.

Emblazoned on each: a polar bear.

Bret Easton Ellis claims, in Lunar Park, that Robert C. Ellis (grandpa) and Robert M. Ellis (dad) were embroiled in a complicated legal battle when it came time for his college tuition and Red paid the tuition to piss off his son.

But he clarifies, in an email, that this isn’t quite how it happened.

“Ok,” Ellis writes, “I thought my father was probably relieved” about not having to pay tuition, “but I found out my grandfather was always going to pay for his six grandchildren’s college education — so it wasn’t as if he did it to spite my dad which I suggested in a Vogue article I wrote 30 years ago. I learned this after the article was published — I got it wrong. Shrug.”

And yet there’s truth to it. Some strange parallels. Ellis describes his father, in fiction and essays and interviews, as an alcoholic. Manipulative. Prone to violence and spontaneous rages. “He pushed me to the floor, pummeled a bit, punched. It was not a continual thing. It was just something that would happen every so often. I assumed that was how fathers were.”

In Lunar Park Ellis characterizes his father as “careless, abusive, alcoholic, vain, angry, paranoid,” and claims that, even after leaving the family home in Sherman Oaks, “[Bob’s] power and control continued to loom over the family . . . in ways that were all monetary.”

Maybe, in the novel (as in the Vogue piece he refers to, and which I could not find), Bret Easton Ellis took an imaginative leap and mirrored his own father-son relationship in the generation above. Some triangular powerplay. Father sabotages son; son sabotages father via grandfather.

Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

All he knew about his third novel when he got to New York was that it would have something to do with Wall Street. And so he used connections to get in touch with some young guys who worked there. Traders and analysts. He’d wait til the markets closed and join them at Harry’s, a famous basement bar in Hanover Square. Power lunch-type place. Darkwood everything with moody lighting on twinkly golden fixtures. Leather and steaks. At one point there’s an electric stock board blinking transactions above the bar that nobody looks at but it’s part of the vibe. Tobacco haze and ashtrays everywhere. Masculine energy. According to the founder, Harry Poulakakos, the indoor smoking ban killed “60 percent of our evening bar trade.” He’s shaking his head as he tells this to the New York Times in 2003. Says they used to make almost as much money selling cigars as they made selling Scotch.

So here’s Ellis, 22 or 23 years old, he’s putting on a suit and adopting the proper poise and then popping into Harry’s where he shakes hands with all these guys who are all probably richer, more suave, more “sophisticated” than he is (they’ve certainly been in New York a longer time) but Bret’s not intimidated because they know who he is already. Or they know “Bret Easton Ellis.” Less Than Zero was such a hit in ’85 and everybody’s heard about his Rules of Attraction book party at the newly reopened Cave Canem, an ancient Rome-styled bar and restaurant operating out of a former bath house in the East Village, where they did gimmicky shit like serve quail with the claws still intact, saying Romans used them for toothpicks, and people wore togas, crowns, and someone spotted Judd Nelson and Matt Dillon and the clothing designer Miriam Bendahan showed up in an outfit she described as “late-’70s leopard punk,” standing there enunciating so that they get the wording right, and the whole thing got written up by Liz Smith, a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, who mentioned Bret quite a lot in those early New York years before she learned about his third book and decided he was bad.

So when he meets these Wall Street guys they likely take him for one of their own. A Gen X “elite.” Somebody who shares their values. Hence the immediate candor when he shows up, “[meets] the new bimbo they’re dating,” lights a cigarette and orders a vodka grapefruit and then just listens to them

talk about buying a car, talk about houses in the Hamptons they wanted to rent, which club to go to, where their dealer was, buying suits, clothes, trips, etc. So after two exhausting weeks of hanging out with these people I understood that my narrator would be a serial killer.

Thirty-five years later if you want to make a reservation at Harry’s you can go on their website and see right there, on the homepage, there’s a big proud banner in elegant letters:

Immortalized in renowned novels such as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and

Brett [sic] Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

While writing American Psycho, Ellis would devote the workweek to writing and research, then on Fridays he’d revise the week’s work, and Sundays were off. He kept seven-hour workdays to better-align his schedule with his friends’, with whom he’d reward himself, afterward, by getting together for drinks and then dinner and probably a club after that, maybe Nell’s (“that’s how our evenings usually rolled”), which was actually a bit of a “concept” when it first opened, in ’84. None of that discotheque sprawl, left over from the ‘70s. Nell’s was sealed-off, intimate, dark. Five-dollar entry on weeknights and $10 on weekends — and allegedly even celebrities had to pay. They were small and affordable but they had standards, and good energy, and they had a bouncer at the door with a red velvet rope who took your cash and either let you in or else he said no — pushed you back — no jeans, you can’t come in here with jeans.

“I’d go to parties fucked up out of my mind,” Ellis told Vanity Fair in a 1994 profile, “and then plan on escaping the party to get even more fucked up.”

Drinking like he did in those early profiles, where interviewers all commented on how quickly this kid threw back his mimosas or vodka grapefruits, like he wasn’t so much interested in the taste as he was in the numbness.

“Numbness as a feeling” is how he would later characterize his work.

During the years he worked on American Psycho, it was also a destination.

He claims to have laughed a lot while writing the prose for American Psycho and claimed, at one point, to have cried while writing some of the violent parts; but really he only said that during the controversy, when his book tour got canceled due to all the death threats (pre-publication death threats, meaning they came from people who hadn’t read the book, threatening to murder him for his violent thoughts).

It makes the process seem emotional but really the writing was so technical, operating within such strict stylistic parameters, that the actual events of a scene — funny or sexy or shocking — didn’t have much influence on the author’s mood. Plus a lot of the research was boring, paging through magazines about clothes or tech or jewelry or whatever his young, murderous, yuppie narrator Patrick Bateman might be obsessed with. Sometimes it meant paging through books about serial killers or pinning magazine cutouts to the wall above his desk but just as often it meant sitting on his bed and listening on repeat to the albums that Bateman himself would listen to, and expound upon, within the text. Bret just smoking, pacing the sparsely furnished apartment, skimming the liner notes for Sports or Invisible Touch to inform the three long, pedantic, error-laden essays Bateman delivers throughout the book.

“I have never in my life had a more difficult writing experience than the month I had to write about Genesis.”

Or he’d get up from one of his white metal folding chairs, like what wrestlers get hit with, and he’d walk around the apartment. He’d open the fridge. Step out onto the 450-square-foot terrace and stare down at Union Square Park, “filled with junkies and homeless people,” and then he’d go inside after a while and open the fridge a couple more times and finally sit back down and write something.

He wasn’t possessed so much by the novel as by the solitude. The cozy tucked-away vibe in a pre-gentrified East Village studio with clean wood floors and white walls and “some patio furniture scattered around,” books piled up on the floor and leaning into walls like a skyline, “along with an elaborate stereo system that had an insanely expensive turntable” and some huge top-of-the-line TV whose specs he could tell you about.

But none of it claimed much space.

And so the prevailing optics were the whiteness of the walls. The high ceiling. The clean surfaces. The “simple wooden desk” and the chair in front of it and the simple white mattress on the floor.

It wasn’t “chicly minimalist,” Bret says, “just empty.”

And so he filled it with people.

Maybe more than he should have.

He wanted his parties to look like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, “where everyone is just smashed into each other,” “packed and fun,” chatting and shouting, shoulder-to-shoulder with 200 other people, leaning in for conversation, shouting over whatever he’s got playing on the insanely expensive turntable, and meanwhile the wallflowers at the party are hugging their drinks, off at the perimeter, bending or kneeling down to skim the tall neat piles of CDs (Genesis, Eagles, Whitney Houston) and books piled up on the floor, towering sometimes 20-volumes tall, and then over by the desk and the chair, where his writing material isn’t exactly on display, their eye might drift across the white of the walls to settle on the magazine cut-outs he’s taped there: men’s fashion, stereo equipment, designer brands.

“Research,” apparently.

Two hundred guests shuffling in and out onto the impossibly long terrace where maybe there’s someplace to sit. A neighbor occasionally calling in a noise complaint toward dawn but that’s when the party would’ve broken up anyway. Everybody leaving, tipsy, Bret included. Stay out all night. Crash at a hotel while a cleaning crew infiltrates the apartment so that when he did go home, later that day or early the next, it would look like nobody’d been there.

Like nothing had happened.

Eventually the building owners told him he couldn’t keep renting, that he had to buy it or leave, and so he called his dad for advice, Mr. Skyscraper out in Century City, who listened to the terms of the sale and said, “What!”

Incensed.

“One hundred eighty per square foot?! Are they out of their minds?!”

Bret bought it anyway.

Happy here. Throwing parties. Making headway on the book. Plus he was living with his boyfriend Jim — whose career, as a lawyer, demanded a closet more opaque than Ellis’ own. And so the relationship was low-key. Intimate. Partly because that’s what gay men of their generation simply decided was the safest thing to do, under the specter of AIDS; but he was also living this way because — remiss as he might have been to say it at the time — it’s what he “always wanted.” In public he needed to sustain this image as the spokesperson for transient, fluid, detached experimental sex. But really, as he said in a 2024 podcast episode, all he ever wanted was “to have sex usually with the same person, in a nice bedroom, after we’d taken showers.”

Growing up closeted in Los Angeles, and suddenly living on the opposite coast, with money and clout and freedom, was its own transgression; being bisexual or promiscuous was edgy for an MTV audience, enough to make you famous, but still not so taboo as just being (somewhat) openly gay, contented, in love.

“I never wanted to fuck a stranger.”

Plus Jim was a stabilizing presence, “a quiet, levelheaded Princeton grad who was always calm and low-key, never prone to drama.” Which made it all the more menacing when, after they’d been dating for a year, Jim asked about the book (which he’d been writing since they met) and so one night, in bed, Bret gave him a couple chapters — a date scene, leading to a rape scene, leading to a murder — and Jim looked up from the pages and told him, off the neighboring pillow, “You’re going to get into trouble.”

Bret hadn’t thought of that. He’d “begun [thinking] of American Psycho as so stylized that it bordered on . . . experimental,” something that “hardly anyone would ever read.” After a beat during which the idea settled, and chilled him, he blinked and performed calm: “Who am I going to get in trouble with?”

“Everybody.”

He always starts a novel in longhand. This is the first draft. “The outline.” Prose on some of the pages and then memoranda all around, for himself, about characters, their quirks, their tics, their verbal habits, physical attributes, various things to keep in mind as he’s puppeting them through scenes — of which he’ll write different versions, in different registers. Maybe just fragments, to see how it works with a certain kind of syntax or rhythm.

So the way he assembled it was to say, for example, that in this first third of the book we’ll see Patrick Bateman go to the dry cleaner, and it’s a long set piece where he’s yelling at them for not getting blood stains out of his sheets, and also there’s a scene where he’s on the phone trying to get reservations at Dorsia, in a panic, because it’s the only way he got some new romantic interest to agree to go on a date with him.

But which scene goes first? And why? The sequence of events is important because the narrator is unravelling throughout the novel and so . . . OK: Bateman will be embarrassed, by the fact that he can’t get the reservation he promised, and this is another straw upon the camel’s back, and it’s why he falls into a bit of frenzy at the dry cleaner’s — except someone will walk in, a woman who wants to go out with him, and we’ll see that he still has the presence of mind to compose himself. But only barely.

Alright so the frenzy needs to be ratcheting up, scene by scene, and so his notes, in the outline, explore the technical aspects of showing, in language, how a person’s losing their mind. What’s the tone for his various moods, and what triggers him from one to the next, and how do you modulate the prose to either swell the feeling of frenzy or bring it down . . . ?

The outline for American Psycho also dictates the handicaps that will be imposed on the language, as a result of the narrator’s personality. Bateman will constantly refer back to “status, products, clothing” as a way of seeing and understanding the space he’s in. Sounds simple enough. But now the novelist’s real challenge, with the prose, is to come up with a system, a syntax, a rhythm that makes these brand-name observations read smooth, natural, almost unnoticeable after a while.

Another parameter for the narrative voice, dictated in his outline: no “metaphors, similes, anything where Patrick Bateman can see [one] thing as something else, because [his perception] is too surface-oriented for that.”

The outline was as long as the novel itself. The first draft in longhand, then three more drafts on a typewriter. There are roughly 10 scenes with violent murders and he left those for the end because they required their own special research about serial killers and decomposition and injuries. He had a friend of a friend hook him up with some criminology textbooks used by the FBI and he’d consult those when the time came.

Another reason for waiting to write those murder scenes until the end is that, by the time he reached the end of the manuscript, he would have been living with Bateman’s voice for three years. He would know all the notes he needed to hit, and how to hit them. As Jay McInerney recounted it to the Times, decades later, “Toward the end of that time he got pretty depressed and wigged out. He had locked himself away. He was morose and depressed. . . . I finally went down to his apartment one night, just to kind of pry him out and take him out. I just thought somebody better shake him and make sure he was alive.”

It would be a few years before he had occasion to talk about the process in earnest.

“I cried a lot, I drank a lot. . . . I was genuinely unhappy; it was not fun.”

In his mid-20s now, nearly broke, he sent the manuscript to Amanda Urban in December 1989.

ELLIS: “Binky Urban, my agent, is the first person who sees everything I write.”

INTERVIEWER: “Has she ever suggested any changes?”

ELLIS: “No.”

Urban sent it ahead to his editor, Robert Asahina, who’s 40 years old when he sits down and reads this novel and finds it annoying at first. Stressful. Bret’s been working on this for three years and it’s just . . . it doesn’t work.

He starts scribbling a frenzy of marginal notes.

Then, around 10 pages deep, he realizes what’s happening. That this is a narrator “who’s completely unreliable,” and he settles into it.

Laughs throughout.

Loves it.

In a conversation on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, almost 35 years later, Ellis tells him he can’t remember sit-down sessions where they edited the book. Asahina tells him, that’s because there weren’t any. He suggested, for instance, that the book’s three long essays about pop artists (Genesis, Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis) be reduced to one single essay. He refused. “Is one music review psychotic? No. Three is psychotic.”

Otherwise, as in the first two novels, he suggested a few tweaks here and there, Ellis accepted about half of them, and then they sent it to Copyediting.

Same thing happened here.

After he sends it to the copyeditor, Asahina reaches out to cover artist George Corsillo, who made brand-establishing motifs on the covers of Bret’s last two novels. He wants George to do the same thing for this one and George says sure, send the manuscript — and so he sends it.

After that, Bret’s out of the picture. Asahina starts to run it through the standard pre-publication procedures, in-house.

This is where things fall apart.

At the pre-sales meeting in July 1990 Asahina circulated a pitch memo, or “tip sheet,” which normally included the book’s jacket summary and whatever info might set the recipient up for coverage: the author’s notable press coverage, if their previous books were bestsellers, pertinent credentials.

“The mistake I made,” he said, “was to attach, to the tip sheet, two scenes” from the book. The first scene showed

one of the grislier murders [and] the other scene was just Patrick being Patrick: downtown and drugs and drinking and so on. . . . I presented [the tip sheet] at this pre-sales meeting which took place in a conference room with . . . 20 or 25 people sitting around, my giving an oral presentation of what’s already on the page in front of them, and what seemed most striking, in retrospect, is that nobody really cared.

There were some, he claims, who remarked on the violence. How extreme it was. But otherwise the meeting was professional. Unremarkable.

The excerpts leaked.

Time magazine breaks the story on October 29.

It’s a simple headline in the Books section: “A Revolting Development.” The reporter, R.Z. Sheppard, shares a brief excerpt in which the book’s narrator, Patrick Bateman, cuts strips of skin off a woman’s leg “while she screams in vain” and then starts biting her head.

“I had to draw the line,” says cover artist George Corsillo, of his decision to quit the design for American Psycho. “I felt disgusted with myself for reading it.”

Sheppard reported: “Some women staffers [at S&S] are especially outraged by Ellis’s descriptions of atrocities against females. But no one wants to say so on the record.” Sheppard’s prose is indignant. Trundles forward listing fuckup after fuckup. He contacts the publisher to see how they feel about this horrifically offensive thing they’ve paid six figures for, asks if they think they’ll be able to offload the paperback rights on anyone after it creates so much outrage.

“We’re working on it.” Simon &Schuster reps appear to be in crisis mode already. “No takers.” Like they’re transcribing a CEO’s urgent pantomime. “No comment.”

Spy magazine’s December issue lands a few days later. Joan Rivers on the cover in a green mascot costume. A banner over her head teasing “PARAMOUNT’S NEW GODFATHER.” Another one at her feet, in smaller font, “Plus: Bret Easton Ellis’s $300,000 Deal with the Devil.”

The one-page feature by Todd Stiles features a pair of line-drawn mugshots at the top, male and female, small and cute with big smiles. One says “Bret,” the other, “Binky” — a nickname given to Urban by her grandmother.

Stiles mentions that American Psycho is listed in the Simon & Schuster catalogue for January 1991 with a five-city book tour. Like he’s happy about it. Then he quotes, from the novel, a paragraph in which Patrick Bateman pours acid in a woman’s vagina and rapes her severed head.

The article’s tone starts out flippant but gets angry quick. More righteous than Sheppard in Time. Stiles excoriates, by name, Robert Asahina himself for acquiring the book, which makes sense, but also his boss, editor-in-chief Michael Korda, and then his boss, Simon & Schuster’s CEO Dick Snyder. Shame, shame, etc. Says that “Binky” Urban should remember, next time she’s at a fancy lunch with these guys, that their meal was paid for by sentences like this one: “In my locker . . . lay three vaginas I’ve sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week.”

He suggests Simon & Schuster isn’t just slated for controversy, but a financial timebomb. Penguin Publishing, he reports, has “declined to exercise its paperback reprint rights, and meanwhile Simon and Schuster’s first hardcover print order is 40,000 copies,” which would be a nightmare to cancel — especially when, as Phoebe Hogan will report in New York magazine a month later, 19,400 of those copies have already been ordered, paid for.

“Not much could be more sickening than the misogynist barbarism of this novel,” Stiles wraps, “but almost as repellent will be Ellis’s callow cynicism as he justifies it.”

But Simon & Schuster wasn’t scared off. They were brainstorming. Thinking of maybe tagging the book’s cover with a warning label, or something on the title — in fact someone says maybe a “bellyband” will do the trick, instead of sealing the book in plastic wrap like it’s porn, there’s just this label that wraps across it with a warning about graphic content.

It didn’t sound great, no, but they’d have to get creative because, as New York magazine would report.

“[F]orfeiting the $300,000 advance and dropping the book was never a serious consideration.”

Except for Dick Snyder. Editor-in-chief.

As Asahina would say on the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, 35 years later, Dick Snyder was a difficult boss, “a son of a bitch,” but also a “genius” for picking out editorial talent. When he brought you onto his team, he trusted you, didn’t scrutinize his editors’ “list” (of acquisitions).

But he was restless by nature. Volatile. Maybe lonely, too. He got married four times and he was perhaps extra touchy in this particular year, this particular month, slogging through the final stages of a miserably public and prolonged divorce from Jodi Evans, another publishing luminary. The separation got so nasty their colleagues were being deposed. Testifying. Dick’s income got leaked; now the New York Times is showing he makes $375,000 (about $2.3 million in 2026). Another article talked about Jodi’s cooking habits, and how they treat the cleaning lady, and how he and Jodi “had great sex after he shot a snake.” Plus he just quit smoking. Of all possible times. Colleagues report walking into his office at 7 p.m. and he’s drenched in sweat, climbing his Stairmaster, 90 minutes deep, mindful about whispers, people talking behind his back, saying he was foolish to give Ronald Reagan $5 million for a two-book deal and now it’s November, the first one’s coming out and it’s living in the shadow of that fucking Trump book, people saying, Dick. Look who voted for this guy. You think they read books? Reporters actually bringing it up to him in interviews! Asking him, to his face, What were you thinking?

All that going on and now he’s got pressure from every direction to cancel American Psycho, a six-figure acquisition, not even two months before publication. It’s embarrassing. He tried to save face by saying he had no idea what was in this book but it’s backfired. Now people are saying he’s either negligent or lying.

Embarrassment aside, there’s Urban.

She’s gonna collect.

It’s November 8 and Amanda Urban is at the New York Public Library’s Decade of Literary Lions gala. Their biggest event of the year. The lion statues flanking the steps outside are dressed in black bowties and top hats. Anna Wintour is here. Ralph and Ricki Lauren. Kurt Vonnegut is here with Jill Krementz. Barbara Bush and her pearls. Tom Wolfe is wearing black.

According to New York magazine, this is where CEO Dick Snyder spots Urban. They step aside. Snyder tells her, all grave, that he’s got concerns.

There’s no account of what Urban tells him in response but subsequent remarks to the press indicate her position:

Refusing to publish a book at this 11th hour, without explanation, raises the question [of] whether there was a form of censorship going on here. What is involved here is a giant corporation responding to pre-publication controversy and . . . abandoning its own tradition of fearless publication.

Then someone hit the gong.

They went back inside for dinner.

It’s November 9 and Urban gets a call from a higher-up at Simon & Schuster who makes his pitch:

“Bellybands.”

It is Friday.

Urban, according to Phoebe Hogan’s reporting in New York, is noncommittal about putting a girdle on 40,000 American Psycho hardcovers. Says she’ll have to get back to him. Hangs up.

But meanwhile there’s no point in even fussing anymore because Dick Snyder, likely shaken from his encounter the night before, decides he should probably read this thing and so he takes a copy of American Psycho up to his country home that weekend, the 75-acre Linden Farm in Cross River, to see what the fuss is about.

He’s not pleased.

He wants a cigarette.

Dick Snyder doesn’t need this right now.

The book’s cancellation is announced on Tuesday.

“American Psycho is not a book that Simon and Schuster is willing to publish even though Mr. Ellis is a serious author whose work Simon and Schuster has previously published.”

No elaboration.

Later, in an interview with the Washington Post, he shed light on nothing more than who’s at fault and where the buck stops: “In my opinion, there was an incorrect decision” by Asahina, in acquiring the book, and that “it was I who decided we should not put our name on this book. It’s a matter of taste.”

Ellis claims in hindsight that he wasn’t surprised when he got word of the cancellation, just two months shy of its release; he’d already been hearing “whispers” about American Psycho causing problems at Simon & Schuster (beginning, presumably, with that sales meeting in July) and they’d gotten “louder and louder throughout 1990,” such that his first reaction — as he remembers it decades later — was “‘Jesus,’” exasperated, “‘this fucking business. This fucking business is so ridiculous.’”

At the time, however, he was a bit more shaken. “Flabbergasted,” according to the LA Times. “I literally couldn’t believe it. I was sick, completely sick.”

“I’m still completely shocked,” in Newsday. “I’m basically numb—and a little bit angry.”

“This might sound dopey, but I have been with Simon and Schuster since 1984. I thought I had a strong relationship with Simon and Schuster. I like that publisher. I thought I would always stay there.”

Staff at his publishing home voiced shock as well, with one anonymous staffer saying it was antithetical to their beliefs and that, if it’d happened with a book he personally had championed, he would resign.

“The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy,” said the anonymous employee, “is that the book is a piece of shit.”

As Ellis remembers it, Urban was quick to tell him there was nothing to worry about: “I have a plan.” In that 2025 podcast conversation with Asahina he remembers telling her what other people had been telling him: sue.

“Binky was completely against that. She said, ‘Do not get caught up in a lawsuit here. You’re gonna go through a rough time with this book. A lot of people are not going to get it for a long time. And to have this and — no. Absolutely not. I’ve got a plan. I’ve got a plan.’”

Urban was on the phone, she said, to the press with one hand, publishers with the other. When Ellis suggested that there were two publishers with whom she was already in talks, but refused to name them, a third — Atlantic Monthly Press — raised its hand to say they’d be interested.

He headed home with his $300,000 advance and hopped a train back west for the holidays. He later told Vogue about trying to distance himself from the controversy, sitting in a San Francisco hotel room, turning on CNN and there was Gloria Steinem, talking about a boycott of the novel, how this young man will be responsible for violence perpetrated against women.

American Psycho, a topic of scorn in op-eds around the country, was now in limbo. It had cost a major publisher hundreds of thousands of dollars and humiliation for its higher-ups. It was radioactive. It was pornography. It was misogynistic. Dangerous.

It was in Binky Urban’s hands.

She sold it again in 48 hours.

Throughout the ensuing storm of controversy there was only one foreign publisher that didn’t drop American Psycho: Picador UK. They’d been with the author since Less Than Zero and believed in his work even if the [editor-in-chief] Sonny Mehta was no longer in charge.

Mehta was now editor-in-chief at Knopf, a prestigious American imprint of Random House.

A domestic competitor of Simon & Schuster.

Sonny Mehta was quiet. Didn’t say much on his way into the office. Kicked his shoes off at the door and moved around silently in socks. Jennet Conant describes his typical Saturday in a 1993 profile for Esquire:

Sonny Mehta will rise early, breakfast on a handful of pistachio nuts, and begin to read. He will read all morning, reclined on a sofa in the living room of his book-lined Manhattan apartment, getting up only to change CDs, of which he has hundreds, preferring classical music. . . . He will read without interruption until 4:00. . . . He will drink Scotch — Famous Grouse — starting at whatever hour suits him, and smoke — Silk Cuts — continually[.]

His days at the office didn’t look very different. Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, 10 years later, that when Mehta took over at Knopf from Robert Gottlieb, back in ’89, “he moved early to reinstate the office cocktail cabinet, the ashtrays, and the tradition of the bohemian lunch.”

Conant sat across his desk for the Esquire interview and, while pouring himself a small shot of Scotch, warned her in advance “that he loathes interviews, intends to say as little as possible, and will be abjectly miserable until the allotted time is up.” She described his demeanor as one of “eloquent disdain.”

Phoebe Hoban, reporting her American Psycho saga for New York, cornered Mehta at the National Book Awards ceremony late that November, after he’d acquired the novel for “[close] to $50,000.” Came with a question but Mehta dodged. Demurred. If you ask me about American Psycho, he said, I will set myself on fire.

A couple weeks later, at a sales meeting, Mehta gave an outline of American Psycho’s rollout: approximate sale window (March–April), size of the first printing (40,000), and cover price (“probably” $9.95). “Mehta told his colleagues that although [American Psycho] wasn’t the greatest book ever written, it deserved a chance to be read.” He also claimed that he’d sat with Ellis, discussed the book, and agreed to some editorial changes. When rumor spread that the version released by Random House would be markedly different from the version Simon & Schuster had just cancelled, Amanda Urban corrected the record:

“That may be Dick [Snyder]’s fondest hope, “because it’s his only chance to come out looking anywhere remotely good. But that is not going to happen.”

The editing, she said, merely aligned with Urban’s own contention that “some cutting should be done in the beginning sections.”

Far as Ellis recalls, Mehta had no grievances with the novel except a scene where Bateman releases a starved rat into a woman’s vagina (he’d tell Fisketjon, “Lose the gerbil”).

The edits, Urban said, would be light.

The book would not be changed.

Gary Fisketjon, creator of the Vintage Contemporaries line of paperbacks that would now release American Psycho, was tasked with editing the novel and what he really wanted to do, according to Ellis, was reduce the whole thing by maybe half.

Fisketjon wore circular eyeglasses and a dour expression and hair swishing down to the nearest swatch of denim or flannel or Aztec patterning, i.e. his shoulders. He was seldom found without a substance back-and-forthing to his lips: black coffee, cigarettes, cocktails.

Ash Carter, profiling Fisketjon for Air Mail in 2025, has to fetch process details from the authors themselves. How Fisketjon distills his work into a grab bag of lines. “I propose,” he told Tobias Wolff, “you dispose.”

“If you reject all my edits,” he warned Joshua Furst, “I’ll never work with you again. If you take all my edits, I’ll never work with you again.”

Fisketjon holds the editor/author relationship in sacred esteem. Confidential. Won’t discuss it. What he’ll talk about with reporters (sparingly) is the publishing industry, or his own methodology. That he edits at a rate of five pages per hour. That each book is roughly a one-month commitment. “Countless thousands of [authorial] decisions factor into the writing of any book,” he told Vice, “and it defies mathematical odds that each and every one was the best decision.”

One firsthand glimpse into Fisketjon’s work comes from Richard Daniel King, a scholar who pored through Cormac McCarthy’s archive, studying his correspondence with editors. Here’s Fisketjon, in a draft of No Country for Old Men (2005), helping McCarthy reconcile his timeline:

Fisketjon added the note: “. . . ‘[T]he day before’ would imply this [scene] is [taking place on] Monday, since Chigurh [the villain] killed those two on Sunday. And the goatfuck is in fact what Moss [the hero] stumbled across at the beginning, ‘two days before that’ [which] suggests [the goatfuck] happened Friday. . . .” To this, McCarthy has simply added “GOOD”

It’s not to say he’s miserly about these things, but this is the editorial sensibility tasked with American Psycho, a book whose narrator is digressive, irrational, and proudly wrong about almost everything; timelines are deliberately asynchronous, characters are constantly mistaking one another for somebody else; its narrator’s confusion is meant to become the reader’s.

It didn’t go well.

But all these folks are friendly anyhow.

It’s fine.

Back in June the New York Daily News reported they were all at the American Booksellers Convention in Vegas together.

A friend reports such dandy publishing gents as Sonny Mehta, Morgan Entrekin and Gary Fisketjon are cutting quite the sartorial contrast in the gambling desert. Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts are the normal dress code, and these New Yorkers are in suits.

Amanda Urban, the reporter notes, wore a pair of dice on her necklace.

Random House flew Gary out to Los Angeles, where Bret was staying with his mom in Sherman Oaks, and set him up at the Bel-Air. Bret drove back and forth over the hill, so they could work on the book together, until the bookkeepers at Vintage said fuck it, got him a room so he could just stay there. (“Yes,” Ellis told the Paris Review in 2012, “this is how publishers spent their money in the nineties.”)

Fisketjon marked up the book with an already honed methodology: green pen curling through the text, like vines up a lattice, margins cluttered with lowercase letters like bugs at an opera: questions, observations, corrections.

