WRB—Dec. 20, 2025
“mumbling insolence”
It is in order to help the young who are entering on careers, and those of all ages who desire to extend those delights and spiritual developments of their lives, that I have managed to edit the Washington Review of Books.
[A note on scheduling: this will be the last WRB of 2025. The first WRB of 2026 will come out on Saturday, January 3.
As always, thank you for reading, and a special thank you to the WRB’s paid subscribers; your support helps keep this newsletter going, and I am moved by your generosity. The WRB is a collective enterprise—not just between me and the other contributors, but between us and everyone whose work we feature, and between us and everyone who reads it. Thinking, too, is a collective enterprise. We think on our own, but we think with the aid of what we have read and heard and seen, and we think sometimes by collaborating of other people (as anyone who has had the misfortune of receiving texts and DMs and emails and letters from me will know). I hope the WRB has helped your thinking this year. Knowing that all of you are out there—especially those of you who were already my friends and those of you who have become my friends due to the WRB—has helped mine. You are all clearly a most learnèd and discerning audience; after all, you have the taste to subscribe to America’s only newsletter. Here’s to another year of thinking in 2026.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I especially commend for my own sake St. Stephen’s Day, which commemorates a man martyred for delivering a long and hectoring speech accusing people who disagree with him of being moral reprobates who can’t read. Where do I get it from? Nominative determinism, maybe. —Steve]
Links:
Reviews:
In Engelsberg Ideas, Jeremy Wikeley (Jem) reviews The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin (1955):
What those same reviews often avoided—though it looks, 70 years on, like the collection’s overriding preoccupation—was Larkin’s frank, and often frankly hostile, attitude to sex and relationships. Even now, summaries tend to dwell on death, loss and diminishment, as though the collection’s sexual politics were marginal rather than central. Roy Fuller, writing in the London Magazine, was one of the few to notice it immediately: The Less Deceived contains an extraordinary number of “not exactly love poems.” Larkin himself suspected the book was “too sexy” for one small Irish publisher, who turned it down.
That central focus is expressed with remarkable stylistic range: the grim symbolism of “Dry-Point” and “Whatever Happened?”; the uneasy charm of “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”; the unsettlingly clinical portrayal of a sexual assault in “Deceptions.” The vocabulary is exact throughout, and often violent: dancers “maul” to and fro; a “swivel eye” “hungers from pose to pose.” We are miles away, here, from the abstract, idealized lovers of The North Ship (1945), with their chaste kisses and anxious farewells.
[My father (not actually my father) hated The North Ship, but it’s not as distinct from his later work as he might have liked to think. A few years ago Jude Russo wrote about its explicit classical references, with a focus on the Horatian. In that piece he quotes D. S. Carne-Ross:
We may however find qualities that seem genuinely Horatian—the tough reasonableness beneath the lyric grace, the alliance of levity and seriousness by which the seriousness is intensified—in poets who show no interest in Horace and may not even have had any Latin.
After the juvenilia of The North Ship Larkin went on to internalize what he had earlier explicitly referenced. Horace can be grim and uneasy, and he can be tough-minded and nasty about sex, but what defines Horace (and Larkin too) is that combination of levity and seriousness. The biggest difference is that Horace’s usual reaction to himself is to laugh. Larkin is too bitter for that. In Odes 1.22 Horace can laugh about being a poet—Larkin writes “books are a load of crap.” —Steve]
In our sister publication in Tinseltown, Annie Berke reviews two novels of choices not made (The Ten Year Affair, by Erin Somers, October; and Wreck, by Catherine Newman, October):
Is it any surprise that, mired as she is in this tastefully oppressive homogeneity, Cora envisions alternate designs for living? The extent to which their lives are not only comfortable but also interchangeable comes up around halfway through the novel, at a party at Sam’s house. Eliot’s boss mistakes the home for Eliot’s; he and Cora play along. After all, “he wasn’t lying because it was how they lived. Broadly speaking. They lived in a house like this. [ . . . ] But they didn’t, you know, actually live there.” In the same exchange, Cora accepts compliments about photographs of children who are not her own. Again, they do have children, broadly speaking—just not, you know, those kids.
