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The Story Reteller

On mourning, the plague, and the birth of the death instinct

Sarah Nicole Prickett

The Plague: Living Death in Our Times By Jacqueline Rose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 176 pages. $27.

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WHEN A DEER, A DOE, STEPPED INTO THE ROAD perhaps a hundred and twenty feet ahead of the car I was driving, it seemed for a moment that she would die, even though, during the same moment, I did not feel afraid that I would hit her. I was calm; I returned my smoking hand to the steering wheel; I braked. The deer seemed to be looking at me. There was a chance she might actually run toward me. I switched off the high-beams. All of this happened in two and a half seconds, before the deer continued across the road, safely to the other side, in a single bound. It was then that, exhaling, I realized the extent to which I had felt for—on behalf of—the animal, and for days after I dwelled on the feeling.

Why, in my memory of the moment, was my thought so precisely that the deer would die? Without being afraid, I had made a leap. I had ascribed to her something like a death wish, or, in more properly psychoanalytic terms, a death instinct. Becoming roadkill is not as common a fate as movies make you think, is way down on the list of causes of deer death, after hunting and starvation and disease. Most deer in the region (I googled it later) die of a sickness transmitted by flies, causing them to drop like the same. Possibly this one wanted to “die its own death,” as Freud said of the organism’s wish.

One answer to my question relies on a form of projection that is more specific, and even more inappropriate, than anthropomorphism. The road on which I was driving was a country road, a two-line tangent I had taken from a highway that had become the whole plot. There were few streetlamps, capriciously placed. Going fast wasn’t safe. But it was late and we were late to the summer house and there were no other cars, and so, barely slowing from highway speeds, I was going fifteen miles over the limit. Rather than admit fear of my own dangerousness into my headspace, I transmuted my lack of care for other living things into this one living thing’s desire, putatively, to be destroyed.

Or, I believed about myself that I was murderous, either because of my particular nature or because of my membership in the world’s most deathful species, that of the human. Confronted with the chance to destroy, some part of me wanted it; no part of me could admit to it. Instead, I had enlisted the straying animal in service of my own suppressed, unmanageable worries about myself, my species, or both. I was behaving at the very least negligently, considering (in fact failing to consider) the twists and turns and the nearness of the woods to the road and the yellow signs, unheeded, more numerous than cars.

Or, I myself wanted to die. This answer seems like the obvious one, because it works through both identification and projection—a pair of processes that are never definitely at odds. To accuse someone of projecting onto you is sharing the error, assuming that the thing someone looks for, then sees in you—because it’s too dark to see inside herself—is something you would not possibly fail to recognize as yours. Or yours, too. There is no reason the deer and I couldn’t both have a death wish, under the circumstances. But I don’t think I did. During the early, destabilizing stages of the pandemic in 2020, I one day realized how long it had been since I felt anything like “feeling suicidal.” Though I am naming the pandemic in recollection, what, at the time, I credited with the cessation of the symptom was some degree of acceptance of both aging and climate change. Either the world or society was rotting and expiring, and suicide all of a sudden seemed redundant.

I want to be clear that the deer in my story is not a metaphor; it is a mother. Perhaps this is why, from another angle, it seemed like she had chosen me for the purpose of accomplishing her fate. Everyone knows what “doe-eyed” is supposed to mean: innocent, even though deer of all genders have strenuous lives and, partly to cope, behave in ways that are endangering and chaotic. Would I have had all these feelings for or about a deer with antlers, do I think? I really can’t say.

Only—saying that the deer is a “mother” brings me to the ur-answer, which helped make all the other ones. This answer is the presence, in a tote bag in the backseat of the car, of a galley copy of Jacqueline Rose’s new book, The Plague, which I had read and which of course I am writing about, and which is about nothing more or less than the necessities of pausing for recognition and stopping for death.

The name of Rose entwines lovingly with whatever is moribund, whatever is misunderstood. Roses reek of their meanings. In 2020, Jacqueline Rose delivered the annual Freud Memorial Lecture—not on the May day of his birth, as scheduled, but on the September day of his death, as rescheduled due to the pandemic. Also due to the pandemic, there was no audience in the flesh. Rose stood alone in Freud’s consulting room in what was once his house, now a museum for him in London. She looked paler than in photographs. She wore a low-cut top, a blazer, a pencil skirt, boots—all black or very dark, and her nails were painted dark if not black. Rose’s whole manner and appearance, so suited to the Victorian setting, goth-like and sensitive, made it seem impossible that she should be saying the word “livestream.” Her subject was Freud’s conception of the death drive, which she argued had more to do with the passing of Freud’s favorite daughter, Sophie, from Spanish flu in 1918 than with anything else happening that year, including World War I. At one point, she glancingly likened the marginalized status of the psyche in public life—her bête noire; without it, what she would write?—to that of “death in the time of Walter Benjamin.” When she didn’t elaborate, I felt thrilled. I needed no explanation, I knew exactly what she meant. I knew it from her.

Rose also stands for Gillian, older sister to Jacqueline. Gillian Rose, a political philosopher whose texts exalt difficulty and plunder spiritual, moral, and relational unease, died of cancer in 1995, age forty-eight. Jacqueline was forty-six. When The Guardian first profiled Jacqueline in 2003, the interviewer asked whether she felt guilt to do with her sister’s untimely death. Jacqueline, in lieu of answering, pointed to one of the essays in the collection she was promoting, On Not Being Able to Sleep. (This reticence allows for the description of Jacqueline, at the start of the piece, as “fervently private.”) The essay, “Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism,” is in part about a disagreement Rose seems to be having, uncharacteristically, with Freud or with Freudianism. The work of mourning can—should—never be finished, says Rose, no matter what he says in his 1915 paper “Mourning and Melancholia.”

I imagine the person with whom she is really arguing is Gillian, who, months before dying, gave a radio interview in which she plainly, approvingly, cited the same bit of Freud: “Freud says if you complete the work of mourning, you return to the fullness of being. If you don’t, you remain melancholic.” Gillian diagnoses not only post-structuralism but even “the whole of recent French philosophy” with melancholia, because of its non-erotic or derealizing fixation on lack and on absence. (Here it may help to know that Gillian, a strange Hegelian but a Hegelian all the same, moved to Berlin after graduating from Oxford. Jacqueline moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, and when she returned to London it was to get her doctorate under the supervision of the foremost sympathizer with French theory in English academia, the scholar and critic Frank Kermode.)

To return—it is in the Woolf essay that Rose for the first time cites Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”:

In the words of Walter Benjamin, the storyteller used to “borrow his authority from death” (“there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died”). But in the course of modern times, dying has been pushed more and more out of the perceptual world of the living. “Though almost all her novels are dominated by a death,” writes Lee, “in almost all the death is not written in.” This makes death the absent-presence in Virginia Woolf’s writing, turning it Janus-like back as well as forwards through literary and historical time.

Rose is writing on carbon paper. Tear away the analysis of Woolf, and below, on a sheet of pale pink, you have the heavy trace of self-identification. “It seems so inexplicable,” says the character Evelyn in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, about the protagonist’s absence. “Death, I mean. Why should she be dead, and not you or I?” For a mourning Rose the appeal of these lines is clear. “Evelyn,” says Rose, “is the character who is left with the question. She carries forward into the rest of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, as a matter of principle, the open-ended uncertainty we have come to associate with Woolf’s later texts.” (Meaning, all of her novels.) So too is Rose the character to whom questions are left, as if bequeathed.

Rose’s second citing of “The Storyteller” is in a passage about violence and representation in Proust and the Nations (2011):

When Walter Benjamin said that we have pushed death from the center of our experience, he was not writing specifically about war, but the inability to countenance death which he attributes to modernity takes on a new resonance in the context of the twentieth-century violence that he did not live fully to see. It is, Freud wrote, impossible to imagine one’s own death (which is why we like to attribute death to accident or disaster, as if it were something we might, if we are lucky, be spared). Today, we are witnessing a technocratic perfection of violence, together with a flood of images of disaster on our screens, whose paradoxical consequence seems to be the idea that death is history.

The third citing is very like the second. It’s in the essay called “Life After Death” in the new book, The Plague:

Freud once stated that no one believes in their own death. In the unconscious there is a blank space where knowledge of this one sure thing about our futures should be. If the pandemic changed life forever, it might therefore be because that inability to countenance death—which may seem to be the condition of daily sanity—was revealed as the delusion it always is. . . . “There used to be no house, hardly a room in which someone had not once died,” the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller.” On the other hand, he argued that in modern life dying has been pushed beyond the perceptual realm of the living.

Four words, verbatim: “inability to countenance death.” Previously, Rose seems to take the notion as a point of fact, not conditional but proof of some condition. We (humans, moderns, Westerners) can’t countenance death. Benjamin said so. Now, revising the citation so minimally as to conjure an enviable lassitude, she falls on the kind of double negative that she, being a Francophile, so enjoys. Does the non-existence of the inability mean we are able to believe in the unbelievable? If only . . . ! A vision of life changing because we do nothing new, only shed some old detriment, gleams and beckons. But in the psyche as in the grandparents’ house, the most useless things are thrown out with the greatest reluctance.

Rose wrote “Life After Death” for publication in The Guardian, and it is a tour de force. Perhaps its most impressive feature is the date on which it appeared: three weeks before Christmas, a time at which normal people are not supposed to think about dying. This was also, I recall, a time at which “normalcy” was seen as some kind of gift. Vaccines had arrived in the US and the UK one year earlier. Social distancing rules no longer applied. Masks were coming off. This is all to say that I cannot imagine a worse time to write an essay urging newspaper readers to not only remember, but also dwell on, the pandemic. Rose is like someone going around the house at shiva, tearing the bedsheets from the mirrors, letting in the haunting—for every social injustice a psychic wound. Right away is when you risk forgetting, as all good analysands know.

Hilda Doolittle, the poet who was briefly Freud’s patient, wrote of an analytic session in which she spoke about the last days of the war, which had ended fifteen years earlier. Freud replied by saying “he had reason to remember the epidemic, as he had lost his favorite daughter.” Then he showed her a tiny locket secured to his watch chain. “She is here,” he said. This telling makes me wonder who is analyzing whom. She says war, he hears epidemic, he says daughter.

A similar slippage—the feeling of a missed step, a dizzy landing—occurs in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud begins by discussing the recurrent dreams in which sufferers from the “war neuroses” (now PTSD in the DSM) get mired in fright. Then, a double line break, as if he is stopping and turning (no other chapter in the book features this kind of paginal schism), and suddenly we are in a very different bedroom. Here, a child is being spied on. Freud observes a “good boy,” aged eighteen months, playing with a spool of thread in a yo-yo-like manner. Throwing the spool under the bed so it disappears, the child cries “o-o-o-o.” Returning the spool to himself, he says “da.” This unidentified child is in real life Sophie’s son, Freud’s grandson.

Freud writes that later, when the child gained the use of his words, he would say to a toy he was angrily throwing: “go to the front.” It was the front where the child’s father had gone to fight. Thus, in a neat bit of back formation, “o-o-o-o” becomes fort, the German word for “gone” or “away,” in whose lonesome vowel Freud hears “go away” and “be gone.” Freud says the child is trying to master as well as make sense of the mother’s goings, to say nothing of her comings, in which the child lacks say. The entire passage is unbearably weighted by a footnote: “When the child was five and three quarters, his mother died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (o-o-o-o), the little boy showed no signs of grief.” If the long “o” had meant wo, the German word for “where,” the little Ernst might have taught himself object permanence; but then Freud would not have learned about repetition compulsion. I wonder how many times a day he opened and closed the locket, or whether it struck him that the watch chain, busied with keeping her memory from falling out of time, looked like a string.

In the Freud Memorial Lecture, Rose notes how Freud’s first biographer suggested there might be a link between Sophie’s death and the conception of the “death instinct.” The readiness of Freud’s alibi is for Rose a sure sign of guilt. In July 1920, just before Beyond the Pleasure Principle’s publication, he wrote to a friend, Max Eitingon: “You will be able to certify that it was half-finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing.” But it was to the same friend that Freud had first spoken of the “death drive,” in letters shortly after Sophie’s death. The half he said was finished did not include the sixth chapter, in which the Todestrieb, translated as “death instinct” or “death drive,” appears for the first time in his (published) writing. Rose doubles down: “I think it would, therefore, be fair to say that Freud owes the genesis of this unprecedented concept to [Sophie].”

Rose is the essence of fair. I wish she were my mother. But there is no such thing as a concept without precedents. A belief that Rose’s writing has engendered for me is that there is always another genesis, another Eve.

Cecily Brown, Aujourd’hui Rose, 2005, oil on linen, 77 × 55". © Cecily Brown

ROSE ALSO STANDS FOR ROSENTHAL, the name once picked by or for a Jewish emigre family to comply with Habsburg decree. Some of the Rosenthals who fled Nazi Germany changed it to Rose, for the purposes of easier transplantation to English soil. One of the Roses became the stepfather to Gillian and Jacqueline, which is how an adopted name became an adoptive one, taken by the sisters to replace the name of their father, which was Stone. Hard to imagine a more signifying change, from totally smooth and closed to totally complex and mysterious. Or, you could say, from the “false telos of masculine logic” to “femininity as body,” these being the terms whose opposition Jacqueline Rose set up, then unsettled, in the Woolf essay, substituting “death” for “femininity” as the foil to reason.

Identification for Rose is a means of testing, questioning, vitiating—rather than proving—one’s identity. She occupies and disturbs the sites of the world’s two oldest prejudices: misogyny and anti-Semitism. I get the sense, while reading her essays about feminism or about Zionism, that the age of the prejudice works against the innocence of those who suffer from it—especially, Rose would say, in the collaborationist realm of fantasy. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Rose describes the fantastical worldview held by Ted Hughes in the wake of Plath’s death: “Celtic . . . culture celebrated the female principle. It is the loss of this principle, which survived into Catholicism but was finally destroyed or driven underground by the Puritan revolution, that is responsible for the destructiveness of our contemporary world.” (Two pre-Christian entities, Jews and Celts, marginalized for the same thing: resistance to what would become a totalizing cult of the afterlife.)

There is little more elusive than the meaning of the female principle in Jacqueline Rose’s thought, but if I were to choose a word for it, it would be "boundless"—a word that goes either way. In her 2014 book Women in Dark Times, she argues that “women have a unique capacity to bring the dark side of the unconscious, of history—whatever is bleeding invisibly beneath—to the surface of our lives,” something she sees as “both a gift and a task.” (You could call it an inheritance.) Plath, Woolf, Rosa Luxemburg, Marilyn Monroe, Charlotte Salomon: women particularly gifted with intelligence, alterity, and spirit, and tasked with psychic depth and solicitude.

Sabina Spielrein—intense, strangely attractive, a little mad, altogether hard to get to know, irrepressible and at the same time ill with fate—is the perfect Roseian subject, making it odd that Rose only seems to know of her. Rose’s 1999 essay “Freud in the Tropics,” about the origins of the split between Jung and Freud, briefly cites a letter the master wrote to his protégé after hearing Spielrein present her first paper—“Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being”—at the Vienna Conference in 1911: Spielrein, said Freud, is “abnormally ambivalent.” He rejected the paper’s premise, saying that “her destructive drive is not much to my liking because it is personally conditioned.” Freud and Jung’s letters were published in 1974. Three years later, a box containing Spielrein’s letters, diaries, and papers was discovered; I wish it had been delivered to Rose’s doorstep. Freud, in the letter at hand, speaks of the very paper in which the precedent to his conception of the death drive lies, since with its presentation Spielrein becomes the first person to enter the phrase “death instinct” into the annals of psychoanalysis. Ironies abound: it’s funny to hear that her theories are “personally conditioned” from the man who rewrote the myth of the primal father and his sons every time he felt betrayed by Jung and/or Adler. (“I thank Professor Freud for the information that circumcision is a symbol of castration,” reads a note at the end of Spielrein’s paper. I hope she is being very dry.)

After Spielrein’s presentation, a period of comment ensued during which none of the men present evinced much appreciation of her points; most of them took the floor to reiterate their own ideas about death and life. One, Dr. Friedjung, made a statement that was remotely apprehensive, calling the paper “an attempt to find a scientific consolation for the fear of death.” It was on this point that Dr. Frau Stegmann, the only woman present, defended Spielrein. Per the meeting notes, Stegmann said,

during the course of the discussion the term “life” was not always used in the same sense; one must keep separate the personal and the universal (cosmic) life. The death wish makes its appearance as the wish to give oneself to the universe. The fear of love is fear of the death of one’s own personality. Love is indeed to be regarded as a transition from the small individual to the great cosmic life.

Freud spoke last, addressing himself not to Spielrein but to the specter of Jung. It was her mentor’s and lover’s—that is to say, Jung’s—fault that she misread, apparently, the story of creation in the book of Genesis. Freud was annoyed that she had “attempted to base the theory of instincts on biological presuppositions (such as the preservation of species).” Spielrein took the floor again to respond, apologizing for all the confusion and seeking to clarify that, for her, sexual instincts belong to “the drive for transformation.”

Freud had distinguished between the two kinds of preservation before. In his 1909 study of the Dr. Schreber case, he wrote that “the individual has a double orientation, aiming on the one hand at self-preservation and on the other at the preservation of the species.” Yet he had never fed one into the other, as Spielrein wantonly did. As for “the drive for transformation,” had Freud possessed an inkling toward such a thing, he might have read into the case of Schreber—who woke up one day dreaming about having sex as a woman—an enlarging difference. Freud wrote that Schreber was half-asleep, and that this fantasy would have been “rejected with the greatest indignation if he had been fully conscious.” Schreber (in the diaries Freud studied) wrote only of being in bed, adding in parentheses: “whether half asleep or already awake I cannot remember.” But there is no question that the famed schizophrenic was awake when being penetrated all over by “female nerves or nerves of voluptuousness,” as he (“he”) beautifully put it. Freud’s diagnosis of repressed homophobia, which he held to be co-morbid with paranoia, probably would not have helped Schreber’s thinking; it might have helped Spielrein’s. If the preservation of the self opposes—or is at odds with—the preservation of the species, then having sex with a man as a man is a self-preserving activity, whereas doing it as a woman is not.

Putting death in the mouth of pleasure takes female nerve, and it may also take one kind of female experience. Remember “the wish to give oneself to the universe.” That the only other person at the Vienna Conference who seemed to grasp what Spielrein was talking about was also the only “Frau” in the room is not a merely sweet instance of solidarity, nor is it incidental that Dr. Frau Stegmann was also, later, in the 1920s, the only member of the Reichstag to argue for legal abortion as a means of bodily—rather than population—control. Only someone at risk of being pregnant could conceive of a death instinct as being conjoined to sexual anxiety and to sacrificial love. Spielrein in 1911 was still a “Fraulein.” When she wrote that “self-destruction can be replaced by sacrificial destruction,” she was being, perhaps, too wishful.

Simone Weil never made it sound so easy. Two stunning analogies in Weil’s essay on human personality, written in her life’s last year, bracket what it takes to become—destructively, impersonally—“good.” Here is the first: “A stag advancing itself voluntarily step by step to offer itself to the teeth of a pack of hounds is about as probable as an act of attention directed towards a real affliction, which is close at hand, on the part of a mind which is free to avoid it.” And the second: “To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child.”

Weil’s spirit, how it plunged her mind and body into difficulty, is a guide through every essay in The Plague (Rose says so in her foreword). “An ethical principle,” Rose writes in the essay “Life After Death,” “is pushing to the fore, taking on an unmistakable if ghostly shape. Nobody can save themselves, certainly not forever, at the cost of anybody else.” Whether the shape is more unmistakable or mostly ghostly, it is familiar. Gillian Rose wrote about Simone Weil first, in a 1993 essay, “Angry Angels,” which compares the thought of Weil to that of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Levinas and Weil being each other’s obverses not only in name: Levinas embraced the Torah; Weil forsook it, entering into a mystifying and extreme Christianity. She never converted, except perhaps by dying, aged thirty-four, of self-starvation.

Gillian—who did convert, almost as if she were joking, ninety minutes before death—argued in her essay that Weil and Levinas each tried to cast out violence into the other’s faith, even as “a residue of violence” piggishly enriched their critiques. Her own iterations or reiterations of Weil’s thought are admonishing and gentle. Listening, says Gillian, is putting oneself in the place of the other while she’s speaking, a suggestion that to my mind describes what Jacqueline does best. On Weil’s difficult concept of decreation, Gillian is perfect: “Th[e] decreation of the self for the sake of justice means the radical renunciation of the possessive relation to the world, but this does not imply the renunciation of relationship to the world itself.”

For Gillian as for Weil, individual rights are too finite to matter. Only justice is infinite, or, as Jacqueline rewords it, infinitesimal. Jacqueline explains “decreation” a little differently: “In the moment of creation, God shed bits and pieces of himself, makes human beings the debris of a gesture which leaves neither God nor humans complete.” This amazing precis makes the “creator” sound like somebody miscarrying. Perhaps, for Weil, being saved was a matter of going backward, becoming tiny enough, fetal, pre-fetal, reabsorbed into the womb.

It was in the year of her sister’s death that Jacqueline Rose adopted a baby out of China. In Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018), Rose recalls a friend with a newborn asking wonderingly how she could give up her lineage. Rose, proud of not being possessive, replies that “to nurture another’s baby is to be part of the DNA of the whole world.” (Compare to Virginia Woolf: “As a woman my country is the whole world.”)

Rose’s excellence as a critic rests on how well she nurtures others’ ideas, how plausibly she treats them as her own. Every written sentence tries to embody an idea, to give it a shape that limns its meaning, as if to recollect something of cave-time signification. Her sentences tend to hesitate and suggest rather than declaim. They are full of pauses and bends, equivocations and even reversals—all on purpose. Giving pause is for Rose an ethical imperative, one she accomplishes in her prose with a lot of soft punctuation. “If there is one thing of which writing about violence has convinced me, it is that if we do not make time for thought, which must include the equivocations of our inner lives, we will do nothing to end violence in the world, while we will surely be doing violence to ourselves,” she says in her 2021 book On Violence and On Violence Against Women. The sentiment is unequivocal. The sentence itself, however, equivocates—practices what it preaches—by virtue of its clausality.

The open-ended uncertainty that is as native to Rose as to Woolf is what makes her feminism breathable, but also radical as in rooted, earthbound, upsurging. I fell in love with her writing in 2016, when she published—in the London Review of Books—a 13,666-word essay on being transgender, which she is not. For an English non-trans woman at the time to accept such an assignment was slightly insane. Trans-exclusionary “radical” feminism was rising in a nation that, you could say (although you probably shouldn’t), was assigned transphobic at birth: the classism that seems so native to England, formed as it was (or as historians say) out of the feudal system, manifests as a distaste for pretense, for striving, even for straying. At the heart of both classism and transphobia is this insistence on staying put. “When you’re born, you’re done for,” as Arnold Bennett said to Hugh Walpole (I found the quotation in a book on Thomas Hardy, whose heroines rouse the direst fates when they loosen their stays). Rose’s titling the essay “Who Do You Think You Are?” spoke to the heart of the problem. Amazingly, she pulled the whole thing off, a graceful and mind-opening feat. It was a feat of listening: a remarkably high percentage of those words are inside quotation marks, against her editors’ protests.

Rose’s own ambivalence can register as abnormal. Take, for instance, the essay in The Plague called “Living Death,” which is about domestic violence and representation during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. Given the subject matter, it would seem Rose is turning “living death” back from the further-out meaning, in which the transitive verb “living” takes “death” as its wedded object, to the more commonly understood one, in which “living” as a present participle tries to modify “death.” Rose describes a “new femicide” that the “pandemic has brought out of the dark,” which at first sounds slightly oxymoronic, but soon she explains that it is “as if the felt fragility of life [has] released into the atmosphere a new, ugly—and seemingly unstoppable—permission to engage in violence.” Her style risks beautification. I like it best when she speaks sotto voce, or in parentheses, like so: “(psychoanalysis as the opposite of housework in how it deals with the mess we make).” When the sentence began she was standing at the lectern, now she is in the seat beside you.

Here is the concluding—a strong word—line of that essay: “If the hardest task in the struggle for life is to give death its place at the core of being human, then perhaps one reason so many women are being punished during the pandemic is because they are more willing to do so.” Rose’s insinuating syntax has always felt natural to me, even down to her habit of shrinking the last word as a way of shrinking from having it (“it” is one word on which she likes to finish; “so” is another). This line for some reason snagged. Despite how clear the referent should be and probably is, I had to reorder the sentence in order to give it thought. Maybe I was having trouble believing that the subject of the sentence actually was women, i.e. potentially me: “So many women are being punished during this pandemic because they are more willing to give death its place at the core of being human, which is the hardest task in the struggle for life.”

Again, if I know what she means it is only from reading her obsessively. To say that women are more “willing” to participate in “the hardest task in the struggle for life” sounds unnecessary to say, like of course mothers and/or wives are tasked with what’s hard and sort of pointless. And it feels strange to invoke women’s willingness in an essay about women being effectively “locked up,” not just locked down, with “their” abusers. Abuse too is a transitive verb, one for which the object is never a subject. No one abuses another so much as they abuse the power they have over another. (Perhaps that is why Rose places alongside these stories a rather dubious statistic showing that countries with women in power had better pandemics, with fewer deaths and less obvious dishonesties, though she does not say anything about the kinds of peoples who elect female leaders.)

For Rose, it is not the believability of women’s stories that empowers them as tellers, but the possibility that women as storytellers—she herself is the story reteller—are less in need of borrowing authority. “One reason motherhood is . . . disconcerting,” she wrote in Mothers, “seems to be its uneasy proximity to death.” Perhaps Freud could “conceive” or re-conceive of the death drive because, in the absence of his daughter and in the presence of his daughter’s son, he could identify with Sophie as a mother.

Gillian’s death inspired Jacqueline’s publishers to suggest that she might write a memoir of her sister’s life. But a memoir, which would not do justice to the life, didn’t materialize. Neither did the project that Jacqueline proposed in its stead, a book about the Jewish-turned-Christian philosopher, mystic, and martyr Edith Stein. (This is all according to the interview of Rose by the editors of The Jacqueline Rose Reader, published in 2011.) Stein is—has to be—the original name of Stone, the dispossessed and disowning father of Gillian and Jacqueline. And now, a further substitution, Weil for Stein. Simone comes from the Hebrew “Shimon,” meaning “one who hears.” “Weil” as a German word means “because,” but as a surname for Germans it’s said to derive from the Latin “villa,” as in a country house, a family estate. Historians believe that “Weil” was adopted by families originally named “Levi,” a Hebrew word for “joining.” So we are fully back in place, if not time.

Cecily Brown, All Is Vanity (after Gilbert), 2006, monotype, 47 1/4 × 36 7/8". © Cecily Brown

ON THE GNARLED FAMILY TREE OF THE GREEK GODS, Eros sits higher than Thanatos, while Psyche, next to Cupid, might as well be an apple on the ground. But above—encompassing them and everyone else—is Chaos. Chaos is the third drive, the collective drive. It’s older than anything, mother with no gender. It’s in the heterogeneity of cancer cells, the movement of deer, water falling on rocks, weather, noise. “Chaos,” as Deleuze and Guattari wrote, “is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.”

A child hears the story of his coming into being, but it is not told to him, it is told to adults, who are asked to “conceive of David vanishing into nothingness.” Before he was David he was a bird, as are all future children in the world of the story. To become born, a baby, he had to be caught by a long string. This is the premise of J. M. Barrie’s 1903 The Little White Bird, a novel for adults that begat the character and the story of Peter Pan. In the story, all that remains of the pre-birth world is the birds’ habit of bringing bread in their beaks to little Peter (Peter can fly because he is secretly part avian). In Jacqueline Rose’s debut book, begun as her master’s thesis under Kermode’s supervision and published as The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), she suggested that writing to the child is a way of knowing the child, while reading to the child requires the child not to know himself. David has to exit the story’s frame, not because the story is news to him (he never tires of hearing it, says the narrator), but because adults are afraid to raise in the presence of children “the question[s] of origins, of sexuality, and of death” that, says Rose, are depicted in the novel as “inherent to the very process of writing.” Birds do not become adults, so neither do they need innocence. The novel’s narrator makes it clear: “That the birds know what would happen if they were caught, and are even a little undecided about which is the better life, is obvious to every student of them.”

In Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague, a similar indecision besets the fictionalized city of Oran. “Bread or fresh air” is the slogan shouted up and down the city’s poorer streets, where, during quarantine, it is not clear that staying alive actually makes for the better life. “Bread or air” is how Rose quotes it in the titular (twice titular) essay with which she opens her book, and, whether on purpose or not, removing “fresh” from “air” makes it even bleaker. The “or” is facetious. These people want for choice. Like the famous women’s suffrage slogan—“bread for all, and roses too”—the townspeople’s plea speaks of the need not to live barely. Roses only look like the subject of this essay. Air really is.

During the lockdown in New York City, I remember liking how “social distancing” gave everybody—each body—six feet of space: graveyard rules. I could almost imagine us all having breathing room forever. But later, when togetherness resumed, it seemed like more and more people were talking more or newly about “setting boundaries,” often in conjunction with “taking space,” which made even my friends, even me, sound like little nation-states at war. Couples who had seemed unshakable suddenly split. Milieus fell apart overnight, over nothing important. Bonds loosened and frayed with startling speed and even stayed lost, sacrificed, in some cases, to a fearful misconception of boundaries as being enforceably borderlike.

People are collectively traumatized, goes one explanation for all of the above, by the pandemic. That is always the word. Rarely is the virus itself seen as a cause of this social disorder. But I do think coronavirus was—is—a disease of the psyche, because of how, unlike cold or flu viruses, it became able to trespass the blood-brain barrier. This made it drive-like in a twistedly literal way: Freud used the Kantian term “Grenzbegriff,” or “boundary concept,” to describe how the drives erupted right between the soma and the psyche. (“Don’t touch my psyche” is the understandable subtext of every “set boundary,” no matter how inappropriately far outside the physical self the line is drawn.)

It’s hard enough to be accountable to each other, one on one. I do not know how to take Rose’s message that “we are all accountable for the ills of the world,” especially given how unaccountable the development and the spread of the virus and all its chance effects seems to be, to say nothing of the other varietals of death that suffuse our air: fumes, microplastics, wildfire smoke. The “whole world” suffers from the minority rule of the living. People who are comfortable with power love the truism that“death is the great equalizer,” which Rose repeats once disparagingly, once skeptically in the book. If the only experience common to everyone is one we can’t share—the one story that can never be told from the other side—then all you can say about humanity is that it’s fatally flawed.

Rose’s afterword to The Plague begins where her afterword to her 1996 collection States of Fantasy ended, with reference to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 polemic, After Virtue. MacIntyre argued that “we have lost the framework which would allow us to live a grounded or consistent ethical life,” as Rose paraphrased it the first time, when her context was apartheid. In her afterword to The Plague, Rose describes the postapocalyptic scenario with which MacIntyre opens his book: an “imaginary” world where scientists are blamed for an ecological fate, and, as a result, the knowledge of science lies in fragments. MacIntyre wrote that “the language of morality has entered the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world I have just described,” that we have “lost our comprehension . . . of morality” (he seems to equate morality with comprehension), that the “peculiarly modern self . . . in acquiring sovereignty in its own realm lost its traditional boundaries provided by a social identity and a view of human life as ordered to a given end.”

Rose sounds, by the end of The Plague, a little tired of the idealization of the world as being whole. Disorder need not be grave, she’s saying now:

Nothing is more dangerous than confronting a world full of fear, arms akimbo, with a boast. Or hanging on in the face of disaster to the idea that we each, individually, are good, that our perfection, lamentably unmatched by an imperfect reality, is something into which the ills of the time—pandemic, climate catastrophe, and war—randomly and unfairly encroach. According to such a mindset, the more insecure things appear, the more confident, assertive, and controlling we need to become in order to master both the world and ourselves. . . . Being convinced we have moral ownership of the earth is the best way to make it uninhabitable.

Writing is an airless medium, ill-suited by its nature to chaotic times. A piece requires some ordering, or it is impossible to read. Only at the end is there the choice to disclose, a hard one to make when every cell in the left-front section of the brain is screaming for closure. What could be more frightening for the writer, an ever-precocious child, than the thought of losing the thread? It’s the thread, authorship, which indexes not only one’s differentiation from others (lovability) but also one’s grasp on another (love). Yet every definition—the point not of language, but of text; the end—is a failure of mourning that speaks to the loss of conception. Someone as bound to listen as Jacqueline Rose will not mind if I end an essay about her book with another writer’s words, even a poet’s. “A broken heart stays open,” Alice Notley said.

Sarah Nicole Prickett is a writer living in New York.

Shocks to the System

Don DeLillo’s novels of the Cold War and its aftermath

Christian Lorentzen

Three Novels of the 1980s: The Names / White Noise / Libra By Don DeLillo. New York: Library of America. 1,100 pages. $45.

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Mao II & Underworld By Don DeLillo. New York: Library of America. 1,100 pages. $43.

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THE DREAM OF AN ARTWORK that encompasses the whole world; of a novel that tells everybody’s story; of characters who feel and act and speak for us all; of the image that nobody doesn’t recognize. Yet it is the world and characters and images and stories themselves that stand in the way of that dream. They are too real and too small, too specific and too discrete to be for all. A person personifying history is still a person, history warped by and warping a personality. A dramatic narrative consists of speeches, acts, events. A consciousness is marred by the having of particular thoughts. An era is stained by its favorite clichés: the rise and fall, rags to riches, the trauma plot. Is there any escape from the contortions and inherited feelings of melodrama? What if it were the conventions of the novel themselves that obstructed the mission of telling the “inner life of the culture”?

Don DeLillo tells two stories about how and when he started writing novels (he wrote and published short fiction beforehand, but that’s another story): in 1966 while he was on vacation with friends sailing off the coast of Maine, they put in at Mount Desert Island and he sat on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower and “had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and a wistfulness—the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing.” This is how the idea for his first novel, Americana, first hit “the nervous system.” But something else happened that week in Maine. He picked up a newspaper and read of Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper.” After stabbing his wife and mother to death, Whitman shot three people to death in a University of Texas building, then climbed twenty-eight floors to the top terrace of the university tower and began shooting at random, killing eleven people and wounding thirty-one others before he was gunned down by police. He had brought with him supplies for a long siege, “including underarm deodorant,” the detail that stuck in DeLillo’s mind.

Two images, one so generic in its evocativeness that it might as well have been remembered from a Hollywood movie, a photograph in a magazine, or a television show. (Nine years later, in 1975, John Ashbery would end his poem “The One Thing That Can Save America” with the lines: “In quiet small houses in the country / Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.”) The other the picture of an aberrant soul—a new kind of man, one we would come to know all too well, though it was impossible to be aware of that then—a monster, yet one who partook of common creature comforts, the habit of attending to the way he smelled, as if you could cover up the stench of mass homicide with a product you bought at the pharmacy. On the one hand, a universal nostalgic dream of America (even for Americans with no such memories to be nostalgic for; even for people who have never been to America, have seen it only in pictures); on the other, a bloody nightmare then without precedent, the predatory logic of war breaking out in the absence of war, devoid of politics, without warning, utterly irrational and random. DeLillo recognized in these transmissions, these sense impulses, the poles of an emergent reality.

A former ad man at Ogilvy & Mather, a child of Italian immigrants born in the Bronx in 1936, a lapsed Catholic, a boy who read comic books and not much else until he got a job minding a parking lot where he read Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce while being paid to sit on a bench, DeLillo devoted himself to writing during his thirties and published his first novel, Americana, in 1971. Five more followed in that decade: End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), Running Dog (1978). These books constituted the early phase: wild grapplings with the themes of the 1960s; a meditation on mathematics written in the shadow of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow; a pair of taut, self-contained thrillers. Since 2000 we have been reading his late work, from The Body Artist (2001) to The Silence (2020), works greeted as so many codas to his earlier achievements. In between came five novels—The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997)—a progress of books with a “range and sweep,” in DeLillo’s phrase, unmatched by either the less perfected early works or the mostly slimmer later ones. Over the past two years these books have been republished in two volumes by the Library of America. White Noise, the book that brought DeLillo a wide audience, academic attention, and a National Book Award, has been adapted for the screen by the filmmakers who, in a strange dialectical twist of the system, have also brought us Barbie. Long hailed as a prophet, of the age of terrorism, of nuclear dread, of random peacetime violence, of the power of crowds, of the corrosive effects of mass media and consumerism, of the ghostly warping powers of intelligence services, he is now seeing his work being set in amber, surely anticipating the involuntary mutations that await the posthumous. In the end, somebody once said, all plots lead deathward.

Don DeLillo, 1988. Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR it was perhaps inevitable that new forms of the novel would emerge to accommodate a new age and its characteristics. The masterpieces of international modernism had often been hyperlocal in their settings: think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Andrei Biely’s Petersburg, or Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. During the Cold War, a system of multivalent colonialism was succeeded by one of bipolar antagonism, followed by globalization under a regime of neoliberalism. Film and television were now ubiquitous media, soon to be joined (or eclipsed and absorbed) by the internet. John Ashbery’s 1972 poem “The System” begins with the sentence “The system was breaking down,” but the remarkable thing about the system is that it hasn’t broken down; that it is always breaking down, but always somehow reinforcing itself; that even an event like the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t lead to another cataclysm (though the specter of nuclear Armageddon remains) but to an increasingly intertwined world troubled by outbreaks of violence in borderlands and interzones, such as the ongoing bloodletting in Ukraine. The resulting landscape has been saturated with universally available information and thus, from the point of view of, say, a protagonist of a novel, holistically unknowable.

This paradox—the overflow of information combined with its fundamental incomprehensibility—became for a certain kind of writer the central problem for the novel to attempt to grasp. Of course, there were other sorts of fiction flourishing too: magic realism, social and historical novels, the African American novel, the Jewish American novel, the minimalist short story, forays into metafiction from various angles at various lengths. All of these were more or less subsumed under the umbrella of postmodernism. The sort of novel I’m talking about, often thought of and taught in schools as the quintessential postmodernist novel, also goes by another name: the systems novel. As the name has caught on over the decades and its practitioners have been canonized, its origins have been obscured. The term was coined by the scholar, critic, and novelist Tom LeClair in his 1987 study In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel and expanded upon in his 1989 book The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.

We retain a loose sense of what a systems novel is by virtue of the fact that LeClair derived his theory from and applied it to novels that are still widely read: the work of William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Coover, Joseph Heller, William S. Burroughs, and DeLillo himself. To read In the Loop today is to notice how far the use of the name “systems novel” has drifted from the terms by which LeClair originally defined it. He was looking for a paradigm and a critical framework more appropriate to these authors’ books than the one primarily associated with postmodernism: deconstruction. He turned to the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, whose magnum opus General System Theory was published in 1968, four years before his death at age seventy-one.

From von Bertalanffy’s “system of systems,” LeClair derived six criteria to define the genre. (1) Systems novels respond to “accelerating specialization (and alienation) of knowledge and work”; “tremendous growth in information and communications”; “large-scale geopolitical crises over energy and exchange (of goods information and money); and “planetary threats produced by man yet now seemingly beyond his control.” (2) They bridge the gap between C. P. Snow’s “two cultures,” the literary and the scientific. (3) “The themes of systems theory are the master subjects of literary modernism—process, multiplicity, simultaneity, uncertainty, linguistic relativity, perspectivism—but in a new larger scale of spatial and temporal relations (the ecosystem) that reflects the new scale of sociopolitical experience, including the rise of multinational corporations and global ecology.” (4) In terms of character, “‘Systems man’ is more a locus of communication and energy in a reciprocal relationship with his environment than an entity exerting force and dictating linear cause-effect sequences.” (5) Systems theory “offers the novelist a contemporary model for hypothetical formulations of wholes.” (6) Systems theory provided a “a doubled or split relation to the idea of mastery, criticizing man’s attempt to master his ecosystem and yet, in its on synthetic act, ‘mastering’ various specialties in large abstractions in order to communicate beyond specialties.”

