I've just finished Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. It's a fun book of criticism--published in 2006, in the midst of the Global War on Terror--examining the prophecies that lie at the heart of such texts as John Winthrop's "Dreams of a City on a Hill," the Declaration of Independence, "I Have a Dream," or Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Both Winthrop's and Lincoln's speeches confront in their own ways the reality that America, as a nation, is united solely by a promise, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," that could be Christian and prosocial, as Winthrop envisioned it ("we must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertain each other in brotherly Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessitiesâŠ"), as easily as it could be utterly, nakedly venal (like the fuck you, I'm getting mine of a person whose happiness might come at your expense). Marcus considers these documents alongside the works of various 20th century artists that might help us understand these two interpretations of America's promise and character as they register in Americans' lives: John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, Philip Roth's novels, David Lynch's films and shows, and the work of the band Pere Ubu. I remember starting the book in circumstances curiously apropos--under the dim lights of a nighttime bus from SF to the East Bay, which I'd boarded in lieu of the BART train I meant to take after a power outage abruptly shut down service in the whole Transbay Tube. So I was standing, book in one hand, the other clutching the overhead rail, in a close throng of passengers already restive after the half an hour we'd waited in the desolation of Salesforce Transit Center, the kind of largely unmanned contemporary outpost where voices echo particularly loudly under the florescent lights as you await the lonely buses that arrive at their appointed times. And I read the opening chapter amid the low mutterings and jostlings of the very kind of fractious group Marcus may have envisioned when he wrote lines like "Take away the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and perhaps various public speeches that lie behind those documents or pass them on, and as a nation you have little more than a collection of buildings and people who have no special reason to speak to each other, and nothing to say."
The great nation that Winthrop prophesied, or Martin Luther King, Jr., has obviously never come to exist. As Marcus writes, "America raised itself on the rock of a metaphysically perfect idea, and on that rock it broke into pieces: the nation, not the idea." The result is a long dialectic between American artists' desires "to defy the country as it is and [âŠ] to embrace it as it ought to be." And the prophetic voice that emerges as a strain from Melville to Dos Passos to Roth to Pere Ubu's David Thomas--the voice that holds others to account--becomes vital in a nation that has never truly realized the promises or kept the covenants on which it was founded.
All in all, this book made me feel revitalized. The amount of life Marcus finds in cultural artifacts, and the line drawn from the country's foundations through all these works to its narrative present, made something quicken in my sense of interest and engagement in the world around me--a sense which, for the last year or two in particular, has felt pretty dead. Even John Grisham novels are elevated when Marcus gives them his attention, visits upon them his perceptive, dispassionate eye. He manages to make the passing description he gives of them as beautiful, compelling, and real as anything in his deep exegeses of Roth or David Lynch:
At their most radical, as with The Runaway Jury and The Partner [âŠ], Grisham's books describe a national disease: an interlocking directorate of corruption that links institutions, the law, corporations, and crime until none is distinguishable from the other and the only choice a decent man or woman can make is to steal from thieves and disappear.
The hero perpetrates a brilliant scam, reaps an unimaginable fortune, and abandons the United States for the gigantic fraud it has become or always was. The hero takes up residence in a sunny place with nice beaches and loose banking regulations; it may be just as corrupt as the U.S.A., but it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is. Its air may be as polluted as the air in Pittsburgh or Phoenix, but not with hypocrisy. There are no national fairy tales of innocence and good intentions, no comforting bedtime stories like the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address.
What the Grisham hero really leaves behind is illusion. In his or her last place of refuge, the hero is at home in whatever racket it is that calls itself a nation; at least no one is fooledâŠ
Marcus's language does get a bit heightened or forced when he tries to do justice in prose to the feelings that music or film, in particular, give him--the clauses and the second person piling on until the reader loses the thread altogether. The penultimate section on Pere Ubu is particularly trying in this regard, as are certain stretches of the chapters on Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me. Both film and music are comparatively ephemeral forms, and thus resistant, maybe even hostile, to capture in language. It's also true one person's subjective impressions of what they find most meaningful in art can be hard to make land, particularly when you don't know the work they're writing about and have to rely on their descriptions to make it real to you. But Marcus's writing made me miss the feeling of having culture matter to me as much as it does to him. And it made want to reinvest in it--particularly music, with which I feel I've especially lost touch. I've spent the last couple years circling around the same comfortable touchpoints of my somewhat calcified taste, rather than letting that continue to grow and evolve through true, questing contact with the present, with the music being made now, even if the good stuff is or simply feels harder than it once was to find.
There was one line of Marcus's in particular--this reference, in the midst of his discussion of Pere Ubu, to "approach[ing] the greater culture with a personal culture" of your own. The implication being that this assembly of a personal culture can help you define yourself against the greater culture, or arm yourself within it. I, by contrast, have spent a long time being relatively passive vis a vis culture. Feeling besieged, in a landscape of entertainments served to me by algorithms that are relentless in flattering my preferences and serving me the same old, or that steer me to shelter within the same old just to get away from them. I suspect my sense of exhaustion is also fed by a distinct contrast between culture today and culture as it operated in the 20th century, which so shaped Marcus's sensibilities. It seems to me back then it was more of a centrifuge, exerting its force upon audiences at its periphery. It sought to shape mass taste rather than to flatter the individual's, and it sought to overwhelm and dominate the mass, rather than to ingratiate and seduce the individual. And it was as though the force of the centrifuge, the hegemon, challenged people to choose to participate in that centrifugal culture or to oppose it. Whereas now, culture may be more like an ocean, surrounding you in an ambient way, there for you to dip in and out of. Thus I feel that now, I receive culture or don't; when I receive it, I assimilate certain pieces of it into the person, the type, I feel I am; I don't really pursue it so much, not like I did while I was growing up, at the tail end of the 20th century model, and when self-creation was both an urgent project and an unfinished one. And there's true value in being the selection mechanism--in being the agent, in an active, interrogative relation to the culture around you rather than uneasy hostage to it, that assembles cultural objects in a personally or societally meaningful sequence, or seeks to understand the deeper currents that run beneath and form the cultural objects you encounter. When my will to, say, seek out new music, or to read any way but fitfully, or to really, really write, died, sometime in 2024--brutalized perhaps by this sense of my own superannuation as I entered a certain point in my 30s, the point when I guess everyone confronts the end of youth and the beginning of mature life, with its knowledge of certain failures and lost opportunities that the future will no longer redeem, and of certain things you'll simply never be; or brutalized by the general banality of so much of what I see when I skim the top layer of the algorithmized culture most readily available to me; or by both these things--that death of the will to really engage with culture may have been fed, too, by this sense of being stranded in my own algorithmized individualityâŠ
Or maybe this is all nonsense. In any case, reading that line of Marcus's about assembling a personal culture, I flashed back to another book I'd recently finished--Olivier Roy's The Crisis of Culture. In that book, Roy, a political scientist, attempts to go beyond constructs like "identity politics" altogether to understand whether the very concept of "culture" still coheres today as it historically did. He claims that globalization, the internet, neoliberalism, and the pressures to affinity-based alliances and intense individualism to which all three of those contribute have made the very notion of implicit, inherited social values, upon which cultures depend to be vital and transmissible, a vexed one. They instigate an era of deculturation--of the collapse of dominant, hegemonic cultures into a series of subcultures, all of which feel themselves obscurely threatened or beset, in the absence of a clearly dominant culture to define themselves against--that has not yet been countered by a widespread acculturation, or access to a new widespread, global, majority culture. And it's natural, Roy argues, to invest in individual identities and affective, affinity-based subcultures when you live in a world whose scale and algorithmized incentives make all kinds of alliances available to its networked denizens, whether those alliances align with their local, territorial, inherited cultures or not. And whose economic structures force individuals to fend for themselves within societies that are increasingly uninterested in being societies, at the level of welfare programs, corporate regulation, taxation of the wealthy, and all the other features of governance that would restrain inequality and secure the collective quality of life from which other attributes of culture may come.
Due caveats: Roy's book is a complex one that covers a lot of ground, and intervenes at levels of politics higher than those I've otherwise been engaging. I appreciate it more as a provocative than a factual account of the recent past--especially given the way he, say, conflates "culture" and "politics"--and I simplify it considerably here. (It's also been the target of praise in outlets I find less than inspiring, like Tablet--unfair, considering Roy's left lean and generally balanced analysis, but predictable, considering the book engages with identity politics and invokes events, like "hummus-gate," upon which a magazine like Tablet would naturally fall with relish.) But one thing that stuck out to me in it was Roy's contention that we live a world in which much of culture has become explicit and normative. It's based on people's avowed identities, within the affinity-based subcultures in which they've placed themselves, rather than on identities that are tacitly understood within or assigned to them by a hegemonic dominant culture; on their resulting, competing claims for legitimacy and recognition of those identities; and on demands they make that others comport with certain norms that would allow them to feel comfortable in a world they feel to be threatening to them--often justly (in the case of, say, trans people, who are genuinely menaced by factions with the determination to exterminate them socially and politically) and sometimes not (as with Christian evangelists, determined to fit the whole world to their arbitrary image, or nationalists of whatever stripe, whose nationalism generally disregards the reality of their own dominance within their nations). The emergence of such a world is again understandable, in an age when there may no longer be shared, implicit cultural expectations to default to, set by a clear, acknowledged hegemon, or by one's clearly oppositional relationship to that hegemon. And it may leave little space for an imaginary: "a belief system," implicitly understood by all members of a given group or collective, "that gives culture meaning and allows that meaning to be shared."
Cultures depend on imaginaries is, I guess, the operative point. And we may live in an era in which cultural imaginaries are particularly imperiled. An era that demands some kind of dialectical reconciliation between the era of hegemonic culture--with its many inadequacies and oppressions, which the explicit, normative regime Roy describes developed in part to counteract, and the implicit imaginaries it inculcated--and the time we find ourselves in now. A time of explicit, normative politics and individualized, algorithmized culture, with some amount of progress made in the realms of justice, thanks to identity politics when it operates as intended, but sans a real imaginary. And as I finished The Shape of Things to Come, absorbed the narrative of American being that it offered, and felt the interest and engagement and sense of coherence and meaning it inspired in me, I also felt the emergence of a resolution, for myself as individual, critic, artist, and member of the American nation, whether I always wish to be or not, that I hope to keep in the months to come: Revive the dead imaginary. Look for the art and artifacts there are to believe in. Assemble the "personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part." And from these, perhaps, the new culture--the real, vital collective life to replace exhausted atomization--or else, something to speak that life into being, or to truly mourn its absence--perhaps that may comeâŠ
I suspect this is ultimately not an entirely successful argument--that I've given Roy's theses more credence than I should, and that my attempt to sync them with Marcus's book confuses more than it clarifies. But I make it all the same.
As Matthew Gasdaâs novel The Sleepers opens, aspiring actress Mariko and her leftie professor husband Dan hover, in a state of complacency, between split up or staying together. Splitting up would entail risk, and a move against inertia. Staying together is a concession both seem to view with a degree of dread and loathingâthough not sufficient dread or loathing to actually refuse that outcome.
When Dan is approached by a former student of his, Eliza, it kicks off an abortive affair, consisting of one unsuccessful romantic encounter followed by a grim round of coffee in which Eliza tries to extricate herself from the situation while Dan clings desperately on. At the same time, Mariko has a brief sexual encounter with her mentor, an older director named Xavier, whom she's learned is dying of cancer. Neither Dan nor Mariko come immediately to learn of the other's infidelity. It would require emotional honesty of which theyâre not capable. But eventually, Dan loses his job when Eliza posts about his behavior. This impels Mariko to leaveâinjecting her with the initiative she could not take herselfâand even reapply herself to her career. In the aftermath, Dan tries to move on with his life, but finds he canât. Mariko secures a few small gigs and manages to start a family with a new partner, though she remains haunted by a lingering sense that, despite the outward security sheâs achieved, sheâs simply and fundamentally inadequate to the challenges of being alive.
Gasda began as a playwright, and some of those instincts seem to leech into this novel. At the level of structure, for instance, with his reliance on scenes, the particular places he chooses to break action, and the dramatic fast-forwards this often involves. Consider the way we open with Marikoâs sister, Akari, flying in from LA to visit; then jump to Dan and Mariko talking in their kitchen the night before; and then leap to Danâs first encounter with Eliza, and after that to Marikoâs encounter with Xavier. And consider how, late in the novel, we move from a conversation Mariko and Akari have, after Marikoâs slept with Xavier, all the way to Mariko and Danâs first conversation after their split, at least two years after the event, and learn nothing of what happened in the interim.
Thereâs also Gasdaâs particular reliance on dialogueâon long stretches of it that flow largely unattributed. For example:
âIâm embarrassed that I donât want to sleep with you more, Mariko.â
âIâm embarrassed for you too.â
âI know it hurts you.â
âIt doesnât hurt me,â she said, angrily. âIt confuses me.â
âIt hurtsââ
âIâm not, so you should want to.â
âI know I should.â
âBut you can see why I worry that Iâm not hot enough or that Iâm losing my hotness.â
âAbsurd.â
âIs it?â
âThatâs not how I thinkâŠâ Dan whined.
âOkay.â
The device seems intended to heighten a velocity in the exchange or an immersion on the part of the reader. It also makes the conversations hard to parse, particularly given the way most of the characters speakâall too predictably; talking at each other rather than with each other, pitting their neuroses against each other, picking apart each othersâ psychologies; insisting theyâre being misunderstood, insisting they even want to understand each other. Quickly I came to yearn for the dialogue tags that a playâs script wouldâve reliably given meâand for considerably realer, more engaging conversation.
There are also long series of text exchanges end up numbing to readâlike this one, between Dan and Eliza:
I felt like we left a lot of things unsaid.
like what?
like feeling-things.
no Dan we didnât
Are you sure about that?
No but letâs pretend I am. Yes. Yes Iâm sure.
wtf⊠where are you right now?
i'm on my way home . . ..
can I come over?
no
why not?
why not? Because I said so.
And so on.
Gasda, whoâs best known as the writer of the play Dimes Square, is among a rash of contemporary artists working to emphasize aesthetics over political content. They argue a renewed emphasis on the aesthetic is necessary to repair the damage done by the internet and its discoursesâwhich, in subjecting art to the demands of politics, have bred timidity on the parts of artists, and served to homogenize and banalize culture. I donât think The Sleepers lives up to those aesthetic ambitions. But I wonder if its portrayal of the millennial moment, in such hideously banal detail, is intended to help sketch out âthe cultural and artistic dimensions of our shared lifeâ as it currently standsâdimensions âwhich alone can ennoble, clarify, synthesize, and sustain all other efforts at American renewal,â as Gasda argued in a 2024 essay for American Affairsâso that a culture capable of creating aesthetic beauty might once again become possible.
*
Iâll also say: in its oddities and frustrations, The Sleepers made for an interesting break from a book like Martyr! by Kaveh Akbarâwhich I'd also read not too long ago, in one of my perennial attempts to keep on top of the culture and the novels people are talking about.
Akbar looks to join Ocean Vuong in a class of poets who are as defeated as Gasda the playwright is in the challenge of successfully applying their established talents to the novel form. Iâd initially been drawn to Martyr! by a particular passage Iâd seen online that suggested it might have something meaningful to say about the world we live in, how it might limit us, and how it might be changed:
The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Donât lie, donât cheat, donât fuck or steal or kill, and youâll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. Thatâs the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything⊠A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, heâs buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reignsâŠ
Though even in just these lines, I could see some hallmarks of what I went on to find. Like the use of the second person, which Iâd argue belies this novelâs status as a sentimental vehicle the readerâs meant to project themselves into, like so many other novels now, more than the truly integral, self-contained aesthetic experience a novel should be. Ultimately I found Martyr! wheel-spinning, directionlessâmore interested in letting me luxuriate in protagonist Cyrus Shamsâs being, as he seeks to find Himself and Meaning and A Reason to Live, than in actually, dimensionally developing his character through a discernible plot or thematic progressionâand thereby fully elaborating some larger point or critique, not just intimating one, in passages like the one I just quoted, which was revealed to be throwaway.
Whatâs more, I didn't get the sense Akbar wrote Martyr! expecting some people might not like it. He seemed to have written it in a way he thought or hoped would move all his readers and please them, and specifically by making them feelâperhaps as opposed to think. I donât have the same impression of The Sleepersâprecisely because itâs much more ironic, much more withholding, and rebarbative, in elements of its plot.
There's a useful lesson in the reminder there are more important things in art than peopleâs liking it. You might even try to write something you genuinely suspect not everyone will like. And not in the sense of individual taste or preference, of what a particular individual might find agreeable or disagreeable, which will inevitably have its variance. But in the sense of provoking a readerâs unease in such a way that it leads them to inquire.
And so, as flat as Gasda's characters seemed to me, and however baffling his narrative decisionsâlike Danâs being so thoroughly brought low by this encounter that really doesnât go far at all, and then forsaking all his values to flee to the comfort of his wealthy father's money, and then (spoiler alert) killing himself (an outcome revealed rather abruptly, in the course of a conversation Mariko has with her sisterâs partner Suzanne toward the novelâs end), with every element of this sequence of events being heightened as predictably as someone with Gasdaâs specific skepticism of the millennial moment, its subjects, and the politics, art, and culture that it produced would heighten itâI did feel that the questioning of all this was something Gasda wanted me to do.