In such an environment of swappable, good-enough objects, people, and dynamics, infidelity is pointless—the two men are appealing and annoying in basically the same ways—but still enticing. Sam offers the promise of something different, if not necessarily better, than Eliot: he is the path (as of yet) untaken. Cora is only lightly interested in her own motivations, more invested, instead, in her libidinal fixation on Sam’s toothpick-chewing habit. In a rare moment of introspection, she admits to herself that “she had designed [her life], wanted it, set it into place, expected it to have meaning, and then it hadn’t.”
[The Ten Year Affair was an Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025.
Adultery, historically, has been of interest to novelists because it lets novelists move a character from one life into a different one. (Think of the difference between Karenin and Vronsky, or between Charles Bovary and Léon and Rodolphe.) And, in a world where all that is solid melts into air, the marriage vow had—in theory—not melted. But a novelistic world in which the potential affair partners are more or less identical to the spouse is a further move into melting. Or maybe not: Marx also says that “our bourgeois . . . take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common,” and for that to be the case they must all be interchangeable.
The Ten Year Affair has to explain all of this to its readers. Cora can’t quite believe that people still have affairs, and the novel can’t quite believe that people still write novels about adultery, which it takes as the concern of an earlier literary age. To this end, it expresses with a thudding literality what the earlier novel of adultery could hint at. Anna Karenina, for example, has frequent references to shadows and doubles at important moments, but the twin timelines of The Ten Year Affair make the idea as clear as possible. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Nick Richardson reviews a book about alchemy (Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science, by Philip Ball, September):
Alchemical art and literature was influential even in its time. Hieronymus Bosch borrowed from the pictorial language of alchemy, stuffing his Garden of Earthly Delights with its instruments and symbols: eggs and pelicans, glass tubes, a young couple pleasure-cruising in a glass sphere. The closed doors of the triptych show the Earth inside a transparent globe, with clouds condensing at the top of it. His Adoration of the Magi also alludes to alchemical themes: a small gold sculpture of the sacrifice of Isaac rests on three black toads, symbols of nigredo, while the buildings in the background look unlike those in any Dutch city but resemble contemporary drawings of the athanor. These references would have been recognized by many of Bosch’s audience, some of whom would have had experience of the tools and symbols of alchemy. Whether Bosch wanted to convey some kind of Hermetic-Platonic subtext, or playfully suggest it, or whether like van Helmont he simply enjoyed the shape and shimmer of alchemical equipment, we can’t be sure.
[The human-sized hamster ball is an attempt to replicate the feeling of pleasure-cruising in a glass sphere. —Steve]
In the Journal, Sam Sacks reviews the new edition of Merriam-Webster’s (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition, November):
Such stature is perhaps what is lost with online dictionaries and what the new Collegiate hopes to regain. As with most things on the internet, the online Merriam-Webster improves efficiency and functionality while collapsing the sense of significance around the endeavor. But there is a reason that people haul their old, careworn dictionaries around with them for decades, and why even now they can be seen splayed open on a lectern in the living room like a family Bible. We are—or at least I am—still primed to treat dictionaries like the secular equivalent of holy books, vessels of crucial information that have been compiled with a care and expertise that is legible in ways the profusion of data online tends to obscure.
And because we can learn from it, the authority we bestow on the dictionary is gratifyingly reciprocal. Martin Amis, who said that he checked on meanings dozens of times every day, explained, “when you look up a word in the dictionary, you own it in a way you didn’t before.” He was speaking to the fortifying feeling of confidence and control that comes from knowing why we use the words that we do. Our language is our own; it makes sense to want to possess it in a physical form.
[The real shame in the decline of the dictionary is the decline of reviews of the dictionary. The best are Dwight Macdonald’s of Webster’s Third (“Lexicographers may still be drudges, but they are certainly not harmless. They have untuned the string, made a sop of the solid structure of English, and encouraged the language to eat up himself”) and Guy Davenport’s of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (“But the art of definition seems to have died with Samuel Johnson, whose stern clarities can still be detected behind the graceless mangles of modern lexicography”). Both of these, though, take for granted that the dictionary—the big physical book—is an authority and not a curiosity. Reviewing a dictionary used to be a means of opining on the English language; now it’s a means of opining on reference books. As Sacks notes, for an up-to-date equivalent of Macdonald’s and Davenport’s reviews you’d have to review “what Google turns up when you search specific words.” —Steve]
N.B.:
The New Yorker has digitized its entire archive.