I have quoted liberally from LeClair’s original formulations to give a sense of the way that in setting new terms for the understanding of these novels he was deviating from the ordinary modes in which we talk about novels. Part of his project was to bring fresh academic attention to DeLillo, whom he saw as neglected by scholars, and so he sought the razzle-dazzle of a theory yet to infiltrate English departments, one that brought with it fresh jargon. It turned out we could talk about these books and understand them in a way close to that which LeClair intended without resorting to this language. Novels teach you how to read them, and they teach novelists how to write more novels. I have tried to reformulate LeClair’s theses on my own in the simplest terms: (1) too much information; (2) the inescapability of science; (3) the incomprehensible scale of things; (4) the limits of any man’s perceptions; (5) the need to see things whole; (6) the impossibility of mastery even when it’s the artist’s duty.

It could be argued that these conditions have applied to any novelist or writer of extended narratives at any time in the history of the form. Wasn’t Dickens synthesizing massive amounts of information? Didn’t Shakespeare have to consider science or cosmology? Wasn’t Nick Carraway telling a story whose historical dimensions he couldn’t entirely grasp? Didn’t Herman Melville and George Eliot aspire to put the whole world into their novels? Hasn’t total mastery eluded every writer from Homer down to Joyce and Beckett? Novels emerge from a long cyclical tradition. Since LeClair coined the term critics have recast the systems novel as a return of the encyclopedic novel or as the maximalist novel, terms of long standing that can easily be projected into the past. But the differences between these terms are useful to discern. An encyclopedia is a container of knowledge that seeks to include everything and organize it. Its mode of organization is arbitrary: the alphabet. The maximum is simply a term of scale: everything will be as big as possible. But the system will not only accommodate everything but also its movement and change. The theory comes from a biologist, and the metaphor accommodates living things, even living things moving deathward.

JAMES AXTON, JACK GLADNEY, LEE HARVEY OSWALD, Bill Gray, Nick Shay. Blunt, stunted men not entirely aware of the circumstances that govern their lives. Husbands and lovers in familial, romantic, sexual disarray. Men buffeted by tides of history they can only strive to comprehend. These are DeLillo’s “systems men.” The name in the middle is the one we all know. The others: an international risk analyst; a professor of Hitler studies who doesn’t speak German; a famous and reclusive novelist who hasn’t published a word in decades; a waste-management executive. All of them, including Oswald, are writers of a sort, now or in the past, frustrated or fraudulent writers. As such are they mere loci “of communication and energy”? Are their relationships with their environments “reciprocal”? Are they not entities “exerting force and dictating linear cause-effect sequences”? These questions recall a conversation between William Gass and John Gardner in an interview conducted by LeClair and published in the New Republic in 1979:

Gass: A character for me is any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier. Just as the subject of a sentence say, is modified by the predicate, so frequently some character, Emma Bovary for instance, is regarded as a central character in the book because a lot of the language basically and ultimately goes back to modify, be about, Emma Bovary. Now the ideal book would have only one character; it would be like an absolute, idealist system. . . .

Gardner: I obviously don’t agree with Bill on all that. It seems to me a character is an apparition in the writer’s mind, a very clear apparition based on an imaginative reconstruction or melting of many people the writer has known. The ideal book has to have more than one character, because we know a character by what he does: what he does to other people, and what they do back to him.

DeLillo’s idea of character, particularly his narrators and protagonists, is not so far from the conventional vision espoused by Gardner: they do things and others do things back at them. And certainly, we know things about them, the way we know things about Emma Bovary. But the novels are not their predicate. Something closer to the opposite, without precise grammatical analogue, is the case. These men move through the books not fully aware of the forces operating on them, unable to comprehend the whole picture, moving by instinct and hunch, and knowing any sense of control is an illusion. They sense that they are not in the subject position. It belongs to the system itself. As Oswald put it, “I’m a patsy.”

DeLillo has said that he constructed White Noise around a “trite adultery plot,” the affair that Jack discovers at the end of the novel between his wife Babette and the man who deals her Dylar, the drug that purports to ward off the fear of death. You could say the plots of all these novels are trite. The Names: a man who does not know he’s working for the CIA becomes obsessed with a murderous cult that kills people whose initials are the same as the places where they are slain. Libra: the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy of rogue CIA agents gone wrong, and Oswald was a misplayed pawn. Mao II: a reclusive, blocked novelist tries to substitute himself for a Swiss poet being held hostage by terrorists in Beirut. Underworld: an array of stories tied together by characters in possession or contact with the ball hit out of the Polo Grounds by Bobby Thompson during the National League playoff series in 1951, the so-called “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” at once the most elaborate and tritest of these conceits.

Plots turned secondary, providing only comic illusions of suspense; characters’ motivations drained of significance—our attention turns both outward and inward, toward the mysteries that move these men through the world and the effects on their sense of that world and their place within it. Acquiescence, surrender, despair—these are all options, and the last may lead, under a spell of delusion, to the most extreme of actions. How does the system bring about its own disruption and how does it seek to correct it? How does it put Oswald in the book depository with the rifle and the spent shells? And how within a week does it make a corpse of him, his murder broadcast on television, another national snuff film?

AMERICAN INNOCENCE AS UNCONSCIOUS COVER for American monstrosity is the theme of The Names, a novel about emergent US imperialism. James Axton is a former freelance writer who has moved to Athens to follow his wife and son after a divorce and taken a position as a risk analyst for a corporate insurer. It will be revealed at the end that his employer, in the person of his deposed boss Rowser, is a front for the CIA. The revelation comes as an anti-climax, since the novel has shown that the workings of American multinational corporations and the American government are barely distinguishable. Collecting information on behalf of either, as Axton does dispassionately, with a resigned boredom born of too much air travel and too much hotel living, amounts to the same thing because it’s part of the same system of international financial domination. When Rowser is introduced it is as a parody of a spy, a perception Axton suppresses:

Rowser traveled under a false name. He had a total of three identities and owned the relevant paper. His office outside Washington was equipped with a letter-bomb detector, a voice-scrambler, an elaborate system to prevent break-ins. He was a man who never quite took the heavy step into foolishness and pathos, despite the indications. His life itself was the chief indication, full of the ornaments of paranoia and deception. Even his hoarse voice, a forced whisper, seemed a comic symptom of the clandestine environment. But Rowser’s massive drive, his will to see things through, overpowered everything else.

He was a businessman. He sold insurance to other businessmen. The subjects were politics, money and force.

Rowser’s main subject is terror: “What he had was a set of interlocking facts he’d drawn from tons of research material on the cost-effectiveness of terror.” Terror here is perceived as something committed rationally that can be absorbed by the system using Axton’s risk analysis. The “foolishness and pathos” would lie in believing that there was any meaning in the disruptions terror or other political violence presented to the system beyond an inevitable statistically predictable resistance. But after Axton learns the true nature of his employment he comes to believe that the attempted murder of a friend of his, an American banker in Athens, was a case of mistaken identity: Axton was the real target. His life of expensed air travel and deluxe accommodation wasn’t so secure.

Until this time, Axton’s more acute interests lie elsewhere: in his disintegrated family and in a series of murders being committed seemingly at random by a cult called Ta Onomata, “the Names.” His divorce signals the breakdown of an old system of living. His wife Kathryn’s work on an archaeological dig on an island in the Aegean Sea is a retreat into a more archaic world, recoverable only in fragments reclaimed with great effort. No effort will restore the marriage, which was broken by an act of adultery Axton committed almost unconsciously and without passion as if to restore risk to a life that had become too calm. When the killings of the cult brush up against the archaeological dig, the cult becomes an obsession for Axton and Kathryn, as well as Kathryn’s boss Owen, a charismatic Midwesterner from a background of tent revivals and speaking in tongues, and an acquaintance of the Axtons’ from the past, the filmmaker Frank Volterra, who made his reputation with a work about the Vietnam War protesters.

There is something a little silly about the cult, novelistically. Their mode of killing, murdering people whose initials match the letters of place-names, is preposterous. But the irrationality is the point and so is the ambiguous role of language. Axton is fascinated by the Greek language and its alphabet but he never goes so far as to learn it. (Owen by contrast knows many languages living and dead.) As much as Axton travels to research it—to the Peloponnese, to Jordan, to Pakistan—he can never tell if the cult and its murders are some reawakening of ancient violence or a modern reaction to the new circumstances of American-imposed globalization. What would the difference be? Language and alphabets are the remnants of conquest, and the old names that go with the cults’ murders are remnants of dead empires. Owen and Frank are similarly transfixed, the one with his memories of plains mysticism, the other as a representative of a counterculture whose antagonism to the system was once without ambiguity. These variations on American unknowing, animated within a book whose tissue is DeLillo’s lyrical descriptions of the Greek landscape and points east, give the novel its power. A character refers to Europe as the “hardcover,” America as “the paperback version,” and India—not yet ushered into the regime of modernity, mass literacy, and the nascent world of computers and telexes, still governed by oral traditions—as “not even a book.” The Names glimpses these contrasts in simultaneous anachronism. It is to Axton and Kathryn’s son Tap that the future belongs. He spends most of his time imagining a lost American past, writing a historical novel about Owen’s prairie boyhood, full of misspellings.

DELILLO CAME HOME FROM GREECE, where he lived from 1978 to 1981, to write a slapstick romp about fear and death in the cosseted precincts of the homeland, which had become weirder and perhaps more stupid and unconsciously vicious, via television and consumerism, in his absence. White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a sham academic who studies Hitler but can’t speak German. The joke, which everybody knows because it’s a book everybody reads, is that the world’s greatest horror, now a few decades in the past, could be tamed by the academic collation of trivia about its main instigator. The subtext that explodes literally into the text is that the placid New World built far away from the slaughterhouse of the Old World is secretly or not so secretly run by means of a system that relies on human ingenuity that is potentially lethal to humans—industrial chemicals, nuclear waste, poison at the supermarket and the pharmacy. Say hello to the airborne toxic event.

The question when it came to adapting this novel to the screen was whether it would be a comedy, a deadpan thriller, or something weirder. Noah Baumbach delivered a period piece comedy full of incongruous if diverting homages to Steven Spielberg and other commercial cinema of the 1980s, such as National Lampoon’s Vacation. It could have been worse. I found myself imagining an adaptation made shortly after the novel was published, directed by Alan J. Pakula and shot by Gordon Willis, with Harrison Ford as Jack Gladney and Barbara Hershey as his wife Babette. This would be the deadpan thriller, The Parallax View of campus dread with jokes. (A film critic I mentioned this to objected and held that DeLillo adaptations belong in the hands of the crazed, like David Cronenberg, who adapted the claustrophobia-inducing Cosmopolis.) Instead we have the actor who played Harrison Ford’s son in the Star Wars sequels doing a tall man’s Woody Allen impression and a Babette whose performance is overshadowed by the frizz of her period hairdo. In the novel Jack says of his wife’s hair: “Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.” “Your wife’s hair is a living wonder,” another character says. “She has important hair.”

The hair is important: done wrong it can be a distraction. (There are a lot of distractions, largely to do with set design, a circa-2005 memory of a 1985 color palette—thank you, American Apparel.) Greta Gerwig’s stereotypical perm in White Noise is distracting, as is Adam Driver’s constant flagrant neuroticism. Yes, these are characters plagued by crippling anxieties, and that is what drives the plot and the action: how to go about everyday life, raise children, and hold a job in the face of fear and certain knowledge of death, a condition that is definitively diagnosed and its prevention or delay relentlessly marketed? Something the maker of The Squid and the Whale seems to have forgotten is that not so long ago people prided themselves on repressing their anxieties, faking their way through life. The Jack and Babette of the film seem to be paying lip service to this in their lines, but they come off like basket cases, an effect not helped by a sing-song delivery of dialogue (loaded in the adaptation with exposition displaced from the novel’s narration), as if the actors have sometimes forgotten what the words mean in an effort to keep up the screwball pace, admittedly a daunting task when the script is full of ironic aphorisms. It’s a strange thing to say of movie characters, but Jack and Babette should have been less particular, more generic, and not so generic in the sense particular to the way we remember that time. We are still living through the White Noise moment—as the rail-car explosion last winter in Palestine, Ohio, demonstrated—only a version digitized and amplified.

Critics pointed out omitted scenes and nonobvious casting choices: Murray Jay Suskind, the New York sports agent turned semiotician, was played by the African American Don Cheadle, and Suskind’s essential Jewishness was supposedly undermined (it seemed to me that Cheadle nailed the character; he was funny and more confident in his comedy than his castmates); the Most Photographed Barn in the World scene was elided (who needed to see it really?). The climactic sequences—the shootout that resolves the trite adultery plot, and its aftermath in the convent where Jack and Babette and the Dylar dealer Mink are tended to by German-speaking nuns who tell them, “It is our task to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die”—are the film’s most entertaining and best executed parts. What surprised me was the omission of a later, highly cinematic scene, in which their son Wilder rides his tricycle across the interstate and reaches the other side without being hit. Afterward, Jack describes a ritual of going to an overpass with his son to behold sunsets altered by the airborne toxic event:

The spirit of these warm evenings is hard to describe. There is anticipation in the air but it is not the expectant midsummer hum of a shirtsleeve crowd, a sandlot game, with coherent precedents, a history of secure response. This waiting is introverted, uneven, almost backward and shy, tending toward silence. What else do we feel? Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass. The collapsible chairs are yanked open, the old people sit. What is there to say? The sunsets linger and so do we. The sky is under a spell, powerful and storied. Now and then a car actually crosses the overpass, moving slowly, deferentially. People keep coming up the incline, some in wheelchairs, twisted by disease, those who attend them bending low to push against the grade. I didn’t know how many handicapped and helpless people there were in town until the warm nights brought crowds to the overpass. Cars speed beneath us, coming from the west, from out of the towering light, and we watch them as if for a sign, as if they carry on their painted surfaces some residue of the sunset, a barely detectable luster or film of telltale dust. No one plays a radio or speaks in a voice that is much above a whisper. Something golden falls, a softness delivered to the air. There are people walking dogs, there are kids on bikes, a man with a camera and long lens, waiting for his moment. It is not until some time after dark has fallen, the insects screaming in the heat, that we slowly begin to disperse, shyly, politely, car after car, restored to our separate and defensible selves.

DeLillo’s relentlessly cascading sentences, so often moving into litanies of nouns that pile up and remake each other, are often in service of this quasi-religious spirit. Baumbach’s film misplaced it, in the supermarket, with a dance number. The LCD Soundsystem song that plays, “New Body Rhumba,” is pretty good, if not quite as memorable as a hymn.

“THE IMPORTANT THING ABOUT PARANOIA in my characters is that it operates as a form of religious awe,” DeLillo told his Paris Review interviewer, Adam Begley, in 1993. “It’s something old, a leftover from some forgotten part of the soul. And the intelligence agencies that create and service this paranoia are not interesting to me as spy handlers or masters of espionage. They represent old mysteries and fascinations. Central Intelligence. They’re like churches that hold the final secrets.” Libra is his liturgical book, a speculation that the fathers of America’s high church may have been responsible for its greatest sin.

Libra’s premise is stated so directly and so clearly imagined—a plot by demoted anti-Castro CIA agents to stage a failed attempt on the president’s life in order to renew US efforts at regime change in Cuba, a plot that is hijacked and kills the president—that it’s a wonder it stirred up so much agitation on its publication in 1988, at a time when the agency’s image was not exactly pristine. There were denunciations from the likes of George Will and others on the right, despite the fact that the novel appeared more than a decade after Seymour M. Hersh’s reporting about the agency’s domestic spying, his revelation of its secret self-history, the so-called Family Jewels, and the subsequent Church Committee hearings. Thousands of documents about the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald remain classified, their absence from the public record fueling justified paranoia across the political spectrum. Almost four decades on, the meticulousness of DeLillo’s speculative novel seems the height of artistic responsibility.

In Oswald he found another stunted man, in this case a real one with a substantial paper trail, including a historic notebook, familial correspondence, photographs, and a memoir, “The Kollective,” about his time as a defector working in a radio factory in Minsk. A real killer, a soldier, a teenage Marxist and would-be intellectual, a trespasser between systems and continents, another kid from the Bronx, Oswald is at once the world’s most well-documented formerly anonymous man and a permanent enigma. For DeLillo, his story was a ready-made into which he could pour his ideas about faith, heresy, and violence, the system pushing a resistant and confused individual toward something he could imagine was his destiny. Here’s something a fictionalized David Ferrie, the pilot who was alleged to have abetted Oswald and denied it, says to Lee a few days before the murder:

“Think of two parallel lines,” he said. “One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest level of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”

The formal fascination of Libra lies in this quality: a historical novel with characters borrowed from life who speak like Jack Gladney or Murray Jay Suskind in White Noise or Owen Brademas and Frank Volterra in The Names. A novel about the crime of the century required theorists of the mystery and authors of the secret liturgy, scribes of the system’s occlusion of cause and effect or what used to be called fate.

IN RETROSPECT Mao II reads like a staccato regrouping, a preparation for the major operations of Underworld. Here the terrorists are more in the realm of the real than Ta Onomata, hostage takers in Beirut. So is the cult, followers of Reverend Moon, from whose powerful spell one character has slipped away. The novel’s structure is buttressed by three set pieces: a mass wedding of Moonies at Yankee Stadium; the funeral march for the Ayatollah Khomeini seen on television; and civil-war-era Beirut seen at night through the eyes of a photographer, who glimpses another wedding party. In between these spectacles is the story of Bill Gray, a reclusive author long publicly silent who has consented to have his photograph taken.

Next to geopolitics and international finance, global terrorism and presidential assassination, environmental disaster and even academicized neutering of historical horrors, the system of literary publicity is small beans. But DeLillo makes use of the metaphor in two crucial ways: the predicament of the author as the object of devotional admiration that threatens to mutate into fanatical violence, the reader behind the bush with a camera who might be carrying a pistol; and the usurpation of the novelist’s role in guiding the dream life of the society by the terrorist. Mao II is the most distilled of DeLillo’s novels because Bill Gray’s status as a famous novelist—not some frustrated ex-freelancer, shambolic careerist academic, agency apparatchik, or scribbling psycho—allows him to aphorize at will and with authority:

There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

The passage is justly famous, if often attributed to DeLillo himself rather than a character he imagined. The pathos is in the word “incorporated,” a despair that under capitalism literature has lost its power because the market has subsumed it. The foolishness that follows is Bill’s attempt to undertake a hostage-rescue operation of his own devising, and to reclaim the terrorists’ power by becoming their prisoner. He is escaping his own hostage situation: life in the woods with his fan and keeper Scott, a presence more malevolent than a would-be assassin, and the truest villain in the entire DeLillo corpus, a living writer’s executor and obstructor. The fate of the writer: increasingly irrelevant yet more and more captive to his own fame and its exploiters. Uncharacteristically for DeLillo, the book is humorless for long stretches, until a hilarious scene near the end when Bill describes recent injuries he has suffered to a group of veterinarians at a bar. He lies and tells them he’s trying to figure out what to do with one of his characters. They advise him to call his character an ambulance and he suggests putting him on a sea voyage, a ferry he intends to take himself to meet the hostage takers in Beirut. One of them responds: “Completely and totally implausible.” The plot leads to its author’s death.

NO OBJECT IS MORE AMERICAN than a baseball, not even an atomic bomb. In Underworld DeLillo hit on a concept that he could follow from the Polo Grounds, Harlem, and the Bronx in 1951 out to the deserts of Arizona and the barren zones of Kazakhstan. A novel including shit, perhaps too much of it. The theme of waste, a ubiquitous phenomenon concealed wherever possible as soon as possible, allows for a panorama. This book could really do the whole thing, and its superstructure tames the many melodramas within. And so much sex. “Who goes to bed with what / is unimportant,” wrote Ashbery. “Feelings are important.” The astonishing thing about Underworld is less its “range and sweep,” in DeLillo’s words—historical and geographic expanse was the plan all along—but the depth and breadth of feeling it accommodates. The novel is a catalogue of longings, frustrations, regrets, rages, and desperations. Paranoia and systems, words that occur dozens of times across 827 pages, are addressed explicitly, as DeLillo enters into dialogue with his great critic LeClair. Afterward he would retreat into relatively miniature contemplations of art, language, war, mortality, and, yes, terror—9/11 beckoned him to write Falling Man (2005)—but the brilliance of the late novels only emphasized their self-conscious fragmentary qualities. He had already done the whole thing.

Christian Lorentzen is a critic currently residing in Albania. He is grateful for a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in support of this essay.

Radical Attention

Pioneering therapist Judith Herman’s studies of trauma and justice

Moira Donegan

Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice by Judith L. Herman. New York: Basic Books. 272 pages. $28.

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“WHAT DO RAPE VICTIMS WANT?” At the height of #MeToo, this question was asked a lot. “What’s really important,” we would be told, with the furrowed brow of someone seeking to assure us of their own seriousness, “is what the victims want.” The rape victim became an offstage moral authority, someone whose judgment could be deferred to. But most often, her supposed desires were evoked to lend legitimacy to somebody else’s project. On the far left, prison abolitionists told us that rape victims didn’t really want their attackers to be punished; instead, they wanted forgiveness, rehabilitation, a kind of virtuous, self-denying nonresponse to the men who attacked them. On the right, meanwhile, conservatives claimed that what rape victims really wanted was a return to gender traditionalism, to those arrangements of masculine authority and forfeited female freedom that get passed off as “protection.” Somewhere in the vast middle, corporate feminists asserted that what rape victims really wanted—what justice would really look like—were changes to the procedures of official reporting avenues, rolled out in a series of HR trainings that would droningly instruct office workers not to address one another as “sweet cheeks.” “What do rape victims want?” we were asked, and then immediately supplied with an answer: rape victims wanted you to buy whatever the speaker was selling.

Nearly six years after its initial heyday, #MeToo has receded, and the backlash has reached its nadir. Now, the question “What do rape victims want?” has lost its aura of virtuous gravity and taken on a kind of exhausted impatience. When it is asked these days, it sounds like something you might say while squinting through a headache. “What do rape victims want?” Do they want revenge? A permanent status of moral superiority, or some kind of eternally repeated apology? In this new world, the rape victim no longer possesses the sheen of admiration that the #MeToo era gave her. Instead, there’s a potent, unmasked resentment in many people’s responses to so-called #MeToo stories, a sense of peeved exasperation with the rape-trauma genre that gets euphemistically described as “fatigue.” “What does the rape victim want from us?” these critics seem to ask. And so, “What do rape victims want?” can now most often be interpreted as, “What will it take to get rape victims to leave us alone?” But maybe this isn’t so much of a change. For all the sanctimony with which the question was asked at the height of #MeToo, nobody ever seemed to wait for the women to respond for themselves.

An exception is Judith Herman, a Harvard psychiatrist, lifelong feminist, and leading thinker in the study of trauma. Herman is not new to questions of rape and its aftermath. Her 1992 book, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, was a field-altering intervention in the discipline. Herman is almost singularly responsible for the legitimization of rape trauma in the psychiatric field. Through her writing, research, and pioneering clinical work, she has prodded the mental health community into an acknowledgment of the unique psychological harms of sexually violent experiences—particularly those, like rape, in which a victim fears for her life. Whatever you have heard about trauma—from its clinical definitions to its literary uses to the gauzy oversimplifications of the concept in Instagram infographics and yoga instructors’ TikToks—owes its origin, at least distantly, to Herman’s decades of work.

Now, at age eighty-one, Herman is capping her career with Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. The book compiles interviews about justice with thirty survivors of violence—twenty-six women and four men, ranging in age from twenty-two to sixty, and “diverse in terms of ethnicity, sexual orientation, and class and geographic background,” all of whom have experienced sexual or domestic abuse at some point in their lives. And so, Herman, one of the most influential psychiatrists of her generation, seems to have taken up the question of what rape victims want at precisely the moment when the fewest people are listening to the answers.

REPAIR IS A NEW SUBJECT FOR HERMAN TO EXPLORE AT SUCH LENGTH. A scholar of trauma and the longtime leader of clinical workshops designed to advance its treatment, she has focused for decades on women’s experiences of violence—that is, the psychological rupture and personal aftermath of rape or abuse—but less on its social repair. Her subject of study was the post-traumatic ordeal, what Freud called in his early work on hysterics, the suffering of “reminiscences.” In her work, Herman writes that in the weeks, months, and years following their attacks, her patients report intrusive thoughts, severe anxiety, bouts of paranoia alternating with dissociative malaise, overwhelming rage, and sleep disturbances that range from insomnia to night terrors. The symptoms derail and constrain their lives, leading to hopelessness, resentment, and an acute sense of psychic claustrophobia. Much of Herman’s earlier work contains lengthy and detailed accounts of psychological suffering, the kind felt by rape survivors, father-daughter incest victims, women fleeing domestic abuse, and former prisoners of war—people who have endured violence from which no one can emerge unchanged.

In Truth and Repair, Herman is interested not only in justice as it is applied but in justice as it is imagined. She challenges her interviewees—not her own patients, she says, but “informants”—to both interrogate and elaborate on their own desires for what should be done in the wake of their abuse. Along the way, the book runs through the various options available—from formal accountability measures like civil suits and criminal trials, to utopian efforts like restorative justice circles. It examines in turn how every method hurts survivors (which all of them do) and how every method has virtues and salvageable elements (which all of them also do). It is perhaps a consequence of her profound and evident respect for her subjects that Herman refuses to push past their ambivalence; the book is ultimately inconclusive about the correct path to justice. The result is not prescriptive but descriptive. Herman investigates the victims’ needs, takes their moral assessments seriously, and looks to their own hopes for the future for its guidance. If trauma, the subject of Herman’s life work, is about the past—“what happened to you?”—her new focus, repair, is about the future: “What do you want to happen now?” The book examines what happens when the victim, as the domestic violence survivor Mary Walsh puts it, gives up “all hope of a better past.”

Many feminists have traversed this terrain. What makes Herman’s work different is her remarkable loyalty to her subjects. She is willing to embrace their anger, even to share it. Often her own rage at the treatment of rape victims seeking justice becomes searingly apparent. “Victims of even the most atrocious crimes must establish the purity of their motives before seeking redress,” Herman says, paraphrasing the writer Susan Jacoby, “by first making a humble ritual declaration that they wish only for ‘justice, not revenge.’” At moments like these, you can almost hear her spit.

The women Herman interviews in particular seem acutely aware of the transformative power of Herman’s style of attention. One of them, Sarah Super, a community organizer from Minnesota, read Herman in the grim aftermath of a rape by an ex-boyfriend, who broke into her apartment and held her at knife point. Inspired by a chapter in Herman’s work that pointed out the value of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to soldiers and contrasted it with the absence of memorials for rape victims, Super successfully lobbied the city of Minneapolis for a monument to victims of sexual violence. The site, located along the Mississippi River in Boom Island Park, opened in October 2020, and features mosaics erected on standing panels and a circle of benches. In 2019, Super invited Herman to the groundbreaking ceremony. It’s not clear that Herman went: after decades of debilitating pain from a knee injury, Herman had major surgery that year. But the story of Super’s invitation, recounted by Herman in Truth and Repair, left an indelible image of the women together, standing in the chosen spot, solemnizing the place with the sheer gravity of rape victims’ suffering and endurance. I was moved by Super’s gesture, grateful and affected by learning of the monument in a way that felt out of character for me. For a few days, I would periodically imagine myself there, walking among the mosaics. At a dinner party, I told a friend about the monument and was embarrassed to hear my voice take on a frantic eagerness. I also knew, as soon as I read about the memorial, that I would never be able to bring myself to go.

Marina Kappos, 172, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 36". © Marina Kappos, Courtesy of Shrine, New York City

IF HERMAN’S IS THE MOST PATIENT AND PROLONGED INQUIRY into the difficult question of what rape victims want for their rapists, then the answer turns out to be somewhat anticlimactically reasonable, even banal. The last two-thirds of her book consist of chapters titled “Acknowledgment,” “Apology,” “Accountability,” “Restitution,” “Rehabilitation,” and “Prevention.” Universally, rape victims want to have the truth of the man’s actions made public. They want his social standing, and the esteem other people hold him in, to reflect what he did to them. Victims are varied and ambivalent on the question of punishment, but nearly unanimous in their desire to have the man divested of the privileges—position, status, power—that would bring him into contact with the vulnerable or permit him to abuse again. Sometimes, they want apologies, and though many of them feel ambivalent about the notion of being bought off, when given the option, they often want money——mostly to cover the high costs of lost work and therapy bills. Almost uniformly, they want to not see him again.

But the question of what rape victims want from the rest of us—not their attackers, but everybody else—turns out to be more complex. What is most resoundingly evident in Herman’s interviews is also what is most unsettling and vital for readers: that in nearly all cases, the rape victim is less angry with the rapist himself than with his enablers. Sexual abuse is often a community endeavor, perpetrated not only by the attacker himself but also by the culture that encourages sexual domination as a measure of male esteem, that degrades women’s complaints and claims to equality, and that continues, after the victim makes her revelation, to hold the rapist in high regard, to act as if nothing has happened. These complicit parties are not strangers to the victim but often her family members, colleagues, and closest friends. “In the triangle of victim, perpetrator, and bystanders, impunity means in effect that the bystanders take the side of the perpetrator,” Herman writes. “The crime alienates the victim not only from the person who violated her but also from all those who doubt her veracity, who blame her rather than the perpetrator, or who choose to turn a blind eye.”

The victims often feel this betrayal more acutely than they do the original violence. Rape is a trauma, but we may not yet have a word strong enough for what follows: the treachery and abandonment felt by the victim whose rape is disbelieved, minimized, or excused by those around her. This is the wound she is least able to recover from.

Perhaps this is why #MeToo generated so much irritation and anger, so much fatigue. #MeToo made it clear that the accusation is not only against the rapist but also the people Herman refers to as “implicated subjects,” whom we might call accomplices. Another word for them is “us.”

TRUTH AND REPAIR IS STYLED AS SOMETHING OF A FOLLOW-UP to Trauma and Recovery. That book offered a new, feminist perspective on trauma: as a set of symptoms caused by the mind’s inability to integrate experiences of violence, force, and helplessness. It is credited with introducing the diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD, and with legitimizing rape victims’ symptoms as a form of post-traumatic stress, a controversial application of a diagnosis that was then almost exclusively reserved for male combat veterans. By extending the diagnosis to women, the book also extends the therapeutic response into politics, articulating a set of social conditions that make recovery possible. In other words, trauma is a psychological problem that has a largely political solution. Trauma and Recovery is Herman’s masterpiece, an example of thorough, original, and urgent work that all intellectuals aspire to and few ever achieve.

Trauma and Recovery rejects conventional clinical approaches that Herman sees as wrongheaded and outlines clinical best practices for working with the traumatized, encouraging what she calls “existential engagement” with the memory of violence, in partnership with the victimized patient. The book anticipates Truth and Repair’s focus on the authority of patients’ own accounts, giving equal weight both to the traumatizing event and to the subsequent moral injuries of disbelief and betrayal. Even during long passages that explain and taxonomize symptoms, placing trauma disorders in a clinical context and distinguishing them from other kinds of psychological symptoms, Herman never loses sight of the emergency of her patients’ distress.

The high emotional stakes of the past for rape victims bring a particular tension to Truth and Repair, which, after all, asks these women to focus on imagining a future. And though their suggestions are reasonable and straightforward, one gets the sense that the request to design their own justice is an uncomfortable and difficult ask. Though articulate and intelligent, many of Herman’s informants are also at times constrained by the limits of our collective political imagination, or so angry and hurt by the profundity of their betrayal and humiliation that the very concept of repair begins to seem inappropriate—premature and vulgar in the face of their pain. But Herman’s approach to the rape victims—her dignified curiosity; her use of them as a source of expertise, rather than as moral pawns—itself offers a new model.

That model could extend to #MeToo itself. The options available to Herman’s interviewees in Truth and Repair are the same ones that became the subject of controversy during #MeToo—prosecutions, civil suits, monetary damages—but these seem inadequate, ineffectual, and small. Procedural changes that make reporting more feasible and favorable for rape victims would improve individual women’s lives, and that’s a worthy cause. But these are ultimately minor treatments for a much greater cultural pathology. #MeToo’s greatest insight was that both the causes and the impacts of sexual violence have political origins, though this idea was quickly buried under cynical appropriations of victims’ moral authority and handwringing over due process. Fixing them will require a much bigger reimagining of how women are valued, what rights they are seen to have, and what claims they can make on our sympathy, our compassion, and our solidarity. Herman’s greatest contribution in Truth and Repair is more than her reflections on criminal procedure or the merits of restorative justice: it is that she knows how to speak to rape victims in a way that honors #MeToo’s hopefulness rather than instrumentalizing it—not with patronizing pity, but with something that looks more like respect.

IF TRUTH AND REPAIR’S SINCERITY SEEMS OUT OF TIME in 2023, that might be in part because Herman is so often out of place herself. A product of the radical feminist movement of the 1970s, Herman forged a career merging psychiatric practice and feminist advocacy over the course of decades when the two fields were often passionately opposed. After finishing her doctorate at Harvard in the early ’70s, she established a mental health clinic, the Women’s Mental Health Collective, with other members of the Boston women’s movement, treating victims of domestic violence. In that work, Herman offered her patients political accounts—rather than merely emotional ones—of their distress, attempting to situate the psychic pain of abuse in the broader context of women’s oppression. The Women’s Mental Health Collective pointed abused women to material resources to leave their violent partners, but this aid was seen as just one element of a broader political and psychic intervention that could make it possible for a woman to leave her abuser.

In 1984, Herman, by then on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, cofounded the Victims of Violence program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a clinical research practice that, until its closure in 2022, pioneered new treatments for traumatized patients under the leadership of Herman and the psychologist Mary Harvey. In particular, the program was successful in making inroads with those who had experienced ongoing, long-term violence and confinement, such as former prisoners of war and targets of domestic abuse—whose traumatic symptoms, Herman noted, were similar enough to raise questions about why the two experiences are so differently valued.

Not everyone liked Herman’s answers to such questions. In a field that often reveres the mental health practitioner as perfectly neutral, this call for an affirmative position taking was controversial. When Herman published Trauma and Recovery, its reception in the therapeutic community was not uniformly warm, largely because of this direct call for the clinician to express moral outrage and political solidarity with the raped patient. Herman’s ideal analyst, one early reviewer wrote, “Must listen, really listen, solemnly and without haste, to the factual and emotional details of atrocities, without flight of denial, without blaming the victim, identifying with the aggressor, or becoming a detective who ‘diagnoses’ ritual or Satanic abuse after a single session, as some have been doing lately [remember, this is 1992], and without ‘using her power over the patient to gratify her personal needs.’” To some in Herman’s profession, this felt not like a suggestion but like an accusation.

Political position taking has been central to Herman’s psychiatry, particularly in her work with victims of sexual violence. Herman does not see patients’ symptoms as “pathological.” Her understanding is as radical as it is sympathetic: these supposed manifestations of an ill and dysfunctional psyche are in fact the mind’s attempt to cope with a world that does not value it. Maladjustment, in Herman’s scheme, is a kind of adjustment: it would be unhealthy for rape victims to adapt too well to a world like this one. The problem of rape trauma, then, is not merely that individual women are rendered “insane” by their inability to cope with men’s violent behavior. It’s that the way women are often treated is wrong, inhumane, and unendurable, to the point of becoming maddening. This is, perhaps, where Herman’s practice departs most productively from the conventions of psychiatry: though her work aims to foster healing for individual patients, she often seems to be suggesting that the real cure for the traumatized rape victim will not be in the analysis room but in a political movement. In this interpretation, it’s the world, not the patient, that is crazy. The logical next step is one that the psychiatric field has often found untenable: that it is the world, not the patient, that needs to change.

Marina Kappos, Frequency Study (Thoughts), 2018, acrylic on wood panel, 8 × 16". © Marina Kappos, Courtesy of Shrine, New York City

THE RADICAL FEMINISM OF THE SECOND WAVE, the era when Herman began her career, was often accused of mimicking the therapeutic project. In 1969, when Herman was a newly minted MD, the socialist-feminist group Redstockings organized its first, pre-Roe abortion speak-out, in which women gathered in a Manhattan church to disclose their experiences of illegal abortion. In January 1971, another feminist group, New York Radical Women, organized a similar event for women to talk about their rapes. At the time, second-wave feminist organizing was still dominated by consciousness-raising, a practice in which women would gather in groups to discuss the ways that sexism had impacted their own lives—conversations that frequently involved intimate disclosures, discussions of childhood, and meditations on the psychic turmoil of life under patriarchy, all guided by the slogan “the personal is political.” Herman joined a Boston consciousness-raising group in 1970, the same year she began her psychiatric residency.

Consciousness-raising tactics came under scorn from the New Left, which accused feminists of indulging a self-regarding emotionalism, their political work reduced to mere group therapy. But the feminists countered that the talking worked—that consciousness-raising wasn’t a distraction from action but a precondition to it. They claimed that patriarchy was so psychically oppressive, and that its pain had been rendered unspeakable for so long—dismissed as private, personal, and apolitical—that a crucial first step of feminist political work would necessarily include mental reframings and emotional catharsis. For her part, Herman saw the similarities between consciousness-raising and the therapeutic endeavor as a sign of the virtues of both, endowing women’s experiences with both meaning and context. “The confidential space of the psychotherapy office had many similarities with the free space of the women’s movement,” Herman writes. “As my patients revealed their secrets, I listened with a new awareness of women’s condition.”

But the feminists weren’t exactly being embraced by the mental health field. Psychiatry had been born with a rejection of women’s accounts of sexual abuse. Sigmund Freud’s so-called seduction theory had first posited that hysterical symptoms in women patients were often the result of past experiences of sexual abuse. But Freud disavowed this theory in 1905 and declared that his young women patients’ accounts of rape and molestation were in fact descriptions of their sexual urges and fantasies. The thesis was controversial at the time: Freud’s most famous early patient, a teenage girl he called “Dora,” abruptly ended treatment when Freud would not accept her claim that the sexual advances she was being subjected to by a friend of her father’s were unwanted. But the idea caught on, and lent legitimacy to the misogynist myth that women desire rape. The notion gained further credence in twentieth-century American analysis. Under the influence of a school of psychoanalytic thought now called “revisionist” Freudianism, the still male-dominated mental health field in the mid-twentieth century tended to regard feminism as maladaptive and infantile, the product of a pathological refusal by women to accept their proper social roles and reconcile themselves to what were supposedly their “real” desires: motherhood, marriage, and submission to men. At the radical feminist speak-out on sexual violence in 1971, one woman described being told by her psychiatrist to masturbate in front of him as part of her “treatment.”

Herman’s own psychiatric practice can be seen as a kind of repetition of Freud’s encounter with sexual abuse—but done correctly this time, facilitating a reconciliation between feminism and psychiatry. Like Freud, Herman was confronted with a staggering number of accounts of sexual abuse—molestation by father figures, rape by boyfriends and husbands, assault by bosses, neighbors, friends—from her women patients when she began her practice. But unlike Freud, Herman proceeded from the assumption that her patients were telling the truth. Her belief in her patients’ accounts shaped her psychiatric philosophy as profoundly as Freud’s disbelief shaped his.