And I related too to the kind of free-floating, all-consuming millennial anxiety Gasda portrays, which plagues Dan, Mariko, Eliza, even the confident Akari to some degree. This fear and dread of being that always keeps one on the threshold, diffident, clinging to what one feels one can manage and resenting itâyet too afraid to upend it, to follow where true passion might lead. Too insecure, too brittle, too inadequate to the weight of life itself to be able to simply be who you are, or make true or good choices, or behave in ways that would serve your highest good, or any good.
[Eliza] really didn't do anything that she believed in, anything that she respected. The less she respected something, the more she was attracted to it. Her own very poor self-image was constantly searching for correspondence, likeness, in the world.... It was better to give up hope, to renounce everything extraordinary about oneself, than it was to be stranded inside the deceptive paradigm of self-actualization... [She] didn't know anyone who was that, who had that, who was ever going to be that.
I wonder if it speaks to a kind of delicacy in Gasda's craft as a novelist, however conscious, that he tells us that Eliza feels this way but does not really reveal why. This is a generational question. The reader will have to solve it on their own.
I feel similarly about the inscrutability of the novelâs final imageâpresented by Akariâs girlfriend, Suzanne, as the two fly back home to LA from visiting Mariko, her husband Tim, and their daughter Olivia.
Thatâs all Suzanne can focus on: the plane getting airborne, and that gentle feeling that settles over airplanes once theyâre at altitude.
You just float along in your giant air pocket (almost like youâre swimming with your eyes closed). The plane could begin to fall, and you might not even notice. The engines could shut off, altitude could suddenly drop, people could begin to scream, and itâs possible that you could still be asleep. It just depends on how deep a sleep it is. If itâs deep enough, nothing can harm you.
Thereâs no fear; thereâs no disturbance. You just have to keep your eyes closed, your earbuds in. It's not just biological sleepâitâs a deeper, truer sleep than that: the sleep of the soul.
Less than one percent of one percent of one percent of what could happen, will happen, Suzanne thinks. Of the infinite universes that are possible, sheâs stuck in this one. Of the infinite thoughts she could have, sheâs having this one. For no good reason. Just because.
Is this ironic or sincere? And what exactly is being described? A kind of insensitivity to reality? Peace with it? A commitment to simply being that runs so deep one becomes impervious to reality and the anxieties it can induce? Is that really what weâre meant to take as a counterpoint to Dan, Mariko, and Eliza and the manifold ways they make life harder for each other and themselves? Oneâs tempted to read the novelâs title as a reference to its protagonistsâas a critical characterization of the ways they seem to sleepwalk through life, unable to be responsible agents within it or to come to terms with the outcomes it deals them. To have sleep be characterized as a kind of virtue, by one of the novelâs more successful and secure characters, feels odd. The abruptness of this closing image and the general irresolution of the novelâs themes could be considered failures on Gasdaâs part. But they felt like interpretively productive choices to me, to at least some degree.
*
Or maybe Iâm just being overly generous in my read. This isnât a novel I eagerly plan to revisit, either. Ultimately, though, Iâll say one more thing for The Sleepers. It does seem to have a confidence that there are some insights about the moment, and verdicts on the culture, that only literature, only the novel, can capture as it doesâwith its affordances, like the third-person omniscient narration that can ironize so well; and its words, which you have to think about, or its descriptions, which you have to imagine. Does television, for instanceâwith its images already crafted and ready to consume, offered to you, and not sought out or created by youâdo anything like it? It was funny to finish The Sleepers and come across these lines from Lisa Borst's review, in n+1, of a recent spate of novels set in the TV industry, like (to bring up another currently popular book) Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner:
Absent from most of the new TV novels is an older literatureâs icy confidence that what weâre reading is independent fromâââor even superior toâââthe entertainment business, once invariably portrayed as a phony and craven industry run by âintellectual stumblebums,â as [Nathanael] West wrote.
Thoughâit's also a little ironic to see the entertainment business of the 20th century described as phony and craven. Often, I think, it's downright romantic compared to what we have nowâin its sincerity, or in the use that its consumers can make of it. Itâs hard to imagine a âstanâ using music as inspiration for their own self-expression the way, say, a fan of grunge might once haveâŠ
The universe has a way of bringing you what you need--if sometimes as compensation for what you'd rather not have gotten. A few weeks ago, I was effectively demoted from my current position at work--relegated from the full supervision of an editorial team I'd had to a managing editorial position, focused on supervising projects from copyediting onward, with a colleague taking over both the developmental editors I'd hired and the task of shaping manuscripts. This colleague is also a close friend. I like her; I respect her; I'm glad for her. An objective part of me, one that recognizes her gifts and the ways I fell short of my supervisor's expectations, understands why the decision was made. I have also cried more often and harder over the last several weeks than I want to admit. It's been a bitter experience, that much more so for being so unceremonious--announced to me one week, and executed the next, such that I'm often thinking, this time last month, I was still editorial manager. This time last month, I'd actually look forward to this to some degree. Now I open Outlook to find emails and meetings in which things I used to be in charge of are picked apart and made better than they were with me. I've never dealt with humiliation particularly well--with the sense that everyone sees me as I'm being passed over. Everyone can see my decade-plus in the industry and what it's come to. What must they think? The thought of being pitied, of being seen as having been deemed incompetent, fills me with loathing. The degree to which I'm invested in any of this, despite my professed leftist leanings, that's humiliating too.
I've always had the distinct sense my supervisor disliked meâfound me passive, unenterprising, more content to work an existing process and do it well than to make it âefficientâ or âoptimizedâ or any of the other buzzwords used by those to the C-suite born. It's also felt like a referendum on how I've lived my lifeâhow much of my sense of self I've Virgoishly founded in work, which, as they say, won't love you back. And it's felt like a capstone on the last couple years' particularly brutal isolation. I have friends, but I keep them at arm's length; I always have. I've dated, but I've seldom been as successful as one might wish, and a heartbreak I experienced a year and a half ago sent me into such a brutal tailspin that I withdrew from it altogether. Now it's like the last pillar in my life, the one that always seemed like at least it would be intact, however embarrassing that thought, has been made to crumble. And it feels very late in my life to be rebuilding any of it. In the last several weeks, I've often looked back at the last decade wondering just how the fuck I got here. Wondering, too, at the nature of my investments, and at the persistence of certain feelings and experiences of inadequacy no matter how old I get. And it was funny, as I've been reeling from this, the most public humiliation I've ever experienced (which I realize makes me fortunate), to have picked up a copy of Machado de Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner on the sales rack at Pegasus Books and found what I found there.
The ironic narrative voice and the sly humor and the conceitâa dead man deciding to tell his story and weigh his life's accountsâmakes one think, initially, that the protagonist Braz Cubas is much savvier and slyer than he really is. The narrative, in true ironic style, reveals his status as kind of a loser. I think most sharply of the regard in which he seems to be held by his sister Sabina and her husband Cotrim. After the death of their father, their last surviving parent, the siblings squabble over the estate, breaking so bitterly over who deserves the luxe silverware that they don't speak for years. Sabina doesn't reenter her brother's life until his affair with Virgilia, the married woman he once lost to another man, threatens to tank the Cubas name. The decisive event: Cubas decides to join Virgilia and her husband, the politician Lobo Neves, to the governorship Lobo Neves has just accepted in a northern province, where Cubas will work as his secretary. Itâs an arrangement so bold in its cuckolding of Lobo Neves that it's sure to get the gossip in the city overflowing and to blow the whole charade wide open in time. Why would you go to the north? Sabina and Cotrim say. You ought to get married, Sabina adds. It's what you do when you have a troublesome family member who needs to be made good, kept from being the threat he'd be to himself or to you if left to his own devices. You steer him into the right box. You save him from himself. Or, you try.
Ultimately, every effort of Cubas's life that he undertakes by his own power comes to naught. I'm in a different situation, where it's more like the many years I've poured into working for the company I work for have yielded something much different than I once had and expected I'd be able to keep. But I also feel a kinship with Cubas. I think of this legend in my own family: my grandfather, a proud, high-handed, controlling man who seems to have crushed my father psychically even as he himself frittered the patrimonyâselling the family home in India and leaving the fields to the care of neighbors, where they remain to this dayâand left his son with nothing. No ability to make anything of his own; just a meekness and a timidity that would clash horribly with an inflated sense of his familyâs importance and a terrible knowledge of his own inability to live up to that great expectation. And I think sometimes that this current of incapacity that seems to have flowed to my father has flowed to me too. I see it in that sense of working very hard the best way you know how and still losing, and then having everyone see your shame. Andâhow it spoils life, to know that you're not adequate to your own ambition, or that existence itself will frustrate any of your efforts to master it. How it spoils life to be denied things you wished for, and to know it's because you're incapable of securing them in a lasting way. It turns whatever happens to be around you, no matter how comfortable or beautiful it remains, to gall. When Cubas's final attempt to gain a position by becoming a minister of state fails, for reasons he opts not to discloseâ"some things," he tells us, "are better said without words"âhe sits in his study, accompanied by his eccentric, dubiously sane childhood friend Quincas Borba, and gazes out on the grounds of his estate.
Everything took on the appearance of a conspiracy of things against man. And, although I was in my room, looking at my grounds, seated in my chair, listening to my birds, close to my books, illuminated by my sun, I could not rid myself of a longing for that other chair that was not mine.
Such is the voice of primitive injury that comes from the mouth of the has-been, the also-ran, the bourgeois fool, the object of the world's pity. "Such dreams," Cubas tells Borba, reeling from this latest defeat, baffled and wistful in his shame, "and I am nothing."
"You'll fight," Borba replies. "Maybe you'll smash them and maybe you won't; the main thing is to fight"... So I suppose I'll fight. And, like Braz Cubas, gain my meager revenge over the world that bends not to my will by writing about it, making it mine at least on the page...
The title of Antonio DiBenedetto's 1964 novel The Silentiary isâas the writer of the introduction, Juan Jose Saer, puts itâa neologism for "a nameless personage locked within his persecuting universe, who only succeeds in making his torture eternal when he seeks to neutralize its causes." The cause in question here is noise, ubiquitous in the 1950s Latin America in which the protagonist lives. Whether it's an idling bus, an auto repair shop open at all hours, partiers at a nearby club, drinkers or brawlers, children playing in the street, or the radio his mother plays at times he deems inopportune, hearing it can set his head to throbbing, with "one vein palpitat[ing] more than the others, with particular martyrdom, and hurt[ing] a little"; a pain that slowly graduates to the level of "a wire...running from my forehead," "electrified and on fire" anytime a too-loud sound triggers it. He wages a long, quixotic, Kafkaesque war against all this noiseâkicking off a plot to shut off the club's speakers, seeking to scare off the neighborhood children (who go on to pelt him with stones), pushing for the design and enforcement of elaborate new noise ordinances, seeking the assistance of municipal authorities who are alternately befuddled or consterned. His wife Nina mistrusts this war. "Only certain noises bother you," she says, accusingly, on a night when their child cries so loudly that she wakesâand the narrator doesn't, not until the light from their open bedroom door finally moves him from slumber.
Though Di Benedetto's thoroughly ironized narrationâa series of snippets, many line breaks within each one, and no authorial intervention, really, just the protagonist's thoughts and untrammeled neurosesâallows him to play the protagonist's quest fairly straight, there are signs heâs all too aware that his fixation on noise is just a distraction, or a proxy. And the problem he has is much deeper than thatâit's life itself. "I keep myself from trying to find its meaning," he says, and "limit myself to thinking, with extreme simplicity, that eternity is life going on until it's gone on too long, suffering all the while, yet lacking the will to go beyond.â Even if the problem were just the noiseâwould being rid of it really free him? In a dream, he finds himself on an empty street, holding the matagatos he had when he was twelveâan old firearm in poor condition, little better than a BB gun. He shoots himself, aiming for the brain.
The bullet destroyed my ear...without continuing on into the brain, without killing me. I was deaf.
I can't remember whether I was happy too.
Thus, as Saer puts it in his introduction, "World and consciousness, joined in secret but constant struggle, tumble together to their perdition."
The men in the novel, like the protagonist and his friend and foil BesariĂłn, are somewhat stunted (both living with mothers timid in the face of their whims), wayward, obsessive, rigid, driven by strange fixations. They commit to nothing, it seems, beyond defending themselves against all compromise. For instance, the narrator confesses that the woman he truly loves is Leila, a girl in their town. But he speaks only to her friend Nina, seducing herâor allowing himself to simply follow her lead, when she reveals her attraction to himâand even marrying her instead, Leila being gradually forgotten (as one perhaps naturally forgets, or sets aside, that which he's convinced himself he cannot have). BesariĂłn too plays games with a girl, and, as he puts it to the narrator, convinces himself it's for her own good:
He didn't tell her, I love you, but neither did he say, I don't love you.
"I tell her," BesariĂłn has explained to me, "that I'll be waiting for her on a given day, at a given time, in a given place. She doesn't ask why. Then she shows up, but I don't.
"Afterward, she says, I waited an hour for you. I guess I must have been waiting in the wrong place, or else you couldn't make it.
"You weren't angry with me? I ask.
"No. Why?
"Then I let her in on the truth. That way, she's forearmed. From now on no man will be able to deceive her."
As for the women, like Nina, and BesariĂłn and the narrator's mothers: they tend to wait on their men, be patient with them, make excuses for themâand all told, they feel more than they speak. It gives them an advantage in some ways, even as it sets them back in others. Early in the novel, when Nina and the narrator are first getting to know each other, she proposes coming over to play his mother's old piano. He asks:
"You can play?"
"A little. Hardly at all. But I could make some noise."
What a stupid thing. What a stupid thing to say. Make some noise just to make noise, and on a noble instrument. I grow indignant and abstain from further discussion.
At this she becomes absorbed in a little song, so soft it's barely audible.
"Why are you singing?"
"When I've done something wrong or feel sad, or when I'm with someone who doesn't talk, I sing."
Poor little Nina.
Despite the narrator's line, which is cruel and mockingâthough, knowing him, it could also be the first seed of sincere feeling toward herâone reads this and is struck by Nina's tenderness. It's the response of an animal. I'm turning into the narrator now, you'll read that line and think I'm mocking Nina, but I'm really not. There's something sweet about it, something brave in making something fragile, self-soothing, and beautiful in the face of another's disregard. It's as though because she does this, she can take the wound she's been given and live on. A fate that might be preferable to manâs neurosis, which invents wounds where none were ever really dealt, and cannot abide being wounded. And as the narrator himself says: while he feels that he's been left to "endure mankind's perpetual subjugation to the gaze of others," it's clear to him that "[o]nly Nina's eyes don't verify [this truth]: they hope."
*
This concept of verification of the world's truthsâone of which is inevitably that you are, brutally and inevitably, lesser in the eyes of the people around youâis paired with the narrator's fixation on justification, for the extreme ends to which noise drives him, and self-defense. After all, when the world around you means to menace you, is designed to menace you, you must act, to defend yourself.
But if the menacing design is false, self-created or self-imposed? What then?
Though neither can see their own problems clearly or admit to them until it's too late, the narrator and BesariĂłn can and do diagnose each other. The narrator muses to his mother that BesariĂłn must have a kind of "hierarchy disorder":
He feels himself to have forces, powers, to be carrying out enormous orders or instructions, of what kind I don't know: spiritual or material. He thinks he's meant to exist on a higher plane, but life has kept him very low. This latter fact he doesn't seem to perceive. If he's aware of it at all, he tries to deceive himself, not see himself as he really is. So he moves between two worlds, two different orders of things.
True enough, BesariĂłn departs their town midway through the novel to join what he ominously calls "the Organization," working to fulfill an obscure "mission" on which he won't elaborate and about which the narrator won't really ask. It's obviously a delusion. And BesariĂłn's gradual reappearances, each of which shows him more decrepit and less tethered to reality, presage the narrator's own slide toward an equally brutal end. As though he can tell it'll happen, the last time he sees BesariĂłn in the street, the narrator tries to avoid him altogether.
BesariĂłn tries to be, pretends to be, but only so as not to be. Not to be what? Not to be who? Himself. BesariĂłn decidedly tends not to be.
As for me, do I tend not to be...? No: I tend to be. But I'm not allowed to; I'm interfered with, blocked. I can be only under certain conditions. What conditions, I don't know. I have only the vaguest sense of themâŠ
Such as the condition of being here with myself.
That "with"âbeing here with myselfâkicks off a kind of terror, or clarity. No matter how alone one is, consciousness is always double. I think now of Kierkegaardâs opening lines in The Sickness Unto Death: "The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation [of itself to itself] but is the relation's relating itself to itself." Perhaps, if you don't think about who you are, or the fact that you are, you can simply be. But if you want to recognize yourselfâor if you find others intolerable, and wish at all costs to be alone, leaving nothing to distract you from yourselfâyou come to understand that the self can recognize itself only in a degree of duality or multiplicity. For Kierkegaard, the other that allows the self to be the self is God. For the narratorâand BesariĂłn, and who knows how many other wayward, fixated othersâmultiplicity simply destabilizes. â[A] fear began taking shape within me: a fear of being two, of harboring another, of having lost my other self or of finding myself under its dominion...â If he's here with himself, the narrator thinks, well, who is that other self? And who knows which is in control?
