IN HIS THIRTEEN-LINE POEM “Scotland,” the Scottish poet Alastair Reid invokes a perfect day when “the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels” and “sunlight / stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.” When the poet meets “the woman from the fish-shop,” he marvels at the weather, only to be told by her in the poem’s last line: “We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!”
IT IS CUSTOMARY TO START an essay about Kafka by emphasizing how impossible it is to write about Kafka, then apologizing for making a doomed attempt. This gimmick has a distinguished lineage. “How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” Cynthia Ozick asks in the New Republic before she presumes for several ravishing pages. In the Paris Review, Joshua Cohen insists that “being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” But far from
A MAN AND HIS FAMILY are vacationing in a tiny village in France. On the eve of their planned departure, the man’s wife and son disappear. He embarks on a hopeful search, asking for information about his missing family from neighbors and the local police. They went to pick up eggs and they didn’t come back, he tells anyone who will listen. But it’s September, and, with the other Parisian vacationers gone, the town—usually sunny and cheery—has transformed. It’s cold and wet, and the townspeople, once spirited and deferential to visitors, are distant and unhelpful. They are also confused by
LAURENCE STERNE DESIGNATED the poet and novelist Tobias Smollett a “Smelfungus” in his 1768 novel-length travelogue A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Smollett published his travelogue Travels Through France and Italy two years before, and Sterne’s punishing evaluation of that work is as follows: “The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris,—from Paris to Rome,—and so on;—but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted.—He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.” That judgment could equally apply to P. Lewis (aka
ELENA FERRANTE DOES NOT require privacy. She lays out her psychosexual-emotional range for all the world in multiple languages. She does not lock down her time, although she controls its use: one written interview in each language with each book. What she avoids is the parade, the opportunity for outsiders to evaluate aspects of her she is not ferociously driven to present. That is why she wrote a letter to her publishers in 1991, before they released her first novel, Troubling Love, before she knew whether she would find one reader or one million. In the letter, she gently refused
“SENESCENCE” ISN’T QUITE THE RIGHT WORD for the stage the writers of the Baby Boom have reached. Sure, they may be collecting social security, the eldest of them in their mid-seventies, but the wonders of modern science may allow some another couple of decades of productivity. When the Reaper starts to come for the writer’s instrument, the first thing to go is flow, but that may not matter: fragments are in. In a decade or so, robbed of their transitions and reduced to accumulating prose shards, the octogenarian Boomers may find themselves newly trendy. A strange fate for a generation
Authors have long asked whether fiction is useful in times of crisis, a question that has been especially pronounced in the past four years, following the election of the current president, the advent of coronavirus, and the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. What can a book do in a time like this? It’s a question central to Want, Lynn Steger Strong’s second novel. The narrator, unnamed until the penultimate page, asks herself throughout the book: Why did I study English? Why did I think that sharing books with people was a worthwhile way to spend my life?
Most fiction about North Korea published outside of that country is by defectors and dissenters, and most of it tells of the hardships of living under a totalitarian regime. Fiction published in North Korea tends to be the opposite: when I visited in 2017, the only English-language books at the bookshop that passed as fiction were hagiographic historical novels about former supreme leaders.
In today’s novels of disillusionment, every party has at least one person who doesn’t know why they’re there, who is thinking, as they find themselves on the periphery of various conversations: “Oh my god, everyone in this world is just way too interested in things.”