Through consciousness-raising, the feminists sought to take on their own traumas—and gender hierarchy itself. Herman was at the intoxicating center of this new political front, an author of the emerging feminist position positing that politics shaped personal experience, and that personal experience could inform politics. If patriarchy was a social pathology, feminists believed they had found a talking cure. But then as now, it just wasn’t clear that anyone was listening.

But if feminist movement politics made the rape victim’s self-disclosure a public form of political agitation, then the psychiatric relationship was meant to offer a more private repair. Trauma therapy, of the kind practiced and advanced by Herman, promises the rape victim a form of recovery and recuperation that can, at its best, validate her pain, restore her safety and dignity, reposition her in her social environment as a valued equal, and return her to health. At least that’s the idea. But the therapeutic relationship in reality is much more fraught; even the most compassionate and talented of practitioners, like Herman, cannot guarantee a meaningful or permanent recovery from the psychic effects of violence. And what psychiatry can do, it can only do slowly, expensively, and on a tiny scale of one-on-one treatment (or, in the case of Herman at the Victims of Violence program, in small groups). Meanwhile, when political conditions do not improve, one victim’s recovery is a mere drop in the ocean of pain created by the ongoing emergency of rape. While the rape victim embarks on the slow, arduous, and incremental work of making herself well, thousands more women experience rape trauma, and are thrown into the moral isolation and mental morass that follows. In this context, a therapeutic intervention can seem like a tragically inadequate response to sexual violence.

Herman is perhaps unique among psychiatrists in the careful thought she has given to the relationship between emotional pain and political action. In Truth and Repair, the most telling theme—and perhaps the one trait that all her correspondents have in common—is the rape victim’s desire to protect others from experiencing the same fate. Herman’s account returns to this wish over and over again, in part because the survivors she interviews keep bringing it up: they insist that any form of “justice” worthy of the name would require the man who hurt them to be stopped from hurting anyone else. The pursuit of this aim leads women into distressing and costly endeavors—like testifying in court—that can seem to impede their healing. After a long explanation of the harms and hostilities endured by gender-violence victims in criminal courts, Herman explains, “Those who chose to participate in the criminal justice system did so mainly because they saw no other way to prevent the offenders from repeating their crimes.” Sarah Johnson, who was raped by a classmate in high school, decided to cooperate with the cops after learning that she was not the boy’s first victim. “The detective told me he knew what happened—[the boy] had done this to between five and ten other girls,” Johnson says. “There had been complaints, but none of them would press charges. He said, ‘Sarah, you’d be helping many girls if you did.’” Later, when Herman observes a Tucson restorative-justice program called RESTORE, she notes the frustration of victims with the program’s emphasis on apology. The women didn’t want statements of regret from their attackers, which they often suspected were insincere. Rather, they wished “to make sure that the responsible person doesn’t do what he did to anyone else.”

These testimonies caused Herman to revise her initial 1992 account of post-traumatic healing, laid out in Trauma and Recovery, which posited that the final stage of recuperation was a victim’s ability to move on with her life. Now, she sees these women’s sense of being in community with other potential victims, to whom they owe solidarity and self-sacrifice, as being the last phase of the healing process.

In the women’s insistence on protecting others, it is hard to see evidence of what #MeToo’s critics seem to fear from the rape victim. The people Herman interviews are not motivated by vengeance or by emotional weakness; they are neither delusional as to the facts, nor overzealous in their interpretation of them. The problem is not with the women’s aims. It is that they cannot achieve them alone.

The #MeToo disclosure is so fraught for the listener, so “fatiguing,” precisely because it creates moral obligations for us. The words “this happened” and “he did this to me” must change our behavior and bring us into solidarity with the rape victim. That means offering a lasting and concrete opposition to rape and to the impunity of those who commit it, rather than relying on pacifying clichés like, “I’m sorry that happened to you” or “That must be so hard.” The rapist must change in our esteem; his reputation and status must be lessened to reflect what he did. The rape victim must be acknowledged and restored to the full membership in the community that the rape denied her. We can no longer act as we once did; we can no longer behave as if we do not know something that we do. Not if we are to live honorably, or by our own principles.

But so many of us do not live honorably, and do not follow our own principles. To our shame, we find it too painful, or too difficult, to oppose rape; too costly to approach its victims with respect. And it is costly. The anger provoked by #MeToo, the exhaustion and annoyance felt at its parade of female suffering, might be best understood as a response to this shame. The rape victims, in their terrifying numbers and evident righteousness, were creating in us, their listeners, an obligation to transform our world. It was a task that most of us did not feel up to, and ultimately, it was one that we rejected.

What rape victims want is to not be betrayed this way, to live in a community that shares their values and sees the horror and the wrongness of sexual abuse. They want their friends and family and lovers to seek to eliminate such violence without having to be told to. “What do rape victims want?” is the question that motivates Herman’s project in Truth and Repair, but the answer seems to undermine that project itself: They want a world where they do not need to be asked. This is the world we have not been strong enough to make for them.

In Trauma and Recovery, the women and girls Herman treats feel breathingly present on the page. Reading the book, one has the sense of Herman’s traumatized patients staring back at you, alert as rabbits. It was a feeling not unlike one I experienced at moments during the height of #MeToo: all those women, famous and anonymous, their jaws set in an intolerable certainty, seeming to stare out at me from magazine covers and newspaper homepages with an expectation that was always disappointed. Maybe this intimate presence of suffering is what makes Trauma and Recovery almost unbearably punishing to read, and Herman’s work more generally very difficult to confront. Her allegiance to her patients, her willingness to attend to the often very dark corners of their minds, reflects a personal strength on her part that I do not share. The first time I read Trauma and Recovery, it took me months to finish. I dragged myself to its pages and then quickly abandoned them, desperate to look away. Herman has made a career of not looking away. What has she seen, I wonder, that the rest of us, in our weakness, have missed?

Moira Donegan is a writer and feminist.

COLUMNS

- THE EDITORS on the return of Bookforum

- CHARLOTTE SHANE on the Beach Boys

Bookforum Is Back!

Help us continue our mission by subscribing and spreading the word

The Editors

Edvard Munch, Todeskuss (The Kiss of Death), 1899, lithograph, 173⁄4 x 241⁄2".

BOOKFORUM IS BACK. We’ve been on hiatus since December 2022, and the Summer 2023 edition is the first issue produced in conjunction with our new publishing partner, The Nation, a venerable magazine committed to fiercely independent journalism. Our mission is to continue the conversation where we left off, publishing essays by writers who are deeply engaged with books and contemporary culture.

Since 1994, Bookforum has staked out its own territory, inviting authors to take on—with critical acuity and personality—fiction, art, literary theory, philosophy, politics, and more. Over the years, we have encouraged new writers to find their voices and given established writers room to stretch out. We trust them to take chances, and the results—for our writers, readers, and ourselves—have been surprising and rewarding.

When the magazine shuttered late last year, there was an outpouring of grief. Major publications covered the closure and placed it in the context of increasing media consolidation, cutbacks, layoffs, and dire signs for the business of both literature and journalism. And what we do is hard to monetize. Each essay emerges out of an intensive process, and it’s difficult to make a financial case for the time, dedication, and thoroughness we ask of our contributors. But we think the rewards are significant and the results worthwhile. Not just as discrete pieces of thought but as a way of getting a feel for the larger culture as expressed through its most durable containers for ideas: books. We don’t think it’s an accident that death and survival come up in multiple articles in this issue. But mourning, thinking, plotting, and disagreeing can be joyful, too. As a reader, you’re part of the community, and we are extremely grateful that you’re here.

We weren’t sure we’d ever be able to make this magazine again, and the essays reflect our own preoccupations with death, rebirth, money, belonging, and the place of art in society. There’s an essay that begins with the writer about to hit a deer with her car. There’s one about trauma and justice, and another by an author who loves the Beach Boys so much that it drives her a little nuts. We wanted to find out whatever happened to the systems novel, how rich people write about their own privilege, and why Lorrie Moore’s new novel features a Weekend at Bernie’s scenario with a man and his dead ex-girlfriend on a road trip. (Freud pops up all over this Bookforum.) We cover the demise of crypto, the hubris of the UFC, Annie Ernaux’s philosophy of la petite mort, and Christina Sharpe’s notes on loss. Out in the Hamptons, Emma Cline’s grifter protagonist tries to stay afloat, a situation represented by our cover painting, by Pavlina Alea.

Whether we sink or swim depends in large part on you. We hope you will be enlightened and entertained as our writers figure things out on the page and invite you along. Please help us continue our mission by subscribing and spreading the word.

LUXURY & DEGRADATION

Einstein on the Beach

The genius of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys

Charlotte Shane

BRIAN WILSON HAS BEEN DEAF IN HIS RIGHT EAR since childhood. He mixed the Beach Boys’ albums, including Pet Sounds, in mono because he couldn’t hear them any other way. “It was sort of like being robbed of something, some pleasure of life,” he said in 1976. “I’m not complaining, but it’s a little bit of a setback.” I think the deafness might explain why the left side of his mouth reaches up when he speaks, like he’s addressing his good ear. (The affect has become more pronounced with age, but it’s visible in footage from the 1960s.) “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killin’ it,” Brian yelled at his father and former band manager, Murry Wilson, during 1965’s “Help Me, Rhonda” recording session. Murry, drunk but not untrue to his sober form, had been berating the guys for almost forty minutes as they tried to get down the vocals.

While Brian’s hearing loss is undisputed, its cause has never been confirmed. In his second, most recent autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, Brian says another kid hit him in the head with a lead pipe. Previously, he claimed this disabling strike came from Murry and, on other occasions, said he was born that way. His mother, speaking as the universal repository of a family’s medical history, said it could have been congenital or that it could have come from a fight with a neighbor. Except for the time when, according to Brian’s cousin and fellow band member Mike Love, she said Murry inflicted it by hitting young Brian in the head with an iron. Doctors couldn’t deduce the cause. Sometimes, no amount of information gathering yields an answer.

I tend to be a finicky reader, but I’ve yet to regret the time spent on any material about the Beach Boys, no matter how contested and familiar the claims. Without complaint, I’ll read another paragraph about original Beach Boys member Al Jardine briefly quitting the band before they released “Surfin’ U.S.A.” because he thought their success was over. Or the tyrannical, recently fired Murry failing to upstage his sons with his flop Beach Boys rip-off, the Sunrays, who opened for the Boys a few times and still couldn’t get any commercial traction. Here comes the usual anecdote about Brian writing “California Girls” while tripping on acid, though in both his autobiographies, he describes writing it immediately after the drug wore off. In a recent documentary, he says its composition happened a week later. Then there’s the oft-told tale of Mike and Brian composing “The Warmth of the Sun” in a half hour after the assassination of JFK, even though in his autobiography, Mike says it was written the night before—which would explain why the lyrics are about a woman instead of a dead president. I’d probably be happy to be reading the Beach Boys’ Wikipedia entry while on my deathbed, smiling and nodding at the three-hundredth encounter with the fact that their name was bestowed upon them by a record exec, and they didn’t know it until the release of their first single, “Surfin’.” I’m not trying to be an expert or out-pedant fellow fans. I just like thinking about the Beach Boys because I feel grateful for them.

The Beach Boys advertisement image, Billboard magazine, June 29, 1963.

Steven Gaines’s 1986 book, Heroes & Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, stands out for its willingness to sideline details about the irresistible music in favor of equally irresistible gossip about affairs, drugs, and fistfights. The result is a collection of remembrances and allegations that could hold the interest of someone who’s never even heard “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” There are other places to look if you want a reverie on Carl Wilson’s legendary vocal on “God Only Knows.” This is the book in which famously mild-mannered Carl gets so excited when he hears their first song on the radio that he—intentionally, maybe?—drinks milkshakes until he barfs, and, by the ’70s, has become an admitted cocaine addict who so spectacularly falls during a concert in Australia that he’s made to apologize at a press conference the next day.

Gaines doesn’t divulge how he earned the confidence of so many ex-wives, collaborators, and intimates. Perhaps he’s a very charming man—or maybe the Beach Boys, like other rock celebrities, attracted fame-hungry and shameless people eager to stake their claim to the legacy. (This is indisputably true for the vile Rocky Pamplin, a model and aspiring singer who, according to Gaines, began a Machiavellian affair with Brian’s wife Marilyn in the three years that he acted as Brian’s bodyguard, then left her cruel, anti-Semitic messages after she fired him. He also, for no apparent reason, joined Mike Love’s brother, Stanley Love, in ambushing and brutally beating Brian’s brother Dennis Wilson. “We broke our hands the first couple of punches,” Pamplin brags to Gaines. “We slammed his head against the bedboard twelve times.”) The book is sometimes dismissed as too sensationalistic to be true, but Gaines appears scrupulous about noting when participants’ stories contradict, and he includes an abundance of direct quotes.

Another mark in favor of its veracity is that the pugnacious, grudge-holding Mike Love takes no apparent issue with Heroes & Villains. In his autobiography, he singles out other authors for misrepresenting the band’s history but mentions Gaines without negative commentary. This is especially fascinating given that Gaines says Mike beat his second wife, Suzanne, while she was pregnant and hired a private detective to help him gain sole custody of their children to punish Suzanne for an alleged affair with Dennis, Mike’s long-standing sexual rival. In Mike’s own retelling, he defends his position  by saying he heard Suzanne once left their two children alone with infamous Manson acolyte Susan Atkins—though he never asked Suzanne if this was true. (In a baffling unforced error, Mike also admits that he toured too much to spend time with his kids.)

Mike is exceptionally unlikable, but Gaines can’t devote too much space to him, given the abundance of details about other parties. Dennis is probably the most sordid figure, according to Gaines’s reporting: he allows the Manson family to live with him for months, coaxes almost $100,000 out of his girlfriend, Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, manages to marry four times before his death at age thirty-nine, and impregnates a teenager who was likely Mike’s daughter and therefore his own cousin once removed. And if the book hadn’t predated many of the Beach Boys’ legal disputes—Mike Love suing Brian and, separately, Al Jardine; the restraining order granted in 1992 for Brian against nefarious, disgraced doctor Eugene Landry; and Brian’s ex-wife Marilyn suing Brian for royalties—it would have been twice as long.

None of this tawdriness spoils the music of the Beach Boys because their music is unspoilable. It can’t be ruined by banal, sexist lyrics or my thousands of listens over dozens of years or by exposure to the members’ worst qualities. Learning about their struggles and failures only makes their achievements more impressive by highlighting the improbability of collaborative excellence, the creative miracle. Dennis wasn’t supposed to be in the band, but Wilson matriarch Audree asked the guys to include him. Al Jardine dropped out, came back in time to sing the lead on “Help Me, Rhonda,” and has stayed for decades of records and tours. Mike Love, that bastard, came up with “round round, get around, I get around” because the existing words were “pussy lyrics” that he refused to sing. Brian was born never to hear stereo, abused horribly by his father, and saddled with mental illness and drug addiction, and yet he wrote some of the most perfect songs the world has ever known.

That sort of inexplicable, felicitous triumph is what we generally call fate, and regardless of how it feels to its players in the moment, from a distance, it looks like a brush with the divine. Brian’s talent—and for all the important contributions made by the band’s cast of characters over the years, Brian’s compositions are the nucleus of the glory—is inextricable from his experience of music as a channel to God, a way to examine and take solace from the fear that’s dominated his life. You don’t have to research much about the Beach Boys before you realize that Brian is freaked out by everything:  interviews, touring, the ocean, the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes.” He wrote “Good Vibrations” while dwelling on his mother’s suggestion that dogs react to people based on vibrations: “It scared me to death.” His famous 1965 remark that he’d one day create “songs that people pray to” registers as typical rock-star arrogance if you ignore the fact that he needed songs he could pray to, too. “Voices were the problem,” he says of his mental illness, “but also the answer.” Music—harmony—was how he found God in his tenderness and terror.

The human voice is the most celestial instrument, and when it combines with others, the effect is transcendent. Family voices are uncannily moving when united in song because of genetic similarities and intimacy; if you grow up together, you’re more likely to pronounce words the same way, which makes the blend more seamless. The only Beach Boys covers I can tolerate are instrumentals because listening to other singers try to riff on perfection is unbearable. And though Brian’s productions are brilliant—the instrumental version of “Good Vibrations” is a deeply satisfying song in its own right—the voices turn a listener inside out. The a cappella version of 1965’s “Kiss Me, Baby” is, for me, as sublime as the whole production of “God Only Knows.”

Brian wrote of making Pet Sounds, “I looked around at the musicians and the singers, and I could see their halos.”

The boys weren’t angels. They sang like them anyway.

Charlotte Shane is a cofounder of TigerBee Press and the author of Prostitute Laundry (TigerBee Press, 2016).

FICTION

- ED PARK: Robert Plunket's My Search for Warren Harding

- JANIQUE VIGIER: Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos

- JANE HU: Emma Cline's The Guest

- MINA TAVAKOLI: Henry Bean’s The Nenoquich

- ANGELO HERNANDEZ-SIAS: Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

- LISA BORST: Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting

- OMARI WEEKES: Maya Binyam’s Hangman

- JAMIE HOOD: Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man

- FIONA MAAZEL: Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story

All the President’s Women

Robert Plunket’s comic novel of a renegade historian

Ed Park

My Search for Warren Harding By Robert Plunket. New York: New Directions. 312 pages. $19.

Purchase this book:

Bookshop • Amazon

I LOVE NOVELS WITH INCREDIBLE review quotes on the cover, the kind that make you feel around for your wallet. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, for one, lured me with a doozy by William Kennedy from the New York Times Book Review, who called it “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the human race.” The best quotes follow you around as you read, subtly inflecting your experience, perhaps even shaping your final, favorable judgment. (“Hey—this is kind of like the Book of Genesis!”)

Years ago, studying the paperback of Nicholson Baker’s debut, The Mezzanine, I was hypnotized by another Times rave: “Its 135 pages probably contain more insight into life as we live it than anything currently on the best-seller lists.” Fast-forward to earlier this year, when I stumbled on that original review from 1989. I snorted when I read how the line about the book’s way-we-live-now-ness actually ended: “with the possible exception of The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American.” I hadn’t heard of the witty reviewer, Robert Plunket, “author of the novel My Search for Warren Harding and a columnist for Sarasota magazine.” Soon after, by coincidence, I saw that New Directions was about to bring Plunket’s novel back in print. (Originally edited by Gordon Lish, it was published by Knopf in 1983.)

The new edition comes with a fine introduction by novelist Danzy Senna, but it’s the other paratexts that deepen the mystery of this great lost comic novel and its creator, now seventy-eight years old. His updated author bio has a goofy charm. As a young man in New York, he had a “successful career as a waiter and office temp,” then relocated to Florida and became a gossip columnist. His list of outlets omits the Gray Lady (for which he’d written dozens of witty articles and reviews), instead citing This Week in Ft. Myers Beach, Healthy Aging, and Sandbars and Sonnets: The Southwest Florida Poetry Review. This self-effacing show of regional pride is also canny marketing, distinguishing his bibliography from the typical literary novelist’s rundown of organs. (As Plunket deadpanned in a 2015 interview, “I honed my skills in the nitty-gritty world of small-town supermarket handouts.”)

Things get even wackier in the book’s new preface. Plunket boasts of having patronized the same adult theater where Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) was arrested, and of doing a nightclub act in 1991 with his friend Katherine Harris, later Florida’s secretary of state during the fraught 2000 election. And on 9/11, he was sitting in a Sarasota schoolroom covering George W. Bush’s visit when the president heard about the second tower. Is this all a send-up, an attempt for “R.P.” (as he signs the preface) to Gump himself into recent history? A flashing of Republican sympathies, to scandalize the liberal literati? A way to show that his life outside the cultural mainstream has been rich with historic import?

A cheeky tone keeps us guessing. Plunket compares his own late-life contentment to Dubya’s: “He has his Laura, I have my Kyle, a young man I met while he was participating in a Wet Jockey Shorts contest.” Kyle has lent a hand as Plunket, nearing eighty, is suffering from medical conditions, including two strokes and a heart attack. “He has proven so helpful that I have even given him a durable power of attorney,” Plunket writes happily, as he preps for a kayak trip on a secluded, gator-glutted stretch of the Everglades. (It’s Kyle’s idea.) In a few fizzy pages, the resurrected novelist has turned himself into an unreliable narrator so keen on bruiting his bona fides that he’s oblivious to his swain’s agenda.

Robert Plunket, 2022. Hannah Phillips

All this, before the novel proper has begun! Or do these curious, entertaining asides belong to the story at large? Concerned with the afterglow of fame and the thirst for recognition, mixing the invented and the real, they anticipate the novel to come. R.P.’s preface is followed by a note from “E.W.”—our prolix antihero, the renegade scholar Elliot Weiner—acknowledging a research grant from the Reed Foundation. To his dismay, the funders have distanced themselves from his work, which has admittedly generated “an array of sordid litigations.” The vibe echoes the foreword to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which Charles Kinbote, the supremely deluded (or artistic) annotator, loses his composure by the third paragraph, griping, “There is a very large amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”

Even the most forgiving reader will see why the foundation was wise to cut bait. Elliot has produced not so much a study of Warren Harding (1865–1923) but a madcap account of trying to get the scoop on the twenty-ninth president’s sex life by cozying up to his illegitimate granddaughter. His tale is full of deception, racial slurs, bad sex, assorted felonies. It’s also a feat of controlled chaos, getting much of its comic mileage out of set pieces that let Plunket merrily skewer bad art, from a feminist theater collective’s interactive play (All My Sisters Slept in Dirt: A Choral Poem) to a LACMA gala featuring the work of celebrities, where Elliot is numbed by

the countless street scenes—Montmartre, Taxco, Bel-Aire—each with its own laws of perspective, the sunsets, sunrises, cloud formations and seascapes with colors not found in nature, the Grandma Moses rip-offs, the cross-eyed portraits (Mrs. Melvin Franks; Kim, Aged 5), the Balinese dancers and native markets laboriously copied from vacation snapshots, the random puddles of color labelled Abstract, the attempts at surrealism indistinguishable from the attempts at realism. . . .

Plunket has said that one inspiration for My Search was his realization that the narrator of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers was closeted, and in updating the plot to 1980, he takes the conceit to the limit, giving his Ivy-educated antihero an interest in Morris dancing (“it involves a lot of swinging of clubs”), Ethel Merman, and women’s fashion. He impulsively invites a trailer-park hunk to move back to New York with him. On the flip side, he repeatedly calls a flamboyantly gay party guest “faggot” and makes sure to constantly mention his girlfriend, Pam. She might be on to something, telling him at one point, “Never in my life have I met somebody who is more out of touch with his feelings than you are.”

The book starts with Elliot scoping out Rebekah Kinney, an octogenarian recluse whom he suspects is the same R.K. who had a brief but productive affair with the married Harding in the early 1920s; she wrote a bestselling tell-all to support their love child after his sudden death. (Kinney is modeled on Nan Britton, over three decades younger than Harding, who penned The President’s Daughter.) Her granddaughter, the obese Jonica—“This woman eats bouillon raw!” Elliott later marvels—can’t understand why anyone would want to rent the residence’s filthy pool house, but convinces Kinney to open it up for the disingenuous Elliot. His furtive inspection of the trash can yields nothing save the fact that “somebody was a Q-tip freak.” After Jonica moves back in with her grandmother, Elliot holds his nose and launches a charm campaign. Her mention of a trunk of letters, which Rebekah peruses nightly, whets his appetite for inspection.

Elliot at times resembles a bitchier version of Ray Midge, the pedantic narrator of Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South (1979). Plunket is an avowed Portishead, and some passages have Dog’s breezy tone of witty condescension, as in his assessment of the “Kesselbaum technique” of poetry writing, taken up by Kinney and her group: “It consisted of stringing together a series of clichés and giving them a snappy, one-word title which would telegraph the metaphor she was planning to massacre. For instance: ‘Carousel,’ ‘Autumn,’ ‘Tidewater.’ And my favorite ‘Freeway.’” At other times, Elliot’s sociological takes anticipate those of Jack Gladney from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). On the run at one point, Elliot ponders getting a job as a night clerk. “Why a night clerk? I wondered. . . . Simple, I realized with a shudder. Whenever anybody gets arrested after a manhunt for some bizarre crime, it always said in the paper, ‘Schmertz had been working as a night clerk at a local motel.’ Either that or a hospital orderly.”

(Side note: there’s a buried joke that didn’t hit me till a second read. Elliot has a sublimated crush on Pam’s brother, Ira, whom he playfully mocks as “Irate Berger.” This means his girlfriend is the Pam Berger to his Weiner. It’s so stupid. It’s so great.)

Plunket could be a missing link between the Portis/DeLillo brand of humor and that of Baker (like The Mezzanine, My Search has some footnotes—mostly recipes) or perhaps Mark Leyner (in his fondness for boldface names). But the book’s queer subtext sets it apart, and the theme elevates Plunket’s second novel, the hyperfarcical Love Junkie (1992), again set in the early ’80s. Texas-born Mimi Smithers has returned to the States with her husband after his stint in Iran working for Union Carbide. Settling in Westchester, the naive and superficial Mimi strives to climb New York’s socio-cultural ladder. She finds fulfillment working for an arts organization in the city, run by the charismatic Tom Potts, who teaches her the finer things, like the proper pronunciation of “Rizzoli’s.” Even after utterances like “I could never have a serious relationship with someone who doesn’t like opera,” it takes Mimi forever to realize her crush object is gay, but once she does, she gets enmeshed in the city’s queer subculture. (An unwitting trip to a fetish club is a masterclass in cringe.) Her attention shifts from Tom to an entrepreneurial Adonis of a porn star named Joe, né Joel Sabinak, whose stunning looks compel her to sketch him. (The drawings are included.) She happily manages his various sidelines: sending his used underwear to a cross section of paying fans across the country, making flyers for his The Sensual World of Joe, his “Verbal Abuse Tape,” and almost single-handedly funding his artsy adult film Circle of Confusion, for which she is tapped as a last-minute stand-in. (“I am a lesbian, I kept repeating to myself. I am a lesbian. I am a lesbian.”)

Love Junkie is eager to please and gleefully tasteless. Recounting a bombing at a Tehran department store, Mimi is proud that she maintained her shopaholism, embassy advisories be damned: “It was a political act.” In a recent Nation critique of White Noise, with its airborne toxic event, Siddhartha Deb wondered why “there is not a single reference to Bhopal or Union Carbide in the footnotes of the [recent] Library of America edition.” To the contrary, Plunket prepares us for the 1984 Bhopal disaster—in which thousands died after a chemical explosion at a Union Carbide factory—then merely uses it as a convenient plot point. Likewise, the killing wave of AIDS makes a startling appearance by the end, only for shallow Mimi to note that, although a friend’s memorial was “ineffably sad,” it was “without a doubt the most elegant social event I’ve ever attended.” Kirkus dismissed the book as “thin camp,” but Mimi’s dogged rejection of tragedy still has the ability to shock.

Though Jay McInerney gave Love Junkie a glowing Times review (headlined “Dominatrix from Bronxville”), Plunket appeared to move on from fiction. Down in Florida, he filed his gossip columns and other pieces for the local press, which means we newly minted Plunket fans can find a wealth of smartly stylish pieces online, including a superb feature last year on the unsolved 1969 heist of religious paintings done by the once-popular Ben Stahl, a Sarasota friend. The larger-than-life depiction of Stahl has the scope and energy of a Plunket novel, with everyone from Ursula Andress to Bob Ross making cameos, the way Jack Lemmon and Candice Bergen pop up at the art show in My Search. “Though he’s been dead for 36 years, he still seems to exist in some sort of limbo, a piece of a mystery that has yet to be solved,” Plunket writes tenderly of his friend. “Will it ever? I hope so. I’d love for Ben to see one more moment in the spotlight.”

It reminded me of a scene early in My Search for Warren Harding, in which Elliot dismisses the judgment of his sole rival in Hardingiana, a Yale scholar who disdains Rebekah Kinney as a “historical intruder,” someone whose existence complicates the smooth narrative of the past. Plunket feels like a literary-historical intruder as well. Those of us just beginning to read funny fiction seriously in the ’80s might have missed him the first time around. What does it mean that, forty years on, he stands as tall as the greats?

Ed Park’s latest novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, will be published by Random House in November.

After the Fall

A novel about East Germans situates romantic feelings within the confines of the state

Janique Vigier

Kairos By Jenny Erpenbeck, Translated from German by Michael Hofmann. New York: New Directions. 336 pages. $26.

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IT WAS THE FALL of the Berlin Wall that prompted Jenny Erpenbeck to become a writer, as if the beliefs and structures guiding her life that had, almost overnight, been rendered obsolete, could be recuperated by language. But Erpenbeck, born steps from the Wall in 1967, wasn’t interested in memoir or commemoration. She preferred tricks of self-effacement, recursion, deferral, anything that lent “freedom from the compulsion of realism.” Her debut, The Old Child (1999), is a parable of a loser’s triumph: a young woman posing as a fourteen-year-old goes to live in a children’s home, turning life into a game she can win by changing the rules. Her second novel, The Book of Words (2004), is another childhood phantasmagoria, loosely set in the Nazi haven of Argentina. Then Erpenbeck shakes herself out of the timelessness of fairy tale. The title of her third novel is, in English, Visitation; in German, Heimsuchung, a word as shifty as her plots—it sounds like “home-seeking” but means both “affliction” and “haunting.” An unnamed gardener tends to a Brandenberg estate and serves as witness to the five self-standing but interconnected stories of its occupants.

With Kairos, her sixth novel, Erpenbeck comes home. A love story edging on cultural history, Kairos etches the arc of a May-December romance through the final gasps and dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Consider it the most personal register in a continuous project. Erpenbeck’s great subject, the lives of Germans in the crosscurrents of the twentieth century, has before now been marked by an austere remove. History supplied the mood, but served mainly as a stage. (It may be worth noting that Erpenbeck worked in theater design and as an opera director). In Kairos, it orchestrates the narrative. Here Erpenbeck climbs in between the reality of things, mapping the subterranean affect of the GDR through its humor, speech, customs, gestures. The picture that emerges is that of a vanished system, a code of sentiment and behavior no longer in use, intact but unserviceable.

The lovers’ story is deceptively familiar. One day by chance, on the bus, she sees him and he sees her; then she looks at him and he looks at her, and by the third look, that’s it, it’s over, everything has begun. This is in July 1986, and they are Hans and Katarina. Hans, fifty-three, is a married man, a writer, and a casual sadist. Katharina, nineteen, is “artistic,” disarming, her openness a liability. In the restaurant, she takes her coffee black, so he’ll take her seriously; he orders a glass of vodka, to distract himself from her age.

When they meet again, she accepts his terms for the affair—the infrequency of their meetings, the need for secrecy, his freedom to see other women—with a smile. If I demand nothing, she thinks, he can’t refuse me anything. He provides little assurance about their romantic future but compensates by giving her bits and pieces of fine culture to furnish a sense of self-assurance. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Caspar Neher’s designs. Giotto, Goya. Mann, Marx. It’s not all intellectual; he also uses his belt.

A year in, Katharina begins a theater internship in Frankfurt, and a life away from Hans. He plays Iago to his own Othello, anticipatorily foisting blame in a way that guarantees the outcome he suspects. She takes up with a colleague her own age. Hans’s devastation has an undercurrent of glee. “Everything regarding your time in Frankfurt,” he tells her, “is material for my investigation.” For the next three years he records cassettes with hateful dispatches that take thwarted lover to an operatic pitch. (“You’re smart . . . but you’re soulless.” “You took sentimentality for passion.” “You regret the consequences, but not the fact that you lacked moral discipline.”) One uniformed Stasi officer to every 320 people, the famous calculation went, or just one man in the bedroom.

Post-Frankfurt is an extended romantic finale. On a parallel track, the end of the socialist world. The Wall falls without mention (“It’s salade niçoise forever, now,” Hans and Katharina joke), and what’s left is a society for whom life suddenly makes no sense. The West is the smell of Chanel No. 5 in the streets, strangers with strange money in their pockets. “Coca-Cola,” Katharina thinks, “has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner.” (Godard agrees.) There’s endless talk of freedom—the freedom to shop, mostly. “Am I lacking in dignity,” Katharina’s friend Sybille asks, “just because I fancy an unusual-looking pair of shoes?” (“Yes, thinks Katharina.”) The glut of things hardly conceals the erosion of beliefs.

Hans and Katharina are symbolically overweighted characters, but I forgive Erpenbeck her ciphers. Her heavy-handedness makes clear distinct experiences in the GDR. Hans, born in the West, wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth, but refused the Fascism of the father, his own, becoming a disciple of Brecht and moving to East Berlin at eighteen “to prove to himself and to mankind that he would have behaved differently.” Katharina, born in the East, where as a schoolgirl she memorized Lenin slogans and Marxist doctrine, knows no other life. The mechanisms of the GDR don’t preclude private feeling. Hans’s insistent castigation of Katharina, following her “betrayal” in Frankfurt, is culturally normal and physically pathological, analogous to the techniques of surveillance and control of the state.

After Hans’s death, Katharina receives boxes of government documents—the Stasi files—and learns that he had, prior to their meeting, been an informant for the state. He used the code name “Galileo,” as in the Brecht play, where the character recants his beliefs to get on with his work. I met the news of the reveal with blankness. The truth here could never stand up for itself.

Stasi surveillance equipment, DDR Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2013. Adam Jones, Ph.D./Wikicommons

KATHARINA, IN THE FINAL PAGES, opens her kitchen cupboard to reveal to Hans a store of products that will soon be taken out of commission: the cleaning product Pulax; a detergent called “Spee,” the baby food “All Weeks and Months,” toothpaste, milk powder, tea, Ems salt. Backstolz baking powder. A brown paper shopping bag printed with pale letters, Goodbye, good buy! She calls the arrangement “GDR Last Things.” Things that were not made to last, now made to be lasting.

“I had this idea,” Erpenbeck told Claire Messud, of Kairos, “of making a museum by writing a book.” It would include, she continued, the things she remembered and things important to her friends. And in a sense, the book does serve as a museum, enclosing a historical period in firmly planted parentheses. But museums are coercive little architectures. Not without merit. They position us outside of history, and in doing so, we gain a certain objectivity with respect to ourselves, and see how much generality there is even in the most personal things, and this generality has a quality of intimacy. But novels, our homes of inner turbulence, are not museums, smoothing and tidying, “clarifying” at the expense of contradiction, pining historical moments as “foreign” and “peculiar.” Kairos captures a moment when history curtailed gesture, adventures of the heart. Erpenbeck’s task is the attempt to make sense of a perished code of behavior.

In The Sense of an Ending, his influential study on making sense of fiction, or of attempting to derive sense of temporal chaos, the literary critic Frank Kermode positions kairos as a “point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end.” This definition seems to me more apt than Erpenbeck’s summon of the elusive Greek god Kairos, with “the lock of hair on his forehead,” when Katarina asks herself, thirty years later, whether it had been a “fortunate moment” when she “just nineteen, had met Hans.” Too religious still, or class-conscious and superstitious maybe, to fully separate “fortune” from “fate,” I found it relieving to revisit kairos in the biblical sense, as the “concord of past, present and future . . . the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future.” It seems truer to the novel, truer than a museum, for the title to mark not fortune but destiny, or a story not defined only by its end, but by the panorama of time around which it situates itself. Pinpricked by the specifics, like seeing a face in a crowd.

Erpenbeck renders the seismic shift created by the Fall by inferring a general pathology from the depth and breadth of Hans’s and Katarina’s subjectivity. And from their liaison: Kairos gains its emotional voltage from the individuating force of love, with all of its indelible precision and detail. Written in the third person, with the perspective alternating between the two characters, the novel’s most beautiful passages occur in the direct shifts between the lovers.

At times these highlight the symmetry of pleasure:

The room smells of lilacs.

Later, they lie so close that when one turns, the other turns too.

So it does exist, she thinks, happiness.

So it does exist, he thinks, happiness.

While other times the alternating voices reveals the projections, delusions, and mismeasures of love:

He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later.

And she, he’s putting himself in my hands.

And then the ruthless symmetry of endings:

Nothing was dearer to Rumpelstiltskin’s heart than to have some living being all to himself.

Some living being, Hans thinks, and stares up into the blue, next to him the woman with whom he had wanted to have a child.

Some living being, thinks Katharina, and stares up into the blue, next to her the man with whom she had wanted to have a child.

The ruins still sit between the two cities when they go back to the Ganymede, where they’d had their first date. It’s closing—forever, one last rowdy consignment of Americans in uniform. Katharina wears the same backless dress, the same velvet hair ribbon, as before when she said yes and smiled. Then it was live musicians playing Mozart; now it’s pop music from a cassette player. Then, at the end of the night, they walked the streets towards home, pointing out this and that to one another. Now, at the end of the night, they miss the tram, hail a cab, two stops.

Janique Vigier is a writer living in New York.

True Grift

Emma Cline’s novel of a sex worker who’s never off the clock

Jane Hu

The Guest By Emma Cline. New York: Random House. 304 pages. $28.

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WHEN WE FIRST MEET HER, Alex is adrift—literally at sea, floating perilously farther away from shore. “What would they see if they looked at Alex?” she wonders, gazing on the rest of the beachgoers. “In the water, she was just like everyone else.”

At first glance, Alex appears like any other young woman enjoying a day at the beach, her “thin brown hair cut at her shoulders.” Alex had learned early on “that she was not beautiful enough to model,” but was “tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was. A good trick.” At twenty-two, she is still young enough to pull off this particular optical illusion.

This is how Emma Cline introduces the protagonist of her new novel, The Guest. Though Alex, as we soon learn, isn’t like the other girls at the beach. She’s merely an interloper—the guest of Simon, a fifty-something art dealer who invites her to his Long Island summer home after they meet at a bar in New York City. A sex worker by trade (though Simon doesn’t know this), Alex is fluent in the art of playing someone’s girlfriend. Well accustomed to being on display, she approaches the maintenance of her physical appearance “with all her careful labor.” For Alex, the project of passing in Simon’s world is difficult to parse from the work of being beautiful.

The objectification of women is a central theme in Cline’s fiction, though perhaps never so overtly as in The Guest, where it manifests through the naked commodification of its heroine. And Cline, no stranger to the gendered projections and intrigues that come with public exposure, is herself an object lesson of sorts. When news broke in 2014 of her $2-million, three-book advance from Random House, at the age twenty-five, few articles failed to note her youth and appearance, even if coyly veiled in references to her as a “literary darling” and “starlet.” (That the writer, who grew up in Sonoma, California, was once an aspiring child actress was also frequently invoked.) Part of Cline’s aura stemmed from the titillating premise of her debut novel, The Girls (2016), which fictionalizes the Manson murders from the perspective of Evie, a fourteen-year-old girl drawn to the cult by “the gaudy, prickling tease” of another young woman. In contrast, Cline’s short story collection Daddy (2020) explores the entwinement of sex and power by focusing on “the twilight years of a certain male figure.” Her most notable depiction of this subject, however, may be found in her widely read New Yorker short story “White Noise,” which dramatizes the inner life of Harvey Weinstein on the eve of his final trial verdict. “It wasn’t a conscious thing,” explained Cline, when asked why she attends to such monstrous figures, “I think it’s a function of living in this society, [where] you’re forced to imagine what’s going on in the minds of men.”