Ellis described it as “a three day frenzy of Gary making suggestions and me resisting them,” the author patiently receiving the small stack of Fisketjon’s several hours’ labor and patiently writing STET STET STET, leaving Gary “extremely frustrated.”

“I think his plan when he acquired that novel was to radically fix it. The problem was that I didn’t think it needed to be fixed.” In the end, Ellis said via email, he accepted about “two percent” of Fisketjon’s edits.

There’s no getting Fisketjon’s side of things because he treats the author-editor relationship as a sacrament. Makes interviews uncomfortable.

Slushpile: What is the craziest or funniest thing anyone has done to get you to read their manuscript?

Fisketjon: This approach never works with me, since this job is not my idea of a joke or a party-trick.

“Gary wrote me a very impassioned letter after the editing process was over,” said Ellis. “He told me, ‘You’re going to be very embarrassed by a lot of this book in five or 10 years.’ And I said, ‘Well, so what?’”

The book was published on March 6, 1991, a day before his 27th birthday.

He was already at work on another novel.

Something bigger.

Publication seems to have ended the controversy. If American Psycho had a direct opponent, it was Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women. Bruce herself said it was not her or NOW’s desire to see the book cancelled, its author muzzled; comments abound from Entertainment Weekly to Fresh Air and the New York Times that NOW’s call for a boycott of not just American Psycho, but of all books by Random House, was an act of protest, not censorship.

You won’t see books being burned or fireworks when the novel is published. What you will see is our attempt . . . to show the gatekeepers of this culture . . . that the women of this country will no longer tolerate gratuitous violence for the sake of profit and entertainment.

Roger Rosenblatt became another opponent when he wrote an attention-grabbing op-ed for the New York Times called, “Snuff This Book,” also calling for a boycott. TheTimes was inundated with angry letters and later published a long rebuttal from novelist John Irving. “If you slam a book when it’s published, that’s called book reviewing, but if you write about a book three months in advance of its publication and your conclusion is ‘don’t buy it,’ your intentions are more censorial than critical.”

Meanwhile Bret was going out there, sparingly, and playing the role of Serious Author,

Like with Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air. She had him on the show in 1991, after the book was out, and pressed him about its violence. Respectful but insistent. Asking why he’d put himself through this for three years, researching FBI casebooks, murderer profiles, details about Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, “I’m interested in hearing what you [Ellis] were going through that made you want to enter this [serial killer’s] mind.”

Ellis gives a neat PR-style answer about the controversy. That it’s out of hand. The book is a satire. He doesn’t understand the outrage.

Gross is undeterred. She asks him: was the violent material something he was “trying to purge from [his] own personality?” To which Ellis answers no. The book is a novel. A satire, in fact.

Of Wall Street.

And, um . . . television.

“Still, though,” Gross working the body now, “when you’re dealing with [a narrator] who stabs somebody in the eyeballs, drills out their teeth, rapes somebody with rats” — getting him on the ropes — “there’s something beyond [an] interest in Wall Street or consumer culture of the ’80s that’s leading to that.”

But then, abruptly, Gross eases up: “I feel funny here!” Hasty, angsty, earnest. “I feel like I’m putting you on the spot.”

Bret says, “No,” consoling, “no no no —”

“I don’t think an author should be forced to explain themselves,” says Gross, sounding almost contrite as she invites this author to explain himself.

And then it sounds for a second like he might do it! The 26-year-old who’s been dealing with this shit for over a year now. Tired of it. A cautious hedge in his voice. He starts to say things like, “Of course there’s um a lot of undercurrents in those [violent] scenes also but um . . .,” trailing off. “I think in many ways . . .,” trailing off. “The violence seems so . . .,” trailing again; exhaling, “it seems so . . .,” pensive pause, “it’s so abstract,” and then the mask slips again —

“Would this whole fiasco have started,” he asks, “if Patrick Bateman was gay and was killing young men?”

And then something catches in his throat. He switches tracks with an audible wince: “The fact that I even have to ask that question just makes me cringe.”

Gross’ voice changes. So do her questions.

The interview lasts another 20 seconds and then Gross calls it a day. Her demeanor notably hastened.

Like something just clicked.

His grandfather, Red Ellis, died in 1991 and when his obituary in the local paper was only a few sentences long someone wrote a complaint saying they were not the voice of the community if they thought this man was only worth a couple sentences.

After that — for reasons related or not — Robert Ellis’ drinking got worse. Recounting, to theTimes, how Bob got wasted that Christmas and created a scene, Ellis told himself, “Okay,” still not burning the bridge, “let’s give it a year. Dads mellow out all the time, so let’s just see what happens.”

They hadn’t spoken in eight months when Robert Ellis died suddenly the following August.

He was 50.

Two years later, during his first major book tour, Bret would finally conquer his fear of flying (“with the help of vodka and tranquilizers”) but in the summer of 1992 he was still traveling between coasts via three-day train rides, “locking himself into a sleeper compartment with a transcontinental supply of marijuana” and a pile of books to pass the time.

He stayed at his mom’s house in Sherman Oaks while lawyers straightened things out with Bob’s estate. In a 2025 podcast episode, celebrating the career of David Lynch, Ellis remembers arriving in LA that week, not knowing what to do, and so going with his sister Amy to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. He remembers liking it, though the memory bleeds together with Unforgiven and Single White Female and Buffy the Vampire Slayer — other movies they saw that week.

Bob Ellis wanted to be cremated and so he was cremated and he wanted his ashes spread in Mexico but instead they were dropped into a safety deposit box and left there. James Ellroy, a fellow novelist at Knopf, had written to Bret with words of support about American Psycho, upon its release in 1991, but Ellis didn’t answer until October ’92. He apologized for the delay, explaining he was “dealing with sleazeball attorneys and demented trustee’s [sic] and my father’s golddigging 24 year-old girlfriend and whether my father was a suicide or not, an overdose of insulin, questions, major trouble with the IRS.” Thirteen years later, in Lunar Park, he would write about the fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” inheriting his father’s wardrobe, “revolted to discover that most of the inseams in the crotch of the trousers were stained with blood, which we later found out was the result of a botched penile implant he underwent in Minneapolis.” An interviewer for the Times asked if the story was true, and winced when he got the nod.

“Sorry,” said Ellis. “You wanted to know.”

The big book he’d been planning as a follow-up to American Psycho was delayed by his father’s death and the “protracted legal wrangling over his estate,” as he later explained to Rolling Stone, but also the fact that

“I was really incredibly fucked up all the time,” he says in a tone that is neither regretful nor self-congratulatory. “I drank and did every drug conceivable, and I was really paranoid and freaked out.”

Ellis explained, via email, that when the big novel was delayed, by personal and technical obstacles, it was his editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, “who suggested the short story collection,” assembled largely from stories he’d written in college, “though he [Gary] saw it as a novel,” given the parallel narratives, and overlapping characters. Fisketjon, he says, didn’t want the phrase “short stories” on the book jacket. He thought it would be “misleading.”

“The recurring characters argued,” for Fisketjon, that it be categorized as a novel.

Novels also sell better. I asked how Sonny Mehta reacted to the “big novel” being delayed, and publishing The Informers instead; Ellis says he can’t recall a due date for the big fourth novel. “I don’t remember any pressure.”

Paul Bogaards describes, in a phone call, a similar environment. “Sonny had enormous patience. [He] understood the psyche of writers and what it took to get to the finish line and if there was an interim work he would be happy to publish it.”

In 1994, Ellis was on his first major book tour promoting The Informers, a set of 13 interwoven stories he’d written mostly in college, set in Los Angeles, mostly about disaffected young people like the cast of his first two novels but occasionally vampires and housewives, too. He promoted the book as a “novel” in some places (The Charlie Rose Show, KCRW’s Bookworm), telling a college radio station that The Informers was an intermittent years-long project that he never thought of as a collection. The position he holds now seems to be the one he shared with Jaime Clarke a couple years later:

JC: Do you work on several different projects at once? I read somewhere that you’d go to the stories in The Informers when you were stuck on something else.

BEE: The Informers [comprises] stories that I wrote in between novels. It wasn’t ever supposed to be a full-fledged novel, and I don’t consider it a novel. It’s a group of short stories, and I think it’s better to read it knowing that it’s a group of short stories. . . . [I]f you go into reading it as a novel, you’re utterly confused and you’ll have no idea what’s going on.

He’d been too nervous for a tour with the first couple novels and then it seemed like a bad idea to go out on the road promoting American Psycho when he’d gotten “13 anonymous death threats,” as the New York Times reported, prior to the book’s release, “including several with photographs of him in which his eyes have been poked out or an axe drawn through his face,” and another one saying he would be “raped with a nail-studded baseball bat,” and so they waited until people calmed down a bit and Ellis himself was just about 30. Meeting readers at signings was “strange,” he told the LA Times, and “scary” at times, but also, um, “good.” He wasn’t polished yet, is the issue, and readers didn’t know what to expect. “I get a lot of like, ‘I thought you were, like, this sort of jerk . . . and I almost didn’t come because I didn’t want to put myself through you being rude to me or something.’” As in almost every other profile of Ellis from 1985–95 he is described (even when the article is scathing) as seeming “rather shy and vulnerable,” with a near-constant reference to babyfat. Cherub cheeks. One reader, at the signing, asks if he liked Bennington. Ellis says, “Um, yes.” Another asks if his characters stay with him after he’s finished a book. Ellis says, “No, not really.”

It was his first book tour. “The Informers,” he told Jaime Clarke a couple years later, “[is] by far . . . probably sentence-by-sentence the best writing I’ve done. I don’t know if it’s the best book, but I do think that the writing is, let’s just say, very unembarrassing to me.” [Italics mine].

By far the best. Probably. At least the prose. Maybe not the story. It isn’t embarrassing.

David Cronenberg was committed to directing an adaptation of American Psycho, with Brad Pitt starring as Patrick Bateman.

Cronenberg “thought it was a fantastic book,” as he explained during a public Q&A for his 2000 movie Crash, but he simply “couldn’t find a way to replicate, on screen, the experience that I had reading the book.” He certainly tried. Recruited at least two screenwriters before abandoning the project. The first was Ellis himself, to whom he gave a few pointers:

I don’t want any restaurant or nightclub scenes, they’re a pain to shoot, so take all of those out.

Ellis thought, “OK, well that’s 70 percent of the book. . . .”

Also, I only want to shoot one murder, so take all the violence out.

“Well that’s another 10 percent of the book. . . .”

And I shoot about a minute and a half per page, so don’t write a full 90-page script, make it more like 70 pages.

“I thought, ‘What the fuck are you asking me to write?’” Ellis claims to have written the version he intended to write the whole time. A “greatest hits” assembly of scenes from the novel. Cronenberg “hated it,” according to Ellis, and bailed after the next screenwriter came up short as well (Rob Weiss took a stab as well; his draft allegedly ends with Patrick Bateman turning into a 50-story kaiju and destroying New York). Ellis invited Jim along on the tour and “we almost killed each other.”

Now, in his 60s, Ellis interviews young authors on his podcast and it’s one of the few topics on which he strikes a paternal tone: “[Y]ou cannot take a boyfriend on a tour.”

“It is all about you, all day long . . . I did it in ’94, for The Informers, I went to the UK with Jim . . . so many issues in the relationship come to the forefront when one partner is being continuously feted and the other one is not, and then they act out a little bit. . . .”

But their situation was unique. Jim was, as Ellis has said, closeted, because of his job, while Ellis (whose reputation at least allowed some sexual fluidity) was at risk, “in 1995,” of having his work “ghettoized into the gay section of bookstores,” a serious professional hazard he discussed with Chuck Palahniuk on the podcast in 2020. In the Vanity Fair profile, promoting The Informers, Ellis invited the reporter, Matthew Tyrnauer, to walk around his apartment but “loom[ed]” behind him the whole time, “ill at ease, a symphony of fidgets and tics.” When Tyrnauer asks about traces of another occupant, Ellis said, “My landlord.”

It might not have been the cause of their breakup, c. 1995, but it seems to have been a factor.

Thirty years later, Ellis would remember Jim fondly, on the podcast, and describe their separation as one of the most painful times of his life.

American Psycho again.

Mary Harron is attached to direct. She wrote a script with Guinevere Turner.

Ellis was paid to write a script, and it wasn’t used, but in 2023 he would explain, on the Wolfgang Wee Uncut podcast, why he deserves more credit:

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, Mary Harron did such a brilliant job reimagining American Psycho — ’ Every single scene and every line of dialogue [in her movie] is from my novel. It is {jabbing chest with finger} my dialogue. And yet Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner get [a screenwriting] credit and I get no [screenwriting] credit.”

Wolfgang Wee nods along. He asks, Are you angry about that?

Ellis corrects his posture. Lowers his voice. “It was frustrating.” Shrugs into the mic. “A little bit.”

But really, he clarifies, the frustration isn’t about pride of authorship; it’s about “residuals. If you don’t get that [screenwriting] credit, you don’t get those residuals.”

“So you have no royalties from that movie?”

“No. I don’t.”

He’s got the one credit on that movie that is, ironically, where the money starts and ends:

Based on the Novel By.

He finishes Glamorama. The big novel. According to Adam Begley’s review in the Observer, Knopf paid “a whopping $500,000” for this novel, and Ellis is prepared to give them their money’s worth.

A world tour.

He’s ready to be airborne, public, eloquent, mannered.

He’s being bustled around from airport to hotel to bookstore and back. He’s hitting his marks. Smiling at readers. Taking the same questions, dishing the same answers, and dodging all speculation about his sexuality. Smiling the whole time thanks to the counsel of Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s Director of Publicity and Media Relations, who planned this book’s tour, as well as the previous book’s tour, and will go on to do the next one, and the two after that. They come to know each other well enough that Ellis would feature him in an autofictional novel six years later: “Paul Bogaards would respond,” to news of the author’s debauchery, “with his own e-mails, such as: ‘I don’t care if you have to stick a broom up the writer’s ass to get him upright and onstage — Just Do It.” Twenty-five years later, having jumped from Knopf to create his own company (Bogaards Public Relations), Bogaards will be sitting at home, watching a 2024 documentary about the Brat Pack on Hulu, and he’ll see Bret Easton Ellis suddenly appear onscreen, a talking head, opining about what it was like to be young and famous in the 1980s and Bogaards will say to himself, “Oh Bret,” distraught, “you’re slouching!”

Bret Easton Ellis is still “young,” the papers are surprised to find, but he is manly and he is dressed well. He is smiling under lamps on Charlie Rose and on Book Talk. Good natured. An LA Times reporter will note that Bret Easton Ellis “often makes fun of himself,” and his PR laugh on a camera or a microphone pops out “a-HA-haaa,” like a jolly pistol in a long hallway. The author poses for Rolling Stone and New York Magazine and the Guardian. Lensflare obscures the screen and dissolves on a Barnes & Noble in Toronto, “standing room only,” he’s reading aloud to hundreds of adults for an hour at a time and then sitting at a table for several more hours while they line up to get their books signed, snap photos, and almost every night he’s leaning forward to hear some bashful young reader bend down and whisper (men and women alike) that American Psycho taught them to masturbate, or that The Rules of Attraction made them comfortable with their sexuality, or look: someone’s got his name tattooed on their forearm. (“Not ‘Bret Ellis,’” he clarifies to one reporter, “which is the name on all my cheque stubs.”) Readers want to know if he cares at all that Michiko Kakutani called Glamorama “interminable” (“There are differences between fashion-obsessed hipsters,” Kakutani seethed, “and Hitler”). The answer’s no, babe. He doesn’t care.

Bret Easton Ellis is wearing a baseball cap and loose-fitting leisurewear when he tells a reporter, in Dublin, that he was recently addicted to heroin but only for a month and that his father didn’t speak to him between the end of high school and the publication of Less Than Zero. “[I]t pissed me off,” he says, “but I was frightened of him.” When she asks about how he’s responded to literary fame he says, “I kind of fantasized that I was going to be a lot better-liked,” and a reporter from the Longview News-Journal in Texas notes that Bret Easton Ellis is “particularly well-mannered” and he happens to be in Toronto while the American Psycho adaptation is being filmed and people are saying that a Canadian serial killer was recently caught and among his possessions was a copy of American Psycho and everyone wants to know, Bret, what are you watching these days (“HBO, The Simpsons, Judge Judy, South Park, and lots of MTV and CNN”) and they want to know how he dealt with the American Psycho controversy and so he tells them about the bodyguards and the death threats and.

But his relationship to that novel has changed.

“It’s only recently,” he tells the Toronto Star, that he could speak about the novel’s “autobiographical elements,” the fact that it was “a very harsh criticism of the way I was living at the time,” that the book is filled with “self-loathing” and how “I also thought a lot about my father and when he made a lot of money how he changed.” The Vancouver Sun says Bret Easton Ellis is not only way friendlier than his books would suggest but also he is “pudgy and balding.” A reporter from the Chicago Tribune begins their conversation, “You’ve said this is your first book with a plot. . . .”

Bret Easton Ellis keeps his poise. He plays his role.

He’s gotten very good at it.

But he’s never had to play it this long.

When the tour is over he’s back in New York and he’s either single or he’s in an open relationship with Michael Wade Kaplan, who might or might not be the unnamed lover in a personal essay he’ll publish 20 years later (after Kaplan’s family has asked him to stop mischaracterizing the circumstances of his death) who’s described as being “a decade younger than me, an artist who had addiction issues that we both assumed were under control until they weren’t.” This young lover was away in Berlin for the summer, leaving Ellis to his devices.

Socializing.

Sleeping around.

Drinking, too — which he’d begin to describe, on the Glamorama tour, as something he maybe inherited from his father (same as a wallet-burning penchant for Manhattan haircuts), “but it really isn’t the same as him,” he clarifies to Patricia Deevy, in Dublin. “I’m not the sort of man who drinks a bottle of vodka at night. I have sometimes a few glasses of wine and then it’s like, ‘I’ve got to go to bed now.’”

Glamorama was a couple years behind him now and Ellis was trying to get this new novel going. He said in a chatroom Q&A from 1999 (hosted by Barnes & Noble) that the novel was “still in the planning stages,” and that he couldn’t say much about it except “I think it takes place in Georgetown. And it will be tangentially about politics and the supernatural and be much more autobiographical than my previous books.”

It would also be an homage to Stephen King, whose novel Salem’s Lot he remembers reading a dozen or so times as an adolescent, keeping tabs on his career ever since. An early hero. It would have meant a lot to him if Stephen King had liked American Psycho, but he didn’t. In fact he didn’t much acknowledge it until he had something nice to say about one of Ellis’ books, in 2005, at which point he said American Psycho felt like “bad fiction by a good writer.”

He had all the time and attention to spare for this new novel but it wasn’t working and (therefore?) he’s socializing with a heavy-drinking crowd, which is sorta fun, he’s getting laid, meeting people — although there is this one issue, a sort of “low humming dread” that pervades his day. But he can’t quite name it. So he’s taking more than his prescribed amount of Klonopin. He’ll concede “a mild addiction to benzodiazepine,” which in conjunction with alcohol and cocaine (he keeps it stashed inside his Juno-60 synthesizer — shhh!) can apparently cause insomnia(?). Plus he’s getting love notes from a stalker. Then packages. Which is basically fine except the normal avenue for fan mail is you send it to the publisher, and the publisher forwards it, in a bundle, to the author’s home address. These parcels are showing up straight at his door. And now on top of all that there’s this heatwave in late July with temperatures in New York City tipping over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The stalker thing is reminiscent of those weeks leading up to American Psycho’s publication when someone from the publishing house had to sit him down with a manilla envelope and let him go page by page through all of the death threats he was receiving because if one of these people was actually serious, and murdered him, “Your parents could sue us.”

All this going on at once and that’s when he collapses at the gym and has a seizure — “a pretty severe one,” as he describes it in White. An ambulance comes and takes him to the hospital and he’s saying he’s dehydrated and paramedics are telling him people don’t have seizures cuz they’re thirsty and soon as he’s at the hospital, compos mentis, they start prodding him to change his clothes, get situated, because they want to run some tests.

They’re worried something might be wrong.

It could be neurological.

A brain tumor.

It was nearly 10 years since his father’s death and something about the seizure made him realize it wasn’t the drugs or the heatwave or the stubborn novel or the stalker that was ruining his life; it was him.

He cut back on partying, on drugs. He went to the doctor and decided that if he did in fact have a brain tumor, well, he should probably know about it and, also, if somebody was staking out his apartment, at one point even sneaking into the lobby and riding the elevator up to his door, well, he should probably address that too.

He was attending his final all-clear checkup at the Zeckendorf when someone popped into the office to say that a “small plane” had hit the World Trade Center.

After the terror attacks he stayed home a lot. Friends came by and one of them told him a story: a guy she knew had escaped the Towers and when he stepped into the street he was

sprayed in the face with warm water. He had no idea where this water had come from and then it rapidly happened again, dousing his face and the suit he was wearing until he realized almost instantly that it wasn’t water at all but had come from a falling body that had hit a nearby lamppost.

There was a dust cloud in the city and buildings huddled in the fog wondering which was next and a stench of melted concrete and steel and rubber and flesh and glass. “The first book I picked up after 9/11 was [Jonathan Franzen’s] The Corrections, and found myself so immersed in it that I was often as grateful it simply existed in this moment as I was moved by the narrative.”

And now his own novel was starting to work. He cut things off with the guys he’d been seeing. Realized the novel wasn’t about some political operative in Georgetown but about himself.

He sealed his balcony door against the stench of burning skyscrapers and began writing the book about his father.

Ellis was with his family in Los Angeles, celebrating the holidays, when Kaplan “was hit by a freak aneurysm at his studio in Williamsburg.”

Describing the situation (fleetingly) in a 2014 monologue, Bret says Kaplan “was found four days later when police broke down the door after Mike failed to answer any of our calls or emails. It had hit him so fast that he was still tightly gripping the handles to the grocery bags he was carrying.”

Kaplan’s clothes were at his New York apartment and it was hard to go there now. He stayed with his mom and stepdad. He couch-surfed. He dreaded New York.

And now he was thinking of just staying in LA. Why go back? He’d been feeling more and more alienated by the literary scene anyway. His friends tended to be the type who did heroin and got fucked up every night. Not too long ago he’d gone to the 10th anniversary of Nell’s, the nightclub he frequented in the ’80s and early ’90s. He sat in a booth with Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin and Jay McInerney and it was almost like old times again except someone ordered a Diet Coke, and kept checking the time. McInerney with two kids at home, Fisketjon and Entrekin accruing responsibilities alongside clout. Their mornings were getting earlier and the long nights harder to shake off.

There were “too many ghosts,” he said.

And so he stayed at his mom’s house. Bedridden for two weeks. He skipped Mike’s funeral in Michigan. Couldn’t do it. Just stayed here. “A 39-year-old man traipsing up and down the stairs every morning to the room that he grew up in as a child.”

In time he got back to the novel. But then he got distracted with a gig. A screenplay. “I thought I was going to make a million dollars and I didn’t. I barely made enough money to pay my mortgage that month. But it was instructive. But, mainly, I liked LA again. I liked it.”

Robert Birnbaum: Is it different from when you were growing up?

BEE: Much different, a much different place.

RB: How so?

BEE: Because I’m different.

In September of ’04 Ellis was doing a final pass on Lunar Park, still in the old bedroom at his mom’s house, when he reached the last couple pages — and felt his chest expand. “That was a powerful moment for me because it was when — and this sounds sappy as fuck, but I don’t care — I forgave my father.”

But once it was done he needed something new. “I was roaming LA pretending that Mike’s death hadn’t happened. Just focus on the work. Lose yourself in the novel.” He was looking for a new project. Something big. All-consuming.

It arrived in a package from his agent.

The package came from a 24-year-old admirer with a proposition in mind: he wanted to take something from Ellis’ past and make it new.

Nicholas Jarecki was a 24-year-old writer-filmmaker who’d made one documentary, called The Outsider. It was about director James Toback. He’d also written one book. It was called Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start. He got a $50,000 advance.

Jarecki sent his book and his film to Ellis as part of a larger pitch: he wanted to write and direct an adaptation of Ellis’ book The Informers. He had an idea of how to consolidate and connect the stories.

It would be his directorial debut.

Ellis was intrigued by Jarecki’s pitch. They started working together and, as tends to happen with Ellis’ collaborators, they became friends. They worked together in hotels, visited each other’s houses, met each other’s families. The original screenplay ran 180 pages. Of sharing it for the first time, Ellis said, “Our agents, were like, ‘This is a really good script, but what the fuck is this? There’s no way this is ever getting made!’ So we were basically on our own.”

Jarecki takes the ball. Darts all over town, meeting with producers. Endless. Hopeless. They’d say yeah, they were interested, and then back out, ghost him, go bankrupt. He attended one meeting where the prospective financier paid no mind to the eviction notice on his desk.

Eventually they found their major backer: Marco Weber.

Marco takes the reins for a while, gets some other people on board, and then one day he takes Jarecki to lunch. Fancy. The Restaurant at the Hotel Bel-Air. (Just a few floors down from where Bret and Fisketjon edited American Psycho.) It’s a white-cloth place with patio doors hanging open all day. Fresh air. Ritzy. The tables are far apart because people who eat here have secrets.

Jarecki shows up for lunch, greets Marco, he’s got his storyboards and his smile, ready to talk business but first, real quick, he looks at the menu and tells the server, I’ll have a lobster club.

Thirty-dollar sandwich.

Marco Weber with updates: there’s good news and bad news. The good news is this: he managed to raise the budget from roughly $6 million to something like $25 million. Which is great! Except it’s also more pressure on Jarecki, as director, because it means there’s that much more money he’ll be expected to recoup at the box office when they finally release this three-hour movie that (let’s face it) isn’t exactly motivated by plot. But that’s fine! Really. Jarecki’s confident in the script, the cast, confident that, after two years on this project, he knows it well enough that he can find interesting ways to put that $20–25 million on the screen and so he agrees, yes, a roughly $25 million budget is decidedly a very good thing and anyway the bad news, says Marco, is you’re fired.

Jarecki’s just blinking. Fired? Parsing the news, when a voice descends from on high and he looks up.

A server shows him what $30 looks like when you smear it on bread.

“I completely lost my appetite,” said Jarecki, years later, “for this lobster club.”

But Jarecki and Ellis were in a “fortunate position”: Weber hadn’t renewed his option on the material. “He couldn’t make the movie without our permission.”

What he doesn’t mention, in the podcast, is that Weber couldn’t fire Jarecki without Ellis’ permission.

“We were best friends,” Ellis later recalled about his partnership with Jarecki, and when Marco Weber came to him about cutting Jarecki out of the film — his passion project, the one he’d introduced to Ellis — “and I said, ‘Do it, cut him out.’”

Jarecki was, by his own account, “ruthless” in the negotiation for being bought out. He knew how badly Marco Weber wanted to make this movie, how many people were already on board — and eventually he extracted a seven-figure sum for the script.

Still, he was devastated by the loss; not much older, c. 2007, than Ellis had been during that first profile at Woods Gramercy in 1986. Hadn’t seen it coming.

Young enough to think that what they were selling was a script.

“I lost friends on that movie,” Bret would later say of The Informers. “I made them back but it was just non-stop stress, people threatening to sue each other, lawyers got involved. I was in my car every day screaming on my phone and I became depressed.”

Drama after obstacle after drama.

He wants a cigarette.

He doesn’t need this.

A two-hour cut of the movie was assembled.

Ellis thought it was . . . decent.

But it tested poorly.

The new director, Gregor Jordan, asked Ellis to write some new scenes. Ellis didn’t want to.

But it was in his contract, so he had to.

Gregor Jordan shot the new scenes and then shoehorned them into this movie that was, at the same time, being shaved down to 90 minutes.

The final product was more painful for him, he said, than a casual viewer. What he sees on the screen is the negative space. Everything that could have been there.

He told the producer, with apologies, that he wouldn’t be doing any promotion for the movie. “I just cannot support this movie in the shape that it’s in.”

But he had to promote the movie.

It was in his contract.

And so he makes the rounds. Interviews with magazines “of [the producers’] choosing.” Mostly over the phone. Bestowing on the film such flowers as, “It is what it is,” and “I guess I’m the person who has to promote the movie.”

Asked about the American Psycho musical: “I’m fine with that.” Of the Less Than Zero adaptation: “Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work.” Of the American Psycho film: it’s “an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less.” He mentions people are pushing him to write a memoir: “It just doesn’t work that way. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know why I write what I write. I mean, it’s impossible to talk about. I don’t know.”

That April, getting ready for the Los Angeles premiere, Ellis remembers buttoning his black suit in front of a mirror, and asking himself, Didn’t you always want this?

A new novel had been percolating for a while. He’d observed the 20th anniversary of Less Than Zero by drinking a bottle of wine and reading the whole book in a sitting. Wondered where those young characters would be today, on the cusp of 50.

His experience on The Informers began leaking into the outline. “2006, 2007, 2008 were terrible,” he told an Australian audience in 2010: he was “involved in a film that is becoming a disaster, people are lying to you, you’re becoming super paranoid, you are drinking too much because of this, you’ve gotten involved with some pretty shady people. . . . in the business, the casting couch has announced itself to you, you’ve taken advantage of it, and you’ve been burned by it as well,” sorta dancing over that latter point, but it’s the locus of his heartache. Ellis hooked up with a young actor. He hints at it often without naming names.“You talk about falling in love with someone at 17, and how that can wreck your life,” he said on theWaterstones Podcast in 2023, “try falling in love with someone at 46. Now that can really wreck your life.”

Lunar Park was dedicated to the partner who’d just died; Glamorama, prior to that, was dedicated to the partner from whom he’d just separated; Imperial Bedrooms is dedicated to “R.T.,” the initials of the novel’s young love interest, Rain Turner.

When the fashion magazine Fantastic Man sent a team to interview Ellis in Los Angeles, in 2009, he warned the visiting reporter, before the tape recorder clicked on, “I am not promoting anything.”

