WRB—Feb. 18, 2026
“Entertainment”
This is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped the Washington Review of Books, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning.
Links:
In the New York Times, BDM on love and Wuthering Heights:
Whether or not we’d want to be around Heathcliff and Catherine in real life is irrelevant to whether or not we can be moved by their love story. And whether or not their story is one we’d want for ourselves is irrelevant to whether or not Wuthering Heights says something true about love.
For this pair, love is where you find your lost other half, your twin, something deeper than even a best friend, something as inextricably you as your own organs. (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Catherine says.) In this story, sometimes love kills us and sometimes it frees us; sometimes it degrades us and sometimes it saves us. Sometimes it does both at the same time.
Who can deny that love wears all these faces? The mechanisms through which Heathcliff and Catherine are eventually redeemed and reunited are dramatically satisfying because in real life obsessive love usually does not have such consequences.
[I was initially afraid that I would have to take back all the mean things I said about the Times’ books section last week, but this piece is in Opinion, so I stand by what I said.
Even in Wuthering Heights obsessive love does not really have these consequences. The story of the second generation is the story of people who had nothing to do with Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, and weren’t around for it, but whose lives are completely shaped by it anyway. That part of the story doesn’t have much of a dark glamor to it—it’s mostly just sad—but haven’t we all, at times, dreamed of a love that would shape lives for generations? —Steve]
In The Guardian, an excerpt from from Namwali Serpell’s book on Toni Morrison (On Morrison, February 17) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 11, 2026.]:
In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience.” She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented: “Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’” Morrison’s literary difficulty was often translated this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?
One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic and a public intellectual. I have worked in these fields as well, so I know that extending many branches can be a way of distracting yourself from the core vocation. The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy. “For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.
[“You must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” is a better version of the line everyone loves quoting:
So much contemporary fiction, even when it’s well written, is sort of . . . self-referential. I used to teach creative writing at Princeton and I would say “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.”
The framing of “your little life” supplies its own context, but your own life being found wanting is not the same as you being found wanting by Beowulf. —Steve]
In The Dispatch, A. M. Juster on Petrarch:
Those sins, however, are an integral part of Petrarch’s greatness. His story begins with a traditional infatuation with Laura’s beauty, progresses to an appreciation of her spiritual qualities, then those qualities start drawing him to aspire to become closer to God. That aspiration leads him to the path of relentless self-examination laid out by Saint Augustine in his Confessions, thus one can view Petrarch as the godfather of both the sonnet and the confessional poetry tradition that exploded in the mid-twentieth century with the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman and many others. Petrarch’s Canzoniere is more than a collection of love poems—it is a record of a long and difficult spiritual journey.
Despite the beauty of the text’s poems and its contributions to Western poetry, a declining number of people are reading Petrarch, even in our universities’ “great books” programs. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this sad phenomenon, but one factor is that early twentieth-century academic biases have been difficult to overcome. Unwilling in that era to deal with either the sensual or the Catholic, many academics presented Petrarch as a safe and foppish “troubadour” whose praise of Laura was merely courtly cosplay, and translations of that era tended to reflect that interpretation.
[Juster has a new translation of Petrarch’s lyric poetry coming out in April, which I am very much looking forward to. As with anyone who produces a new translation, he is obligated to be dismissive of earlier attempts; he says of Robert Durling’s literal translation of the Rime Sparse that it “has been extraordinarily helpful to scholars, but no one reads it for pleasure.” The nice thing about Durling’s edition, though, is that it has the Italian on the facing page, and this non-reader of Italian can manage to magic eye it. Perhaps this is closer to scholarship than pleasure, but I like it.
It would be difficult to imagine a more comprehensive misunderstanding of Petrarch than as a “troubadour.” (Or perhaps a more comprehensive misunderstanding of the troubadours than to think they were engaged in the same thing as Petrarch.) The troubadours were writing songs to, and for, actual women, in the same way that a later generation would pick up the guitar to get chicks. The Petrarchan project is not that; it is more interior, mysterious, self-aware as an artistic enterprise.
John Freccero, putting Petrarch in conversation with Augustine and determining that he is very consciously committing idolatry, concludes:
In germ, it suggests that all the fictions of courtly love have their semiotic justifications: the love must be idolatrous for its poetic expression to be autonomous; the idolatry cannot be unconflicted, any more than a sign can be completely nonreferential if it is to communicate anything at all. Spiritual struggle stands for the dialectic of literary creation, somewhere between opaque carnality and transparent transcendency. Finally, it might be suggested that the illicit or even adulterous nature of the passion has its counterpart in the “anxiety of influence”: communication demands that our signs be appropriated; poetic creation often requires that they be stolen. Petrarch’s prodigious originality is that he was entirely self-conscious about the principles of which his predecessors were only dimly aware. By transforming the Augustinian analysis of sin into a new aesthetic, he made self-alienation in life the mark of self-creation in literature and so established a literary tradition that has yet to be exhausted.
Freccero also notes that Dante’s Beatrice is always pointing beyond herself, like a good Augustinian: “God the Word is at once the end of all desire and the ultimate meaning of all discourse.” “Beatrice” points towards the one doing the blessing; “Laura” points to the empty air—l’aura—and poetic immortality—lauro. Whose laurel is it? Not hers, but Petrarch’s; it points back to him.
The Rime Sparse is, after a fashion, an extremely lengthy commentary on Catullus 85 (which Petrarch knew):
I hate and love. Why? You may ask but
It beats me. I feel it done to me, and ache.
(Ezra Pound’s translation; I don’t love it but I don’t love any others I know either.) It’s a poem about a woman’s effect on the poet—and it never mentions her at all. —Steve]
And it has long been the position of the managing editor that Berryman is at his most interesting when most explicitly engaging with Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney and, through them, Petrarch. (One such sonnet of Berryman’s was the Poem in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025.) —Steve]
In Bookforum, Christian Lorentzen interviews A. S. Hamrah:
Lorentzen: What are the damaging legacies of Entertainment Weekly?
Hamrah: Consumer guide thinking. Herd mentality. A certain kind of smugness. Slavish interest in famous people in the industry. The hope that someday you’ll maybe be the Toluca Lake bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal entertainment section, and also writing very big, long, thick biographies about famous people in the film industry. Those are the legacies of Entertainment Weekly, which is not weekly anymore, but it’s still called Entertainment Weekly. Yeah, I don’t know why they still call it that. They insist on Entertainment Weekly.
Lorentzen: That’s the brand.
Hamrah: Who cares? Nobody cares.
Lorentzen: The Atlantic got rid of Monthly.
Hamrah: But what would it be called without Weekly, just Entertainment? That’s not a magazine, it’s a Gang of Four album. So I remember when I really started to dislike Entertainment Weekly as a vehicle for film criticism. It was when I saw a guy I knew had started in zines, and now he was reviewing films for Entertainment Weekly. He gave the Godard film Two or Three Things I Know About Her a B-plus when it came out on VHS. It’s a one-paragraph review of a Godard film from 1967, and it gets a B-plus. That is no way to live.
[Maybe I should rebrand this thing. “Please. The WRB was my father. Call me Washington.” Or perhaps “Books.” One of those names so obvious you wonder how nobody else claimed it before. Like “Society of Jesus.” —Steve]
Another note: I don’t know how old I thought Hamrah was, but I was sure it was not old enough to be reading reviews of VHS releases in Entertainment Weekly. —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Thames, James Wolcott reviews Updike’s letters (Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, 2025) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 18, 2025; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Nov. 26, 2025, WRB—Dec. 13, 2025, and WRB—Jan. 14, 2026.]
The letter continues as Updike makes fifteen additional numbered notes, running through the pad of Hotel Australia stationery helpfully provided by management. Number 15: “My cock is yours—up or limp, your toy and acolyte and (sometimes timid) explorer.” The next letter, composed on the same stationery on the same day, is addressed to his estranged wife, Mary: “In the plane from Honolulu I had to watch The Way We Were (1973) again and found myself crying over the way we were (and are).” What an operator.
[The Way We Were is a tedious movie that could only have been taken seriously in the mid-’70s, when having mixed feelings about one’s life and conduct was in itself proof of emotional sophistication. All the sex writing in Updike’s letters is awful (Wolcott, like most of the other reviewers, provides the—choicest—excerpts for our delectation), but in its shamelessness at least it isn’t self-congratulatory. —Steve]
In The New Statesman, Leo Robson reviews George Saunders’ latest novel (Vigil, January) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 21, 2026.]
As her erstwhile self, Jill was “limited” in view, “constricted” in pity. “One judged,” she tells us, “one preferred.” None of this is true of “elevation”—or of Chekhov, who, according to Saunders, is unburdened by “a political or moral stance,” remains “open” and “perpetually curious” and used the short story “to move beyond opinions.” Saunders claims that as the reader watches Chekhov doubt all conclusions, we feel “comforted.” At one point, Jill notes that remembering her mortal life “always caused me to become less powerful and effective.” Hearing Tobias Wolff read aloud from a trio of Chekhov stories, Saunders realised that fiction was “the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication . . . a powerful form of entertainment.” The novel’s heroine is a paragon of wisdom, acceptance and freedom from vanity whose only terrestrial counterpart, with the exception of certain spiritual leaders, is a great fiction writer while at work. In this analogy, Boone—whose own strength has been to make companies “profitable” and “efficient”—is equivalent to a character, whose inner world Jill inhabits, and a reader, beneficiary of comfort and communication.