Yet if Cline’s fiction about aging men affords them a perverse excess of interiority, then her portrayal of young women risks doing, if anything, the opposite. The heroine of The Guest might be described as leaning into her own objectification—claiming it, however uneasily, as a form of empowerment. In Alex’s line of work, appearances are everything—though the smooth facade starts to crumple early on. (At one point, she describes the “faint wrinkle” between her brows as a “ghostly coin slot.”) Alex’s retreat at Simon’s is cut short after she dents his car and commits the party foul of jumping in the pool with the hostess’s much younger husband. He has his assistant buy her a one-way ticket back to Manhattan, not realizing that Alex has no home to return to. Her roommates have since changed the locks because she stole from them one too many times, while a menacing ex keeps blowing up her phone for, we suspect, similar reasons.

Rather than have Alex confront her past transgressions, Cline doubles down and sends her protagonist drifting further into the deep end. Alex convinces herself that Simon only needs time to cool off. All she has to do is wait him out—mostly by swimming in other people’s pools until she can swim in his again. The rest of the plot is structured by Alex’s torturously simple goal: if she can survive on the island for just six more days, until Simon’s annual Labor Day party, he’ll surely welcome her back. This is where The Guest starts reading like a video game concocted by the Marquis de Sade, with Alex dodging increasingly disastrous obstacles in her quest to return as Simon’s guest. Turns out, a lot can go wrong in six days.

As Alex starts losing her grip, readers might expect her to turn to backstory, dredging up biographical details that could explain her deviant, often self-destructive, behavior. But Cline’s narration lingers stubbornly, stickily, on the surface. As the author notes in interviews, her aim was to avoid what she calls “trauma math,” in which some primal wound would illuminate her character’s actions. Rather than have Alex look inward, Cline draws her out through other means—by, you might say, looking outward. Alex gradually comes into focus not through what she says about herself, but what she imagines other people see when they look at her. Cline writes Alex out of “negative space”—manifesting her contours through how she interfaces with the world, what she notices in it.

This kind of aggressively spectral heroine—thin in more ways than one—seems increasingly a mainstay of contemporary Anglophone fiction. As with Rachel Cusk’s recent protagonists, they’re known more through their characterological outlines than their interior motivations. Or like Sally Rooney’s brittle heroines, they work through their inner wounds by worrying their outer ones. Alex is forever picking away at her body—as if one way to confirm whether this body can feel is to test whether it bleeds when pricked.

Pavlina Alea, Neos, 2022, acrylic on linen, 48 × 72". © Pavlina Alea, courtesy of the artist

Cline’s prose blooms with descriptions of precarious exteriors—and not just Alex’s. The novel paints a world of carefully maintained veneers, from the “seamless” lawns, “green flat and unchanging,” to “the illuminated swimming pools that dotted the landscape.” But The Guest largely remains at the level of mere forms, rarely venturing to probe what might be troubling the waters beneath such glistening stillness. Indeed, Cline’s narration might be described as literally superficial—her observations only lighting on the surface of an encounter. More often, Alex actively seeks to short-circuit the full intake of a scene. When inspecting the damage after crashing Simon’s car, “she kept her gaze a little blurry—better, for the confession, if Alex didn’t know the full extent of the damage.” Regarding her unceremonious dismissal: “she replayed their last conversation with a mental squint.”

Cline’s close-third-person narration often looks like intense sociological precision, a stream of keen interpersonal observations filtered through Alex’s squinting eyes. What emerges is an uncanny impression of a realist world, populated and furnished with a plausible cast of realist characters. While Alex appears to be an acute reader of her social environment, she’s a reluctant reader of her own self. Throughout the novel, Alex is constantly on the move, a temporary guest in every group she meets—and, perhaps more fundamentally, a stranger to herself. Alex keeps getting in her own way, as though hoping to control her increasingly untenable arrangement by precipitating any inevitable calamities before they catch up with her first. One could say that Alex possesses a relentless death drive, though The Guest—unlike Freud’s theory—offers no origin story for her impulsiveness. Like any good gothic plot, Cline’s novel rivets as it follows Alex into progressively fatal encounters. But the inverse is also true: as the hazards compound, readers struggle to grasp what exactly is psychologically motivating Alex, given the notable absence of sociological background.

Instead, what Cline has created is a heroine who, in order to keep self-reflection at bay, must herself actively pursue self-annihilation. For most of The Guest, Alex is on some kind of painkiller—an attempt to “stitch the looser hours together,” to blur and maybe blot out her actions. Frequently she dissociates, waking up to inspect her own body like the site of a crime scene (“Alex must have gone swimming . . . how else had her hair gotten wet?”). The effect is mesmerizing, almost compulsively so. But like the Manson girls from Cline’s debut novel, Alex here remains a black box.

How long can someone maintain such profound self-delusion? And what kind of patience does it demand from readers? In John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” a clear intertext for The Guest, the protagonist’s delusion is stretched over the course of a hazy afternoon. But what Cheever’s short story executes in a few thousand words, Cline’s novel drags out over three hundred pages—a test of endurance for both Alex and, you might suspect, the reader.

The Guest culminates, as promised, with Alex crashing Simon’s Labor Day party: a rapprochement between capital and labor. But the novel never takes us past this long-anticipated moment. Instead, it ends much as it begins—in a scene of suspended looking. Spotting Simon across the lawn, “looking as he had always looked,” Alex smiles in his direction. When he doesn’t move, she wonders whether “it was possible that Simon didn’t recognize her.”

By the end of the novel, Alex must finally confront that she’s no longer a guest, but an intruder. Though for those observing from the outside, it could be argued that the line between the two is never so clear to start. For if Alex is not like the other girls on the beach, she’s not quite like the other workers tending to the Hamptons elite, either. In contrast to these service and gig laborers, the contradiction underwriting Alex’s existence remains that her kind of work is ultimately one that can never quite avow itself as work. In this way, Alex stays in character for all of The Guest, as she moonlights (and daylights) as pretend girlfriend, flirtatious dinner date, and fake friend to another woman. Given the narrative demands placed on this character—a worker who’s never off the clock—it’s a trick that can only be sustained for so long.

Jane Hu is a critic living in Los Angeles.

Diary of a Reducer

Henry Bean's lost classic novel of a man in search of a muse

Mina Tavakoli

The Nenoquich BY HENRY BEAN. NEW YORK: MCNALLY EDITIONS. 208 PAGES. $18.

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ONE STURDY WAY TO UNDERSTAND WRITER and director Henry Bean is as a specialist in the study of extremely bad behavior. His best subjects are the worst: self-hating havoc-wreakers, or the “I Suffered Complicated Trauma and Now the World Has to Deal With It” type. Populating his catalogue of asshole picaresques—rich with vicious couplings, drunken confrontations, alfresco autoeroticism—are a secretly Jewish neo-Nazi played by a skinhead Ryan Gosling (The Believer, 2001), a sledgehammer-and-baseball-bat-wielding vandal (Noise, 2007), a sexy serial murderess (Basic Instinct 2, 2006), and the protagonist of his only novel, a writer who presents his latest project as a kind of homicide. “He pictures a brief affair that begins with her feeling whole, solid, full and ends when her life and character lie in ruins.”

So goes the rank voice of Harold Raab, the diarist-narrator of The Nenoquich, written in the ’70s  and first published in 1982 as False Match. The recherché title Bean preferred all along, now restored to the reissue by McNally Editions, refers to an Aztec term that translates roughly to “worthless person” or “will never amount to anything.” This gives us poor Harold: a twenty-six-year-old writer at work on an unspecified masterpiece from his bedroom in the rental he shares with three lefty housemates, each “seized by a fit of despair” over their prospects in life. As sluggardly and shapeless as Berkeley circa 1970—a whiff of the freshly dead hippie heyday still in the air—Harold watches as his formerly revolutionary-minded friends abandon him and the city to “topple over the ridge into Los Angeles or New York.” In the purgatory meantime, his pod talks “about mothers or capitalism or technology (a different trip every night)” until they adjourn into separate bedrooms through which sounds (sex, arguments, the flipping of a page) seem to travel too well. The days groundhog until one evening when Harold, eavesdropping, becomes torqued by a passing reference to a married woman he’s never met.

This is all sympathetic enough. Harold could really use a muse—someone to marshal the fog of his compulsive writing habit (“Despite my efforts,” he drones early on, his project “grows in size without any refinement of shape or purpose”), to redeem his general aroma of insignificance (“I was superfluous even to myself”), and to distract him from his near-estrangement from his family. Sheer mention of Charlotte Cobin, normie Cali dreamgirl (“too tall, too young, too cheerful, too frank”) seems like a salve. Harold, who sometimes writes about himself reflexively in the third person, suddenly “has fantasies of degrading and humiliating” Charlotte. Total stranger and part projection, she makes for perfect prey, and ten pages in, Harold’s diary becomes as Parnassian as Kierkegaard’s Johannes in Diary of a Seducer, or as jaundiced and designing as Elliot Rodger in his manifesto, My Twisted World. “He would force her to have pleasure,” Harold declares. “She would be lost.” We wonder when and how—and even if—she’ll be destroyed.

The Nenoquich asks us to treat the title as if it comes with a question mark. Is Harold a zero? Is worthlessness his fate, or is it volitional? And what would it take for him to amount to something? For Harold, Charlotte is precious not only as a literary subject, but also as a victim on which to test the exploitative equation wherein one’s meaning expands when someone else is made smaller.

A diary is a flexible formal framework, and Harold’s is a confessional and a ledger, nakedly documenting his invented rules of conduct for the affair (“Rule 3. Eschew deviousness”), his real-time tallies of conquest and failure, and how his logic warps and loops as the days become “seasoned” by Charlotte’s “imminent presence.” In the scene when Harold meets Charlotte’s doctor-in-training husband and immediately clocks him as a moron governed by the boring principles of “cause and effect (in that order),” we see how unaware Harold is that he’s driven by precisely this rhythm, winning Charlotte with the arithmetic of affection, then retreat (in that order). Success is a zero-sum procedure, Harold thinks, and as he makes his new lover cry, tells her she’s being insane, loathes her privately, and commits casual infidelities, consensual reality falls into an all-swallowing, Harold-shaped void. Charlotte’s pain is his kindling. “I could break her like an ear of corn if I wanted,” he affirms at one point.

Stories about cruel, corrosive men tend to veer noirish, gratuitous, or at the very worst, didactic. Bean’s intervention is that his excellent bedside manner—crisply authoritative, gentle to his subject, grisly, but only out of necessity—offers no delusions that Harold’s way of life could possibly be worth it. Bean’s case study is a serious scrutiny into how his specimen of perpetual crisis lives with what he’s done: as Harold promised, Charlotte is met with ruin, meeting a disgusting end as hurt and infected as he is. The novel’s finale is as conclusive as a proof. “I hurt,” Harold notes, ergo, “and wanted to hurt her.” When Charlotte fantastically dies, Harold is surprised to learn that he loses something of himself, and “would not mind losing some more.”

I reacted to the end of The Nenoquich as I did to an understatement from the middle of The Believer. “With you,” goes the skinhead’s fascist girlfriend, “there’s a tragic dimension.” The Nenoquich’s final dimension is certainly tragic, but not just because of the dizzy downward slope angling Harold’s universe. It’s in the dimension’s perpetuity, deadlocked in a creature so wanting for meaning, impatient for plot, atrociously creative. “What does it mean to be an asshole?” Harold wonders in the middle of a manic passage. “It means you can’t stop.”

Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia.

Are We There Yet?

A madcap novel of national grief swerves between Reconstruction and the Obama era

Angelo Hernandez-Sias

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home BY LORRIE MOORE. NEW YORK: KNOPF. 208 PAGES. $27.

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LORRIE MOORE’S NEW NOVEL STARTS TWICE. The first chapter is a letter from one sister to another, an old one, probably, because who writes letters anymore and I don’t even know what a “desk cartonnier” is but it sounds old. I can’t quite place the year or state but the period and region are clear: the Reconstruction South. “I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks,” our narrator, an innkeeper named Elizabeth, writes, as if to say, There will be no Confederate relics in my lodge. Canadian coins, oddly enough, circulate, but one senses that Elizabeth is speaking of more than those when she writes: “All is tradable somewhere because we live in a forgotten way in some corner of the beginning of the end of the beginning. I don’t know who I really mean by ‘we.’ But it does seem this place has been handed some moment in history then grown fearful and impulsive about hanging on to it. A useless lunge. Sinful even. A good scalawag sticks to her diary.”

At the end of this beginning one figures that Moore, long an incisive chronicler of contemporary life, has embarked on a bona fide historical novel. To an extent, she has. History buffs will be glad to see this particular moment described with the same linguistic precision that Moore brings to the present. Consider “scalawag.” Originally reserved for emaciated cattle, the term got a makeover in the wake of the Civil War, when Southern Democrats slung it at white Southerners who—whether for private gain (yeoman farmers who wished not to return to serfdom) or for egalitarian ideals (radical Southern Republicans)—supported Reconstruction. Its use here is not lip service to verisimilitude but a kind of inside joke. “Good scalawag” is an oxymoron insofar as it is not clear what immediate social good comes from writing in a diary. Diary? So it isn’t quite a letter. It won’t be posted, anyway. Elizabeth, we realize, is writing to the dead.

Even in nineteenth-century garb, Moore’s style is unmistakable: assonant, adjectival, alliterative, witheringly aromantic, geopolitically attuned, at once lyrical and laid back. “I have a vague affection for him,” writes Elizabeth of one of her lodgers, “which is not usable enough for marriage.” Of desire, she writes, “Oh, yes, I say to the darting thing, the fluff of a dandelion clock or a milkweed puff: I sort of remember you.” Of domestic chores: “I have reached a tiredness with the housekeeping and so the whole place has lost its spank.” Has a long-dead diarist ever sounded so alive? The history buffs are looking up “spank” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Hoo-ee, are they in for a surprise.

The second chapter leaps forward a hundred and fifty years and a few hundred miles north. We shift into a close third-person view of a middle-aged high school history teacher named Finn. He’s driving into the Bronx, where his brother Max is dying of cancer. While Finn racks his brain for things to talk about, a cat’s litter box slides around in the back seat, courtesy of his landlady, who asked him, without explanation, to get rid of it on his way out of Illinois (“Any trash bin will do. Just drive away quickly. I don’t know the precise regulations”). Finn ruminates. He’s “trying to mull moments into anecdotes” to amuse his brother. “But they should not make the dying laugh in a way that made them want more of life. The dying should laugh wearily in a way that said, OK. OK. Enough.” His rehearsal proves useless. When he arrives, he and Max talk about Finn’s sorrows, chiefly his ex, Lily. It is the sort of ironic reversal Moore revels in: Finn, who has come to console his brother, is consoled by him. “I feel sorry for you, man,” Max says. Finn, incredulously: “You feel sorry for me.”

Somewhere along the way in Finn’s first chapter, which spans eighty pages, we begin to wonder where Elizabeth, whose opening letter lasts only ten, has gone. It takes a while to realize that, in shifting to Finn, Moore has not just leaped through time, she has altered its fabric. When Finn shows up at Max’s bedside, their conversation alone lasts thirty pages—a good chunk of the novel. Even readers who fancy themselves patient may start to think, Well, it’s been nice, but shouldn’t this, you know, get a move on? Isn’t there supposed to be some sad music and we pour our hearts out and you look at me then look out the window and drift off?

For any writer, the elongated scene is a high-wire act; a gust of boredom can knock her, and by extension the reader, off balance. But the slowness here acts against boredom by extending our discomfort. Dying, Moore suggests, is an awkward, dragged-out thing. It is a process, a procession long and irrelevant until one or one’s beloved is called to the stage.

Whatever Finn’s success in telling stories that make the dying laugh wearily, Moore makes us wish for life—the life of the scene, and so the life of the book—to go on forever. Her figurative powers are astounding. Max has “the smooth hue of an apricot. He was a manila envelope getting ready to be mailed.” Finn misses Lily “like a dog, not seeing colors, chasing his own sepia-colored tail, sepia because it was all in the past, one’s own tail when chasing it, was in the past, but hey that’s where everything he wanted was.” He and his brother speak in jokes, blunders, foil hat theories, and aphorisms: “For an event to be real,” Finn says, “it has to have that strange imperfection and contradiction that gives it reality.” Rushing beneath the surface of their encounter is regret. (“For the rest of his life [Finn] could begin every sentence with Regrettably and never tell a lie.”) Finn lapses; Max holds him steady:

“Were there things we should have done as brothers that we didn’t do?”

“It’ll be OK,” said Max.

“Things we should have said?” Perhaps Finn was becoming embarrassing. “Did we say them?”

“Yeah, mostly. Man, there’s a ball game here.”

When it ends, the very scene that made us ask Is it over yet? makes us say Wait, already? As with Max, so with Lily, a professional clown who has lived forever on the brink of ending her life. While Finn is away, she kills herself. He drives back to Illinois—crashing without serious injury to self or car along the way—and visits her grave, where he finds her aboveground, smiling at him with a mouth full of dirt. Her undeadness is casually fantastic and comes at the novel’s halfway point, as if merely the next link in a chain of events. Finn and Lily set off on a road trip to a forensic farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she really wanted to be buried. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, as it turns out, is a road novel. “Are we there yet?” Lily asks. Time unspools like the long belt of highway before them. “Where are we?” Lily asks. They talk. They sort of hash things out. They have car sex. They’re going the distance.

Lily’s resurrection is an experiment in grief: even if our dead could come back, they wouldn’t be able to say what they hadn’t been able to say. “But why Jack of all people?” Finn asks Lily on their drive—Jack being the one she left him for. Lily answers at a slant:

“You’re not being that nice to me,” she said. She was fragrant. A whiff of truffle and marsh. It moved him.

“Forgive me,” said Finn, “but as I drive along this highway, with trucks passing me, then me passing them, I’ve yet to achieve overview as to who we were to each other.”

“We were each other to each other. Not everyone can say that.”

Finn, for his part, still can’t be honest with Lily, whose death has haunted him for a decade: “So many times she had forced him to imagine her dead. All the images he had fashioned—hanging in the garage by a rope, or in the closet by three belts buckled together—all these had deformed his mind.” Moore pushes Finn’s psychology into a provocative frankness; for all his sympathy (for all his being moved by Lily’s stench), he is also capable of resenting her to the point of secretly egging her on: “Nor would he tell her how furious he was at her for her death nor how through the years prior there had been moments he had wished she would just get it over with and go ahead and not mull so dramatically and create all that dread in him. He would not tell her how she had worn him down any number of times until he had thought, Well, just die then, if that’s what you need.” Again the reversal: the very thing Finn privately wished for, when realized, infuriates him.

Tala Madani, The Primitive, 2015, oil on linen, 18 × 16". Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

The comedy of the novel’s pacing is only heightened by its eventual return—so delayed as to give a jolt—to Elizabeth. She is there on the other side of Finn’s chapter after all, right where she left off: managing the inn, grieving her sister, fielding the so-called gentleman lodger’s intensifying advances. Cut to Finn. Cut to Elizabeth. And so forth until the end. If the narrative threads of I Am Homeless are intertwined, one is a shoestring and the other a rope. I am tempted to ask why and just as tempted to ask why not.

Maybe the more interesting question has to do not with the size of each thread but their tightness. I Am Homeless is loose. One reads Finn’s thread wondering how Elizabeth’s will affect him, or (such a thing could happen in this novel) vice versa. There is indeed some overlap: Finn finds Elizabeth’s notebook while staying at an inn—the inn—with Lily. After their departure, the narrator discloses that Finn has stolen the notebook though not why or what he makes of it. In the space of that silence, readers can imagine the cause for Finn’s fascination: the history (elsewhere, the mere thought of Abraham Lincoln’s death brings tears to Finn’s eyes), the portrait of another person grieving her sibling’s death, or the presence of certain coincidences (the gentleman lodger’s name is also Jack). Still, from a narrator who otherwise hews very close to Finn’s psyche, this silence invites speculation.

It isn’t just Finn one wonders about. In the absence of tight narrative twining, the brain’s associative muscle takes charge: What about 1871, the novel seems to ask, resonates with the last days of 2016? When Elizabeth speaks of a divided nation being handed a moment in history and chickening out—when she speaks of a “useless lunge”—she, or the novel, is also speaking to us, or “us.” To the extent that I Am Homeless is a novel of personal grief, then, it is also a novel of national grief, Moore’s lament for the United States, against the rightward backswing Obama’s presidency precipitated, or the promises his administration failed to keep. At once a swan song and an imperative: well, just die then, if that’s what you need.

I find myself initially iffy about the Civil War–era parallel, which, for all its historical aptness, has perhaps been drawn enough to lose its spank. But Moore is no didact or nostalgist, and if she’s reading a eulogy for the American Experiment, she’s standing on its grave while she does so, in Lily’s clown shoes. If Finn is getting crapped on by capitalism, it’s on Grand Central Parkway, where “eighteen-wheelers, fulfillment by Amazon, lurked in Finn’s blind spot then passed violently on the right, splattering mud on his windshield, which he smeared and smudged and dimmed with the wipers on their frantic high speed as well as the squirters with their buoyant blue spritz.” His venture into the United States’ intestinal tract is no pastoral reverie; at one point, he stumbles upon what appears to be a literal content farm.

Perhaps death in I Am Homeless is a decoy. The novel’s preoccupation with time—which Finn considers “a strange ocean through which we imagined we were swimming rather than understanding we were being randomly tossed”—is baked into its form. We think we are swimming through Moore’s prose, admiring its glimmering moments, but we are really being tossed about, made to experience the simultaneous protractedness and abruptness of endings—those of loved ones, of country. Dying, it turns out, takes forever and no time at all.

Angelo Hernandez-Sias’s latest story appears in this summer’s issue of The Drift.

Bleak House

Paul Murray’s novel of a downwardly mobile family in post-crash Ireland

Lisa Borst

The Bee Sting BY PAUL MURRAY. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 656 PAGES. $30.

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THE DUBLIN-BORN NOVELIST PAUL MURRAY, who entered adulthood during Ireland’s rapid modernization in the 1990s, writes fiction about the problems that modernity everywhere has failed to solve. His characters come up against cruelty and abuse, inequality, grief, terrible loneliness, death—but generally their problems boil down to one of two sources, their families or their money. Murray’s 2010 boarding school–set bestseller, Skippy Dies—with its fucked-up children of sick or divorcing parents, its neatly bidirectional line between the traumas of childhood and the disappointments of adulthood—tilts toward the former, resulting in a warmly humane novel with an occasional YA-ish texture. In 2015, Murray returned with The Mark and the Void, a shaggy comic metafiction about the European sovereign debt crisis and an aggressively materialist novel. Its characters are career investment bankers without partners, children, or even living parents; much of the dialogue concerns opaque financial derivatives. Was Murray self-consciously declaring his allegiance to a different, spikier, less psychological kind of literature? Early in the book, a banker meets a novelist, who laments the clichés he’s been noticing in realist character-driven fiction: “A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father; a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker; a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art.” In place of all that interior stuff, the speaker wants to write fiction about the intricacies of high finance.

Fiction about the intricacies of high finance is hard to pull off, which is perhaps why The Mark and the Void remains underrated. But in his new novel, The Bee Sting, Murray has tried again, from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the architects of Ireland’s financial collapse, The Bee Sting trains its gaze on a cast of characters further downstream from the crash: a single Irish family, battered by the economic downturn. Having swapped out a chilly corporate setting for a small-scale domestic one, Murray has found a more quotidian route back to the systems-sized concerns of his previous novel. He’s even made use of the father-son trope that The Mark and the Void winkingly renounced: there are, in The Bee Sting, many scenes in which a boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father.

That father is Dickie Barnes, whose financial troubles occasion an ambitious, high-drama family saga with a surpassingly propulsive plot in no way confined by the novel’s domestic setting. Over 650 pages, the recession exposes the Barnes family to blackmail, addiction, a biblical flood, threats of gang rape and assault via hammer, doomed gay affairs, dead lovers, a scary catfishing scheme, and the ominous, lightly magical presence of Irish folklore that also lurked in the corners of Skippy Dies. A novel this action packed risks feeling ungainly, shambolic. But the world of The Bee Sting is spacious and three-dimensional enough to handle it, in part because Murray, in his fourth novel, seems to have at last settled on a balanced theory of the origins of contemporary bourgeois unhappiness: every escalation in the novel’s relentless series of unfortunate events is the outcome of intimate circumstances and world-historical ones in equal measure. A tragedy of middle-class decline and self-annihilation, The Bee Sting’s accomplishment—a major one—is to bring together the family and the economy as truly intertwined subjects, into a double helix of oikos and oikonomia that twists toward dread.

The four members of the Barnes family live together in provincial Ireland, where, we learn on The Bee Sting’s first page, they are among a handful of “well-known families in the town.” The novel passes in wide turns between their perspectives, each of which is fine-tuned and distinct. The social dramas, classroom comedies of manners, and destructive internet habits of teenage Cass and her tween brother, PJ, are written in a persuasively adolescent high key, inflected respectively by Instagram poetry and first-person shooter games. (Murray opens the novel with two long sections following each kid in the close third person, which means it’s slightly top-heavy with the kind of naive child perspective that has been one of his fallbacks since the prep-school hijinks of Skippy Dies.) Their mother, Imelda, is beautiful, depressed, and unworldly: “Imelda did not listen to the news,” Cass observes. “She didn’t want to hear a whole load of blather about global this and economic that.” Like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, Imelda’s sections are written with almost no punctuation, which gives them a rushed, hysterical, not-quite-literate texture, graced occasionally with unexpected enjambments: “Feeling like it doesn’t matter whether you sit or stand Come or go Live or die It will all disappear in the silence a tiny speck of white on white Bouncing off the walls like an echo of yourself.”

Dickie, her husband, has the least gimmicky narrative style of the four, the closest to Murray’s natural voice, and he anchors The Bee Sting as its voice of adult consciousness. As the family’s sole breadwinner, he also operates as the novel’s leading indicator of Ireland’s fiscal health. Narrated partially in flashbacks, Dickie’s storyline maps precisely onto the Celtic Tiger era, when Ireland’s economy expanded at a sensational velocity thanks to a Thatcherite program of business-friendly tax and regulatory policies, a flood of foreign investment, and increased trade within the EU. The Barneses were beneficiaries of all that free-market growth: Dickie’s dad, we learn, established a Volkswagen dealership in the early ’90s and ran it successfully over the course of the ensuing happy decade, when money was easy and, at least in Murray’s telling, somebody was always bumping “Wonderwall.” Eventually Dickie inherits the dealership, and for a while, family life parallels Ireland’s national shift from traditionalism to consumerism. Imelda, who grew up in Cinderella-ish poverty, “drifted away from angels, religion, got interested in home furnishings.” Cass and PJ grow up with vacations to Málaga, a Brazilian housekeeper, “serious discussions of an indoor sauna.”

Murray has been a critical chronicler of Ireland’s era of prosperity for a long time. Even before he satirized Dublin’s financial power players in The Mark and the Void, characters in the pre-recession-set Skippy Dies were referring ambivalently to “the country’s vertiginous modernity.” Initially, Dickie accepts his family’s upper-middle-class lifestyle with weary detachment: “The world was made with this kind of life in mind, he came to realize. The world was a machine designed to sustain and perpetuate this kind of life.” By the time The Bee Sting enters its present tense (an unspecified year in the 2010s), the machine has broken down. As Fintan O’Toole puts it in his book about the corruption and cronyism that led to the Celtic Tiger’s catastrophic end, Ireland’s era of development has revealed itself to be “a false economy of facades and fictions,” the country’s banking system has collapsed, and the fate of the Barneses once again neatly indexes the national financial situation. A portentous, deflationary tone sets in. With the market for foreign cars cratered, “an air of dread gathered over the showroom,” Cass reflects. “She couldn’t bear it. The unloved, unbought cars, still dazzling desperately, reminded her of stray dogs in the pound, waiting to be put down.”

Thomas Street, Dublin, Ireland, July 4, 2012. William Murphy/Wikicommons

The crash is global, but the Barneses feel it personally. Downward mobility pulls each character in distinct directions, toward distinct kinds of chaos and alienation. (For much of the novel, no family member quite understands what the others are up to; scenes in which they talk past, mishear, or choose not to speak to one another are frequent.) Cass develops a furtive drinking problem and begins spending her evenings at the Drain, one of the novel’s many lovingly sketched bars. PJ, fleeing racketeering bullies, attempts to raise his own funds by selling off his toys (slime kits and Poké Balls: Murray clearly has a real son), jettisoning the physical signifiers of childhood in a preadolescent version of Chip Lambert’s critical-theory fire sale in The Corrections—the book that established the template (perspective-switching, flashback-heavy, class-conscious or at least class-anxious) for this century’s big family sagas.

Precarity makes itself felt on Dickie and Imelda’s marriage, too. Long-dormant family traumas and secrets—Imelda’s past relationship with Dickie’s dead brother; Dickie’s parallel past relationship, in college, with a man—erupt under the pressure of austerity, cool into isolation and lovelessness. Murray’s deft use of switched perspective allows us to see the contempt with which the couple sees each other, and with which they’re seen from without. “The Crisis had transformed Main Street into a mouthful of cavities, businesses big and small shuttered in its aftermath,” he writes in one of the novel’s more omniscient passages. “Yet the collapse of the garage was felt by the townsfolk to be of a different order. A fall as dizzying as the Barneses’ couldn’t come from simple economics. There had to be a moral element.”

Moral misgivings, loss of fortune, the word “townsfolk”—the novel can sound self-consciously Victorian, down to the Gilded Age name of the Barneses’ last remaining asset, a wooded property they call “Goldenhill.” Much about The Bee Sting echoes the sprawling novels about family and class written around the turn of the twentieth century: its financial highs and lows are Whartonesque; its richly mapped provincial world and sense of the individual as complex social allegory bear something in common with Middlemarch; its rapturous flashbacks to Dickie’s gay campus love affair read like censored scenes from Maurice. (Maurice, in The Bee Sting, is the name of Dickie’s businessman father, as if to suggest that these modern people really were birthed by some prior era of fiction and morals.) The effect of all this old-fashioned style is an apparent neatness of subject and form. Fin-de-siècle literary devices, Murray suggests, can bleakly illuminate our current social landscape of fin-de-siècle inequality.

And yet Murray is also attentive to capitalism’s more recent developments. (A masterful example from earlier this year: his very funny first-person investigation for New York magazine, nearly novelistic in its own right, into Zuckerberg’s metaverse.) One consequence of the Celtic Tiger, as with many neoliberal programs, was to shift financial risk from the public sphere onto private households—part of a widespread transformation of the nuclear kinship system, as the historian Melinda Cooper argues, into “a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century social state.” New magnitudes of debt were shouldered by individuals, families were encouraged to operate like little corporations (at Dickie’s inherited dealership the labor hierarchy is practically Freudian: his dad can still fire him), and private vulnerability skyrocketed; in Ireland, as O’Toole writes, the average household lost roughly half its financial assets during the 2008 crash. In staging an old-school riches-to-rags story within this punitive post-Thatcher system, The Bee Sting poses a question: What happens to the family saga in an era in which there is only the family?

Faced with a faltering society and a faltering tether to it (he does indeed get fired), Dickie withdraws—not just into home life, but into a totalizing antisocial fugue. In the woods behind Goldenhill, he embarks on a project of “future-proofing”: building a bunker where, “if the grid goes down,” he imagines the family can hide out together and live off the land. With PJ in tow, he starts camping out with a mysterious buddy, Victor, who is preoccupied by the coming apocalypse. The prepper is entirely without backstory, one of The Bee Sting’s few truly anti-psychological characters and thus, in a novel governed by the logic that your family and class background turn you into yourself, a source of great ominousness. Victor watches survivalist videos on YouTube, and “sometimes their voices weave their way into Dickie’s sleep: he finds himself dreaming about George Soros, wire cutters, deals on Amazon Prime.” As if in defiance of the networked world pulsing opaquely around them, the men learn to skin and eat squirrels. They dig a makeshift well and contract E. coli. They buy guns.

An unemployed dad with an obsessive hobby is standard stuff for family sagas (think of Franzen’s Alfred Lambert, spending months repainting the porch furniture), but Dickie’s attempt to build a four-person private security apparatus points to something darker than paternal absentmindedness or malaise. It’s as if his family’s financial perils have opened Dickie’s eyes to the totality of modernity’s wrongs, attuned him to the fragility not just of the economy but of everything else. (“If Maurice Barnes Motors can go down and no one’s able to stop it,” PJ reflects at one point, “then a grid can probably go down too.”) After weeks or maybe months in the woods, Dickie’s formerly measured voice grows wilder, more paranoid. “How much of life is insane, when you think about it?” he wonders. “Civilization itself is insane, it’s insane to continue as normal when the world is burning alive.”

What larger apocalypse is the bunker anticipating? After hundreds of pages of sustained foreshadowing and dread, in which catastrophes threaten to fall at any minute onto every member of his family—failing grades and alcoholism on Cass, schoolyard violence on PJ, existential grief on Imelda—Dickie’s own fears are, in contrast, oddly unfocused, cohering only into the abstract imperative to “protect” his family. But what is he protecting them from? Does he hope to shield his family from the threats posed by climate change, a subject his Zoomer kids have taught him to worry about? Is he protecting himself from his wife, who to be fair is always yelling at him about his failures? Is he building himself a literal closet, guarding his secret queerness? Is he defending against the whole litany of terrifying possibilities that his prepper friend recites: “Ageing infrastructure. Storms. Solar flares. Nuclear attack. Unforeseen black swan event”?

Nuclear attack never comes, but the end of the novel is truly shocking, not unlike that of this year’s other daringly plotted novel about a bunker, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood. In his vague, increasingly unhinged desire to defend his family and their estate against the creep of all of society, Dickie subjects them to an outcome more final than any financial downturn. Is this the fate of the family saga, in a historical moment when the image of the family in its traditional novelistic form—bourgeois, property-accumulating, compulsorily heterosexual—has been mobilized so effectively by forces of reaction? “The world is how it is,” Dickie tells himself at the novel’s end. “That’s not your fault. You can only think about your family.” There is in fact, in this roaming and expansive novel, a full world beyond the family, a world of things that Dickie, if not his wife and children, repeatedly withdraws from: solidarity, education, love. In exchanging the whole of that world for an impossible dream of private homeland security, Dickie begins to resemble O’Toole’s description of modern Ireland in crisis: a state, he calls it, “in the throes of a demented property cult.”

Lisa Borst is the web editor of n+1.

Endless, Nameless

Maya Binyam’s novel of diaspora and forgetting

Omari Weekes

Hangman by Maya Binyam. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 208 pages. $26.

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IN HANGMAN, MAYA BINYAM’S engrossing and shrewd debut novel, the author cultivates a world in which many languages are spoken but few are understood. After twenty-six years, an unnamed narrator finds himself on a flight traveling from what seems to be the United States back to his African homeland. He has just listened to the man sitting next to him tell a story about his life when a flight attendant asks if he would prefer tea or coffee. Though it is a routine question, she must switch languages for him to realize that he has a preference: coffee. With that settled, she asks, again in multiple languages, if he would like sugar: no, though she hears yes. Later in the flight, the flight attendant must switch languages yet again, after screaming, to update him on the status of his seatmate: he’s dead.

Given how much happens to this narrator without his knowledge, Hangman feels like a novel written with active verbs in the passive voice. The protagonist appears on a plane because his ticket has been purchased for him. He possesses luggage, but someone else has packed it for him. Things get even more mysterious from there. He knows that he is returning home, but the concept of home has grown quite fuzzy since he left; he has no real feelings about it. And, to top it all off, he arrives at his African destination with no itinerary and no knowledge of who will be picking him up. Over the course of a few fateful days, he encounters cousins who call him “brother,” emails from his brother who requests visa sponsorship and money for medication, and long-lost family members in whom he sees himself but cannot recognize. The protagonist’s estrangement in his country of birth goes well beyond the forgetfulness that settles in when one is away from a place for too long; rather, his long stint in the United States—a place he politely calls “the country where I had become a citizen”—has so thoroughly squelched his curiosity and capacity to relate that he can only act as a hapless tourist, a shadow of his former self.

The novel’s sub-Saharan location also remains unnamed throughout, but this is not because Binyam considers any one place as a synecdoche for a landmass populated by over one billion people. Instead, the placelessness is the point. The Western gaze reduces Africa to a continent that only matters in terms of the West’s self-interests, and it is as if the narrator’s perspective has been so warped by American empire that he cannot see the particularity of where he is. For those who migrate—to the United States, to Canada, to Europe—the vibrancy of the continent can diminish, leaving room for the racist narratives of Africa’s cultural remoteness and illegibility that have been used to justify conquest and economic imperialism.

As the narrator fatalistically bops around the strangely familiar lands of his birth, eventually learning that he is there to search for his brother, everyone he encounters wants to tell him the most random aspects of their personal stories, even as he often conceals his own. A wealthy man whose house and inheritance have been seized by the national government reveals that he now works at the zoo and the lions need more steak than his bosses will allow. A bank teller airs his grievances about the tediousness of his job and how much he hates the days of the week. And, most interestingly, an old man selling yogurt on the side of a road relays a conspiracy theory: free will does not exist because our choices are circumscribed by what is socially acceptable. He imagines an alternate universe—one tethered to ours much like the underground is tethered to the real in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film Us—in which we make the opposite decision to every decision we’ve made in this dimension. To see ourselves in that parallel universe would be to see a stranger because “it would be impossible to incorporate all the choices we could have made, but had not made, into a stable and singular ego.”

Jac Kritzinger, Boy A, 2012. Jac Kritzinger

This theory of the converse-world double gains traction as more scenarios feel eerily similar to ones that the protagonist has already witnessed, and more people begin to resemble who the narrator used to be in previous lives. The familiarity, however, elicits greater bewilderment. When a taxi driver informs him of the collective effort a city undertakes to protest prohibitively expensive gas prices, which only succeeds after police accidentally kill the child of a striking cabbie in a shootout, the narrator does not know what to make of the story—was the collective success of a 1 percent reduction in fuel costs worth the individual pain the cabdriver feels over the loss of his child? In his confused response, in which readers suddenly learn that he too drives taxis, the narrator tells a patently American tale about drunk women trying to stiff him out of a fare and calling him the N-word in the process. That epithet baffles the narrator: “I looked around the parking lot, trying to find the person she was talking about.” In the first story, an African conception of collectivity emerges out of a shared sense of duty despite individual sacrifice. In the narrator’s, an American sense of collectivity is compulsory, forged fraudulently out of anti-Black racism despite individual identification or lack thereof.

Later, the narrator, who had also been a graduate student and a revolutionary in Africa, cannot help but feel hailed when he overhears two young scholars arguing in a café about history and the efficacy of violent insurgencies against governments. One of the men, nondescriptly described as “good-looking,” tells a story of his father, who chose dangerous political action, imprisonment, and exile over being present for his family. According to the son, his father “had derived so much fulfillment from the fantasy of communal life that it had warped his attachment to the private security of romantic love.” This betrayal of the son, which took place while he developed in the womb, profoundly affects his attachment to the time of revolution, which sacrifices living in the present for the unrealized promise of the future. The communal impulses that characterize the most satisfying parts of postcolonial life in the novel end up being thwarted by revolutionary processes that usher in global capital.