All he’s doing at the moment is writing. Ellis was “precipitously close to finishing” a new novel, maybe a few weeks left, and this, according to Ellis, is where he enjoys “bursts of intense writing” and also the “immense amount of relief in working on something that is all your own.”

He’s isolated up here, standing around awkward with a cigarette. His Diet Coke.

There is a certain kind of writer that I cannot stand that is very popular with academics and with critics. [Their books are] carefully written, streamlined . . . very smooth and almost polite . . . very careful . . . [and] craving respect from the critical community. That’s a limitation. . . . You have to write because you are obsessed by this material and because it says something about yourself. Good manners can work for you for a while as an artist. I suppose as much as bad manners can.

The final product is a 40,000-word novel. Or a “novella,” as he sometimes calls it. He’s noncommittal about labels. Same with The Informers (his book) being a collection of “short stories” or a “novel” — he’d rather just call it a book. Later on he’ll resist the label “essays” on his book White, preferring to describe it as one long essay with chapter breaks.

Imperial Bedrooms shows the cast of Less Than Zero as fortysomethings in LA. The protagonist, Clay, has been given the same last name as his creator, same apartment, and the same job: a screenwriter/producer for a movie called The Listeners.

He falls in love with a young actor. It ends disastrously. He betrays his oldest friend.

It ends with a chiseled paragraph that concludes the overarching story of unrequited love between Clay and his high school sweetheart Blair:

There are many things Blair doesn’t get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know. . . . I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.

He didn’t like the book when it first came out.

Imperial Bedrooms, he told Three Guys One Book, “became the most autobiographical novel I’ve ever written. When I look at it, it’s almost a memoir of those years compressed into four weeks,” dredged from “the lowest place in my life,” emotionally “shattered.”

But the completed thing felt too short, too surface, too bleak; the language, he said, was pared down “to the point of haiku.” Plus he felt he’d made too many concessions to Fisketjon in the editing. There’s a scene at the end where the narrator tortures two teenagers and Ellis was bothered to’ve made concessions.

That summer he does just a handful of domestic interviews and one of them is conducted by an old friend, Jesse Katz. They went to high school together. Snuck into bars. Ellis loaned him a necktie so they’d look older.

Three decades later they sit in a patio booth at the Polo Lounge and order drinks. Bret gets a Don Julio Blanco margarita with a shot on the side and a glass of water.

The rain becomes a downpour. They’re isolated on the patio. Bret fidgets, drums the tablecloth, lights a cigarette.

He’s on his fourth margarita when Katz observes how publishing has changed in the age of Twitter. Every author “responsible for [them]selves.” It’s “terrifying and yet ultimately, maybe, liberating.”

Bret drinks and agrees and says, “Like love.”

Katz snorts with laughter.

Bret just “pull[s] on his cigarette and says it again. ‘Like love, Jesse.’”

He agrees to another book tour. International again. “I have to do book tours,” he explained to Richard Birnbaum. “I do have to promote myself.”

I don’t sell [so] many copies where I can sit back and let royalties pour in. It really is, the financial aspect of my life is in one way, it’s pretty good. I’m able to make a living off the books I write, but on another level, yeah, I am moderately stressed about money. Not to the point where it distracts me from writing. There is always a worry — maybe I don’t need another nine months on this book.

But he adopted a new uniform for this one. Zip-up hoodies and sneakers and black-rim glasses and a baseball cap and a slouch. During interviews (especially on stage) he would become irreverent, digressive, evading questions with performative distraction or boredom.

Shtick.

Harmless. Maybe it embarrasses the interviewer in public. Fine. He hates this. He’s dragging himself through it.

The shtick hits a snag during his first event in Australia. He’s onstage with journalist Ramona Koval before an audience of roughly 300 people.

Koval opens with a 49-word question that’s asking, in essence, what drew him back to sequelizing his debut novel. It’s eloquent. Thoughtful.

Ellis listens. Stares out over the audience. After a few beats, he says: “Delta Goodrem.” The name of an Australian popstar. He just discovered her last night at the hotel. He was flipping channels and caught one of her music videos. Thought she was hot.

Ramona Koval listens til his monologue trails off. “And this has got to do with what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “it’s just been on my mind.” Koval asks if he didn’t like that question.

“No I did like that question,” said Ellis, “I just need to hear it again.”

The audience chuckled.

“I didn’t like your answer,” says Koval, “so I’m going to ask you another one.” And so she embarks on another one. Longer this time. More thoughtful. He answers the same way. Later says he was about halfway through his second monologue when he noticed that Koval “had put down her pad and crossed her arms and was kinda glaring at me.”

Koval asks if he no longer takes himself seriously as a novelist.

“It’s hard to [take myself seriously] in this kind of venue,” said Ellis, “because you want to be authentic, you want to be real, but the real me really wants to talk about Delta Goodrem.”

A moment of tension. Koval says, “I think she’s too young for you.”

The audience makes wincing low-blow noises. Uncomfortable. Not liking this.

“I mean,” Bret rebounding, “guys like Clay [the novel’s narrator] are very attractive to these girls.”

Kovel says yeah, but they’re interested in something transactional.

Bret makes noises to the effect that “New York is worse,” meaning the literary scene.

Koval asks, if the New York literary scene is so toxic and punishing, why was he a star of it for so long?

“I was a poser,” sounding stressed suddenly, “I posed during that whole thing, I didn’t know how else to act, I was supposed to be, like, this whatever, this serious young American novelist, and I was groomed for this position that I was not in any way, shape, or form —”

Koval chirps, “Who groomed you?”

“The press!”

“I had a bit of a breakdown in January of 2013.”

He told the story to Vice and as a prologue to his interview with Rob Zombie. “I did more writing in 2012 than I’d ever done in my life — a series of movies, two of which got made, and countless television pilots.” It trickled through the holidays into January thanks to a gig he took against his agent’s advice, allegedly, to work on a CW show by Gossip Girl co-creator Josh Schwartz: a supernatural high school drama called Copeland Prep. He’d never worked for network television before and wanted to see what it was like.

It sucked.

In his final weeks on the show, as he described them in a 2022 podcast, Ellis would submit a script in the afternoon, and then receive notes, with rewrites expected at 4 p.m.

He’d get those done, turn them in, and get notes right back — with rewrites expected by 7.

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it!”

What he really wanted to do was write prose. And so he started making notes on a novel. Something he’d been wanting to write since high school. About a murder that’s mistaken for a suicide.

The notes took off . . . and then sputtered.

The novel wouldn’t come together.

Later that year he would launch the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast from the PodcastOne studio.

He started to write monologues in prose.

Amanda Urban suggested he assemble some of his podcast monologues into a collection. Bret, noncommittal, brought it up “at dinner one night,” c. 2016, “between the first martini and the second martini,” with Jay McInerney and the novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Matthew Specktor.

Specktor remembers Bret saying (he’s paraphrasing), “Binky wants me to write this book based on the monologues and I don’t know how to do that.” Both McInerney and Specktor are encouraging but it’s Matthew who sees right away how to do it, methodologically, and so he volunteers himself.

Signs a contract with Knopf to join the project in an editorial/curatorial capacity. Tells Bret, Send me everything you’ve got, and a few days later he receives, via email, a Word document. “400 or 500 pages.” He’s sitting there in Palm Springs, poised over his laptop, he opens the email and sees the file’s called “White.doc.”

“I saw the document,” Specktor tells me over the phone, “and thought, ‘Oh man, he’s gonna call this book White?’”

This, he points out, was 2016 or 2017; “that word was very loaded.”

“Then I opened the document and saw the actual title.”

White Privileged Male.

“I thought, [pausing] ‘White . . . is a much better title.’”

He said as much to Bret, who conceded the point.

Specktor read through the monologues and selected the ones he thought were best, with a “chronological-ish structure that worked,” and sent them back to Ellis one by one — “he re-wrote them from scratch and sent them back” — and then Specktor would edit them, thought “not super aggressively” because, for one thing, Ellis was trying on a new style. Something he’d picked up from reading the monologues aloud. “He was very certain about wanting the repetitions, he wanted it to sound a certain way. He wanted a certain kind of rhythm. I think that’s what fed him into White more than anything.”

It was his point of entry for every book to date: finding the voice.

Gary with his pencils.

“The whole page,” says Specktor, “is covered in green pencil.”

Specktor and Fisketjon worked together in a “tag team” approach to the material. In the earlier sections, where Ellis writes a memoir-like essay about the American Psycho controversy, or how he fell in love with Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, Specktor remembers feeling “this stuff was fantastic,” but requesting, as a caveat, “We can kinda ease up on the fulminating about liberal hysteria,” not because it was bad, necessarily, just that “there was so much of it,” and Ellis, for the most part agreed. “Kept taking the edits and taking the edits,” until they reached the final chapters. That’s when Bret “started piling that stuff back in.”

Specifically in a final essay about Kanye West and the changing nature of celebrity.

Fisketjon was lost in this, according to Ellis, kept webbing the page with ink: “‘Who is this Khin-yee,’” Ellis’s chortling impersonation on the podcast, “‘Khen-yay?’”).

“Bret and Gary were certainly friendly,” Specktor says, “but there was a little more friction in that relationship than I understood.”

Ellis told him, It’s always been like this: Gary wants to cut, cut, cut and I hate it.

But Specktor saw it as something more admirable than that, a throwback, and resisted the simplification. “I was like, ‘That’s not fuckin’ true,’” that he knows firsthand, from talking to Gary socially, that the guy’s a fan — but this friction, he says, is what makes their relationship so fruitful and, in a way, antiquated. Two people who admire and respect each other, they have different sensibilities, and they sit down like professionals and hash those differences out.

As for Bret’s certainty that Gary hates his work: “That might just be Bret,” said Specktor. “Especially with this book.”

Shortly before White’s publication, Ellis received a call from the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner for a brief interview.

“Bret should’ve known that that was not gonna go well,” Specktor remembers with a wince. “That was calamitous.”

Chotiner — described as “the Interview Assassin” in a Q&A with the Columbia Journalism Review — starts his interview by addressing Ellis’ frustration, in the book, with liberals’ constant complaint that Donald Trump described Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” He asks why Ellis is so bothered by that.

Ellis (who, in 2009–10, dodged questions about newly elected President Barack Obama, and who in a 40-year career seems to have never been pressed to opine about a president) argues that Trump only said Mexicans are rapists once, “in his very first speech, and didn’t say it again. . . .”

Chotiner: “OK, but Trump says lots of racist things. We can all agree on that, right?”

Ellis: [Pauses.] “Sure.”

Chotiner: Why does people being upset about [Trump’s racist remarks] bother you?

Ellis: No, no, no, no, no. That just twisted up what I meant.

Chotiner: Tell me what you meant.

Ellis: You think I am defending a racist.

It gets worse from there.

But somehow the disastrous New Yorker interview did not hurt the book’s performance; in fact, it helped.

This was a more starkly polarized media landscape than the one in which he’d been raised. What might look, to some readers, like a relatively apolitical novelist blundering through an interview, revealing his political naivete, might look, to viewers on the opposite side of the political aisle, like the exact thing Ellis is bitching about in his book: a pillar of liberal media, the New Yorker, becoming so frothingly radical that it lured this gay, Gen X, coastal intellectual elite into a “gotcha” interview. Why? Because they couldn’t tolerate a moment’s dissent.

Ellis, in his brief panic afterward (he walked gaping into the next room and told his boyfriend, “I just got punk’d!”), might not have seen the opportunity right away.

But Tucker Carlson did.

“My publisher didn’t want me to do it.”

Years later, promoting his next novel, Ellis would explain to The Drift that the “reams of bad press” generated against White did nothing to diminish the interest of readers.

“If you’re invited, believe me, go on Fox,” he said. “Fucking sell 5,000 books.”

Without revealing exact numbers, Ellis has said that his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show sold out two printings of White’s hardcover.

“The Tucker thing,” Bogaards says over the phone, with a measured pause, “it is what it is. If you watch the interview there’s nothing transgressive about it, there are no pyrotechnics really, he’s very measured in his cadence, he makes his points eloquently.”

Ellis remembers Bogaards being less cavalier. Looking at the sales and telling him, matter of fact: You’re going back on Fox.

Says Bogaards over the phone: “I remember a lot of people saying, ‘What the fuck is Bret thinking,’ and I thought, ‘He’s writing about the moment, writing about what he sees in the world.’”

Then he’s overseas, all over Europe, where his complaints about Millennials (“Generation Wuss”) find more sympathy. “Our interview comes at the midpoint of an international tour,” writes Dougie Gerrard for City AM in London, “one that he forlornly tells me ‘will never stop.’”

Ellis had discovered a lucrative new talent: enraging young people. “Millennial hysteria!”

In encountering so many Millennials, and living with his Millennial boyfriend for almost a decade, Ellis says he found one of their most distinct qualities to be “a love of rules,” a belief “that rules offered a kind of pathway, a narrative that wasn’t . . . otherwise [there], and that all of these rules about what you can say, what you can’t say, how you can express yourself” were a way for these panicked young people to keep a grip on that “narrative pathway.”

Narrative, he could tell them, is not what they should cling to; it’s voice.

Ellis told Vanity Fair that the Covid pandemic changed his career; “the Hollywood dream I had chased for 14 years — of directing the scripts that I had written — died with lockdown.” He doesn’t explain how he reached that conclusion. Only that “I found myself . . . thinking about [high school] classmates,” going through Buckley yearbooks, listening to playlists from 1981. Started thinking about that book he’d been tinkering with for 40 decades, that nearly happened in 2013 after he visited his friend in Palm Springs. “I started looking [online] for [photos of] all the places where we hung out,” he told Barry Pierce in a 2023 interview, “[and] they’re all gone. I had a profound wave of nostalgia for that time. I started writing the book that night, and the next day I had 14 pages. It happened very quickly.”

The voice on the page was familiar — sprawling, indulgent, like a podcast monologue where time wasn’t a factor — but the tone was more nostalgic. Kinda campy. Victorian. Second paragraph starts like this:

When I first sat down to write this novel, a year after the events had taken place, it turned out that I couldn’t deal with revisiting this period, or any of those people I knew and the terrible things that befell us, including, most crucially, what had actually happened to me.

Mary Shelley over here. He’d found a way into the material: it’s not a story about youth itself, but the remembrance of youth.

He and his producer, Adam Thompson, were meanwhile hosting the podcast out of his apartment on Doheny, and after several weeks of the pandemic, when there hardly seemed to be a topic that didn’t bring them back to talking about Covid, Bret suggested they take a stab at serializing the novel. Or the opening chapter, at least. See how it goes.

Once the serialization started, the listener response was effusive, and they carried straight ahead to the end of the novel, occupying a whole episode with narration, at first, and later consigning it to the first half of the show, with an interview tacked on at the end. Ellis sustained a (roughly) 40-page lead on the week’s material, recording the text with a limited set of punctuating sound effects (car doors opening, closing) and fielding listener feedback through the comments (without engaging with it).

Amanda Urban, he claimed, was annoyed. Exasperated. Felt he’d “wasted” his novel (coming now at a rate of roughly two per decade) by giving it away like this (although, as Ellis would point out on the Waterstones Podcast, the basic $6 access for new listeners is more than he’d get for each book sale).

Over and over, for months, Ellis said there was “no deal” in place to publish The Shards, and that he wasn’t eager to seek one out.

He might have been feeling burned out, with respect to publishing, and given his burgeoning success with independent ventures, he might have been flirting with distributing through a smaller press, for less money up front and larger residuals.

But there were financial realities to consider. In 2022, breteastonellis.com began auctioning white cardboard Gift Boxes, with his signature across the top in metallic Sharpie, and a copy of one of his novels inside, for $125. In 2022 a “Signed American Psycho Gift Box” was available for $15,000. Probably a joke, or a symbolic purchase for some top-tier patron who wants to support the show. “I’ve been able to make a living as a writer,” he told Numero in 2020, “but always with stress about money, scraping by from pay cheque to pay cheque.” He called it a point of friction with his “millennial and a democratic socialist” boyfriend, who hates to hear Ellis worry about paying his mortgage every month. “He doesn’t know my tax situation and doesn’t realize it’s all a big mess.” In 2021, Ellis, like many others, took a stab at selling NFTs; at first he was auctioning off ownership of his most provocative tweets (“come over at do bring coke now”), but later in the year his name came up in a bigger enterprise, “Bitcoin Psycho,” in which buyers got NFTs pertaining to American Psycho along with a signed hard copy of the novel. The terms and technicalities are inscrutable, which suggests someone made a proposition and he said sure, loaned them his namesake.

In 2023 he and the podcast’s producer, Adam Thompson, spent almost an entire episode (S7E19) talking about his career, money, his malaise after a meeting with his estate attorney. “The fact that I have an estate attorney, in Century City, suggests a kind of privilege,” as does, he says, “the fact that I have things to leave to people,” though he also “realiz[ed], during this meeting: not that much.”

He said that his boyfriend, Todd Michael Schultz, had just found an article in a French magazine describing Ellis as “the Shakespeare of Generation X.” Bret, at the mic, echoes the label with relish before countering with his boyfriend’s observation: “Yeah. You’re the Shakespeare of Gen X. We’re living in a 1,400-square-foot condo.”

When the negotiations finally moved forward with Knopf, Ellis was struck by how much the experience had changed since his last novel, Imperial Bedrooms, was submitted (more than a decade prior).

Sonny Mehta had died.

Gary Fisketjon had been fired.

Paul Bogaards had retired (and was now going solo).

As his editor/translator told him, when he visited Denmark a year later for the Shards tour, “You are not going to see royalties for this book while you’re alive. We will sell a fair number of them. . . . But [considering] the nature of the business, the expense of books, what it costs to make a book, the advance we have to pay out . . .” Ellis, sounding mellow at the mic as he recounts his editor’s remarks, gets side-tracked by an observation: “Twenty percent [of that advance] goes to the [literary] agent, and then [the author gets] double-taxed: you’re taxed in Denmark, and you’re taxed here in the US. So really, making a living being a writer . . . it’s over. It really is.”

When The Shards was finally submitted to Knopf, for editors’ consideration, Ellis felt more poignantly the change of the guard. If he turned in a new novel, under Sonny Mehta’s tenure, the book would — as he recalled on his podcast — be accepted almost immediately. A couple days at most.

This time the feedback took two weeks . . . then three . . . four weeks . . . five weeks . . . six.

He seemed openly proud of The Shards, when it was done, in a way he might not have displayed in the 1980s or ’90s (“I believe in, more or less, humbleness”) — but in Ellis’ interviews for the book, and podcast monologues, there seemed to be a gap between his pride for the novel and his enthusiasm about publication.

“The patience required to write a novel,” he said in an interview with Brian Pierce, “[and] wait for it to be published, and then to get [it out to] readers, is just an antiquated system[.]” When Knopf finally accepted the book — which was handed to them, he felt, as “a final cut,” carefully edited and already available, in full, through the podcast — the publisher told him it would take more than a year to be published. “I was like, well, fuck, okay, why even bother?!”

At that time, the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast seemed to have around 3,000 subscribers, each paying a few dollars per month, and in 2023 its host was a full decade into the medium. He was comfortable enough to privatize it, breaking away from the PodcastOne studio and rigging a setup in his home office; better still, Ellis and Thompson, his producer, had cultivated such a rapport, on-air, that Thompson became a co-host, basically, a comedic foil with similar obsessions (pop music, Los Angeles lore). The show has a simple and elegant format and, for the past few years, has been almost unfailingly punctual in its weekly appearance (season nine ended in the last week of 2025; season 10 began the first week of 2026). Here, for an unlimited audience, he could write and talk about the topics he liked, with whomever he liked, for as long as he liked — and the audience was already invested.

Maybe that was the way to do a book now.

It’d be lonelier, sure, it wouldn’t have that collaborative thrill he’d had in the ’90s — but where were the people he’d worked with anyhow? Where was that business model?

By going indie, however, he was forsaking an unignorable amount of up-front money: the initial sale, the foreign rights, the audiobook (Ellis re-recorded the entire novel, to publisher specs, later complaining about how often they asked him to slow down, Bret, enunciate. . . .).

Finally he did sell The Shards to Knopf and, working with a new editor, shaved “70,000 words” between the podcast version and the hardcover.

And the hardcover’s a handsome product. It’s got a neon red jacket, designed by Chip Kidd, with a laterally slatted motif, like George Corsillo did for Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. Reviews were largely positive. For an epigraph he chose a quote from George Orwell that says, “If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself,” and the dedication is just three words long: “For no one.” A change of pace in which Bret the very good soldier, the team player, the Brat Packer, the amenable collaborator with his 4 p.m. rewrites, and 7 p.m. follow-ups, dedicates his seventh novel not to a boyfriend, as he had with the last three, or to his father; no editor, friend, collaborator. A small triumph. “Thank you” for Ellis seems to always mean “sorry” and like he told his producer, “I’m too old to be grateful.”

Alexander Sorondo, a contributing writer to The Metropolitan Review, lives in Miami. He’s the author of the Substack newsletter, big reader bad grades, and his debut novel, Cubafruit, was released last year.

William, or “Mr. Able” as his students and colleagues know him, is having a crisis of faith. An English teacher in the far western flatness of Kansas, he too is being flattened — worn down by his fourth year of teaching at the high school from which he graduated, a job he fell into through haphazard idealism and his father’s school board connections. “It’s not the kids . . . and not their parents,” he explains in the opening pages of Why Teach?, Peter Shull’s earnest new novel. “It’s the admins . . . and the legislators.” Chief among the indignities the latter have visited upon him is their insistence on “test prep” as the overarching goal of education, along with the extirpation of literature from the secondary school curriculum. As the communication of his love for the classics of the American high school canon is his main source of pleasure in teaching, Mr. Able is becoming increasingly depressed.

Of course, there is also the respect and admiration of his high-spirited students to keep him going. He has developed a following among the jocks and more raucous elements of the school, whom the administration is only too happy to keep dumping on him as long as he keeps getting them through their standardized tests. He likes to think that his novelistic approach to lesson planning — setting context, drawing telling analogies, establishing a vocabulary before plunging into the full Sturm und Drang of the works — equips them with textual insights and a way of looking at the world that will carry them through life. But even this pleasure is fading. Bryce, one of his first students, a football playing golden boy and younger brother of a high school friend, has died in a car crash, speeding around a dangerous curve, most likely drunk. William mourns him, questioning the power of the lessons he imparted to Bryce and his other students to truly affect the course of their lives.

Nevertheless, he persists, playing a cat-and-mouse game with Mrs. Hirsche, the school’s head of literacy, whose job it is to observe teachers’ performance and make sure they are not deviating from the “new curriculum”: the training of students in the art of passing standardized multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. William cleverly mixes elements of the “old curriculum” — novels and poetry taught for literary value — with the rote literacy of the new standards, managing to get away with this approach through several of Mrs. Hirsche’s frowning classroom “walkthroughs.” Eventually, however, she calls him on the carpet, hands him a book entitled Stories Don’t Matter in the Real World, which, she claims, argues that there is “no clear relationship between reading these long works by the likes of Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and any sort of real-world preparedness.”

The receipt of this book has the same kind of world-shattering effect on Mr. Able that Lord Henry’s gift of the “poisonous book” had on Dorian Gay, sending him not into a life of debauchery but into a state of listlessness and despair. He becomes increasingly dissociated, going through the motions of teaching “like a high-functioning alcoholic,” coming home to fall asleep immediately, awakening in the middle of the night to watch television, then sleeping a few more hours before zombie-ing into work. Throughout the rest of the novel, we witness his herculean effort to cope with the idea that the literature he has grown up with, which constitutes the core of his education, is not sacrosanct, not a collectively recognized given, but a cultural object that must supply its own justification. He loses his motivation and connection to the blandishments of high school life. He skips out on the school’s big football game against its Dodge City rivals, choosing instead to drive to Wichita and party with his college buddy and his girlfriend, a fellow English teacher. He has a short, ill-fated fling over Christmas vacation with Kelsey, a law student and daughter of his parents’ country club chums, who will be clerking for his father’s law firm in the summer. He half-heartedly submits applications to law and grad schools, convincing himself that they will provide the escape he is seeking from the torments of his cognitive dissonance. Finally, he succumbs and spends the winter semester resentfully leading his students through skill-building exercises and sample multiple choice practice for their upcoming tests.

It’s hard to understand how a young and intelligent college graduate like William could be so floored by a challenge to his assumptions. It’s one thing to be affronted by an effort to remove the classics from the English curriculum, but for William the simple questioning of literature’s value opens up a black hole that sucks in all the certainties of his world. If The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible don’t matter, what does? If the Bard is dead, then everything is permitted. He has gone from high school to college and back to high school in his provincial hometown without ever questioning his life or values. That his conformity includes beliefs shared by the cultural cognoscenti doesn’t mean those beliefs stem from understanding and commitment so much as just going with the flow. Now that the flow has been interrupted, he must begin to think for himself . . . and not just about teaching. William becomes a kind of autodidact of everyday life, inductively reasoning from what he takes to be original observations to conclusions everyone already knows. “Good people behave in ways that are out of character all the time,” he tells us. The members of the country club his family belongs to, it turns out, prize wealth and status and might now view him as “a poor teacher and not someone who belonged here.” Highly attractive women, he incellishly opines, judge their suitors by “how much money we make.” Children, it seems, grow into replicas of their parents: “Despite her soon to be earned JD, ‘club wife’ might be [Kelsey’s] destined role in life and ‘club husband’ mine.”

Such ignorance about the world and his place in it, about social class, cultural conditioning, and the complexity of human motivations would seem to call into question just how much all his reading has contributed to William’s understanding and ability to navigate life. Perhaps the education that he and his students are so desperately in need of lies outside of books seen as fetish objects and instead in the cultivation of a critical self and social awareness. Socrates, after all, managed to bring his pupils to a new level of understanding without any homework or reading assignments, just the art of dialectic. Thinking outside the box might be the solution, but as the powers that be upend his expectations, William just wants his box back.

Luckily rescue arrives in the form of a phone call from Wichita. His college buddy’s girlfriend has actually read the evil book that William oddly has yet to crack. Stories Don’t Matter, it turns out, does not in fact argue for that position but instead examines the many pros and cons of teaching literature in the era of standardized testing, the internet, the changing job market and comes down on the side of literature. Shakespeare doth matter after all. Apparently, Mrs. Hirsche, the Head of Literacy, had not bothered to read the poisonous book either, or was insufficiently literate to understand it. Armed with this revelation, his students’ success in their pre-spring break testing, and acceptance letters from several of the law schools to which he had applied, Mr. Able is able to make it through the spring semester. He is back in his somewhat battered box. But does he want to stay there? The question remains, why teach?

William’s moment of truth comes while hot-tubbing with Jim Jr., the loutish junior partner in his father’s law firm, and three local hotties who Jim knows and tells William “would love to get down with you.” Jim toasts William’s last days of teaching and the big bucks he’ll be making when he graduates from law school, causing the ever-ambivalent William to blurt out that he’s not yet sure he’s going to go to law school, causing Dani, one of their female companions, to withdraw the hand she has been rubbing his thigh with and move away, causing William to experience another of his shocking epiphanies about human frailty: “her attraction to me was based on an untruth . . . that I would someday be a lawyer, presumably a rich one.” And there it is! William’s aristeia, the climactic moment, the pivot of his narrative arc, or to put it in terms of his beloved high school classics, his Huck Finn “all right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment, only substitutes continue teaching for hell. Infuriated, William leaps up from the bubbling cauldron, throws on his clothes and stalks off into the night. A few pages later, as school is closing for the summer, we learn that he will be returning to his job in the fall.

I didn’t like this book when I started reading it. The questions it addresses seemed like the kind of issues discussed on the PBS NewsHour or one of the topics that Mike Myers’ Linda Richman alter ego would announce before sending everyone off to “talk amongst yourselves.” A sober subject for the sober-minded bien pensant in a forum suffocated by too many shuttered Overton windows, that is to say, within the categorial framework of society’s managers not its liberators. Yet as I read on, I came to dislike myself for not liking it at first. The guileless sincerity of the protagonist’s, if not the author’s, voice, its squareness, is cringey, but spares the narrative the Blackboard Jungle / Stand and Deliver / Dangerous Minds clichés of the dedicated, noblesse oblige teacher “trying to reach these kids” who aren’t really bad, just misunderstood. By the same token it misses the rich resonance of pop cultural high school snark. No Spicoli classroom pizza delivery; no Dazed and Confused “awright, awright, awright”; no Wayne and Garth. Just William and his brooding, unironic experience of the High Plains plainness of everyday high school life. But why do I need irony and referentiality in the art I relate to? Isn’t it just an evasion of the stark reality Why Teach places before us? For I, too, think that stories matter.

So, mea culpa to this book and to myself. Narrative constitutes the world, even now when it is fragmented into short-form video, memes, tweets and Substack monstrosities. We need to know how to “read” them all, to comprehend how they make their meaning and determine whether that meaning coincides with our own. Stories give wings to our imaginations, and imagination — which takes us out of ourselves, connects us with others and other realities — is what is left of our humanity now that our reason has been fed to the machines. Someone has to transmit the semiotic gene to our future generations and mutations, show them how to take meaning from whatever form the dissemination of narrative knowledge assumes. That is why we must teach. It’s just not clear who’s up to the job.

David Polonoff is a satirist and novelist living in New York City. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, East Village Eye, and on his Substack, Tropelessness. His novel WannaBeat, detailing a misspent youth in San Francisco’s literary North Beach neighborhood, is available from Trouser Press Books and Amazon.

An interviewer once asked Patti Smith whether she’d always planned on becoming a rock musician, and she responded with a characteristically impassioned rant against labels. “Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that?” she said. “I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then they called me a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.” This was in 2008, by which point Smith had produced 10 records, almost as many poetry collections, a play, and a few books of photography and visual art. Two years later, she released the National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids, and for a while it was tempting to think of her as a rock poet who dabbled in autobiography. But more books have since followed — there are about five prose memoirs in total now, depending on whether you include the 90-odd page Devotion — signaling something less like a side project than a complete creative rebirth.

