WRB—Aug. 20, 2025

“A DREAM CALLED PROSE”

I’ll be the face that you see in a crowd
I’ll be the times that you cry out loud
I’ll be the smile when there’s no one around
I’ll be the twice-weekly books-and-culture email newsletter that you just can’t put down

Links:

• In The New Yorker, Vivian Gornick on feeling inadequate:

  Yet it is also true that the influence of negative self-regard over character formation can be remarkably varied. I have a friend of many years—I’ll call her Diane—who suffers mightily from the suspicion that she is not worthy of the world’s affection: she grew up feeling not only unloved but unlovable. Instead of developing into someone driven to act out the injured self in the ways I have been describing, Diane’s instinct since childhood has been to engage affectionately with humanity at large. For her, the pain of feeling unlovable is assuaged by acting as though she lives in a garden of earthly delights where all the other animals are creatures of equal interest and value. Hers is the gift of making all who come her way feel, “You enchanting creature! I could happily go on talking to you for the rest of my life.” What Diane yearns to have others think of her, she bestows on her every interlocutor. In other people’s lives, Diane’s self-abasement is the cause of emotional nourishment.

  The solipsism of low self-esteem is one of the wonders of the human psyche. So inexplicable is its grip, so binding its influence, it can feel almost mythic. And why not? Myths are what we invent to accommodate the mysteries of nature: our own if not those of our surroundings. Scientists can explain daylight and darkness, gravity and rainfall, but who, after all, can explain why we are born with a need to think well of ourselves, and why, when we don’t, life becomes an exercise in humiliation?

• In The Guardian, Vincenzo Latronico on English literature and universal literature:

  This didn’t happen only in Europe. As discussed in Minae Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2008)—an essayistic memoir about the author’s having to choose between being an American and a Japanese writer, and choosing the latter, and regretting it—at the turn of the millennium the idea of national literatures, modeled as a system of literary discourses on a somewhat equal footing, no longer held. Instead, we moved into a world in which one of those traditions had expanded beyond the national, becoming de facto universal.

  There is nothing intrinsically lamentable about this, which can be seen as a way out of nationalisms. But there can be only one universal; and as the Anglophone tradition ascended, other national literatures shrank to become increasingly local. In a system in which English-language literature deals transnationally with general issues, the specifics that had characterized national literatures (Austen’s England, Dostoevsky’s Russia) lose their role and become local color, picturesque. When a story has universal ambitions, such as Durastanti’s Strangers I Know (2022), it thus makes sense to recast it someplace more relatable, in a setting where the exoticism won’t get in the way.

  [My first instinct is to compare this to the situation in which Latin was the way to reach an educated audience all over Europe, and using the vernacular was a purposeful choice. But Latin was no one’s native language, and no one nation could claim that Latin was theirs.

  I do, though, think it’s worth distinguishing “the Anglophone tradition” from “English as she is spoke,” for lack of a better term. The worldwide spread of English has certainly had an homogenizing effect, but at the same time that spread has created Englishes that are not represented in the Anglophone literary tradition. I used to work with a lot of Indians, and I loved hearing Indian English. (When I lived on Long Island one of the theaters by me showed a lot of Bollywood movies, and it was frequently a highlight of those too.) But I have not seen it in literature, and if the goal is to defamiliarize native Anglophone readers, give us something we’re not used to, I think it would be much more effective to encourage new versions of English from outside the UK and its historical settler colonies to contribute to Anglophone literature than to give us something in translation where the specifics have been reduced to local color. Local color isn’t new, and we all know how to handle it. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Rhian Sasseen reviews a story about a woman who becomes a narrator (The Time of the Novel, by Lara Mimosa Montes, June):

  There is a gentle humor to how Montes has her narrator go about achieving this impossible goal. First, she quits her job, and the joke here is this: in some of our most-loved fiction, everyday actions of living—working, cooking, sleeping—are sometimes excised in favor of narrative momentum. “In solidarity with the narrators I liked most,” observes the narrator, “I was determined not to work.” Real world concerns begin to recede as she begins this process of transformation; “one of the first things I did was stop paying my phone bill,” Montes writes. (Characters, of course, do not busy themselves with such quotidian anxieties.) To exist as a work of fiction, as Montes conceives of it, is to enter into a heightened sense of awareness, akin to a bodhisattva upon reaching nirvana or a saint transcending the petty concerns of the mundane. “HELLO,” reads the out-of-office email one receives when they email our narrator: “I AM CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. I’M CHASING A DREAM CALLED PROSE.”

  [I get jealous when I hear about someone else living out my dreams. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• How to write metered poetry

• What’s up with minor writers?

• A Poem by Matthew Prior and the importance of names

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 below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. 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 telling your friends about us. —Steve]