In moments like this or the narrator’s conversation with the taxi driver, readers might wonder if they have been thrust into a speculative world where both small talk and genuine introspection have been abolished. Revolution, one vexed topic among many that are adjudicated and theorized throughout Hangman, often gets rendered as collective struggle with individuals only mattering when they become a main character of the event. Binyam adroitly shows through both form and plot how self-determination at the national level requires so much personal loss that the personal can become lost as well. The narrator becomes so preoccupied with figuring out what is happening to him on his journey that basic attributes like profession, kinship, and personal history are divulged to readers haphazardly and diffusely.

By the end of the book, Binyam pushes into the surreal to reorient readers yet again around basic conceptions of home and family. In one characteristic moment, when the narrator contemplates the extent to which he is the driver of his own actions, a white woman “with a squished-up nose and no torso” appears, offering him salvation in a home that was the house he owned before he fled to the United States. While figuring out the situation—“I walked up the porch steps, which were my porch steps, onto the porch, which no longer belonged to me”—he implausibly runs into his son’s mother, who takes him on a journey in which he meets a dizzying number of family members with no names: “my cousin,” “my son’s mother’s brother,” “my mother’s son’s brother,” “my mother’s sister’s daughter,” “my mother’s sister’s son,” “my brother, my brother, my brother.” These relations lose much of their meaning, like how distant relatives can form a gestalt in the mind that is difficult to parse at a family reunion. The experience becomes so uncanny that even as readers finally figure out what is happening with the narrator and just as he finally arrives at what he assumes to be his brother’s funeral, he becomes more forthright about his willful lack of comprehension: “The house was just an empty space, inside of which were all the people, dressed in shadows, whom I did not want to hear, and in fact could not understand. I did understand, but I didn’t want to, so in my head I told myself I could not.”

The protagonist’s confusion is well documented, but we rarely see him deal directly with one key feature of diasporic subjectivity: loss. Though the narrator has ostensibly returned home to see his ailing brother, his sibling’s status is so constantly in flux that his very health defies the basic mechanics of temporality. At once, he may be suffering from a heart condition or dying from a heart condition or dead from a heart condition. Readers will speculate, but the clues we receive via emails—which the narrator reads in internet cafés or on random computers in office buildings that miraculously spring up—do not tell a coherent story. Filial love, if it exists here, is sublimated into the urgency of finding the lost brother and finally ending a chaotic journey; it is not explained in mere conventional expressions of joy or longing. Even food, which is often palatably described in novels of the diaspora, here takes on little more form than a protein or a carbohydrate in liquid: “some kind of chicken in a bright red sauce,” “some sort of green vegetable,” “bread soaked in yellow sauce.” These attachments to home efface any impression of diasporic belonging because they are so dislocated from any sense of real significance, let alone nostalgia. In these scenes of disjunction, Binyam combines the vertiginous effects of invasion and destruction with the rich cultures and philosophies forged in relation to and outside of the domineering logics of subjection. The resulting tempest, which rages with as much relentless restraint as her prose, leaves readers constantly feeling unbalanced, as if something is off—just beyond our reach.

Omari Weekes is an assistant professor of English at Queens College, CUNY.

Come as You Are

Annie Ernaux’s book of sex, writing, and selfhood

Jamie Hood

The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer. New York: Seven Stories Press. 64 pages. $14.

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I WAS SEVENTEEN AND IN MY THIRD YEAR OF FRENCH when I learned the phrase la petite mort: “the little death.” The boy in class I had a crush on—what was it he called himself? Roland, Jean-Pierre, Henri?—informed me, whispering so Madame Chrétien wouldn’t overhear us, that it was meant to describe an orgasm, or rather (I discovered later, after experiencing more than the panicked fumbling of high school trysts), the untenanted feeling that comes after having had one. Of course, I thought, of course, great sex would be something like an annihilation of the self. In my diary, I wrote of my ache for Roland-Jean-Paul-Henri that “I am already in the process of dissolving,” that, in proximity to him, the borders of my being no longer seemed to be my own. I felt sure that the little death, when it arrived, would shepherd me to a big love or, better, to a world that radically exceeded the threadbare parameters of my own.

Lately, I’ve been digitizing my diaries, which is how I’ve dredged up this forgotten history. My recollection of that boy and my crush, as well as the affinity between desire and ontological disintegration, uncannily echoed a passage I happened upon in the diaries of the French author Annie Ernaux last summer. Embroiled in an abject affair with a married Soviet diplomat, Ernaux confesses that cumming with him seemed a kind of dissolution: “I’m still inside his skin, his male gestures . . . caught between fusion and the return to self.” Passion is often a project of effacement, an interpenetration of self and other that threatens the unity and sovereignty of the individual subject.

Orgasm itself, though, proves a malleable condition across Ernaux’s corpus, the place where her ongoing projects of self-making and writing become knotted together (she has termed this a “total novel” of life). In Shame—her 1998 account of witnessing, as a child, her father’s attempted murder of her mother—she binds the memory of domestic trauma to her first climax, a seemingly incongruous association until you consider that, for the women of Ernaux’s generation, “Nothing . . . mattered as much as a girl’s sexual reputation,” and the onset of menses signaled a new and “deadly time” when women’s freedom became suddenly “ruled by blood.” Sexual shame was more than a bad affect: it was the totalizing determinant of a woman’s existential value. In that passage, importantly, Ernaux’s initial masturbatory orgasm is not a dispersal but a consolidation of self, the “moment when [her] sense of identity and coherence is at its highest,” a kind of personal spiritual communion. Elsewhere, the aftermath of orgasm manifests as a “fatigue,” a world with no “outside,” an indeterminate and “hollow place.”

For decades, Ernaux has traced an umbilicus between sexual release and the act of writing. Beginning with 1991’s Simple Passion and continuing through Getting Lost (2001) and The Possession (2008), the author has meticulously dissected the ways sexual and aesthetic creation summon experiential elsewheres in which we become provisionally absented from time. (These states are also for her companions to death—time’s inverse.) An orgasm opens The Young Man, Ernaux’s latest, where it is a kind of “dereliction” that functions, unanticipatedly, as a utilitarian tactic—an antidote to a period of writer’s block. “Often I have made love to force myself to write,” she tells us, suggesting the erotic act is akin to the blank page, interzones interrupted by the violent rupture of climax—or else a first sentence. Even compared to the ekstasis of sexual harmony, there is “no greater pleasure,” she insists, “than writing a book.” At fifty-four, then, she embarks on an affair with a man thirty years her junior, a university student she’d corresponded with, to “spark” a new text. Though he’s living with a girlfriend in Rouen, he soon breaks things off and the entanglement with Ernaux “became a relationship that we longed to take to the limit.” A romance on its face, The Young Man gathers singularity and texture as an account of manifold transits: between youth and age, living and dying, in and out of passion, passing through menopause, and from Ernaux’s impoverished beginnings through her ascension into the literary bourgeoisie.

Ridley Howard, Walking, Clouds, 2022, oil on linen, 50 × 60". Courtesy of the artist and Marinaro Gallery

Ernaux is a superlative archivist of heterosexual pleasure—one of the last living straight girl icons—a habitual “initiatrix,” a self-professed connoisseur of cum. It’s worth repeating that Ernaux’s notorious “crudeness”—for a time following the star-making book, Simple Passion, French weeklies mocked her as “Madame Ovary”—is a politically insurgent act, a renunciation of sexual shame as a disciplinary apparatus disproportionately weaponized against women. Her attention to the baroque possibilities of the body moreover distances her experience from women’s orthodox social roles. Following the breakup of her marriage to Philippe Ernaux (one of the few experiences she hasn’t ruthlessly anatomized in her texts), Annie has tirelessly guarded her freedom from the domesticating ministrations of romance. She is, finally, a lover, not a live-in. She begins, however, spending weekends at the young man’s apartment, reminded of the improvident delights of fucking a man who keeps his mattress on the floor, returned to the city of her student days—a city, she realizes, that for years she’d only driven through en route to her parents’ graves in Yvetot, the Normandy commune where she’d been raised.

The affair transports Ernaux to that past. In the young man’s economic “destitution,” she sees, again, her working-class origins. His “gestures and reflexes were dictated by a continual, inherited lack of money,” reassembling the “hickish” boys of her youth. “He embodied the memory,” she reflects, “of my first world.” Annie Duchesne (as she was then known) had been the daughter of shopkeepers, situated, as she remarked in her Nobel lecture last October, among “people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education.” Unlike the constituents of that forgotten class, the young man is a layabout, living dislocatedly on the future promises of luck—“work for him meant nothing more than a constraint with which he did not wish to comply.” Ernaux escaped her upbringing through academic achievement and forged an autonomous path after marriage and motherhood by teaching and writing. For her, “a profession had been, and remained, the condition of my freedom.” Like the women of her childhood, she did not have the luxury of principled abstention from the workforce. And as a woman who came of age in an era when “contraception was prohibited and termination of pregnancy a crime,” she has shown time and again how weathering class precarity and the structural indignities of misogyny are interconnected struggles. But with the young man, she concedes, she is “a bourge.” She must admit to the vast distance between Annie Ernaux, class defector, and the girl she once was, a girl, as she writes in The Years, who’d “lived in close proximity to shit.”

If he conjures her past, the young man likewise situates Ernaux in an ineradicable future—the terminus of mortality that awaits us all. Though he at moments renders her “ageless,” he also “was my death, as were my sons for me, and as I had been for my mother.” She is adamant that, without fear of social stigma, men her age have been reveling in the revivifications of May-December dalliances for ages and so, “I saw no reason to deprive myself.” And yet the particular amusements of the individual cannot themselves retool the system; she remains subject to the erotic politics of a world that exiles aging female bodies from the libidinal economy. Inside a sexual imaginary engineered by and for straight men, the idea that an older woman could relate sensually, rather than maternally, to a younger man is strange, if not outright abhorrent. As Ernaux recognizes, what people see when looking at her and the young man is, “in some tangled way, incest.” The couple does little to dispel the fog of this taboo. She takes him to see the Eugène Ionesco play The Bald Soprano, a “ritual [she’d] observed with each of [her] sons when they entered adolescence,” oddly recapitulating their familial bildung. He, meanwhile, calls her le reum—Verlan slang for mere, or “mother.”

As their affair loses steam, the young man unnervingly confides in her that “I would like to be inside you and come out of you so I could be like you.” His is a chaos of longing: to penetrate, be born of, and finally resemble or even replace Ernaux (“he was my death”). This omnidirectional desire disturbs every kind of temporal and ontological order. His yearning to have a child with her is, in fact, what sows rot in the ground of their mutual fantasy, the utterance that precipitates the end of the affair. Ominously, his apartment window overlooks the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital where a hemorrhaging Ernaux had been treated following complications from a “backstreet” abortion she’d had in the 1960s. (She documented this event in her first novel, Cleaned Out, as well as in 2000’s Happening.) The building, decommissioned and under construction, was “illuminated . . . throughout the night,” returning her to that rift of trauma—invoking, suddenly, the moment when “Kennedy had just been assassinated,” when a man not much older than this one had impregnated her, when a popular song on the radio was inseverable for Ernaux from a state of “mad love and dereliction” (that word, “dereliction,” binds her memory of the abortion to the opening orgasm of the text).

She’s come to feel that they were only “reenacting scenes and actions already past . . . as if I were writing/living a novel whose episodes I was constructing with care.” Fascinatingly, Ernaux identifies the young man only as “A.,” an odd doubling of the initial she’d used to anonymize the diplomat-lover of Simple Passion four years previously. As in that affair, the borders between Ernaux’s experience and her documentation of it collapse. In her diaries she at first insists that “I wanted to make this passion a work of art,” before correcting herself to say that “rather this affair became a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art.” She initiates the affair with the young man to “spark” a book, only for the book to consume the affair’s immediacy, its lived reality. Art supersedes—it enfolds—life. She wonders whether all experience henceforth will seem to her a recursivity, whether the “present was only a duplicate of the past.”

Like Proust (whose In Search of Lost Time haunts her erotic writing), Ernaux sees time not as chronological but palimpsestic: in the existing moment, traces of the past remain, nearly illegible but inextricable from it. Thus the past may intercede at any point. In the most recognizable passage from Proust, this is signified by the madeleine, which harbors his philosophy of “involuntary memory,” disentangling fictions of linear progress, rendering time an irrevocably permeable condition of being. In my diary eight years after that French class crush, I wrote of a man I’d been fucking that “I want to melt into him, to have a single body, to have him inside me entirely and forever.” In the time of those men, I had been overcome—seized—by longing. But in transcribing these events with relative consecutiveness, the memories become shorn of singularity, divested of their strange psychic pull. Almost a decade after that first need, could I hear the distant ringing of my previous language? My teenage past hummed beneath the skin of my grad-school heartbreak. “Proust suggests,” Ernaux reminds us in Shame, “that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn . . . that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind.” But Proust, crucially, also sees memory as having a kind of alchemical relation to the present—it metamorphoses and reorders us in our recollections. In this sense, the truer descriptor for Proust might be anamnesis, an innate knowledge that lives inside, precedes, and exceeds the particular histories and life span of the individual; a remainder that now and then appears above the waves, a “souvenir” (from the French, “to come from beneath”), something like the “soul” of time.

Ernaux, in turn, intermixes these ensouled sediments with the specters of the personal—her memories, the stuff of one woman’s experience—which “confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.” Though at first the affair with the young man had transported her beyond the limits of age, in the end she sees that, while he’d torn her “away from [her] generation,” she was “not part of his.” His youth cannot resurrect hers or occlude the looming gloam of death. For an instant she considers in-vitro fertilization with the young man, but a book has begun to reveal itself to her: she starts writing the pages that would become Happening, realizing she must leave the young man, terminate, rather than bear him into the world, “as if wanting to tear him away from myself and expel him as I’d done with the embryo.” In a sense, A. gets his wish—though not, perhaps, in the fashion he’d hoped. Ernaux, ever and again the writer, surfaces, having “found that I was happy to be entering the third millennium alone and free.”

Jamie Hood is the author of How to Be a Good Girl (Grieveland, 2020) and a twice-monthly newsletter on Proust, regards, marcel. She’s written for SSENSE, The Nation, The Drift, and other publications.

The Shape of Things to Come

Hilary Leichter’s cantilevered narrative of love, time, and space

Fiona Maazel

Terrace Story By Hilary Leichter. New York: Ecco. 208 pages. $28.

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REMEMBER WHEN THE worst thing was death? AIDS, cancer, COVID—a horror for the people who died (are still dying) and a massive source of anxiety for the rest of us. And yet as my daughter and I waited out lockdown—fwiw, my daughter in this context represents the zeitgeist—she never once worried about us dying from COVID. Nope, she’d already assimilated death anxiety into her shelf of bedtime reading, the old standards. Instead, her fear had stepped up and out on a ledge overlooking apocalypse. Climate change. The end of everything. Extinction.

Hilary Leichter’s second novel, Terrace Story, understands the climate we’re living in and how useful it is for generating the kind of pressure that can mold a novel into shape. Yes, Terrace Story is about family, love, loss—it’s pretty gutting throughout—but what gives it presence is the forgone conclusion that it’s all gonna be over soon.

I want you to take note of the word shape. It’s an important one for this novel, especially in the context of the end of everything—is there a better metaphor for extinction than shapelessness? Terrace Story is obsessed with shape. With the geometry and space of our inner lives and their analogues in the outer banks—a terrace here, a ruin there. In a world where extinction is the air we breathe, the shape of things takes on significance.

But what is this novel about, you ask. I’ll try to tell you. It’s an intergenerational story set in some distant future and split into four sections: “Terrace”; “Folly”; “Fortress”; “Cantilever.” Did you know that folly is also the name of a structure that serves no purpose? I didn’t. “Terrace” first appeared as a short story (also called “Terrace Story”) that won acclaim for its lovely sensibility and sentence making. In brief, it’s about a young couple—Annie and Edward—and their baby, who live in a tiny apartment. One day Annie invites a colleague over and, poof, through a closet door materializes a terrace. There’s fodder here for a hundred New York City real estate jokes, but what’s happening in this section isn’t droll so much as gorgeous.

But the terrace arrived upon her with the relief of a long-awaited reunion. Annie felt a chill, because it was a reunion with herself. She had been accommodating some unknown injury for years, and it had silently joined the daily landscape of known feeling. Now, standing on the terrace, she woke to find her forgotten wound healed.

For a time. But in the way of all things marching toward their end, the family’s halcyon days go dark. It’s a slow process, marked by little ticks of agony. Annie rushing to her baby instead of kissing her husband on New Year’s: “The physicality of the moment passed quickly, but it lingered from the end of one year into the beginning of the next, Annie and Edward standing only steps apart, the queasy sensation of extra distance tucked between the measurable inches.”

The novel returns to this couple—do not fear—from a different point of view later.

Section Two: “Folly.” Some earlier time in the future (but still far off; crows are extinct, e.g.) we meet a couple living squarely in the shadow of time—the wife writes about extinction, the husband teaches history. Soon enough, the wife becomes obsessed with her husband dying: she “had not felt this pointless circle for some time, the unmistakable shape of dread, the Questions. She was in its circumference now.” Her thoughts and feelings become, themselves, like little follies that dot the landscape of her marriage. They have a child. There’s an affair. Two. And for a time, the bedrock of their relationship crumbles. The center cannot hold.

Mohammed Sami, Infection II, 2021, mixed media on linen, 82 5/8 × 71 1/8". © Mohammed Sami; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Modern Art, London

And so more estrangement, loneliness, and loss. Though what stands out for me about this section—this novel, really—is how well it depicts joy. Small moments—fleeting and sad in retrospect for the unhappiness they precede—but all the same: wow. It’s a lot easier to write about despair than joy. Joy often feels banal on the page. People who like each other are banal. And yet: this couple.

George wiped her brow with the side of his sleeve, and she grinned, wiping the rest of her sweat on his chest, nuzzling into his belly and the soft meat of him that gave way for her affection. She left a round wet mark on his pressed shirt.

Despite “Terrace Story” being the jumping-off point for this novel, it’s actually Section Three, “Fortress,” that is the show-stopper. It occupies the bulk of the novel and its thematic concerns, and it is sad. It’s about a woman, Stephanie, who can make space—literally—for the things she wants. Space takes on the shape of her desires. She can make her tiny sister’s grave bigger. A bowl. A tunnel. Stephanie can create space where there was none. What she can’t do is re-create life. As such, the loss of her sister governs so many of Stephanie’s choices, it reminded me of a great line by the poet Henri Cole: “Remember / death ends a life, not a relationship.”

Stephanie has thoughts like “solitude was the only space worth having” until she falls in love. The perimeter of her life grows to accommodate feelings for this man—“Oh, she could go everywhere in her life and still never make it to the end of Will”—but at no point is there even the slightest chance their relationship can blossom into a happy place for her. And because Leichter has organized this novel so that we know how things end for Stephanie (think reading about the Civil War from Robert E. Lee’s perspective), we get to really dwell on the how and why of her choices instead of rushing through just to see how it ends.

Which is a smart choice on Leichter’s part since so much of this novel—most every sentence—is freighted with subtext and implication. If you rush, you will miss all the wordplay and ideation happening throughout. And probably have a hard time understanding just what is going on beyond the logistics of plot. Now, some readers will find the effort to unpack Leichter’s prose fatiguing; others will find its relentless fix on theme fatiguing. But mostly I found both the work and the novel’s perseverating on theme enjoyable—at once claustrophobic and performative as a result. For instance, the way Stephanie describes her parents, who, out of fear, abandon her to grief and loneliness: “She thought of her parents, whether she could really claim them as her own anymore. Two small remnants, like porcelain figurines abandoned on the floor of her mind.” Or Stephanie’s version of joy: “Her heart looked for a place to put everything it could not hold, palms outstretched, creating an alcove to save her happiness for later.” The floor of her mind, a place, an alcove—Leichter will miss no opportunity to stay on message.

Section Four: “Cantilever,” pitched as a metaphor for the catapult through time:

The person who invented the suburbs had already died. That’s how quickly time was moving now. If you blinked, you missed an entire story. And stories seemed to stop before they’d even started, supported only at one end by the teller, then wobbled out carefully like a beam into the unknown.

I love this idea of stories cantilevering out into who knows what. Though really, this section is less of a cantilever than a bow that gathers the loose ends of the novel in closure before Total Closure. It’s the least successful part of Terrace Story—perhaps it takes one leap too many—though it does have its share of what now feel like signature Leichter moments of insight (see above) and pathos (see below):

“I will see you in my dreams,” he said. She did not know if he saw her, but she saw him. He was usually making eggs in the kitchen, but the kitchen was much too far away. Then he sat down in his weekend clothes and told her about his day, still on the other side of the room, retreating fast into the dark.

A novel that can claim a few of these moments is notable. One that can boast several is memorable. Re: Stephanie and her longing to make things last, I love how she puts it: she “wished she could make moments bigger, too. But of course, that was what memory was for.”

Fiona Maazel is the author, most recently, of the novel A Little More Human (Graywolf, 2017).

NONFICTION

- DENNIS LIM: Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

- SASHA FRERE-JONES: John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

- RYAN RUBY: Brian Dillon's Affinities: On Art and Fascination

- HARMONY HOLIDAY: Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes

- JO LIVINGSTONE: Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words

- MATTHEW SHEN GOODMAN: Michael Thomsen’s Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 Billion Industry

- JENNIFER KRASINSKI: Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever

- HANNAH ZEAVIN: Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

- CHARLIE TYSON: Ross Benjamin’s The Diaries of Franz Kafka

- JOHANNA FATEMAN: Anna Cassel: The Saga of the Rose

- JESSE BARRON: Nick McDonell’s Quiet Street: On American Privilege

- TARPLEY HITT: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman’s Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

To-Do Nihilist

Ian Penman’s meditations on a hardworking, self-destructive filmmaker

Dennis Lim

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) By Ian Penman. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). 200 pages. $17.

Purchase this book:

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THE CRITIC Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a work of biographical criticism with strong views on the genre’s pitfalls and limitations. Right at the outset, he pronounces “the absolute impossibility of summing up” his subject, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and promises that this auteur monograph will not stoop to “plot outline and capsule description.” He questions the very point of “biography or overview or memorial or accounting in this era of Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other just-a-click-away info blocs and image banks.” And he bemoans the “dulling effect of canonization,” citing as a negative model Sartre’s biography of Genet, “a shocking attempt to neutralize or freeze someone when they were still alive.” Fassbinder, who died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-seven in 1982, left behind an improbably vast corpus of more than forty films and a messy, larger-than-life myth, all of which have, in Penman’s estimation, spared him from “being turned into a monument.” As its title suggests, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a kind of anti-monument in spirit and in form, content to leave the outsize figure at its center elusive, protean, only partially glimpsed.

The quote from Nabokov’s The Eye that provides Penman’s epigraph and subtitle (“For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me”) well suits an artist who gravitated to self-portraiture, populating his films with stand-ins and alter egos, and who moreover loved mirrors both as set decor and as alienation devices. Like many critics who have sought to do justice to a cherished subject, Penman adopts an essentially mimetic approach. Channeling Fassbinder, who seemed to work at the speed of thought, the author wrote his book in a headlong, three-month burst of industry. Composed of numbered fragments—450 in all, many of them no more than a paragraph—Thousands of Mirrors thrums with a restless, associative energy as Penman jump-cuts among commentary, anecdotes, personal reminiscences, syncopated epigrams, rhetorical questions, blocks of quotations, and rat-a-tat lists, all the while drawing on a polymath array of references.

It becomes clear within a few pages that this is not primarily a book about Fassbinder. Or rather, it is not primarily interesting as a book about Fassbinder. An image of the man emerges, to be sure, and it is a familiar one: a “mythic ogre,” a “monster of productivity” who never missed a deadline, “a plotter in the calculus of dependency.” Penman’s book is at its least convincing when it tries to behave like a typical critical biography. Mining Fassbinder’s childhood, the author links an early fractured family life to an adult inability to maintain functional relationships, attributes his individualist ethos to Steiner schooling, and enlists psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to propose that an absent mother made him “an orphan, adopted by cinema.” Early on, Penman admits it was a mistake to attempt a binge rewatch of Fassbinder’s films—they were too claustrophobic for lockdown viewing—but close readings do not in any case seem germane to the project at hand. While Penman dwells engagingly on several films—including the scathing terrorism drama The Third Generation (1979), which he calls the most prescient of the films, and the Nabokov adaptation Despair (1978), for him a richly fascinating misfire—what counts here are less the movies as texts than the impressions they left on him, the sense memories they still conjure.

Penman is a generalist par excellence, as well as a writer who thrives on generalities. The broader the brushstroke, the more compelling he tends to be. There is no question that Fassbinder and his films mean a lot to Penman, but where he truly excels is in mapping the overlapping contexts that produced the man and the work: post-war Germany, the economic miracle, the Cold War, ’60s counterculture, post-’68 disillusionment, gay liberation, the Me Decade, the explosion of consumer culture, the dawn of modern-day terrorism, the heydays of classical Hollywood and various European New Waves, experimental theater, punk, post-punk, modernity itself, and even the Weimar era, which Fassbinder depicted in the TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). This flaneurish drift, always connecting and constellating, dense with historical and theoretical allusion yet light in its touch, is a Penman hallmark, recognizable from the music reviews he has been publishing on and off for decades, from his feverish teenage contributions to the NME to his more expansive recent essays in the London Review of Books. Perhaps owing to the methods that produced it, Thousands of Mirrors features a heightened version of Penman’s distinctive prose style—punchy slogans alternating with riffy sentences elongated with multiple ors and ands, rarely settling for one word when three or four are available—and it perfectly fits a brand of criticism that often approaches reverie and thought experiment.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Venice Film Festival, Venice, Italy, 1980. Photo: Gorup de Besanez/Wikicommons.

“How to register both the tang of personal memory and the real underlying grain of an era?” Penman asks, in effect articulating a statement of purpose. Reading its subject as a sign of the times, Thousands of Mirrors strives to discern the shapes and meanings of epochs. Penman notes that Fassbinder was born on May 31, 1945, “about as close to the dividing line between the ceasefire and the beginning of reconstruction as it’s possible to be.” He obsesses over the idea of Fassbinder as a cusp figure, a link between periods and generations. Which is another way of saying that he stands for something irretrievably lost: “the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed.” Dead four decades, Fassbinder is of course a talismanic figure from Penman’s youth, someone who had a “huge and axis-shifting effect” on the impressionable lad whose nomadic childhood was spent on Royal Air Force bases and who moved to London in 1978, on his nineteenth birthday, greedy for experience. For all the sinuous forward motion of its chain-of-thought meanderings, Thousands of Mirrors is, at heart, a prolonged backward glance. Not least because he tries to “retain traces of the book [he] might (should?) have written at the time, just after [Fassbinder’s] death,” Penman spends a lot of time straddling then and now, measuring distances that can seem impossibly vast. In some ways, the main ghost haunting the book is not Fassbinder but the Penman of forty years ago.

For the film historian Thomas Elsaesser, the challenge of Fassbinder criticism was that he represented a case of “work upstaged by life.” “If the life explains the films, and the films explain the life,” Elsaesser wrote, “then not only is each the foil for the other, but each makes the other transparent: to the point of tautology.” Penman doesn’t exactly solve this conundrum; instead, he complicates it, adding even more reflections to this hall of mirrors by bringing his own biography to bear. “I have to wonder now, why was I so drawn to the RWF mythos?” he asks early on. Nearing the book’s conclusion, he poses the question again, sharpening its thrust: “Why was I so drawn to Fassbinder? What lack or sympathy or punishment was sheltering behind my response?” He looks for commonalities: both autodidacts who are prone to self-destructive excess (and yet good with deadlines). Penman goes so far as to posit a grim cosmic kinship, revealing that the first time he took heroin, it was the night Fassbinder died.

There are moments of discomfiting disclosure, as when Penman wonders if having Fassbinder as a role model simply meant “a threshold or excuse or ticket for all kinds of lazy and reprehensible and long-term harmful behavior.” Thousands of Mirrors is in the end a cautionary tale about the perils of overidentification. Fassbinder carried out his live-fast die-young motto. “But what if you find yourself still alive, in late middle age?” Penman writes, in perhaps the book’s most piercing line. Not unlike Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors blurs the boundaries among criticism, biography, and memoir. When Penman writes, “There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with such lingering on the past,” he’s speaking of Fassbinder’s attraction to certain eras, but as he surely knows, the sentiment applies to so much else. An occasional devastating question—“How to work with the backwash of failed dreams?” “How to survive an extended mourning and/or melancholy”?—sweeps everything into its maw: Fassbinder, the larger culture, Penman himself. Even if Thousands of Mirrors reveals more about the author than the filmmaker, it is—like Léger’s book—a reminder of how insular and impoverished much film criticism is and has been, how tied to hidebound conventions of description and evaluation. Penman is by no means Fassbinder’s most insightful exegete: he tells us little that we don’t already know about these much-discussed movies. But he says a great deal about what it means to live with them.

Dennis Lim is the artistic director of the New York Film Festival. His most recent book is Tale of Cinema (Fireflies Press, 2022).

Spit Happens

The elusive art of Harry Smith

Sasha Frere-Jones

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith By John Szwed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 416 pages. $35.

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COME BACK WITH ME, children, to a New York before David Zwirner was Robert Moses, when nobody was watching and a “slightly hunchback, short, magical-looking” buddy from the Pacific Northwest could flood the caves of independent film with color and mayhem. Care was different then—the Hotel Chelsea wouldn’t kick you out for setting off the fire alarm and Allen Ginsberg was keeping visionaries in milk and blankets on 12th Street. The buddy from Washington State was Harry Smith, and John Szwed has ably shaped his chaos for the first full biography, Cosmic Scholar. What remains to be determined—and will be partly addressed by the Whitney Museum’s upcoming Smith exhibition, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten—is what this “Harry Smith” represents to anyone looking for him. And what did Smith himself think Smith was doing?

Smith was a loud ghost running wires between worlds, a “gnomish” saint who made connections more often than he made stuff. Hostile to the existence of galleries and museums and other obstacles to free circulation, Smith spent his life feeling for a pattern that might connect all the holy detritus in his ark: crushed Coke cans, paper airplanes, Seminole quilts, Ukrainian eggs, books, records, dead birds, string figures. The movies he painstakingly built from Vaseline and dye and paper cutouts changed how filmmakers saw the material of film itself. The problem for the historian is that Smith excelled in eliminating his own “excreta” (his word), throwing films under buses and tossing projectors out of windows. His close friend during the “Berkeley Renaissance” of 1948, the artist Jordan Belson, said that Smith “had nothing but insults and sarcasm for most art and most artists.” (This quote comes from the fantastic American Magus, a collection of interviews with those in Smith’s close circle first published in 1996, and one of Szwed’s sources.)

Smith preferred to think of himself as “an anthropologist.” Photographer Robert Frank thought that Smith was “a genius,” and “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.” The idea of transcendence unlocks something in Smith’s self-encrypting system. His activities had the rhythm of devotional acts and spiritual offerings, none of which left behind the elegant incline of a career. Much of the Smithness that did reach the outside world got there as a by-product of his looking for money (not among the things he collected). Little of what he did happened because he needed to prepare for an exhibition or record release. The paintings and films and indexes he worked on were labor-intensive meditations. His student and friend, the filmmaker M. Henry Jones, reports that Smith felt that finishing projects was not important: “It’s important that you’re always doing it.”

Harry Smith with his jazz mural at Jimbo’s Bop City, San Francisco, CA, ca. 1950. Hy Hirsh, courtesy of the Harry Smith Archives.

The reason most people know Harry Smith is something called The Anthology of American Folk Music, released as a three-LP set on Folkways in 1952. New to the just-forming world of folk-music collectors, Smith worked in part from a document called “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records” compiled in 1940 by very well-known folklorist and recordist Alan Lomax. Jug bands, blues singers, minor stars, unknown performers, family choirs—all of them are in the Anthology. The compilation was strong enough that “Harry Smith” was briefly thought to be a pseudonym for Lomax. Smith was, in fact, someone with thousands of records from the ’20s and ’30s, and a deep enough commitment to anthropological study to annotate the entire batch. The Anthology brought up as many questions as it answered: What is a professional musician? What is a spontaneous, authentic expression? In the decades since the Anthology came out, people have projected lifetimes of energy onto the compilation, looking to it for evidence of a “real” or (per Greil Marcus) “weird old America.” The belief in a lost era of transcendent and commercially untainted music has sometimes taken over, even if Smith never believed in a good old days, ever. There’s even a Harry Smith Frolic now, twenty-first iteration just completed, where musicians play acoustic instruments and re-create the entire compilation in order at midnight. If Smith would likely not have liked the idea of the Anthology becoming a prescriptive standard, the prospect of people playing live versions of these songs in real time would have appealed to him.

His “spiritual wife,” Rose “Rosebud” Feliu, told Paola Igliori that Smith’s work was “an out-welling of this incredible compassion he had for everything that lived.” Possibly true, but Smith’s friend Debbie Freeman said what Smith really loved was “taking drugs” and “putting people down.” Jonas Mekas, Smith’s booster and de facto archivist, said that Smith “used to spit, and act very bad and nasty” in order to “mask his sweetness and goodness.” Of himself, Smith once said, “I received my original education in my mother’s womb and found that other scholastic organizations were inferior. The object is to record.”

Szwed takes Smith at his word, and Cosmic Scholar is a mammoth recording of Smith’s movements. Szwed is sharp enough to not play judge and takes no sides in the Compassionate Harry versus Nasty Harry debate. He knows that Smith’s social interactions, the spitting and kicking, are crucial to his legacy, in part because Smith destroyed so much of what he produced. If you get excited about Smith’s films, your only resources are VHS rips on YouTube. His catalogue raisonné so far has produced only two volumes, the first documenting his paper-airplane collection and the second presenting forty-five of the string figures he mounted. “String figures are the only universal thing other than singing,” Smith said, and he put in years learning how to record and re-create the figures he either heard about or came across. The Moon and The Moon Gone Dark were two figures he found in California, attributed to “Central Africa” on his accompanying index card. The string shapes look more like exploded eggs than traditional moon shapes, all to the credit of the original, unknown string artists.

What Smith did leave behind was enough, though. If he had only been responsible for The Anthology of American Folk Music? Dayenu. If he had only assembled stop-action hallucinations like Heaven and Earth Magic? Dayenu. I am devoted to one particular Harry Smith: the anti-supremacist. Under the protective layer of insults and digressions, Smith harbored a deep belief that communication was happening everywhere all the time and that no kind of language was better than others. He told Dawn-Michelle Baude that he did believe in “some creative force.” “I hesitate to call it ‘God,’ because that’s too limiting,” Smith concluded.

Smith’s pursuit of patterns—in string figures, dances, needlework, piano improvisation—was a search to understand all the various hymns to that God, and he undermined hierarchy even when it paid the bills. As he told John Cohen in 1969, “Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records and trying to institute changes. It’s more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them, rather than to catalogue more stuff.”

BORN IN PORTLAND, Oregon, in 1923, Harry Everett Smith was the only child of Robert James Smith (not the occultist Aleister Crowley, as he said for kicks) and Mary Louise Hammond. His father worked in the canneries and his mother was a schoolteacher who sometimes taught children from the Lummi and Swinomish tribes. During their time in Anacortes, Washington, Smith’s parents lived in “identical” houses at either end of one block, with Smith living in a tree house between them. In a quote not reproduced by Szwed, Smith told P. Adams Sitney that during this time he “mostly” lived with his mother. “I performed what might be considered sexual acts with her until I was eighteen or nineteen maybe,” Smith said. “No actual insertion or anything, but I would always get up in the morning and get in bed with her, because she had a long story she would tell me about someone named Eaky-Peaky.” I understand the risks of reproducing this claim, but Smith’s story is poorer without it. We learn from Cosmic Scholar that Smith “boasted that he might be the only person on earth who had never had sex,” but we hear little else about Smith’s libido, suggesting he was asexual. Other Smith sources establish clearly that he masturbated and was found in bed with at least one person (though not with the dog that Smith sometimes claimed to have fucked). The story of his libido may not have been as appealing to Szwed as his tall tales, but it ultimately seemed, God forbid, sort of average, even if Smith’s celibacy was odd in the context of ’60s and ’70s New York. His few moments of being normal—or normative, as his sex drive seems to have been—are as important as his confabulations and omissions, which are admittedly better copy. It is hard to forget this less salacious but much weirder comment about his mother from Think of the Self Speaking (an essential collection of interviews with Smith): “My posture is derived from trying to be exactly her height, for she was shorter.”

Smith’s adult journey was presaged by some of his childhood missions. There was a stash of Masonic documents in the attic that young Harry was told to avoid—a directive ignored. When he was fifteen, Smith went to record and interview the Lummi, using a “disc-cutting machine” and a film camera to document their ceremonies.

I got interested in the designs in relation to music. . . . It was an attempt to write down the unknown Indian life. I made a large number of recordings of that, which are also unfortunately lost. I took portable equipment all over the place long before anyone else did and recorded whole long ceremonies sometimes lasting several days. Diagramming the pictures was so interesting that I started to be interested in music in relation to stuff.

Our Harry’s juvenilia didn’t end up producing a book or album, but that doesn’t diminish his vision. How many white teenagers were documenting the cultural language of First Nation peoples in the 1930s?

Once Smith got hold of his parents’ photos of the Alaskan wilderness, he created his own homemade movie show: “I can remember the amazement that I felt when I took the lens of the flashlight and was able to see one of the snow scenes on the walls of the hall.” He made camera obscuras and pinhole cameras and eventually created some of the first American “non-objective films” (images without stories or representation of known objects). Smith’s tumbling cubes and circles convey the sorts of images you get when you shut your eyelids and stare at the sun. “It is more interesting being alive and observing the perfect 3-D widescreen effect produced by the central nervous system than sitting in a theater watching some kind of myth,” Smith said.

After moving down to Berkeley, there was a brief moment of employment in 1947, when Smith acted as the assistant to anthropology professor Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. After that, Harry Smith was in charge of being Harry Smith, with God and his friends picking up the tab. In 1947, a film curator introduced Smith and his films in a letter: “Harry is an artist with a background in New Orleans jazz and anthropology, and his work is very exciting.”

When Smith hit New York in 1951, he ended up on the doorstep of poet Lionel Ziprin, one of his earliest protectors, a job Ziprin tired of quickly. Ziprin said Smith had come to New York for three reasons: “To see Marcel Duchamp, to see the Baroness Hilla Rebay of the Guggenheim Museum, and to listen to jazz and go to Birdland.” Rebay had been sending Smith $50 a month to continue his film work, before there even was such a thing as the Guggenheim. That the films survived, even in part, is a blessing, but it also represents a sort of scriptural glitch, since so much of the work is gone and we have only a handful of clues to figure out why Smith made anything. Smith said, famously, that the films are “minor accessories to my painting.” I have never seen a single of these paintings in person, and if I cobble together all the books and catalogues I have, I can see maybe ten decent reproductions of Smith’s paintings, arrays of almost always symmetrical symbols, several truly sublime, others fairly childish. Smith’s explanation? “It just happened that I had the films with me when everything else was destroyed. My paintings were infinitely better than my films, because much more time was spent on them.”

