WRB—Apr. 1, 2026

“number of walls”

Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to manage to edit the WRB

Links:

Reviews:

• In Engelsberg Ideas, Boyd Tonkin reviews the Rijksmuseum’s exhibition of art inspired by the works of Ovid:

  After the Renaissance, the Metamorphoses became much more than a popular encyclopedia of the Greco-Roman legends later labelled as “mythology.” The epic came to define, almost to monopolize, the storytelling of antiquity, so that Ovid’s iteration of these motifs served as the template for their transmission. This familiarity, and ubiquity, can dull their force and muffle their shock. The most irresistible pieces on display in Amsterdam restore the shattering violence or strangeness of the moment, and process, of change. Titian’s Danäe, suffused with violating gold; Michelangelo’s Leda, the original lost but present here in a magnificent engraving, as the divine fowl entangles its victim in an invasive sensuous stranglehold; Caravaggio’s Narcissus, not idly inspecting his pretty face in the pool but actively, desperately enamored of the self as other: such works channel the uncanny terror of becoming after a divine desire attacks.

  [The familiarity and the ubiquity contribute to this dulness, but the treatments some of the myths get do as well. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne is the world’s most skilled technical exercise.

  “Suffused with violating gold”! Ovid already links Danäe to Midas when he tells that story later in the Metamorphoses: “The water where he washt his hands did from his hands so ronne, / As Danae might have beene therwith beguyld” (as Arthur Golding has it). It also reminds me of Cassius Dio passing on the story that, after defeating Crassus at the battle of Carrhae, the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat in mockery, which is taking “suffused” and “violating” very literally.

  This same sense of excess characterizes Golding’s sets of oppositions to describe Narcissus. It reads as almost proto-metaphysical:

  All these he woondreth to beholde, for which (as I doe gather)

  Himselfe was to be woondred at, or to be pitied rather.

  He is enamored of himselfe for want of taking heede,

  And where he lykes another thing, he lykes himselfe in deede.

  He is the partie whome he wooes, and suter that doth wooe,

  He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe.

  O Lord how often did he kisse that false deceitfull thing?

  How often did he thrust his armes midway into the spring

  To have embraste the necke he saw and could not catch himselfe?

  (Perhaps this would have been unremarkable, stylistically, in 1620, but not in 1567. “He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe” sounds a lot like Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe,” another proto-metaphysical poem.) The circularity of the descriptions, seeming to move away from Narcissus repeatedly only to always return to him, parallel his unquenchable desire for himself.

  And Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” makes, beyond its smaller synecdoches, one change serve as synecdoche for all change, moving from sex to history to death:

  A shudder in the loins engenders there

  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

  And Agamemnon dead.

  “Invasive sensuous stranglehold” is a great phrase too. —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Patricia Lockwood reviews a reissue of Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927, 2025) and a book about Willa Cather’s trips to the American Southwest that inspired the novel (The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, by Garrett Peck, March):

  Thea is unsexed by her vocation, her ambition, her choice of lover—and also by her genius, a quality we recognize but are unable to quantify. When we are inside her consciousness, this quality is less apparent than when she is seen through the eyes of others: Ray, the railway brakeman who loves her; Doctor Archie, who first notices her talent during a house call; and others who view her almost as a natural phenomenon. The model for Thea was the opera singer Olive Fremstad, one of three performers Cather profiled for McClure’s in 1913. She was Swedish and had marvelously substantial arms. “Cather went to interview her in her New York apartment,” Doris Grumbach writes in her introduction to The Song of the Lark. “She saw her transformed, when the opera house needed her to fill in at the last moment, from a weary, wan woman to a glittering, radiant star.” A version of this appears towards the end of the book when Thea, who has achieved her success and whose exhaustion is now total, is called in to play Sieglinde in Die Walküre. At once, weariness transforms into fire.

  “The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification,” Cather wrote in her essay “The Novel Démeublé” from 1922. “The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.” Learn to sing, then learn to unsing. Learn how to touch and pass on.