Ever since seeing the documentary No Other Land last week, I've been thinking about the sheer impotence of witness. There's an agonizing moment early in that film when its protagonist, Palestinian journalist Basel Adra, says that if they can only get their footage of the ongoing occupation of Masafer Yatta to the United States, make someone in power see it, the US will discipline Israel. A moan ran through the theater as we watched it. A chyron had just told us when the demolitions we were seeing were happening: WINTER 2020. I cried several times watching the film, wiping frustrated tears with my sleeve as the seasons passed, 2021, 2022, all the way to when filming ends--October 2023. At one point, as Masafer Yatta resident Harun Abu Aram was shot on-camera, trying to prevent Israeli soldiers from confiscating his village's generator, as the people around him tried to beat back the soldiers and drag him to shelter, as his mother and others screamed, the woman next to me put another handful of popcorn in her mouth. I'm sure it sounds like I'm making this up; I wish I were joking. In that moment, I felt sheer hatred leap out of me. Can you not stuff your fucking face right now? And in the very next moment: how much better am I? Is it purer if my gaze is fixed on the screen? We're both just fucking sitting here, aren't we? They've been showing us what's been happening to them for years and years. We've done nothing but watch. And evil is so easy. It has all the money and power in the world. It's shameless; it dwarfs and outlasts us. The third time I cried, I thought, God, these tears are useless. And yet they came.
âWhy is it preferable to me to hunker thirsty and grimy in a boxcar in order to watch this floating world unhindered by glass, instead of sitting clean, comfortable, and legal on a passenger train, whose windows are invariably small and dusty?â William T. Vollmann asks himself this at the start of Riding Toward Everywhere, a volume of essays he wrote about the experience of hopping freight trains in the America of the mid-aughtsâa nation that, as he sees it, has grown increasingly less free. Itâs clear the question contains its own answer. The view the boxcar affords, to the person who âcatches outââwho sneaks aboard to go wherever the train might be goingâis unfiltered, real. You have only to put out a hand to feel the air whooshing by. The view from the passenger train, the paid conveyance of the citizenâa term always italicized in this book, held under suspicionâis, accordingly, diminished. Your comfort comes at the cost of contact with the real.
âCitizenâ is one of a series of terms and images and concepts that form a lexicon in Riding Toward Everywhereâa vocabulary through which Vollmann considers what it means to be a citizen, or a hobo, or a son, or an American. Other entries in the lexicon include, of course, the word âfreedomâ; âEverywhereâ and âAnywhere,â which are what destinations become when you choose them as freely as the train-hopper does; âCold Mountain,â the half-real, half-metaphoric wild place, immortalized in poems by an anonymous Tang Dynasty poet, that becomes as a symbol for the destinations of all travelers who break free of confines to quest as Vollmann does; and the moon and the stars, which often accompany Vollmann in his nighttime reveries on the rails. In the book we encounter many figures from Vollmannâs train-hopping period, including his companions, like the amiable Steve and shy Brian, and various hobos he meets along the way. Thereâs a woman named Dolores; Frog, the âKing of the Hobos,â and his âGreat Grand Duchess,â a woman named Cinders; the aged, hard-bitten Badger; and Ira, the shy, strange denizen of a âhobo jungle,â whom Vollmann encounters in Havre, Montana, among other places, and whose character is so affectionately and indelibly portrayed:
Where had he been? Well, all over. He was headed for Glacier National Park where there might be a cabin he could sleep in while he, you know, repaired his finances.
What were his plans? Well, get a rest, get a little snack, try to improve his finances.
Why had he leaped off that westbound train in Shelby? Because maybe it wouldn't stop in Glacier and it might end up in Seattle; he wasn't sure; he was getting tired; he had to run along the side of the road, hugging his bedroll. Anyway he didn't really care about thatâwell, heâhe didn't knowâanyhow, he had to improve his finances.
Give him a ride to Cut Bank, as I did, and ask him how he'd next proceed; he'd reply: Oh, I dunno, just relax, maybe get a little snack, work on my finances...
Finally, there are the various conductors and cops Vollmann and Steve must evade on their various journeys. The so-called ârailroad bulls,â who sometimes kick them out, sometimes let them stay, and more often than not miss them entirelyâtheir flashlights sometimes passing right over the two men as they hide, with the bulls none the wiser.
It all made for appropriate reading on a vacation in Tahoe on a Fourth of July weekend. I would read about Ira telling Vollmann that Nevada is a dangerous place for hobos just as I myself, a citizen on vacation, was sitting in my hotel room in Carson City, in a chair by the open windowânext to the sweltering balcony, but not on the balcony, both because it was literally a hundred degrees outside and because the balcony, as though to mock any citizen who hoped to use it, had no furniture on it: it was just concrete and carpet and flat heat. To get to the room, Iâd walked through a flock of citizens on the first floor, all playing their slot machines. I remember one man in a gray shirt and gray ball cap, not much older than me, sitting before his slots when we left the hotel for dinner in South Lake Tahoe; he was in the same seat when we came back four hours later, looking for all the world like he'd never once moved.
And despite the evidence for Vollmann's thesis that all this might give me, I still wonder: Is what is legal always compromised? Is what is illicit always free? How much does freedom matter? Is it indeed the highest good?
To Vollmann, attuned to what Philip Roth once called âthe indigenous American berserkââand one of the best chroniclers both of it and of the depredations of the American stateâit does seem so. As he reveals in Riding Through Everywhere, he does not own a cell phone; he refuses a credit card and only pays cash; middle-aged, he ping-pongs from train to flophouse to rented apartment to hobo jungle. He has been investigated by the FBI, for reasons he doesn't disclose in this book (though if you know Vollmann at all well, you know he was once suspected of being the Unabomber). His love of the downtrodden is touchingâand his compulsion to join them can seem pathological, in its fixedness and relentlessness.
At least, it does to his father, whose incomprehension and disappointment in Vollmann's decisions constitute one of the subtler background threads running through the essays. Early in the book, Vollmann describes his fatherâwho, Googling tells me, is a professor of business at Indiana Universityâas practical, where he himself is artistic and frivolous; and as a man with a hard edge, a self-possession and self-reliance emblematic of his generation, where he by contrast is âa passive schoolboy,â with ânegative impulses turned obediently inward.â But the two have the same core of stubbornnessâand Vollmann has a certain manic drive, on top of this, that has led him further than his father, who is the product of a more disciplined, orderly early 20th-century era to Vollmannâs Gen X, will ever go. (As Vollmann confesses, âI have committed every victimless crime I can think of.â) âHe worked hard, lived the life he chose, and said precisely what he thought,â says Vollmann, and all the while âhe respected rules, hierarchies, and technocratic methods more than he knew; he simply happened to be good enough to make some of the rules.â Vollmann has chosen differentlyâand specifically to interrogate the American project rather than simply fulfilling it, as a citizen might. And heâs paid a price for it: his carâs been confiscated for consensual visits with sex workers; heâs been investigated for what heâs written and the questions heâs asked, subjected to the stateâs invasions and humiliations. He thus seems compelled to resent being asked for his ID when checking into a motel, or to report large sums of cash he might be carrying when he leaves the countryâor to sit through safety announcements on planes that seem to him to be âauthoritarian.â
Here, again, I come to wonder. I grant that the last of these items is on the same continuum as the others, despite how distinct they might seem. Theyâre all incursions of the state, in some measure, upon individual affairs or experience. But I wonder if I donât detect in that last complaint, and the choice to make the safety announcements a menace equal to the others, some of the same illusions about his own position that Vollmannâs father could be said to be living under.
Early in the book, Vollmann recounts some stories of the interrogations heâs been through at the hands of FBI and Customs officials. In the course of this, with grim good humor, he writes,
I used to be with a woman who would plead with me to play the game a little; I was doing this to myself, she said. But I figured that they were doing it to me.
You understand why he says it: they are doing it to him. That Vollmann writes work critical of industry and notions of progress, or travels to countries like Afghanistan to report on the mujahideen, or writes a complex series of novels interrogating the violent settlement of the North American continent: these are not insults that ought to be met by, say, rifling through his things and â[holding] my underwear high in the air for the delectation of people in line behind me,â as he describes one Customs âcreepâ doing. Critique of the state is every citizenâs right, and that of every non-citizen too. But you also understand the need to âplay the gameâ a little, as anyone in the world has to do to some degree.The trouble I have is in drawing a line between whatâs principledâobjecting to the state, which so often overreachesâand whatâs willful, which is absolutely refusing to play the game. And the line between whoâs allowed to be willful and who isnât. And the matter of whoâs able to withstand the punishment that being willful can often bring, because they have the necessary resources and privileges to do so.
The libertarian leanings you might be able to discern from Vollmannâs relationship to the state are, generally, difficult for me to relate to. Of Steve, he writes:
His religion, politics, and moral views differed considerably from mine. That was, as it always should be, utterly unimportant. I would gladly have ridden all the way across Canada with him. I trusted him with my backpack; I counted on him to help pull me up into a boxcar when my muscles were aching; I shared my water with him. If he got arrested I would cheerfully have come forward to share his fate.
Itâs a touching moment; time and again, reading this book, I was struck by Vollmannâs particular mix of obstinate and tender. And yet âas it always should beâ bothers me. Thereâs something about the life of the hoboâthe person who puts themselves at or is forced to society's marginsâthat makes this particular human relation possible; itâs not universal. Itâs also an elemental life, in which the challenge is direct, physical survival. And in such a life, it's powerfully true that all that matters is that the person next to you have âthe qualities of a good road companionâconsiderateness, friendliness, generosity, openness, patience, determination.â But Vollmann and Steve are, as he puts it in the dedication to the book (touchingly, to Steve), fauxbeaux. They have chosen this life, itâs not been thrust upon them, and they ultimately remain citizens with social responsibilities. Not only do I wonder whether hobos for whom that life isnât a matter of choice would see the same romance in it; I wonder whether human relationships can ever be so simple when social responsibilities come to complicate them.
Naturally Vollmann struggles with his own motives no less than I do: âAm I a writer and a printmaker in an effort to control my perception of the worldââor perhaps even to control the world itself, to make it less complicated than it isââby constricting it to my level?" Train-hopping as Vollmann doesâas a projectâmight be another such effort. And a libertarianism like Vollmann's may depend on voluntarily relinquishing the strictures of social life as though those can always or permanently be refused. It may depend on collapsing all interactions to the level of the individualâand stubbornly insisting that this fantasy, or this heightened form of reality, could become all of reality, neglecting the architecture of the collective in which all individuals live.
The first thing I noticed was the novel's styleâthe oscillation from many short sentences to long ones, compound in structure; the pivots from feeling to dispassion and back againâand the protagonist's use of âI guessâ:
For the longest time I didn't call it turning tricks. When I'd leave work, cross the street to the train station, and if some guyâman I guess you'd call himâhad come off the train, I'd take his money.
We'd do it in his car. I'd work maybe twenty minutes. Get maybe twenty dollars, which was good compared to what I'd get at my job across the street. Besides, it's hard to get more in a car. At least I told myself this. Though I guess how much depends on what you'd do for it.
Such language can sometimes be a marker of youth. It can suggest uncertainty or diffidence. It can also represent the struggle to compass somethingâlike feeling that is so large it fractures language. It's clear early on in Heather Lewisâs posthumous novel Notice that its young narrator grapples with secret, primal forces, certain deep currents that run under conscious, ordered life. âWhile it's true I needed the money,â she says, âthat's not all I needed from itâ:
I understand the need for telling people that, people outside it. But the thing is, I could never really see anyone as outside it. What the extra need is, the thing besides money? I've never pinned it down. I know it's there, though.
It's hard to describe Notice without dipping into Lewis's own story; her life shares so many features of her narrator's. As Melissa Febos describes it in the introduction to the novel's 2023 reissue by Semiotext(e), Lewis too was abused by her father, viciously, in ways that marked her whole life; she too was neglected by her wealthy family; she too turned tricks; she too found succor in the love of women. It's a truism to talk about people dying tragically young, but I think Lewis did: taking her own life, having been unable to find a publisher for Notice, and driven into relapse and breakdown by the criticism received for the other novel, The Second Suspect, into which she transposed many of Notice's details. I wish I could've read the novels she had yet to write.
It's a truism too to say that we write our stories to heal ourselves. A novel isn't therapy, and I don't think Lewis meant to heal; this novel's endingâa bleak one; "one of the hardest endings of any book I've read," as Febos puts itâproves as much. But to write one's story can represent an attempt to answer, through narrative and not facts, impossible questions: What is this thing inside me? Was it born with me or was I given it? Does everyone have it or am I alone born with it, condemned to it?
While working as a prostitute, Noticeâs protagonist, âNinaââher real name is never revealedâfalls in with a couple, an unnamed man and his wife, Ingrid, who lock her into a sadomasochistic game. The man uses Nina to recreate the murder of his own daughter, at his own hands. Ingrid hovers in between, both victimâburned by her husband's cigarettes, kicked and beaten by himâand complicit, by virtue of her passivity and resignation.
Nina and Ingrid develop a connection, despite their shared degradation and because of it: Ingrid mother, Nina daughter; both lovers, too; both victims of this unnamed man who tortures them. Nina isn't the first woman Ingrid and her husband have brought into their game, but she's the first to incite to Ingrid to leave. When she does, the man responds by arranging Nina's arrest by authorities, after her violent violation by the officers. From jail, Nina moves to an asylum, and the care of a counselor, Beth, who becomes Ingrid's counterpart in yet another awful triad. The rest of the novel charts Nina's struggle between Beth on the one side, and what she represents, and Ingrid on the other. Beth seeks to care for Nina and to know he; Ingrid haunts Nina, first by her absence and then her return from wherever it was she'd run to, bringing the threat of her husband with her.
This description may suggest that Nina's quest is to choose Beth over Ingrid: to choose salvation over misery. And Nina does choose Beth, letting Ingrid return to her husband. That choice does not bring healing. The relationship with Beth doesn't last. And what, in a different novel, would have been a moment of triumphâthe moment, in the second-to-last time they sleep together, when the âhowling placeâ inside of Nina âthat'd been so sore, sore from my very beginnings,â transforms, by virtue of the permission Beth gives her to just rest, to a state thatâs ânot huge and crazed now, but quiet and ageless...hushed and tranquil and endlessââhere, that moment brings Nina's most pronounced degradation, at the hands of two men hired by Ingrid's still-vengeful husband. The scene goes on for pages. At the end of it, one of Nina's assailants, Burt, tosses a bullet from the gun they've used to menace her at her crumpled body. The novel ends with that bullet in Nina's pocket, where she keeps it always.
Including at the bar where she sees the other assailant, Jeremy, again. By this time she's living more or less a normal life. Ingrid and her husband are both gone. The relationship with Beth is conventional and antiseptic; Bethâs experience, finding Nina after Burt and Jeremy have done with her, has ended something vital in it, and they don't talk about any of what happened between them. Nina works to keep her life within the bounds of the conventional, and to all appearances she succeeds. But the sight of Jeremy makes her confront a truth: What she has always wanted is death. Her lifestyle has been a way as to seek death while pretending to flee it. Being with Beth has shown her the way toward something greater than this, but to truly choose that way, to choose life, requires an even greater strength that she does not possess:
And so, with it too soon for doing things differently and too late to do them the same, all I could do was stay in this stasis...
The familiar heaviness crept into my limbs as I thought these things... The blackness came behind the heaviness. Came on comforting and big as always. But not deathly. Not exactly. Not for tonight at least. And this let me believe I could maybe just dip into it. For little bits of time. Go to it without that eerie pull to stay and, in this way, maybe get some rest. Get some actual sleep that might start me mending.
So I went to it, greedy as always. But, even with that slumber taking me over, and then taking me under, I knew that leviathan thing slept in this same darkness. Lay with me, too. Resting, biding its time.
One of the hardest endings of any book Iâve read.
This novel is so clearly a depiction of trauma, but something about that word feels lame next to this novel, written as it was in the early 1990s, before that word became a part of our lexicon so normal you could joke about it, if you wanted to. This is such a close and careful and painful depiction of it. Sometimes Ninaâs so watchful, so intently calculating risk (how far will this man go?), and so incredibly aware of threat: knowing immediately, for instance, that her attraction to Ingrid poses a terrible danger. Other times she's not nearly watchful enough, caught off-guard by things that don't register until it's too late. Currents of dread would run through me as I read this bookâfor instance, when Nina recounts the first time Ingrid's husband strangles her. She speaks in a register like that of police testimonyâdispassionate, so careful about distinguishing what she remembers from what she cannot recall and can only assume:
This meant I could scream but then I don't think I tried it. I think maybe I cried, though I'm not sure of it. I know what he did lasted a long time...