Smith met his final angel, Allen Ginsberg, in 1958. Thelonious Monk was doing an eight-week run at the Five Spot, and Smith was often there, drawing marks on paper while Monk played. When Ginsberg noticed him—Smith was already sort of a legend—he approached Smith and asked what he was doing. Smith said he was “trying to notate the syncopation of Thelonious Monk’s piano” in order to “synchronize collages and hand-drawn frame-by-frame abstractions with Monk’s music.” It is key to stop and consider that Smith did this also with his paintings, sometimes subbing in Dizzy Gillespie’s music as the source for his images. This is the same work he had done with the dances of the Lummi and would go on to do with the rhythms of Kiowa peyote ritual songs: notation in order to create an aggregate he could then study. Smith may have destroyed his films and paintings not simply because he was perverse or lit on Dexedrine or drunk as an old potato. If his visual works were part of a larger project to, as he said, record, then the thing he was recording was the point, not his notes. Monk and Dizzy and the world would keep playing, which is much more to Smith’s ultimate point:

I would prefer to see this technological thing knocked out, because all the things I’m interested in, like singing, poetry, painting and stuff can all be done just as well without this large number of can openers, eggbeaters, Empire State Buildings and things. I would like to see smaller communities that are self-supporting spring up.

The thing that actually made him famous was The Anthology of American Folk Music, released in 1952. Smith sold off a stack of records to Folkways founder Moe Asch and wrote the liner notes, refusing to categorize the records by race, or by its traditional proxy, “blues” and “hillbilly,” all of which led to the larger catch-all of “folk music.” “I wanted to see how well certain jazz critics did on the blindfold test,” Smith said. “They all did horribly. It took years before anybody discovered that Mississippi John Hurt wasn’t a hillbilly.”

Though it represents a fairly brief moment in Smith’s work, the Anthology was, as Ginsberg described it, a “bomb.” Bob Dylan went on to record at least fifteen of the eighty-four songs in the Anthology, some of them appearing on his very first album in 1962. How scholars and musicians perceive the popular music of the early twentieth century is in no small part formed by this collection of songs, and by Smith’s loony mash of typefaces and symbols and arcane syntax. The surreal juxtaposition of unexplained symbols and quotes echoed European Dada and Surrealism, but little else in the American music business. The packaging of the Anthology is a little like one of his films frozen and then spat out onto paper. Smith would have been the first to point out that the recordings themselves are an arbitrary selection of what America’s self-supporting communities were up to.

It is important to remember that Smith and Folkways and his more glamorous friends were all, as far as America was concerned, obscure. Before the internet, small cohorts stayed small and didn’t collide unless someone really put in the work. Film critic J. Hoberman said that when Smith was awarded a “Merit Award” from the Grammys in 1991 and appeared (very briefly) on television, it was a shock to his friends in the film community.

“We had no idea that was the same Harry Smith!” Hoberman told me.

Smith died later that year, back at the Chelsea Hotel for a final haunting.

The Whitney Museum show will feature Smith’s most elaborate film, a four-projector symphony called Mahagonny, completed in 1980. (Smith’s rendering of the Wizard of Oz was more expensive, involving detailed dioramas and interpolations of both Hieronymus Bosch and Ernst Haeckel, but it was never finished and only nine minutes survive.) Though Smith began as a pioneer of non-objective aesthetics, creating many films that never even used the lens to capture live action, Mahagonny features many human beings doing their thing, and serves as an unintentional documentary of life at the Chelsea Hotel. Rosebud and Patti Smith and various denizens of the hotel appear, with the whole thing (sort of) synchronized to a recording of Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny. The Whitney show will also feature string figures and a Dock Boggs record from the Anthology and Smith’s notation of Native American dance, none of them things you’d normally categorize as art tied to a single artist.

What, ultimately, are we crediting Smith with? A sensibility? An ability to connect? A deep appreciation for the magic of culture? Are patterns evidence of people or deeper truths or both? Smith would never have become a collector jagoff parading a stash of 78s and droning on about the good old days, that much we know. Were Smith to pop up now, with the same eyes and ears and heart, I imagine he’d be obsessively downloading TikToks and filing them away in thumb drives all over Ridgewood.

Sasha Frere-Jones’s memoir Earlier will be published by Semiotext(e) in October.

To Affinity and Beyond

Brian Dillon’s anti-critical criticism

Ryan Ruby

Affinities: On Art and Fascination By Brian Dillon. New York: New York Review Books. 320 pages. $19.

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IN OSCAR WILDE'S “The Critic as Artist,” Ernest cajoles his friend Gilbert off the piano bench and into an armchair for a discussion, as the original title of the mock-Socratic dialogue would have it, of the “function and value of criticism.” Over the course of an evening passed in the library of his Piccadilly town house, Gilbert, an incorrigible contrarian, pours glass after glass of epigram, paradox, and hyperbole down the throat of Ernest’s received ideas until they can no longer stand up.

It is probably unwise to attempt to derive anything as definitive as a “statement of Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy” from so thoroughly ironic a text, but Gilbert does advance a coherent theory that not only is art a “self-conscious, deliberate” criticism, “criticism is itself an art . . . both creative and independent.” Criticism, he argues, stands in the same relationship to a work of art as a painter does to a model or a landscape; the critic treats a work of art as a “suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any resemblance to the thing it criticizes.” Having been put into a particular mood by an artwork, the critic’s aim is simply to create another one for the reader. “Creative criticism,” as Gilbert calls it, has survived into the twenty-first century as a minor literary mode, embraced, to varying degrees of explicitness, by such writers as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag, Wayne Koestenbaum, and the Dublin-born, London-based essayist Brian Dillon.

Dillon’s Affinities, the third volume of an informal critical trilogy, begins where Gilbert leaves off: “I am tired of thought.” Following Essayism (2017) and Suppose a Sentence (2020), Affinities collects Dillon’s short prose writings on thirty images, arranged in chronological order, from an engraving of the eye of a fly in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) to a photograph of a rose from Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance (2001). Many of these pieces have previously appeared in venues such as Artforum, Frieze, the London Review of Books, and Cabinet, where Dillon is the UK editor. Connecting like a “loose seam” his considerations of art photographs, family photographs, scientific images, and stills from films and theatrical performances is an “episodic” investigation into the titular concept in three senses. First, the affinity a critic has for various works of art; second, the affinities various works of art have with each other; and finally, the affinity Dillon has for the term itself.

“I found myself frequently using the word affinity,” he writes, “and wondered what I meant by it.” Taken together, the book’s ten “essays on affinity” can be described as a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism. Dillon subjects the word to a familiar array of para-academic procedures. He considers its etymology; its relationship to cognate concepts like fascination, appreciation, sympathy, attraction, the crush; its lowly position in the hierarchy of accepted aesthetic categories; the history of its usage in the discourses of literature, science, and theory; its metaphorical relations to images of, for example, fog and light; its unassimilability to the norms and procedures of scholarship; its noncognitive status as an affective atmosphere or mood. Much like Dillon himself, who supplements his freelance work by teaching creative writing at Queen Mary University of London, “affinity” is perched on a wire between the technical jargon of the English department, where interpretations are advanced and arguments in support of them are defended, and the demotic vocabulary of the social cataloguing site, where an algorithm sorts objects according to their similarities, and users are content to simply “like” them. “When I wrote affinity in a piece of critical prose,” Dillon muses, “perhaps I was trying to point elsewhere, to a realm of the unthought, [the] unthinkable, something unkillable by attitudes or arguments.”

Like Dillon, I am a partisan of creative criticism, but when I am told that something is unkillable by argument, I reach for my revolver. If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. His memories of the academy are a source of “shame,” and the institution functions as a kind of superego for him, whispering in his ear, as he writes Affinities, more than two decades after he received his PhD from the University of Kent, “Do you call this criticism? What is wrong with you?”

Brideshead Revisited, 1981, Channel 4. Episode 1. Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons).

Say what you will about the academy, the reason that pursuing an argument is a cornerstone of critical practice is because arguments are at least intersubjectively available to readers, who may be persuaded by them or not. (As for the use of etymology as a valid means of elucidating a concept, the word “critic” is derived from the Greek kritikos, “able to make judgments,” from krínein, “to separate, decide,” from the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, “to sieve,” thus “to discriminate, distinguish.”) It never becomes clear what particular advantages “affinity” has over its cognate concepts—what affinity, rather than attraction or liking, allows the reader to see—to anyone but Dillon. Being a private matter, his affinities are not, properly speaking, enthusiasms. Dillon seems perfectly indifferent to whether his reader shares his, and the essays in Affinities, which are at best informative, provide little encouragement to do so. When Dillon writes that affinity, like a crush, “exiles us from consensus, from community,” I cannot help but wonder who “us” is supposed to include.

Put differently: affinity begs the question. Since sharing an affinity with another person is a matter of chance—although a rigorous sociology of taste would suggest otherwise—learning that Dillon has an affinity for an artwork tells us something about Dillon, not the artwork. This is why the successful essays in the collection are the personal essays—about his childhood migraine auras, his aunt’s collection of photos of her house, the Charismatic Renewal movement in the Catholic Church to which his mother briefly belonged, his viewing of the Brideshead Revisited TV series on Channel 4 as a Dublin teenager with “anglophile tendencies” and dandyish pretentions in the mid-’80s. Here at least we are treated to something we could have not learned elsewhere, and do not learn in most of the essays: how Dillon came to have his particular affinities.

The exclusive focus on affinity has other limitations. Aside from the academy, we never learn what repels Dillon. Nor do we ever learn what he is ambivalent about, though to understand a concept it is surely just as important to understand the limits of its application, and what lies beyond them. Affinities are often only “temporary,” Dillon acknowledges, but we are only treated to a single case in which he describes the familiar aesthetic experience of having the terms of one’s appreciation change as one’s taste develops and as one acquires new experiences and knowledge. Not coincidentally, it is the strongest essay in the collection. “Hope, fear, resignation, regret—how very middle aged,” Dillon reports of what he gleans from his “seventh or eighth viewing” of Brideshead Revisited early in the third decade of the twenty-first century. “I wonder now if Brideshead . . . was always a lesson for me, frustrating and revealing, in how riven and contradictory a work of art could be.” “I had to read it against the grain,” he continues, “turn a story of aristocratic inner-war English life into a model for escaping ordinary Irish expectations in the 1980s.”

When Dillon does criticism he “simply get[s] into a mood about the thing [he] is meant to be writing, and pursues that mood until it is exhausted.” This is perhaps not so different from what anyone, even academics, do when they write, although it is unduly coy about the role played by generic constraints, house styles, editors, and indeed, changes of mood in the final shape taken by a piece of critical prose. In support of this method, if you want to call it that, Dillon invokes the authority of Oscar Wilde and the “throwaway theory of mood” he finds in “The Critic as Artist.” Dillon “takes solace”—the tone of the phrase is characteristic—in the precedent set by Wilde’s dandyish approach to criticism as an art form in and of itself.

Yet interpretation—reading an artwork against the grain—never lost its centrality to Wilde’s concept of criticism. What makes a criticism creative and independent art is precisely that it adds something new to the artwork that isn’t obviously there (or there at all) and in so doing justifies its reason for being written in the first place. In his treatment of most of the images in Affinities, however, Dillon largely eschews interpretation—since this would require him to claim something about the image and, in turn, justify that claim in the face of potential disagreement—in favor of mere description, sometimes with tentatively phrased speculation, for example, about the thoughts of the subjects, as when he wonders whether the girl in a photograph by Helen Levitt “might be looking toward the future.” Dillon objects, on principle, to the use of “mere” as a qualifier, but what else should one call description that serves no further hermeneutic, rhetorical, narrative, or philosophical function?

In the right hands, ekphrasis can, of course, be a powerful tool, as T. J. Clark’s sustained attention to Poussin in The Sight of Death demonstrates. Dillon, citing the example, nonetheless elects to forgo Clark’s “protracted and intense gaze” in favor of a “slightly stupefied” one that moves from image to image once his attention switches elsewhere, his mood is exhausted, or the deadline approaches. Not that there is anything to object to in Dillon’s prose style—except for its lack of ambition. Readers of the bravura performance of syntax that opens Suppose a Sentence will know that Dillon is capable of some impressive finger work. In Affinities, he turns in a few pretty passages—such as when the Comte de Montesquiou’s mustache is described as having been “waxed into vicious points” in the essay on Claude Cahun, or when “a stream of transparent glass or plastic letters floats” out of photographer Francesca Woodman’s mouth “like ectoplasm”—but he keeps the soft pedal on for most of the concert.

Underlying Wilde’s theory of mood is a deeper question of the critic’s temperament. Dillon’s could not be more different from Gilbert’s. It is not simply that Dillon is sincere, whereas, for Gilbert, “a little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Nor is it that Dillon is self-effacing, whereas, for Gilbert, “it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others.” It is fundamentally a different attitude toward mood itself. What Wilde values in creative criticism is capaciousness: its capacity to deliver “complex multiform gifts of thought that are at variance with each other,” which “fully mirrors man in his infinite variety,” and can “give form” to “every mood.” Dillon, by contrast, rarely ever departs—in his selection of images, in the dour tone of his short sentences—from the single mood for which he seems to have a genuine affinity: melancholy.

In the end, Dillon does not seem to mean anything different from what anyone else does when they use the word “affinity.” Perhaps the sentence should instead be read as: all writers have tics, why do I have this one? As with all repetition compulsions, the answer turns out to be a personal one. The first time “affinity” appears in the trilogy is in an early passage in Essayism, where Dillon notes that the essay genre “seems to have a peculiar affinity with” the list. (The word “peculiar” is another tic: he frequently uses this word, as well as the adjectives “weird” and “curious,” to modify his responses to art, as though these required a performance of surprise in order to receive permission to be expressed.) Dillon is certainly fond of lists. Essayism opens with one (a list about the subjects of famous essays), as does the passage I have just quoted from (a list of synonyms for the word “list”). He praises Sontag for drawing up lists of books, slang, recherché vocabulary, “likes and dislikes.” Suppose a Sentence is a commonplace book or cento; Affinities is a kind of photo album. It does not fail to note the lists of the fourteenth-century alchemist Pseudo-Geber, Diane Arbus’s list of places she wanted to photograph, Charles Eames’s list of advice for design students, or the list of “ordinary heroes” compiled by the Victorian painter G. F. Watts. It concludes with “a partial list (or imaginary collage) of images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.”

The psychology of the list-maker is that of the collector; lists are, after all, collections of words. In the Arcades Project, in what is undoubtedly the canonical statement on the psychology of the collector, Walter Benjamin writes: “Perhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.” Interestingly, since Benjamin’s essays are frequent reference points throughout the trilogy, and since Affinities is a book that seeks to resemble the collagist Arcades Project on a personal rather than civilizational scale, he does not consider this particular passage, which continues: “The collector . . . brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects.” Dillon claims that the personal pronoun of the essay genre is “dispersed” across thousands of bodies over hundreds of centuries; Essayism is a way of bringing them together again. Just as what brought the sentences of Suppose a Sentence together was that a “remarkable number seem to be about death and disappearance,” what brings the photographic images of Affinities together is “a state of bodily between-ness verging on dissolution.” Blurred or partial images of faces, scenes of ruin and destruction, and the abyssal unintelligibility of the cosmos are what seem to “impinge” on Dillon’s melancholic eye.

If the connection between writing and depression is a cliché, as Dillon remarks in Essayism, the connection between photography and death is no less one. (It is explored in both Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Sontag’s On Photography, the two obvious precursors for Affinities.) Melancholy is tolerable in a writer to the precise degree that one cannot be certain what its specific cause is. Unfortunately, the motive underlying Dillon’s three collections is fairly transparent: the death of his mother, of scleroderma, after years of depression and mental illness, when Dillon was sixteen, and the death of his father, five years later. This furnishes the subject of Dillon’s 2006 debut, In the Dark Room—also a book about photography. The story is revisited at lesser length in “On Consolation,” an essay in part about his parents’ reading habits and in part about his twin discovery of Camera Lucida and his vocation as a writer in Essayism. It is mentioned again in the chapter on Elizabeth Bowen in Suppose a Sentence. In Affinities, Dillon writes: “One day I will stop writing about this, rehearsing the bare facts for anyone who will listen, attaching her life and her death to half the things I have to say about books and music and art and stray photographic scraps in which as it happens she has no part.” This furnishes us with our best clue as to why the collector Dillon is drawn to “affinity,” the concept in which he finds “something unkillable by attitudes or arguments.”

The pathos of the collector, however, is this: no collection can ever be complete. Dillon’s final essay on affinity, consisting of a list several pages long, on what did not make it into the book, is itself only partial, and necessarily so. “In every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector,” Benjamin remarks. Dillon can add indefinitely many new items to his collection, because in each one, he will always see the same thing. The way out of this vicious circle is not to think of argument, as Dillon does, as something that, by establishing the truth of the case, kills discussion, but rather as something that, by risking disagreement and difference of opinion, makes one’s thoughts and one’s moods available to others for further discussion. In other words, to think of an argument as Wilde thinks of an interpretation: as something that is never final.

Let’s give Wilde the last word then. When Ernest is on the verge of conceding the argument, Gilbert interrupts him: “Ah! Don’t say you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”

Ryan Ruby is the recipient of the 2023 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism.

The Ire Next Time

Christina Sharpe’s intimate commentary on memory, rage, and grief

Harmony Holiday

Ordinary Notes By Christina Sharpe. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 392 pages. $35.

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And I’m not sure why I’m infatuated with death.

—Kendrick Lamar

It’s more than just an ordinary pain in your heart.

—Stevie Wonder

WE'RE ALWAYS WOOING our catastrophes. They delight us with their constellation of delay and grace. The catastrophic slows time and lets us revel in its ugly beauty. Then we cede it to fantasy and romance in a dissociative stupor. If you remix it well, the remixes turn out like when Moodymann flips the glowing lilt in Betty Carter’s voice from ballad into arabesque and back on his song “I’d Rather Be Lonely.” He doesn’t employ the by-now-recognizable trope of disembodied sampling. Instead he remythologizes Carter’s use of the phrase this time I’ll never be lonely into this time . . . this time, repeating. Time hangs there like a pendulum inviting  its bittersweet relief. The relief is emptiness the way form is emptiness, we materialize in those gaps between grand declarations and withholding. It’s as though he’s rewriting the meaning of interval with her voice until her atonal enunciation is time itself—bent, weathered, yet endlessly exuberant with the promise of more and never, more.

Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, a series of 248 “petits machins” that move between gutting intimacy and restrained social commentary, makes similarly ambivalent promises to itself and its ghosts—I won’t write about you, I’ll write about you forever, I resent how you left, I love remembering you as you were, as you once were you still are to me. The book is a collection or series of interrupted remixes, which return to their sources to master the ephemeral. They resemble the bent blues stutters trapped within footwork songs, which commit to their hysteria of loops until they are sculptures, pillars, then plundered by the same exegesis that brought them forth.

Ordinary Notes is operatic and its first movement interrogates memorials and the grieving they at once sanction and prohibit. Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure, one note reads. The rest of the page is intentionally left as blank as the shudder that haunts the aftermath of such an observation, both cruel and accurate. Sharpe often uses our collective scars and her own personal scars to help her reach the pitch of cruelty that mirrors the cruelty of those who inflict those injuries, which are concrete, metaphysical, and psycho-spiritual. As she traverses Alabama’s Legacy Museum, devoted to the twin legacies of slavery and mass incarceration, we witness with her how a certain degree of near reverence for trauma and catastrophe makes their continued cycle inevitable. Black pain exploited for spectacle becomes white shame and black fame or ignominy, or the only route black people see to empathy and an even sadder aim, humanization.

We tiptoe through the museum with her, looking for trapdoors and refusing escapism. We wonder where escapism fits into this steadfast account of the terrible and our collective and personal attempts at rehabilitating from terror. Ultimately, the only reprieve from this attentiveness to collective pain is focus on personal pain, which allows differentiation that in the context feels almost like triumph. If one person is wholly seen, in detail, and deemed worthy of that caring regard, all of us are. If all of us are gazed upon at the same time with the same enchanting shame and guilt, we’re all erased by the desires of the spectator. This not-so-subtle shift back and forth between seeing and being seen or surveilled does the work of interweaving personal and collective destiny in such a nonlinear fashion that after reading Sharpe’s book, these fates may never be disentangled again. What happens to you, your mother, and your brother perhaps happens in part because it was allowed to happen to everyone with no intervention for so long. When “allyship” arrived it was grandiose and alienating, also half-hearted and in the service of the very culture that perpetrated the abuses in the first place. The renovated empathy was a withheld apology turned opportunistic minstrel performance of remorse, a place white liberals could go to weep about what they believe they did to black people. Maybe afterward they go to brunch or on a cruise.

The contrast between performed remorse and natural ruthlessness in so-called oppressors makes the oppressed hardest and unusual to ourselves and others sometimes. We grow hypercritical. We investigate routes to meaningful connection and relation that are not mediated and distorted by Western ethics. We discover casual anguish, made to look disaffected, even a little cool, like how Miles Davis plays, that singular and lethal tenderness that is always already switched and enjambed with biting rage. That range, so black and so blue it’s inflamed with no need for a spark from an outside source. It sets itself on fire then makes you watch its effigy and resurrection into cool. It does this again and again in sampled loops of black life shipwrecked somewhere between Persephone’s destiny and that of the phoenix, on display for a public that is more interested in simulacra of atonement than soul.

The soul is hidden from the museum and the monument. It’s often dark to itself as well. We must find that at home, among ourselves. We are ritualistically displaced beyond privacy but we must retrieve the soul anyway. Maybe we have to accept being quietly supernatural to access it, Ordinary Notes insinuates. Sharpe watches her mother’s graceful hands and finds in them a gesture more resolute and monumental than every white apology. Real solace. Her mother was a clairvoyant child, employed as such. Through that example, Sharpe discovers how we take ourselves back by finding pleasure in and among ourselves and our visions. The anhedonic spaces of formal memorials threaten that imaginative autonomy. We dismiss these spaces and check the horizon for literature and mothers’ hands when the curatorial fails. Note the word “cure” in it. As if the role of the museum or curator is to cure some unruly cultural reflex with order and affect, gravitas, miraculous air-conditioning in the service of the preservation of native artifacts, stolen graves, etcetera.

Nina Simone performing "Feelings" at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux Casino, Montreux, Switzerland, 1976. Eagle Rock Entertainment.

The sections of Ordinary Notes that occupy domestic, private, and imaginative spaces are warmer, less cruel-to-be-kind, more tropical with their truths, and devastating because with that candor they enter the storm and not its carefully curated aftermaths. One is titled “Can I Live,” not quite sure it is asking itself or its audience. These parts of the book are vulnerable and brave and at times even unflatteringly so. They document the disorienting role of the writer in a family—to upend, to try to mend through upending, to break and reconstitute filial modes. Subject to the discrete biases of the writer’s generous but subjective memory, the notes about the family are elegiac love letters laced with a nearly imperceptible quotient of scorn. Dates of the parents’ deaths are listed and relisted as numbers of years—of suffering and near debilitation. And then Sharpe will contest her own subject position with an observation that implicates herself, her audience, our monuments and descheduled monuments, our need for monuments, our greed for them: there are those who settle all seeing there, in the wound.

She drops this dagger and moves on, but we get locked in the wound with those jaded settlers. At one point in the text, she places Claudia Rankine in that wounded vision. She’s at a talk at Barnard watching a film produced by Rankine and her husband, John Lucas. The film makes an unjustifiable spectacle of black trauma with no trigger warning. Sharpe writes Rankine a letter that eviscerates the exercise of the film. It’s as if she’s addressing the nerve center of the black bourgeoisie that often exploits the iconography of largely working-class black precarity to satisfy white liberal guilt addictions. Artworks can function this way on a subconscious level, sometimes imperceptible to the artist, yet in spaces dominated by spectators detached from said experiences, it goes unchecked and unhealed. Sharpe’s critique was an act of brazen generosity. And it recoils onto herself and all of us with the unasked question at the center of Ordinary Notes: For whom do we keep and speak these records of despair and recovery? And another inquiry: Are we satisfied with shaming white liberals into being impressed by the jarring emotional range of black life within our work? If all of these gestures of organized and dysfunctional memory amount to more praise from the white academy than from our communities, is that enough, is that something we can feel and heal by?

With these discreetly provocative questions, Sharpe’s notes morph into a list of inconsolable grievances. The fact that they can come into print as record is the only available consolation, a sign of the great and disappointing notion of “progress.” None of the tragedies and monoliths accounted for will be dissipated by these accounts of them, but they will be shielded from the inaccuracy of alternate accounts or the erasure of no account. I hear Billie Holiday’s voice here: You’re just a no account, / never will amount to nothin’ at all / when there is work to do and someone yells for you / you don’t heed the call. The song is about idleness, shiftlessness. The archetype its lyrics invent is Sharpe’s foil. She works so hard at bearing witness, often in the service of those she loves, that one wonders if her unwavering attention to the border between honor and disgrace negates her own needs for rest. This work is restless. Each note gropes toward an impossible, altruistic reckoning, and each one, like the museum, contains its own failure to achieve that. Sharpe works to suture mistrust of the impulse to memorialize with a personal and collective need to remember the dead and their stories, and to avenge them. We all become the fruits of our suspicions of the other, but here we see how they also sacrifice us to their causes and let us take them and ourselves subterranean, to hell and back. These notes travel through territories and crevices in the spirit, places so fractured that their only entrance code is a ruin. The notes’ unflinching seriousness makes them foreboding and alienating in moments; there will be no dalliance or lighthearted mirth in the middle of the mourning scene. And at the same time there will be a moment for Barack Obama to demonstrate why the tendency to soothe our own trouble with opportunism must be eliminated.

Sharpe recounts Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” during the eulogy for the politician and pastor Clementa Pinckney, following his death in a mass shooting in Charleston, and how that moment moved the mourners and onlookers with false honor. The song, she reminds us, was written by a white man looking to be absolved of his sins, which included trafficking black slaves. This book works by re-alchemizing some of our memories of our own lives so that they become more blunt, decolonized. Events and rituals that we know are questionable emerge qeasily here, so that now when we think back on Obama’s quasi-authenticity at a sacred homegoing, we don’t repeat crazy platitudes like “my president,” we aren’t abducted by silly, ornamental political posturing. Nor are we left barren. There’s a purgatory these notes exist within, an almost utopia wherein one’s interiority is enough but also insatiable. There’s no happy ending to the story of a woman who needs to understand why the sacred becomes the profane so easily, why we manipulate black life into theatrics for ill-acquainted onlookers sometimes, and in other instances yank it back bitterly and retreat to solitary brooding. The final note wants to be music, crescendo, but instead shows up as muffled scream or withheld sobbing that makes the syntax tremble. Measure by measure, the work teaches us that even the most self-aware methods can yield the feeling that testimony will always be inconclusive, often marred by disbelief in its own severity, always shocked it has had the experience that demands its brutalizing commentary. Sharpe quotes the endlessly revered Nina Simone performance of the song “Feelings” at the Montreux Jazz Festival (1976), I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like this. This looping black sample is harnessed again and again to shatter outrage with beauty and dignity.

Notes simultaneously conjures Simone’s smoother address to sentiment, the song “Feeling Good.” When it comes on, it evinces a dark and ominous story is about to unfold, but as Simone sings, we discover that she’s using notes with blues connotations to initiate praise and complete satisfaction with the mundane and particular pleasures of the present moment. Sharpe’s final note: this is a love letter to my mother, and the suite of images that feel good which follow it like gasp and sigh of relief, take the book from “Feelings” to “Feeling Good” or from lament to surrender. You cannot rearrange anyone’s route to saying “I love you,” Sharpe’s work reminds us. You can detect when those who don’t quite know or remember what love is try to pass it off as worship or material concessions; they end up trapped in a museum or time snatched out of time, as one note deems it, totems to the unreal. Sharpe is busy backing away from other people’s delusions here, she paces herself, she dresses her wounds in these original psalms.

Harmony Holiday is the author of Maafa (Fence Books, 2022).

A Loss for Words

Jenni Nuttall’s mission to recover the forgotten and suppressed vocabulary of women’s lives

Jo Livingstone

Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words BY JENNI NUTTALL. NEW YORK: VIKING. 304 PAGES. $29.

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AMONG THE OLDEST REFERENCES to menstruation in literature is in the book of Genesis, in a story about a lie. Rachel stole her father’s household gods, it goes, and when he came to retrieve them, she threw a covering over the objects and sat on it. She couldn’t stand, she apologized to her father, because she was in “the way of women.” At the end of the sixteenth century, an English clergyman clarified in his guide to Genesis that Rachel wasn’t pretending to be incapable of standing, just uncomfortable, due to her “monethly custome,” an ancestor to our contemporary “period.” As Jenni Nuttall explains in her new book Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, “period” has been in use to name a quantity of time since the Middle Ages, but “only at the end of the seventeenth century”—so, a little after the clergyman’s time—“does the phrase ‘monthly period’ appear in medical books as a name for menstruation.”

Before the sterile, temporal sense overwhelmed it, menstrual vocabulary in English was more playful and direct. In the Middle Ages, “oferflownis . . . gecyndes” (“natural overflow”) and “rennyng” (“running”) described blood leaving the body. Later, in early Modern English, doctors often called periods “the reds” “to distinguish them from discharges collectively known as the whites.” Branching out, Nuttall gives us “tentigo,” the engorgement of the clitoris or penis, and affectionately rural-sounding names for the former, like “heyward of corpes dale” and “the kiker in the cunt.” Who decided to leave these frank words and charming phrases to history? While it might seem intuitive to think of language becoming clearer or more precise over time, Nuttall points out that this isn’t always the case. We are capable of and might benefit from recovering words deemed unfit by English’s ruthless evolution.

Nuttall teaches the history of English and its literature of the Middle Ages at Oxford, where “young feminists” ask her to explain things like the link between “spinsters” and “spinning,” and whether a “maiden” is always a virgin. She also has a teenage daughter with whom she wants to discuss bodies using “plain facts,” and feels dissatisfied with the small range of clinical, Latinate words in English use today. Both contexts, she writes in her preface, led her to old glossaries and dictionaries, trawling for “the beginnings of women’s words, our now-forgotten vocabulary.” Perhaps, Nuttall proposes, we might have use today for this discarded lexicon. “Like vintage tools laid out for sale at a flea market, we can pick up these older words, puzzle out their purposes, compare them with today’s language and see if we have any use for them, decorative or practical.”

Around the time the structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure became more famous than the philologist Ferdinand Sommer, the study of the history of words left serious conversations to become etymology, legitimate only for the use of poets, dinner party guests, and the kind of academic everybody resents. That doesn’t mean there’s a right or wrong way of writing about past forms of English, only that there are no rules. To her credit, Nuttall announces herself to be cherry-picking along the lines of her own interest. At one point, she visualizes Mother Tongue’s data as a Wunderkammer: “Old words, like many sorts of antique bits and bobs,” she writes, “seem quaintest without any of their original provenance.” This “bits and bobs” method characterizes how she proceeds “by snippets and excerpts, assembling a patchwork quilt of dictionary entries and quotations, each phrase or sentence making up my larger textile.” Throughout, she defers any arguments building in the background in favor of a pointillist, accretive approach, gathering microhistories from the lineage of individual words and phrases related to women’s bodies, experiences, and working lives.

Nuttall understands that invoking “women’s words” to describe experiences that are not universal to all women and that are often shared with people who do not identify as women will exclude some readers. So she makes a modest claim about who her book is for, borrowing a rhetorical aside from Julian of Norwich, the late-medieval mystical writer. Julian wrote about her faith, Nuttall notes, “al [sic] in general and nothing in special,” meaning that she was not commenting on any individuals’ lives or claiming ultimate authority for her thoughts. “Just so,” Nuttall writes, “the women’s words I’ve chosen are relevant in general but not necessarily in special for every reader. But I hope my grammar of us and we can stretch to include whomsoever might know something of the experiences each chapter describes.” Gradually, however, through tiny increments of the “special,” Nuttall puts together a lexicon that, like a thesaurus, limits meaning to a few synonyms while seeming to expand it.

Carlo Dolci, Saint Agatha, ca. 1665, oil on canvas, 26 7/8 × 19 3/4".

Much of the book is taken up in pointing out a void in modern English, a negative space where the vocabulary “of the distinctive parts of female anatomy, of menstruation, of sexuality, of pregnancy and childbirth, of caring, of working, of the stages of our life cycle, of male violence aimed at women and of patriarchy and inequality” of past Englishes once dwelled. If describing Elizabethan-era women “getting their period” feels vaguely anachronistic, it’s not because of the facts, but because of the changed vocabulary. The shift from “monthlies” or “lunations” to the more abstract “period” is perhaps evidence, Nuttall suggests, that a fleshier and more practical lexicon has been eliminated by misogynist squeamishness about what is considered appropriate to say out loud and write down. The words that survive today have been altered by material as well as social forces. By the eighteenth century, the language of birth had begun to share vocabulary with the language of imperial expansionism, global capitalism, and the trade in enslaved people: terms like “labor,” “delivery,” “productive/nonproductive,” “failure to progress,” and “future issue.”

Sometimes words disappeared for no reason. Sometimes they emerged, fully formed, out of the obscure music of English nonsense. The term “dildo,” for example, comes from a once-popular chorus. “Sing doe with a dildo! you might bellow with enthusiasm in Tudor England,” Nuttall writes. Similarly, “hey nonny nonny” “conveniently rhymed with cunny, that slang word for vagina or vulva.” In an early modern multilingual dictionary, the Italian “fossa” or “pit” is translated as a nickname for “a woman’s pleasure-pit, nony-nony or palace of pleasure.” In contrast with these nonsense-derived words, the phrase “willy-nilly,” Nuttall explains, derives from a nasty and specific phrase: “wulle ha, nulle ha”—whether she wants to or not.

The truth of “willy-nilly” is a good example of how the rules of conventional taste have obscured certain histories. Topics like sex between women, for one, are few in the written record, but that’s no reason to think that reflected a real-life scarcity. Some rare French neologisms of the Middle Ages tried to wrangle with the details of lesbian sex. Nuttall compares conservative commentator Candace Owens’ horror at Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performing “WAP” at the 2021 Grammys to an twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poem on contemporary vices. Ladies in particular, the poet Étienne de Fougères wrote, do something Nuttall glosses as “‘coffin’ on ‘coffin’, ‘shield’ on ‘shield.’” Elsewhere he calls scissoring “l’escremie del jambot,” which Nuttall translates as the delightful “thigh-skirmishing.”

Is language supposed to be a record? Nuttall would like to fill in some of the blanks. As she points out in her chapter on menstruation, scholars have not always been able to countenance the medieval language of the body. Victorian translations from Old English, she writes, “primly camouflaged” “monað-aðl”— meaning “month sickness,” or menstruation—as the Greek “catamenia,” which few readers could ever have been expected to understand. This kind of pointed absence is reminiscent of how British politicians, as Nuttall cites, argued in 1921 that the government should not outlaw lesbian sex because doing so would inform women of its existence.

It’s striking, then, to examine the negative space in Nuttall’s project of recovery. In a passage fraught with fascinated ambivalence, Nuttall describes the visual culture around Saint Agatha, the fifteen-year-old Sicilian martyr whose breasts were cut off by a Roman magistrate. In paintings, Nuttall writes, “Agatha often appears holding her two breasts on a platter, two jellified and cherry-topped desserts.” Imagining removing breasts, Nuttall writes, makes her “shudder and daydream.” Historian of medicine Barbara Orland and other scholars have repeatedly shown that breasts were a locus of queer thought in the medieval and early modern periods, for example in the abundant record of miraculously lactating Christian men. But Saint Agatha seems to inspire Nuttall only to visions of dismemberment. “What if we could just take them off?” she asks, about breasts. “We could keep them in a bedside drawer, ready to be suctioned on when wanted for a particular purpose. No need to strap them down to exercise; nothing to be stared-at or groped.” The fact that you can remove your breasts if you want to is not mentioned, but “uni boober,” a term Nuttall cites from communities of postmastectomy British women, is—more than once. It’s a strange moment from which to preclude the voluntary while celebrating the involuntary.

By the afterword to Mother Tongue, the unsaid is positively looming over the page. Recently, Nuttall remarks, “when some topics relevant to a majority of women have been addressed, the words woman and women themselves have sometimes been avoided in favor of circumlocutions” like “those who menstruate.” She complains of feeling “as though there are more rules to follow and more conventions to attend to when discussing women’s lives” today, invoking fellow Oxford academic Deborah Cameron’s term “verbal hygiene.” “Some of us,” Nuttall writes, with a strange “us,” “find this verbal purification unproblematic and helpfully precise, an inclusive sign of progress. Some of us prefer the gender-additive language of women and . . . as a workable compromise.”

Nuttall does not explicitly frame the social forces of erasure in language as violent or compare proponents of gender-inclusive language to whoever killed the word “wicket” for “vulva.” But she does suggest that “language activism” threatens to overwrite her women’s words, and claims it is imposed “top down rather than being requested by those concerned.” “Many of us”—now apparently meaning cis women—“fear the consequences of choices which might meet with disapproval. Taking into account patriarchy’s habit of urging women to be quiet and of caricaturing those women who do speak up or out as gossipy, frivolous, hysterical, dull, or bitchy, it seems regressive to stifle women’s words, however progressive the motivation.”

Nuttall’s “grammar of us and we” has shrunk and hardened, the subject of the sentence lost in subjunctive layers. Suddenly it all makes sense: Mother Tongue reads exactly like a rebuttal to the imagined proposition that the phenomenon roughly labeled “women” should be eradicated from English. This hidden argument is based on one of the most annoying misunderstandings of the movement for letting individuals choose to use nongendered pronouns: that, like those patriarchs of years past, nonbinary people want to erase women from language. Considering how inclusively Nuttall’s project began, this realization reminded me of puzzling over a student’s essay, hunting for its logic, only to realize that its ostensibly mind-blowing juxtapositions are in fact simple mishmash. Mother Tongue isn’t dishonest, but just like a rushed piece of homework, its mission is overwhelmed by its own sense of exigency.

Jo Livingstone is a critic in New York.

Atlas Slugged

Michael Thomsen on the real winners of the Ultimate Fighting Championship

Matthew Shen Goodman

Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 Billion Industry BY MICHAEL THOMSEN. NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER. 448 PAGES. $30.

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IF YOU WERE TO HAVE TWO MEN FIGHT EACH OTHER with a minimum of rules, should they do it in a boxing ring, or a plexiglass cube, or a cage (and maybe an electrified one)? These were the novel logistical questions faced by the founders of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, including a used-car salesman turned ad mogul and a Brazilian described by Playboy as “the toughest man in the United States,” as they attempted to identify what form of martial art was most effective at incapacitating an opponent. Inspired by a Chuck Norris flick, they chose the cage—no electricity—to determine whether, say, a sumo wrestler could beat a “pit fighter” and held their inaugural grand prix on November 12, 1993, in Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena. The slender Royce Gracie, brother of said toughest man, wore a gi and used his family’s brand of jiujitsu to best an American boxer (one glove, shoes on), an American professional wrestler (red speedo), and a Dutch kickboxer (karate pants, a previous opponent’s teeth still embedded in the flesh of his right foot). The UFC paid Royce $50,000 for winning the event that had been advertised around the city as “The End of Civilization as We Know It” and which birthed the athletic chimera that is mixed martial arts.

UFC 1 garnered dismissive critical reaction—“disgusting, dumb, and depraved,” according to TV Guide—in addition to nearly ninety thousand pay-per-view buys and $1.3 million, enough to impress the execs. Three decades later, you can watch men (and, since 2012, women) in the UFC’s official skivvies headkick each other live weekly on PPV and broadcast television, as well as in hundreds of streamable past fights. Jetting from Anaheim to Shenzhen to Abu Dhabi to Melbourne, the UFC has gone global and gangbusters, and in 2016 was acquired for $4.2 billion by talent agency Endeavor in the largest transaction ever in sports history. Michael Thomsen’s Cage Kings examines the remarkable trajectory of the UFC, from its lowly beginnings in the ’90s to its peaks of profit in the late 2010s. Along the way, Thomsen considers the growing popularity of this multibillion-dollar behemoth against the backdrop of American life growing ever more immiserated, and attempts to contextualize the normalization of a competition in which a fighter can “guillotine” an opponent and a fan won’t blink.