  [Some of this is also true of Sieglinde. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Rowan Williams reviews some recent novels involving clergy (My Lover, the Rabbi, by Wayne Koestenbaum, March; A Private Man, by Stephanie Sy-Quia, April 14; and Communion, by Jon Doyle, April 2):

  It means the lines between failure, suicidal recklessness and exemplary fidelity are pretty shaky. Doyle offers a story with something of the same unsettling challenge as the Passion narrative itself, leaving us to think through what kinds of loyalty matter most, where heroism ends and folly begins. But ultimately, what all these fictions—and so many other novelistic explorations of clerical identity—place on the agenda is this: what if there were a place to stand beyond the realm of majority opinion, institutional compliance, the conventions that make someone popular? And what if that place were not a place of privileged freedom to ignore and demean the reality of others in the name of unchallengeable power, sanctioned by the divine, but a place of both absurdity and extreme jeopardy? What if this were the place whose existence was testified to by the life of the priest, pastor, rabbi, whatever—even when these people so regularly themselves failed to occupy that place convincingly? Is this what makes fiction about the clergy—behaving or misbehaving—still a compelling way of asking where freedom really lies and how it works in a culture ever more in love with simple, authoritarian answers?

  [“Majority opinion, institutional compliance, the conventions that make someone popular”—in other words, the bourgeois attitudes about money and marriage that have been central to the novel as an art form. The clergy are in this world but their presence points to methods of evaluating human life beyond it. All those discussions of what makes a good clergyman in Mansfield Park are not intended to resolve anything about how a clergyman should be; they instead allow the Crawfords to reveal the limitations of their thinking. To them, the whole thing is folly. And, as Paul says, “the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” —Steve]

• In The Atlantic, Robert Rubsam reviews a reissued novel by Charlotte Wood (The Natural Way of Things, 2015, March):

  This limits Natural Way as a novel; worse, it dramatically dulls the impact of Wood’s critique. She wants us to see how a society that treats women as naturally inferior traps, exploits, and denigrates them. Unfortunately, her plot confines these characters to another narrow set of roles, and most of them are portrayed as incapable of leaving their cage. The novel ends with the group of women gleefully giving up their own lives in exchange for small bags of luxury cosmetics—a metaphor so reductive and condescending that it scans as misogynistic. How else to read this moment but as the culmination of that “natural way of things,” which pins the blame on contemporary, commercialized womanhood? They might as well be doing it to themselves.

  [Roger Ebert’s review of A Clockwork Orange (1971):

  Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization, and not by creeping fascism—but by the producer, director, and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick.

  Did the characters do that, or did the artist make them? —Steve]

• In The New Republic, Hannah Rosefield reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book today.]:

  The ability to dissolve boundaries in this way, to make the individual social, is what originally drew the narrator to Thomas. During his breakdown in college, he started hearing voices. Thomas’ insistence that “we all hear phantom voices [ . . . ] hallucination, too, is social” was one of the many things he said and did, the narrator tells us, that “might have saved me.” Yes, there are numerous moments in their unrecorded interview that are unpleasantly destabilizing—but aren’t those just the disorientations of Thomas’s nonagenarian memory loss? Or perhaps the narrator’s own twitchiness about being separated from his phone?

  Max’s depiction of Thomas suggests otherwise. “There was no point, none, in telling him about [Emmie’s] struggles,” he says to the narrator. “Just as there was no point, there had never been any point, in telling him about my own personal problems.” Some time ago, he recalls, his partner had a biopsy to test for cancer; when Max confided his fears, Thomas’ response—at least, in Max’s memory—was “Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed.” As a parody of Lerner’s own tendencies, it’s a darkly funny moment—but the concern it betrays is real. Max’s description of his father calls attention to how often Thomas’ words to the narrator in the book’s first section were dismissive or coercive, rerouting their conversation to Thomas’ own preoccupations. The details of the narrator’s dream are unimportant, Thomas insists; the narrator’s desire to establish the facts of Thomas’ upbringing is “silly.”

