WRB—Aug. 10, 2024
No one knows what the Washington Review of Books means. But it’s provocative. It gets the people going.
N.B.:
The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place on the evening of August 17. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In the Literary Review of Canada, Patrick Warner on why writers are like that:
Mostly, reality allows you to passively interact with it. But then suddenly—seemingly unprovoked—it is in your face, demanding action. Such moments of change are often at the core of great literature. In these moments, reality reveals and even alters character. The skillful writer investigates, pulling apart such experiences to show the many and competing strands of reality and fantasy that they contain. The reader is given the chance to enter into another’s experience (while using their own experience to authenticate it) and to take on board the feelings and thoughts of multiple characters. It is an opportunity for both empathy and insight. That is not reality, of course. Such complexity is usually too much to handle in real time. It is overwhelming. We are paralyzed in the face of it. Often, all we can do is fall back on something called gut instinct—where unexpurgated wisdom meets untapped potential. We react because we have to. We do the best we can in the moment. Only time will tell if our response is adequate.
[I personally have no explanation for why I am like this. Neither do my friends and associates. —Steve]
In The Point, Trevor Quirk on John Barth:
Of course, that inadequacy was built into the largely destructive program of postmodernism. The great postmodern novelists sought apocalyptic reversals and demolitions (righteously, by my lights) in an effort to reacquaint humanity with its ductility, ignorance and helplessness. Pynchon miniaturized us before the entropic machinations of history. DeLillo rendered consciousness an instrument of totalizing cultural logics. Even Nabokov peered from behind his psychic sceneries to remind readers that character, like soul, was mere puppetry. Barth lampooned the wild audacity of the narrativized life, the assumption that each of us is owed a blank slate on which to etch and chisel our legend. Yet for how musically and variously he could puncture this conceit, he had so little to say about the life lived free of that illusion. In his later years, he even seemed to occasionally rediscover his old nihilism in new terms: the storytelling animal was helpless but to project narratives onto a universe that would never accommodate them.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Tommy Gilhooly on John Clare and the uses of dialect:
Though Clare co-operated and benefited from Taylor’s editorial aid in terms of punctuation, it is the employment of his local Northamptonshire dialect in his verse which caused contention. As we will see, the politics of ownership and control at the geographical level—in terms of enclosure—intersect with matters of Clare’s language in print culture. John Barrell argues, in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972), it is at the level of language that Clare seeks a local quality—a sense of place—in his verse; this is “inevitably opposed to the ideology of enclosure, which sought to de-localise, to take away the individuality of a place.” Clare’s employment of Northamptonshire dialect words was fundamental to this project of localisation—a local language for a local landscape.
Richly onomatopoeic words such as gulphy (gulping), scrowled (scratched with lines) and prog (poke) vitalize Clare’s poetry. The latter, prog, was a particular favorite of Seamus Heaney, using it as the title of an essay in The Redress of Poetry (1995). The onomatopoeic quality of Clare’s dialect adjectives allows one to revel in the murmur of trees, or the crunch of footsteps in fresh snow, as language seems to dissolve into pure sensory experience.
Two in our sister publication across the pond. First, Anne Carson on handwriting and boxing:
If your writing slants to the right you are a person strongly influenced by your father; procrastinators dot their “i”s to the left, etc. Graphology is the study of handwriting as a clue to character analysis. It’s hard to believe it isn’t a good clue.
Scriptural disintegration: also scary as an image of the cognitive breakdown that is another gradual effect of Parkinson’s disease. Vagueness, forgetting, discontinuity, gaps and fissures, slowdowns, stops. When critics talk about the “late style” of Beethoven or Baudelaire, do they mean marks on paper as well as, or as a clue to, hauntings in the brain?
“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,” Adorno writes in Essays on Music.
Reviews:
Second, Ruby Hamilton reviews three reissues of novels by Celia Dale (Sheep’s Clothing, 1988, 2023; A Helping Hand, 1966, 2022; A Spring of Love, 1960, September):
The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar “golden age” of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): “It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.” Dale has no truck with being glib about the grim—take infant mortality: “lived for four days and died like a little skinned rabbit”—but she has none of the kitschy charm of arsenic and old lace either. She was a late inductee to the Detection Club, and it shows: cyanide in a teacup has been switched for sleeping pills in Bovril. The novels feel dated even so, as if they were all written before the 1940s were out. The covers of the new Daunt editions offer a pastiche of postwar stylishness—driving gloves and a clasped leather handbag; a Hopper-like photograph from Bob Mazzer’s Underground of a woman in a neck scarf in a nearly deserted Tube carriage; a black-and-white photograph of a couple cutting a cake, his head cropped out of view and the camera trained on the knife—but there’s no such glam in Dale’s scuzz, none of the seductive entropy of Soho sleaze. Dale’s England is determinedly—interminably—drab: a land of supermarket cheese counters and John Lewis carrier bags, rendered in meat-and-potatoes prose with neither eye nor time for beauty.