Patti Smith has always been an oddly protean artist, so enigmatic and passionate and willing to follow her own creative whims. As a young poet in the early ’70s, she came to see rock music as a more potent vehicle for her writing and recast herself as a singer-songwriter, emerging from the early New York City punk scene as both an avatar of the movement and a singular force that stood outside of it. Beginning with the earth-shattering debut Horses, her first records stripped rock ’n’ roll down to its constituent parts and blended them with impressionistic spoken word delivered with operatic intensity — a sound that she once called “three chords combined with the power of the word.” In the mid-’90s, after nearly 15 years in semi-retirement, she stepped back into the public eye with a string of poetry collections and plaintive albums that traded in the street-punk vigor of her early work for a gossamer sincerity befitting Smith’s status as a recently widowed mother of two. The decades since have seen her become a peculiar kind of renaissance woman, shedding records, books, and artwork at an astonishing rate, all while continuing to tour and blogging/vlogging prolifically on her Substack.

The foregoing arc might have fit snuggly into a single ghostwritten volume, the kind that we’ve seen far too many of in recent years, but Smith has instead spun her story into an eclectic batch of books written in her own inimitable style. Unlike the autobiographies of, say, Maya Angelou, which chart a life sequentially, Smith’s overlap and intertwine in a patchwork of narrative and rumination. One has to read them together for a complete portrait of her life. Just Kids, for instance, focuses on her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their time together in New York City. The more lyrical and elliptical M Train presents a series of vignettes that oscillate between the recent present and Smith’s life with her husband, former MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. The Year of the Monkey gives us a play-by-play of her 2016. Smith’s latest book, Bread of Angels, ties all of the disparate threads of her previous works together in a linear narrative, painted in broad strokes, that takes us from her birth to the present day. As a unit, the books add up to a volatile but thorough portrait of the artist, candid and guarded by turns, occasionally listless and girlish, but always shot through with Smith’s peculiar charm.

Her childhood was an unsheltered one in every way. Smith’s family relocated 11 times before she turned five, shuttling from one rooming house to another in Pennsylvania and South Jersey. Her father was a machinist in a factory, her mother a waitress who occasionally took on ironing work. Patti, the eldest of four, was always sick. She was born with bronchial pneumonia in the middle of the winter, and when she returned from the hospital, her father had to hold her over a steaming washtub to keep her alive. “Mine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence,” she writes in Bread of Angels. “During the first six years, I weathered one communicable disease after another, bronchial pneumonia, tuberculosis, German measles, mumps, and chicken pox.”

An artistic and anarchistic streak revealed itself at an early age. When she wasn’t bedridden, she read poetry and fairy tales and played make-believe in the trash-strewn lots around her house. On her first visit to an art museum, she was entranced by Picasso’s paintings and defended them against her father, who was partial to Dalí. She later stole a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, setting in motion a lifelong infatuation with the poet rivaled only by her parallel obsession with Bob Dylan. As a card-carrying Jehovah’s Witness, she attended bible studies and knocked on doors with her mother (“buckets of urine and excrement were thrown on us when hostile people opened their doors”), but she left the church as an early teen when an elder told her she had to choose between God and art. By then, she was already dreaming of escaping and becoming a jazz singer, a poet, a famous painter. “Only my devotion to my siblings kept me from running away,” she writes. Trapped in South Jersey, she got a job in a factory inspecting tricycle handlebars and then attended a teacher’s college for a few years before dropping out. At 19, she became pregnant and gave the child up for adoption.

Such was the life that Smith fled in 1967 for a transient existence in New York City. Almost immediately, she met Mapplethorpe, and the two set about making a life for themselves as bohemian artists, first as a couple and later, after the photographer threw himself headlong into the city’s gay BDSM scene, as close friends. Supporting herself by working in a bookstore, Smith drew furiously and wrote poems that she would later cannibalize for lyrics. In 1971, she was invited to read alongside the poet Gerard Malanga at St. Mark’s Church, and on a whim, she asked her friend Lenny Kaye to accompany her on the electric guitar. “It was the first time an electric guitar had been played in St. Mark’s Church, provoking cheers and jeers,” she writes in Just Kids.

Things moved quickly from there. There were invitations to publish poems in small magazines and give readings in London and Philadelphia. Cowboy Mouth, a play that Smith had co-written with her then-paramour Sam Shepard, hit the stage a few months after the St. Mark’s gig. Blue Sky Records offered her a record deal, which she turned down, wary of losing creative control. She published chapbooks of poetry and wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult. Smith and Kaye meanwhile continued giving hybrid performances that fused music and spoken word, billing themselves at one point as “Rock ’n’ Rimbaud.” By 1975, they had added a keyboardist, a drummer, and another guitarist to their troop. Smith now found herself at the helm of a rock band, which was invited to play a two-month residency at CBGB, where they were spotted by Clive Davis and promptly given a seven-album deal with Arista Records.

Smith had released four of those albums and was playing to stadiums packed with tens of thousands of fans when she abruptly stepped out of the public eye in 1979 to settle down with Fred “Sonic” Smith. Given their previous lives as boho punks, their time together, in Patti’s telling, seems almost confoundingly quaint. After a private wedding ceremony attended only by their parents, the couple bought an ivy-covered cottage near Lake Saint Clair in Michigan and spent the next 15 years raising a family out of the public eye. Together, they refurbished an old boat and listened to jazz records and traveled to far-flung corners of the world together on artistic fact-finding missions. Fred listened to baseball games and got into classical music. Patti wrote and communed with the natural world. “With the arrival of dawn,” she writes in a typically lyrical passage:

I would step outside as the flowers opened, the doves cooed, and the long-haired willows swayed slightly over the dark canal. I was enthralled by small things, the wonder that our tree grew pears that fell by my feet, that wild roses climbed up the trellis, entwining our balcony, that the same doves returned every spring to nest upon it, and that the morning glory seeds I planted covered the cyclone fence at the edge of our property, boomed an impossible blue.

William S. Burroughs once described Smith as “a shaman . . . someone in touch with other levels of reality,” and there are intimations throughout the memoirs of this higher order of perception. The most ordinary objects can begin to shimmer when they come into her orbit. As a child, she covets a friend’s Communion dress, believing that “it had special properties, like an invisible cloak, and that it would keep one safe from harm.” She pockets a stone while hiking in Mexico because it seems to call out to her “as if waiting for another commandment to be etched on its polished surface” — although airport security later confiscates it, occasioning a mini spiritual crisis (“I took the stone from the mountain and it was taken from me”). We’re likewise alerted at every turn to the totemic significance of a particular café chair, a bathrobe, a billboard outside of a hotel.

It’s the same with books, which Smith writes about with an almost religious sense of devotion. Her favorite works of fiction and poetry — Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Bolaño’s 2666, Genet’s The Thief’s Journal — become holy books, sacred texts to return to and explicate again and again. As soon as she finished Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, she immediately started over with the first of many re-readings because, she writes in M Train, “the ghost of a phrase was eating me.” Then, too, she’s unapologetically mawkish in her reverence towards the authors. Over the course of her memoirs, we accompany her on trips to the gravesites of at least a dozen writers and are treated to many a grainy polaroid of their possessions (Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick).

But Smith’s literary hero worship tracks with her own hard pivot toward the written word over the last few decades. For all of her resistance to labels, her memoirs are littered with starkly candid statements of artistic purpose: “I knew then with all my being that to be a writer was what I wanted more than anything”; “I’m going to remember everything, and then I’m going to write it all down”; “I grew lighter, healthier, and sure of the vocation I had chosen above all others. That of a writer.” Fred’s early death from heart failure in 1994 led Smith to return to the stage and begin making music again. By that point, however, she’d begun to think of herself primarily as a prose writer, although it took her 15 years to release her first full-length book. In the intervening years, there have been new records, constant tours, and exhibitions of her artwork — all of which appears, now, like mere dabbling for Smith. “I could imagine life not performing, not singing, not drawing, not doing many, many things,” she said in an interview recently. “But I could not imagine not writing.” We can only hope she stays the course.

Habib Sabet is a writer based in Vermont. His writing has appeared in County Highway, Pitchfork, and Aquarium Drunkard, among other publications.

I came to Aymann Ismail’s memoir Becoming Baba eagerly, not only because I’ve been writing about fatherhood for many years, but also because one of the great surprises of my 2025 was a personal exploration of Islam. It’s a courageous book, and it satisfies on both counts. But its enduring influence, if it has one, will lie more in its discussion of faith.

It’s hard to know where the story of fatherhood begins. Is it at the moment a pregnancy test comes back positive? The moment of birth? Or further back, when the foundational layers of masculine identity are laid?

Ismail wisely begins with his parents’ formative influences as guides that he resists as a child and then struggles to emulate as an adult. Raised in Newark by Egyptian immigrants, Ismail code-switches between the Islamic school he attends and the gritty urban culture beyond his family’s protective shield. It isn’t just that he wants to fit in as an American, he also questions rules that seem arbitrary or overly punitive.

In one case, a harmless game of MASH (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House), in which children predict which celebrities they’ll marry, lands the young Aymann in the principal’s office under the false charge of playing boyfriend/girlfriend (dating is forbidden in Islam). The principal brandishes a pair of sharp scissors, threatening to cut out his tongue if he doesn’t use it more responsibly. In another case, he is punished for speaking to a girl who forgot her lunchbox in a classroom. When he swears in frustration, Ismail’s teacher throws him against the door and later expels him from class.

“The people in charge had revealed themselves to be even more childish than the students,” he writes. “I saw no point in following rules that only led to more punishment.”

Examples like these serve as important benchmarks for how he later approaches discipline as a father.

While Ismail respects his parents’ traditional practice of Islam, it often seems puppet-like to him. As a young person, he wants authenticity more than anything, and he chases it in art, illegally photographing graffiti in the NYC subway and once even climbing the beams on the Williamsburg Bridge for a few risky shots of the city. He is proud to be Arab, proud to be Egyptian, even proud to be Muslim, but he carries a deep-seated guilt for not loving his faith the way his parents wish he would.

This inner tension remains unresolved when he meets Mira, another child of Egyptian immigrants. Mira knows the Quran inside and out, but she does not wear the hijab, and Ismail is shocked when she takes a hit of his roommate’s joint. Their relationship quickly moves from friendship to courtship, including a formal engagement with her family in Kentucky, when Mira’s father asks Aymann to lead the Maghrib prayer. It’s been so long since he’s prayed that Aymann stumbles his way through, forgetting how to close the ritual. Despite his embarrassment, he finds Mira’s family forgiving and he feels a rekindled desire to embrace faith genuinely.

Ismail’s own Baba reminds him that children follow the example they are given: if he is lazy with his faith, his kids will be, too. But America isn’t friendly to families. The steady demands of work, coparenting, and schedules indifferent to the salah (the five daily prayers) constantly get in the way. Mira keeps up with her prayers, but Aymann does not, and he carries guilt and defiance within him.

Becoming Baba captures the paradox of American identity. Part of Ismail is unshakably Egyptian and his earliest memories include playing with other boys at the mosque after the Friday prayer. Yet he is also a tough Newark kid, comfortable on the streets and ready to rebel at the slightest provocation. He doesn’t follow orders just because someone in authority has said so. And he is not going to pray, even though he knows all the words, if his heart isn’t in it.

That conflict resolves in one of the most touching scenes of the book. Aymann and Mira take the edge off a stressful day with the kids by sharing a cannabis gummy. The effects last a few hours and Aymann still feels high when Mira invites him to join her for the Maghrib prayer. The Quran forbids praying while under the influence, but Aymann decides to join Mira anyway. Surprisingly, he feels more present than he ever has.

“For so long,” he writes, “I had carried a sense of disconnect from Islam, as though it were a tradition I’d inherited but never fully internalized. That night, the act of prayer wasn’t about circumstances or perfection — it was about showing up, imperfections and all, and finding a way to connect.”

This was a brave book to write. I’ve browsed the reviews and several readers take Ismail to task for his haram choices and the shade he casts on his parents. They seem to miss the fact that it was judgment that pushed the young Aymann away from his faith.

Becoming Baba does not suggest that “anything goes” or that precision doesn’t matter in practicing Islam. The book is a bridge between cultures and generations, an invitation to anyone (including me, a newcomer to faith) to come as they are, questions and flaws intact, to emphasize mercy over judgment even in your view of yourself. In that sense the book is a balm for our time. It resists tribalism, refuses to be shoved into a cultural or political box, and opens a space for other fathers to wrestle openly with what parenthood means.

It is also a young man’s book. Some of Ismail’s jokes about smashing patriarchy fall flat. In one case, he makes far too much of teaching himself how to make mashed potatoes. But there are many touching moments, such as the feeling that his infant son Musa protects him while he pushes his stroller through the rough Newark streets. A good memoir resolves its opening tensions, and Ismail shows how his children soften him, coaxing love and gentleness from his wild urban heart.

Perhaps the most moving scene is when Ismail invites his father to join him and Musa for the Friday Jummah prayer. In place of his characteristic brusqueness and disapproval, the elder Baba says, simply, “Good idea.” It becomes a weekly ritual for the three of them and an image that brings the book’s title home.

They attend the same mosque where the young Aymann played. Only now it’s his son climbing on him while he bows, his own mini-me chasing the other boys around the room after the prayer. He isn’t the man his own father was, but who is? Their weekly reunion is an act of mercy on both sides, one that allows Ismail to fully inhabit his role, to become a baba himself.

It’s a story that every father and son, and every sister and mother, should read.

Joshua Doležal is a book coach and editor. He is the author of a memoir, “Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging,” and a poetry collection, “Someday Johnson Creek.” He also writes “The Recovering Academic.”

A woman stands on a stage under harsh, punishing red light, wearing a black skirt over tight black pants. Her hair is a thick black mane, swept back from her face, and her eyes are wide and dark and her gaze pierces you like a bullet. She is topless, but her body is covered in blood and her wrathful eyes dare you to sexualize her.

In the voice of a demon she roars,

When any man hath an issue out of his flesh

Because of his issue, he is unclean

Every bed whereon he lieth is unclean

And everything whereon he sitteth, unclean

And whosoever toucheth his bed shall be unclean

And he that sitteth whereon he sat shall be unclean

And he that toucheth the flesh of the unclean becomes unclean

And he that be spat on by him, unclean

Becomes unclean

Her voice is an instrument of astonishing power. She rises from a guttural growl to a piercing shriek and holds that glass-shattering, tooth-rattling note so long you begin to think she must have the lungs of a deep-sea free diver. With just a single microphone, she seems like she can tear down the walls of the cathedral in which she is performing — St. John the Divine, in New York City.

She is Diamanda Galás, and she is performing the Plague Mass, a song cycle that functions as a rite in memory of those (including her brother, the playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás) who died of AIDS in the 1980s, and a furious excoriation of the religious and governmental authorities who chose to condemn the sick rather than help them, never mind fighting the disease. The song, “This is the Law of the Plague,” comes from her 1986 album The Divine Punishment, the first volume in a trilogy continued on in Saint of the Pit and You Must Be Certain of the Devil.

There is no mention of Diamanda Galás in Paul Elie’s The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s.

Four men and a woman are onstage. They are all shirtless except for her; they are doing hard, physical work. The music (guitar, keyboard, bass, drums) is extraordinarily loud, and slow, and heavy, but it refuses to grant the listener catharsis. The guitar and bass play a single, simple, Black Sabbath-esque riff, over and over and over, and the drummer slams his snare like an orchestral tympanist. The singer has long blond hair like a Hollywood Jesus, and he howls his lyrics with the passion of a preacher, or a penitent. “I will pray / I will pray / I will go down low, and I will pray to you. . . . I will beg you Lord, and I will pray for you to forgive me now / I will go down to the center of the earth, and I will curl up in flames, and I will beg you Lord: Take me in your cruel arms, take me down home. . . . Praise God! Praise the Lord!” Behind him, the band crashes along like a giant tearing through a forest, uprooting trees and digging holes in the earth with every step. The only grace note amid all this punishment is the female vocalist, who moans wordlessly like she’s singing at a funeral mass. The song is more than 10 minutes long, and by the time it ends it feels like it’s been happening forever. You come out of it like being awakened from a trance, and for a brief moment you wonder who you are, where you are, how you got here, and how you’re going to get home.

They are Swans, and they are performing “Sex, God, Sex,” from their album Children of God. Earlier Swans releases bore titles like Filth, Cop, Greed, and Raping A Slave, and the songs were about abjection, punishment, and self-loathing. This album includes a liner-note thank you to “Jesus Christ, Our Lord,” and the songs are full of images of love, trust, sacrifice, repentance, and rebirth. Onstage, these songs become rites of purgation, singer Michael Gira bellowing his mantralike lyrics at the audience as his partner, Jarboe, offers a blissful, angelic counter-presence.

There is no mention of Swans in Paul Elie’s The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s.

(I interviewed Michael Gira once. I mentioned that his lyrics often seemed moralistic, and he laughed very hard.)

Other songs and artists not mentioned in Elie’s book: Metallica’s “Leper Messiah,” from their 1986 album Master Of Puppets; Motörhead’s “Orgasmatron,” from their album of the same name, also released in 1986; Slayer’s “Jesus Saves,” from Reign In Blood (1986 again); Ozzy Osbourne’s “Miracle Man,” from 1988’s No Rest For The Wicked; Trouble’s Psalm 9, from 1984. Even when criticizing its hypocrisies and venality, metal has always taken religion and faith seriously — far from being Satanists, Black Sabbath were practically a Christian rock band, an impression impossible to overlook when one actually reads the lyrics to songs like “Black Sabbath” and “After Forever.” And Trouble were Christians. But Elie either doesn’t know this, or believes it to lie outside the scope of his book.

One could also suggest that classical works like Steve Reich’s Tehillim, composed in 1981, and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, from 1984, might be worth analyzing, particularly the latter, which became a favorite (if that’s the word) among terminal AIDS patients. But they are not to be found in this book either.

So what does Paul Elie think was the notable religious pop culture of the 1980s? Well, the book begins with the release of Bob Dylan’s 1979 album Slow Train Coming, on which he announced his conversion to evangelical “born again” Christianity. He then leaps forward 13 years, to Sinéad O’Connor’s 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live, during which she infamously tore up a photo of then-Pope John Paul II, exhorting the audience to “fight the real enemy.” He describes these two events as bracketing an era in which:

figures in what we call popular culture engaged questions of faith and art and the ways they fit together with an intensity seldom seen before or since. They tested boundaries between sex and the sacred; they explored the controverted character of religion — its power to divide us inwardly against ourselves and to set us apart from one another in society. The work they made brought on public controversy: protests, boycotts, congressional hearings, pulpit denunciations, and claims that this song or film or photograph spelled the end of Western civilization.

Even in these three sentences, there are premises one can easily argue with. His “seldom seen before or since” is hyperbole almost as empty as when Donald Trump says something is “like nobody’s ever seen before.” The idea of art “test[ing] boundaries between sex and the sacred” frames the discussion entirely and only on the terms of religions that don’t view sex itself as sacred, which is to say this is a book about the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths, and if we’re being honest, mostly the Roman Catholic Church.

Born in 1965, Paul Elie has written extensively for the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Commonweal. He has deep ties to the New York publishing world, having worked for decades as a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (this book’s publisher). His Catholicism is at the heart of his work to such a degree that one could almost call him a missionary. His first book, 2003’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, chronicled and analyzed the lives, work, and friendship of four midcentury Catholic writers — Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. He is currently a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and is also a longtime supporter of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic social organization founded in 1968.

So here’s where I declare myself: despite my mother’s best efforts, I do not consider myself to be a Catholic. I was raised Catholic; I was baptized, I took first communion, served as an altar boy, was confirmed. But I haven’t been in a church in over 30 years, and if I believe in anything these days it’s more of a personal philosophy than a religion, one that draws haphazardly and in roughly equal measure from Norse paganism, Zen Buddhism, the Stoics, and the poetry of Jim Harrison. Monotheistic religion baffles me.

This often puts me at some distance from pop culture, because pop culture in America is drenched in religion, even when it’s not explicit. So much American music of the 20th century — Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Prince, James Brown, George Clinton, and many others — is either drawn from the music of the Black church or is in dialogue with it that someone of a non-religious nature can wind up more than a little alienated. Am I appreciating this music wrong? Am I being disrespectful to it by enjoying it purely as sounds arranged in patterns, rather than as some sort of devotional act?

Of course, it’s not just Western pop that raises these issues. The voice of the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was astonishingly beautiful, and his marathon performances could send any listener into a joyful trance, whether or not they were Sufi Muslims like him. South African jazz pianist Nduduzo Makhathini’s music often carries deeply spiritual messages, but he’s singing in the Zulu language, so what does it matter? Many such cases.

Elie describes most of the art discussed in The Last Supper as “crypto-religious,” a term he defines as “work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief . . . work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect: as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.”

The works he selects for analysis cover a broad range: art by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and David Wojnarowicz; music by U2, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, the Smiths, the Neville Brothers, Prince, and Madonna; novels by Don DeLillo, William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie; Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Some of these were attacked in their time as blasphemous, and Elie does a good job of describing the political whirlwinds surrounding the release of Last Temptation and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. (Jean-Luc Godard’s 1985 film Hail Mary, widely protested and criticized by the pope himself, is another surprising omission.) Others were only mildly controversial, if at all. Who’s ever had a problem with Bono’s preachiness, except as a manifestation of his overall pomposity?

The Last Supper is about more than art, though. Elie is also telling us a story of religion’s place in 1980s society, with a particular focus on the Catholic Church, the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, and how both those entities responded to the AIDS crisis. He also delves into the sexual abuse scandals within the Church, which would not truly burst forth until decades later. He follows the lives and careers of brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, priests and peace activists who took up a variety of causes throughout their lives, including Philip’s work with AIDS patients in the late ’80s. (Which brings me to another surprising omission: Larry Kramer, whose name appears only twice in this book and whose play The Normal Heart goes entirely unmentioned.) He also talks about the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, forced to keep his Catholicism hidden while living under Soviet domination but who let it blossom late in life, in California. The contrast between Miłosz and his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II, is a fascinating mini-narrative running through the book.

The degree to which Elie focuses on Catholicism and Catholic (or at least Christian) artists makes the few exceptions stand out, often starkly. Obviously the story of Salman Rushdie and his novel The Satanic Verses, which earned him a death warrant from Iran’s religious authorities, among other condemnations, is important as an example of the collision of religion, art, and politics, but it doesn’t really tie in with most of the “action” of the rest of the book. This is partly because its subject was Islam, but also because Rushdie was based in London, and Elie’s book is mostly centered around New York City. The New York art world, the New York literary scene, and New York-based filmmakers like Scorsese make up the bulk of it, and Elie’s story of gay protests against AIDS focuses on New York-based actions like the infamous “die-in” held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Thus, Rushdie is discussed on his own, but he’s only truly assimilated into the big story when fellow authors stage a reading on his behalf in Manhattan.

Despite its omissions, elisions, and awkward juxtapositions, The Last Supper is a fascinating and valuable book. I learned a lot reading it — about Andy Warhol, who was a much more devout Catholic than I ever knew; about the Neville Brothers, whose work was unfamiliar to me (though I love the Meters, a band led by Art Neville that sometimes included younger brother Cyril); about The Last Temptation of Christ, which I really should watch one of these days; and more. And any book that can make a reader say “Yeah, but what about?” and “Yeah, I don’t know,” as many times as this one is well worth reading. Paul Elie’s taste in art may stay mostly in normie territory, but he clearly sees art as one of the highest human endeavors, whether inspired by faith or not. I bet I could get him to listen to Swans or Diamanda Galás, and we could have a very interesting conversation afterward.

Philip Freeman is the author of Burning Ambulance on Substack. His latest book is In The Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. He lives in Montana.

There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or “keeping company with Nazis is wrong.” But judging from the American reception of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director — which has been noted for its “unnerving timing” and described as “curiously prophetic” — you’d think that was exactly the book he’d written.

But while Kehlmann has said he set out to write a novel, which appeared last year, about “complicity,” the book isn’t exactly the prophetic meditation on the new F-word that American critics have made it out to be. There’s something much more nuanced and original going on here, namely, Kehlmann’s depictions of the banality of fascism, which extends the now-clichéd state apparatus of Nazi Germany to Hollywood, the authoritarian vision of great artists, and beyond — even to the author’s own handling of the material.

In The Director, Kehlmann fictionalizes the life of G. W. Pabst, nicknamed “Red Pabst,” the Austrian director who rose to prominence as one of the most influential filmmakers of the Weimar Republic, with socially radical films like Pandora’s Box and The Threepenny Opera. Kehlmann takes notable liberties with Pabst’s biography, inventing characters who become major players in the novel’s events, fiddling with timelines, and reworking historical details to serve the book’s themes. It’s a novel drawing more from Kehlmann’s imagination than from historical record.

The book follows Pabst, after a frustrating stint in Hollywood, as he returns to Nazi Germany — a return presented here not as a political choice, or even an unpolitical choice, but hardly a choice at all. As his wife Trude puts it, it comes down to “a string of misfortunes”: the trip is meant to be a quick family errand to arrange nursing care for his mother, but war is declared, the borders close, and Pabst sustains an incapacitating fall at home.

Pointedly, Pabst is not making a deal with the devil. And yet, this is what some reviewers would have you believe, casting the novel as a drawn-out Faustian bargain. An NPR review titled “A Filmmaker in Nazi Germany Strikes a Deal with the Devil in ‘The Director’” even opens with a reference to the German legend.

This framework is missing the point of what Kehlmann is actually up to. As Kehlmann writes in The Director, “The oldest rule of the art of deception: a large movement makes a small movement invisible.” Focus too much on the big, bad Nazis, and you’ll miss the subtler micro-fascisms the book is rife with.

Hollywood’s studio system is the primest example of tyranny in microcosm; Pabst finds himself with a terrible script, he can’t choose the actors, he can’t control the camerawork, and — even though he’s famous for his editing — he’s denied final cut. And the kicker: when the film is a flop, it’s considered to be his fault, and since “you’re only as good as your last film” — the Hollywood equivalent of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one empire, one leader”) — his directorial career in America is effectively finished.

Pabst in his filmmaking is portrayed as a despot himself: an actress hears “he hardly paid attention to the script, instead improvising on set, making up scenes, changing plans like a child at play.” A demagogue of sorts, he knows how to manipulate his actors. As his son, Jakob, observes, Pabst uses a certain voice on set “which soothes everyone and gets them to do what he wants.”

This fictional son must contend with the authoritarian structures of school as well as his social circle. He learns the surest way to survive is to demonstrate his own physical dominance, which he does by starting a fight with a boy and striking him repeatedly in the face with a stone concealed in his hand. Pressured by schoolmates, he descends into the lowest depths of the Pabsts’ German country home’s creepy cellar, practically into hell itself, in one terrifying scene. “[S]ince he absolutely can’t let his companions think him a coward, he no longer has a choice,” Kehlmann writes.

Mindful of appearances, Trude joins a book club run by the housewives of high-ranking Nazi officials, which only picks the commercial books written by the (real-life) Nazi hack author Alfred Karrasch. She learns quickly there are to be no dissenting opinions but only praise. Indeed, one of the book club members is rejected by the group for merely going off-topic. (“A circle like this is based on agreement, on harmony,” one of the ladies tells the woman, before she tearfully departs.)

Official criticism is also dead. A once-formidable critic becomes one of the Reich’s “subtlest describers”; in his reviews, he’s even prohibited from saying whether actors are good because, as a Nazi official explains, “it would imply that the actor could be bad. But how would that be possible? The films are produced by the ministry, so how could they be anything but excellent!”

In this way, Kehlmann doesn’t just limit authoritarianism to political systems like Nazism, but shows how this structure of power exists everywhere, from governments and markets to studios and interpersonal relationships.

When he meets with the Minister of Propaganda, the scene takes on a surreal quality: spatial distortions and the Minister’s exaggerated theatricality give it a disorienting, dream-like atmosphere — a literal bureaucratic nightmare. Kehlmann departs from a simplistic Mephistophelian framing, depicting the Minister’s power as so exaggerated as to be symbolic, a force that can’t be negotiated with. With reality thus destabilized, Pabst’s choices become hard to discern and nearly impossible to judge.

So what do you do when you exist in a system that automatically makes you complicit, when every step of the way, it appears you have no choice? That is the nature of these systems — even the seemingly benign ones like book clubs, schools, or marriage. Readers looking to reinforce a clean moral binary won’t find it here. Kehlmann exposes the absurdity of demanding moral perfection from artists in systems they don’t control.

The deadest giveaway of Kehlmann’s refusal to pass moral judgment on Pabst is the novel’s climax, when we learn the (fictionalized) truth behind Pabst’s lost film, The Molander Case, and the nature of Pabst’s downfall. While his assistant director, Franz Lang (a made-up character), is traumatized in over-the-top, cinematic fashion by Pabst’s use of camp detainees as extras, Pabst’s downfall isn’t a consequence of his “collaboration” with Nazis at all. It isn’t the loss of his soul but the physical loss of the film that is his ruin.

When you look at it, Pabst’s philosophy isn’t unreasonable: “The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.” But while Kehlmann, in his European way, may be skeptical of easy moralizing, he isn’t Team Art-for-Art’s-Sake either; with the film’s disappearance amidst the chaos of war, he shows that artists, no matter how great, can’t create art in a vacuum. Pabst’s mental undoing is not moral in nature; it is a systemic failing. Like it or not, artists, no matter how authoritarian, belong to a system. The very structure of the book, which comprises an enormous cast of characters with their own POVs, argues this.

“All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film,” Pabst says. “Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist.” Sure, but if a great film falls in a forest and no one hears it over the blitzkrieg fire, does its greatness even exist?

For all his nuanced questions, Kehlmann lacks all nuance in his storytelling. In this way, there’s also a whole meta layer to the book — the book’s title seems to refer not just to Pabst but to Kehlmann himself as he riffs on well-established cinematic genres.