  [I sort of resent the implication that my preferred approach to WRB editorial notes is basically that of an elderly man free-associating and rambling about whatever is in his mind, but I guess it’s not wrong. —Steve]

• Phil Christman reviews Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, “an eight-hour long play that represents but—importantly—does not adapt The Great Gatsby”:

  Still, The Great Gatsby the novel is not as funny as Gatz the show. When Shepherd kindly made a guest appearance in my wife’s intro-acting class this week, he apparently gave a bit of an explanation as to why. Having read the novel many hundreds of times now, and memorized every word, he knows The Great Gatsby probably better than anyone else now living, and he doesn’t like any of the movie versions. His biggest complaint about them is that the movies always try to portray the glitz of Gatsby’s parties and the glamor of Daisy Buchanan’s social world, when the point of the novel is that these things are a) completely illusory and b) exist only via the power of suggestion, which is the very power that the novel exercises over us through the miracle not of Daisy’s “low, thrilling voice,” which we can’t hear, nor Gatsby’s all-forgiving smile, which we can’t see, but through Nick’s description of these things. Everything we know we know through Nick. So a version of the text that is true to Fitzgerald’s vision will keep us honed in on that. The actors, who are all clearly capable of doing the story in a straightforwardly tragic register and making us all weep profusely, instead go for a slightly cartoonish, in places almost slapstick representation of the scenes that Nick describes, and they switch back and forth between regarding Nick as a narrator-director of the action and as a fellow-character. Their eyes communicate over third and fourth walls, and the number of walls changes from second to second.

  [The problem with The Great Gatsby is that everybody read it for the first time in high school, which makes it difficult to distinguish the novel as it actually is from the novel as everyone half-remembers it from a while back. (Personally, I refuse to re-read it; when I read it in high school I found it perfect, and I’m sure I wouldn’t if I returned to it. I won’t be borne back ceaselessly into the past! I’ll just refuse to look at it! —Steve]

• In the Journal, Belinda Lanks reviews a book about defining colors in the dictionary (True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink, by Kory Stamper, March):

  Ms. Stamper, a former Merriam-Webster lexicographer, traces the story back to I. H. Godlove, a young chemist the publisher hired in 1931 to help bring scientific rigor to the slippery business of defining colors. His entries read like a strange hybrid of laboratory report and poetic comparison. One entry describes begonia as “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral . . . and bluer and stronger than sweet william—called also gaiety.”

  By the early twentieth century, color had become a scientific and industrial problem as much as an aesthetic one. Synthetic dyes—dominated by German companies before World War I—had transformed color into a global commodity, while wartime shortages exposed how little standardization existed in describing it. One manufacturer’s idea of khaki or olive drab, for example, might not match another’s—a serious problem when thousands of yards of uniform fabric had to be dyed the same shade.

  [Merriam-Webster is all very fine, but I wanted to see how a real pro does it and so looked up colors in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Red: “Of the colour of blood, of one of the primitive colours, which is subdivided into many; as scarlet, vermilion, crimson.” Yellow: “Being of a bright glaring colour, as gold.” Green: “Having a colour formed commonly by compounding blue and yellow; of the colour of the leaves of trees or herbs. The green colour is said to be most favourable to the sight.” Brown: “The name of a colour, compounded of black and any other colour.” Poor blue doesn’t get a description: “one of the seven original colours.” And purple gets two definitions: “Red tinctured with blue. It was among the ancients considered as the noblest, and as the regal colour; whether their purple was the same with ours, is not fully known” and “In poetry, red.” (I’m not sure what Dr. Johnson was thinking about when he questioned whether the purple of classical antiquity was the same as ours; in his defense, it’s not like he had access to photographs of Byzantine mosaics. “Wine-dark sea,” maybe. No doubt he would be pleased to know that we have reconstructed Tyrian purple, and it is, in fact, purple.) —Steve]

N.B.:

• “Cucumber: The Plant That Moves More than You Think” [“My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow.” —Steve]

• 12 tons of Kit Kats were stolen in Italy [“The candy bars were molded after race cars, still featuring KitKat’s iconic chocolate-covered wafers,” the Guardian reports. Is it really a Kit Kat (I’m not indulging this stylization) if it doesn’t have the long skinny pieces you can break off? Isn’t that the whole point? —Steve]

• Americans are buying vacant Japanese homes.