In The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal reviews Sarah Manguso’s new novel (Liars, July) [The Upcoming book in WRB—July 20, 2024.]:
Signed and sealed, Liars is almost impenetrable in its self-conviction—but there is a clue to understanding it, embedded in the acknowledgments. Manguso thanks the cartoonist Tracy Schorn “and the life-saving community of Chump Nation,” an online network of people who follow Schorn’s writing on infidelity. Manguso became a daily visitor to their forums after her husband left her; it was, she said on Schorn’s podcast, her therapy. The group shares a particular vocabulary and framework for understanding infidelity. The betrayed party is “the chump,” the cheater is a “fuckwit,” and the cheating partner is, incredibly, “the schmoopie.” A chump minimizing a fuckwit’s harm is said to be engaged in “spackling.” For the chump to compete with the schmoopie for the fuckwit’s attention is to do the “pick-me dance.” To try to understand the cheater’s motivation is to be entangled in “the skein of crazy.” Chump Nation has a mission to reframe cheating as abuse and to push back against “the reconciliation-industrial complex.” “Lose a cheater, gain a life” is the motto.
These steely certainties, swaddled in baby talk and baby thinking, are the unfortunate scaffolding of Liars, which employs language not of harm, hurt, or humiliation but of domestic abuse. “It’s the critical mass of details that makes John’s abuse impossible to deny,” Manguso said on the podcast. “We need to get specific when we talk about covert domestic abuses.” Heterosexual marriage itself is regarded as only questionably consensual. “We are impelled to make this bad choice,” Manguso added. “The entire civilization is screaming it at us . . . from the cradle.”
[To insist that cheating is a form of abuse is revealing. Set aside the question of whether it is; the point of labeling it abuse is to declare it unacceptable in all cases. This, then, would only be necessary if it were acceptable in some cases. Chump Nation would have us believe that this language is directed against “the reconciliation-industrial complex,” which is fair, but all of this is protesting too much. Sehgal reports that “Chump Nation cautions against posing too many questions about why someone cheats, about marital dynamics or psychology, to avoid revictimizing the chump.” What could these questions possibly discover? That the cheater had reasons for his actions? Of course he did. Everyone acts for reasons. That his reasons were good? Impossible, if cheating is always wrong—they would be, however sympathetic, bad reasons. And, if learning them would lead you to justify his actions, you didn’t believe that it was always wrong in the first place. They would only be threatening if they led you to the discovery that you didn’t actually believe that cheating was always wrong. And, to prevent this unpleasant discovery, Chump Nation asks no questions and labels cheating abuse. Plenty of people now will say cheating is acceptable, after all; significantly fewer will say so about abuse.
All of this, let alone “heterosexual marriage itself is regarded as only questionably consensual,” is an indication that something strange is happening to heteropessimism. It is part of a broader trend I think of as “stupid cynicism.” I call it this because it is incredibly cynical, it is intended to make the proponent seem wise and sophisticated on account of its extreme cynicism, and it actually makes the proponent less intelligent about how the world works. Plenty of political commentary falls into this bucket, but the quintessential example is self-help advice that amounts to “you gotta look out for Number One because everyone else is just out to screw you over. This is the path to enlightenment and feeling good about yourself.” In the case of this heteropessimism gone rogue, it begins with a generalization—“men are trash”—and moves into an iron rule of history—“all men are and always have been trash.” From this it follows that, if you want a man, you have to take men as they are. It would be foolish to expect anything from them, and it would be foolish to hold them to any standard. Needless to say this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; you get what you expect. You can choose cynicism, but cynicism won’t free you from what Katie Kadue calls “the most depressingly unimaginative ideas about hetero marriage.” You can criticize. You can discern. You can make moral judgments. (You can even say that cheating is wrong!) You have to, if you want to live. —Steve]
In The Baffler, Cara Blue Adams reviews Ayşegül Savaş’ new novel (The Anthropologists, July):
Small does not mean inconsequential. These small things are, of course, life itself, and when attended to, become as large as each of our lives is to us. The Anthropologists is refreshing in its foregrounding of relatively low stakes events: Asya and Manu’s relationship has its ups and downs but is fundamentally happy; the apartment search is sometimes discouraging, but not crushingly so; Asya’s documentary proceeds as planned, though she worries that her family and friends will find it strange, and a litany of people do react with a lack of comprehension. Her grandmother tells her, “Forget about daily life. No one cares about that.” When Asya brings up the idea that she might capture something “emotionally new,” her grandmother tartly replies, “Don't complicate the point. We named you for a continent and you’re filming a park.” One friend wonders why she doesn’t use the money to travel. Her father, unable to understand how her choice of subject might be meaningful, cautions, “You have to do work that matters to you.” But of course, this work does matter. The dailiness is the point.