Indeed, the book opens and closes with Franz years after the main events of the story, straining to suppress the memory of what happened on the set of The Molander Case — evoking the Expressionist “madness framing device” used in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

After Pabst boards a train back to Austria with Trude and Jakob, the novel slips into horror — the dread rising as every other passenger disembarks from their train and they alone continue into Nazi territory.

Upon reaching their home in rural Austria — the “castle,” as they call it — the family finds that the estate’s caretaker, Jerzabek, has become a leader of the local Nazi group and transformed into a grotesque tyrant. Kehlmann draws here again on the traditions of German Expressionist gothic cinema: the Pabsts become trapped in their shadowy, decaying estate, ruled over by Jerzabek’s watchful paranoia and arbitrary authority, and their plans of making Austria a quick pit stop are thwarted. It’s a portrait of microfascism at the domestic level as well as of the petty men who flourish when a regime gives them license to terrorize.

This is also the moment when Kehlmann’s aesthetic mode — and its potential pitfalls — fully emerges. As Pabst says, “Almost anyone can shoot. It’s in editing that you make a great film.” It is also in editing, however, that you make propaganda. Kehlmann edits history freely; as delightful and entertaining as it is, Kehlmann’s auteur vision is built on “alternative facts,” exaggerations, and the flattening of characters to shape his narrative.

In contrast to the complexity with which Kehlmann examines how ordinary people slide into complicity, other characters like Jerzabek and his family are portrayed as stock villains in a horror B-movie. This is evident when Pabst and Trude hear Jakob screaming and discover him being terrorized by Jerzabek’s daughters:

Jakob stood on tiptoe pressed against a wooden post. He was tied up. Thin straps cut into his neck, his bare arms, his bare belly, his exposed calves; he was wearing nothing but underpants. On the floor of the attic sat the two girls, each with a bird feather in her hair. Their faces were painted with reddish chalk. One of them was holding an ax, the other a gleaming kitchen knife.

While it’s all in good fun — the book was originally titled Lichtspiel (literally, “light play”) in Germany — this stylization risks moral flattening as well. It’s an aesthetic and also conceptual inconsistency that clashes with the novel’s otherwise careful judgment.

And yet, even when Kehlmann is flattening, he can still take you by surprise with an argument for complexity. Take, for instance, the scene where Kehlmann imagines Pabst assisting Leni Riefenstahl on the set of her film Tiefland, a production that, both in the book and real life, used internment camp detainees as extras.

While Pabst is asked for his input, it’s clear the only acceptable contribution is assent. Riefenstahl is drawn in the broad strokes of satire, though the satire seems aimed less at Nazi moral degeneracy than at the corporate world, another example of an authoritarian system rife with complicity. In this exchange, Pabst himself makes the case for resisting oversimplification:

“But what are you putting spotlights on his face from below?”

“To make him look evil!”

“I know . . . a few evil people. And they’re not usually sharply lit from below so you can tell.”

“You don’t say. What kind of evil people do you know, Georg?”

As for the style itself, the book reads like commercial fiction in its prose, so plain and straightforward that at times it borders on utilitarian, not unlike a Hollywood script. Given the nature of his cinematic aesthetic, Kehlmann leans hard into genre conventions. So naturally, the odd cliché or melodramatic flourish pops up now and then — often winking, sometimes not, so far as winks can make it through translation.

We witness “the hint of an involuntary shudder” when Pabst puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Franz’s madness and fainting episodes are contrived as over-the-top. And then there’s the matter of Karrasch, whose potboiler Pabst and Franz are adapting, turning up in Prague just while Pabst and Franz are editing their auteur take. Karrasch’s apoplectic outburst (“Utter trash! Filthy, Bolshevik, Jewish, vulgar, pornographic, vile trash!”) borders on farce. In other words, the tropes are, well, tropey. The problem becomes that when you imitate something long enough, you start to become it.

While I may have trouble recommending the book to my literary snob friends, there’s enough self-awareness that the excesses don’t count against it. Kehlmann seems fully aware that he’s implicating himself. It’s part of the point; the cinematic style and narrative control serve as analogues for authoritarianism.

Or, Kehlmann might be suggesting, the depictions of authoritarianism might serve as analogies for the artistic process itself. The novel makes this explicit in Kehlmann’s portrayal of Pabst. He shows us a filmmaker with a one-track mind who can only imagine the world in images, and in doing so, hints at his own artistic predicament. Late in the novel, Pabst reflects on one of his long walks:

And because his imagination, after so many decades, could function no other way, he envisioned films: a crime of passion on the great bridge, a golem rising from a deep cellar, the fiery sign on its forehead, a strange star in the sky heralding the arrival of a new era of deceit, the execution of noblemen on the great square before a mob crying for blood, the old Kaiser Rudolf, half-mad in his cabinet of curiosities, with a long beard and flickering eyes. They would have been somewhat old-fashioned, these films, but the city of Prague conjured such images of its own accord.

Like Pabst, Kehlmann knows his vision is a bit old-fashioned, steeped as it is in the conventions of early cinema, but the guy just can’t help himself. And what choice do we have but to go along with it? He’s the director in this book, after all.

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

{Cough, clears throat}. Chapter one. It’s 1991 in Manhattan. Cue a Gershwin piano trill, followed by sirens; open on an old lady getting her purse snatched. An ambulance whizzes by. Gray skies and rain; a little group of shivering hookers. Oh yeah, the roaring ’90s. But this isn’t Midtown. No, no, we’re in the crosshairs of 88th Street and Second Avenue. One building has a line outside. We zoom in on the awning — it’s Elaine’s, the glamorous literary canteen. The camera takes us inside, tracking. Tucked into a little table — not in the back, never in the back; only loser tourists and hack writers sit in the Siberia of that crowded restaurant — but along the right row, visible from the entrance, below the sconces and crooked picture frames, is Woody Allen’s table. Table six. Imagine it! A wintry night, and the tourists outside gripping their Frommers, and the candlelit table that sits empty until Woody Allen arrives. Mia Farrow is there, too, picking at cold tortellini, but she doesn’t stay long. Not because she’s angry — no, none of that stuff has happened yet; Farrow just doesn’t like to stay out late, and leaves hours before her famous boyfriend, who lives alone on the opposite side of the park. Woody spends the rest of the night chewing burnt steak, drilling red wine, and shuffling cards for Gay Talese and George Plimpton at a late-night poker game that wraps at dawn.

Allen was a fixture at Elaine’s every night for 10 years, and would trade barbs with Kaufman, the thick-wristed owner who talked like a yenta but punched rather more like a Belfast prizefighter. Kaufman and Woody were like relatives, which made Allen a prince in the kingdom of New York’s top haunt for mayors and movie stars, where Jackie Kennedy made her first public appearance at 2 a.m., several months after the assassination of her husband, and where Woody Allen was introduced to Mia Farrow.

Cast your mind back to the time before The Allegations, and you realize that, right up until that point, Allen was in the midst of an unstoppable 15-year run: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Interiors, Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Husbands and Wives — not a flop among them and several considered masterpieces of cinema. Woody Allen was drowning in Oscars and cultural acclaim that hummed alongside a tumultuous personal life of divorces, high-profile romances with co-stars and slobbering nubiles, jazz residencies, Knicks game sightings and regular late-night TV appearances. Allen was an arthouse darling and a box office supernova who laughed his way to mainstream success. Then came August of 1992.

Everything changed. These days, Woody Allen might be the closest thing the internet has to a stock-image diddler. He’s the Colonel Sanders of “coming to a playground near you . . . .” Searching for someone in New York who is confident Woody Allen molested his daughter is like looking for a beard at the Western Wall. They hear a few grisly details, watch the HBO doc, take one look at Allen’s big nose and squinty eyes, and decide he’s 100% a pedo. His man-about-town persona all but vanished, excepting, for a time, a quiet clarinet residency at the Carlyle. The bard of 20th-century personal freedom was replaced by a monkish 21st-century ghost. Suddenly, the same filmmaker who wrote and directed Crimes and Demeanors is a husk of his former self. Gaffe after gaffe, blunder after blunder. Manhattan and Radio Days are exchanged for clunkers like Bullets Over Broadway and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, with Deconstructing Harry — Allen’s angriest, funniest movie — sandwiched in between. Going to see a new Woody Allen movie becomes less of a cultural event and more a question of: Is this one actually good? Because the last one was a pile of shit! Every film after 1992 is measured against the virtuosity of that miraculous run, before the director’s private life rattled his artistic one. Woody’s name now summons an old man with a hat pulled low, withdrawn into cultural exile — irrelevant to most, yet fiercely defended by a devout cult of truthers ready to wage war to preserve the reputation of the artist formerly known as Allan Stewart Konigsberg.

Yet even these fans of Woody Allen might pick up his newest work and first novel, What’s With Baum?, feeling some trepidation about the prowess of this one-time master storyteller at 90 years old. When I showed off my copy of What’s With Baum? (it wasn’t easy to find a copy in Park Slope), my brother said: “Lemme guess, the main character’s neurotic and loves jazz.” Point taken. After all, is Woody Allen even still a great filmmaker? An inspired writer? Or just a short Francophile with a disease obsession and a half-century hard-on for boilerplate philosophy, urban elitism, and eager nymphs? Do the stories matter, or is the ticket price just an excuse to litigate his bizarre life choices? Can you play in your mind the long pull of a trombone, a tuba farting out a few bass notes, and from that point onward predict exactly what Allen is going to say, again?

Perhaps Woody is going to say that old men find young women attractive? Fascinating. Or that wealthy married people are tempted to cheat in order to feel something? And when they do philander, they do so with lots of massage oil and martinis, necking in the shadows of cheeky uptown jazz bars. They will often regret it, too, and end up killing their sexual accomplice only to get away with it in the end. Woody likes love triangles; he is a strong believer in the power of luck over other cosmic forces. You can find all these themes in his old and new material. The only difference is that it feels old in his new material, and new in the old material. Sydney Pollack’s performance in Husbands and Wives will never not feel fresh in its wry brutality. Are we supposed to laugh or be appalled by Pollack’s character violently dragging his yoga instructor girlfriend into a car while attacking her New Age love of tofu and crystals and spiritual consumerism — a profound dig at early-’90s bullshit enlightenment? Owen Wilson’s floundering Allen-character in Midnight in Paris is charming enough with his floppy hair and general paralysis, but there is nothing transcendent about the performance or the film. What seems to change and improve in Woody Allen’s later movies is mainly the apartments, which get bigger and more unattainable as the years wear on. Allen famously shot inside Mia Farrow’s spacious but hamish Upper West Side apartment for the Thanksgiving scene in Hannah and Her Sisters. In 2019’s A Rainy Day in New York, Timothée Chalamet’s character, Gatsby Welles, is an intellectually tortured twentysomething who wears loose ties and tweed suits and plays piano in his family’s residence at the Pierre Hotel, where an apartment can go for as much as $65 million. He spends time writing poetry and longing for the past in the aisles of Dean and Deluca or in the lamplight of Bemelmans Bar. Elle Fanning’s character describes him as “quaint . . . searching for his romantic dream from a vanished age.”

Woody’s early masterpieces ask us to indulge and roll our eyes at the liberal arts-educated characters we’ve surely encountered in the city and found insufferable. But the new movies, with a few exceptions, contain none of the lives and affectations recognizable enough to be satirical. Similarly, What’s With Baum? fails to make much of a statement, probably because Allen chose an earlier, but essentially unchanged version of himself to mock-examine his present-day affliction.

In What’s With Baum?, Asher Baum, a Jewish writer with bad allergies, imprisoned in a loveless marriage, seeks creative validation wherever he can find it. And when he does, he pounces on it, literally. One of the more revealing through lines in the novel is the way Baum, a hapless Allen stand-in, tries to squirm and joke his way around the fact that he groped a journalist after she complimented his writing. First he denies, then he massages the truth, and finally Baum admits what happened: he felt-up a journalist! All the while, he paints himself as a victim with an odd relationship to sexual dynamics. After all, fawning over someone’s work is a sexual invitation, isn’t it? Allen suggests that Baum was tricked, preyed on by the female journalist’s licentious praise. A conversation between Baum and his agent goes like this: “‘Rape? She says I raped her?’ ‘I definitely don’t [think you did], Asher, but what the hell does it matter what I think? In today’s culture an accusal is as good as a conviction.’” Initially Baum is stunned by the accusations. Who, me? And thinks of suing her for defamation. What a wild and irresponsible tall tale, he says! A hit job! But then we learn that Baum’s memory is a little foggy and he was in a weird place that day and maybe, just maybe, he needed some affection. Doesn’t everyone? Baum demands. It was an innocent kiss! So what if she wasn’t as reciprocal to the advance as he might have liked. He needed to smooch somebody!

In other words, isn’t everybody vulnerable to predatory impulses once in a while? Can’t we cut Baum some slack? So what if his hand grazed (or did it cup) both her breasts?

It is one of the more chilling moments in the book, especially because, at first, I was charmed by Asher Baum, just as I have been by Alvy Singer, Isaac Davis, and Harry Block — magnetic Allen proxies with questionable judgment. Allen’s characters have a good track record of joking their way out of unsettling behavior, like when Isaac Davis, Woody’s Manhattan surrogate, jokes to his fortysomething-year-old friends that he’s dating someone “who still does homework.” Davis’ quips about Tracy, his astonishingly young girlfriend, don’t feel like Allen building a case. Allen embraces the edginess of the relationship, proud of his libertine spirit; the pure ecstasy of toying with a teenager. If Manhattan is a celebration of this period of Allen’s carefree debauchery, What’s With Baum? is a whitewash of it. Baum might be the closest thing Allen has to an updated Deconstructing Harry, Allen’s most self-effacing film. Deconstructing Harry is the exception that proves the rule that Allen made pretty bad movies after the accusations. Deconstructing Harry, the 1997 Ingmar Bergman tribute, is an underrated Allen masterpiece, a fiery, urgent reaction to Allen’s own humiliation, and a gemstone crammed inside a shit sandwich of post-1992 films. What’s With Baum? is an attempt to replicate the same manic doggedness, but this time someone forgot to put a ball in the cannon. The novel is cynical and amusing and full of Woody’s trademark wit, but fails to create a universe or arouse much interest other than as a flimsy device to express Allen’s personal grievances. Asher Baum is a pill-popping writer ruled by a wandering eye, with several bad marriages behind him and another divorce on the way. Baum’s first marriage went sour when he couldn’t not bang his wife’s identical twin sister. Now Baum is in his 50s and imprisoned in an unhappy third marriage to Connie. They live in the Berkshires because that’s where Connie feels most at ease. She spends her time obsessing and bragging about her gorgeous, writerly son, Thane, a bestselling overnight sensation. If this rings a bell, it might be because it’s similar to Allen and Farrow’s relationship in the ’80s. Here is what Allen told the New York Times Magazine in 1991 about their relationship:

I could go on about our differences forever. . . . She doesn’t like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don’t like it. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants; I like fancy places. She likes the West Side of New York; I like the East Side of New York.

The real-life country home that belonged to the Farrow family, known as Frog Hollow, haunts Woody’s fiction even 34 years later. “Baum had always hated the country,” Allen writes. “Everything about it: the ticks and spiders; the raccoons, cute but with rabies; the poison ivy; the sound of crickets and cicadas. He hated the isolation.” Baum is a prisoner in the great outdoors, bored to the point of carrying on long paranoid conversations with himself; a weak, but telling device in the book that reminds us we’re in the hands of a reclusive, first-time novelist with a bone to pick.

Woody’s family man routine that he’s been trying to peddle since the ’90s is finally true now that he’s a nonagenarian, but Friar-Woody is a recent development. For six decades Allen was a social animal mining a tangled personal life for material — bleeding relationships dry, taking morally and legally questionable risks, crafting composite characters from a libertine sex life. Rolling Stone reported that in the late ’70s and ’80s, Allen brought Mia Farrow into threesomes with various teenage women and even carried on a long turgid affair with a 16-year-old he met at Elaine’s, later used as a pastiche for Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan. At the height of his unimaginable fame, Allen was a cunt-hound, an untameable rake trading on fame and charm who pushed his dalliances to the limit. And according to Christina Engelhardt, the subject of Rolling Stone’s 2018 piece, Engelhardt was a willing participant in Allen’s threesomes that included Mia Farrow. And Farrow took part in these orgies not for her own sexual gratification, but to please Woody. But Mia had limits. For a decade she shared her creative life and body with Allen, but Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, was a redline.

Ironically enough, Woody’s womanizing ends when he marries Soon-Yi in 1997, which is in stark contrast to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Sunday Times, Allen and Epstein became acquainted in 2010. A trove of 10,000-ish emails between Allen and Epstein suggests that two of the world’s leading Ashkenazi sex pests took a lot of walks together in Central Park and mainly chatted over Chinese food at dinner parties. Their friendship had little to do with underage girls, but Bard College, family rendezvous in Venice, and private screenings of Woody’s new films. As these revelations are revealed across Twitter feeds, Allen has not backed away from or downplayed their bizarrely innocent alliance, perhaps to prove that he hung up the rake 30 years ago.

For Woody, the highest order of existence has not been art, but rather personal freedom. Allen’s uncompromising pursuit of Soon-Yi was the logical final transgressive act in a life of heedlessness. It is poetically fitting that Allen’s own scandal consumed him, and ultimately gave him an obsessive sense of unfairness that compromised so much of his later work. In Allen’s 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, he says that he would marry Soon-Yi all over again. This is perhaps the most courageous (I did not say honorable!) thing about Woody Allen. Feel free to call the marriage to Soon-Yi repellent or immoral or predatory or just very, very European.

Woody Allen had a lot to lose by pursuing his current wife. He would have gained much more, in terms of public adoration and creative opportunity, had he actually been the shut-in he claims to be. But Woody Allen lives to be absolutely true to himself, and ultimately one part of him defeated the other. A real worker bee would have sat at home and stayed with the same woman, like a Robert Caro or Stephen King. The risk of changing partners at a late age, no matter how stale the relationship, endangers productivity. Being true to yourself isn’t so easy — if you’re too true to yourself you run the risk of being completely selfish, and it’s hard to say whether or not courting Soon-Yi and alienating himself from the world was the ultimate act of selfishness or romance. They have, after all, been married for three decades.

Today, not much is known of Allen’s domestic life; a discrete third act wedged between two roaring avenues on a quiet Upper East Side street. When Allen did happen to appear at a Halloween party with Soon-Yi in 2013, Page Six reported that he left the moment he “became the center of attention.” We know that he attended many dinners at Jeffrey Epstein’s apartment and hated the food, and also that he heroically saved a man’s life with the Heimlich maneuver in 2023, as reported by Page Six. It’s comforting to think that Allen is still up there working everyday, honoring the same routine — the treadmill, the typewriter, the careful diet. The thick glasses and high corduroys and reliable hairline that hasn’t budged since the ’70s.

What’s With Baum? is Woody Allen still wrestling with the same questions from a past life. The prose will not change your life, but you will chuckle. Even chortle. He isn’t in competition with the gods of literature at this point; he writes for himself. Woody Allen is still on an inner journey, still lusting after someone’s sister or a drooling fan with great legs and a taste for the arts, even at 90. Woody Allen has developed his craft at a level that has earned him the right to repeat himself, and it’s a delight that he’s still around. The same Woody Allen who directed Crimes and Misdemeanors and Annie Hall is coming out with new work and it’s still the same! The inner compulsiveness, the commitment to his own preoccupations — is it a dedication to legacy? Nope. It’s just that Woody hasn’t learned a goddamn thing.

Noah Rinsky is the creator of @oldjewishmen and the author of the bestselling humor book, The Old Jewish Men’s Guide to Eating, Sleeping, and Futzing Around. His personal Substack is Father’s Milk.

Toward the end of this essay, I’m going to tell you about the time 30 years ago when Jim Harrison — the singular American poet and novelist — stole my date. This happened at a literary festival in Key West when I was 25 years old. Worse, I had flown there from East Lansing, Michigan, with nearly the sole purpose of meeting Harrison, whom I idolized.

Before I get to the story, let me discuss Todd Goddard’s sweeping biography, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life. Harrison wasn’t a household name, but few writers have inspired a readership so passionate. Some of us have even made pilgrimages to the bars he loved — Dick’s Pour House, on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula; the Murray Hotel Bar, in Livingston, Montana; or the Night Before Lounge, a strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska. Years ago, I knew a successful New York-based author who discovered Harrison too late, just after his death in 2016, when for a couple of weeks fellow writers celebrated him with fond obituaries and gushing tributes. “I learned that everyone I know had apparently hung out with him at some point,” she wrote to me. “It was like how when David Carr died, I learned that he’d sent every journalist I know an encouraging email, except me.”

The easy way of describing Harrison is to say that he was driven by enormous appetites — for food, sex, booze, literature, and the natural world. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner, an admirer, called him “our poet laureate of lumbering desire.” It’s an apt characterization, though Goddard, an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, probes more deeply. His book draws from over 100 interviews, Harrison’s vast collection of personal papers, and intimate familiarity with his work. Goddard stresses Harrison’s accomplishments in poetry — the form he most cared about — and while his portrayal is admiring, it does not shirk from his flaws. The Harrison that emerges in Devouring Time is deeply sentimental and disarmingly cerebral, but never didactic. He grappled with metaphysical questions though he resisted abstractions; he found meaning in the dying of elk, winter rivers, and the savor of food.

Harrison was born in the northern Michigan town of Grayling in 1937, which back then was rooted in the timber economy. His Swedish ancestors were hardscrabble farmers, though his father worked for a New Deal agency. When Jim was seven years old, while “playing doctor” with a girl about that age, she thrust a shard of glass into his left eye, blinding him permanently. Later in his life, when posing for photographs, he often angled his ruined eye to the side, exposing its milky sclera.

Religion was strongly present in his family. Before proudly declaring as a teenager that he would be a poet, Harrison planned — amusingly, in retrospect — to become a fundamentalist preacher. He was precocious enough that at 18 he wrote a combative letter to John Ciardi, the Saturday Review’s poetry editor, expressing his distaste for so-called “academic poetry” — and Ciardi responded. Harrison remained a lifelong skeptic of MFA programs, which he compared to “Ford Motor Plants.” An aspiring poet would be better served, he later advised, working as a “truck driver, a proctologist, a stripper, a dishwasher, a furrier, a cowboy, an unlicensed plumber.”

At Michigan State, Harrison read widely and prodigiously, though rarely for his classes. He was a distracted and spotty student, dropping out and returning several times before finally earning two degrees there. As a young man he twice sojourned to New York City, styling himself as a post-Beat bohemian while occasionally sinking into depressions.

At 19, back in Michigan, Harrison fell in love with Linda King, whom he soon married in a shotgun wedding. To observers, their relationship has long seemed vexing: he wrote voluminously about nearly everything in his life — except her, which was as she preferred. Linda also did not share Jim’s wanderlust, so he almost always traveled alone. Goddard shows they deeply loved and depended on one another, and when times were lean — as they were until middle age — his inadequacy as a family provider weighed heavily upon him, a source of guilt and shame. This, however, can be hard to square with Harrison’s lifelong, assiduous wooing of women, about which he made little secret, and which some found distasteful. He was briefly linked with the starlet Jessica Lange and unsuccessfully pursued William Styron’s wife, Rose. He had numerous dalliances, sometimes with younger women who admired him, as well as some prostitutes.

Linda was at Jim’s side when his life’s greatest tragedy struck, in 1962. A drunk driver killed his father and sister, with whom he had deep, meaningful relationships. Goddard doesn’t mention it, but in his memoir, Harrison later listed among the errata of his life his decision to glance at a police photo of their brutally mangled bodies. Afterward, Harrison plunged even deeper into his writing. “You can see it in my first book, Plain Song,” he remarked. “If people die then you better get down to business.”

He moved to Boston, where he found an enthusiastic supporter in Denise Levertov, who was the poetry advisor for W. W. Norton. Though distrustful of academics, Harrison briefly taught in the mid- to late 1960s at Stony Brook University. His biggest “accomplishment” there was to help organize a major poetry conference in 1968, which brought scores of luminaries to campus, and was so libation-fueled, raucous, and fractious that at one point Allen Ginsberg fell to his knees, chanting Buddhist peace prayers.

Around this time, Harrison struck up, initially through correspondence, a lifelong, richly textured friendship with the ineffable Thomas McGuane, who had been one of his contemporaries at Michigan State, though they barely knew each other there. Goddard quotes liberally from their decades of letters, which “ranged from the performative — literary high-wire acts — to the confessional. . . . As the years went on,” Goddard notes, “they’d write to each other with the expectation that they were doing so for posterity.”

This was so even as Harrison’s early work met little success. From his 1973 poetry collection, Letters to Yesenin: “I don’t have any medals. I feel their lack / of weight upon my chest. Years ago I was ambitious / But now it is clear that nothing will happen.”

He was drinking and smoking too much — he would never stop — nor did he cease anguishing about his terrible health habits. Among the first of an improbable number of Harrison’s wealthy friends was the poet Dan Gerber, from the family that founded the iconic baby food brand; together they traveled widely, to England, Ireland, and the Soviet Union. Harrison is often celebrated for his epicurean appetites, but on some of these trips, he would overeat compulsively, darkly, to the point of sickness.

Harrison’s autobiographical first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir (1971) sold meagerly, though it garnered a couple of prominent and enthusiastic reviews. Its first sentence — a poetically inflected marvelment — runs two pages. A knock against Harrison, perhaps, is that throughout his career, his protagonists often seemed to mirror his own darkly comic voice and thinking. While driving across a flat, colorless stretch of Nevada, his character, Swanson, muses: “I see why they test atomic bombs in this state — if they didn’t, I would, only in more central locations.”

Harrison’s next novel, 1973’s A Good Day to Die, was better plotted but likewise sold poorly. Farmer (1976) was also unsuccessful, though both are excellent. Meanwhile, he struggled through northern Michigan’s gloomy winters while laboring in near obscurity. Also from Letters to Yesenin: “Suicide. Beauty takes my courage away / this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red robe / hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”

During this period, Harrison trekked regularly to Key West, where he roistered and fished with large-souled kindred spirits: McGuane, whose career was flourishing; Russell Chatham, a luminous painter of landscapes; Guy de la Valdène, a wealthy French sportsman; and the singer Jimmy Buffet, before he became famous. They collaborated on a small-budget cinéma vérité film, Tarpon, the appeal of which I’ve never quite understood — though Henry Begler approves1 — and some fishermen consider it a classic.

McGuane, flush with cash from his novels and screenplays, bought property just south of Livingston, Montana — he named it the Raw Deal Ranch — that became the locus of an exuberant, closely knit literary community. Harrison visited frequently and got his first true big break there through a friendship he formed with the actor Jack Nicholson, who effectively underwrote Harrison’s classic novella collection, Legends of the Fall (1979). Reviewing it in The Sunday Times of London, Bernard Levin famously called Harrison “a writer with immortality in him.” The book’s success “marked a tremendous change in Jim’s life,” Goddard says, “more tied to Hollywood, screenwriting, cocaine, movie stars, and especially money.” Legends also helped concretize Harrison’s reputation as a “macho” writer, a term he despised. “I write about the preoccupations I was born and raised with, fishing and hunting in the country,” he later groused. “Why is that macho?”

Harrison reveled in his newfound success, even as it sapped his time and energy. To recalibrate, he hired a trusted family friend as a personal assistant and formed an intense relationship with a New York City psychotherapist. But in a 1982 letter to McGuane, he shared a “brutal admission”: despite earning over a million dollars in the preceding four years — roughly $4 or $5 million today — he was broke. Given his druthers, he would have focused more on his poetry, but that’s not where the money was.

His next major achievement was his 1988 novel Dalva, which broke new ground by giving voice to a female protagonist, a Nebraska woman who searches for the child she gave up at birth. Both he and his editor, Seymore Lawrence, thought that book would be the one, and perhaps it should have been. But Harrison never did win a National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize; he was not even nominated. Some suspected that was because his interests in the American hinterland were too far from the gaze and tastes of the coastal literary establishment. Late in his career, however, Harrison became far more deeply revered in France than the United States. They called him “le grizzly du nord du Michigan” and “le Mozart des grandes plaines.” His public appearances were major events and people recognized him on Paris streets.

Harrison continued producing lyrical, meditative, and comical works — novels, novellas, poems, essays, and a couple of screenplays. He wrote prolifically and would never again be poor. He was tickled when the New Yorker published his novella “The Woman Lit by Fireflies,” another impressive work. One of his memorable essays, “A Really Big Lunch,” recounted an eleven hour, 37-course meal he took in Burgundy, France, where the menu was drawn from recipes in 17th and 18th-century cookbooks and “likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon.” Many readers also loved his Brown Dog chronicles, about an unlucky, hard-drinking, half-Ojibwe trickster who drifts across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Some sensed that his later fiction did not measure up to Legends and Dalva, and that is probably true — but his poetry rarely wavered. As he aged, he wrote especially well about illness and mortality. From his 2015 collection, Dead Man’s Float:

My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me —
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.

Harrison entered an early physical decline, and Goddard’s acute descriptions of his ailments — diabetes, gout, kidney stones, back pain, blood pressure spikes, respiratory, prostate, and bowel problems, shakiness, and various convalescences — should give pause to anyone prone to romanticizing his unruly modes of excess. He hated having to curtail his traveling and to give up his remote northern Michigan cabin: “I’d rather sell my kidneys to a republican,” he wrote to a friend. He even had to fight the State of Arizona to keep his driver’s license. There was at least some mordant humor, Goddard notes, in the image of Harrison, “a lifelong intellectual and writer,” straining with shaky hands and poor eyesight to pass the written portion of his state’s driving exam.

Harrison died in 2016, in the most fitting way — hunkered at his desk, writing a poem. “Had Jim written the secret number of birds he had counted in a lifetime on a slip of paper as he had once promised in the poem ‘Counting Birds?’” Goddard muses. “If so, he did not get to pass it to his wife and daughters from his deathbed, as he once imagined.”