In Nicole Flattery’s recent story collection, Show Them a Good Time, precarity is a draining certainty. Unlike the protagonists in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends or Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which precarity is expressed as youthful malaise, Flattery’s characters experience money problems as a potentially endless catastrophe. Originally from Mullingar, Flattery is part of a generation of Irish writers whose adult lives have been defined by austerity. The all-female protagonists in Show Them a Good Time are stuck in this boom-bust loop. Hometowns are not the safety net they once were, and cities are cold
In Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel, The Appointment, a patient sits in a medical exam room and monologues at a man named Dr. Seligman for 131 pages. The patient, Sarah, was born in Germany but is now based in London and likes to gossip about her former shrink, Jason, whom she hates. She isn’t sure whether she hates Dr. Seligman, though she initially distrusts him. She wonders if he’s like Jason, who would definitely smile his way “through any atrocity” with the ridiculous conviction that he could forgive all “petty human errors.” This raises an obvious question: if Sarah doesn’t trust
WHAT ARE THESE RED PILLS AND WHERE DO YOU GET ONE? They seem more potent than most non-metaphorical drugs. Just a single dose and you’ll never see the world the same way again. The term comes from The Matrix. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) presents Neo (Keanu Reeves) with a choice of two pills, a blue one that will allow him to live complacently within the illusion he’s used to (a fake life as a regular Joe with a family and an office job), or a red one (it looks like a Robitussin tablet) that will show him “the truth” (he’s really
HOW DO YOU WRITE A POLITICAL NOVEL IN 2020? How do you not write a political novel in 2020? It is impossible to imagine a contemporary writer presenting a version of the world that is not marked in some way by Trumpism, the threat of ecological catastrophe, the deepening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, the spectacle of racist police brutality. Yet the process of digesting the various horrors of the present into prose isn’t always noble. There is a way to use the novel as a balm to soothe the tempers of people who see themselves as opposed
“I PAINT THE PORTRAIT OF THE AGE,” the Austrian writer Joseph Roth proclaimed in a 1926 letter to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung. “I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist,” he continued. “I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.”
THE NARRATOR OF SIGRID NUNEZ’S NEW NOVEL, What Are You Going Through, is an unmarried female writer who seems to be between sixty and seventy years old. She has a friend, another unmarried female writer of the same age, who is dying of cancer. (The friend prefers the word fatal to the word terminal—“Terminal makes me think of bus stations, which makes me think of exhaust fumes and creepy men prowling for runaways,” she says.) After the last round of treatment fails, the friend—no one is named, which works well in the novel but is already cumbersome in a review—invites
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts, the unnamed narrator notices a butternut squash. It makes her think of a detail in a Dürer engraving. Later, in a restaurant, she spots a decorative squash. “There appears to be a vast referentiality everywhere,” she tells us. It’s true that patterns exist—or, anyway, that we’re constantly finding them. It’s less true, I think, that there’s meaning in this fact. It’s only a game we while our lives away playing.
BEFORE SHE ORDAINED HER BOYFRIEND the first “good cop,” Lana Del Rey was born to die. It was 2012. She was only five months away from twenty-seven, the age at which celebrity musicians are, anecdotally speaking, very likely to experience a turn of fate. (Amy Winehouse overdosed in her tenth month, Janis Joplin in her ninth.) The album she put out that year, Del Rey’s second, was considered a breakout hit. Born to Die, critics agreed, had changed the course of her life.
It took me a while to get around to Circe (Back Bay Books, $15), Madeline Miller’s extremely popular 2018 novel told from the perspective of the island-dwelling witch from The Odyssey. Friends had raved about it circa its publication. I’d read one page and put it down, finding it too hard to get into the narrator’s formal, serious Ancient Greekness. Then, two years later, novels featuring contemporary people stopped being able to hold my attention. Characters went to bars and museums, rode the subway, walked around with their faces uncovered. I couldn’t relate. Time to read about an immortal demigoddess
Greek life is enough of a pop-culture staple that it’s easy to forget how little attention fraternities and sororities have received from writers of literary fiction. The campus novel has been with us since the early 1950s, and while the genre has grown capacious enough to include such disparate works as Possession and Dear Committee Members, The Groves of Academe and Giles Goat-Boy, most tend to focus on faculty—specifically, a certain strain of libidinous professor who bemoans the benighted state of his department. Novels about college students—The Secret History, The Marriage Plot, The Idiot—have avoided frat row entirely, with the
In Andrew Martin’s new story collection, we’re with the critics, who are also writers, who often don’t write anything at all. Like Derek, who peaks hate-skimming a novel by the sometime-boyfriend of Violet, a member of his War and Peace reading group: “First paragraph: way too long. How many clauses did one man need? Last sentence: something about a Carolyn ‘emerging carelessly’ from a car. Indeed.” Derek throws the book in the trash, feels something. He is lashing out, having “been proven wrong in his interpretations of the text at every turn” over eight months of Tolstoy, and all in