In the local Post,
reviews a reissue of a novel by Elaine Kraf (The Princess of 72nd Street, 1979, August 6):Instead, our narrator finds herself moving between extremes. “You thrive on complication,” an insane psychiatrist—the only medical professional we see her consult in the book—tells her. “My best advice in this matter is destruction instead of false construction.” He’s right, even though, as she thinks on leaving his office, it’s not exactly actionable advice. Though her instability is related to her mental illness (“for the past five minutes I have been a water lily,” she interrupts herself to tell us at one point), her inability to reduce or simplify manifests in other ways. Reflecting on her failure to become “a great painter,” she tells us: “I felt the need to tell the truth about everything. If a pot had nine hundred colors I wasn’t about to leave one out.” The resulting paintings are “crazily intense,” riots of color in which the form of the original objects remains recognizable even if nothing else does.
N.B. (cont.):
Women are driving automobiles.
People are carrying around small electric fans. [No one wants to work these days. What happened to the hand fan? —Steve]
The members of The Band bought suits.
Characters in novels might go grocery shopping.
This happens about once a week at this point. [I didn’t think about Game Informer, to which a subscription was great middle-school playground currency, for years and years, but recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about what makes print magazines work, what makes them special and what they can do that online publishing can’t so easily replicate, and I remembered that a lot of my first intuitions for what a great magazine could be were formed there—20 years ago it was lux, expensive and glossy and thick enough for a square binding every month, and it was something you could get lost in. (You know, if you were ten.) Something a big old magazine gets to do is have its little in-jokes and inset columns and quirky repeated gags—exemplary in this tradition, I think, are the old New Yorker news lines that fill an inch or so of column space after all sorts of heady and by-now classic pieces of writing when you look at the original pages. These don’t translate well or really at all to a media environment where everything is flattened into a URL you get on a social feed or (we hope) in your favorite email newsletter. They’re gestures of care and communicate a great deal more than they say about the sensibility of the editorial staff of a publication—which is, hypothetically, the real thing which keeps you coming back and gives you a real sense of trust in and identification with a magazine. A funny aside or 400-word note is perfect inset on the printed page, but there’s no sense to promoting it on Twitter—that’s a flattening. (For years and years the McSweeney’s homepage had a rotating quip in the header, which I always found delightful but which was discontinued a while ago. I had that in mind when I started putting a funny bit of absurd misquotation at the start of every WRB—I hope that’s a small incident of delight for all of you.) —Chris] [No one knows what the opening bits of absurd misquotation mean. But they’re provocative. They get the people going. The formative magazine of my youth was National Geographic (R.I.P.). From it I did not get my taste for beating jokes and bits into the ground, but it did give me the sense that, if you wanted to and were good enough, you could fit the whole world into a magazine. Now obviously the WRB is not catholic in the same way that National Geographic was (but maybe one day we’ll send Julia and a photographer to, say, Iqaluit to report on the poetic traditions of the Inuit), but the sense that, if it was happening somewhere in the world, you might read about it in the pages of National Geographic has always struck me as a worthy goal for a magazine. I don’t pretend to be saving civilization here—even shoring fragments against my ruins is a bit self-important for my taste—I am merely collecting things I think are interesting where I find them (whether from my reading or the recesses of my mind) and then sharing them with you. Like Chris says, it’s about care and communication. Few things are more important than just showing up and being there. And the tiresome bits and tedious obsessions that characterize the WRB are part of that. —Steve] [I think Julia’s transition to jetsetting reporter is long overdue. —Chris]
- ’s notes about the death of magazines.
New issues:
The Dial Issue 19: Fiction
Literary Review of Canada September 2024 [As linked to above.]
Still Alive 03
Jack Karlson, the “this is democracy manifest!” guy, died on Wednesday, August 7. R.I.P.
Local:
Something called Clever Real Estate has out a new study saying that Americans think D.C. is the least desirable city to live in. [This same study says that Americans think Tampa is the most desirable major metro area, so it would appear that the only thing Americans hate more than D.C. is being cold. But then I grew up in Maine, and my attitude towards northerners moving south is more or less what Fidel Castro expresses at the beginning of Scarface (1983): “They are unwilling to adapt to the spirit of our revolution. We don’t want them! We don’t need them!” —Steve]
The Academy Art Museum has two new exhibits: Multiple Modernisms: Recent Acquisitions, 2020–2023 and Tidewater Camera Club.