Royce Gracie at "UFC 1: The Beginning," McNichols Sports Arena, Denver, CO, November 12th, 1993.

Politicians and officials did blink, however, at least in the early years, perhaps freaked by the apocalyptic tagline pasted around Denver and PPV executive Campbell McLaren’s exclaiming on Good Morning America: “You can win by tapout, knockout, or even death.” State athletic commissions refused to sanction the sport; UFC executives were even threatened with arrest in Charlotte by police sure that MMA had to be against some law, even if they couldn’t say which one. Though he later proclaimed he’d have tried MMA had it been around in his youth, Arizona senator John McCain called it “human cockfighting” in 1996 and sent an open letter to every governor in the country asking them to support a legislative ban of the UFC. As chair of the Senate committee overseeing cable in 1997, he called all the major companies to dissuade them from broadcasting UFC fights. Many complied, sinking the promotion’s earnings per event from as much as $2 million to as little as $100,000. Increasingly illegal and unprofitable, the UFC was let go for a song, scooped up in 2001 by Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank Fertitta III, the brother-heirs to a Las Vegas gaming conglomerate fortune. The brothers created an LLC called Zuffa, Italiano for “fight,” and installed an impulsive childhood friend of Lorenzo’s named Dana White as president of the UFC. While Thomsen attends to the rise and fall of significant athletes over the decades, his book’s titular monarchs are pretty obviously this trio, who maintained an iron grip over the UFC as they honed Zuffa into a machine for growth, leaning on their political ties from the casino business to sanction MMA throughout the country (and then the rest of the world). The company partnered with new broadcasters and voraciously acquired competitors, all the while bullying the fighters they kept under contracts described by one labor-law professor as the worst he’d ever seen in sports or entertainment. Business picked up year after year such that today, hardly a week ever goes by without cage activity.

Fighters come and go at an accordingly fast pace, and White’s comparative longevity has made him arguably the public face of the UFC. A former boxercise instructor and adherent of self-help guru Tony Robbins, White is prone to calling employees “fags” and insulting reporters, and cultivated a cultural identity for the newborn sport that fetishized its dumbass, ex nihilo will to power; to quote Robbins, the UFC is for “the few who do versus the many who wish.” In the 2000s, Zuffa partnered with the then-newfangled television channel Spike to successfully woo those elusive, internet-addled eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old men who were early cable cutters. MMA became a pressure valve for the NEET nation who would live through multiple recessions, the real hourly wage’s stagnation, the ballooning of consumer debt, and the credentialization of the job market. (Without implying MAGA causality, Thomsen rhymes the UFC’s popularity with the rise of a twenty-first-century Caucasian chauvinism charged with resentment over nonwhite athletic success; “UFC was so successful,” McLaren tells the author, “because it was a sport white guys could win.”) These conditions not only precipitated the infantilization of culture in the new millennium—a savaged American public retreating into the homey comforts of expanded universes and over-cathecting with pick-your-entertainer—they also gave rise to the consumption of fighting at a scale and clip previously unheard of.

The athletes themselves rarely benefited from the sport’s ressentiment-fueled rise. The UFC maintained a massive roster of fighters it saw as replaceable and bulldozed these independent contractors (never employees) by essentially calling them pussies if they complained. When the first season of reality show The Ultimate Fighter swapped Survivor-style goofball challenges for weekly matches, White cowed dissenters in an on-camera speech, asking a group of men willing to face death in a cage, “Do you want to be a fuckin’ fighter?” On TUF and off, fighters say yes almost categorically, making up an athletic lumpenproletariat that’s bought into a violent multilevel marketing scheme in which many will make less in a year than federal minimum wage. It is, as Lorenzo happily puts it, an “eat what you kill” system, in which many fighters inured to such economic cruelty are already as dispossessed as their fans. TUF wildcard Chris Leben, Thomsen notes, collected cans to pay for bus fare to get to school and was illiterate until his teens; underdog’s underdogs the Diaz brothers proudly repped Stockton, California, which was “the most profitable 250-square-mile stretch of farmland in the world, and one of the poorest regions in the US” when they were growing up.

The Diazes have been exceptionally vocal about their mistreatment, but most fighters are happy to turn themselves into slurry on the UFC death march with a smile. (“I was so driven,” says one fighter, “if they said to me, Don’t eat for a month, I would have done it.”) Like White, as Thomsen details, they are fond of self-help platitudes. The Robbinsisms sound like cope when you only make twelve thousand to show up in the cage, with another twelve thousand if you win, but a select few brash rainmakers have willed themselves (and the UFC) to greater heights. Conor McGregor, a plumber’s apprentice turned MMA phenom, dominates Cage King’s final chapters. The Irishman was first convinced of The Secret’s law of attraction—if you think it’ll happen, it’ll happen—by mentally manifesting parking spots while driving around Dublin. Luckily for him, he’s also an athletic anomaly with the gift of (mediocre) gab. “It’s always you versus you,” McGregor has said. It’s not hard to see why this might be particularly appealing to the UFC’s desired demographic: If the world tells you you ain’t shit constantly, shouldn’t you be able to beat your ain’t-shit self?

“We’re not here to take part, we’re here to take over,” McGregor said in 2014 after only his third UFC fight. The phrase is oft repeated by his legion of fans and fighters unsure of how to earn besides aping the sport’s most successful fighter. McGregor was the first UFC fighter to hold two belts simultaneously and headlined half of the UFC’s ten top-grossing fights of all time, but did he achieve anything like equity with the Fertittas, who couldn’t have made quite such a killing selling to Endeavor without his bombast? As the world’s highest paid athlete of 2021(due mainly to his whiskey brand), McGregor will likely avoid the worst harms faced by his peers, who struggle without the support of the UFC or a union to treat the flesh-eating staph infections and collapsed lungs Thomsen inventories at Cage Kings’s end. Still, he might have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a cerebral malady officially undiagnosable without an autopsy but easily suspected given his behavior. In a single night during the NBA playoffs this June, he sent a Miami Heat mascot to the hospital with an overzealous play punch and allegedly sexually assaulted a woman in a bathroom. But it’s a fool’s errand to determine what is ascribable to CTE versus possible (some say probable) substance abuse versus a career of being rewarded for sociopathic and violent solipsism.

As Thomsen points out, most professional sports split revenues 50-50 between athletes and their leagues; the UFC keeps its books under lock and key, but it seems to pay out less than 20 percent. Without feeling sorry for him, then, you could argue that even McGregor has been treated unfairly for his violent efforts by a company that may as well have always been led by Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, who is fond of a self-serving koan that will be familiar in its shithead self-help smarminess to anyone who has ever tried to negotiate for more than crumbs with their boss: “Fair is defined as where we end up.”

Matthew Shen Goodman is editor-in-chief of The Baffler.

Pier Pressure

Prudence Peiffer’s history of a midcentury artistic haven

Jennifer Krasinski

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever BY PRUDENCE PEIFFER. NEW YORK: HARPER. 432 PAGES. $39.

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BETWEEN 1956 AND 1967, the Coenties Slip on the lower tip of Manhattan was home to a group of artists who had moved to the city with grand ambitions for their work and little money to their names. In those lean years, before they were canonized, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman, and Delphine Seyrig all took up residence in this “down downtown,” on a dead-end street on the East River where they nested themselves among fishing ships and sailors, the changing tides and unremitting grime, living at a remove from the New York City art world. Here on “the Slip”—a commercial dock designed for transience and exchange—they lived in cheap and drafty lofts, nurturing intuitions and ideas into radical practices, producing bodies of work that would, in the end, be very much a part of the zeitgeist.

“Place is an undervalued determinant in creative output,” writes author-scholar Prudence Peiffer in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art, her tale of these artists at that time, proposing that any chronicle of an aesthetic evolution should consider not only who but also where. “What if, rather than technique or style, it’s a spirit of place that defines a crucial moment?” This question seems to perfectly befit the twentieth century, the age of the found object, the readymade, the already-made, of Pop art and appropriation, when artists began grabbing whatever was around them—the commonplace, the discarded, the overlooked—and calling it subject matter, using it as material. As Peiffer explains:

To think of an artistic group in terms of place is to write a different history of art, one that can be more inclusive, more open to serendipitous interaction, and can also explain more of the cultural, emotional, and financial context behind any art object.

Such a narrative shift might elicit another question: If place is relocated to the fore of art history rather than relegated to the background, what refreshed literary form might arise?

This is a terrific challenge, and The Slip takes it on, launching with a brief history of the land that would one day be home to these artists: from the earliest humans who paddled canoes up to the lush island of “Manahatta” around 1000 BCE, to the construction of the New Amsterdam settlement’s first pier on the East River in 1648, to the Slip’s role as an active harbor during World War II. By the time Peiffer’s subjects arrived in the mid-1950s, the sailmakers who’d once cut their sails in the wide-open lofts near the water had mostly vacated, leaving behind spaces large enough for artists to live and work, a new and unusual arrangement. If, once upon a time, a studio was a kind of stage—cast with models or laden with fruit and flowers for still lifes—the Slip’s spaces functioned more like cloisters. Cleaning, scraping, and repainting were the artists’ initiation rites, poignant metaphors for their reworking and reimagining of what art could do and be.

Lenore Tawney in her Coenties Slip studio, New York, 1958. © David Attie

The neighborhood had no art-supply store and little in the way of amenities: breakfast at a restaurant called Sloppy Louie’s, a small grocery with a limited selection of goods. But the Slip was a kind of oasis: the center of the art world, then in the thrall of Abstract Expressionism, was up in Greenwich Village, and once the business day was done, the Slip’s bustling streets were dead quiet, aside from the clamor of drunken sailors. Cheap rent afforded these artists the most precious real estate of all: headspace. According to Martin: “When you paint, you don’t have time to get involved with people, everything must fall before work. . . . That’s what’s so wonderful about the Slip—we all respect each other’s need to work.” Martin’s “we” refers to what was perhaps the most significant virtue of the Slip: the community of artists who, living so close by, supported and influenced one another in myriad ways, and Peiffer’s book comes to life in the vibrant details of their connections. Martin, as the de facto “den mother,” was, according to Kelly, “very much a healer,” counseling the younger artists when in crisis. Indiana and Youngerman, needing money, teamed up to teach an art class, which didn’t succeed in part because students didn’t want to go all the way down to lower Manhattan. Kelly and Indiana, lovers for a time, eventually stopped speaking because Kelly disapproved of Indiana’s choice to include words in his work—a choice that would become Indiana’s signature move. And so on.

But the Slip itself supported their burgeoning practices, too, wending its way into the work. “Before Coenties Slip, I was aesthetically at sea,” recalled Indiana, who scavenged the area’s streets for the scrap from demolition sites that would become the materials for his now-iconic wood sculptures. Martin also dabbled in assemblage, making objects out of bottle caps and nails and wood. Each member of the group paid homage to the neighborhood in turn: Youngerman titled a 1959 canvas Coenties Slip; Kelly, a work he made that same year, Slip; Rosenquist, a 1961 painting of a spoon, fork, and egg yolk, Coenties Slip Studio. And so on again.

Throughout the book’s first half or thereabouts, Peiffer advances her premise by weaving historical facts about the Coenties Slip into the artists’ stories, interjections that sometimes weigh down her narratives’ otherwise ascending arcs. The tender recollection of a walk that Indiana and Kelly took together in Jeanette Park in 1957 is incised with a brief report on the ill-fated steamer for which the park was named. The mention of a quote that Indiana borrowed from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to use on a brochure prompts a several-page chronicle of Slip life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how it was irrevocably altered by the appearance of the El train in 1875. And an account of Tawney’s sprawling, light-filled loft space and the illustrious guests she would occasionally host there—composer Harry Partch and author Anaïs Nin among them—is diverted by a discourse on sail-making. These interruptions, though unwieldy, are not wholly uninteresting and are absolutely in line with Peiffer’s conviction that place be properly accounted for in art-historical scholarship. But the real challenge is a literary rather than a scholarly one: How to make location as compelling as character or as dynamic as even the mildest plot point? “Place is a tricky protagonist,” the author concedes, but its resistance to this role, its inherent misbehavior as such, is an obstacle well worth attending to, at least for the ways in which it could reshape history’s telling. In the end, this book, like its subject, provides readers, its temporary lodgers, a solid launchpad from which to imagine how.

As it is, the Slip performs here most convincingly as the artists’ silent interlocutor and coconspirator—a source of free materials and affordable space—and as a metonymy for the fleeting years and figures that compose the whole of this story. Even the artists were aware that whatever sifts into consciousness from the material world ultimately constructs a state of mind: about her fourteen-foot linen and wood sculpture Dark River (1962), Tawney said: “It is an inner landscape that I am doing.” Indiana traced location through his avocation in lines that echo the wordplay of Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”: “A ‘slip’ is that construction that a ship berths in, you see. It slips into place and docks. . . . The Slip has been an influence and a very formative force in my painting.” Explained Rosenquist, plainly, about his place in the world: “I think of myself as an American artist, growing up in America, thinking about America.”

As is the American way, all but one of the buildings where the artists once lived on the Slip were razed by the ’60s to build office towers. The tenants were evicted or moved out. Seyrig left for Europe in 1960 to film Alain Resnais’s New Wave classic, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which would make her an international cinema star. Martin relocated a few blocks north to South Street, then departed the city for good in 1967, explaining, “I had established my market so I felt free to leave.” Tawney eventually settled in with the artists who were inhabiting SoHo lofts. In 1963, Kelly moved to the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side, where he took his walks through Central Park rather than by the river. Indiana, the last one standing, stayed until 1965, remembering his former home as a “New York waterfront demolished by Moses, Rockefeller, and Progress.” But of course, Coenties Slip was a place of commerce before Indiana and the others moved in. A street may change art, but art changes a street, too. Then art changes again, and streets, too, and both keep doing so, though now the insatiable and intertwined economies of real estate and the art world—both fed by gentrification, a term that would enter popular conversation around 1964—make it harder to say which happens first.

Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and contributor to 4Columns, Artforum, and the New Yorker.

Where Egos Dare

The secret history of a psychoanalytic cult

Hannah Zeavin

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 432 pages. $30.

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IN THE SULLIVANIANS: SEX, PSYCHOTHERAPY, AND THE WILD LIFE OF AN AMERICAN COMMUNE, journalist Alexander Stille follows whispers of a psychoanalytic cult and breaks open the story of how psychotherapy escaped the consulting room and became the total environment of its patients. The book centers on Saul Newton, a therapist turned charismatic leader who directed a collective search for liberation through analysis and communal living. Needless to say, it all went horribly wrong.

Many reporters claim to surface an under-told story, but Stille truly delivers. Even in New York analytic circles, few have acknowledged the sect that, from the 1950s until 1991, functionally controlled the lives of hundreds of its members. (I only ever heard a half rumor at a dinner party from a friend of my analyst parents, who heard it “from the couch,” so to speak.) Those four decades allowed for entire families to be raised inside the cult. And families were a key site of control within the Sullivanians: patients were seldom allowed to reproduce, and when they did, they often had several other group members function as potential fathers. Recently, aided by over-the-counter DNA tests, second-generation Sullivanians, who are now in their thirties and forties, began to reconstruct their shadowy childhoods. Much like Oedipus, they quested after their biological fathers. Life following myth, some were at least a little surprised by what they found. First-gen Sullivanians were suddenly willing to talk, and on the record, about their decades inside the group. Stille was ready to listen.

According to The Sullivanians, the story goes something like this. In the ’50s, just as Jim Jones was moving to make a Marxist revolution by nestling politics inside an Indianapolis church, one Saul Newton, alongside his fourth wife, Jane Pearce, sought to braid Marx and Freud and spark a revolution in and through the consulting room. Communist movements, they felt, had failed precisely because they left out the psyche and socialization. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, was being used in conservative ways and was largely pro-family, pro-babies, and pro-adjustment to the difficulty of same. To unlock their full potential, each theory needed the other. The problem was that Newton was not a clinician. (The solution: lie about it.)

While Pearce was a medical doctor and licensed to practice psychotherapy, Newton was not. He claimed that he had mailed his social-work thesis, but his advisor never received it (dog, homework). While Pearce treated patients, Newton was a clerk at the William Alanson White Institute, which was cofounded by the interpersonal psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan as a radical alternative to mainstream psychoanalytic training. When Sullivan died, the institute went through a massive, conservatizing restructuring. Unhappy with this turn of events and sensing opportunity, Newton left paper pushing behind to cofound his own therapeutic group, the Sullivan Institute, which borrowed the glow of Harry Stack Sullivan but was never authorized by him. Now Newton reigned as one of its leaders. Bartleby, he was not.

The Sullivanians of the train from Amagansett, ca. 1972–76. Donna Warshaw.

White Institute cofounder Clara Thompson had argued that “the institute is not a home.” The Sullivanians tried to prove their former teacher wrong. An institute could be everything: a family, a nonmonogamous marriage, a commune, a revolution, and of course, a cure. By 1963, Newton and Pearce had coauthored the nearly five-hundred-page manual for the Sullivanians, The Conditions of Human Growth. The first words read: “We live in a dangerous world.” Newton and Pearce thought that social systems were scaled-up sites of violence that could only be done away with if we jettisoned the family. The mother was described as a “repressive agent” who introduced her child to a “self-system” that readied them for exploitation. Therapists, they argued, were too often apologists for capitalism or “the psychological counterparts of political liberalism.” The Sullivanians believed “in the withering away of the state and the restrictive self-system” at once.

Stille offers an exuberant and often moving journalistic account of how this project turned cultic, but he never quite seems to care that the cult started as a utopian Marxist-Freudian project —save that it adds to the wacko factor. Stille’s sometimes pat understandings of Freud and psychoanalysis leave a hole at the center of the story. This is not to say that Stille should have been a better historian, but without taking the particularities of Freud and psychotherapy seriously, the Sullivanians could be seen as a run-of-the-mill cult. (Cults have abounded in the counter culture since the ’50s. Some estimates report about ten thousand cults big enough to track in the United States right now.) But the mechanism for cultish control was, in this case, analytic care. The alibi for ceding to that control was the yearning for revolution. Stille never fully makes the connection: cults, revolutionary sects, and analytic care all rely on intimate cells and secrecy. Therefore, disambiguating how that secrecy is instrumentalized to make a cult rather than, say, a revolution, is key.

Psychoanalysis as a practice has often given rise to reclusive, secretive milieus. This phenomenon was initiated by Freud: in his salon, the father controlled the extension of his theory, had secret committees with international reach to safeguard same, and guarded his archive with a notorious tightfistedness (the man loved to burn his drafts and letters and exile his friends). This makes a certain kind of sense. Psychoanalysis is the business of secrets—their revelation, their interpretation. It is therefore bound by confidentiality at every level. This secrecy is supposed to protect patients: Whatever confidential committee might have delivered the tenets by which you’re treated, you’re supposed to experience it as framing an encounter that allows for more and more freedom. At least, that’s the hope. Yet the secretness of the consulting room, with its alchemy of transference and enactment, means abuse can bloom. Analytic power is supposed to stop there, tarrying on the precipice of the waiting room, living only inside its patient, who then is sent out into the world. For the Sullivanians, this worked in reverse. Analysis became the total world, and the patient was just living in it.

LIKE MANY SELF-MADE LEADERS, Newton’s origin story formed how he would rule. He imputed murderous rage to his parents, and by extension, to all parents. Newton decided biology was nothing and environment total. He sought, like anyone playing God, to remake the world in his image. His tool was psychotherapy. The vulgar Freudianism and its transformation into an “emancipation” politics flow from there. Newton appropriated Freud to his own ends. He flipped the Oedipal complex: rather than the child wanting to kill daddy and marry mommy, mommy and daddy were evil and wanted to commit infanticide. This new foundational myth gave rise to Sullivanian policy. As members joined the group, their access to their children was restricted, and babysitters were highly encouraged. Eventually, the children were sent away.

Manual in hand, the Sullivanians embarked on their first era of growth. In this period, as one therapist put it, the aim of the group was “to put the human into Marx.” So far, so good. Power redounded to Newton, his ever-changing cast of therapist wives, and a select few training analysts. So it would be at almost any psychoanalytic institute, then as now. But the Sullivanians wanted to institute societal change, not cure individuals, so they needed many patients. For the experiment to work, the institute required access to the rest of their lives. Leadership continued to try to “liberate” children from their parents and parents from their children.

Every cult needs a recruiter; charisma is not confined only to the top. For the early Sullivanians, that role fell to Clement Greenberg, the most prominent art critic in midcentury America. “Chumship” or an “intimacy of peers” was as central to this revolution as sexual freedom. Patients were told to fill datebooks not just with sexual escapades but also with social dates. Thanks to Greenberg, many of these early patients were artists and writers, including Jackson Pollock. The painter, summarizing his own worldview—which jibed with Sullivanian treatment—put it this way: “What the fuck: everybody should always do what they want to do.” Without using the word id, Pollock’s credo captured the theoretical bent dominant in the early years of the institute: we are dissociated from our life drives by awful parents and the society they’ve built. (The cure, as non-Sullivanian poet Frank O’Hara once said, was to have the grace to live variously.) Pollock was already battling alcoholism by the time he wound up in the Sullivanians; the group thought that excessive drinking was the cure, not the sickness (some analysts drank heavily during sessions). Stille argues that this attitude—that self-permission in the service of creativity, especially achieved through alcohol—would lead to Pollock’s eventual death in a drunken car crash.

Stille contrasts the early days of the institute with the other forms of mental health care on offer, largely psychoanalytic. Newton may have been dogmatic and a charlatan on the make, but he was not, at least, a conservative shithead, like many analysts at the time. Stille makes the case that everything that might be called neo-Freudian in the ’50s was radical. He does so by repeating some well-worn myths about Papa Freud (most crucially, that he worked only with the wealthy and well-educated—although this is false). Not to be pedantic, but the neo-Freudians in the United States, called ego psychologists, were most often deeply conservative. Newton would have stood out among them; he had based his notions on that of the most radical psychoanalysts, many of whom were hived off by their fellow analysts as mentally ill or quacks (or both). This historical backdrop matters for thinking about how exciting a leftist low-fee therapeutic collective like the Sullivanians might have seemed at the height of Freud Mania. Seemingly everyone in New York was supposed to go to analysis to help them adjust to the woes of sociality, but in the hands of the Sullivanians, psychoanalysis was deployed to more radical ends. Not only was their analysis affordable and open, it sought to completely reconfigure the family rather than accept the duty of it. What’s more, it was sociable (never underestimate the power and pleasure of the peer).

The ironic uses of psychoanalysis to repress desire was matched elsewhere in the culture until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. If, during the economic miracle of the ’50s and ’60s, the meaning of family life was under quiet reevaluation, the health of the family form became a settled science for some or else spilled over into a full-blown counterculture. As psychiatry became ever more anti-mother, both the New Left and the neo-communalists challenged conventional family arrangements and their role in social reproduction. The Sullivanians already had more than a decade of experience in basically destroying the families of their patients—and doing so intergenerationally. This was understood as being for the good of the psyche and for society. Carried out in accordance with Newton’s psychological doctrine, the policy of family destruction also made good sense for consolidating power in a group. If communes (and cults) posed themselves as a healthy alternative to the nuclear family—and one that many in the counterculture actively sought out—the Sullivanians’ policy did double work. Newton knew that the family’s abolition could ensure the health of the group—and consolidate his power. It was essential to prevent other primary attachments from forming, whether romantic or filial. Stille writes movingly of the children of the institute, “Their absence, in a sense, made the group possible.”

Birth control and abortion had made it possible to decide when to not have children, but analysts could determine whether patients were “fit” to mother at all (fatherhood was often separated from biology). What functioned as psychological eugenics had the added benefit of consolidating control, a power play. Stille tells us the story of how the practice of breaking the biological family finally resulted in a mother losing custody to her ex, who had fled life inside the Sullivanians (mostly a problem because it brought legal attention to the community); the formal separations then ceased. Yet, according to his informants, mother-infant bonds remained highly regulated for all but the upper echelon of analysts—who had many children and relatively normative access to them.

In this portrait, who is calling the shots and what keeps Sullivanians from leaving is not exactly clear. The flytrap of friendship seems to make sense as an object of devotion within the group and then abruptly stops making sense. Stille shows us the good side of such community—deeply devoted homosocial “chumship” and the care that followed, ease in sociality, and the privileging of creativity, pleasure, mentorship, play. None of the Sullivanians, as it were, was bowling alone. But even this good is turned insidious: if all your friends—and your therapist—were inside the network, it made it harder to see it for what it was, and to leave. The ostensible leader of this project, Newton, remains a shadowy figure. Yes, he was at the top of a hierarchy and used his position as analyst-leader to intimidate, harass, and assault his patient-followers, reassigning patients to lower-status therapists if they acted out. But the carrying out of orders, the deepest structures of intimidation, seem to be carried out by his wives—one and then another and then another.

By the ’70s, Pollock’s “what the fuck” had its counterpart: “fuck you.” Patients were made to fall into line, and enforcers had a brand-new headquarters on the Upper West Side that further consolidated their power. If you didn’t want to do something that the Sullivanians suggested, you were forced to in the name of “not-me” experiences (things that make us uncomfortable but that must happen in the name of growth). This could include being sexually exploited and raped, having emotional ties broken, or being made to stay in unhealthy collective housing. Patients were given emotional dressing-downs “summaries”—by both peers and therapists alike. As if the facts weren’t bad enough, Stille engages in some light redbaiting to make this sound not just psychically awful but politically sinister. In little asides, Stille writes that the protocol “seems like a parody of the Stalin show trials of the 1930s.”

Both Freud and Marx drop out of view as Stille focuses on the dynamics of what is now indisputably a cult. Those theories of material life and mind seem to have receded for the Sullivanians as well. Among the radical devotees were those unfortunate woo-woo shoppers, their interest piqued by new social arrangements and self-growth, who happened to be taken in by a completely self-aware master charlatan. By the ’70s, alongside psychotherapy, sketch comedy was introduced to the group as a salutary practice seemingly out of left field by Luba Elman, a therapist-actress. Although dance, painting, music, and writing classes had long been features of Sullivanian life, acting became a guiding force for the collective. Quickly, the theater troupe within the psychotherapeutic community was codified as “The Fourth Wall,” with more than a hundred members actively participating. As the theater became a potential rival to the clinic, Elman was ousted and Newton, along with one of his therapist-wife, Joan Harvey, were installed at its head. Participation in the theater then became nearly mandatory—to the point where its name eclipsed that of the original institute.

The group simultaneously refocused its Freudian-Marxism on antinuclear politics, becoming ever more hardcore. Or, in Stille’s telling, paranoid: restricting members’ food intake, monitoring the air for radioactivity, forming security details that Stille describes as outlandish—and they may have been. On the other hand, that paranoia might have been at least somewhat grounded in reality. For the revolutionaries in the group, the extent of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of covert actions against American citizens had just been exposed. The leaders of the Sullivanians may have noted that Jim Jones had fled for Guyana, under investigation. Nonetheless, securing the group, playing in the group, therapizing in the group, and performing as a group—all created more work for patients. That was exactly the point. Labor bound them further to the community.

Stille notes that the ’50s represented the height of psychoanalysis’ power and the moment when birth control remade American sexuality. But he forgets one-half of the equation when the book narrates the group’s final chapter in the ’80s. When AIDS hit New York, the Sullivanians tightened its controls both in sensical and extreme ways. While the epidemic closed the community further, the ’80s also marked the rapid decline of psychoanalysis as a whole. That the tide had already turned against psychoanalysis writ large (as well as countercultural lifestyles) is never mentioned as a contributing factor to the group’s downfall. When news of the cult broke in the Village Voice and in New York magazine in the late ’80s, it was due to yet another custody case. (The irony of an anti-family cult being taken down by members asserting their legal right to the family was not lost on anyone.) As the intricacies of the group’s protocols were paraded in print, it might have become clear that, if psychoanalysis and the cult form weren’t exactly synonymous, the terms were coming ever closer in the metonymic mind of the public.

Then Newton died, and, as that theorizer of charisma Max Weber promises, the leader’s end resulted in the end of his domain. The Fourth Wall/Sullivan Institute officially disbanded in 1991. Though largely diminished in the outside world, the cult remained inside its former participants. Trauma and inheritance and the intersection of the two meant that this chosen family couldn’t be entirely fled—or no more than one of origin.

OUTSIDERS POSE CULT MEMBERS TWO QUESTIONS, especially after they join our side: how did you get in, and why didn’t you get out earlier? By the end of the book’s four-hundred-plus pages, we still can’t exactly feel our way into why so many people joined this group in a moment of cheap apartments and plenty of looser countercultural arrangements. We could chalk it up to accidents or luck, but Freud doesn’t believe in accidents, and Marx doesn’t believe in luck. In a narrative centered on the recollections and high gossip of the fallen cult, Stille doesn’t offer us a satisfactory theory resulting from either. He is prone to repeating facts and details, as if we are unable to fully grasp the compromises of life in the cult. And we never quite get beyond an introductory characterization of the Sullivanians—like being told the beginning of the same story again and again. (Of course, we’re now all used to consuming stories fronted by recap. I am sure The Sullivanians will receive the A24 treatment sooner rather than later.)

The outlandish story covers over a lack of interpretation, a theory that would help us understand how desire operated within this particular group. Instead, it seems that the reporting, the facts, are supposed to speak for themselves. And perhaps this is so, although I have my suspicions that the story is told as “wild” in part because militant Marxists and psychoanalysts have long been suspect to those who view them from the outside. The Sullivanians were always a little wrong, a little false, a little wild because radical psychoanalysis is always too extreme. Though billed as a devolution from the potential of an open radical community to the sordid actuality of a closed cult, the story seems foretold in Stille’s telling. The Sullivanians started with all the fatal characteristics of a cultish group and only amplified them, like turning the dial from ten to eleven.

Within psychoanalysis, when new sects and groups emerge, analysts often discipline them long before the mainstream catches wind. There are two true outcomes: either you hive the wild Left flank off as crazy, or you keep it as a secret to safeguard the wider practice. Perhaps Stille doesn’t give us a theory of the Sullivanians because psychoanalysis is, to so many, already cultish, and so his work is already done for him.

FREUD WOULD HAVE RECOGNIZED WHAT WAS HAPPENING within the Sullivanians. Although he was largely a theorist of the individual, he did remark on the intrapsychic pressures to stay within a group. Namely, that leaders are perceived as perfect, and we convince ourselves that we might be so by proxy. To have the ear or eye of the perfect one confers some perfection on us. Newton was such a leader. He supposedly invented his radical theory and—however he lived—was said to flawlessly embody it.

He constantly kept his patients working up a ladder toward that growth—the psyche as pyramid scheme. Of this arrangement, it is unfortunate that there isn’t a more, well, psychoanalytic read offered by Stille, either of group relations or the transference between supplicant and leader. Nonetheless, analysts who lived through the rise of fascism, and those who came along at midcentury—peers of Newton’s—stand ready to offer exactly this. One in particular, Heinz Kohut, thought that the charismatic leader acquired power from traumas in their earliest childhood and was positioned to seduce others who had similar experiences of deprivation. This was Newton’s simple parlor trick. He found those with his shared history—its broad strokes—and went for the kill.

Historians of social movements, particularly of Marxist organizing, could offer their own answers about what a collective might become, how the revolution might be painful (even before it fails), and why one might stay long after it lost any utopian luster. When Stille does try to account for the extent of buy-in to the group, he turns to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who calls these “totalist” or high-demand groups, which often rely on a “cult of confession.” It is crucial, however, to note that psychoanalysis requires totalist individuals, those who are willing to lie on the couch day after day, year after year. What Newton and the other leaders of the Sullivanians did was rely on this attitude while removing the greatest safeguard of psychoanalysis in the name of the revolution: ambivalence. Ambivalence was necessarily absented to maintain the omnipotent charismatic leader and his otherwise untenable social structure.

That there is charisma in militancy is clear. True to psychoanalytic precepts, the whole situation at the Sullivanians was overdetermined. But to gain a more substantial understanding of its functioning, we would need to look beyond the fear that kept patients in line, beyond the mechanisms of control, to the dissonance and dissociation required to live within it. We would need a sense of the belonging and pleasures gained from living a project, from the very depth of surrender that kept members from breaking the fourth wall.

The Sullivanians instrumentalized the silence of the consulting room to make a society unto themselves. What Freud himself teaches is that the old cannot be merely forgotten or abandoned, for it will reappear in new guises. If we’re not careful, we will exchange our old bad fathers for new ones. It is this story, of the ills of the repressive family traded for the toxicity of a repressive cult, that Stille tells. The question remains, on the other side of his book, why we might make this exchange.

Hannah Zeavin is a historian at UC Berkeley. She is the founding editor of Parapraxis.

Quiet Quitting

Franz Kafka’s work-life imbalance

Charlie Tyson

The Diaries of Franz Kafka translated from german by Ross Benjamin. New York: Schocken. 704 pages. $45.

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FRANZ KAFKA’S LAST STORY was a fable about art and labor. “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” is a tale told by a mouse who, with marked erudition and fair-mindedness, reflects on an extraordinary community member, the singer Josephine. At times of danger or emergency, the news will spread that she plans to sing. The community assembles, and Josephine, delicate and frail, stands before them in song, her arms spread wide, her throat stretched high. The tones emanating from that delicate throat are, according to some, not singing at all but rather ordinary piping—if anything, weaker and thinner than the sounds all mice make. It is peculiar, the narrator considers, that “here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.” But her art has a strange hold on all who listen. It turns the ordinary materials of speech into something transcendent.

From the beginning of her artistic career, Josephine has made an unusual demand: to be excused from all daily work. The mice, a “race of workers,” deny her this privilege. Even their children scarcely get a chance to play before they are drafted into the “struggle for existence.” Josephine persists in her campaign. She makes shows of exhaustion, refusing her supporters’ pleas to perform. She limps, she weeps, she falters. At the story’s end, she vanishes entirely. This tale of a mouse diva, the last full expression of Kafka’s dying voice, frames the relationship between the artist and the community as a labor negotiation. Is it enough for the artist to make art? Or must she also contribute to her community’s more earthly needs?

This impasse between art and labor was, for Kafka, a perpetual torment. He worked in an office, and he did so diligently. But he knew what he was; by night, in solitude, he gave art his supreme allegiance. Riven in two between his day job as a lawyer for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute and his nights suspended in a trance at the writing desk, he came to see the office as a hell that drained his frail and overtaxed body of the vitality he needed to pursue his true vocation.

The complex nature of Kafka’s agony around work is made freshly discernible in Ross Benjamin’s new translation of the author’s diaries. By giving us a more bodily Kafka than has hitherto been available, Benjamin helps us sense the author’s pleasures and pains with greater clarity. As we turn the pages of the diary, we are reminded that the same man who professed that he was “made of literature . . . nothing else” also went swimming, took walks, visited brothels, and, when his digestive troubles lapsed, dreamed of forsaking his carefully masticated vegetarian diet to gorge himself on sausages and “eat dirty grocery stores completely empty.”

Kafka also looked at pornography, posed nude for another man’s sketch (“Exhibitionistic experience”), noted the “sizable member” bulging in a fellow train passenger’s trousers, and admired the long legs of two lovely Swedish boys, “so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.” These passages are all excluded from the sole previous English version of the diaries, a translation from 1948–49 based on a bowdlerized German edition prepared by Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod. By reinstating these squeamish deletions, Benjamin provides helpful context for other homoerotic passages, such as a pair of entries in which Kafka imagines his neighbor barging in each evening to wrestle with him. One night, the neighbor brings a girl to watch the combat. “Be quiet,” the neighbor whispers into the ear of his victim, who now realizes his opponent “would do whatever it took even use shameful holds to win in front of the girl and make himself shine.” The original translation offers, more tamely, “unfair holds.” Benjamin’s choice accents the passage’s eroticism. Whether the shame attaches to the unsportsmanlike neighbor or the story’s speaker, pinned and overpowered, is left open to interpretation.

Benjamin’s rendering not only gives us a more sensual and erotic Kafka; it also presents the diaries in a more unpolished voice. Benjamin resists the temptation to correct Kafka’s punctuation or smooth out his more contorted sentences, making the jottings feel immediate, sometimes breathless. And these are no ordinary diaries. We find little that is comparable to the anecdotal documentation of Samuel Pepys, the spiteful gossip of the Goncourt Brothers, or the careful literary-critical judgments of Virginia Woolf. Readers hoping to learn the facts of Kafka’s life will not encounter them here. While we get glimmers of Kafka’s milieu—the Jewish intellectuals of early twentieth-century Prague, the Yiddish theater troupe whose performances he attended faithfully—the diaries offer limited external detail. They place us, rather, in the often fantastical world inside Kafka’s head: descriptions of the theater, dreams, and dreams about the theater in which Kafka is irresistibly drawn to a woman wearing men’s clothing. The diaries record the fits and starts of one of the twentieth century’s most unusual imaginations. These are working notebooks dotted with pen-and-ink sketches and peppered with fragments, ideas, and parentheticals. It can be difficult to distinguish whether some entries are factual descriptions or fragments of stories, fantasies, or dreams. Casual observations mingle with reports of secret torment; world-historical events occur alongside mundane acts: “Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming school in the afternoon.”

The best entries are fictive, whether recording dreams or tales-in-embryo. Some of these unfinished stories are masterpieces in miniature, such as one about a group of laborers forced to break stones for miles to smooth the gliding of a great royal snake: “‘Prepare the way for the snake!’ came a shout.” And nearly every page offers evidence of Kafka’s gift for verbal pictures: the crumbling wall of a brothel, a girl’s half-turned neck, Max Brod straining to read Phaedra under a streetlamp and “ruining his eyes with the small print.” But more arresting than the imagery or the stories is Kafka’s unrelenting howl of self-reproach.

Kafka reserves his harshest self-flagellation for his failures to realize his literary gifts. Absolutely certain that writing is “the most productive direction of my being,” he was equally sure that his talent was being squandered. His daily obligations to the insurance office (which he carried out ably) and his family’s asbestos factory (which he shirked) were part of the problem. But what really racked him was his own pitiful negligence. The lament “wrote nothing” recurs as a sad refrain. “What excuse do I have for having written nothing yet today? None,” he sighs. He ruefully takes account of his weakness: “And now complete failure in my work. . . . I see the task and the way to it, I would only have to push through some thin obstacles and can’t do it.” Exhausted and trembling, he lashes himself on: “Go on working under any circumstances, it must be possible despite sleeplessness and the office.” And, perpetually, the complaint: “Wrote nothing.” “Wrote nothing.” “Have written nothing for so long.”

Of course, other writers have entrusted similar self-recriminations to their private notebooks. George Gissing’s journals, to pick just one example, show the gloomy critic of Grub Street restlessly quantifying his literary production or lack thereof: “Black, black; another hideous day. Not a line of writing. Too horrible to speak of.” But Kafka’s blunt declarations do more than bemoan his lapses in progress. They also express, with melodramatic flair, his feelings of entrapment. The days spent on the fourth floor of the insurance institute, the evenings spent burning with pen in hand: “These two professions could never tolerate each other.” After a good night of writing, he was “aflame” in the office the next day and could accomplish nothing. The pressure of his real (literary) work, pursued in desperate bouts of nocturnal imagining, taxed him to the point of physical collapse. He saw himself condemned to “a horrible double life from which insanity is probably the only way out.” Such lamentations achieve a queasy comedy. Kafka’s insistence on presenting an ordinary predicament in inflated, hyperbolic terms is at once amusing and endearing. Yet the reader’s smile may falter when one considers that Kafka’s grasp of the situation was arguably correct: a literary genius fated for a short life was frittering away his talents in an office.