About that trip to Key West: I had become intoxicated by Harrison’s work in college. My enthusiasm was intense. At the time, I was working on a master’s degree in history but thought I might pursue a Ph.D. in English, and I secured a travel grant to attend a multi-day festival on American Writers and the Natural World. Harrison would be featured there, along with my second-favorite writer, McGuane, and others I admired. But the clear goal was to meet Jim.

And I did get to briefly introduce myself to him. He signed a book and posed for a picture. But the idea that he would take any special interest in me — because I was a fan, and I too was from Michigan, and knew its northern woods — well, that was of course a juvenile fantasy.

Otherwise, the conference was fine. Most of its attendees were much older than me; they seemed dilettantish and well-heeled. I purposefully dressed down in a flannel shirt. There was, however, an attractive woman there, about my age, who was also a grad student, from someplace in Florida. We hit it off a bit. The first day, we talked. The second night we kissed on a bench. For the third night (I confess) I hoped maybe we’d have sex. We’d made dinner plans, but at a late-afternoon reception she told me she wouldn’t be able to make it: Jim Harrison had invited her to a group dinner. Ugh.

We adjusted our plans and agreed to see each other afterward for late-night drinks. We set a time to meet at Sloppy Joe’s, a bar that Hemingway famously frequented, but had since devolved into a garish tourist trap. I showed up and waited for her. I continued waiting, longer than I should have. (This was before cell phones.) Eventually, two of her English professors walked in, and my heart sank when I overheard one murmur to the other: “Oh no, he’s still here.” They approached me gingerly, knowing I’d been waiting for [name forgotten]. “I’m sorry,” one said. “I don’t think she’s going to make it.” They’d just seen her boarding Jimmy Buffet’s yacht — with Jim Harrison. He was 58 then, but seemed older, and used a cane — maybe to manage his gout or possibly just to offload his massive weight. Regardless, I’d not stood a chance. About a month later, the woman I’d fancied sent me a letter apologizing; nothing sexual had happened with Jim, she stressed.

I met Jim again in 2002 at a reading outside Boston. This time, we actually got to chat a bit. I mentioned someone we knew in common and asked for his opinion of Richard Yates. Eventually, I brought up that we’d briefly met six years prior at that Key West conference, and that while he surely hadn’t known it — and of course there were obviously no hard feelings — he had poached my date.

He lit up with a giant grin. He remembered that night well, he said, not least because he’d ended up stuck with the entire $3,000 tab from the dinner party. The truly amazing thing, though, was that he’d seen her again, just the night before, on his book tour. “She came to my party at Elaine’s!” he boasted. I asked if she was still very pretty. He responded, still radiant, with a wisecrack that made me chuckle — but that was also so outrageously lewd and disarmingly specific — that I will never repeat it in print. Except to say that I am glad that Jim Harrison did not live to see the #MeToo movement.

John McMillian teaches recent American history at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. He is the author of Smoking Typewriters and Beatles Vs. Stones. His new Substack is Mick’s Opinions.

“The Mysticism of Money”: that was the brassily alliterative title of a 1922 essay published by Harold Loeb in Broom, the magazine he co-founded and bankrolled. Contemporary American culture, Loeb observed, had positioned commerce as its new religion. Europeans made money as a means to old-school ends; Americans had started to make it for the sake of making it. This was strange and unsettling, but the upside was an emerging metropolitan culture of startling energy — as Loeb put it, “vigorous, crude, expressive, alive with metaphors, Rabelaisian.” You could object to the economic system underpinning this boom, its inequities and vulgarities, but there was no denying its vitality.

Aged 24 when he read Loeb’s essay, Malcolm Cowley sat up. By the end of his long life he had become a fixture of the American metropolis, a grand old man of the New York literary establishment. But his roots — as he puts it in Exile’s Return (1934), the first and most enduringly popular of his nonfiction books — were “west of the mountains,” in the hilly woods and streams of Cambria County, Pennsylvania. He was often exasperated with America, and for long stretches found himself radically at odds with its prevailing political mood. But he never fell out of love with his country, in the sense of its places and people. When he read Loeb’s essay he was living in France, during two formative years among the much-mythicized community of expatriate Americans. Perhaps Loeb’s paean to America made him homesick; it definitely clarified his vision of his life’s work.

During his schooldays at Peabody High in Pittsburgh, Cowley fantasized of becoming a newspaper’s theatre critic. As it happened, his literary career scaled greater heights. He played a central role in the formation of the 20th century American canon. As Gerald Howard shows in this lucid and enthralling biography, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, there’s a persuasive case to be made that — as professional critic, political activist, essayist and editor — his was the central role.

Cowley strove unflaggingly for a genuinely modern and authentically American literature, and a world in which those two qualities did not exist in tension. He wanted a new scene, a subculture within American letters, which would speak to the alienated generation born around 1900 and confirm Loeb’s sense that the restlessly innovative national spirit might manifest itself in modern works of art as well as in railroads and skyscrapers. But this wasn’t going to happen by magic. It needed men of letters — they were mostly men, mostly white and middle-class — to bring it to fruition.

The Americanist Barry Shank defined a scene as an “overproductive signifying community.” Scenes arise, according to this theory, when a physical place (Shank is writing about rock music in postwar Austin) produces more energy than can be conventionally absorbed by existing cultural structures. This kind of bottom-up, sociological explanation has become dominant in Anglophone analysis of cultural scenes, even premodern ones: the explosion of literature in late Elizabethan England, for example, is typically explained as the frustrated spillover of a generation of minds educated for civic and administrative positions which, in a fragile economy and stagnant political culture, did not exist.

Howard’s biography is not the first of Cowley — it follows (and gracefully acknowledges) Hans Bak’s pioneering study, whose first volume appeared in 1993. Howard sets out explicitly, though, to tell the story of the “Cowley era.” His focus is not so much a single life as that life’s achievements “on behalf of American writing.” Against the grain of sociological, bottom-up approaches to cultural history like Shank’s, The Insider argues that cultural production does not just happen. The various scenes that compose a literary culture are made, not born; if they crystallize or coalesce, it’s thanks to the vision and determination of certain persons. Scenes might escape the confines of traditional cultural institutions, but sooner or later they produce their own hierarchies of association, their own rules and regulations. Twentieth-century American literary culture was a system — informal, provisional, protean, but a system nevertheless. All systems ask to be played, and Cowley was one of the key players.

Howard narrates the Cowley era’s arc in three acts, the first two of which correspond roughly to the two interwar decades. When Cowley arrived in Paris in 1921 for his busy stint of criticism-writing, Europe-observing, and café-haunting, he was returning to a continent he’d first known as a battlefield. In 1917 he had interrupted his studies at Harvard (he’d published poems and reviews in the Advocate, whose editors grandly came out in favor of the Allies) to serve as a camion driver at the front — like Hemingway and Dos Passos, with whom he’d associate on the Left Bank. He stayed in France until 1923, establishing himself in the precarious but lively ecosystem of transatlantic magazines; after completing a scholarly thesis on Racine in Montpelier he returned to New York, and eked out a living as a professional critic. Times were hard, but his work bore fruit: in 1929 he published his collection of poems, Blue Juniata, and the following spring was elected to the board of the New Republic, as Associate Editor in charge of the “back of the book,” the section for reviews and cultural essays.

In 1921 the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post (a journal untroubled by character-limited digital name fields) published Cowley’s essay “This Youngest Generation.” It contained his “once-in-a-lifetime bolt of intuition about his generational cohort,” on which Exile’s Return would expand. The generation born around 1900, Cowley proposed, was distinguished by time because it was unusually alienated from place: cultural differences between America’s regions, even in the south, had worn away, replaced by a uniform Americanness cultivated by a homogenizing education system. In other words, America was having its 19th century cultural-nationhood phase. The displacing effect of the Great War, therefore, accentuated a pre-existing generational rupture. This is one of several instances in which Howard shows Cowley’s talent for laying his finger on the cultural pulse, his ability to diagnose the contemporary condition as well as mold literary responses to it.

Howard draws out, with an assured grasp of his material and an analytical lightness of touch, some productive paradoxes in Cowley’s theorizing. The camion-driving generation rebelled against their parents by spurning Henry James in favor of bolder European literature. Yet they also rejected 19th-century America’s tendency to position itself as a cultural province of Europe. The truly American literature Cowley was searching for would throw off the shackles of European manners as well as New-World Puritan morality — but the seeds of that emancipated, self-possessed flowering would be discovered across the Atlantic. In the mid-1920s Cowley felt more excitement about Dadaism than the early work of Hemingway; his collaboration with Matthew Josephson on the transatlantic magazine Secession represents a futile but instructive attempt to import Dada aesthetics into the USA. The problem, Cowley discovered on his return, was that in New York the budding Dadaist is vulnerable to being snapped up as a copywriter for an advertising company.

“Solvitur ambulando,” read the inscription of a book given to Cowley by his Harvard composition instructor, Charles T. Copeland, before his departure for the war: it is solved by walking. Attributed to Augustine, the phrase’s original connotation is of the puzzled scholar’s head-clearing stroll. Cowley’s expedition, as Copeland knew, would be more adventurous. The “Youngest Generation” sought to correct what they saw as a cloistering tendency in the first modernist wave — the movement often known as Symbolism, which Cowley’s contemporary Edmund Wilson would portray in Axel’s Castle (1931) as a reassertion of Romantic aesthetics for a post-Darwinian age. Cowley’s reservations about Symbolism are epitomized by his reaction to the death of Proust. “His own death was only a process of externalisation,” he writes in a 1922 essay for The Dial; “he had turned himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry.” If they wanted to hold the mirror up to 20th-century nature, younger writers would need to forsake Proust’s method and get out more. Amy Lowell, who met Cowley at the Harvard Poetry Society and liked his poems, expressed this need as the Imagist value of “externality,” a focus not on the Proustian out-turned self, but instead on “things for themselves and not because of the effect they have upon oneself.”

The need for externality also meant that literature could learn from investigative journalism. But ambulando in this sense, of the reporter’s shoe leather on the sidewalk, risked lapsing into something more aloof — the detached wandering of the European flâneur. An American writer, Cowley discovered in the 1920s, has to balance the twin imperatives of making a living and remaining free from the soul-crushing mechanism of industrial capitalist society. The risk of cutting loose, though, is confinement to the sidelines. In a 1929 essay on Hemingway, Cowley proposes that his generation had adopted a “spectatorial attitude” towards the Great War. “Incompletely demobilized,” they had not grown out of it. They were sharp, disabused observers of modern life, but maybe observation was not enough.

In Howard’s telling, the second act of Cowley’s career began when he responded to this nagging desire for a socially-committed literature. The Wall Street crash expunged complacency from establishment political discourse and thrust radical alternatives into the limelight; the suffering unleashed by the subsequent recession made aloofness a difficult attitude for writers to sustain. Cowley’s leftism was sincere and his dedication to activism impressive. In 1931, as part of a squadron of writers and journalists assembled by Theodore Dreiser’s National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, he visited Kentucky to witness the miners’ strike in the eastern part of the state. After violence flared in Harlan County during the violent crackdown, Cowley returned with another committee. They were met with intimidation, denounced as “revolutionary Bolsheviks from New York.” Howard brings the scene vividly to life: Cowley staying cool in the face of thuggish strikebreakers trying to spoil supplies transported for the miners’ relief; ensuring that the Paramount cameraman’s film made it safely across state lines.

Cowley’s leftism was always of this engaged, activist kind. He avoided joining the Communist Party outright, instead affiliating with subsidiary groups like Dreiser’s. Rather than a writer suddenly jilting their first love of literature for an affair with politics, Howard depicts a man of letters compelled by acute circumstances to pay attention to the material crises in his country. Communism remained for Cowley a means to the end of allaying the hardness — longstandingly spiritual as well as, with recent urgency, material — of American life. “Art and culture,” declared Cowley in a state-of-the-nation address at the inaugural American Writers’ Congress in 1935, “cannot live in such a world.” He took only limited interest in the proletarian literature championed by more doctrinaire Communists like Mike Gold. What the novel could borrow from Marxism, Cowley thought, was not its ideological rigidity but its commitment to “grappling with the social world.” He held up Dos Passos as the shining example of a novelist who grappled, whose work uncovered the “huge, impersonal forces” governing American society, but also the way those forces could “shape and warp individual destinies.” In other words — and in the expanded, diluted sense of Tom LeClair’s original term — the systems novel.

That Cowley seems so perceptive on the divergent radicalisms of art and politics makes it all the more troubling that he became, for a considerable chunk of the 1930s, an apologist for Joseph Stalin. Young American readers had gobbled up Exile’s Return, fascinated by its cultural analysis and evocations of literary Paris — but gnarled conservative critics took exception to the fecklessness of Cowley’s generation and the naivety of their leftism. Across the 1930s, Cowley’s defense of the Soviet Union and its proxies grew more entrenched. Unlike Hemingway, he did not travel to Spain to witness the Civil War firsthand, but was anxious in this next European conflict to adopt something other than a “spectatorial attitude.” When violence broke out between factions of the antifascist coalition, Cowley sided with the Soviet-backed Popular Front, turning a blind eye to their ruthless purge of Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist groups. He responded to the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, in which 16 veteran Bolsheviks were condemned to death as Trotskyist conspirators, with expressions of support for the Soviet government.

There’s no escaping or qualifying the enormity of Cowley’s misjudgment. But it’s worth noting that a biography of a well-intentioned person of letters who had toyed with supporting 20th-century Europe’s other murderous tyrant-in-chief — even fleetingly, like Cowley — would be a much harder sell. An indulgence still operates in what used to be called (until, say, January 2026) as “the West,” towards intellectuals who brushed with Stalinism, as distinct from Marxism or Communism: they weren’t to know the full extent of the horrors, goes the party line, or the severest of the supposedly unintended consequences. No such largesse exists — with one major, warmongering exception — in the progressive circles of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet world. Yet we tend to neglect those alternative perspectives. In a rare but repeated instance of blurriness, Howard describes American leftists travelling to the 1929 International Congress, and then a conference on revolutionary literature, to Kharkov, a city located “in Russia” — except that Kharkov, now Kharkiv, has always been a Ukrainian city, and was from 1919 - 1934 the capital of the Ukrainian SSR.

Nevertheless, Howard navigates this episode well, achieving a skilful balance between sticking up for his man and taking care not to defend the indefensible. This reasonable partiality is a feature of The Insider as a whole; Howard champions Cowley without letting affection distort his judgment. Many of Cowley’s contemporaries, both friends and adversaries, analyzed his Stalinist mistake as a classic case of someone confusing politics and literature. In a ferocious demolition job for New Militant, Felix Morrow diagnosed Cowley’s apology for Stalin and hostility to New York Trotskyism as an instance of “the lost generation’s distrust of ideas and contempt for abstract thought.” (In full Temperance Preacher-mode, Morrow also condemned the New York literary scene’s fondness for “gin, fornication and dandified rowdyism”; I’ll have what they’re having, wavering young Trotskyists might have secretly thought.) Wilson, in the mirror image of Morrow’s argument, accused Cowley of setting too much store, rather than too little, by ideas: “politics is bad for you,” he told Cowley, “because it’s not real to you.”

The literary man whose understanding of politics is insufficiently abstract, but who at the same time treats politics as an exclusively discursive affair, a game of arguments: that guy got around in the early 20th century, and walks among us still. It’s true that Cowley’s faith in Stalin rested on textual accounts whose authority trumped empirical reality: “people who ought to know,” he comments on the Robles affair (the 1937 summary execution of a Republican writer in Spain on NKVD orders), “tell me that the evidence against him was absolutely damning.” But Howard’s narrative suggests another interpretation. Cowley’s reluctance to see Stalinism for the grotesque tyranny it was stemmed fundamentally from his desperation to see radical spirit, of both literary and political form, manifest itself in the real world. He criticized the New York Trotskyists, hammering out their positions in the early issues of Partisan Review, not principally for their theoretical abstraction and austerity of style, and still less so on the Stalinist grounds of being crypto-“rightists”, but because in opposing the Soviet state the Trotskyists were undermining the only modern alternative to the economic system tearing American society apart. “On the political scene,” Morrow speculated, Soviet communism for Cowley’s generation “corresponded to what surrealisme represented on the literary scene.” Morrow got this subtly but significantly wrong, Howard suggests: Cowley’s appalling indulgence of Stalinism derived not from a dogmatic commitment not to the avant-garde itself, but rather from stubborn and beleaguered faith in the avant-garde’s original promise of material change in the real future.

Cowley’s earnest commitment to Communism, his belief in its capacity to transform American life wholesale, sets his attitude to the social relations of his own trade in a strange light. Cowley slotted into Manhattan white-collar life happily: at the New Republic offices, “on West Twenty-First Street in a placid corner of Chelsea,” he took breaks for games of “deck tennis in the backyard” and enjoyed the “excellent lunches prepared by the cook, Lucie.” In 1935 the magazine moved north to elegant Modernist premises in Midtown, designed by the architect William Lescaze. In “disguise as a junior executive,” Cowley claimed to feel “like a spy in enemy country.” But he was also a content half-week commuter with a house and garden in Connecticut, happily married to Muriel (his first marriage, to Peggy Baird, had ended in 1931) and recently a father. Comfortable with bourgeois rhythms of work and structures of family life, Cowley also thrived in the hierarchies of the New York literary scene — whose form, individualistic and hyper-competitive, was about as non-Communist as could be, whatever specific beliefs its members espoused. Cowley was generous as well as tenacious, trying where possible to find work for impecunious young reviewers promoting themselves to the New Republic. He wanted the hierarchy to work constructively. But he didn’t question its existence.

This complex tension, between radical positions and the thoroughly bourgeois patterns of a life spent promoting them, surfaces particularly in Howard’s occasional references to sport. Cowley’s self-fashioning as a New York intellectual with simple country roots doesn’t seem to have drawn much on the athletic parts of American popular culture — though Bak’s biography informs us that, as a freshman at Harvard, Cowley enjoyed throwing his hat over the crossbar after Harvard defeated Yale 41-0 in the 1915 derby; he also felt a frisson when his friend Hart Crane played “Très Moutarde” on the piano, as it had supplied the tune for his high school football song. In the late 1920s, for a series sponsored by bookstore chain Brentano’s, Cowley wrote an admiring profile of Ring Lardner, author of short stories and sports columns. Lardner’s engagement with the quotidian immediacy of sport made him appealingly modern. The Insider draws on sport less for its immediacy than for its availability as a metaphor for the struggles and contests of a literary career. “Here we have the material for a searching work,” proclaimed Louis Untermeyer in a review of Blue Juniata in 1929, “and the author does not fumble his chance.” Howard himself, describing the Communist party’s charm offensive against Cowley in the mid-1930s, reaches for a baseball analogy: “it was time to bring the major leaguers onto the field.”

Sport is a rich, ambivalent metaphor for the competitiveness inherent to a literary career. It might stand for the hustling, ruthless ultra-competition some persons of letters swear by. Alternatively, it might connote healthy competition and fair play, the ideal of a level field in which skill and application go unusually far. In this second sense, a sporting attitude seems compatible with the values of the literary Communist. But the literary Communist who believes uncritically in hustling is beset by contradictions.

The Insider’s final third narrates the last act of Cowley’s career. A profusion of nonfiction writing — more essays and reviews, a second edition of Exile’s Return, and several new nonfiction books — restored the trust and status he had lost in the rancorous 1930s. Most significantly, Cowley secured a position as an Advisory Editor for Viking. Harold Guinzburg, Viking’s founder, offered him the job in 1949, and it proved a smart decision: as Howard tells it, Cowley made four interventions that had a lasting impact on the 20th-century American canon.

The postwar decades were the most settled and tranquil of Cowley’s life. Accordingly, Howard’s narration starts to flit more freely between periods, breaking strict chronology to carry forward a relationship forged in the 1950s to its conclusion decades later, or setting a single event in the context of Cowley’s formative experiences in the 1920s. It’s an astute choice, a structural reflection of the tendency in later life to look both forward and back. But Cowley owed his success and happiness to an act of aristocratic benevolence. The Second World War had dealt him severe personal and reputational blows; he had been stripped of editorial responsibilities at the New Republic. Cowley’s rescuer was Mary Conover Mellon, who with her husband Paul had set up the Bollingen Foundation, originally to promote the work of Carl Jung. Seeking to expand its scope as American society contemplated the coming era of supremacy, the Foundation awarded Cowley a generous five-year stipend (officially and bizarrely called a “Five-Year Plan”; Howard lets the irony speak for itself) to use as he saw fit. As Howard puts it, Cowley “was able to woodshed — to read attentively, meditatively, voluminously, constantly, encyclopedically.”

Cowley made inspired rediscoveries and harnessed creative ways to share them with an expanding reading public. In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime had started producing their Armed Services Editions: slim paperbacks, brightly colored and double-columned, marketed to American troops. It was a wild success; wedged into uniform pockets, the books cushioned Nazi bullets at the Normandy landings. Viking, keen to surf the wave, started issuing its own pocket paperbacks, and the Portable Library was born. During his five years of woodshedding Cowley had returned to Hemingway, and now for the Portable series he edited a selection. In a single stroke Cowley’s introduction altered America’s idea of the Lost Generation’s original headline act.

Hemingway had come to be seen as a painterly Naturalist of clean surfaces. Cowley aimed to expose the shallowness of this view, and reveal the Symbolist Hemingway, the poetic intensity lurking around the edges of his traumatized and vagrant characters. This was a Hemingway of still waters running deep; a lifelong angler, Cowley in the Portable introduction compares the experience of rereading Hemingway to revisiting an old fishing spot, and finding the woods “as deep and cool as they used to be.” Re-establishing his friend as a modernist, Cowley’s edition “rendered Hemingway teachable.” It also transformed understanding of his style, revealing the potency of what his granite-hard sentences left unsaid. In the master’s hands, a concise and economic style was good not only for describing things, but also for suggesting subtext and resonance. Whether any other writers could follow suit, and thus whether this reframing helped American literature march on, is a different question.

The second rediscovery was an unambiguous triumph of canon-adjustment. By the 1940s, William Faulkner’s career had apparently run its course. Cowley single-handedly revived it, first with critical essays and then with another Portable selection. His correspondence with Faulkner shows tact and patience, which paid off: the reclusive Faulkner engaged with the project, and ensured that it became something more collaborative and original than a standard miscellany. Cowley’s idea was to focus on Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner’s mythical version of his Mississippi homeland. Faulkner supplied a map (“Surveyed . . . for this volume”) as well as a family tree, stretching back to Culloden in 1745, of The Sound and the Fury’s Compson family. “The job is splendid,” he told Cowley by letter after publication, “damn you to hell anyway” — Faulkner-speak for “thanks so much.”

Cowley’s work on the edition was a “magnificent example,” Howard comments, “of selfless, disinterested generosity on the part of one writer to another.” This is true, and you sense the compliment’s sincere warmth. But Cowley’s acts of “disinterested” generosity were also carried out on behalf of American letters, in whose health his interest was considerable. “I like and love the American literature,” he says in “Hemingway’s Wound” (a late essay where he also self-defines as a “little American”), “even while feeling that its past is still in process of creation, not to mention its future.”

The Portable selection presented Faulkner as a folklorist, Howard says — “a bard, a teller of tales” who would remind genteel readers or GIs that their cheerily confident, newly supreme America was built on the swamps of dreams of fantasies, many of them premodern and some, like slavery, ugly and unmastered. For all his rootedness in the South, Cowley thought Faulkner most resembled Hawthorne. In the Portable Hemingway he had grouped Hawthorne with Poe and Melville as “haunted nocturnal writers . . . who dealt in images that were symbols of an inner world.” His editions of Hemingway and Faulkner equipped him with the start of an answer to the question of literature’s place in the new era of American ascendancy. Communism had lost all credibility and American capitalism was flourishing. Literature could not bring about the system’s overthrow; what it could do was humanize the American experience, by showing up the darkness and unmastered history hiding in the system’s cracks.

Cowley’s third editorial triumph was the part he played in Jack Kerouac’s long struggle for publication. Howard, who retired in 2021 after a distinguished career as an editor for Doubleday, gives a sparkling inside account of On the Road’s, well, road to publication. The young Kerouac was a self under construction, dressed in a “rented tux” for “steak dinners” with Robert Giroux, editor of his first novel, The Town and the City (1950). But it was Cowley who read the first draft of On The Road for Viking, fought its case with doubtful colleagues, and persevered for years until, in 1957, the novel was published. He had help from Helen Taylor, Viking’s in-house copy-editor, “strict and cautious” but also an open-minded expert who knew good prose when she saw it; it was Taylor who “put the clamps” on Kerouac’s freewheeling style, checking the flow with commas, in the novel’s first edition. Howard achieves a fascinating portrait, authoritative but non-institutionalized, of postwar American publishing culture, and demonstrates the usefulness of writing modern literary history from inside — of understanding writers not as isolated witnesses, lone refractors of zeitgeist and vibe, but rather as actors within complex internal ecosystems.

Writing up On the Road in Viking’s catalogue, Cowley compared Kerouac’s Beats to his own (now aging) Youngest Generation. In the 1920s the exiles had sought the avant-garde spirit in France; now, in the second war’s wake, a similar ragtag group was “roaming America in a wild, desperate search for identity and purpose.” But there were differences. The intra-American pilgrimages of the Beats contained a spiritual dimension (Kerouac was a singular mix of Catholic and Buddhist, as well as a nihilist rebel) “entirely alien to the Lost Generation,” just as, to the Beats, that older grouping’s commitment to organized leftism seemed quaint. Like Dos Passos, the Beats were responding to structural forces in American life. But they depicted those forces in mystical rather than political terms. The material leftism of the socially attuned, “grappling” novelist had been sublimated — just as it would be on the right, decades later, when the paranoid anti-Communism of the postwar period morphed into evangelism and conspiracy theory, and then took control of an obliging Republican party.

The retreat of literature — that is, commercially viable literary fiction marketed to white professionals — from politics coincided with literature’s entry into a rapidly expanding university system. The postwar period was the beginning, as Howard notes, of what Mark McGurl calls the “Program Era,” where creative writing emerged as a university discipline. About the compatibility of literary and academic culture Cowley had his reservations, but he accepted invitations to instruct on several programs and taught “diligently, if less formally than a credentialed academic might.” His workshops at Stanford included a powerfully-built young man working on a story about a mental institution and its sinister methods of mind control — once again, oppression of a spiritual rather than explicitly political kind. Reading the early drafts, Cowley put his considerable critical weight behind the novel that became One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

As anyone who has spent five minutes on literary Substack knows, few topics attract rancorous heat like the influence of MFA programs in creative writing. It’s easy to mock creative writing as a discipline, to depict the horseshoe of graduate students in a seminar room as a sterile, artificial replacement for a spontaneous gathering in a Parisian café. The founding father of Stanford’s program was the novelist Wallace Stegner. His wife, Mary, remembered him remarking of the married veterans arriving at Stanford on GI Bill funding, that they “needed a place where they could write and talk, like a coffee house in Europe.” Stegner’s remark demonstrates a modern uncertainty about the public sphere, a hankering after “third spaces” that belies their precariousness under capitalism. It’s the same haziness that underpins the contemporary American use of “community” to mean “people online who agree with me.”

At its worst, Cowley thought, the MFA steered young writers towards rectitude and away from life. He hated the metafictions of the John Barth school, quipping that “the books themselves seem long-haired and bearded”; he also criticized contemporary novels for being unpeopled. Yet if the rise of university creative writing risked sterilizing literature, it also — as Cowley saw firsthand, in Kesey’s case — could provide outsiders with a path to publication more certain and less luck-dependent than in previous generations.

On the whole, Howard shares Cowley’s nervousness about separating the real world from the world of books. Both author and subject seem ambivalent about the school which came to dominate the postwar study of English literature: “those symbol hunters, the New Critics.” As practiced by luminaries like Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Winters, and W. K. Wimsatt, New Criticism combined a receptivity to symbol and ambiguity with an ethic of painstaking, close textual attention. The problem, Cowley argued in The Literary Situation (1956), was an over-emphasis on being perfect, and a bias toward texts whose perfection showed up under the critic’s microscope.

It’s true that the most “teachable” writing is not always the best, and that New Criticism at its driest seemed positively hostile to the artistic temperament. There is such a thing (certain contemporary novels remind us) as writing for critical explication, and it’s a blight. But New Criticism was practized not only in order to train the next generation of American novelists; literary studies exists — and continues to, just about — for its own ends. New Criticism laid the foundation for an extraordinary profusion, beginning in the 1960s, by American academic critics. Studies in this tradition range adventurously, often beginning in the European Middle Ages and ending in the Lost Generation or even with the Beats. These books played their own part in the great humanist project to which Cowley also contributed, of representing America to itself by revealing where it stood in the long perspectives of global space and time.

Setting academic and professional criticism at cross-purposes, Howard perhaps projects a characteristic of our own times onto the recent past. These days professors and publishers, even of literary fiction, have oddly little to do with one another. But it wasn’t always the case. The English poet Geoffrey Hill considered 1925 - 1965 “the high period of American literary criticism.” Hill names R. P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling among the heroes of this golden age, which coincides with the most influential period of Cowley’s own career. Critics like Blackmur moved easily between universities and literary journals, and wrote in an all-purpose idiom which eschewed both jargon and cultural populism.

Cowley himself wrote in this idiom. His critical voice is assured, serious, effortlessly in command of its material. He doesn’t pander, as some critics did then and do now, to what might be called the Implied Airhead Reader. But he does write personally, without the contemporary academic pretense to objectivity. “Reading the book for the first time,” he remarks in his 1943 review of Eliot’s Four Quartets, “I remembered the Swedenborgian sermons to which I half-listened every Sunday morning during my boyhood; I didn’t grasp their meaning, but . . . went home to dinner with a pleasurable feeling of elevation.” But this folksiness is backed up by deep, careful engagement, and most importantly — for the hawkish, performatively unhoodwinkable critics of today — by what Hill calls “a form of love, a sense that to seek to penetrate the mystery of how and why works of literature succeed or fail is to do work of inestimable value.”

