WRB—Apr. 22, 2026
“tedious and unoriginal”
If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of managing to edit the Washington Review of Books, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.
Links:
In Socrates on the Beach, Bennett Sims on person and ending:
There’s a larger lesson here, I think, about endings: how a story’s most unexpected and necessary developments can be emergent properties of its style; how, whenever you hit a wall (or some wallpaper) in a draft, the path forward may already have been prepared somewhere behind you. We can almost imagine Gilman arriving at “in spite of you and Jane” in this way. We can imagine her, for instance, drafting the line “I’ve got out at last” and getting stuck on it: it’s good, she feels, but merely good, the ending is still missing something. We can imagine her reading over the story from the beginning, pausing at “what is one to do?”, and gradually coming to see it: how the answer to this question—the answer to the ending—is embedded in the form of the question itself, in its shift to 3rd-person. That is what one is to do. And so we can imagine Gilman’s thrill in returning to the final paragraph and adding “in spite of you and Jane.” Now that that line has been written . . . now the story can end.
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication on the sweet Thames:
Ian Penman reviews a book about the Beach Boys (Surf’s Up: Brian WIlson and the Beach Boys, by Peter Doggett, 2025 in the UK)
The progression from the Beach Boys’ early commodity pop to Pet Sounds (1966) to SMiLE (1967) seems to mirror a broader cultural shift: clean-cut collegiate larks to reefer madness to psychedelic revelation. One of the biggest distributors of LSD in California was a gang of working-class ex-surfers called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who merged Eastern mysticism with psychonaut politics and heavy-duty illegality. Chasing the white light and the dark sun. Chasing the memory of a high that will never be recaptured. John Milius’s wistful Big Wednesday (1978), set between 1962 and 1974, tracks the difficult transition to adulthood of three young surfers. Offscreen, two of the film’s lead actors—Gary Busey and Jan-Michael Vincent—had their own gnarly difficulties. The dream of those early surfer-boy Beach Boys songs inculcated the promise of smiley teenage omnipotence. But how was that promise to be fulfilled in a culture that allowed too many men to drift through life as if it were indeed an “endless summer,” in which they never had to grow up or make amends or lose their appetite for self-distraction? By 1975 a hollowed-out, disconsolate Wilson had retreated to his bed, where the porous line between dream and reality washed away completely. The safe space of “In My Room” had become a sorry terminus: drawn blinds, junk food and an ogreish need for drugs, heroin included. A beached boy. Willful son to blotted-out sun.
[Penman:
He just ups and says out loud whatever’s on his mind or in his heart, without any masks or baffles or qualifications. A complicated tenderness, with no macho bluff. Which is the reason so many men feel close to Brian Wilson in a way they never do to Mick Jagger.
Well, I feel closer to Jagger than to Wilson (not as if “Managing Editor prefers posturing and perverse intellectual to uncalculated naïf” will come as a surprise to regular readers of this newsletter). I say that to explain the source of my belief that Penman misstates the appeal of Wilson; or, at least, he’s wrong to identify this up and saying it with the lyrics. It’s in the music. Pet Sounds and SMiLE especially are the work of a genius with no real idea what he’s doing—nothing sounded like this before, and very little would ever sound like it again—and, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and is working with no real model, he has nothing to fall back on besides his own belief that the sounds he’s putting together to convey his emotional state sound good. And he pulls it off. This achievement is far more moving than something like the lyrics of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Plenty of ’60s rock has stupid lyrics, but none of it is as wrong about the world as that song’s attitude of “if I could just get married all my problems would go away.” —Steve]
Christian Lorentzen reviews Ben Lerner’s latest (Transcription, April 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 1, 2026; we linked to earlier reviews there and in WRB—Apr. 8. 2026.]:
Transcription is set in 2024, but Joe Biden is never mentioned, though the place where he funded a genocide is, and there’s a lot about Covid. It’s a novel about an older generation that is faltering and soon to be gone, dysfunctional youth and adults in between who are prone to fucking up (though dropping your phone in the sink is hardly a Hunter Biden-level fuck-up). Emmie’s failure to thrive might be an allegory for the novel, not this slender and subtle one, but the novel as a form, crowded out as it is by all those screens and other junk food, the broader culture contemplating offing itself in the name of AI. When Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) considers that the poetry he reads and wants to write could never effect a political revolution or overthrow the world economic system, it makes him want to swallow his year’s supply of white pills. I found all the stuff about phones and screen time in Transcription tedious and unoriginal, but I see its broader appeal. Novelists enjoy writing about these anxieties and people enjoy reading about them. They are relatable for now; Thomas likens phones to secular details in an icon painting: a newspaper, a pocketwatch, a tallow candle—details that can be burned off without a loss of meaning. That material seems to me the sugar-coating around a more bitter pill: a novel about mortality with strong suggestions of suicidal tendencies, themes that are difficult to address directly, subjects that wither with too much explanation or direct confession.
[I talked at some length about the function in cultural criticism of people in obviously depraved relationships with their phones in WRB—Dec. 3, 2025; most of what I said there applies to novels as well. The self-abasement that is also self-exultation, the condemnations of self that are secretly condemnations of others, the elaborate ruses necessary to talk frankly about wanting to die—all this reminds me of The Fall by Camus:
Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I” to the “we.” When I get to “This is what we are,” the trick has been played and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.
—Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
Why baseball fans are like that
A Poem by John Donne, and whether Dr. Johnson was thinking of it when critiquing Lycidas
New frontiers in Petrarchan self-obsession
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