The Friends of the Northeast Library and the Friends of the Southeast Library are hosting a joint used book sale at the Northeast Neighborhood Library today from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Avalon Theatre is showing Join or Die (2024), a documentary about Robert Putnam and his work, on Wednesday, August 14 at 8 p.m.
Poem:
The North Ship XXIII by Philip Larkin
If hands could free you, heart Where would you fly? Far, beyond every part Of earth this running sky Makes desolate? Would you cross City and hill and sea, If hands could set you free?I would not lift the latch; For I could run Through fields, pit-valleys, catch All beauty under the sun— Still end in loss: I should find no bent arm, no bed To rest my head.
[This poem is, as the title indicates, from The North Ship (1945). After all that about in-jokes and bits above, I’m happy to have the chance to do this one again: my father, Philip Larkin, was right that most of the poems in The North Ship are not that great, too derivative to hold up to his mature work, but there are still a few gems in it. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Pantheon | August 13
Mina’s Matchbox
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen B. Snyder
From the publisher: In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.
In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
Also out Tuesday:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane
Penguin: Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
Random House: Peggy by Rebecca Godfrey, with Leslie Jamison
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Dracula. He then started reading a collection of essays on the English Civil War (The English Civil War, edited by Peter Gaunt, 2000). [I started at the back with Christopher Hill’s “A Bourgeois Revolution?” (1980), about which more below. —Steve]
Chris started reading Speedboat. It’s very good. The NYRB paperback has a Donald Barthelme blurb on the back.
Critical notes:
Christopher Hill:
Before 1640 the English ruling class aped Spanish, French, and Italian fashions and ideas; after 1688 Britain was to give the lead to Europe. The novel, the bourgeois literary form par excellence, developed from the spiritual autobiographies of the sectaries and from Bunyan’s epics of the poor: Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding could not have written as they did without the heritage of the seventeenth-century Revolution. But they produced a new art form for the whole of Europe.
[The Pilgrim’s Progress is a guide to all kinds of novelistic maneuvers because the allegory requires Bunyan to tell the reader exactly what he is doing at all times. A character falls into a slough of despond in plenty of novels, but there’s a kind of artlessness in making it literal that exposes its function in a novel. —Steve]
An excerpt from lectures by Gillian Rose on the Frankfurt School (Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott, August 6):
They were interested in Nietzsche because Nietzsche launched an attack on the bourgeois culture of his day. Like Marx, he referred to “bourgeois philistinism.” The Frankfurt School too wanted to demonstrate the reemergence of social contradictions in both so-called popular and so-called serious culture. It was equally critical of both highbrow and lowbrow, if you like. In fact, it rejected that distinction.
It is easy to claim, if you are not particularly well-versed in history, that novels used to ignore politics. But our era has produced some of the least political fiction in existence. Characters sit around and talk about politics, sure, in the novels of Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Ben Lerner, and so on. But politics are curiously absent from their lives. Their emotional worlds are fragile and narcissistic. They shut themselves off from everything that is exterior, from the humdrum of death and despair and global realignment of power. They look inwards instead. Reading this generation of literature, the most prolific ever, you might be swayed to Alba de Céspedes’ view of things. You have to descend into the well, at least for a little bit, at least long enough for the scales to fall from your eyes and to be able to see things as they really are.
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld interviews Jonathan Kramnick about his new book (Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, 2023):
Don’t we all feel when we are writing sentences about sentences, composing words about words, that there is something always at risk in what we’re making? A risk that it won’t work well or will break and fall apart? And don’t we also have that feeling of getting it right when it all fits together?
My contention is that close reading isn’t really reading, it’s writing. Or that when we talk about close reading as an interpretative practice and when we say that such and such is a reading of a poem or when we refer to this article or chapter as a reading of x, what we’re talking about is not reading in the sense of words coming in through our eyes and then being processed and understood semantically or otherwise. Rather, we are talking about attaching our words to other words and creating something. As the term circulates in the profession, close reading is in this way a practice of writing more than it is one of reading.
[We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 8, 2023, a roundtable in WRB—Feb. 7, 2024, and a response in WRB—June 19, 2024.]
- Moul on epigrams:
Epigram seems a lot less central to verse culture (such as it is) today than it was in early modernity: we certainly don’t generally commission the things for public events, and it’s hard to imagine being imprisoned for writing one. All the same, a good epigram still has a very particular pleasure to it, a clickety crunch of satisfaction at something put so well, and a quotability too—that’s the mark I think of the genuine epigram, that you find yourself quoting it annoyingly at appropriate (or even inappropriate) moments. If a poet cares at all about his or her poetry being memorized and, as it were, used in everyday life, epigrams are a good investment.
[The last one she includes, by Vikram Seth, wrecked me. Beautiful. I think of the “clickety crunch” of epigrams as the whole thing snapping into place. It’s like Legos. —Steve]