Few professional critics working today have time to develop Cowley’s depth; no one outside the academy receives five years’ funding just to read books. Meanwhile, almost no one in the Anglophone academy can survive if they spread themselves across a range as wide as Cowley’s. Yet as Howard’s analysis of Cowley’s Stalinist blunder shows, range has its pitfalls. Highly proficient at zooming in, Cowley always zoomed back out to consider texts in the broad context of American literature and the broader context of American society. We can admire the humanist preoccupation with literature as societal lifeblood, but we should also note that Cowley found it easy to encompass society because he failed to take so much of it in. If his engagement with the proletarian novel was fleeting, his consideration of race and gender was negligible. He admired some work by Black writers, such as Ellison’s Invisible Man, but both his aesthetics and his politics were shot through with a universalism effacing of difference, and it’s this same breezy universalism that allowed him to co-author, with Daniel P. Mannix, a general history of the Atlantic slave trade.

This is Howard’s first full-length book, but he has written numerous essays over the years, on contemporary literature and the lives and times of its publishers. His essays crackle with wit, cutting their astute observations with self-deprecating asides and abrupt high-to-low tonal bounces. The Insider deploys this verbal fun stuff sparingly, but judiciously: “no wonder young people hate adults,” Howard comments after quoting from a snotnosed review of On The Road by Robert Ruark (“a sub-Hemingway novelist of the manly man variety”). He goes to town in the acknowledgments, by far the most entertaining section of its kind in any recent literary biography. He thanks Helen Rouner, his own editor at Penguin, for her patience “as I have learned the difficult skill of becoming an author (insert ironic horse laugh here).” And he takes dead aim at the “sloppy bureaucrats at the Federal Bureau of Investigation” who stonewalled his request for Cowley’s files..

Howard exercises restraint, too, in the other direction. His insider methodology, with its emphasis on contingent networks and significant actors, strikes a complementary but refreshing balance with analysis of 20th-century culture overloaded by sociology. On occasion, however, some sociological speculation wouldn’t have gone amiss. Exactly how and why writers like Cowley, white and male but radical in their receptivity to Marxism, were able to overlook so much difference in their conception of American society, is a question the book could have afforded to address. Similarly, the brilliant analysis of Cowley’s rehabilitation of Faulkner points to the richly ambivalent place of the South in the postwar literary imagination: the holdout of white supremacy and grievance, on one hand; on the other, fertile ground for the folkloric, mythical country Cowley wanted to foreground as booming postwar America left behind all its versions of pastoral, however dark.

Reading this book more than a century after Cowley’s formative sojourn in France, it’s natural to wonder about the state of bohemia in our own times. As we all know, times are hard for artists. In 1932, John Cheever (who benefitted, like many others, from Cowley’s generous encouragement) rented a room on Hudson Street for “three dollars a week”: about $280 per month, in today’s money, except the young writer wanting a one-bed on Hudson Street needs about five thousand extra dollars to make their rent. Defying prohibitive conditions, however, scenes continue to form and assert themselves, in New York and throughout the world. You’d have to be a philistine as well as a loser to assert, like Peter Thiel did in 2011, “the collapse of art and literature after 1945.” Doesn’t it kind of suck, though, that even the most radical cultural scenes rely, for their publicity and visibility, on the platforms owned by Thiel’s fellow bootlicking oligarchs — the rocket guy, and the guy with the embarrassing new golden chain?

Substack’s relation to those platforms is another hot topic. Substack’s most progressive feature seems to be its openness, its absence of gatekeeping. Online communities can form on Substack, though they are subject to the same algorithmic warping that makes communities on other platforms so shrill and tribal. More promisingly, Substack’s reach and transparency can be harnessed to the end of cultural scene-construction in the world of material cities — and the rest of us can fantasize about it.

Vladimir Nabokov has only a walk-on part in this book: “I am sick of teaching,” he writes to Edmund Wilson, three times in a row with fed-up artlessness. But this biographer-subject relation has something Nabokovian about it. Howard knew Cowley, and is stylishly economical with personal recollections. His biography is bookended by two personal encounters: in the introduction, as a novice fiction editor in 1981, Howard shakes the hand of a “deaf and elderly” Cowley in the office; in the epilogue, he warmly remembers attending Cowley’s 90th birthday party in Sherman, Connecticut, 1988.

A literary career entails a constant back-and-forth between art and life: fictional characters haunt flesh-and-blood persons; writers express their truest and most feigning selves on the page. Many details of The Insider might have made the author of Pale Fire prick up his ears. At Harvard, Cowley and his friend the poet S. Foster Damon created a literary hoax, a “plowboy poet” called Earl Roppel. In 1944, Cowley restored a good chunk of his literary reputation with a New Yorker profile of the editor Maxwell Perkins; “I wouldn’t mind being like that fellow,” said Perkins of the man in the piece. With a very light touch, but convincingly, Howard chalks up Cowley’s surprising posthumous obscurity to a literary conspiracy: having made so many enemies among both conservatives and Trotskyists, Cowley suffered from the vindictively long memories of New York’s taste-making scenes.

In Nabokov’s hands, this book would become a story of sinister encroachment, as two American men of letters, each with trochaic Scottish-sounding names, stalked and eventually confronted one another. In Howard’s telling, however, the real life of Malcolm Cowley is happy to exult the considerable achievements of its subject, while exhibiting many of the virtues it commends in him. It makes an understated but urgent case for the centrality of persons of letters to a good and decent society; it demonstrates the usefulness of writing cultural history from within. Most of all, it portrays 20th-century American literature in all its glorious vitality.

Archie Cornish is a writer and academic who lives in London. He has published fiction and essays in New Writing, Literary Review, The Fence and others. He writes a Substack called Night Thoughts and is working on his first novel.

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George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with a trademark humor and humanity. In one way, his most recent offering, Vigil, is the extension of those themes his devotees have come to love. But in a different way, Vigil opens up entirely new ground, by asking what it means to view the world’s depravities not just as wrongs to be made right, but as wounds to be healed.

For much of his career, class and the economy have been his primary framework for working out this question. Whether in his famed story “The Semplica-Girls Diaries,” in which migrants make a living as front-yard ornaments, or in “Escape from Spiderhead,” in which experiment subjects are made to work off their debt in pleasure research centers, we have seen how the systems we’ve set up can destroy us in sometimes comic ways.

But telling a story about the horrors of the world that doesn’t careen into despair is no small trick. A story about migrants who sell themselves as animatronics for the wealthy could easily be told as a threadbare morality play. It would be easy to take the story of political autocracy, as with his recent “Love Letter,” and to tell it remorselessly. But such stories would also be incredibly boring, and arguably less true. For intertwined throughout these stories of rapacious capitalism, is an undercurrent of empathy. To return to “Semplica-Girls,” the protagonist of the story is a middle-class man trapped in the rat race, who hires the Semplica-Girls for a party to elevate his social status. It would be easy to merely condemn the lawn ornaments’ exploitation at the hands of a status-conscious consumer. But Saunders juxtaposes the girls’ suffering with the love the protagonist has for his children, and his sincere desire to help them be respected in the world. Even dictators have mothers, and even monsters want to have a friend.

But such sentiments, while absolutely true, feel not only wrong but gauche in an age of ICE raids and government malice towards its citizens. It doesn’t square with our desire for justice, much less our hope to see the powerful and unjust have their day of reckoning. And while in Saunders’ writings, there are occasions in which the loving monster finds their comeuppance, there are plenty of occasions when this contradiction of love and suffering caused remains unresolved: the loving monster just walks away; the Semplica-Girls go on undaunted. For love — actual affection — must be true, even among the monsters, if we are to have any hope out of the horror.

So how do we reconcile this? One possibility might be that history will simply rewrite the monsters as pure monsters. It is easy, particularly in light of the economic critique Saunders employs, to write off the love which the monsters seek as pure ideology, a phantasm which is really just the love of money and status in disguise. But Saunders has seemed to prefer another possibility: that both of these are true, and that earthly life is not the only venue for working out this contradiction. In fits and starts in his earlier work, this possibility of resolution has appeared, as characters die and pass into whatever lies next. In stories such as “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Mother’s Day,” and “Ghoul,” we have already been invited in part into this possibility, as central characters trip just over the line of life into death with their own lives unresolved, leaving the reader to wonder what lies next in their story.

After reading Saunders’ fullest treatment of this theme thus far — his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo — I can understand why he opts for a less than serene vision of the world to come. For many of the ghosts we meet in the afterlife in Lincoln are unresolved in themselves, haunted by unfinished business. We might wish for a more merciful postmortem for the figures we meet there. But for Saunders there is work yet to be finished beyond the grave. Saunders’ vision in Lincoln is of an afterlife teeming with real work to be done, with the dead carrying their lack of resolution around in the form of engorged genitalia and multiplying eyes instead of chains and lockboxes. What began to emerge more directly in Lincoln was the acknowledgment, to paraphrase Saint Paul, that the struggle of life is not against flesh and blood, but takes place in the intimacies of the invisible.

That the afterlife reflects, in its chaos, the unresolved nature of life is, I think, one of the strongest aspects of Saunders’ vision. For in many recent literary depictions of the Great Beyond, the maelstrom of life is traded for stillness and quiet. What comes next in this vision is something like J.K. Rowling’s quiet train station, Matt Haig’s library of possibilities, Alice Sebald’s omniscient narrator in a quiet space. Such visions treat the Great Beyond as a place of silence, a pivot from the chaos of the world. But Saunders draws from an older set of writers who see no such relief in death, in which the afterlife is just as raucous as life — we are not done with life just because we die. Whether in Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” or Dante’s Divine Comedy, the afterlife in this tradition is one in which the wildness of life is amplified: death is not relief from the injustice of life, but a place to contend with it even more directly.

For as long as Saunders has been mulling over the ways in which capitalism wrecks the world, it seems death has been on his mind, too. In a recent interview, Saunders notes that the three truths of facing death appear as “you’re not permanent; you’re not the most important thing; you’re not separate.” In death, Saunders observes, every person is faced with the fact that they are — in the end — a character in a larger drama: no amount of capital or self-inflated importance will save you. Either we come to terms with this in life, or death will remind us of this in less gentle ways. Perhaps Scrooge being haunted in the winter of his life is not just a truer, but a kinder, vision than we remember.

All of this brings us to Vigil, Saunders’ latest in a long line of explorations of death and what it ultimately exposes about living. K.J. Boone is dying in his Dallas home, attended to by his loving wife and, unseen to the living, a cast of spirits who serve as doulas for the dying. Boone lies in his giant mahogany bed, in monogrammed silk, stubbornly satisfied with his life. On death’s door, he brings with him a long legacy of oil production, climate change denial, and wealth.

It is easy to read Boone as a buffoonish cartoon, but the longer we stay with him, the more Saunders helps us to be sympathetic to a man whose career was spent making billions off of misinformation and denial. We learn about his impoverished upbringing; we see him communicating with his long-dead mother (herself a member of the afterlife chorus swirling unseen above the Dallas metroplex). And ultimately, as he understands that death is on its way, we see Boone fearful and angry. As the narrator puts it, everything that he loved is about to be lost behind a door that cannot be opened again.

Chief among the doulas attending to Boone is Jill Blaine, midwife to hundreds of souls. Her aim in attending the dying is not to change them, but to comfort them. She is part of a guild of spirits whose purpose is to help the dying let go. In less capable hands, Jill would also be a cardboard cutout, but slowly, we see that her work is tied to her own past. Having died in explosive fashion, Blaine never had the opportunity to come to terms with her own death, had been denied comfort in her last moments the way she now seeks to give comfort to others. But — as in life — Jill’s approach to the contradictions of love and horror is not the resolution on offer. Alongside her in this liminal world are a French spirit, some flatulent pranksters, and images of Boone’s past collaborators who are aiming not for comfort, but for retribution.

Boone as a villainous, self-assured antagonist feels a little strained at times, a Jay Gatsby for the climate era. And at times, as other reviewers have noticed, Saunders leans on his themes of the spirit world as too much of a wild rumpus, with spirits who poop out smaller versions of themselves and at times overshadow the more subtle lead spirit Jill. But these are conventions that help draw our attention to the main question: in Boone’s last act, what should we be aiming at? Repentance, consolation, or something more sublime?

Jill helps us to see Boone for what he is: a man who has devoted his whole life, shaped his family existence, built out his most strongly held values around the proposition that the world needed oil to keep on spinning. And in this, she grasps that it may be too much to ask Boone to repent. The aims of the other tormenters — to get Boone to change, to finally atone for the damage he has done to the world — assume that a dying person might be compelled to see their whole life as a mistake, and might apologize for everything that they committed their whole being to. The love he had for his family, his work, and his own place in the world were real, though, and not to be denied.

Jill, by contrast to those seeking Boone’s repentance, understands that at the end, we see our lives as knots that cannot be easily untangled. It’s here that Jill’s mandate to comfort rather than change strikes home: she understands that there comes a point at which a committed life, for better or worse, gains momentum and will find itself locked into a direction so deeply ingrained that it cannot wish to do otherwise. All Boone wanted to do was make his parents proud, to look life squarely in the face, and to enjoy it along the way.

None of this is to excuse Boone’s sins, but to humanize them. Boone gave his family love and a great life, in no small part by poisoning the atmosphere; Boone tried to honor his parents and did so by accumulating more wealth than a person could possibly use. The other spirits are right to force Boone to come to terms with his life, but wrong to frame it as an act of pure repentance: to recant a life is not just to recant one’s sins, but the love that made those sins possible. This is the most human of contradictions — the pursuit of a good life by bad means — and it is this that causes Jill to realize there is something humans are meant to pursue beyond both justice and consolation: the ineffable mystery which she terms “elevation.”

In the world of Vigil, the term is elusive, signifying a goal for these souls which exists beyond the categories of repentance and retribution. It is the language she gives to this complex contradiction that Vigil works out: that because we are capable of both great love and great devastation, the aim of our lives must not be simply to seek justice against wrongs or to atone for our wrongdoings, but to seek mercy for ourselves and others. In the language of one Christian writer, our lives are characterized by the search for that good which we are meant for as creatures, a good that we frequently try to acquire in destructive ways. In Vigil, this is true of both the living and the dead. For even the spirits who guide the dying are wounded and in need of repair; the spirits too are working out their salvation in fear and trembling, seeking this “elevation” even as they help the dying to move into the afterlife. And so, both the dying and the spirits are in search of the mercy — that elevation of the soul — that will help them to acknowledge that both the love they had in life and the wrong they did were equally true.

That there is a synthesis beyond retribution and atonement–this “elevation”— is a powerful truth that has meaning for both the living and the dead. It is this recognition — that there may be something beyond pure justice and cheap forgiveness — which proves the most perplexing for both the characters of the novel, and for the reader looking at Vigil as a simple morality play. For neither readers nor characters of the book can pretend that the damage Boone contributed to is an illusion. But neither can we denigrate Boone’s love for his family as a sham. What Saunders points us to, ultimately, is not repentance but mercy, with ourselves and others. In this, we might find hope that when we come to the end of our own lives, we might see them not as pure failures or successes, but as gestures in pursuit of truths we fail to name in their entirety. That mercy, after all, might be the very thing to practice in life, long before the shadow of death finds us.

Myles Werntz is Associate Professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of numerous books in theology and ethics, and writes at Taking Off and Landing: Explorations in the Moral Life

America’s power to wage war hangs more on the sex life of the greater sage-grouse than you might guess. You wouldn’t want to overstate the case. If you were to rank determinants of wartime readiness, the greater sage-grouse’s amorous entanglements would probably place behind things like defense outlays and the upkeep of stealth bombers. But those entanglements do play a small role, and that’s still more than most imagine. It is certainly more than I did until only a few years ago. Then I took command of a cavalry troop in the U.S. Army and lost my innocence forever.

The greater sage-grouse are picky eaters. Nature did not bless them with the strong gizzard a bird needs to eat seeds and so they have few options. They prefer sagebrush, black when possible. They nest below sagebrush, too, and among it they establish their leks, here a noun and elsewhere a verb, derived from the Swedish word for play, that refers both to the greater sage-grouse’s mating rituals and the sagebrushed sites where they occur. It is on the strength of these facts that English-speaking man gave the greater sage-grouse its name.

The trouble is that the land in America where the sagebrush grows also often lends itself to cattle grazing and natural gas drilling. Less valued than beef and power, the greater sage-grouse has retreated to certain swaths of federal land where legal protections mean cattle cannot graze and energy goes unexploited. One such swath lies in the rain shadow cast by the Cascade Mountains over Central Washington. It is a wind-swept steppe, about as big as Nashville, belonging to the U.S. Army. It is called Yakima Training Center.

To Yakima Training Center I would trundle as a cavalry commander with my trucks and troops to train. The trip to Yakima was already a nuisance. My unit was garrisoned at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, some 165 miles away from Yakima, on the far side of the mountains. Though it was peacetime, we were under standing orders to train hard and so serve as a “credible deterrent” to unrest in the Indo-Pacific. But owing to the density of human settlement on the Puget Sound, and to the sensitivities of another of God’s creations called the Mazama pocket gopher, we could not blow up the large munitions in Tacoma needed to stay sharp and so credibly deter anything.

For these reasons, we would climb into our Strykers, haul over the Snoqualmie Pass past ogling skiers, then descend to Yakima. But upon arrival at the Training Center we found ourselves at the mercy of the greater sage-grouse. Vast stretches of crosshatched yellow marked on the map where we could not drive our trucks or shoot our guns or even sleep on the ground, lest we upset the grouse leks. Having just explained to our soldiers that the planned training was so important they had to leave their families behind for weeks on end to hazard night maneuvers with live rounds, we then had to explain to them, with our yellow-splotched maps as aids, that the training was not more important than the carnal appetite of a local game bird.

Soldiers are alert to the absurdity of their position. Like an infinite staircase drawn by Escher, their work can at times seem to climb to the highest plane — the self-sacrificial preservation of society — only to terminate back at the start, in the low ground, squabbling with a grouse for a place to lay one’s head. For what reason, they start to wonder, do they endlessly trudge up and down these mountains? It’s enough to make you question whether you’ve gone mad, or if things aren’t ordered completely backwards. And then one day you pick up a novel like Michael Jerome Plunkett’s Zone Rouge, and you feel the order set right again.

Plunkett’s novel is set amidst the centennial of World War One. It opens not with a grouse but with a cow, and for its purposes a cow will do. “The cows, they suffer in silence,” the first sentence declares, scoring with the reader rare World War One surprise. And with that surprise’s momentum at its back, the book goes on in its first pages to depict the manual extraction of shrapnel, gathered while grazing, from the stomach of a suffering heifer. The squeamish and the empathetic might object if the writing weren’t so good. Others might object too, if it weren’t also for the overwhelming sense one gets immediately that the scene has a purpose, that the account of war to come is different than those we’re used to, and that either way, the story will be worth the wait. It is.

The story Zone Rouge tells is that of Verdun. Not the battle, per se, but the battlefield — or what is found there, one hundred years on. And what one finds at Verdun is ordnance. Artillery shells, mortar shells, grenade bodies, numbering in the millions. Most of them, poured into the land by German and French artillerists, remain buried there even after a century of cleaning. Underfoot the shells leach arsenic and mercury and lead into the soil, until a farmer plows them up or else the long-suffering earth, after so many cycles of freeze and thaw, finally heaves them to the surface.

Then what? One calls the démineurs. These men, trained in the handling and removal of unexploded ordnance, rumble in trucks out to the site of a shell’s discovery. There they get to work on the shell’s safe removal. By a job’s end they have taken another infinitesimally small step towards Verdun’s rehabilitation, a process that will consume several more of their lifetimes, estimated to end when Verdun is as distant a memory to the living as today Frederick the Great is to us.

These démineurs make up much of Zone Rouge’s cast. Throughout the book they speak in a choral voice that evokes for the reader the generational, faceless nature of the task to which they’ve dedicated their lives. It is a credit to Plunkett’s craftsmanship that despite the tactile subject, it all sounds almost musical. So the démineurs tell of the shells:

We carry them out of the ground to our trucks by the armfuls. In canvas sacks on our backs. Stack them in lockers lined with sand. Cinch them together with slick cable wire and pack them by the pallet. Put them on trucks and fill them to the ceiling. Store them in steel-lined cellars with thick iron doors that shut with a dull clunk. And when there is no room left, we shove them in the corners of the lot in our depot. Find odd gaps where they can be stacked a dozen high. Every nook and cranny. Loads and loads.

From this chorus of démineurs eventually emerges a leading man named Ferrand Martin. But as is the case in war as well, the foil in Zone Rogue steps forward first. His name is Hugo Lafleur. He is a real estate developer. To advance his business interests, he has sought and won election as the mayor of a dead town called Fleury. Dead, because Fleury exists materially only as rubble on the battlefield but is preserved in law alongside eight other ruined towns as an administrative monument to the places the war wiped out. Their mayors steward their memory.

A rib brings Ferrand and Hugo together. It juts out from Fleury’s poisoned soil beneath a 75-millimeter shell Ferrand and his crew are called to remove. Human remains are not unheard of at one of humanity’s foulest killing fields, but their discovery is not as common as it used to be and so is cause for commotion. As mayor, Hugo has a natural interest in the bones, heightened by the looming centennial of the battle. As a démineur, Martin’s interest in the dead is passing — he deals instead with what killed them — but the archaeologists who arrive at the scene need a hand, and Martin lends one.

What follows is an austere but often beautiful story of the bones of Verdun. In Hugo the mayor and Ferrand the démineur the reader gets a finely wrought, ironic contrast. Though Ferrand spends his days pulling things from the earth, Hugo is the extractive one — commercially, politically, sexually. And though Hugo is elected to an office of stewardship, Ferrand is the custodial spirit. Despite advancing illness and an acute awareness of his work’s Sisyphean aspect, he grows obsessed with the identity of the man to whom the discovered bones belonged.

It is just a small spoiler to say that no one learns that identity. A tag found close to the bones bears the name Augustin Caladec. Yet archival searches return several Augustin Caladecs, some French, one German. This frustrates both Hugo and Ferrand for different reasons. Hugo’s reasons are political; a particular French soldier would better serve the marketing of the battle’s centennial than an anonymous, nationless one. Ferrand’s reasons are existential; he hopes to give the ghosts that haunt his work any face at all.

But as it turns out, in the end all sides of war are faceless. A use of Zone Rouge’s hundred-year view is that it allows us to discern such things. The bones left behind are difficult to name and buried artillery shells do not discriminate between faces of any kind. This irresolution is just one way Zone Rouge hews to hard truths rather than the sort of false but pleasing narrative arc so many people, including the reader and Hugo Lafleur, wish the war would give them.

The second great use of Zone Rouge’s long view is that it affords the reader a good, hard look at the dirt war leaves behind. That dirt is everywhere, and it is forever. In the Red Zone demarking the battlefields from which the novel gets its name, one must be wary of the drinking water’s perchlorate levels. Mushroom pickers in the surrounding forests must be alert to anomalous toxicity in their harvest. Locals cannot spend a day in the fields of Verdun without finding shrapnel in the crevice of their clothes, “Titian red, oxidized rust, glittering in our palms.”

This dirt one cannot outrun. Eventually Ferrand is brought low by cancer. As with so much, he cannot be certain of the cause. Perhaps the poison amidst which he lives did him in. Perhaps it was bad luck. Either way he must cease his work as a démineur. He then passes his hobbled days with a mechanical claw, picking up trash. He will not live to see the job finished. A second choral voice, that of the dead of Verdun, joins that of the démineurs, to observe: “There is so much to clean up.” Such epochal contamination, of the spiritual and the ecological sort, transcends any one life, defies the measure of any one man.

The novel does not suffer much for foregoing tidy resolution or dealing in such bleakness. This is again a credit to Plunkett. A lesser writer might probe existential questions only at the cost of deadened prose. Zone Rouge is instead given to moments of deep, enlivening beauty. These moments come regularly enough both to sustain the reader’s attention and to stave off the claustrophobia that otherwise encloses a reader wandering through the dark of such trenches.

One such moment occurs at a local bar after a day’s work, between Lafleur and the young archaeologists come to Verdun to see about the bones. The beauty of the moment is not in Lafleur’s philandering, though Lafleur is rendered so humanely that the reader is tempted to forgive his many sins. Rather, Plunkett bottles the heady mood that forms between hardworking people out on the town after a day’s purposeful work. It’s an alchemical thing, more than the sum of its parts, the sort of moment that abides in one’s mind long after the toil that made it sweet is forgotten.

Another such moment is a memory from the edge of Ferrand’s youth. The reader is transported from Verdun’s cratered and poisoned hills to a French lake in late summer. After a long day’s work, a young Ferrand and some friends take a boat out. “We were all exactly who we wanted to be in that moment,” he remembers. They meet a boat of girls. A short flirtation follows. Just as the two boats part, Ferrand finds courage. He dives into the water, surfaces alongside the girls, and carves his number in the gunwale for the one who caught his eye. She would become his wife, then his ex-wife.

This memory Ferrand carries with him, “the moment an unfamiliar face becomes familiar.” Such moments are otherwise so elusive, as Augustin Caladec’s bones remind us. And once had, such moments can sustain an entire life: “We held it and then it was gone. It happened.” Faced with the horror of Verdun, so vast and deep, the reader and the démineur and soldier and Sisyphus himself all might be forgiven for asking: is life worth it? Carved in a gunwale of a boat on a lake in summer, in the air between some bar patrons, Zone Rouge seems to gives an answer. It is yes.

This brings us back, of course, to the lekking greater sage-grouse and the sidelined soldiers watching them. Set aside the obvious point that the soldier and the grouse and the demineurs and the Department of Natural Resources all agree that mating makes life worthwhile. Set aside also the ecological point, that it is not backwards in the least to preserve the sage-grouse at the cost of some military training, for if the winners of a war inherit a poisoned earth, theirs is a pyrrhic victory. There is something even deeper going on here than the conservation of randy birds, if you grant that such depth can be reached. There need not be anything else going on — Zone Rouge is a beautiful story in its own right — but there is.

In life it is easy to get confused about the order of things. So much of life runs in circles, and with little apparent forward movement, that one struggles to discern starts and ends. Does our work interrupt our rest, or the other way round? Does war interrupt peace, or is peace what we call a pause in the fighting? Does a shell’s detonation punctuate the end of a long arc or just launch that of another story? And given that all these things circle back on themselves, does any of it matter, or is all progress a cruel illusion? In Zone Rouge might be read the moving suggestion that we cannot know, and it does not matter. We can only find what is good and decide our work is in service to that good thing. So if one must cease his work to let the sage-grouse lek, it is perhaps best to let it lek.

Theo Lipsky is an active-duty captain in the U.S. Army. One can find his writing in War on the Rocks, The Point Magazine, Military Review, Modern War Institute, and his newsletter, Garrison Notes. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of War.

The world is worried about fascism. Across the U.S. and Europe, conservative, nationalist, or populist movements are on the rise. The rhetoric is intense. Many people, including politicians in power in the U.S., have likened Donald Trump to Hitler. We’ve seen what appeared to be a Nazi salute from a major tech mogul. Other tech guys fell in line — they want to keep doing what they’re doing, after all. Not all the people who voted for the current administration are bigoted, misogynistic racists, of course, but some of them are. Most of them — or at least the ones I have contact with — just wanted better wages and cheaper groceries. But also, books have been banned. Especially in South Carolina, where parents are worried about sex (not the same people who are worried about fascism) and bad words. High school kids should not be able to read about sex! Because, then, you know. Also, they might become gay. Or trans. Or whatever. There’s a slow trickle of weirdness, mixed with danger. Many of us teachers think: but the students have the internet, right? And we’re worried about books turning them gay? And yet in the middle of this, people have been rounded up, deported, students sent away, and now, masked men have shot and killed citizens.

There have been several novels over the past 10 years that predict a coming civil war (or retroactively envision a disunion), the rise of a kind of fascism, the disintegration of countries, violations of privacies of all kinds: Omar El Akkad’s American War is one. Set in the future, it’s about a person being radicalized to the right, in what the novel calls the Free Southern States, a part of the U.S. that has seceded over fossil fuel policy. Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X also depicts a U.S. in which, in 1945, the South seceded from the Union and has become a theocracy. There’s a western territory, too. But rather than focus on this fascistic, southern theocracy, X is mainly about the literary cliché, popularized by Bret Easton Ellis in the ’80s, that you can never truly know another person. George Saunders’ Liberation Day is another example, where several of the stories are set in some fascistic, dystopian future. There are so many preceding this, of course. We have 1984, though we live in a version of reality closer to Brave New World. There’s Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (which are reminiscent, at least in premise of American War, where climate issues are primary causes of destabilization, which in turn is not unlike Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake). There’s Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the attendant TV show. There are many more than this, but here, at least, are a few of the main players.

One could say that the rise of fascism is an ever-present threat, and that artists and novelists need to be ever-engaging with this threat. One could also say these repeated tales are part of the problem. The narratives don’t seem to be getting through — they’re not making an impact. Why is that? One could deem Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, written in the ’90s, with its elected figure using the phrase “Make America Great Again,” as prescient. Or one could call it ignored. Perhaps art has never really made an impact, not in any real way, not on the political scene. Or maybe it’s that some of the narratives on the left have stalled out, repeating themselves like bad memes — shouting into the void or, worse, the echo-chamber. Too many of our current novelists seem to think they can persuade a reader to believe a certain set of morals, the correct way to empathize, and in turn, convince the reader (if they weren’t already convinced) of which side of history one should be on.

But empathy can’t be taught — it has to be experienced. A person has to find their own way toward it. For educators, teaching empathy is fraught: saying how to be empathetic is not the same as displaying it, nor the same as allowing students to figure it out on their own. It behooves the teacher to be wary of the fact that they might be trying to convert people to their worldview, especially if the point of, say, a writing assignment is to “teach empathy.” That same wariness is needed for the artist. My question in this essay is not can art awaken a person to the horrors of fascism — it clearly can. My question is: is there a point when repeated narratives stall out, lose their power in the endless repetition of certain premises, and read more like propaganda than a real story or real life? What does a novel look like that has this stalled quality?