This problem could not be solved by a prudent divvying up of hours. Literature requires regular sojourns into the world of the spirits, demanding from the author “a lostness in himself out of which it is difficult to step into the air of the ordinary day.” The office hauls one back from this realm of transcendence. The working world, for Kafka, was not merely mundane; it was also debasing, an arena of punishment and subordination. One entry, for instance, takes us inside a workshop plunged in darkness. The craftsperson can see nothing, yet “for every bad stitch one received a blow from the master.” In labor, one submits to the demands of others. The community for which one works may be hostile or indifferent; it exacts, nonetheless, its due measure of toil.

The writing desk emerges not so much as a reprieve but as a new scene of torment. The forces unleashed by literary creation were, Kafka imagined, powerful enough to crumple and rend his body. “I will jump into my novella even if it should cut up my face,” he resolves, mustering more courage than the task might seem to require. His vision of writing is corporeal, often violent, expressing both fear of and a wish for the body’s dissolution: “The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces.” He curses his delicate constitution, “this body pulled out of a junk room,” as insufficient to withstand literature’s elemental blast.

Throughout the diaries, Kafka cannot escape the body. “He has the feeling that by being alive he blocks his own way,” one entry reads. “From this obstruction he then in turn derives the proof that he is alive.” A variation on Descartes: I obstruct myself, therefore I am. This conclusion soon gives way to a more violent expression of self-hindering: “His own forehead bone bars his way (against his own forehead he beats his forehead bloody).”

This image of a forehead beaten bloody resurfaces in “The Burrow,” one of Kafka’s final stories, about a badger-like creature who has constructed an elaborate underground labyrinth. To create this “beautifully vaulted chamber,” the animal used the only tool available—his forehead—to pound the sandy soil into shape. “I was glad when the blood came,” he affirms, “for that was a proof that the walls were beginning to harden.” Out of this arduous toil, the animal secures his refuge: a lair where he is entirely isolated, self-sufficient, and safe from the predatory world.

Or so he thinks. But the burrow, we learn, breeds endless dissatisfaction. In attempting to modify his home, the animal disfigures it, scratching holes in the walls and blocking his own way with heaps of dirt. This artificial structure requires constant revision. Such revisions create, in turn, new tasks in a Sisyphean cycle from which there appears to be no exit. Meanwhile, the animal’s paranoia mounts. He wonders if another creature is closing in. His secret sanctum, to which he devoted all the labor of his mind and body, may turn out to be no more than an enormous tomb.

With this new rendition of Kafka’s diaries, Benjamin escorts us inside the burrow, showing us the artist at work. At once disturbing and humanizing, these unexpurgated notebooks remind us that the achievements of this singular writer were unlikely, precarious, and paid for with great pain.

Charlie Tyson is a writer from North Carolina. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Yale Review, and The Baffler, among other publications. He’s currently writing a book about idleness for Pantheon.

Summer 2023

ART BOOKS

Inner Visions

edited by Kurt Almqvist and Daniel Birnbaum. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Stolpe (Distributed in the US by ARTBOOK DAP). 220 pages. $45.

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Johanna Fateman

IN 1912, THE SWEDISH ARTIST-CLAIRVOYANT Anna Cassel recorded the following message, crystal-clear instructions from a spirit guide, in her diary: “First, allow yourself to have dreams and then visions and colors and numbers, letters and images. Make a careful note of everything. It is of utmost importance to be thorough in your description.” Cassel was a lifelong friend of the spiritualist painter Hilma af Klint (and very likely more than a friend, for a time), as well as a close collaborator. In af Klint’s notebooks, Cassel’s group of 144 enthralling small paintings, her dutifully thorough description of a primordial story, transmitted to her from the astral plane, is referred to as “The Saga of the Rose.” The cycle was meant to serve as both a prayer book for the artists’ devout Christian-occult community (whose all-women initiates totaled just thirteen) and a history of the world.

Discovered in the archive of the Swedish Anthroposophical Society in 2021, the sacred illustrations are reproduced in this solemnly beautiful clothbound book, its hushed design aligning with Cassel’s glyphic and celestial compositions. Fastidious and fervent, aware of trends in painting and Modernist decorative arts, Cassel favored botanically inspired lines, distilled geometries, and a crepuscular-or-witching hour palette to capture the strange wind and cold light of a particular metaphysical space. The saga’s figurative and allegorical entries complement her numinous approach to abstraction. Tarot card–like watercolors—a swan and a chasm-spanning bridge, for example—offset the floating runes, glowing pyramids, and stark Rosicrucian imagery elsewhere.

Though the book is not rushed in its appearance, it’s delivered with the caveat that research into the vast output of Cassel and her complex, intimate milieu has only just begun. The luxe edition comes on the tail of new information (detailed in the editors’ accompanying essays) proving that the earlier, large-scale series “Paintings for the Temple”—the subject of major museum exhibitions, on which the posthumous superstardom of af Klint is based—was, in part, conceived and executed in partnership with Cassel. And significantly, both women’s writings indicate that other works attributed to af Klint were made collaboratively by various combinations of their circle’s members.

The revelation of these material and spiritual contributions challenges not just the chronology and composition of the canon but also the patriarchal notions of individual authorship and singular genius at its heart. Only recently, af Klint’s work (or what was thought to be hers) upset the art-historical timeline, placing her ahead of solitary male artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich as the inventor of non-objective painting. Now, that recently revised narrative of twentieth-century European painting is cast in doubt. It was not a lonely female savant but a visionary women’s collective, founded on romantic and religious bonds, in intimate contact with the spirit world, that arrived at pure abstraction first.

Guilty Pleasures

Nick McDonell casts a cool eye on his wealthy milieu

Jesse Barron

Quiet Street: On American Privilege By Nick McDonell. New York: Pantheon. 144 pages. $26.

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IN HIS 1980 ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN SCENE, “Within the Context of No Context,” George W. S. Trow supplies an anecdote from Harvard in the early 1960s. During an art history class on the Dutch masters, a Black student described Rembrandt as “‘belonging’ to the white students in the room.” The white students totally agreed with this. “They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt,” Trow writes. “They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress.”

At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that these students were expressing “white guilt.” A generation later, Trow thinks the prevailing wisdom was wrong. “No,” he writes, “it was white euphoria. Many, many white children of that day felt the power of their inheritance for the first time in the act of rejecting it.” One way to look at Trow’s revision is as a cynical teardown of ’60s idealism: it looked sincere in the moment but was actually just privileged self-indulgence. But guilt and euphoria are fully compatible moods, not mutually exclusive ones. You can usually detect both of them whenever the children of privilege try to describe their own experience. What changes is only the levels of the moods in the mix: depending on the temperament of the person doing the describing, and the cultural context they’re describing from, one of the two will usually dominate.

The early 2000s, for example, were a time of near-guiltless euphoric writing about privileged childhoods in New York City private schools. Gossip Girl #1 came out in April 2002. The debut novel by the writer Nick McDonell came out that January. Set a few blocks south in the same neighborhood, Twelve was a tight thriller about kids who “step carefully to avoid wetting their Jimmy Choo knee-high stiletto boots,” and whose hedonistic winter break comes crashing to a halt when their friend shoots up a party with an Uzi (the title refers to a fictive mix of coke and ecstasy). A success on its own terms, Twelve gives us credibly shallow characters who have no anxiety about their own class position, except that it might not be high enough. If these kids ever talked about Rembrandt “belonging” to them, it would be because their parents collected.

A generation later, guilt has drowned out the euphoria of upper-class entitlement. McDonell frames his new memoir, Quiet Street, as a reckoning with his own privileged upbringing. From the way he describes it, his path has been a gilded one. Twelve was published when McDonell was eighteen years old and newly graduated from Buckley, a private school on East 73rd. As he transparently lays out in Quiet Street, McDonell’s family was connected: his father was editor-in-chief at Esquire; George Plimpton was a frequent household guest. While Twelve became a bestseller and was adapted into a movie, McDonell continued on to Harvard, where none other than Plimpton recommended him to the Porcellian, a club so exclusive that it doesn’t audition anyone on merit—only family connections can get you an interview. And so on.

Journalists have tended to view McDonell’s literary career through the prism of its own glamour: the access to the elite, the early success, and the author’s traditional handsomeness. Which side was he on? Reviewing An Expensive Education, McDonell’s 2009 spin-the-globe espionage novel, the New York Times was unsure whether it analyzed, or just advertised, the Ivy League spies at its center. “Is McDonell a double agent or a triple agent in the class war?” the reviewer asked. McDonell’s reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan raised similar questions. Though the content was critical of the invasion, and had to do partly with civilian casualties, the work McDonell is concerned with in Quiet Street was reported from within the benevolent force field of a US Army embed. Sure, “class treason is an option at all socioeconomic levels,” as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1989. But it’s difficult to make writing into treason. Outside the force field, most of the dead on the American side weren’t McDonell’s peers: statistically, they were the middle class and poor for whom the army is the employer of last resort.

IN EARLY 2020, McDonell decided to volunteer in the morgue of a New York City hospital, thinking he might write a book about it. But as he tells us in the introduction to Quiet Street, subsequent events led him to suffer a crisis of faith in the project. “As the pandemic ebbed in New York, a summer of protests began,” he writes. “The protestors demanded that America reckon with its history of racial and economic injustice, and I marched too, sometimes. I wondered, though, if I had reckoned sufficiently with myself —or, perhaps more important, with the community that had produced me.” This impulse to reckon—literally, to see what one owes—is not unfamiliar among the children of privilege and can express itself in a variety of ways. At the extremes, you have the rare class treasonists (Frederick Engels) and the trite whiners (Prince Harry). McDonell falls at neither extreme, preferring a softer introspection: “I would write about the one percent, among whom I had been raised,” he tells us. “For, rather than experience injustice, I had in many ways been its beneficiary.”

Nick McDonell, 2023. Photo: Roopa Gogineni

The benefiting starts with Buckley, an all-boys private day school. There are thirty-three students in his year. Teachers stay in their well-paid jobs for decades. Shirts and ties are required, except for phys ed, which happens in a third-floor gymnasium “fully equipped” with a “high bar, pommel horse, vault, parallel bars, rings, a spring-backed tumbling floor. Also a weight system and a pair of ropes.” Because of the apologetic tone in which McDonell presents these bells and whistles, the reader is invited to scoff at them. But what he’s listed so far—good teachers, small classes, nice athletic facilities—are basically the features of a Northern European public school. So, what’s the problem? In my view, Buckley’s amenities are grotesque not because of some immanent badness but because they should be available universally: they’re privileges when they ought to be rights. Much to his credit, McDonell never pretends to renounce his pleasures—a politically-correct stance that would have tipped the book into disingenuousness. (I have my own internal drama about having gone to Harvard, but I would never pretend the gym wasn’t great.)

Only when we turn from classes to class-training can we finally accept McDonell’s invitation and start shaking our heads at the excess. By the time they turn twenty, Buckley boys may deliver toasts, hunt grouse, read blueprints, ride horses, taste wine, train falcons, play backgammon and tennis and bridge, serve dinner for twenty, buy real estate. Buckley boys can give you a handshake that sends “a message like a snake’s rattle.” They know “how to ask a favor from a chief of staff”—which in the world of the one percent does not mean the president’s right-hand man but the person who oversees domestic servants in a mansion. They also betray the elite’s obsession with believing themselves to be everymen: they are supposed to be able to charm a plumber as well as a Senator, to “appreciate Taylor Swift as well as Tchaikovsky.” Buckley boys are learning how to conduct themselves in a manner commensurate with their class position.

Then comes summer vacation. Long afternoons at the Devon Yacht Club, “trapezing over whitecaps.” At Devon, don’t try to pay with cash: write your membership number on “a chit with a small pencil.” (Readers of Emma Cline’s The Guest will recall that the narrator, a twenty-two-year-old sex worker, dines out on this trick at a beach club in the Hamptons.) When it’s time to leave New York, hunting is a good option: “Stags in Scotland, quail in Georgia, bonefish in the Bahamian flats.” Or maybe off to Lamu, an island in Kenya, to check out one of the “most expensive hotels.”

Still, it’s no fun if you’re alone. All the stops are pulled out when it comes to dating. “Candlelit yoga in Ubud, Bali; sport fishing on Bristol Bay, Alaska; eating out of a silver dog bowl in Berlin’s KitKatClub at the direction of a dominatrix; sex in a tuxedo in London’s locked Cadogan gardens. Or just packed with the friend group around a marble bar in the West Village, drinking a few twenty-dollar cocktails, laughing about whatever was trending on Netflix.” That last one sounds so bland it’s almost touching, but otherwise—not bad. And if the courtship culminates in marriage, give this a try: ceremony “in a coed arts club, the Century”; evening reception “at a men’s club, The Brook.” The pleasures of the weddings are tactile: “the grain of starched white tablecloths, the chilled Sancerre, the massive arrangements of calla lilies.”

After the yoga and the starched cloth, it might be time to have babies at “the world’s finest hospitals.” Then it’s off to the country house in Connecticut, Wyoming, or Maine. When all that’s over, you can expect the midlife crises and divorces. Some of this material is just the familiar folkways of the Eastern Seaboard aristocracy, known to anyone who has read, say, George Being George, the oral history by Plimpton’s friends: fireworks in the Hamptons and literary parties in Manhattan, tennis matches and private clubs. But some of the anecdotes are crazier than that. My favorite character is the spurned wife who calls a swat team on her ex-husband’s wedding to his new girlfriend. Then comes the funeral, where a Buckley boy can “confidently deliver a eulogy.”

McDonell is especially good at finding the lies behind his younger self’s illusions. The fine manners, he realizes, conceal class violence. The obsession with fairness on the athletic field seems like an attempt to deny the unfairness of the economic system that put the players there in the first place. McDonell is unsparing, too, about the social customs of the boys he grew up with: their unthinking mimicry of a Hollywood representation of Black American culture (calling each other “dawg” and “gangster”); their casual racism to their non-white peers. In one of the book’s strongest passages, McDonell takes himself to task for having called an Indian friend “darkie,” in what he thinks must have been a stab at humor. “I knew the word was taboo but had taken to using it,” he writes, “making jokes about ‘the jungle,’ imitating her father’s accent.”

The tone of that sentence is clear: it’s lucid self-reproach. But what do you make of the tone of these two, from the chapter on vacations: “These holidays began long before college and were miraculous gifts. They recharged us, gave us new dreams, probably increased our life expectancies.” When I first read this, I assumed it was ironic: it sounds like a vacation brochure that a ridiculous bourgeois would peruse in a Michel Houellebecq novel. But then, if we do read that as irony, what do we do with this bit, only a few paragraphs later:

There were other prices [to the holidays], vast costs—genocide, rape, pillage—borne by whole other communities, that, by the end of their educations, one percenters knew about but often ignored or spun to their advantage.

The irony is gone, replaced by a kind of apology in which Trow, one feels, might sniff out a bit of grandiosity. These kids must be very powerful to be responsible for genocide, rape, and pillage every time they take a vacation.

The vacillation in these moments—between grandiosity and remorse—is probably inherent to the project. McDonell is trying to write from two distinct urges, to confess his own feelings and to expose the lives of others. The confessional material is the strongest, because McDonell is willing to deny himself the protections of privacy. He tells us how much he made for this book, the insider baseball that led to his first novel being published, how much he has in stocks, the price of his house. In these passages, McDonell is getting something out of his system, trying to unburden himself of his class guilt. Remember Elif Batuman’s 2010 essay “Get a Real Degree,” which observed that rich white kids in MFA programs were “finding their voices” by writing in the voices of the “non-white, non-college-educated, non-middle or upper-class” (a Vietnamese woman raped by an American soldier e.g.)? Quiet Street is the exact opposite of that.

But when McDonell switches from getting something out of his system to trying to expose the system, I occasionally feel the edge of his perception going dull. Exposure requires a different animating force than confession: you have to be willing to piss people off. As a journalist, McDonell knows this, but I don’t think there’s much in Quiet Street that would ruffle the feathers of its own subjects—let alone pluck them bare. In some chapters, there’s a coyness that is hard to square with the mission. No names are named that aren’t already in the media, leaving the subjects encased in a tactful anonymity.

Quiet Street’s hesitancy to stick in the knife is paradoxically one of its most honest qualities. For the past few years, there have been calls for writers like McDonell to speak from their own subjectivity, rather than write the stories of others. McDonell is aware of this, worrying that if he executes his book about his time as a volunteer in the hospital morgue, he will be “profiteering” off the experiences of the working class. But the subject position of a “one percenter” is a lonely place to practice identity politics. This is one reason that novels about private schools are conventionally narrated by scholarship students: most readers are on that side. And because the outsider needs to observe almost as a matter of survival, his gaze sharpens to a point. The Secret History wouldn’t work nearly as well if we didn’t see the story through Richard Papen’s desirous, skeptical eyes.

McDonell is trying to be both Papen and the rich students Papen writes about. It’s similar to Fitzgerald’s predicament after he published This Side of Paradise, and a Princeton professor wrote him to criticize his cynical depiction of Ivy League snobbishness. Don’t worry, Fitzgerald wrote back; he still loved his alma mater. “The undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country,” he wrote. (He appears to be serious.)

I can never remember what happens in Paradise, but I will always remember how the Princeton kids, out on a lark, stop for lunch at a Long Island hotel. The bill is eight dollars; the carefree Kerry throws down two. Won’t they get in trouble, cautious Amory asks? “No,” says Kerry. “For a minute he’ll think we’re the proprietor’s sons or something; then he’ll look at the check again and call the manager, and in the meantime—.” In the meantime, they’ll be gone.

There’s an anecdote in Twelve that I would nominate as the 2002 version of this classic. It’s an anecdote, in fact, that reappears in different form in Quiet Street. Here is the first version, about a teenager in Twelve:

Tobias is beautiful. Not quite effeminate, just beautiful. Tobias is a part-time model. There is a famous story about him too. It’s about how when Tobias was twelve, he took a shit in his bed just so the maid would have to clean it up. Tobias bragged about it the next day at school.

And here it is twenty years later:

The wealth is not a secret, nor the inevitable violent decadence. I remember a schoolmate who bragged about defecating in bed so the maid would have to clean it up. Such behavior extended to the highest reaches of power, as was clear in President Trump’s casual sexism and violence. One of his children and one of his grandchildren attended the same school as I and the aforementioned defecator.

The earlier version doesn’t confuse me at all: I know exactly how it wants me to respond. I’m meant to be titillated, and I am, by the nasty behavior and the unpretentious profanity. The second version sets up different expectations. Knowing I’m reading nonfiction, I can’t forget that this kid is a real person, part of a cohort of real people, who have grown up and taken their places in the American power structure. And so the passage arouses an acute curiosity. Yes, it’s worthwhile to hear that Buckley boys could be sadistic toward their maids. But wouldn’t it be juicier to learn which private-equity firms the most sadistic ones now run?

Jesse Barron is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Los Angeles.

Editor's note: This article has been revised to clarify the fact that McDonell did not report from Iraq and Afghanistan solely as an embedded journalist with the US Army.

Commit to the Bit

An actor and a journalist chronicle the crypto crash

Tarpley Hitt

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman. New York: Abrams. 304 pages. $28.

Purchase this book:

Bookshop • Amazon

CRYPTOCURRENCY’S BLEND OF OPAQUE TECHNICAL JARGON, obtuse regulatory schema, and flagrant gambling has, since its inception, made it a magnet for characters you could generously call “colorful.” This was the case in 1992 when a squad of anarcho-libertarian Neal Stephenson fans first started gossiping about the idea on the cryptography listserv “Cypherpunks.” It was likewise true in 2008 when someone (or multiple people) using the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto sicced Bitcoin on the internet. Nakamoto—speculated, at various points, to be a Rhodesian cartel boss, a Palm Beach County detective who died gruesomely in 2013, and a libertarian model-train collector with the misfortune of actually being named “Satoshi Nakamoto”—has kept their actual identity unknown to this day. That the Bitcoin creator, who spawned an industry that later claimed a $3 trillion market cap, had no evident interest in becoming its messiah did not deter others from trying to assume the role.

When I first started paying attention in the spring of 2018, crypto was emerging from one of many crashes, and the survivors resembled something out of slapstick. Consider Australian businessman Craig Wright, who toured conferences as Nakamoto like some crypto mall Santa, as industry peers openly called him “a fraud” (or, in one incident, “pumpkin-man Craig”); Wright later sued a number of them, including an anonymous Twitter account with a cat astronaut avatar, for libel. Or Mighty Ducks actor Brock Pierce, whose first foray into digital entrepreneurship was marred by sex-trafficking allegations against his boss; he rebounded to digital-arms dealing in online games before cofounding the controversial stablecoin Tether. And who could forget the TRON blockchain’s Justin Sun, the onetime Grenadian rep to the World Trade Organization who very publicly paid $4.5 million for a dinner date with Warren Buffett in 2019, only to back out days before the meeting. Sun claimed a sudden case of kidney stones, though various outlets reported that he was under investigation by Chinese authorities and had been quietly “on the lam” for much of the year.

The field’s affinity for cinematic weirdos did not die, even as mainstream coverage and ballooning profits invited more tedious emissaries into the fold. In 2021, a new such oddity appeared, albeit one with a slightly different sales pitch; former teen heartthrob Ben McKenzie became the industry’s “first celebrity anti-promoter.” Like many crypto personalities, he had a backstory that’s hard to fit into one sentence. Born to a family of multiple Wikipedia pages—a Pulitzer Prize–winning uncle, a grandfather who grandfathered the Public Broadcasting Act—McKenzie earned his own page at the age of twenty-four after crashing on the couch of voice actor Ernie Sabella, who played Pumbaa in The Lion King. In 2003, McKenzie scored a role on Hollywood’s turn-of-the-century teen drama The O.C. playing Ryan Atwood, a brooding but gifted bad boy who gets adopted by a rich family in Newport Beach. Atwood’s rapid class ascension made him the consummate mole—an outsider on the inside of an affluent clique—and an apt conduit for the show’s implied critique: a prescient concern, as writer David Klion once observed, with “the enormous sums of money then fueling a speculative housing bubble across sunbelt suburbs like Orange County, California.”

The show made McKenzie very famous. Over the next four years, he would earn six Teen Choice Award nominations and land on Teen People’s “25 Sexiest Stars Under 25,” Independent Online’s “100 Sexiest Men Alive,” and OK! magazine’s list of “Hollywood’s Hottest Bachelors.” His talents were also noted outside teen-mag foldouts; in 2005, he played the surly, humiliated kid brother in Phil Morrison’s Junebug, an indie Oscar nominee about the class anxieties of a North Carolina family when their eldest son returns with a posh wife in tow. In later years, McKenzie was drawn to law-enforcement roles. Since 2009, he has played a rookie cop on Southland, a rookie cop on Gotham, and an ensemble member in a staged reading of the Mueller Report. And in 2021, he would become crypto’s leading celebrity skeptic.

By this point, McKenzie’s conversion to crypto naysayer has taken on the tidiness of an anecdote told many times. The pandemic had put acting on pause, along with everything else. An injection of federal funds had overheated the stock market. A subreddit had conspired to short squeeze the stock of an aging game retailer (GameStop) and then an aging theater chain (AMC); the forum’s users sent share prices so high that the trading app Robinhood stopped letting people buy these stocks. Exchanges had been flooded with “special purpose acquisition companies,” or “SPACs”: shell entities that raised money to buy private corporations, giving the latter a shortcut to go public. DeFi—or “decentralized finance” applications built onto blockchains—had introduced myriad new ways to lend and leverage tokens, while “nonfungible tokens,” or NFTs, allowed traders to pay millions for DeviantArt-style jpegs with names like “CryptoDickButt #1462.” When an old friend encouraged him to invest in crypto, McKenzie was skeptical (this friend’s financial advice had, in prior years, led him to lose nearly $10,000 on a medical-tech company that claimed to have developed “synthetic blood”). The actor had studied economics in college, but his expertise was out of date. To catch up, he took a twenty-four-part online course at MIT from now-SEC Chair Gary Gensler, then got stoned and decided to write a book. He messaged a journalist named Jacob Silverman on Twitter.

Silverman, an established writer and contributor to the New Republic, had recently run a piece that aligned with McKenzie’s outlook (“Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam”). The two met at a Brooklyn bar, bonded over baseball and fatherhood, and agreed to team up. At the time, Silverman seemed more like a collaborator than McKenzie’s ghostwriter or guide. They began publishing articles and touring conferences together; early last year, a New York Times reporter profiled their visit to a Bitcoin mining complex in Texas. The duo planned to turn their research into “some sort of Hollywood production,” the piece noted, perhaps an O.C. reboot in which a “cryptocurrency billionaire” moves to Newport Beach and “takes control of the local real estate market.”

Somewhere along the way, the relationship seems to have changed. In June, Silverman posted that he “was not involved in the promo/media for Easy Money.” If the actor still plans to produce a documentary or television adaptation, Silverman does not seem to be involved (he has tweeted that he “does not own or have access to the footage”), though he did put out an excellent podcast exploring similar themes. Over the summer, McKenzie’s appearances were mostly solo acts. At the Brooklyn book launch in July, Silverman’s name was not on the bill. Silverman did do some promo for the book, writing on social media: “I’m proud of the work I did on this book and continue to do as an independent journalist. I learned a lot about money, lying, and trust.”

The result of that partnership is Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, which came out from Abrams in July. McKenzie’s latest role finds him again bearing witness to a speculative bubble—now not in real estate but in highly volatile assets built wholecloth from code. Again, he plays an outsider, this time not for moving between classes but for criticizing members of his own. Silverman and McKenzie’s first shared byline was a Slate article called “Celebrity Crypto Shilling Is a Moral Disaster.” The piece took aim at a slew of celebrities—Lindsay Lohan, Tom Brady, Kim Kardashian—who’d started pushing various crypto and NFT projects, at times without disclosing their personal stake. The book continues that crusade, expanding beyond Hollywood hype generators to the insiders and executives pumping a market McKenzie sees as a Ponzi-like fraud. It’s an investigation into his hunch that cryptocurrency, despite its “liberatory rhetoric,” merely amplifies “the worst qualities of our existing capitalist system”—that without extensive oversight, it would only repeat that system’s mistakes.

Kim Kardashian's deleted Instagram post promoting EMAX tokens, June 2021.

MCKENZIE ORIGINALLY BILLED Easy Money, in classic Hollywood pitch-speak, as “The Big Short for crypto”—a comparison that makes sense in broad strokes. When the actor started out two years ago, crypto was on a historic upswing. Bitcoin, worth just $5,000 in March 2020, swelled by 700 percent the next spring. McKenzie saw parallels to the subprime mortgage crisis Michael Lewis chronicled in his 2010 bestseller: record-setting speculation, a dearth of regulation, excessive leverage, and impossible percentage yields, all centered around potentially toxic financial products that few seemed to understand. Like Lewis’s protagonists, McKenzie responded by trying to short the market. He bet his crypto friend a dinner that Bitcoin would end the year under $10,000. But Bitcoin peaked that November at a per-coin price of over $68,000; McKenzie paid for the meal.

Easy Money is McKenzie’s bigger bet. And it diverges from The Big Short on key points, not just because the latter set a comically high standard. The book is foremost a polemic. McKenzie not only argues that crypto is overvalued, under-regulated, and rife with fraud; he makes the case that the entire ecosystem is itself a pyramid scheme—a “naturally occurring” Ponzi “predicated on getting more regular folks to gamble” their savings in a zero-sum game beyond the reach of federal safeguards. Crypto had re-created the housing bubble’s combo of risk, leverage, and complex financial vehicles. Only this time, McKenzie predicts, the burst would be even more disastrous in that it would fall “more heavily on average folks.” It’s a bold claim, which McKenzie rationalizes like this: “At least in the years leading up to the GFC [Global Financial Crisis], some people got to live in houses. . . . After a major crypto crash, regular people would be left with nothing. Vapor.”

While Lewis merely haunts his text with an intermittent first person, McKenzie is Easy Money’s protagonist. It is, inevitably, a celebrity memoir, if one that distinguishes itself through McKenzie’s sense of humor (or Silverman’s; the extent to which this book was ghostwritten remains unclear). The book is aware that stars’ excursions outside their expertise often end in humiliation. McKenzie’s solution is constant self-effacement, appealing to the reader not from authority but from his general lack of it. “I’m an actor with a barely used undergraduate degree in economics,” he admits, “a bored, mildly depressed, forty-something-year-old man in desperate need of adventure.” McKenzie can exaggerate his handicaps—as when he admires his publisher’s “bravery” for buying a book effectively destined for bestseller lists (indeed, it immediately became one). But the actor’s blunt sense of his own shortcomings lends him a candid charm and a convenient framing device. He uses his own entrée into the crypto community to steer the reader through its biggest scandals of the past two years.

McKenzie’s friendship with Silverman shapes the first two chapters of the book, and their investigation into crypto’s underside then takes them to the popular stablecoin Tether. A “stablecoin” is one that, in theory at least, is always equal to one dollar. The company has claimed its coin supply is fully backed, meaning that for every Tether in circulation, it has one dollar or equivalent in reserves. But its founders have avoided any full financial audit and, according to the authors, sport a range of red flags: Tether has just twelve known employees on LinkedIn, some of whom may not exist. One of the real execs once paid a $65,000 counterfeiting settlement to Microsoft; another worked for an infamous online poker company that was exposed for having a “secret ‘god mode’ that allowed insiders to see the other players’ cards.”

From there, the authors meet some fellow doubters: the anonymous Twitter poster Bitfinex’ed (named after Bitfinex, the cryptocurrency exchange with ties to Tether), as well the hosts of the podcast Crypto Critics’ Corner. They visit havens for crypto’s most eager boosters—South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, the Bitcoin Conference in Miami, the Whinstone Bitcoin mine in Rockdale, Texas, and El Salvador, where dictator Nayib Bukele has made Bitcoin a national currency and planned a “Bitcoin City” powered by hydrothermal energy from a nearby volcano. Along the way, they dive into crypto’s major “casinos”: the mammoth exchange Binance, the “algorithmic stablecoin” Terra/LUNA, the lending company Celsius, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, and the trading company Alameda Research and its sister exchange FTX.

While Lewis took pains to simplify the Wall Street processes that produced the subprime crisis (an achievement memorialized by Margot Robbie’s famous monologue in the 2015 film adaptation), McKenzie, perhaps graciously, doesn’t dwell on crypto’s arcane mechanics. He focuses instead on those “casinos” and the characters who run them. In pursuing the latter, McKenzie’s star power pays off— not only does he land interviews with some of crypto’s most colorful executives but he also convinces them to talk on camera.

The authors spoke to Alex Mashinsky, the Celsius CEO who claimed to have invented the voice-over tech underlying Skype and Zoom (he also says he thought up Uber, DeFi, and a Bitcoin precursor four years before Nakamoto brought it to the masses). Mashinsky readily tells McKenzie that, of crypto’s then-$1.8 trillion market cap, just “10 to 15 percent” was “real money.” Everything else, he says, “is just a bubble.” The actor also talks to Brock Pierce, the Tether cofounder who left to start a crypto paradise in Puerto Rico and whom the book memorably describes as “a little man in a red, white, and blue Bitcoin trucker hat whose legs were pumping almost as fast as his mouth.” Pierce’s mouth slows notably during their interview. While explaining why Tether struggled to find an auditor, he invokes Arthur Andersen—the accounting firm that shuttered over its role in the Enron scandal—as one reason its peers were cautious of the crypto sector. It was seen as too “high risk.” McKenzie catches the comparison: “You are saying ‘high risk,’” he interjects, but “Enron was a fraud.”

And at SXSW, McKenzie and Silverman get courted by a group of self-professed CIA agents, each allegedly attending on intelligence business (they claim to surveil crypto, but also use it to pay informants). Two of the agents invite the authors to dinner for a night of binge drinking and insinuating stories about secret projects. The surreal sequence involves an attempt to recruit McKenzie, one agent’s drunken mission to sexually harass a nearby publicist, and three souvenir coins embossed with the slogan: “In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor.” McKenzie surely benefited from celebrity access, but he was also blessed with Silverman’s journalistic bonafides. In June 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried started DMing him on Twitter; Silverman requested an interview. Weeks later, the pair landed an on-camera conversation with the FTX founder, four months before his company’s collapse.

IN MANY RESPECTS, McKenzie picked an auspicious time to start reporting. Though he lost his Bitcoin bet (it has still not fallen below $10,000), his prediction would prove mostly right. Last May, the crypto market cratered. A top-ten currency called TerraUSD—an algorithmic stablecoin whose “peg” to the US dollar relied entirely on its sister token, Luna—entered what’s known as a “death spiral.” Both tokens raced toward zero, wiping out an estimated $45 billion from the crypto market in a week. Terra’s founder Do Kwon fled to Singapore, then Serbia. But the industry couldn’t outrun contagion. Alex Mashinsky’s Celsius froze withdrawals, then filed for bankruptcy. Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) saw its stake in Luna—once estimated to be a half-billion dollars—plunge “to just $604.” In July, 3AC filed for bankruptcy, as its founders also  reportedly fled abroad. One of its creditors, Voyager Digital, filed for bankruptcy the same week. The Winklevoss twins’ Genesis Global Capital, another creditor, was out $2.3 billion. Crypto’s self-appointed savior Sam Bankman-Fried tried to bail out survivors. But just months later, his own exchange imploded in perhaps the most spectacular crypto failure the industry has so far seen. The bubble burst in real time, and each rupture brought new revelations of malfeasance by the colorful personalities in charge.

McKenzie’s timely book research gave him a front-row seat to the fiasco and in-person interviews with its main architects before their lawyers told them to pipe down. A Bankman-Fried interview is hardly brag-worthy on its own—until recently, the crypto thought leader was doling out on-record comments like candy. But that McKenzie grilled him while the media was still fawning speaks to the actor’s instinct—which, in at least this respect, was stronger than Michael Lewis’s. The latter had also been following Bankman-Fried since before FTX’s bankruptcy but with a different angle. Before SBF’s public downfall, McKenzie notes, Lewis had been “in thrall with the boy wonder.” (Lewis has likely changed his mind but his book on SBF doesn’t arrive until October.) To that end, McKenzie’s timing has only gotten better. The book’s rollout coincided with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s first major charges against Binance and Coinbase, the last twin bastions of crypto-world respectability.

But in another sense, crypto’s cartoonish collapse has dulled the impact of McKenzie’s thesis. It seems obvious now that crypto consists mostly of scams, though it’s not clear to me that anyone was especially surprised. Even before the crypto winter, traders would readily admit that the industry was full of Ponzis and rug pulls and outright theft. McKenzie receives that attitude with amazement: “I’m not kidding,” he writes, “practically everyone I spoke to at crypto conferences and other public events both admitted to being scammed and accepted it as if it was almost obligatory.” To him, this “shared understanding” was evidence that crypto resembled a “cult.” But perhaps it’s evidence that McKenzie and crypto loyalists have been on something like the same page. They both know it’s gambling, and that the house always wins.

One of crypto’s peculiarities is an unusual consensus among its pundits; skeptics and boosters may draw wildly different conclusions, but they agree on many particulars. One man’s unregulated casino is another man’s unregulated casino, and this can undercut a clean gotcha. Toward the end of the book, for example, McKenzie ties crypto’s rise to the online poker boom of the early aughts, when virtual blackjack or Texas hold’em rooms had grown into a multibillion-dollar business. A congressional bill in 2006 took out most of the domestic poker companies, and a crackdown in April 2011—known in the poker community as “Black Friday”—shuttered the offshore stragglers. Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper two years into that demise, and the original code, McKenzie observes, included a “poker lobby, a framework from which a virtual poker game could be built.” It’s a great detail and one not widely reported. But it’s not exactly a departure from what anyone already knew. “One day we may find out Satoshi’s true motivations,” McKenzie concludes. “For now, all we know is that they were initially interested in poker.” You don’t say.

It’s clear that, as of now, the crypto impact crater was much smaller than McKenzie anticipated. The subprime mortgage crash cost millions their homes and triggered a global recession that stretched on for years. Crypto’s collapse was, in many ways, “faster and dumber and more complete” than the global financial crisis, as Matt Levine wrote in Bloomberg last year. “But it did much less harm, because the damage was confined mostly to crypto.” There were real, devastating losses—losses that, a JPMorgan Chase study found, hit low-income traders harder, as they bought later and at higher prices. But those same traders tended to invest in small amounts precisely because of crypto’s known risks. The bigger players, per that same study, had higher incomes. They also had more crypto—of which, as Mashinsky himself said, just “ten to fifteen percent” was real. The gamblers had been playing with house money, and that’s what many of them lost.

There’s always a chance that McKenzie’s prediction, like his early bet against Bitcoin, has again come too soon. The problem of the subprime mortgage crisis was not just that the assets were risky; it was that banks and savers thought they were safe. The credit-rating agencies had become complicit, doling out good grades on bundles of bad loans. They “performed that alchemy that converted the securities from F-rated to A-rated,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz told Bloomberg in 2008. Few would accuse crypto of seeming too safe. But now, after standing at the sidelines for years, the SEC has finally entered the arena. Its twin lawsuits allege that Coinbase and Binance have each been operating as a securities broker, exchange, and clearinghouse without registering as any of them and that, as a result, they have avoided the disclosure regimens that have governed such industries for years. If the SEC wins, it could effectively wipe out the domestic crypto trade, moving the business offshore. But it could also alchemize a new era of regulated tokens—an outcome that may stabilize crypto or lend it a veneer of respectability. It raises the question of what crypto might look like absent overt scams and colorful characters, and whether we can live with what’s left.

Tarpley Hitt is a writer in New York and an editor of The Drift. Her history of Barbie will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2024.

Table of Contents

Bookforum: Summer 2023

FEATURES

The Story Reteller

Shocks to the System

Radical Attention

COLUMNS

THE EDITORS on the return of Bookforum

CHARLOTTE SHANE on the Beach Boys

FICTION

ED PARK: Robert Plunket's My Search for Warren Harding

JANIQUE VIGIER: Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos

JANE HU: Emma Cline's The Guest

MINA TAVAKOLI: Henry Bean’s The Nenoquich

ANGELO HERNANDEZ-SIAS: Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

LISA BORST: Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting

OMARI WEEKES: Maya Binyam’s Hangman

JAMIE HOOD: Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man

FIONA MAAZEL: Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story

NONFICTION

DENNIS LIM: Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors

SASHA FRERE-JONES: John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

RYAN RUBY: Brian Dillon's Affinities: On Art and Fascination

HARMONY HOLIDAY: Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes

JO LIVINGSTONE: Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words

MATTHEW SHEN GOODMAN: Michael Thomsen’s Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions & Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 Billion Industry

JENNIFER KRASINSKI: Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever

HANNAH ZEAVIN: Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

CHARLIE TYSON: Ross Benjamin’s The Diaries of Franz Kafka

JOHANNA FATEMAN: Anna Cassel: The Saga of the Rose

JESSE BARRON: Nick McDonell’s Quiet Street: On American Privilege

TARPLEY HITT: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman’s Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud