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interviews Stephanie Yue Duhem about her recent collection of poems (Cataclysm Moves Me I Regret to Say, June):Franz: This is the stuff I really like, though—like in the poem “Drift”: “the specter of a scepter,” or “a tree silvering in rain, / slivering at the thunderbolt.” You shift one element and it becomes a different word, like it’s revealing a new meaning that generates the next moves of the poem. Rhyme seems related to the theme of doubling in the book, as in the poem title “Nom et Nom,” which translates into French—i.e., doubles—the title of your earlier chapbook, Name and Noun, but ironically loses the distinction of meaning, since French uses the same word for both (another doubling). This calls to mind language learning, a theme in the poem “Origins.” Can you say more about that?
Duhem: I’ve always been intrigued by doppelgängers and masks. I think it’s related to my background as a first-generation immigrant and having to learn a new language in a self-conscious way, at the same time that I had to develop a new persona because of the cultural differences between the United States and China. I had just turned six when my family came to the US, so I went through school here, but those first years were rough. I feel like I’ve doubled many times in my life, with immigration being just the first instance. There was the time I spent in France with my first husband, who’s French. That was another language and culture I had to learn to navigate (though he later moved with me to New York City). It’s just all these dislocations on top of each other, each time requiring another doubling or another sort of mask.
[I remember encountering Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger” for the first time, getting my hands on a translation of the lyrics, and learning that German also uses its word for “ape” to mean “mimic poorly.” The question is always how good the reproduction is. —Steve]
In UnHerd, David Masciotra on David Foster Wallace’s rural Midwest:
In a sense, that anonymity feels appropriate. “David felt safe here,” says Victoria Harris, a retired ISU English professor who was close friends with Wallace. Harris tells me that the author liked being close to his parents, and establishing good relationships with his students, but also that he enjoyed “being away from it all.” She adds that he preferred living in a quiet, “middle class” neighborhood—as opposed to more luxurious subdivisions nearer the city centre. “I don’t pull an aw-shucks-regular-guy thing,” Wallace himself once told an interviewer, “[but] I treasure my regular guy-ness. I’ve started to think it’s my biggest asset as a writer.”
Wallace was in a unique position to use art and journalism to make sense of Middle America’s collapse into partisan rage and a mindless addiction to scrolling. The fact that he wrote a masterfully experimental novel from a tiny home in a normal Midwest neighborhood captures yet another duality in his work. Unlike most contemporary literary fiction, he didn’t write about the insect politics of Brooklyn, further pulling the art form out of the window of relevance of most Americans. At the same time, though, he enjoyed the reverence of the New Yorker set, giving him the potential to communicate to two different audiences.
[The problem with situating yourself at this particular intersection is that you end up feeling superior to both your neighbors and the New Yorker set—saying “I appreciate the American Midwest at all” to the latter, and “I Appreciate The American Midwest On A Much Deeper Level Than You” to the former. It’s also basically the same problem created by writing massive experimental novels while also insisting on your sincerity and depth of feeling; the combination lets you feel superior to anyone who only does one or the other. —Steve]
In The American Scholar, Jessica Francis Kane on writing a novel about Penelope Fitzgerald:
A decade after her death, her letters were published in So I Have Thought of You (2009), inspiring another wave of appreciation. A few years after that, Hermione Lee published a biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (2014), precipitating another outpouring. Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Sebastian Faulks, Hilary Mantel, and James Wood are among the prominent writers who have written about Fitzgerald’s work, often admitting to a bit of awe, even befuddlement. One of my favorite quotes is from Faulks: “Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality—the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.”
So why am I worried about her? Because for reasons I cannot fathom, her literary reputation seems to be lagging behind those of her English contemporaries, namely Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner. My evidence for this is the eight years I have been working on my novel, Fonseca (August 12), about a curious, three-month trip she made to northern Mexico with her young son in 1952. I’ve asked almost everyone I’ve encountered about her. Most of the time, Spark and Brookner are household names, whereas Penelope Fitzgerald creates confusion. There’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, and Penelope Lively, and it can take a moment to sort that out. Every once in a while, I will see a flash of recognition in someone’s eyes, and on those occasions it’s all I can do not to immediately envelop the person in a hug.
[Fonseca was an Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 9, 2025.]
[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:
The end of rock’s self-mythologizing
Trends in architecture and construction
Donald Hall translates a Poem by Horace and makes it funny
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.
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