Sales of nonfiction are down. [Several people quoted in this article suggest that podcasts are replacing nonfiction as a source of information; this makes instinctive sense but I’m not sure it lines up with what the most popular podcasts are. You have to go way down the podcast charts to get to anything with much of an equivalent in nonfiction publishing. If podcasts are a substitute for nonfiction, it’s because listening to podcasts takes up lots of time, and that time has to come from somewhere. (I will say, because this colors my commentary, that the only podcasts I ever listen to are Odd Lots and various college football podcasts, and what I get from those doesn’t exist in nonfiction publishing.) —Steve]
Photos from old publishing holiday parties.
Controversies in Canadian English.
Updates to museum security.
New issues:
Harper’s Magazine January 2026
The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 5 / January 2026
Poem:
“The last day on earth” by Rewa Zeinati
will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back
their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The
phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and
no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat
rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed. Everyone will be
looking to the left. Kitchens will smell of burned sage and soldiers
will abandon their sleeves to the heat of a broken field. The field will
cover the dead with daisies and the desert will turn into a single
grain of salt. Everyone will be thirsty. A child will switch off the TV.
A river will remember itself. Women will run outside on younger
feet and lovers will call their lovers to the window to show them how
all the barbed wires had turned into threads of wind. Everyone will
be looking at what’s left. And you and I might talk again on the last
day on earth. You might still have something to say to me. You
might still want to show me how much I was wrong.
[While a little grim, this seemed like an appropriate selection for the end of the year. I particularly like the echo between the lines, “Everyone will be / looking to the left” and “Everyone will / be looking at what’s left.” Its form also reminds me a little of an earlier selection, “Critique of Paradise” by Michael Lavers, with its unfolding catalogue of vignettes, off-kilter but evocative: “Kitchens will smell of burned sage and soldiers / will abandon their sleeves to the heat of a broken field.” The final thought in the poem is ambiguous to me, the entrance of a second person, who may still tell the author she was wrong: does Zeinati simmer with resentment at this confrontation, set on the eve of annihilation, or does she acquiesce to a secondary perspective, knowing that it’s true? —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
University of Chicago Press | December 26
Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel
by Rafael Walker
From the publisher: Realism after the Individual offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding realist novels published in the United States between 1900 and 1920, a period that has been described wrongheadedly as a “gulf” or a “valley” in American literary history. In this generation of writers, only three have remained in favor among critics: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. Others have disappeared from view altogether—writers such as Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington, all of whom were critically acclaimed bestsellers in their day.
As Rafael Walker shows, this generation of writers deserves new attention for the way they revised many core facets of the nineteenth-century novel in response to the historical shifts around it. This generation of novelists not only rejected liberal individualism but also formulated alternative paradigms for conceptualizing selfhood. The result was a slew of woman-centered realist novels that broke with literary precedent: The novels punish characters not for desiring too much but for failing to desire enough, they depict subjectivity not as private and interior but as outward-facing, and they view closure not as the novel’s aim but as a convention to flout. Realism after the Individual both revises prevailing views of American realism and lays the foundation for an alternative account of the development of literary modernism, one that illuminates the continuity between realism and the modernism that followed it.
[I don’t think Tarkington has disappeared from view altogether, but only because Orson Welles adapted one of his novels for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). —Steve]
Out January 1:
University of Nebraska Press: The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888–1891: Volume 2 edited by Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias and Katie Sommer
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Recognitions by William Gaddis (1955).
[In lieu of a big round-up about the best things I read for the first time this year, I’ll just list them (in no particular order): Anna Karenina, The Faerie Queene, The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport (1981), J R by William Gaddis (1975), Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford (1924–1928), and big chunks of poetry by Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, and John Berryman. —Steve]
Critical notes:
She wanted to be a major novelist. If that didn’t work out, she wanted to be Eliot or Matthew Arnold—a black-clad gatekeeper at the portcullis of Culture. Yet the way in which her example inspires brings to mind neither of those two, nor does it bring to mind Benjamin or Canetti or Adorno or any of her other European models. Instead it makes me think of Oscar Wilde, to whom she dedicated “Notes on Camp.” Wilde’s literary output was wonderful, but his greatest work of art was his life and his myth. So too with Sontag. She created herself so that we might know what a life lived her way would entail, in all its glory and its difficulty. She would have been furious to hear me define her this way; she would have protested that the work alone was what mattered. The tragedy is she wouldn’t have realized the compliment. They still leave flowers at Wilde’s statue in Dublin, and plant kisses on his stone mouth. Who the hell reads Matthew Arnold?
