WRB—Apr. 26, 2025
“funhouse fun”
Too old to be the managing editor of the Washington Review of Books, too young to die.
N.B.:
May’s WRB Presents, featuring readings by Carlo Massimo, Molly McCloskey, Kelly Sather, and Ena Selimović, will take place on Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 p.m. at Sudhouse DC. Readings begin at 7.
Links:
In Granta, an interview with Renata Adler about her memories of Hannah Arendt:
Editor: You’ve pointed to how Arendt achieves a special kind of authority in her prose. And you’ve also respectfully pointed to how this authority in her writing, alongside a drive toward fundamental concerns, comes with certain costs. The authority, you suggest, can sometimes crowd out precisely the kind of dialogue she aims to build with her readers. What’s your own feeling about authority in your own writing?
Adler: I don’t think in terms of authority. When I think about prose I think about Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, that kind of crisp style. Of course I don’t write anything like that, except that I sort of try to in fiction. What’s a good sentence? That kind of crisp . . . something. Hannah writes in such a different way. So, no, I don’t feel the authority thing, and now that you mention it, I wonder if Hannah did.
Editor: This crispness you pursue on the page—what is it exactly?
Adler: One thing it is, much to my astonishment, is monosyllables. I like sentences to end on the monosyllable. Or I really just tremendously like monosyllables. That’s not a Hannah Arendt thing. But that’s only in fiction. I don’t really seem to do that in non-fiction, where the sentences are sometimes longer than I remember. But I do care about the word. Some writers do, and some writers don’t. Some writers care about momentum or rhythm, but I think I’m very aware, maybe too aware, of every single word, although I bet an awful lot go by, because of course you can’t be aware of every single word. Hannah was also aware of every single word, but in quite a different way. She didn’t attach as much importance to cadence or rhythm.
[This issue of Granta also contains a 6,000-word memorial of Arendt by Adler that she wrote years ago and decided not to publish at the time.
Cf. Matthew Zipf’s piece on—among other things—Adler’s use of commas (linked to in WRB—Apr. 23, 2025), which suggests in its own way that Adler is more interested in the word than the rhythm.
I think Adler’s approach to authority is more or less the right one—any decent writer will have some, but making “authority” the goal in your writing is about as likely to succeed as making “happiness” the goal in your personal life. If you try to find it directly you never will; you have to let it show up while you’re working on other things, and of those (at least, once you have something to say) style is the most important. —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Marat Grinberg on Stanisław Lem as a Jewish writer:
In the text, Rappaport himself wonders why the German officer, who was in full control of the condemned Jews, needed a volunteer at all. His explanation presents Nazi evil as a parallel to the hopelessness of cosmic contact: “Although he spoke to us, [ . . . ] we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human [ . . . ] Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have.” This Nazi officer—“a young deity of war,” a figure of “fate, which one did not have to explain”—is like a transcendent and malignant force with which it is impossible to communicate. While in the cosmic case, the lack of communication is “received metaphorically, as a kind of fable,” here “it is completely literal”: radically dehumanized by the Nazis, the Jews are the human “species” confronting the inexplicable and all-too-real horror of annihilation.
Reviews:
Two in Bookforum:
Jane Hu reviews Katie Kitamura’s new novel (Audition, April 8) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 5, 2024; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Mar. 22, 2024 and an interview with Kitamura in WRB—Apr. 9, 2025.]:
The formal strangeness of Kitamura’s novels might be attributed to how they subvert the natural laws of cause and effect, as if to put the emotional climax before the narrative development, the punchline before the set-up. The way her plots unfold can be hard to describe, partly because their generic outlines fail to get at the heart of the matter. Organized around archetypal situations like murder, infidelity, and orphanhood, her books seem to arrive pre-scripted. Their surprising weirdness—what makes them utterly uncanny reading experiences—lies in the sense that you’ve kind of maybe already read a version of this story. That feeling is your cue to look even closer—at someone’s flickering glance, an affected gesture or awkward pause, which might add up to a performance so total you’re finally unsure whether it’s a performance at all. Summary might approach the dramatic irony and rhetorical bluntness of these books, but something more alien is at play in the way her narratives take shape, assuming one configuration and then sharply realigning it. Kitamura’s narrators function like optical illusions, revealing themselves to readers like magic eye puzzles, morphing between discordant views of what appears to be the same scene. As the narrator of Audition reflects during a rehearsal, “There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
[There’s the Baldwin quote: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” But there’s also Sidney:
You that poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizen’d wit do sing:
You take wrong ways . . .