• Among the things baseball teams are giving away this year include team-branded fishing lures, a Grateful Dead tie-dye puffer vest, a hat reading “BAD DAY TO BE A [hot dog emoji],” and a George Costanza calzone bobblehead. [America’s real national pastime: junk. —Steve]

Poem:

“Chiaroscuro” by Isabelle Baafi

ask me about my first crush my brother piling sand on me till i couldn’t breathe he gave me a hammer i didn’t use it but i took its power son rise son threat son drinks the rain that pools in collarbones mother’s hands raking my scalp yesterday i pressed her sponge to the lake to clean it now the lake is gone it is easier to lasso the moon than to help your father lay down to die but what if the tomatoes never went bad what if splinters are a warning to run i once found a ransom note in my ear the face in the photo was mine i pawned everything went to the drop-off point no one ever came to set me free give me a bed with no crumbs in it pluck the fishbones from my throat i forgot where i hid the matches and after that it was easier just to live in the dark

[I enjoyed the integration of spaces into the prose poem format, modifying the linebreak but nonetheless controlling the reader’s speed. I thought the spaces were particularly effective in the moments of repetition, “son rise / son threat // son drinks” and “but what if // the tomatoes never went bad / what if splinters / are a warning to run,” as they slowed my eye, but did not insist on the vehemence of a line break.

This piece also reminded me a little of Andrea Gibson, who was an artist of some significance for me in my adolescence. My taste has evolved since then, but I’m seeking to renew my appreciation for work that is unafraid of sentiment or even theatricality. My favorite lines here are: “i once found a ransom note / in my ear / the face in the photo was mine,” which elicited a shiver of anxiety, and “i forgot where i hid / the matches / and after that / it was easier / just to live in the dark,” which I read as an outbreath of frustration rather than futility. —K. T.]

Upcoming books:

Out April 3:

University of Chicago Press: Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II by Anthony Kaldellis

Seagull Books: Within, Without: On Two Cities by Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 7

Transcription: A Novel
by Ben Lerner

From the publisher: The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’ house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Also out Tuesday:

Biblioasis: On Sports by David Macfarlane

Liveright: Canzoniere: A New Translation by Petrarch, translated from the Italian by A. M. Juster [We linked to a piece by Juster on Petrarch in WRB—Feb. 18, 2026.]

New York Review Books: The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lehman

Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy by Clare Carlisle [We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 5, 2025.]

OR Books: Duchamp Takes New York by John Strausbaugh

Princeton University Press: The Roman World War: From the Ides of March to Cleopatra’s Suicide by Giusto Traina, translated from the French by Malcolm DeBevoise

Simon & Schuster: In Trees: An Exploration by Robert Moor

W. W. Norton: Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World by Anne Enright

What we’re reading:

Steve read more of Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love by R. Howard Bloch (1991). [Haven’t figured out Petrarch yet. —Steve]

Critical notes:

• Jorge Luis Borges on Edward FitzGerald (h/t Patrick Kurp):

  Seven centuries go by with their enlightenments and agonies and transformations, and in England a man is born, FitzGerald, less intellectual than Omar, but perhaps more sensitive and sadder. FitzGerald knows that his true fate is literature, and he practices it with indolence and tenacity. He reads and rereads the Quixote, which seems to him almost the best of all books (but he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and “dear old Virgil”), and his love extends to the dictionary in which he looks for words.

  [They never made them more sensitive and more sad than they did in the fin de siècle. And I typed “Edmund FitzGerald” the first three times. You know. —Steve.]