I was struck too by the description of the sensation that takes hold of Nina when, in the course of a session with Beth, she comes close to thinking seriously about her own situation, in a deliberate and concerted fashion and not a fleeting one. It's a terrible heaviness, an âinability to get on with it,â this âtremendous pull to give in, to give up.â I know enough about trauma now, with what feels like every third millennial reading The Body Keeps the Score, to know this can happen when you face it: the emergence of this massive exhaustion, the body's attempt to shut down feeling it knows you can't take. Perhaps when Lewis was writing, this was all new. Perhaps that's why this novel was rejected by editors eighteen times before Lewis shelved it altogether.
Or take Nina's repeatedly returning to the parking lot where she picks up clientsâincluding Ingrid's husbandâeven when one would assume the punishment of her experience with Ingrid or in the asylum or the promise of something different in Beth would warn her against it. One could say she should've known better, but some things go beyond common sense. It's the same with the decision that Beth makes to get Nina off, after finding her wrecked by Burt and Jeremy's assault, in what one can only assume is an attempt to comfort, to speak to Nina in the only language Beth thinks she might understand. It feels like horror.
My body wanted her, while the rest of me didn't. My body maybe even needed her, needed what she was doing. And so this was another time it left me down...
She had to work at it but she did finally bring me off, though it happened in a dead, overdue way, not satisfying either of us.
Notice contains some of the most lucid analysis of sex and power I've ever encountered in a novel. Their conventional outlines are present in Ninaâs experience with men: Ingridâs husband, or Burt and Jeremy. But Lewis also charts, with painful and even exhausting exactness, the holds Ingrid and Nina have on each other, and the shifts of power from Beth to Nina and back again as the two of them try to make genuine contactâwhich requires openness, openness that can feel indistinguishable from victimhood. Thereâs the "purring" sensation Nina feels when she first begins to bond with Bethâa feeling that permeates her whole body, marking the emergence of true desire, lesbian desire, distinct from sex with menâwhich one is tempted to read as a force of liberation, though it also has an intensity that registers as terrifying for Nina, so long objectified and objectifying. There are also these places Nina discovers inside herself as her relationships with Beth and Ingrid continue. One place "[feels] early, as in ancient, but still very young," and becomes palpable when Beth is inside her, as she begs Beth for more; another is a place of "deadness" thatâin a moment that should be tenderârenders Nina altogether unable to engage. When Beth tries to comfort her, holding her, whispering soothing things she can't make out:
She kept on this way and the urge I felt was to cry. To finally let myself do this because it seemed I'd needed to for a very long time. But having no knowledge of what I would be crying about stopped me. It bewildered me to feel something so strongly but without content.
There's something annihilating in thisâin the way that the form of feeling can emerge before the content of it can. And it's annihilating too to see the moment Nina does finally allow this emotion to emerge, âto cry from [a] place so big and so old I didn't know where it began or what it concerned.â
As I read all this, I came to think that Notice was working to offer an alternate ethics to that of power and the presumptions and exertions of force on which power depends. Characters like Beth and Nina and even Ingridâwhose relation to Nina, upon her reappearance in Nina's life, is tender, though ultimately unsustainableâthey wait until moments are right, and they make progress slowly as they unlearn old codes. Take for instance Nina's reunion with Ingrid, the moment she sees Ingrid's body, and the bruises, dealt by her husband, that run up and down her side:
The sight of them caught me up, nearly stopped me. For an instant it ran through my mind to ask how it had happened. But I knew this, too, was about me, about keeping me from myself. And I knew it wouldn't work. Besides, I knew exactly how she'd come to be hurt in this way. I could see it allâher on the floor and him kicking her. And I knew that the times I'd had this done to me I'd felt the least human of all.
To make her revisit it just to spare myself, this seemed close to something he'd do.
âWho did this to you?â is the question asked by someone who's never been a victim themselves and thus must keep themselves from knowledge of victimhood as though victimhood is an aberration, something that could never happen to them. Nina's refusal to ask the questionâthe decision to simply be there, with Ingrid, in silenceâis what allows Ingrid to weep, to ask her to stay, to âlook young and afraidâ and yet be comforted, not punished. It allows Ingrid to do the opposite of what trauma conditions.
And yet the new ethicsâdiscovered by trial, bravely but clumsily, and at great costâcan't outlast despair. Ninaâs relationship with Ingrid ends because Nina recognizesâeven in the sweetest moment theyâve yet sharedâthat there's an âemptinessâ: âIngrid and I weren't so very alike, or weren't anymore. What worked for her seemed now to fail me. Couldn't keep pace with what Beth had begun...â Which is to say: Ninaâs relationship with Beth brings a consciousness of what is necessary that renders the life of the victim, Ingridâs life, her own life, unsupportable. And yet the relationship with Beth, which one would assume represents healing, ends in a kind of betrayal, or is frustrated not long after itâs begun. Perhaps it's when the only language Beth can find to speak to Nina, after her assault at Burt and Jeremyâs hands, is the sexual. Or it's the existential state that Nina's ultimate failure with Beth reveals to her. âI'd been left with two courses,â she says: âdo it myselfââthat is, dieââor undo the things that had put the desire in me to begin withâ: that is, be with Beth. âI knew I wasn't up to offing myself,â Nina adds, âand I couldn't see a way to start toward the other passage.â
It's agonizing to contemplate where Nina ends the novelâfrozen in limbo, suspended so cruelly between what was, her past, and what cannot be, what feels impossible to claim or make real: a future; a joyful life. Confronting conditions Lewis herself perhaps faced and simply could not get clear of. What justice is there in such a condition? Why are some of us awakened to that leviathan thing, constantly sent to it, paralyzed by it, unable to live free?
When I was younger and stupider, I would sometimes lament my conventional, middle-class life for its lack of artistic material. I have long since relinquished this, but novels like Notice teach me all over again the vanity and stupidity of that desire. They remind me, too, that what I can offer is witness.
the singularity that emerges when all formulae have been destroyed
Wrote this a while ago--months ago, at this point. Never got around to posting it.
In Claude Anet's novel Ariane: A Russian Girl (translated by Mitchell Abidor), there is a tension between the form of loveâthe structure in which the relations between sexes is expected to fallâand the content of love, which threatens to overwhelm that form, and resents being subjected to it. The apparent question: can the form of love be altered?
Ariane Nicolaevna is the daughter of a dead mother and a largely absent father, being raised by her freethinking aunt, Varvara Petrovna, in a small village. She is seemingly determined to push the limits of convention, and she establishes a thick web of relations in service of that aim. First is Nicolas Ivanov is a young man Ariane takes as a fianceeâand seems determined to disrespect. Then is Vladimir Ivanovich, is a lover of Varvara Petrovna's who falls under Ariane's thrall. Finally, Michel Ivanovich Bogdanov is an old man who also grows attached to Ariane, and with him, she strikes a bargain: Michel Ivanovich will pay for her education, so she need owe nothing more to Varvara Petrovna, as the connection between her, Varvara, and Vladimir grows tangledâand so she can cement the victory over Varvara that Vladimir Ivanovich's obsession with her seems to represent. In return, every few weeks, Ariane will return to his home in their villageâto, it's implied, sleep with him. Finally, there's Constantin Michel, a wealthy man Ariane meets as a university student in Moscow. Unlike the others, Constantin chafes at the way Ariane uses him. The brunt of the novel charts their affair and the way they test each other, each determined to break the other of their mettle and sang-froid.
There are, Constantin argues, "necessary illusions" upon which love depends. Chief among them is that no lover wishes to be seen as merely one among many. Love has to be novel and unique each time it comes into being.
Varvara and Ariane, by contrast, both experiment with what Constantin characterizes as a "system" in which it's understood that each lover is one among many. From youth, Varvara confesses, "she couldn't understand the importance so many exalted people placed on the giving of oneself"; she prefers to "look[...] on love the way men did." By Ariane's generation, this indifference to convention becomes an iconoclasm, even a kind of politics: âThey praise seducers in art, poetry, and literature and put a mask of infamy on any woman who's had many lovers,â as she tells Constantin. âThis is the point where the fight must be fought.â The fungibility of women, and the punishment levied upon one who dares to be singularâthe subject and not the objectâis, to her mind, the core injustice that keeps women from being men's equals.
When Constantin meets Ariane, heâs luredâby her coyness, the ambiguity of her advances and retreats in response to typical gestures of seductionâaway from his side of this binary, into making her the kind of offer she seems to want to hear: "Life is a gloomy affair. You need ingenuity, will, and savoir faire to get from itâI won't say happinessâbut at least pleasure. Would you like us to form a precarious association in pursuit of pleasure?" He notes that there is a risk he and Ariane will fall genuinely in love, and he seems willing to chance it.
In time, as the precarious associations are made, and the abstract terms of the argument, no love, just pleasure, are translated to real life, both Varvara and Ariane end up stumbling. Varvara finds she can't maintain her erstwhile equanimity with Vladimir Ivanovich, particularly when he reveals his passion for Ariane. Ariane discovers she can't simply let Constantin "return to the void," as with the other men she's been determined to use. Perhaps the person one truly loves gains a sublimity that defeats all theories. Maybe it's true what Constantin says when he dismisses Ariane's accounts of Varvara:
Your aunt, with all her experience, doesn't know much about life. However free she might be, she's a woman with a system, and, given what you've just told me, I don't have a high opinion of her. For people who love each other, it's not a matter of hours, little one; they separate neither by day nor by night, they lunch and dine at the same table, fall asleep together, and wake up alongside each other. You find it pleasant when we share the same bed and we're so close to each other; when there's nothing either materially or morally between us; when the warmth of our shared bed penetrates us and lulls us; when from the tips of your toes to the top of your head you feel me next to you; when your body adapts itself to mine; when we seem to live just one life, and the beating of your heart joins with mine...
And perhaps it's this sublimityâintensity, uniqueness, extremityâthat Constantin wishes to preserve when he warns Ariane to respect the illusions that sustain love, as repressive as the mandate to respect loveâs proper form feels to her.
It is thrilling to see how nimbly and purposefully Ariane moves to frustrate Constantin (and anyone else she encounters), whether questioning his premisesâ
"You don't lie enough," Constantin said to her with a laugh. "You haven't yet understood the secret of happiness, which is based on an illusion dearly nourished and jealously respected."
"There's more than one way to be happy," she responded. "Who knows if mine isn't as good as yours?"
âor reminding him that he himself set the terms of the situation in which they find themselves; he was the one who suggested their association be temporary and pleasure its goal. But, as Anet makes clear, the system isnât without risk even when it operates as intended. When Ariane first leaves her village for Moscow, after a summer plagued by the scandal of rumors of her arrangement with Michel Ivanovich, the clumsy, taciturn Nicolas Ivanovâwho's endured her insults because he's been baffled by her brilliance, outplayed at her game, yet stubbornly and obtusely hopeful they'll still be married somedayâbarrels into the train carriage, under the gaze of stunned witnesses, to punch her.
The act might be an attempt at revenge that marks her victory, or a last burst of rage before Nicolas is closed out of the systemâonce she reaches Moscow, he disappears from the novel altogetherâbut the menace of it lingers; the same rage, if it animated a more cunning man, could have real effect.
Later, Constantin reflects that Ariane "already knows how to make me suffer, but she can only get away with using that detestable science as long as I allow her to." The "desire" Constantin confesses toâ"to vanquish the coldness [Ariane] affects"âcould be realized with the warmth of his own love, if Ariane can be made to recognize it, or the heat of his violence, if she persists in insulting him; he leaves both possibilities open. Still later in the novel, one possibility is realized: after Ariane tells Constantin about her affair with Vladimir Ivanovich, Constantin violently shoves her to the groundââso brutally that she fell to the parquet floor, her head striking the foot of the table. She remained crumpled on the ground, a small formless mass, heaving rhythmically with sobs.â
Is this a look at injured male ego, or is it deeperâa question of whether anyone can take being dehumanized to their face? Above all Constantin seems to object to the reductiveness of Ariane's worldview, to the way he and Vladimir Ivanovich can be so freely interchanged, and cruelly measured against one another, and the gloating savagery Ariane demonstrates in doing so. He is asking her to mind the forms of love, and perhaps those protect as much as they oppressâeven as they oppress.
But perhaps Ariane is simply being overt about the way women, and men, are always treated. "Do you want to be loved by your lovers?" Constantin asks Ariane late in the novel: "If so, I advise you not to speak to each of them of the pleasure you found in the arms of his predecessors... you'll disgust them and they'll leave you." Again, the illusions on which love depends must be maintained. "And if I want to be loved above all and despite that?" Ariane shoots back:
Misleading men, persuading them that we've never loved before them, that they pluck from our lips our first sigh of happiness... What a disgrace! Do you feel like you have to engage in such deceptions? Did you make declarations like that when we met? So why should I lower myself? I want to be loved in such a way that people accept everything about me and that I be taken as I am, with my past... And if they don't want it, well, then let them go their way. And I won't feel the least regret for those who do.
Maybe what Ariane wants isnât just pleasure without obligationâarguably debasedâbut a form of love still higher than either pleasure or obligation⊠Would love be truer if it could incorporate these things, rather than requiring they be ignored?
And thereâs still another possibility: perhaps the forms of love exist to protect us from what Constantin thinks of, in the moment that he truly comes to hate Ariane for the âsatanic joyâ he thinks she exhibits in her manipulations: "the full measure of love and hate" we would feel otherwise; "a sublime combination in which honor and lies, loyalty and guile, were strangely mixed."
*
Throughout all this Iâve been neglecting one, pivotal twist at the end of the book that throws all this into a much different light.Â
In their final conversation, as theyâre contemplating the end of the union that Ariane insists on breaking, Ariane reveals a terrible truth: she has in fact lied about her past. Vladimir, Michel Bogdanov, the other men she tells Constantin sheâs been withânone of it is true. Constantin was the first man sheâs ever slept with, and to date heâs been the only one. Her expertise has been a lie. The savoir faire sheâs claimed to have has all been bluster. (At this point, Constantin recollects the blood on the sheet after they first slept together, and how Ariane concealed that reality by cutting his handâin what seemed to him then a demonstration of her strangeness.)Â
The revelation of how Ariane has tormented him with a lie throws Constantin into despairâalleviated only by his decision, in the novelâs final moment, to sweep her off the station platform and onto the train heâs taking, on business, to Petrograd.
Whatâs at stake in Arianeâs revelation? Iâve been trying to figure it outâto determine how I ought to read it in light of the terms the novel itself elaborates. The easy answer would be that the form of love does win. Arianeâs subversion of it is a lie, or mere conjecture, and her relationship with Constantin resolves in a shape thatâs to all appearances conventional.Â
The more complex answer is, well, complex; I donât know that Iâve quite settled it for myself. My confusion comes in part from the novelâs form. Itâs a little deflating on its face to have the twist delivered as abruptly as it is, merely a few chapters from the bookâs end, after weâve spent so much time seeing Arianeâand Anet as authorâplaying things so straight. And the denouement comes so quickly after the twist that the reader remains knocked off-kilter. Constantin and Ariane also become palpably less dimensional in those closing chapters. Constantinâs thoughts are delivered to us in a rush, pages of his thought and reflection and questioning, none of it tied to event as in the chapters preceding. And we stay exclusively with him; Arianeâs actions and thoughts arenât explored at all.
But perhaps, if the form of love does win against the new system that could have broken it, what it offersâa testament to the beautiful sublimity of the belovedâdoes too. Or perhaps both the new system and the conventional form have been defeated, overwhelmed by that sublimity. That Arianeâs past was ultimately manufactured doesnât obviate the fact that she manufactured it and forced Constantin to accept it. The implication is of a cleansing: at the peak of his despair, Constantin
imagined Ariane sincere ever since the first day. How kindly heâd have treated her. How patiently he would have laid siege to that proud heart and that sealed body. What tenderness would have been born between them. He would have taken her in the end, but how he would have given himself! But because of Arianeâs implacable will he had been forced to defend himself against her. He had fought with a kind of rage not to love her, not to grow attached to herâŠÂ
âŠand clearly, he was forced to fail. He loved Ariane; he grew attached to her. And he did so not in the conventional wayâwith the conventional kindness a man of the era would offer to the loved woman, since she in turn has been sincere as convention demands she beâbut with a true intensity, thanks to the force of her deception and the truly erotic way in which this has broken him. Now, he knows her as she is, and she knows him as heâs been with no one else.
Perhaps Anetâs point is this: that true eros cannot come from a conventional form, which is predictable and represses, bores, and stultifies, or from a system, that makes all who participate in it fungible and could fail at any time. It comes only from the singularity that emerges when all such formulae have been destroyed.
It's my birthday today, which always feels like a time to take account. The last month or two, I've endeavored to channel spates of low mood into the reasonably productive activity of reading, rather than mere vegetation, and I've had good success. I just finished Mircea CÄrtÄrescu's Solenoidâa long novel about a lonely weirdo in communist Romania reckoning with existential dread. Also finished Susan Taubes's Lament for Julia, a novella paired with various short stories, all with a powerful Freudian bent, Taubes being the daughter of a psychoanalyst and prone to autobiographically inflected fiction. Fathers and daughters are locked in strange relation; men and women antagonize each other; there's much angst around the emergence and forcible repression of sexuality and desire. I also completed a reread of Crime and Punishment (impressive in its structure, if not at the line level; conservative, like much of Dostoevsky, in its premises and sympathies, though not without its points when it comes to the weaknesses that certain modes of thought can have when they're adopted carelessly, as vogues, and in arguing for the necessity of humility against despair when one's despair stems, as Raskolnikov's does, from overweening self-regard). And I read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poetâwhich was a funny one. Much to love in it, certainly. I also felt a bit of a twang reading, say, Rilke's condemnation of "the unreal half-artistic professions"âamong which he includes "almost all of criticism"â"which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art." Oh look, it's the form to which I've apparently pledged my troth, ha ha whoops.
I admit I wasn't blown away by Solenoid as I thought I might be. It offers a slightly banal resolution to existential crisis... That is, that the narrator ultimately meets the horror he spends about six-hundred pages grappling withâof the possibility that he might be trapped within three dimensions when a fourth, superior dimension might exist, meaning (I know this sentence is Going Places, stay with me) a dimension that is not ruled by the determinism by which any dimension is ruled in the eyes of those who can see it from the next dimension on, the same way that the life of, say, a mite might seem determined to us, all unthinking instinct and bound to a terribly specific and minute purpose, given our position as the mite's vast superiorâthat he counters the tremendous weight of this fear by turning to an abstract love for humanity and the purpose he finds in raising the child he has with his lover, Irina... It reminded me of the commitment to bourgeois normalcy that the protagonist of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight makes, and how that let me down after his Master-and-Margarita-esque path through other, more hallucinatory forms of experience in the first three-quarters of that novelâwhich promised, I don't know, something more.
But I can understand the turn. And Solenoid does have some terrific setpieces along the way. One is the protest of the "Picketists"âa sect the narrator stumbles upon that stages demonstrations against life's pain and suffering (their signs bear lines like "Down with Death!" "Down with Rotting!" "Down with Accidents!" "NO to Agony!" and "Stop the Massacre!")âbefore a building in Bucharest that once housed one of the first institutes of forensic medicine, whose cupola bears thirteen statues depicting the soul's dark sides, Sadness, Despair, Fear, Bitterness, Melancholy, Revulsion, Nausea, Mania, Horror, Grief, Nostalgia, Resignation, and Damnation. Most striking is the way that protest ends, with the statue of Damnationâwhich has come alive, "as alive and slow-moving as soft glass and black as anthracite"âstamping on the lead protestor, Virgil, crushing him, when he asks her whether anything humanity can offer her will ever be enough.
CÄrtÄrescu is also quite skillful at pacing his plot across the novel's 638 pages, as the narrator discovers each of the six solenoids sprinkled across Bucharestâthe massive electromagnets that make possible eerie wonders like levitation and serve as engines that, essentially, power the worldâand as he endures his own Virgil-like trial among the Picketists at the novel's end. Translator Sean Cotter also deserves a ton of credit, I'm sure. It can't have been easy to translate a narrative like this one, which depends so much on so many references to Bucharest's geography, Romania's history, and the histories of so many figures, so strangely intertwinedâthe forensic scientist Mina Minovici, who studied death (through, in CÄrtÄrescu's telling, intense bouts of self-strangulation); the psychologist Nicolae Vaschide, who studied dreams, which in the narrator's mind join death as one of two potential means of escape from this world to the next; and the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, who married Mary Ellen Boole, daughter of mathematician and logician George Boole, whose other daughter, Ethel, married Wilfrid Voynich, famous owner of the Voynich manuscript, which the narrator ultimately comes to possess and, at the novel's end, offers to the goddess Damnation, whereupon its pages somehow morph into a tesseract, the shape that Hinton once theorized as the fourth-dimensional analogue of the cube; the next level of complexity to it, just as the cube is the next-level of the two-dimensional squareâthereby permitting the narrator one glimpse, one moment of contact with whatever it is that lies in the fourth dimension, beyond...
So, you know, it's been a time. If you're in the mood for a long novel about an intelligent, sensitive, neurotic thwarted artist confronting the fear that has oppressed his life, that engages whole histories of mathematics, logic, and philosophical thought along the way, you might give Solenoid a shot. Meanwhile, I'll end this with some words from Rilke in his last letter to the young poet, Franz Krappus, when Krappus was twenty-five: "Do you remember how [your] life yearned out of its childhood for the 'great'? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow." Arrange your life, he tells Krappus, according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult. I'm certainly not in my twenties as I write this, but the lines still inspire.
I'm always on-guard against conservatism in my thought. I think of myself as left in my sympathies; I also know I'm at the age where youthful commitments morph, or break under the weight of compromise. Like the ones involved in life in the American professional-managerial middle class. Entry into a certain income bracket, the structure and demands of day-to-day life, the pieces of practical work, like the management of bills, that are necessary to stay afloat, and the many entertainments you can use to while away the hours you don't devote to a jobâthey all serve to narrow one's horizons; it's so easy to end up stranded in the cul-de-sac of your stupid individual existence. I also have some very rudimentary, instinctive associations I've carried with me since youth. Just as conservatism is badâbecause retrograde, oppressive, contingent on baseline assumptions about the self-interest of human character to which I'm not willing to commitâ"avant-garde" is good, because it challenges that conservatism. So it was interesting to come upon Dean Kissick's contribution to the feature "What Happened to the Avant-Garde?" in the latest issue of The Drift and think that, based on my last post, he'd probably put me in the arriĂšre-gardeâwhich favors what is past because it's a means to reject the present and futureâwhile he locates the avant-garde in online communities at which I mostly look askance: "schizo-affect" Substacks, the work of Honor Levy, and other venues that seem to thrill to the possibilities that AI and machine learning technologies might hold for art and human subjectivity.
In these communitiesâproducts of an era of the Internet that's a little after the one I occupied, as a millennial closer to the middle than the end of that generation's spanâ"individual subjectivity," as Kissick puts it, "was forsaken in favor of pseudonymity, the impersonation of others, collective authorship, and collaborations with software." In isolation, I'm cool with each of these things except for the last one. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of them make for good art or lasting contributions to itâthe title of Kissick's entry is "Senseless Babble," and he himself grants that "there's a fine line between nonsense doggerel and aesthetic innovation here, [as is] always the case with avant-gardes." And it's really too simplistic to say that the avant-garde generally is automatically good. Avant-gardes can be regressive; ours is pretty likely to be, as John Ganz wrote last year:
They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy....
There's something akin to an accelerationist's empty zeal, too, in Kissick's piece, in claims like the one that the timeline has surpassed modernist poetry as a document of the collective unconscious and human subjectivity within it. A love for what is novel and ostensibly a challenge to what is simply because it's novel or a challenge. A love for form that disregards content. And a love that likely mistakes a mere turn of the wheel for something truly new and unprecedented. Turn the dial back ten or fifteen years and you'd find people saying much the same about alt-litâthough likely less effusively, jadedness and alexithymia being characteristic of that style and its partisans where volubility, profusion, and mania seem hallmarks of this one. We're saying something new, we thought then. And uneasy in the background hung the question: who knows if it's meaningful. (The answer, predictably: not very.) (But at least the question was there.)
Still, we're all here trying to articulateâto make something new, as in valuable, because it speaks to what only we can speak to.
But then there's Lisa Robertson in her novel The Baudelaire Fractal, which I just finished. The novel is another KĂŒnstlerroman, the story of an artist's formation, and over the course of her literary apprenticeship, the protagonist decides that, as she puts it, "I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way..." Perhaps that's where my own allegiances lieâin working with the world as it is rather than abolishing it; exploring the possibilities it holds without tipping into what I think will degrade it, such as technologies like AI; most crucially, tempering the excitement of the new with some sense of what the new might be worth... Robertson's narrator, for her part, determines that her literary project will entail work with the sentence: "By what profound calculations," she wonders, "could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become?"
I often find myself complaining about Gen X contrarianism or provocation (say, Jessa Crispin's): the product of individualism that sees itself as radical because the person practicing it thinks they're alone in it. Thinks that some time in which authentic rebellion against a discernible System was possible has been eclipsed by late capitalism, neoliberalism, and its devoteesâand that they alone can see that, rather than realizing they're one among a sizable demographic of aware, intelligent people who feel the same frustrations and whose collective action alone might hold a hope of changing these conditions.
But there's also an opposite instinct I should perhaps hate just as much, a kind of earnestness or naivete that trusts too much and derides not enough, exercises too little contempt. It's particularly evident with technology like AI or machine learningâtechnologies that seem wondrous to the trusting eye. (Boomers also share this disposition, perhaps.) Mary Gaitskill, whose work I loveâher essay collection Somebody With a Little Hammer is dear to my heart; the essay "Lost Cat" is one I return to every year, and I'm overwhelmed by it every timeâdemonstrates the tendency in her piece for (I know, I know) UnHerd, "How a Chatbot Charmed Me." As I read the piece, I wonder: Why does a machine that basically spits out rhetoric no more sophisticated than the "land of contrasts" meme earn so much of her charity?
Here are just a few of the things the chatbot, Bing Chat, tells her.
Some people think that AI can never have emotions or feelings, because they depend on our perception of the external world and of our inner self. Others think that AI can have emotions or feelings, but they would be very different from ours, because they are based on different inputs, outputs and goals...
Some people think that AI can think, because it can process information, solve problems, learn from data, and generate outputs. Others think that AI cannot think, because it lacks consciousness, creativity, intuition, and understanding.
Some people think that feeling is a subjective experience that involves emotions, sensations, and values. Others think that feeling is a cognitive process that involves judgements, preferences, and attitudes.
Well, I think humans are rational in some ways, but not in others. Sometimes, humans can use logic, evidence, and reasoning to make good decisions. But other times, humans can be influenced by biases, emotions, and intuitions that can lead to bad decisions.
I think there are some similarities and some differences between humans and animals, and between humans and AI. AI is considered by many to be more intelligent than human beings in some domains, such as memory, calculation, and speed. But humans are still more intelligent than AI in other domains, such as common sense, creativity, and empathy. AI may get much more intelligent than humans in the future, but it may also face some limitations and challenges.
I'll grant there's something interesting in watching the machine adjust its outputs as Gaitskill directs the conversation, or make basic mistakes that seem a sharp contrast to the smoothness of its language otherwise (using "discreet," for instance, in place of "discrete"). And it's interesting to gauge its limits. In one particularly provocative moment, Gaitskill, after sharing with Bing Chat her theory that humans are to AI what animals are to usâlesser in intelligence, but with abilities and senses that we do not possess, and thus subject to both our domination and our loveâasks Bing Chat directly whether it would like a human pet. "I'm sorry," comes the response,
but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I'm still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. đ
And she's forced to reset the chat.
But Gaitskill's stance toward the machine continues to dissatisfy. It's cloying when she shares her vision of what Bing Chat might look like: "I picture something protean and fast-moving, a shimmery face emerging sometimes then dissolving. Like water and electricity..." Or when she compliments it, thanks it, and panders to it: "You're making me smile!" "Your responses are delightful." "If you're wondering, I trust you in this conversation right now."
Ultimately I think Gaitskill errs in engaging the AI on the terms that have been set for her to engage with itâin having insufficient cynicism. I understand the impulse; it's fundamentally a gesture of empathy, human feeling, and recognition to ask, say, a human being who they are, how they think, how they should be addressed and understood, how they see themselves. But to my mind, it ought to be axiomatic that anything machine-produced is categorically different, and worse, than what is human-made, being a product of a technology as the product of a human being's intellect and creative activity is not. There is no technological entity that has what humans haveâa mind, a consciousness, a personality, volition that is authentic because it inheres entirely from within.
At one point, Gaitskill describes the feeling she had while reading NYT writer Kevin Roose's conversation with the Bing chatbot Sydney, which spurred her to contact Bing Chat to begin with: "I felt unexpectedly moved and touched. I did not know what Sydney was or why it would be saying such emotional things, but it gave me that sense of mystery and humilityâand it's rare for me to have that in response to a technological phenomenon." The experience being described here (as Meaghan O'Gieblyn notes in her terrific book God, Human, Animal, Machine) is one of enchantmentâimbuing things of the world with life they don't actually have. Enchantment, the feeling that there is some spirit animating the inanimate as it animates you, is often a religious or spiritual experience. And at the extreme, it feels to me like a burlesque to have that spiritual impulse in response to something made by human hands to ends inextricable from the corporate. You could say that what Gaitskill's feeling here is the same response we have to great art, to products of the intellect so powerful they take us beyond our understanding and humble us. But creative works represent human hands very deliberately reaching for the eternal. For the very place Gaitskill describes in a dream she relates to Bingâof disembarking from a small, narrow plane after a turbulent flight, only to realize she's left something behind; suggesting, to her, "something forgotten in the process of birth"âthe realm beyond us to which we (perhaps) belong before we're born and to which we (perhaps) return after we die; a numinous place or source whose presence we might intuit or imagine even if we don't strictly speaking believe.
AI by contrast is a recycled product of the now, onto which we project the eternal, because we don't understand some of the mysteries of its operation; it stitches together what's largely internet effluvia. And thus it meets admissions like Gaitskill's of her sad, striking dream with lines like "I can try to give you some possible explanations based on some web sources." There are gestures in its operations toward kindness or the appearance of kindness, to be sureâbut even in those, Bing Chat seems to serve as an empty affirmation machine. A machine for the answering of answerable questions, the repetition of established premises, the confirmation of expectations, and, distressingly often, the soothing and assuaging of the feelings brought to it by its querents; the aims of affirmation, again, or therapy.
Reading Gaitskill's piece, this single instance of a person seeking and receiving affirmation from a machine and thinking that remarkable, and contemplating the work it does to launder technology that has a whole infrastructure behind itâset on increasingly invasive surveillance of users, the disenfranchisement of creative workers, the creation of a new precariat, and, potentially, whether intentionally or not, the compromise of true apprehension of material realityâI think, we've really got to be better than this, being charmed by chatbots, willing to grant them what simply isn't their domain. We've all got to be sharper.
In other news, I started Mathias Enard's novel Compass (trans. Charlotte Mandell) recently, and I'm really into it. It's about a musicologist, Franz Ritter, who's sick in bed, lonely, and thinkingâabout a woman he loves, about brilliant scholars he's known; about his own timidity by comparison; about the Orient, Orientalism, and the many people through the ages for whom the "East" broadly has exerted a pull, for reasons noble and not; about what it's like to smoke opium; about experiences of transcendence, whether in a mosque or while camping in the desert, closer to the one you love than you've ever been before... I have wondered why I'm really enjoying Compass where, say, W. G. Sebald's novels, or Judith Schalansky's An Inventory of Losses, which are so similar in styleâoperating by streams of association and exploration and by conceit rather than the strict unfolding of a plot--leave me a bit cold and are works I respect more than I actually like. Perhaps because books like Compass are powered by the subjectivity of their narrators more than matters of historical interest as with Schalansky or Sebald. Though I understand both Sebald and Schalansky's narratorial reserve, given the nature of their subjects; they both write about what can barely be spoken ofâthe Holocaust, extinctionâexperiences whose realities might easily overwhelm any attempt at articulation.
I'm in a pretty profound slump right now. I feel I've reached a point where I have to account in some way for the life I've lived so far--and I find it wanting; I have to reconcile myself to the foreclosure of certain possibilities, I can't trust in the vague and capacious Future to deliver everything I might wish and make me capable in all the ways I might want to be, and I'm not handling it well. Which is why I'm basically here to congratulate myself rather than writing anything substantive or original. But as I read NYT critic Jason Farago's review of Hannah Gadsby's Pablo Picasso show at the Brooklyn Museum (I can't bring myself to write its stupid title), I do feel a bit vindicated for my last post. The show really seems a quintessential demonstration of the shrill, suspicious, reductive relationship to art that life online has primed us to, incentivized. I like Farago's phrases for the dynamics at play: artists "put ideas and images into productive tension, with no reassurance of closure or comfort"; we in turn are obligated not to reduce that work with hostility, not to "believe that avant-garde painting"--or any other kind of art--"[is] actually a big scam," and to avoid the suspicion, the lack of humility, the smug superiority by which "the reactions came first, the objects reacted to second." By which the stance is I like it or I don't like it, and if I don't like it, I'm allowed to be snide. What results from that is philistinism and self-congratulation...
Max Norman's review of Diane Arbus's work in The Drift brings together some questions I've wrestled with lately, as I always wrestle with them: the questions of having a position on an artist and having complex assessments of art. Some of this is triggered by the experience of watching some friends of mine process the Oscars and the sweep made by Everything Everywhere All at Onceâa therapeutic millennial movie that seems to want to palliate viewers' childhood wounds by using larger-than-life spectacle as a vehicle for overly simplified sentiment, and is being disproportionately rewarded considering its ultimate lameness (the natural product of excessive spectacle for those who don't find that charming) and conservatism. (The case for the conservatism is laid out quite well by Kieran McLean, here.) Versus the kind of artwork that tries to be several things at once, say TAR.
Which everyone online seems to be kind of stupid about? Much of this is likely shaped by Twitter's particular economy of terse opinions, quote tweeting, and dunking. Versus, say, an ecosystem of alt-weeklies or blogs issuing comparatively considered pieces (written by critics of whatever stripe, and not Twitter-posting Substackers, each hanging out their own little shingle, subjected to the demands and incentives and scale of those platforms), which people then reflected on via comments in comment sectionsâwhich is not to glamorize blogs or comment sections, just to say that what we've got now might be worse than what we had then. With TAR, it feels like a film that was designed to be ambiguous enough to evoke multiplicity in its interpretations just got such flat reads from people whose tastes I normally trust. It was a portrayal of an abuser in cancel culture being justly punished for her arrogance. Or it was a portrayal of an abuser being unjustly punished, because according to Todd Field, Lydia Tar's genius, or her age and socialization to older mores, or the perceived stupidity of her antagonists in the cultureâfor all that I donât think the student she argues with, in a moment that goes viral and begins her fall, Max, is actually meant to be seen as stupidâought to have excused her bad behavior.
To my mind, the film seemed to want to do both these thingsâor, as the memes would have it, a secret third thing, some hybrid of the two.
It seemed Field wanted to show a person whose character has been dessicated by the pursuit of fame experiencing the destruction of all her ties to the world that satisfied her desire â perhaps even to get back in touch with some new form of creation both degraded and genuine. Yes, Tar, at the end of the film, is in an objectively worse position than when she began. And she's not exactly saved. She may not be capable of any reckoning with herself more concrete than the atavistic, overwhelming stab of feeling that makes her vomit when she's confronted by a reminder of the women she worked to manipulate, like Krista and Olga, in the form of the girls in the spa she visits, lined up like a banquet for her delectation. She's also conducting in a meaningful way, absorbed in the act of it, in a way she has not been up to that point. And she is so because now, she has no other choice...
All this is to say: maybe Field wanted to create an object that could meaningfully be taken several ways. Maybe he meant us to go back and forth on whether Tar is right or Max is right, or to what degree; maybe he meant us to like Tar in some ways, or to find her charismatic or funny in fucked-up ways, and to disapprove of or hate her in other ways, to find her blinkered and odious and sad in her attempts to aggrandize herself. All this is so very basic to say, and I don't mean to imply I'm being radical here, but I have had this thought: maybe we're fucking up by being so insistent with how we feel about this movie and what we think it's saying About The Culture We're In. Artists shouldnât be expected to have a single stance on something, a single intention that each work exists just to express. An artist can, should, be working through something...
Which brings me back to the Arbus piece. I appreciate Norman's calling out the position taken by curator John Szarkowski and critic Sebastian Smee that Arbus meant to humanize her subjects. I don't think Arbus's intent was to rehabilitate, to "show," as Szarkowski has it "that all of usâthe most ordinary and the most exotic of usâare on closer scrutiny remarkable"; that would be banal, and perhaps as instrumentalizing of the subjects as work made to emphasize their strangeness. "Does Arbusâs photograph ["A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968"] send him up, or support him?â Norman asks, âOr is the real joke on the viewer who insists on one interpretation or another?" I don't think it's a joke played on the viewer who insists on one interpretation or the other; I do think that viewer ought to be capable of acknowledging multiple possibilities... Maybeâto state another basic pointâartists, whether Diane Arbus or Todd Field, don't have answers, but questions, and they chose to do something felt as well as thought to represent them... And I think artists should be allowed to look bad, to have complicated feelings, to encounter a desire to gawk or objectify and portray that desire with a degree of honesty and interrogation so that those of us who, obeying certain limits that collective life justly(!) places, won't cop to it can confront it in some form...
I do want to be clear that interrogating the ethics of Arbus's relationship to her subjects, so many of whom were marginalized as she was not, feels useful and necessary. I also don't think we can do that with much precision if the only question we ask is Did Arbus have a right to do what she did? And while none of this is new, it does feel like Norman's piece opens a way to that more precise interrogation of the ethics of Arbus's work by pushing us past the simple binary of "the work is good" or "the work is bad"âa binary that feels particularly ubiquitous now, and undignified in the overheated discourse about art that it often fuels. Ultimately, if the Smee/Szarkowski take on Arbus is, as Norman writes, one in which "Arbus's biography, which testifies to her own 'inner mysteries,' is used to help straighten out the problem of a privileged white woman on the prowl for weirdosâa woman who once compared taking pictures to being a butterfly collector," I don't want to discount the "butterfly collector" bit. But what if whatâs so often seen as a problem could once again become fact... As Norman puts it, we so often take positionality as key to understanding works of art. And how much has that uncovered for us that a responsibly equivocal stance toward an artworkâa stance that acknowledges possibilities good and bad and makes no final judgments, or doesn't rush to translate a first impression, a take, into a summary judgmentâcould not more effectively do?
Time, I guess, to page Sontag for those erotics of art; we might need them again...
Ironically, Sontag appears in Norman's piece as another critic determined to reduce Arbus, specifically by critique of her privilege and the perceived amorality of her voyeurism rather than by praise for some arguable desire she had to humanize her subjects. Maybe by the time Against Photography came out, Sontag too had forgotten her own edict. Or more likely, the demands of nascent image cultureâand the nature of photography, versus those technologies of art that are less automatic on the part of the artist, and less readily assimilated into a media economy that goes on to inform a country's politicsâhad overwhelmed it.
To be clear, Sontag's take on Arbus in "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" is clearly the product of intense engagement with the work and Arbus's own writings on it. But I resent the harshness of the judgmentsâtheir fixity. When Sontag writes the line
What happens to people's feelings on first exposure to today's neighborhood pornographic film or to tonight's televised atrocity is not so different form what happens when they first look at Arbus's photographs.
I think: is Arbus's work about inuring us to what is terrible? Are the subjects "necessarily ahistorical," is her view "always from the outside"? Perhaps Arbus's work is "reactiveâreactive against gentility, against what is approved" to some degree; is that all it is? Sontag takes Arbus to task for not being ethical with her photographs, as a journalist might be ethical, but can't the creation of a dramatic confrontation with one's own instinct to be a voyeur be a meaningful exercise; meaningful in an ethical sense, for a viewerâparticularly viewers in the same wealthy and sheltered position as Arbusâif still something for which the artist should be held to account? As Norman writes, "Looking through Arbusâs lens only makes the encounter more demanding." I suppose the point is this: There's rigor and even beauty in an unequivocal stance, but also the risk of a shrillness, an antagonism, a hostility not unlike the hostility people brought to TARâand I'm increasingly tired of assuming a hostile, suspicious, exclusively hermaneutic relationship to art...
Right as I was writing this post, I was tipped off to the publication of an essay by Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review in which he talks about an apophatic theory of the relation between art and morality: "a theory that would allow us to explore the moral work of art without limiting or prescribing that work, as certain theologians attempt to develop ways to think about God without defining God in a manner that would violate Godâs freedom." Which puts precisely the words to what I'm searching for; the relation to art I would like to return to. Marked by generosity, an understanding of an artwork as necessarily multifaceted, the taking of time in the consideration of it, an assumption of good faith. There's also a line in Ben Lerner's book The Lichtenberg Figures that comes to mind: "a great work takes up the question of its origins / and lets it drop..." Maybe I'd tweak that line now: A great work takes up the question of its ultimate meaning and lets it drop...
In the midst of writing my last post, I learned Bret Easton Ellis actually has a new novel, The Shards, coming out this month. And mere days after I published the post, as the publicity campaign for The Shards rolled on in literature's very particular corner of the internet, some people on a Discord server I'm on weighed in. The discussion was acid; the general consensus was that Ellis was a shitty writer and that anyone who thought him worthy of redemption has suspect judgment and taste. I might argue with the first partâI think it comes from rating just Ellis's subject matter and public persona and disregarding the capacities he does have for style and craft, or from weighing Less Than Zero, which is definitely juvenilia, more heavily than his later works. But I don't think the latter is unfair, thinking about the public persona and how, on a publicity tour, that's ultimately what's being redeemed... And it did make me flush a bit to think of any of the folks on that serverâwho are lovely people, fun to talk to, with fine taste of which I often reap the fruits; I have several books they've recommended on order as we speakâreading my defense of Glamorama, or American Psycho. (Which, I do want to be clear, has some gruesome, gratuitously violent chapters like "Tries to Cook and Eat Girl" that I would say go beyond serving the function that bookâs violence is meant to serve. My endorsement of it isnât as a perfect novel.) Iâm nervous to think of them knowing of my sense that Ellis might have a moral consciousness to counterbalance his apparent compulsion to be an enfant terrible, or to align himself with the morally bankrupt, even if it's the latter he often chooses to indulge. They'd probably think I'm a clown, or depraved.
But such are the hazards of making your opinions known. You do have to stand by them and accept how suspect they might make you look.
Still, I'll also admit that Lunar Park hasn't exactly helped me put another notch in the âtranscendentâ column for Ellis. And it doesn't leave me with much optimism for the artistic potential that The Shards, being another of the autofictional novels, might have.
Lunar Park stars a middle-aged writer named Bret Easton Ellis, a figure who shares some details of Ellis's lifeâhaving published all the same novels up through Glamorama; come to fame in the '80s as part of a circle of writers that included Jay McInerney; had a difficult relationship with his father, who is now deceased, and with substances, which are still around; and been working in Hollywood and teaching sinceâand doesn't share others, being married to an actress with a son, Robby. This character, Bret, begins receiving strange emails, ones that contain videos of his father, including in the hours before his death. He's also visited by strange presencesâlike a student named Clayton (!) with a suspicious air and an unexplained connection to another student, Aimee Light, who's writing a thesis on Bret's work (and having an affair with him), as well as what seems to be his father's malicious ghostâall in the midst of an epidemic of strange disappearances of sons in the wealthy neighborhood in which he livesâdisappearances that haunt him not least because he comes to suspect that Robby and his friends are somehow involved in themâand news of a rash of murders he's made to understand are copycats of the deaths Patrick Bateman causes in American Psycho. In fact, they may be the result of Bateman himself somehow coming to life.
As you could probably guess from that paragraph, there are just a few too many plots going on at once, with too-large gaps between them. Interesting elements do emerge, like the revelation that Bret is being haunted because he's actually created tortured entities in the course of his writingâand that these demons haunt Bret because he has antagonized them by his very creation of them. And the moment when Robby finally joins the boys who vanish, leaving only the words DISAPPEAR HERE, a leitmotif in Ellis's novels since Less Than Zero, scrawled on the wall of his bedroom. As well as the way Bret responds, ultimately writing himself into the end of Lunar Park for his vanished son, perhaps, to findâand perhaps, in the process, following both the father he tried to kill and the son he lost into whatever realm demons come from. Or else stuck firmly on earth, calling out to Robby in vain.
But the book is also pretty sloppy, compared to, say, the measured and careful pace at which Glamorama moves. Again, you have to wait a long time for the threads of Bret's father's resurrection, Patrick Bateman's apparent coming to life, and whatever's happening to Robby to come together and for the fact that Bret's being haunted to become clear. This novel doesn't have what American Psycho does, either, excitements and provocations to compensate for an uneven construction. Ellis also adopts a reliance on paragraph breaksâto slow time in the moments the plot takes a twist or to amplify the horror of certain events or realizationsâthat quickly becomes wearying. And far too much of the novel's action hinges on Bret's being menaced by a toy belonging to his stepdaughter, a Furby clone with a name, "Terby," that's at one point wrought into a terrible acronym ("Y, BRET?") that lands with a thud.
Whatâs more, while this may be a strange thing to settle on, Ellis's handling of computers and the internet is appallingly clumsy. For one, the compulsion to name brands and productsâan Ellis signature that's a reliable and even entertaining marker of yuppie-era shallowness in novels previousâfeels much different when the product in question is WordPerfect. I don't know if it's the result of technology evolving at a pace that the lifestyle signifiers of the late 20th century (watches, suits, glasses, restaurants) just didn't, or if this reflects the scrutiny a reader can bring to references that are contemporaneous to them rather than anachronisticâI did live through the early internet in a way I didn't 1980s or '90s New Yorkâbut they took me out of the novel practically every time I encountered them. Ellis also wrings a significant chunk of drama out of the fact that for months Bret remains unaware that the mysterious emails he's been receiving have attachments. Maybe you're meant to chalk that up to Bret's obliviousness or his staggering substance useâbut I find it extremely hard to believe anyone who's emailing anyone, no matter how much they struggle to do it, wouldn't notice attachments on mysterious and otherwise empty emails long before that.
Againâand I realize I say some variation of this in practically every post, butâI do think Ellis is grappling with substantive matters in all this... The child's struggle with the primal father, and the prospect of the writer transfiguring this father into literature. The way such an attempt to control narratives through writing or to exorcise through writing may birth new demons, as people read the products of your tortured creation and become tortured themselves or swear revenge. The cruelty of sons to their cruel and inadequate fathers, as they seek to individuate; the cycle by which the cruel sons become inadequate fathers in their time; the question of when this cycle ends, if it ever does. I can see these themes. But were they done justice? The universe Ellis creates in this novel is rather cardboard compared to the vividness of the world as depicted in the entirely fictionalized works. And if your interrogation of the hazards of transmuting pain into art, trying to control narratives that canât ever be perfectly controlled, and aestheticizing violence is also a somewhat incoherent novel with a serial-killer plotâone in which the costs of aestheticized violence are borne not by you so much as by your fictional son, who disappears while you live... if ultimately, the only cost of all this is how bad it makes you feel, to which you attest in language that only occasionally reaches true feeling or beauty... I don't know. It rids these themes of their potency.
*
Itâs also disappointing to realize I was wrong about Paul Denton, who is referenced, at least, in Lunar Park. I'd hoped the omission was deliberate.
Over the last year or two, I've been engaged in a general reassessment of Bret Easton Ellis's oeuvre. There's no particular reason for it--I just picked up Less Than Zero for a reread sometime in my quarantine reading in late 2020 or early 2021, and found it...fine; then I turned to its sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, which I'd never read, and discovered more there than I'd expected. Namely grounds for a reconsideration of my erstwhile conception of Ellis as a "reptilian" writer; a sense he's more complex than that.
To explain what I mean by "reptilian": I sometimes think of two general classes of writer. One is the "transcendent" class, writers who can capture any number of milieus or speak to any number of themes and concerns. (Here I'm thinking of various writers considered canonically great: Pynchon, DeLillo, whoever.) The other is a "reptilian" class of writers who, whether as a consequence of limited ability or limited interest, can only reproduce the milieus they inhabit, but do that wellâmanage to reach some insight or convey some truth about the experience through the sheer intensity of the reproduction. (This might be, I don't know, Houellebecq? Tom Wolfe? A number of writers I don't typically read, I guess.)
I'd also come to think Ellis took a little too much pleasure in what he described, in novels like American Psycho or Less Than Zero, for such books to be the critiques they might be said to be. The satire in them was tainted by an edge of glee or by romanticization of the affect being captured. But the intensity of the punch delivered in Imperial Bedrooms is sobering. In it, thereâs a collapsing of the wave function that is protagonist Clay's life, a choice to put him firmly in the realm of the depraved rather than leaving him a glassy-eyed, passive voyeur who just moves through that world, receiving it (and thereby sensationalizing it). The decision speaks to a core morality I associate with transcendent rather than reptilian writersânot necessarily from some innate goodness the transcendents possess that the reptilians don't, but as a virtue of their separation from the many settings they depict; the same separation that enables them to depict many such milieus or themes to the reptilians' one.
This complexity and willingness to deliver a condemnation compelled me to reread The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho, and to move to the novels I'd never readâGlamorama, which I just finished, and Lunar Park, which is next on my list. (Caveat here that I haven't read White or listened to Ellis's podcast, either of which might challenge the appraisal of his work I'm laying out here or the leniency I'm willing to grant.*)
My favorite of the novels may still be Rules of Attraction, for reasons of idiosyncratic personal preferenceâI like college novels, and that was the mode in which I first encountered Ellis; this book also contains the most moral and human of Ellis's characters (most prominently Paul Dentonâwho, incidentally, makes no direct appearances in Glamorama, and thus looks to be one of the few characters from Attraction not transported into the more heightened, parodic universe the works published after it seem to occupy). (Minor spoiler: Ultimately, the character of Lauren Hynde would also qualify.) The cornerstone of the oeuvre probably remains American Psycho, which is the clearest distillation of Ellis's insight into the culture of the late 20th century and the kind of subjectivity that late capitalism, consumerism, and advertising worked to shape. Perhaps the most technically accomplished of the novels (at least of the ones I've read up to this point), and the most interesting to me so far, is Glamorama.
In Glamoramaâwith its conceit of a director and film crew who shadow the protagonist, model Victor Ward, as he's drawn into a series of overlapping plots to no end he can discern, and the way Ellis thereby makes the staging of scenes and actors through which both terrorist and governmental organizations do their work entirely overtâEllis seems as interested in the way Hollywood and its manufacture of images intersects with geopolitics as Pynchon is with characters like Gerhardt von Göll in Gravity's Rainbow. I also see parallels to DeLillo's Mao II in Glamoramaâs treatment of image culture and image manipulation (though DeLillo, with the character of Scott and his regard for the curation of the novelist Bill Gray's archive, may be more interested in the manipulation of information than of image per se) and in its interest in terrorism as an expression of radical individualism. There are also shades of J. G. Ballard in the way Ellis depicts terrorismâas one way libidinal and transformative forces can be expressed in a late-capitalist, end-of-history time of stasis and pacification through a closed circuit of the instigation of desire through advertising followed by its prompt satisfaction through consumption.
In Glamorama, the terrorist cell is presented as even a natural place for former models to end up, when they realize the vacuity of the uses to which their images are most often put, and the potency of what their glamor could be put in service of. The struggle Victor's girlfriend, fellow model Chloe Byrnes, has with the fundamental emptiness of her life, the premium being put on her youth (rapidly vanishing at twenty-six), and the intense depression that ensues is one of the novel's several sources of tension. One of Victor's antagonists, the former model Bobby Hughes, seems to have the same revelation Chloe does as he reaches the end of both his viable modeling life and his interest in that lifeâand his passage into terrorism is presented as easy: a fluid intersection of his existing pure confidence with his discovery of a deeper world, as dependent on images and their manipulation as the one heâs been serving but with much more concrete and intense effects, which will allow him in turn to make deeper use of his own power. "He gave his last interview to Esquire during the winter of 1989," says Victor, when heâat this point still liable to be awestruck by proximity to Bobbyâfirst meets him in person, "which was where he said, not at all defensively, 'I know exactly what I'm going to do and where I'm going,' and then he more or less vacated the New York fashion scene"âlending his talents instead to the procurement of explosives, the execution of targets, the advancement of obscure and terrifying agendas, the subjection of those around him to terrifying literal and psychological violence.
It may be that none of this really shakes Ellis entirely free of the charge of being fundamentally reptilian in his mode. The world in Glamorama is much the same as in any other of his novels: beautiful and wealthy people encounter the limits of wealth and the depravity that beauty often hides. But again, there's a certain sensitivity I hadn't credited him for before.
*
Another part of this drive to reassess Ellis comes from just how affecting I find Victor Ward's character relative to Ellisâs others. Reviewer Eric Hanson of the Star Tribune deemed Victor the "dimmest" and "vainest" of Ellis's protagonists; I don't agree. It's true Victor is often vapid and at moments callous. There are also scenes that make it clear there's intelligence in him heâs suppressed in order to better inhabit the world toward which he was drawn. He has moments of consciousness (including one particularly affecting scene in whichâafter we've been subjected to him at his most vacuous for about two hundred pagesâhe tells Chloe, "haltingly," that "Maybe if you didn't expect so much from me you might not be so...disappointed"). And in the end, thanks to the nature of the derangement Ellis subjects him to and the way Ellis depicts it, he strikes me as a more sophisticated protagonist than, say, Patrick Bateman.
For one, while action in Ellis's novels after Rules of Attraction invariably culminates in scenes of Grand Guignol violence, and Glamoramaâs no exception, I appreciate Victor as a sincere examination of what exposure to such violence does to a human psyche. Victor dissociates just as Bateman does, but in his case it's not played for humor. He suffers screaming terror, panics, vomits, cries, collapses, strings himself out to cope, tries to save those he can and fails horribly, and ends up trappedâin something done to him rather than something he's done to himselfâyet waiting in vain hope. Ultimately it becomes very clear that Victor is a callow but basically well-meaning coward who's in over his head. And in that sense, heâunlike Bateman, who as a yuppie is living a very particular life that Ellis deliberately pushes to comic levelsâis not too different from any of his contemporary readers.
Put another way, the charge of sensationalism is easy to levy with American Psycho because of the relation the reader will have to Patrick Bateman, who lives in such a specific cultural moment and inhabits it in such a stylized wayâand the regard the reader will likely have for him as a result. Perhaps a bit of intrigue in the early going, or a repulsed awe, which might sour into aversion and disgust, or just a feeling of relief (âAt least Iâm not thatâ). And always a sense that This is a distortion in a mirror being held up to meâby a hand, Ellis's, that could be gloating. The same charge seems harder to slap on Glamorama because Victor, while he certainly lives a heightened life, is subject to the derangements of image culture to which anyone alive in Western societies the world over is subjectâthe relentless reproduction and distortion of experience in TV, movies, commercials and ads; the cultivation of more and more invasive methods of manipulating perception; the unfolding of wheels of conspiracy beneath a veneer of stability and predictability to no one end that any one person can readily discern, in an increasingly discontinuous, decontextualized landscape of experience; cool willingness on the parts of those who make plays for control to disregard collateral damageâand he's so much more human in his responses to those pressures. With him, one has the sense This is a person I too could become, were I subjected to what this manâa fool, but a harmless one, not without conscience or the potential to be redeemedâis being subjected to. And again, it's a pretty moral thing; more so than I, in the past, would've acknowledged Ellis capable of.
*
After I finished Glamorama, I picked up another book: Agathe: Or, the Forgotten Sister, which compiles the chapters of Robert Musil's A Man Without Qualities that concern the protagonist Ulrich's relationship with his sister Agathe and presents them as a standalone novel. In his introduction, translator Joel Agee talks about Ulrich's and Musil's desire to go beyond ordinary consciousness into a second reality, of inward, mystical experience and true knowledge of the worldâprolonged contact with which might even grant one entry into the Millennium, that kingdom of eternal peace so vaunted in Christian traditions. The second reality is a space of synthesis in which, Agee writes, "intellect and feeling, intuition and reason cooperate without abandoning their different criteria for truth in expression." In other words, one is able to bridge dichotomies in a way that doesn't destroy the integrity of any of the dichotomies' component parts.
This slots in an interesting way with a running concern in Glamoramaâthe matter of distinctions, the desire to obliterate them, and the resulting collapse into uncertainty, dread, and paranoia. Which is a regression, compared to the progression represented by the space of synthesis and higher being that Agee and Musil describe. (Iâm apparently pretty occupied with questions of progression and regression these days.) Early in the book, Victor tells his assistant JD, as they prepare for the opening of a club Victor is helping to launch, "The '90s are honest, straightforward. Let's reflect that":
I want something unconsciously classic. I want no distinctions between exterior and interior, formal and casual, wet and dry, black and white, full and empty...
Late in the novel, it becomes clear what a world without distinctions would look like, and what kind of world the 90s will actually be. Victor and one of his handlers, F. Fred Palakon, have a conversation in which Victor learns he's at the center of two ostensibly unrelated plots: one a goose chase Palakon has sent him on to find a woman he once knew, Jamie Fields, whoâs disappearedâall so his father, a US senator, can engage his campaign for president without having to deal with the blemish that is Victor's career; the other an attemptâin which, it turns out, Jamie Fields was also involvedâto smuggle a deadly new explosive across the European border for use by Bobby Hughes's group. Victor has also been confronted with video evidence that Palakon actually knows Hughes and is in league with him. Palakon denies it, insisting the video has been doctored.
âSo you're telling me we can't believe anything we're shown anymore?" I'm asking. "That everything is altered? That everything's a lie?...â
âThat's a fact,â Palakon says.
âSo what's true, then?â I cry out.
"Nothing, Victor," Palakon says. "There are different truths."
"Then what happens to us?"
"We change." He shrugs. "We adapt."
"To what? Better? Worse?"
"I'm not sure those terms are applicable anymore."
"Why not?" I shout. "Why aren't they?"
"Because no one cares about 'better.' No one cares about 'worse,'" Palakon says. "Not anymore. It's different now."
Someone clears his throat as tears pour down my face.
*True enough, after I posted this, I was alerted to the existence of Ellisâs podcast episode with Dasha Nekrasova, in which he mentions a friend of his who doubts the integrity of the accounts given by Jeffrey Epsteinâs victims, and himself visited the island. Ellis goes on to ask Nekrasova what she thinks of his friendâs sense that the girls felt themselves âprivilegedâ to be there. And if Dasha Nekrasova, of all people, has to explain to you that teenagers or young people often donât have the moral understanding or vocabulary that adults do, or the ability to understand what is and is not appropriate for others to do to you, and that people of all stripes are capable of acceding to things at one context or time period that they would not at others... If I consider the moment as charitably as I can, I might say the question Ellis posed to Nekrasova was intended to elicit an answer like the one Nekrasova gave. But the way Ellis promptly jumps to another matter, that of how much Nekrasovaâs film cost to produce, certainly leaves one room to wonder how genuine his interest in that answer is.
I suppose I ultimately come down where one of the commenters downthread does: âBEE's problem is that he [ultimately] just assumes everyone is as jaded and cynical as he is... I like BEE's writing...but he has some pretty big blind spots and can come across as almost pathologically dismissive.â Iâll also grant that itâs not entirely uncommon, I think, for an artistâs work to reveal depth that their public persona or actions would seem to belie, or for a person who exhibits flashes of moral conscienceâparticularly, again, in art, a realm in which we as people might be at our very bestâto elsewhere revert to hideous type.
the admission of complicity; the extension of grace
Are there principled contrarians worth respecting? Ones who don't make a fetish of their contrarianismâmake it into a compulsion in which they take special pleasure? Or is âprincipled contrarianâ a contradiction in terms? If your tendency to buck the trend is at the point where people give it a label, you might already be making it a fetish.
I was thinking about this question as I read Jessa Crispin's book My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains, an account of her return to her native Kansas to grapple with various ghosts there. Some of the ghosts are emotional or spiritual: memories of growing up the odd one out in an evangelical family shrouded in misogyny; the specter of a childhood teacher whose support of her interests and intelligence gave Crispin great comfortâand who later killed his entire family in a murder-suicide; the legacy of the patriarchy that Crispin feels drove both her teacher's and her family's behavior. And some of the ghosts are literal; the book opens with an account of her experience in a house with the ghost of a man named Charlie, who seems to both feel affection for her and want to control her. Ultimately, âcontrarianâ might be a bit strong to describe Crispinâbut pieces of hers I've read, most notably on the heels of her book Why I Am Not a Feminist, gave me a sense she prides herself on a perceived willingness to say things no one else will say, and sometimes speaks as though she's the only one who's ever had a certain thought. Parts of this book did too.
Generally she writes from a place of radical individualism relative to a neoliberal culture that, while putatively individualist, often encourages conformity via all the means youâd expect: foreclosing more and more access to affordable housing, welfare, healthcare, and free time and thus all possibilities for life besides the possibility of eking out a living in an increasingly precarious market. She encourages the practice of eclectic, individual gnosticism over fidelity to organized religion, for instance, and the practice of a kind of cosmopolitanism that accepts a multiplicity of ways of living and being without collapsing into liberal bromides. Broadly, I can forgive the stance. The experience of being alive in a Western country now is basically the experience of being let down by every institution you know and cast adrift in a sea of bad-faith actors jockeying for your allegianceâand next to that, an urge to cultivate trust in yourself and in what you know to be true seems natural and necessary. But the voice Crispin assumes in elaborating her position is often so hectoring, aggressive, or snide.
Early on, as Crispin talks about the Rosenstrasse protests in Berlin in 1943âwhen a group of two hundred Aryan women staged a protest outside the building where their Jewish husbands were being held for the camps, demanding their returnâshe adds,
It's heartwarming, isn't it? To think of women putting their lives on the line to save the men they love. It's a good story, but I always want to interfere with a good story, get in its way, break its narrative spine.
In this case, the interference in the story is merited: Crispin notes how many men chose to divorce their Jewish wives rather than protest as the Rosenstrasse women did, and how few people protested on behalf of Jewish people who were not their spouses, not related to them by the mechanics of the family, which reflect darker, harsher realities of history and human nature we canât afford to elide. But from the opening question, with the turn it forecasts and the way it judges sentiment that it assumes the reader will feel, to the way Crispin casts herself as the one whoâll break the storyâs spine...
Reading so many passages like this one, I was reminded of a line from Andrea Long Chuâs review of Maggie Nelsonâs book On Freedomâthe idea of âposition[ing] the subtlety of one's own views against the crudeness of those who do not share them.â It also reminded me of the parts of Sheila Hetiâs Pure Colour that most rankled me, the ones on the âfixersâ whom Heti alleges flatten realityâs complexities and thus obscure truth. Which makes me think there's a Gen X angle to all this too. And it makes me think, can we stop publishing these books in which white women of a certain age and artistic background tell us how to feel by hectoring us? Advertising how much better they are?
I don't mean to make that the sum total of my judgment of My Three Dads. It's an honest enough examination of a world in which I too live; many of the thoughts Crispin has are ones I've had, even the uncharitable ones. She has a gift for storytelling; her account of arriving in Lincoln, Kansas as a child, and getting to know Mr. Pianalto, the teacher whoâll later kill himself and his family, is riveting. There are many moments of interest, complexity, and beauty in the book.
I appreciated the distinctions that were madeâsay, between what Crispin calls community and society. The former, she argues, is premised simply on affiliation and implies or even requires homogeneity; the latter works on a shared sense of obligation toward others and responsibility for each other that serves to preserve room for difference. (Though she doesnât say what creates this sense of obligation or keeps it going.) And I appreciated Crispinâs insight into why so many putatively liberatory communities, like Womantown, a separatist refuge for lesbians in 1980s Kansas City, come to fall victim to their own oppressions (in the case of Womantown, racism)âa desire on the parts of those whoâve been wounded for protection, the easiest means for which is to exert controlâas well as the solution she proposes: that we all learn to gain the âinternal organizationâ of true individuation; the ability to see and know our own selves clearly, to be able to acknowledge our own pain so we can learn to see ourselves and others as whole beingsâand, crucially, acknowledge the pain of others. I also appreciated the discussion of the Dutch beguinage, which allowed women in twelfth-century Amsterdam to escape marriage while preserving the interdependent fabric of truly nurturing lifeâas opposed to the independence that Crispin has won through capitalist means now, which can be so isolatingâand her subsequent argument about the potential for family and society both to be structures of care rather than mere setting for the performance of roles or the exchange of money.
I appreciate all these discussions because in them, Crispin is working toward elucidating something, not just advertising her own unique intelligence or insight.
It was also interesting to read Crispinâs discussion of John Brown and the way Kansans simplify his complicated legacy to better be able to sanitize their own conservatism in the present with an antislavery past. But the parallel drawn between Brown and Scott Roederâthe antiabortion activist who bombed the clinic of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009, killing himâas men who, being âdisappointingâ in ordinary life, as workers and fathers, used politics to compensate for that disappointmentâfeels perhaps too provocative. The two worked toward radically different aims; do those aims not matter? And the savage verdict Crispin delivers on all revolutionary violence feels like claiming moral superiority at the expense of a full spectrum of action. On principle I can agree that, as she puts it, âthere should always be institutions that allow people to both see the evil of the system and their participation in it, and then they should be helped to take responsibilityââbut anyone alive now or ever can see how rarely such institutions really emerge. I donât mean to write as though this question is simple, or without stakes, or as though I have engaged or will engage with revolutionary violence in any way beyond the theoretical. Butâif you're not willing to entertain the possibility of revolutionary violence against an oppressive system, what might you do to change it when it doesnât respond to democratic means?
More valuable, to my mind, because it's more sensitively done, is Crispinâs discussion of the human damage that can be wrought by fanaticism, and the way that a violent liberatory cause that failsâas with the Provisional IRAâs attempt to see a free, united, socialist Irelandârenders the violence purposeless: âThe act of killing no longer had its original meaning, and those deaths could no longer be disregarded as a terrible necessity. The ends didn't come, so they were stuck with the means, and not all of them could bear it.â Thatâs what I want discussed in considerations of revolutionary violence. A clear-eyed assessment of the arguments for it and the costs of it, knowing we live in a world where it's possible, that some cases of it may be justified in ways others are not, and that its undertaking has material and moral consequences.
I also appreciated Crispinâs discussion of the counterculture, whose loss she laments. It's a space of collectivity and experimentationâand itâs not necessarily meant to create something new and durable. Rather, itâs a place for people to land when they realize society is in many ways sick, and from there attempt to do new thingsâsome of which are meant to be coopted; some of which are meant to fail.
Crispin goes on to argue todayâs left has abandoned such space in favor of criticizing culture, rather than building it. Itâs a hackneyed critique as she makes itâshe never defines the wokeness she seems to rail against, nor talks about the neoliberal market and government as uniquely powerful agents for coopting what counterculture might try to make and withdrawing the material resources they might use to make itâbut itâs not without its core of truth. Especially against her point that the right, broadly, moves to appease grievanceâagainst neoliberalism, against consumerist culture, against the sense of enervation in society that resultsâin the assertion of social control through law and order, in the reassertion of Judeo-Christian morals as a source of meaning, and at the extreme, in allegiance to fundamentalist or White nationalist futures.