You’re always kind of maybe already reading a version of something else. —Steve]
Second, Jessi Jezewska Stevens reviews a collection of Lynne Tilman’s stories (Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories, March):
To resist death and keep our friends alive are among the very best reasons to write. Tillman shows us how, through a legerdemain of absence, swerve, perpetual motion, and delay. If she ever appears hostile to linear narrative, it’s in the manner by which we criticize most those we love best: we want better for them. But Tillman is also aware of the inevitable trade-offs. Constant digression can make it difficult to sustain or relax into any one emotion. In matters of romance, especially, the mode of elliptical anti-progress—of keeping all the plates spinning, all the balls in the air at once—made me reflect on the occasional temptation to surrender, nevertheless, to more traditional narrative comforts.
It’s a temptation not even these puckish stories can escape and is in fact part of what drives them. “For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers,” begins Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Not really: throughout Tillman’s collection, characters are at once drawn to and repelled by the temporary loss of control—another kind of death?—that falling in love and funhouses require.
[“So long lives this . . . ” —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Lisa Halliday reviews Claire Messud’s new novel (This Strange Eventful History, 2024):
For all this baton passing, the novel reads with a gorgeous fluidity, its perspectives changing subtly, sometimes within a single paragraph. Observations that could be attributed to a character, the narrator, or both imbue small details with resonance, as when Gaston wipes his mouth using a consulate napkin embroidered with France’s escutcheon: “Someone had sewn the stitches; someone had ironed the linen. So many lives in their hands.” The frequent yet judicious interpolation of French captures how multilingual people think and speak: with much spontaneous toggling and only intermittently conscious association. With Lili Lebach, “Denise inhabited herself fully, she felt bien dans sa peau.” It wouldn’t do as well to use the English here—to say that Denise felt at ease—because Denise feels most at ease in French, inhabiting it like a skin. While François walks his dog in America, a light rain falls “at an angle, hitting him in the face—the word crachat came to mind; though to whom might he say it?” And though three times in the novel the teenage years are referred to as “the ungrateful age,” it’s the first reference, when the expression appears also in French, that’s most evocative, because l’âge ingrat sounds more deliciously sullen, and grating, as adolescent ingratitude can be.
N.B. (cont.):
The ice trade is back; people are shipping ice from Greeland’s glaciers around the world.
The time Joseph Addison dropped his notes in a coffee house (h/t Patrick Kurp).
The giant hogweed in art. [A plant perhaps most noticeable for its phototoxicity; as Gilles Clément reports here:
To be burned by giant hogweeds, we need to proceed to an “exchange of fluids”: first we must sweat, then get in contact with the sap, and finally expose ourselves to the sun. June is the recommended month. Lesions appear within the hour. Recovery takes a little under a month.
Some of the historical headlines have been a bit more fun: “Giant hogweed burns children,” “Plant hazard traced.” I suspect it was headlines like the first that inspired Genesis to write a song about the giant hogweed’s quest to get revenge on humanity. Not a band I particularly care for—the music is too frequently goofy, the English mysticism is all derivative (“Dancing with the Moonlit Knight,” one of their best songs, takes eight minutes to produce half the effect Blake obtains in five seconds with “I wander thro’ each charter’d street / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow”), and the merits of introducing the world to Peter Gabriel are outweighed by the demerits for introducing the world to Phil Collins. But I will give them this: no band has ever been more suited to depicting the giant hogweed’s quest for revenge in song. —Steve]
New issues:
Bookforum Spring 2025 [As linked to above.]
Granta 171: Dead Friends [As linked to above.]
New Left Review 152 • Mar/Apr 2025 [As linked to below.]
Steve McMichael died on Wednesday, April 23. R.I.P.