Enter Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a humorless novel about a dystopian Ireland where a fascist regime has come into power by declaring a state of emergency. The plot is simple, and for the most part, compelling. The book begins with Larry, Eilish’s husband, being interviewed by what are essentially Gestapo agents, and then being detained. Eilish is left to care for their four children, of varying ages, ranging from baby all the way to young adult. Most of the plot asks: what should Eilish do, stay or go? Leave Larry behind? (She cannot contact him, knows not where he is.) She decides to stay, bad things befall the family, and eventually she is forced to leave, feeling that she’s failed the family by neglecting to act earlier. If the opening of this essay was amusing and weird, please be warned: this book is neither amusing nor weird. It’s deadly, deeply, darkly serious. Very, very dark. Dark that gathers. If America is currently tipping toward fascism — and that’s, as they say, a big “‘if” — it’s been a slow, stupid, infuriating, weird, degrading, ridiculous, mundane, comical, harrowing, cheap tip. There seem to be signs everywhere. Not so in Prophet Song.

Prophet Song is a curious book. It’s overly sentimental, cinematic to a fault, and has only a basic understanding of human psychology (Eilish begins as a person and ends as a thing, an arc that was foretold by soothsayer and mystic, Carole, in the middle of the book), but is interestingly plotted. By which I mean to say: though we don’t really know who any of these people are — Eilish is “mother/wife” — we want to see how things end up, not unlike the latest Mission Impossible movie. There are some very good action sequences, as when artillery break the family’s house apart late in the book. There’s an exhilarating and frightening sequence in which Eilish is hunting down one of her sons, Bailey, trying to figure out which hospital he was put into. There’s a bureaucratically confusing pandemonium to this sequence that feels apt. But it’s not in action that Prophet Song falls flat, rings false. It is in style and voice, and it’s in the depiction of people, of consciousness.

The problem with the style and voice of Prophet Song is that Lynch seems to be too clearly aping one of his influences on the one hand (I won’t even go into who that influence is — you’ll get it right away if you’ve done any reading), while on the other, he relies on cinematic tropes rather than the novelty of actual life to depict his dystopian world. This causes the novel to feel sentimental, focused on darkness as a literary tick, inauthentic, contrived, and weirdly unreal.

But Prophet Song has a certain power. Lynch’s novel makes you forget that its aesthetic is contrived and characterization poor: the stakes, the politics, the horrors of a fascistic regime wipe from our minds the literary and artistic failings of the book. The sentimentality, the loss of one family member after another, the bombings, the hunt for milk, the one-dimensional bad guys of “the party,” the dry toast, the eventual shelling, the cement dust in the air, the constant confusion, the constant sense of loss, the constant sense of being unmoored, the ever-encroaching darkness, the darkness that seeps into the house, into the self, into the soul, vacuuming everything into its nothingness — these things so move us and are made to seem so impossible and possible at once that they seem new, that we fail to see that Prophet Song is essentially a domestic thriller dressed in the clothes of literature, with a clear and banal political agenda. It’s a book about the rise of fascism for the Goodreads era.

But Prophet Song has other, stranger problems. Let’s begin with the prose. One day at her office, shortly after Larry has been detained (she’s not heard from him at all and won’t for the rest of the book, presumably because he’s dead), Eilish watches the news on her computer at work. People are being beaten by batons. Tear gas is shot into a crowd. The protestors of this new regime crouch and huddle. It’s pretty standard stuff. So cinematic, so precise in its imagery gleaned from other images of such a situation. As a reader, we aren’t witnessing the real thing here. We’re witnessing a version of a version of a version of it. But, it’s also serious. This is serious: it could happen to us, we are made to think. Which yes, it could, but this is not nonfiction, and it’s not news — it’s a novel. It’s not propaganda warning about the possibility of fascism, it’s art. We watch Eilish become panicked and feel she must leave work:

She sweeps her security pass and her belongings into her bag, steps through the office sleeved in one half of her coat, the stairwell reverberant with the smack of her shoes and then she is standing on the street with her phone to her ear, Larry’s phone does not answer and when she rings it again his phone is turned off. It is then she looks up and it seems as though the day has come under some foreign sky, feeling some sense of disintegration, the rain falling slow on her face.

Here I’d like to introduce the operating principles of Lynch’s prose style. The ever-present present tense, quickly sketched images, a psychology of abstract concepts (“some sense of disintegration”), as well as the unfortunately cinematic style: this is an image of a panicked, suffering woman looking up into the sky as rain falls on her face. We can feel the camera angle, almost sense the cinematographer choreographing the shot. It’s a cliché, of course, but what’s so interesting about the passage, and much of Lynch’s writing, is that he works really, really hard for it not to be a cliché. He tries to out-prose the cliché. Nonetheless, the passage remains a cliché, and the heavy reliance on the language of the literary — “the day” coming under “some foreign sky” and Eilish feeling “some sense of disintegration” — only belie the fact that an overly used, overly cinematic image is being hidden. Also, does she ever get her other arm “sleeved”? I kept seeing her panickily standing in the rain with her face upturned with her phone to her ear with her jacket only half on. The imprecision of the prose is astonishing because the prose wants us to think it’s so precise. Only one arm is “sleeved” — my god, we’re meant to think, look at the stunning and inventive precision of his prose, that singular detail. We’re not meant to see any of the other stuff.

More to the point, the passage reveals the problem of the rest of the book: up until this moment, Eilish has sort of seemed like a person. Before his detainment, she debates with Larry what they should do in the face of this new regime, how Larry should respond to the interview with the Gestapo-like force, etc. But here, as happens in the rest of the book, she becomes a reaction. As the book continues, she even further becomes a reaction to situations. She might be a microbiologist, but that never really matters. She goes to her workplace as a matter of course. She and her children bicker, while the war begins to emerge around them. One son runs off, but Eilish is in charge! No Ma’am, no longer, this son informs her. More such contestations — conflict and story that is born out of circumstances, as though these are the reactions of any family (except those on the other side), completely universal, nearly abstract, lightly dressed in the clothes of specificity.

Likewise, Eilish’s inner world is often abstract: she has at times “this feeling of possibility giving rise to hope,” when things look up for a moment, but after more bad news arrives, this “hope” quickly leads to “this feeling they are falling towards something that cannot be defined by anything she has known in her life.” Why the use of “this”? There’s no telling. But more importantly, this is not the specific content of thought, emotion, or consciousness. These examples, and many more, are abstract inner formulations, which serve the narrative well in a certain sense: Eilish is not a person, but an everyperson. Lynch can do these inner abstractions all day, and he does. At another point, after learning more bad news about the regime and its hold on the state, Eilish “does not know why she remains so calm, another door has been opened, she can see this now, it is as though she were looking out upon something she has been waiting for all her life, an atavism awakened in her blood.” Lynch doesn’t worry too much about mixing metaphors. On the one hand, some sort of inner “door” has been opened in Eilish, and on the other hand, this inner door is also an “atavism awakened in her blood.” Or is she looking through the opened door at the atavism awakened in her blood? No worries — it sounds so literary, so lyrical, so poetic.

The real problem is that we’re in the realm of psychological concept, not psychology itself. This isn’t how people experience their own minds — it’s how an author fashions a character literarily. When we do get specific in thought, right after the opened door/awakened atavism, we see Eilish “thinking, how many people have watched upon war bearing down on their home, watching and waiting for their fate to come, entering into silent negotiation, whispering and pleading, the mind anticipating all outcomes but for the spectre that cannot be directly looked at.” This is Eilish thinking. This, finally, is specific thought, specific consciousness, rather than abstracted consciousness. But also, it’s Paul Lynch writing. This isn’t thought, this is literary thought. I simply don’t believe Eilish thinks this way. The reason Lynch can’t write an actual psychology — a real person — is because no real people can exist in this world, in which the regime is evil and the people of “the party” are essentially voids, not actual human beings. Eilish and her family, too, are only tropes.

The book’s political message, which is so simplistic as to be laughable — that fascism is evil — leaves the characters devoid of life. Flat, unreal, and merely reactive. It is not the characters that matter; it is the notion that we, the readers, should be worried this is coming for us. That’s fine. There’s a place for that kind of message. Unfortunately, the place for that kind of message is in a newspaper, maybe an opinion column. The question that this book brought up for me is this: what is art for, especially political art? If Prophet Song is any answer, it’s that one should know one’s position fully, and expose the evils of one’s society, in order to tamp them down. In this way, art, and political art in particular, is not about asking questions, it’s not even about having a question. It is about knowing which side of history is right and being on that side. It is currently, depressingly, a major strain of the liberal position, and a position of liberal art, and I say this with the caveat that the answer to this problem is not “right-wing” art, but is instead art that asks different questions, and marks out a new territory, a new path.

So, Eilish is an everywoman. But of course, she’s not an everywoman, she’s a particular woman living in a particular society. Lynch disregards this: not only is Eilish an everywoman, but her oldest son Paul is an every-son, her middle son Bailey another every-son, and her daughter Molly an every-daughter. These are not characters, they’re types, and they exist as types throughout the book. Eilish and those of her ilk are good types, while the book tells us quite clearly that the rest of the world are bad types. This is what happens when a book is more interested in political correctness than reality. Everyone who is part of “the party” in this novel is less than human. Their less-than-humanness is written all over their grimacing, greedy, beady-eyed faces, all descriptions Lynch actually uses. The two agents who detain Larry might as well be evil automatons they’re so obviously inhuman and bad. When Eilish looks at Paul Felsner (her new boss who is part of “the party”), she sees an “abyss.” A soldier’s face is described thusly: “the angry brow aslant over the green eyes, the weaponed body that speaks absolute force.”

There’s a dreamy vagueness to the way Prophet Song is written. Eilish will be doing something, like say watching “online the growth of the protest” (why is so much of this book written in Yoda-speak? Watched have I online the growth of protest) but we don’t see her sitting anywhere. We don’t see her in her room or in the kitchen. We have no idea if she’s watching on her phone or her laptop. Suddenly, she can see “Larry’s face looking up as though in expectation,” though we have no idea what Larry looks like and can’t conjure him ourselves. Then, in the same paragraph, it’s a new day, Saturday, and “Molly comes into the kitchen dressed in white.” Dressed in white because, you know, that’s the color of not-the-regime. But white what? We talking pants and a shirt? It’s Saturday now? What day was it when it wasn’t Saturday just before? Part of the problem here is that Lynch writes in huge, sectional paragraphs. He just moves from thing to thing. Beneath the problem of the huge paragraphs being consistently vague, it’s not clear why Lynch is writing huge paragraphs, why he’s not separating out dialogue, why he’s doing any of it this way — I can’t see any reason for it, except that it appears literary.

This is distressing to me personally. As another author — admittedly much less well known — who writes in big paragraphs and doesn’t separate out dialogue, Prophet Song bothers me. I worked for years to understand why I write the way I write, and why the pages of my books should look the way they look. I eventually understood that because I was attempting to represent consciousness, and because consciousness doesn’t separate out visualization now, action now, dialogue now, I had to find a way to put it all together. To try to mimic the operation of the five skandhas. I would still use tags, but dialogue wouldn’t be separated out because a character was experiencing this all at once, as one big thing, through consciousness itself — I was, in sum, writing the mind.

But Lynch is not writing the mind. In fact, he’s mainly writing action (still that same Saturday, talking to her daughter):

Eilish turns to the table and lifts up a magazine and puts it down again. For goodness’ sake, she says, where are my glasses? Your glasses are sitting on top of your head. Well, she says, aren’t I a right eejit? When she turns around Molly is watching her strangely and then her mouth wrinkles as though she might cry. I want my daddy back, she says, I just want him back, why aren’t you doing something? Eilish looks into her eyes seeking for something, she does not know what, something from the old Molly to hold onto, some sense to give, but Molly instead is pushing at her, pulling on some lever.

The worst part of all this is I have to talk about the word “some” now (please do notice that word in two previous quotes). I wish I didn’t have to talk about the word “some,” but the novel has made me have to talk about the word “some.” In the last quote, we once again have the abstraction of inner self, with “some lever” being pulled on. What lever? Some lever. A specific lever. But also, not a specific lever at all. The lever never returns. The lever — so specific that it requires a “some” to identify it — is a mysterious lever, not your typical lever, the strange, dark, sad lever that “some” seems to suggest. And “some” continues to suggest this throughout the novel. Here are some examples of “some” from page 203 of my copy:

The fighting has passed through Connell Road like some ferocious grabbing water pulling the walls and the house fronts into rubble . . .the white dust faint upon the sycamore that stands unvanquished outside the school with half its trunk scorched to the neck as though some vandal had tried to set fire to it . . . this street that looks like two places at once as though some filmed transparency of a foreign war has been placed upon an image of a city . . .

We’re witnessing a literary tick. A formulation the writer loves, which I understand. We all have our little tricks we like. But this formulation is so frequent in Prophet Song that I felt pulled out of the reading experience.

Prophet Song made me think of another book that also begins with a missing father and the rise of a fascistic regime, Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness. The difference between these two books is stark. Fatelessness, about a 14-year-old who is imprisoned first at Auschwitz, then at Buchenwald, and for a longer duration at a camp in Zeitz, is a direct, intelligent, non-poetic, thoughtful book. Georg’s father is sent to a labor camp, and what Georg feels, more than anything in this opening, is embarrassment — embarrassment about how to act, how to proceed, how to show his father affection before he leaves, as well as embarrassment when he discusses the labor camps with a girl, her melodramatic reaction contrasted with his stoically ignorant one. In other words, Fatelessness is funny. There’s an absurd humor in Georg’s father going away, packing a knapsack. It’s a dark humor, of course, but it often makes the reader feel amused, sometimes even laugh, and because of this, a looming poignancy arises. In fact, even once in the camps, Georg tells jokes, so do others, laughs at his friend, Bandi Citrom, that is until he is too weak to laugh, too near death. My point here: absurdity, and its attendant, humor, are part of this dark landscape. This is all absent from Prophet Song.

More importantly though, Fatelessness, for all the seriousness of its subject matter, never gets sentimental, never becomes overly cinematic (perhaps due to when it was written), and always tries to remain very direct and honest about what’s going on within its main character, Georg. The policemen and guards in the book are sometimes very, very cruel, and sometimes also show Georg and others some decency. Unlike the void, darkness, and emptiness in Prophet Song, those existential noumena are properly aligned in Fatelessness, and written in a plain, direct way that adds to the specific reality of the situation, as when Georg has been in a camp for some time and is literally starving:

I had felt hungry at the brickyard, on the train, at Auschwitz, even at Buchenwald, but I had never before had the sensation like this, protractedly, over a long haul, if I may put it that way. I was transformed into a hole, a void of some kind, and my every endeavor, every effort, was bent to stopping, filling, and silencing this bottomless, evermore clamorous void. . . . But I did try [to eat] sand, for instance, and anytime I saw grass I would never hesitate; but then, sad to say, there was not much in the way of grass to be found. . . .

While the darkness and voidness is symbolic, poetic, lyrical, sentimental, and abstract in Prophet Song, it is experienced as a direct fact in Fatelessness — it is real, a real aspect of a particular, specific life, and portrayed here with more directness, understanding, and emotional and psychological depth for that directness. It is just this kind of directness that Prophet Song needed more of. Lynch, in attempting to artfully get some words around the ineffable qualities of life and death, forgets that sometimes things are transparently what they are, and in their plainness, in their directness, amazing truths are revealed, as in this passage toward the middle of Fatelessness while in the camp at Zeitz:

[I]magination remains unfettered even in captivity. . . . I usually found myself back home. True, make no mistake about it, I was no less audacious in doing that than I would have been with, say, Calcutta; only here I hit upon something, a certain modesty, and, I might say, a kind of work that compensated and thereby, as it were, promptly authenticated the effort. I soon realized, for example, that I had not been living properly, had not made good use of my days back home; there was much for me to regret, far too much. . . . There had been dishes I had been fussy about . . . there was the whole senseless tug-of-war between my mother and father over me. . . .

What’s remarkable here is that though the reader is in a concentration camp with Georg, though we are in a situation here that we’ve never been in, though this seems so extreme and we’re so far from it, we recognize, immediately, that a realization like this is authentic because we’ve had similar realizations too. No such realizations come in Prophet Song, and that is because, rather than being an individual who can think, Eilish is a reaction who reacts, until she sort of doesn’t. Everything is political, everything is about fascism, everything about the regime and the very basic consequences of that regime: people being unmoored from their lives, their homes. People dying. It’s probably unfair to compare Prophet Song to something like Fatelessness, but I offer it here because I don’t think Prophet Song approaches the reality of such a situation in the correct way — it may even do a disservice to it. While its politics are admirable, though never risky — we all know a fascistic regime would be awful, and we all know it is important to be reminded of real-world horrors so as not to repeat them — novels are novels, not sets of propaganda. Never once in Fatelessness does there seem to be a message about how awful and unmooring and how bad fascism is — it’s far too inquisitive for such simplicity.

Prophet Song is extremely readable, goes quickly, and I did want to know what happened to Eilish and her family. But, I never stopped to consider. I never put the book down and thought. Mainly, the thoughts I had, besides will he let them live or die?, were, this is overwritten, this is out of a movie, this feels inauthentic, and this feels clearly ideologically driven. In other words, I could see the author all over the novel, hands everywhere, shaping things; it seemed to me, in fact, that the author was so taken by an overarching political perspective, so rigid in that perspective, that he had no new thoughts about any of this and was simply regurgitating things he had learned were bad. In this way, Prophet Song is a symptom of the current Western cultures it has come out of: cultures of clearly divided opinions, starkly drawn lines. Even though Lynch never really gets into the specific politics of this dystopian Ireland, we easily feel the “left” and “right” of how this is all working — and those on the right, they’re barely even people (though, to his credit, Lynch makes a nod at grey areas later when a rebellion arises and those folks are violent too). The book almost seems to say: you, your family, that is what is real; everything else, that is political machinery, machinery of war, the machinery of the regime, and should be regarded as such. Fatelessness, on the other hand, was a book I read slowly, pausing, often confused, not by what was happening, but by how the main character was responding, growing, living. I even forgot it was fiction. This was, to me anyway, the ingeniousness of Fatelessness — that Georg is never mere reaction. He is always Georg, an individual, even when he’s being reduced down to nothing. His individuality always remains. Eilish, on the other hand, in much less intense circumstances, quickly becomes a shell.

If only Prophet Song had looked back to literary forebears like Fatelessness, there might have been a chance for it to have been a great book, a book that explored the more confusing, taboo areas of such a situation. It might have actually raised some questions, rather than seeming to constantly be driving its point home about how awful this all is. In Fatelessness, at the end of the novel, when he has survived the camps and returned home, Georg is frustrated upon seeing his family again, who want to hear of the “nightmares” of the camps, the “atrocity” he has suffered through. He’s so angry he can’t say anything. He escapes onto the street. He vows that if he’s ever asked about it again, he will tell others about “the happiness of the concentration camps.” An incredible, moving ending. This doesn’t mean that the camps were pleasant places — they weren’t, people died, and Georg nearly did too. But he also grew up there, had friends, experienced moments of kindness. Experienced the growth, even, of his own sense of himself. Not just his identity, but his innermost nature. What is that nature? Fatelessness leaves it mysterious, because it is. Prophet Song, on the other hand, despite its insistence on the ineffability of existence, tells us everything. It made me re-state something to myself I had forgotten, and may serve as a way forward for literary novels of the left to try to see beyond their own increasingly static ideological predilections: just because a novel reads quickly, has good morals, the right stance, a compelling story, and a propulsive quality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great novel, and in fact, it may not be a work of art at all.

Alan Rossi is the author of two novels, Mountain Road, Late at Night and Our Last Year. His stories and essays have appeared in many journals. He lives in South Carolina with his family.

The calls came in around 10:40 on the night of August 25, 1955. Thomas McGuinn, the dispatcher on shift in the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office, had been on the job for three years, but had never encountered anything like this. Sgt. Ralph Weber and patrolman Ernest Nehrer were watching a “big, bright, round” object above the Fernald atomic plant — where uranium ore was processed for nuclear weapons.

Both Navy veterans (Weber had been an airman), the officers were in separate cruisers, watching the object from different locations as it hovered at 5,000 feet. McGuinn also fielded frantic calls from farmers in the area about the “bright, round and tannish in color” object. Nobody could identify the object, but its arrival was less than surprising.

For the past few days, the Cincinnati area had been besieged by unusual sightings. Members of the Ground Observer Corps, a civil defense group with eyes peeled toward the sky, reported airborne lights of several colors. According to contemporary researcher Leonard Stringfield, the lights were variously described as “blinking with a bobbing motion” and “hovering in pendulum-like motions.” Once they were caught on radar, the military responded swiftly: jets were scrambled from the Lockbourne Air Force Base to intercept the objects.

Stringfield, who stood in nearby Madison Place with binoculars pointed toward the sky, struggled to see the drama through heavy clouds, but recalled that “the continuous din of low flying jets gave the writer a familiar choking chill, one that he had known during the Pacific campaigns while waiting for the inevitable attack.” America, it seemed, was under invasion.

Others were less convinced.

During the flap of sightings, Conquest of Space was showing at the local Woodlawn Drive-In. The film about an international mission to Mars was standard sci-fi fodder of its day, but includes some interesting elements. The commanding officer, Col. Samuel Merritt, comes to believe the crew is acting against God’s will. After an astronaut dies on board, Merritt recites Psalm 38:3 before sending the corpse into space.

While viewers watched the space drama at the outdoor theater, “flickering red, green, and white lights” flew overhead. Afterward the theater’s owner, Nat Kaplan, wrote to the Motion Picture Exhibitor trade magazine with a theory that dismissed not only the local event, but the growing sightings across the country. Kaplan “pointed out that outdoor movie screens are built to reflect light skyward and that light bounces from screens.”

A response to Kaplan’s theory came from a reader in Clarksburg, West Virginia named Gray Barker, who operated the state’s “largest film buying-booking agency” and also happened to be the editor of The Saucerian, the “world’s largest publication about ‘Flying Saucers.’” Barker penned an eleven-paragraph screed, which the editors coyly trimmed down to three, so as to stress Barker’s firm dismissal: “we were always under the impression that drive-in screens, if tilted, were tilted DOWNWARD, to reflect the maximum light toward the audience. Perhaps his screen is remarkably different than most.”

Barker ended his letter with a gentle curse: “let me again protest Mr. Kaplan’s disservice to ‘saucer’ investigations—may his film rental rise!”

A 1956 episode of Wonderama, a Sunday morning children’s show, featured two puppets — Egbert the Bookworm and the Steam Shovel— and a man in a space suit. That man was 31-year-old Gray Barker, whose newly released book, They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, alleged that the government and Men in Black were silencing people who reported UFOs. An interesting choice for a kids’ show, but book publicity tours are rarely glamorous.

Some people’s names are their destinies. Barker was a carnival barker for the paranormal. A shrewd writer who realized that UFO believers and seekers were similar to fans, Barker stretched the truth until it snapped—exaggerating kernels of fact and perpetrating outright hoaxes. Barker ran a press, Saucerian Books, that published works on the fringe of the fringe: stories of contactees and mothmen and space lovers.

Far from a literary footnote, Barker is actually the perfect encapsulation of UFO culture in America: a community somewhere between a fandom and a religion, shepherded by hucksters who peddle schlock. For those who live and die by UFOs, it is in their best interest that the objects live up to their names: unidentified, a perpetual mystery that creates attention and generates (often very little) money.

The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker by Gabriel McKee from the MIT Press arrives at the perfect time. Fresh off months of frenzied sightings of mysterious drones in the Northeast, and with the release of alleged Navy encounters in recent memory, UFOs are a part of the public psyche again.

Media coverage of these new flaps, including in legacy publications like the Wall Street Journal, has been poor. Breathless revelations that the government used UFO sightings as disinformation campaigns to hide secret weapons programs ignore decades of reporting and released documents. Longtime investigator Jerome Clark has bemoaned the lack of historical knowledge of those covering the subject. I agree with Clark, and confess feeling like a kindred spirit with Barker when he critiqued the overzealous theater owner.

I’ve been researching and writing about UFOs for more than 20 years, starting with a local case from July 9, 1947. The day before, the Roswell Army Air Field had issued their infamous press release: “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.”

On the other side of the country, in Morristown, New Jersey, a pilot named John H. Janssen observed four discs overhead. Janssen, who wrote an occasional airport column for local newspapers, took a photo — one of the first-ever published UFO images. The case was my introduction to the complexity of ufology. Although the image is striking, and Janssen initially appeared to be a credible witness, researcher Ted Bloecher notes that Janssen was prone to conjecture. “I really believe these craft to be operated by an intelligence far beyond that developed by we earth-bound mortals,” Janssen said, and thought “these are reconnaissance craft” that “are probably making a thorough study of us and our terrain and atmosphere before making any overtures.” Janssen soon claimed another, more dramatic encounter: “his plane was stopped in mid-air for a number of minutes while being scrutinized by a pair of discs hovering nearby.”

I knew to be suspicious of such observers. While in high school, I interviewed a former member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, once the leading UFO research organization in America. As a scientist, he was both interested in and skeptical of UFOs — an important mixture. If I wanted to get truly serious about research, he told me, I needed to study Egyptology, ancient languages, folklore, and theology. I had to recognize that even if a field was new to me, I had to contend with its history. Most importantly, he said, be wary of single-witness cases. Most people couldn’t be counted on to tell the truth in small matters, let alone ones as tenuous as the paranormal.

It was an intimidating and necessary conversation to have, and prepared me for investigative work in other subjects, ranging from exorcisms to international hacking cases. Yet skepticism should fuel, but never neuter, a sense of wonder.

Early in The Saucerian, McKee writes that we should envision his book as a form of biography, but adds a disclaimer: “I encourage readers to keep in mind the primary focus of the work at hand — exploring Barker’s role in and impact on the production, distribution, and consumption of the stigmatized knowledge associated with UFOs and the paranormal — and forgive the relatively short shrift that other areas of his life may receive in what follows.”

That’s certainly a fine angle for a university press book. But McKee makes another statement that gives me pause: “To understand how the UFO macronarrative has grown and influenced our culture, we should first examine the only physical evidence that we have of UFO experiences: the books that describe, contextualize, and speculate about those experiences.”

McKee is not a ufologist; he’s an accomplished research librarian who works at NYU’s Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Research librarians are gifted detectives. He discovered that Barker’s book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers appeared in the 1958 film Bell, Book and Candle. The movie depicts “a publisher of occult books (Jimmy Stewart) who becomes romantically involved with a practitioner of black magic (Kim Novak),” and Stewart’s shelves are lined with multiple copies of Barker’s book. McKee concludes: “Despite the similarities between the topics published by Stewart’s character” and Barker, “it’s most likely that the shelves were stocked from remaindered titles acquired by the film’s set dressers. This would indicate that by the beginning of filming in 1958, Barker’s book had run its course, at least as far as the mainstream book trade was concerned.” I can’t help but applaud that level of observation.

Despite these talents, McKee’s dismissal of UFO evidence undercuts the complexity of his subject. McKee desires literary and linguistic approaches to UFOs. He is correct that the “unidentified nature of an unidentified flying object means that, tautologically, the percipient doesn’t know what they saw,” and that Barker “simultaneously strove to preserve the mystery surrounding this ungraspable subject and to package and commodify it for an audience that he cultivated and nurtured.” He also reminds readers that modern American UFO discourse is inextricable from language by citing Kenneth Arnold’s description of his seminal sighting in June 1947: “Arnold compared their shape to that of a pie plate, but newspapers picked up a different term for their headlines, from Arnold’s comment that they moved ‘like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.’” Flying saucers was a description of movement, not shape.

Yet McKee’s narrative method is too convenient for his material. UFOs are more than a literary medium. One of the most compelling American cases — a 1964 sighting of a craft and humanoids by Socorro, New Mexico policeman Lonnie Zamora, with trace evidence and corroboration — merits a single sentence in the book.

This is the conundrum of The Saucerian: it’s a great book on Barker the man (and showman), but it misses the opportunity to be a great book about UFOs. Perhaps I am being too greedy here, and again, channeling a bit of Barker’s own frustration about the subject.

Let me say what McKee does well. Barker and UFOs are preternaturally American: kooky and mystical. Although Barker was skeptical of the paranormal, he believed in belief, so to speak: he was a populist, a poet, a closeted gay man in West Virginia in the mid 20th century. His central role in the burgeoning UFO movement meant that many of the essential tropes of UFOs that last to the present can be traced back to his pen and imagination.

Barker “mythologized” when Men in Black visited Albert Bender, a fellow ufologist. The ending to They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers remains both chilling and clever:

I am not alarmed about bug-eyed monsters, little green men, or dero who may or may not be shooting at us with rays from far underground.

Something else disturbs me far more.

There exist forces or agencies which would prevent us from finding out whether or not there are such green men, or bug-eyed monsters, or saucers with things in them.

I have a feeling that some day there will come a slow knocking at my own door. They will be at your door, too, unless we all get wise and find out who the three men really are.

Barker corresponded with everyone — researchers, believers, and skeptics alike — and his playful nature belied a serious core. “I AM thoroughly dedicated to promoting UFO crackpottery,” Barker wrote in a letter. Fellow UFO trickster James Moseley said that he and Barker’s main contributions were “to stir the ufological pot when things got dull.” Like a good satirist, though, Barker respected his subject, and his audience.

McKee’s conclusion in The Saucerian is sound: Gray Barker’s “influence is enormous, albeit scarcely untraceable, affecting the rhetoric of UFO literature more than its substance.”

Nick Ripatrazone is the Culture Editor for Image Journal, and a Contributing Editor for the Catholic Herald of London. He has written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and The Atlantic, and his most recent book is The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America.