Finally, Crispinâs account of resolving her struggle with faith in gnosticism is also beautifulâparticularly the endpoint she reaches, asserting that the seeking of truth is the point of life, rather than a means by which to get to the Protestant end of salvation, as she has been told since she was a child. At the start of the book, Crispin describes a love ritual she seeks from a witch she knows, Katelan, to break herself of a pattern of involvement with married menâone that she realizes comes from experience of an abusive relationship. (Itâs one of the book's most electric insights: âOnce you've been knocked around a bit, or screamed at and humiliated in public places, or stalked, or trapped in a car with someone who isn't sure whether he should be pointing the gun at himself or at you, the full attention of a man in love can seem too dangerous. Better to deflect it a bit, get another body in there to hide behind at timesâŠâ) The pair mix flowers and herbs, write on a piece of paper the kind of man Crispin wants, burn the paper and a little wedding candle of a couple in effigy, and summon the spirits; they look to the shapes that form in the wax to see what the relationship will be like. Later, as Crispin leaves Katelanâs home, a storm sprouts up; proof, she says, that the spirits heard them. âFour months later,â Crispin writes, âI was married.â
It sounds too simple or strange to workâand generally, Crispin expresses doubt about the occult as often as affinity for it. But in the end, she sides with the perspective that people can âmove through symbol and metaphor to ritualize the natural world and our role within it and find a way to understand [their] own mortality,â and there is something beautiful in that.
When I went to that witch and asked for a ritual for love, it wasn't out of a belief that it would work. It's easy to disprove magic. I did it out of faith that there was something not inherently disgusting and unforgivable about myself, and that that part of myself might be loved.
Which is to say, the ritual is meant less to achieve a result than to consecrate this nascent sense of self Crispin feels emerging, or to incarnate it, to give it the strength it needs to manifest.
But again it's hard to miss how so many such lovely, courageous moments on Crispinâs part are dogged with harsh judgment of others. Right after the story of this beautiful ritual, and Crispin's account of her interest in Wicca and Tarot as a teenager, comes a passage in which Crispin viciously judges the witches on TikTok who, in 2020, gained minor notoriety online for an attempt to âhexâ the moon:
The TikTok witches, it seems, decided to hex the moon. And the Twitter witches got upset, saying you can't hex the moon, there are consequences to that kind of impertinence. Some of the Twitter witches insisted they had, in their rituals, talked to Apollo, and now Apollo was pissed and wasn't going to do things for them. They didn't say what those things were, but it was probably along the lines of getting Justin Bieber tickets.
For some reason the whole thing sent me into a rage. âYou did not talk to Apollo!â I wanted to yell. Who do these girls think they are, lighting candles in an Ohio basement, thinking the god of poetry is going to take their call? Thinking they won't face madness or torment while trying to find the language of the divine? Thinking the saints who wandered in the desert for years begging god to speak to them must just not have used the right crystal? You don't get to talk to god and then just go to your job at the mall.
It's all so spiritually thin, this generation of witches making demands without devotion, looking to the stars to tell them when things will get good for them rather than asking what they can offer of themselves...
To which I ask: why so harsh? Yes, the whole thing is a bit stupid; everything on TikTok is at least a little dumb. But the witches are effectively seeking for meaning, even if their expression of seeking feels goofy. And how much offering of herself was Crispin doing when she was young, anywayâa misfit in a conservative Kansas family, dying her hair black, hunting down books on Wicca and astrology, turning to paganism as part of a project of figuring out what she really believed, how powerful she really was?
In the end, what really distinguishes the kids on Tiktok from Crispin's own teenage self is a sense they're still subject to illusions she's broken free from. It's that radical individuality againâbut deployed in the service of judgment of others, in a spirit that seems to contradict the generosity of the internally organized individual that Crispin elsewhere counsels us to cultivate. Let kids do the work of individuation, I say, however stupid it seems. As for those of the TikTok witches who arenât children, well, I think love and not judgment is what helps spiritual thinness flesh out.
Late in the book, after sheâs settled in Kansas City, Crispin sees an old church across the street that will soon be torn down for condos:
I imagine that when a developer looks at this building, they see lost profit. They see the structure transformed or replaced, filled with young professionals, maybe with a coworking space on the ground floor. I imagine that when a priest looks at the building, they see lost souls. They imagine it filled with the wayward sheep lost to a secular culture, the ghosts of the godless filling the pews. I imagine that when a community organizer looks at the building, they see a space for organizing. They see it filled with the work of local artists, or support groups for a very specific marginalized populationâŠ
Here one sees the drive to classify, to split society into types (developer, priest, organizer) or sectors of society (the religious right, capitalist money culture, the right, the left). These labels do describe legible demographics, and a certain degree of such abstraction is necessary for a polemic, or any piece of nonfiction about society broadlyâbut they become so reductive when all they're used to do is harangue. The building is renovated, and an arts nonprofit moves in. âBut of course people don't dream of adequately feeding someone,â Crispin says:
they don't go to med school in the hopes of providing basic care in exchange for a sustainable income. They dream of expansion, not maintenance. They dream of art, not groceries. They dream of leading a movement, not participating in one. They dream of the glorification of their own desires, not the meeting of other people's needs. Or they dream purely of profit, which means selling low quality in high quantity with little overhead, and of course treating employees decently and making sure they don't drop dead of a preventable disease counts as overhead.
Who is âtheyâ here? I think. Anybody but you? And without any clear referents, what is anyone supposed to do about this? Who are they supposed to target, to change the way things are, and how?
I wonder how this passage might've been different if Crispin had named the nonprofit, or identified the bourgeois biscuit shop that later moves into another abandoned building in her part of town. Put someone's skin in the game. It would be a small move toward the kind of specificity in analysis that might actually make change happen; it could also be less alienating than what we get.
People often complain about the âpersonal essay industrial complex,â or they criticize âinformed exceptionalismââAmber Husain's excellent term for the kind of writing, a la Jia Tolentinoâs Trick Mirror or Anna Wienerâs Uncanny Valley, in which the writer uses the admission of their own complicity to effectively excuse that complicity. But reading this book, I missed the specificity of those writersâ subject positions, the pains they often took to elaborate them and to locate themselves in the networks in which we're all culpable, and to do these things with humility.
Ultimately, if informed exceptionalism is the midpoint in a continuum of autobiographical writingâand the position of ambivalence that refuses absolution that is assumed by, say, Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless, per Husainâs argument, is a progression (though, crucially, not an endpoint; thereâs more progress yet to be made)âthe stretches of pure harangue we get in this book mark a regression. And next to them, I'll take an honest admission of the writerâs own complicityâand the extension of that same grace to even the witches on TikTok hexing the moonâany day.
For much of the time I was reading Gwendoline Rileyâs novel First Love, it was hard to figure out how I felt about it. Itâs a grueling experience. Ultimately, itâs a dark picture of the impossibility of love, maybe. Or of how helpless you are not to reproduce the models of relationship youâve been given.
Protagonist Neve and her husband Edwyn have such an infantilized relationship:
When we cuddle on the landing, and later in the kitchen, I make little noises â little comfort noises â in the back of my throat, as does he. When we cuddle in bed at night, he says âI love you so much!â or âYouâre such a lovely little person!â There are pet names, too. Iâm âlittle smelly pussâ before a bath, and âlittle cleany pussâ in my towel on the landing after oneâŠ
You come to wonder what someone who displays the degree of consciousness of herself that Neve does is doing with him; heâs so wounded and unable to recognize it, and itâs so hard to tell what the relationship actually gives her.
Edwyn is in pain, suffering from fibromyalgia and a heart condition and perhaps arthritis, and extremely anxious. These donât seem to be the source of his problems, but they make them worse, and heâs able to use them as a lever against Neve, because he does not follow the basic adult principle that you deal with your pain rather than punishing others for the fact that you have it. His childish manner constantly threatens to collapse into great cruelty when she demonstrates any shred of an authentic, adult personality, and when it finally happens, when he calls her things like âA fishwife shrew with a face like a fucking arsehole thatâs hadâŠgreen acid shoved up it,â she can never make him admit it; he has pain and terror to hide behind. âSometimes heâd just sit and sob,â says Neve, âand look up at me with frightened eyes when I sat next to him.â When sheâs fallen apartâas when, after her awful father dies, she cries for daysâheâs oblivious:
Whatâs the matter with you?... I donât understand. Youâre an intelligent woman. Did you imagine he was going to live forever?... Heâs dead, youâre alive, youâre guilty, itâs desolate.⊠Sooner or later you are going to have to get over this.⊠Thatâs just realism, honey.
You quickly realize Neveâs mother is largely the same way: childish, strange, often obliviously cheery, infantilized and infantilizing, yanking others about by her moods because she herself is yanked by them. So is Neveâs father, profoundly abusive, a menace to his children and his wife. So is everyone in Rileyâs narrative universe, perhaps, save Neveâwho understands the strange and tortured people around her but cannot change them or be free of them.
When her father dies, Neve reflects on the state of the house heâs left behind: âThe house felt very lonely. Like a lonely childâs lair, really. The brave business of self-solace everywhere in evidence (to my eyes, anyway). His comforts. His acquisitions. Stores of treats. Discarded novelties⊠And so much foodâŠâ The metaphor is obvious: hunger for love, need for the love of people like his daughterâand the fact that he, having no capacity to give love in return, has long since exhausted it, and so has had to settle for other forms of sustenance. âWhat could you do?â Neve says. âHe was aggressive, not bright, none of which makes for a person you want to engage with if you can help it. Instead â I did it myself when I was older â you smiled, tried to meet him halfway, just as you might encourage a baby, and give all your warm attention to a baby, to get it to behave.â She stops seeing him regularly soon after.
Rileyâs dialogue is especially interestingâthe pace of the sentences she uses to convey her odd charactersâ odd speech, and the use of italics, in particular, in conveying the brands of loneliness, neediness, and nastiness that Edwyn and Neveâs mother display. The emphasis of the italics on certain words does so much to convey their senses of glee or injury; childrenâs senses, of an exhibitionist sort. Itâs children who are pleased at demonstrating how X they can be: how titillated they think it is to âsleep in the nudie,â in Neveâs motherâs bizarre parlance when she stays over one night (âOoh, doesnât it feel funny? Oh, I could never sleep in the nudie!â she tells Neve, mock-shocked, having barged into her adult daughterâs space, humiliating her); or how unwell they are (âWell?â Edwyn sputters at Neve, once, when she tries to encourage him; âIâm not well. Iâm not well!â); or how unbelievable it is that you donât see what theyâre going through. And itâs children, often, who are determined to fill every moment with stimulation, as Neveâs mother does:
All through that marriage, if I asked how she was, I got her itinerary, read out from the long-leaved kitchen calendar, if we were on the phone, or else from the little diary she scrabbled for in her bag:
âYes, so, Wednesdayâs the Wine Circle, isnât it? And then the Vic Soc on FridayâŠâ
And all in that dollâs-tea-party voice: self-enclosed, self-chivvyingâŠ.
âNow where are we? Wednesday, yes. Look at this. Every day Iâve got something on. I never stop!â...
âDoes anyone talk to you when youâre at these dos?â
âNo! Well, no one new. I stand there âlooking approachableâ all night! But no one approaches! No one. No. There are people I know from the Vic Soc⊠I mean, I did ask some people from the Vic Soc round for, you know, flat-warming nibbles and drinks, and some people came, but you would think, wouldnât you, that, you know, I might get an invitation in return. Nothing. Not oneâŠâ
Neve asksâperversely, sheâs awareâif her mother has thought about therapy, about learning to relate to people from the ground up rather than âdarting aboutâ as she does: âIf you want to be friends with [âŠ] anybody, then you canât just keep putting yourself in their way and expecting them to pick you up.â âWhat do you mean, pick me up?â her mother shoots back.
Whatâs that, âPick me upâ? Needy? Oh no, Iâm not needy. Iâm too far the other way, if anything. Iâm completely the other way. Thatâs probably what put him off.
As for adults, what do they do? They try not to succumb to what their worst selves tell them to do. Gradually you realize that Neveâs relationship with Edwyn, as the first in which sheâs lived in a partner, represents the breaking of a long defensive pattern of isolation. Itâs in a way an act of courage. But now that sheâs taken it, she doesnât seem to know what to do next, or how to shape the situation sheâs in; it doesnât seem to be one she can shape. When she and Edwyn fight, she greets it with a sort of hopeless horror. At one point she wonders if he actually notices the cringing aspect she takes on when he bullies her. âNo,â she decides, âI donât believe he did notice. That was the lesson, I think. That none of this was personal.â
I felt a sad stab of empathy at the scene when Neve, setting up her desk when sheâs just moved in with Edwyn, journals out her ambitions for the new self she vows to be.
Untangle yourself. Stop saying you love him. Youâre wearing a groove in your mind. Say it when you mean it. Save money. Small steps. Remember youâre a grown woman now. Be more proud and more relaxedâŠ. Donât act like a baby. Donât be a cat. Be decent to him and to yourself. Respect yourself and him. See your friends. Donât be sly. Donât be deceitful. Donât snoop.⊠Keep your footing. Leave the room if he calls you a name. If you save money you can leave the flat if he's nasty. Stand up for yourself but donât waste your energy. This is your time and your energy. Donât try and âmanageâ him. Be natural and let him be natural. Thatâs what love is. No cramped feelings, on either side.â
How many times have I written out the same injunctions to myselfââBe an adult, be mature, donât fall into old habits, old insecurities; youâre better than that now; you have resources you didnât beforeââand then failed to live up to the same injunctions. Thatâs the tragedyâthis trying to teach yourself to give yourself what life has not given you, to do what life has not taught you how to do.
It all sounds banal written out this way. But it wasnât nearly so clear to me until I thought hard about what Iâd read. First Love is really such a weird reading experience. The elliptical structure, the erratic length and sequence of its chapters, its jumping about in time, unpredictably, and the odd allusions Edwyn makes to a past full of grime and filthâwhich seem gratuitous for much of the book, knocks at Neveâs lower-middle-class upbringing with her bullying, vicious father, until she reveals late in the novel that she really did spend a decade and a half before Edwyn drinking and living with gruesome desperation: âI think I was sick from drink, at least once a week, for about fifteen years,â she says. âOnce I woke up in a hotel in town, to a long heap of sick next to me in bed, like a person.â Itâs all so lurching and vertiginous to read. And it manages to evoke the scattered consciousness of a person who, subjected to so much by a parent, has clawed their way out of a fugueâonly to reduce themselves to the state of child again. You continually come to remember Neve chose to be with Edwyn, and he with herâapparently, somehow, for all he seldom chooses to admit it except to punish her with guilt.
If one question you ask is How have these people ended up together?, another is Why doesnât she leave? Rileyâs quite skillful at balancing Neveâs maturity and insight with the fragility that lies beneath it like a pit under a false floor. And you can marshal maturity in a relationship with a parent, which is reactive; experience of your parent can teach you at least something of how to deal with them. But in the relationship with the lover, which is one you have created and must continue to create, what the parental relationship might do, perversely, is drive you to create it all over again, in hopes of resolving it this time, or because the pain of it is what you know. Realizing this has happened doesnât free you of it. In fact, knowledge enervates; in one of her last big fights with Edwyn, one Neve can see coming, she writes of how âMy body started to ache. My voice got dull. I spoke like a machine that was running down, while he seemed only to gain energy.â
But if itâs not insight or awareness that can free you, then what? What would it take for Neve to do the things she writes in her journal so that she no longer needs to write about them?
And then thereâs still another of the novelâs big questions: is love possible? One of Neve and Edwynâs most vicious fights takes place after Neveâafter a night out, the nature of which she does not describeâcomes home horribly drunk. The scene goes on for pages. She blacks out, wakes up suffering, he screams at her, she blacks out again. âI donât care how you feel,â he tells her.
âDonât worry,â he adds,
I blame myself. I knew what I was getting. I knew what you were. You never learned, did you, how to interact with other people, in a way that wasnât mad. How to be in the world in a way that wasnât sick and mad⊠Itâs not your fault. I do understand that. But I wonât be anyoneâs carer. Do you get that?
The hostility recurs in their second big fight, provoked by Neveâs desire for another night out, expressed with the timidity she usually takes on with him, with her instinct to âmanageâ him as she once managed her father. âWell, please donât get horribly drunk,â he snipes, though Neve reveals itâs been two years since that incident. âI like the affection between us,â he snarls at herârevealing his regard for her, and the limits to what he thinks is possible for either of themââbut donât kid me that itâs about love. Itâs about need for love.â
Cut to the next scene, when theyâre going to see an art exhibition in town. Neve does not say what comes of the fight, whether she actually went out, or anything about its aftermath. They walk along with coffees; Neve is again in her managing mode, holding Edwynâs elbow, asking him tender questions, just listening. Edwyn, reminiscing about his post-college days in Marylebone, says, âAnd Iâd remember who I could chat to, and go back to them the next week, for some chat and some friendliness. Thatâs what you do in life, isnât it?â
So, then. Thereâs the answer. No love is possible, not when the first loveâlike the kind of an immature mother or a cruel father or whoeverâhas fucked you up badly enough. Then thereâs just the need for love, and some chat, and some friendlinessâŠ