David Thomas died on Wednesday, April 23. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Hap” by Thomas Hardy
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
[I was talking with someone at the NYC Salon last night about Hardy and this poem came up. I think it clarifies that the reason Tess and Jude and all the rest of them fail and die is not that some vengeful god is out to get them—not even because that vengeful author, Thomas Hardy, is out to get them. They suffer and die due to coincidence, yes, but most of all because they were born into Victorian England. For all Hardy’s bleakness he also has a reformist streak.
I also insist that “Thomas Hardy and the Purblind Doomsters” should be the name of a band in a Pynchonesque novel about the ’60s. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Penguin Press | April 29
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
From the publisher: What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.
Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.
The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.
Also out Tuesday:
Astra House: Fireweed: A Novel by Lauren Haddad
What we’re reading:
Steve read a little more of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Critical notes:
- on those lines of Seamus Heaney’s that everyone loves to quote:
Heaney, on the other hand, gives us a metaphorical “rhyme” between Hope and History—a fancy way of saying that, sometimes, things turn out as you hoped they would—and a “tidal wave / Of justice” which produces a “sea-change.” Troy, as the party responsible for the war, did indeed experience something like a “tidal wave of justice” when the Greek armies obliterated it, but the metaphor, which should mean that the island will be swamped like Atlantis (those are pearls that were his eyes), is rather less in tune with the Irish tenor, where we are vaguely swept along to a “further shore” “on the far side of revenge.” The imagery seems to cohere, in that it all has something to do with the ocean, but doesn’t bear much weight—not unlike the eye-rolling assertion that two words rhyme which manifestly don’t. Heaney also tells us, otiosely, “No poem or play or song / Can fully right a wrong”—but can they do so mostly? partially? at all? Why not (e.g.) “No poem or play or song / Can make up for a wrong”? The understandable desire to say something grand and uplifting gets the better of Heaney here and there.
[The imagery coheres even less than this to me. The phrasing Childers identifies—“tidal wave,” “sea-change”—is just as violent and full of death, if not more so, than all the hurts of human life that came before it in the poem. The poem does nothing with this, and even the reference to birth at the end speaks only of the cry of new life and not the pain of giving birth. Heaney is a sensitive enough poet that the images come to his mind, and he writes them down, but without realizing what they introduce into the work. (“Thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn” puts it very simply.) And this connection between destruction and creation is in both the paganism that makes up the source material and the Christianity that colors Heaney’s reading of it. There is something of both Heraclitus’
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger. But he undergoes transformations, just as fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named after the savor of each.
and Malachi’s
But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap.
here. The whole thing feels a lot like an attempt at Auden, but Auden would have pulled at the contradictions and was better at avoiding writing otiose nothings. —Steve]
Gay Talese (interviewed by Harry Lambert in The New Statesman):
Journalism, which is supposed to be of the day, is in my case something that could live for 50 years. Why? Craft. My father was a tailor. I have clothes that are 60 years old. The buttons don’t fall off, the stitches don’t come apart. They’re made with affection and attention to detail and idealism. I believe in that. If you adhere to that with real faith, what you do will have a long, long life.
In the New Left Review, Lola Seaton on identifying objects as art:
But if Comedian is a partial joke, one might wonder who the butt of it is. If the banana is an immanent critique of the artworld as a fatuous system of commodification—a comment on the fact that “anything can be art” and sold as such—its being so enthusiastically welcomed by that system and so profitably commodified has, at a minimum, ambiguous implications. A hundred years after Duchamp’s urinal was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists, it’s hard to regard similar gestures as critical, a genuine challenge to the artworld; difficult to say, when a banana is sold for millions of dollars, who is having the last laugh. . . .
Comedian could be seen as a costly, nihilistic joke, one that mocks not only the artworld but other artists, mocks art itself, mocks its audience: snubbing, even ridiculing, our offer of attention, abusing our “willingness to trust the object.” De Maria’s allegedly brass-filled hole, Hughes noted, required “an act of faith.” With an artwork like Comedian, it can seem as though there is little left to believe in. And if the artworld needs “injections of distrust” to justify itself as trust intermediary, then this implies a complicity between artists and art dealers—between those who make art and those who sell it—working together to create just enough uncertainty to sustain profits without undermining demand.