[It might be impossible to be Eliot or Arnold now thanks to, in part, “Notes on Camp.” We expect our critics to bounce between high and low, a fashion inconsistent with the lofty seriousness (self-seriousness, to the uncharitable) of figures like those two or of Adorno. Or, as Sontag puts it in that essay, “The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity.” To be fair, the origin of this bounce between high and low goes back to the modernists, but they employ it for very different purposes. When Eliot juxtaposes high and low in The Waste Land he does not aim to find anything valuable in the low, and his real purpose in praising the music-hall star Marie Lloyd upon her death was to use her as a stick with which to beat the middlebrow. Begler talks about “Notes on Camp” shaking up the “rabbinically serious Partisan Review.” Those “black-clad gatekeepers at the portcullis of Culture” Sontag wanted to be were not “rabbinically” serious, of course, but it was similar.
And Matthew Arnold is worth reading. —Steve]
BDM reviews Maggie Nelson’s book about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift (The Slicks, November):
And it is a problem when I can write responses to art, as Nelson says, in my sleep; if I already know without reading a text, or reading the first couple lines, precisely what somebody will say and how they’ll say it, I don’t want to spend any time with that work. If it happens often, I cease to respect the critic. The reason this becomes so visible with Taylor is not because of her or the ways people find her irritating, but because everybody wants a slice of the attention constantly directed her way. Thus there is a large volume of writing, mostly bad, mostly careless.
[I’ll say it: comparing Swift to Plath is an insult to Swift.
The problem of critics slumming it when talking about pop music is, I think, unsolvable. (The only real exception coming to mind is Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004), and that’s a great book. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone on the fence about Bob Dylan or trying to learn about him. It’s exclusively for huge Dylan fans who want to watch another huge Dylan fan who has read everything associate everything he has read with Dylan’s lyrics.) That high-low bounce discussed above is difficult to handle tonally; at its best it’s cheeky and playful, but more often it’s either slumming it, as I mentioned, or undermining the authority of the critic, as if the presence of pop lyrics is a sign that the whole thing shouldn’t be taken too seriously. —Steve]
Victoria Moul on Christmas poetry (in English and Latin) in early modern England:
In fact, Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” is quite a similar poem, and its early date—Southwell was executed in 1595—helps to explain why Jonson was so astounded by it. For anyone who’s read a lot of seventeenth-century religious poetry, Southwell’s poem is very good, but not really surprising. But if you try to forget your knowledge of seventeenth century poetry and immerse yourself only in the vernacular lyric of the 1580s and 1590s, you start to see what Jonson meant. Southwell, certainly influenced by Jesuit poetics as it was developing rapidly on the continent, had written something which was quite unlike much else in English at the time, or indeed in Anglo-Latin (Latin written in England).
[“The Burning Babe” was the Poem in WRB—Dec. 10, 2025. One difference between Southwell’s poem and some of the best seventeenth-century religious poetry is that Southwell does a bit of scene-setting before introducing the bizarre image at the center of his poem and then explaining it. Later poems are willing to get right to it in the very first line—“Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,” “A broken Altar, Lord, thy servant rears,” “I am a little world made cunningly,” “Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,” and so on. (That last one might be the most audacious first line of any poem I know.) In comparison to such bluntness Southwell’s poem eases the reader into it. —Steve]
Patrick Kurp on Ford Madox Ford:
Like Anton Chekhov, Ford is one of literature’s blessed ones, almost saintly in his service to letters and fellow writers, though a highly fallible man. In the introduction to the last of his more than eighty books, The March of Literature (1938), he describes himself as “an old man mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.”
Largeness is the key word for Ford. He liked to say that genius is memory. His own was like an elephant’s. No one admired more of his elders, or discovered more of his juniors, and so went on admiring and discovering till the end. He seemed to like nothing that was mediocre, and miss nothing that was good. His humility was edged with a mumbling insolence. His fanatical life-and-death dedication to the arts was messy, British, and amused. As if his heart were physically too large for his body, his stamina, imperfection, and generosity were extreme.
[There are worse ways to live life than to aim at someone saying this about you after you die. —Steve]
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