[“The most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication” and “a powerful form of entertainment” are rather different things. And who is reading Chekhov to feel comforted? (Cf. Henry Begler on Saunders and other male writers of his generation, as linked to in WRB—Jan. 29, 2025.) —Steve]
N.B.:
“Two months into what was quickly becoming known as the Great War, the Financial Times asked its readers to predict the impact the conflict would have on the map of Europe. As a game. With cash prizes.” [Should the WRB start running contests? —Steve]
Götterdämmerung during the Winter Olympics.
[I don’t have a good place to put it, but I want to give Dan Neil at the Journal some kind of award for opening a review of the new Ford F-250 with this paragraph:
Russell Crowe’s portrayal of Nazi leader Hermann Göring in the film Nuremberg (2025) is brilliant but incomplete. Little is made of Göring’s outrageous personal style: the power-blue Reichsmarschall’s uniform, the fur-lined capes, the diamond encrusted badges and batons, the face makeup. Göring’s sartorial choices raised suspicions among both the Allies and Nazi high command that he was homosexual.
Who said the review as public service is dead? —Steve]
Van Gogh truthers.
“Constant Sexual Aggression Drives Female Tortoises to Walk Off Cliffs”
Foucault’s old car.
New issue: Bookforum Winter 2026 [As linked to above.]
Robert Duvall died on Sunday, February 15. R.I.P.
Frederick Wiseman died on Monday, February 16. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Helen of Troy Calls Her Sister” by Maria Zoccola
cly, you remember when it was us and the boys and mom and dad and we all drove up to chincoteague for the summer and the car just —collapsed— —just broke down, and dad took the hood up and put his head in the engine and hollered for mom to keep turning the key and the sky— —like fire— —record heat, air-con kaput with the rest and the sun crushing down like a mouthful of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer’s gut— —and castor wouldn’t— —wouldn’t get out of the car, he was afraid of the snakes, you remember the snakes, buckets of them wiggling around the trees— —rising up— —leaping up to strike, and i said momma don’t you see what’s happening, but that’s when dad all punked on motor oil snatched up a rock— —a boulder— —biggest one he could find, and he smashed that thing down on the engine so hard i thought the earth had split, sound like a plane crash— —like a death— —but damned if that engine didn’t roll right over for him, just spread its legs and purred, and there was nothing sweeter than pulling out— —past the trucks— —past the men, none of whom had stopped to help, and castor, poor kid, didn’t he throw up? all over the back seat, smelled like milk and rot— —all the way to virginia— —all the way to the big house, you remember the hurricane? you remember the hydrangeas, how they looked so bright inside the storm?
[Zoccola lays out some more great similes here: “the sun crushing down like a mouthful / of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer’s gut” though my favorite phrase is “dad / all punked on motor oil.” The affection and admiration, still slyly amused; the knowledge of his potential for failure, here blessedly unrealized; and maybe a twinge of fear.
Beyond the standout phrases, this is another poem as conversation—not quite a contrapuntal poem but nearly—located firmly in the States, in the near past, all invention besides the names. The two voices give way to a certain escalation, but also a validation of narrative, a mixed up memory reinforcing itself in sisterhood. It’s the knowledge of the referenced story’s arc that gives the poem its bite. We know how Helen will alter to Clytemnestra’s life, foreshadowed perhaps by Clytemnestra’s interjection — “like a death” and the final image of the hurricane, to which Clytemnestra makes no rejoinder. Helen remembers alone, the flowers, their blinding beauty. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Carnegie Mellon University Press | February 19
Killing Orpheus
by Forester McClatchey
From the publisher: A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using received forms, especially the sonnet, this collection cycles through various speakers, including an aging Penelope, Frankenstein’s monster, Isaac beneath Abraham’s blade, and an elephant in Hannibal’s army. Here are sprays of flowers and hungry alligators, lethal snakes, and a baby’s first breath. Here are poems that reckon with death, but for the sake of life. Here is a poetic consciousness that shows us we must dare to make “a truce with loss” in order to go “spinning into love’s bizarre abyss.”
Out February 24:
Belt Publishing: The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure by Elizabeth Zaleski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
Knopf: The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems by Michael Ondaatje
What we’re reading:
Steve read a bunch of articles about Petrarch.
Critical notes:
Charles Lamb on Valentine’s Day (h/t Patrick Kurp):
In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart,—that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears,—the bestuck and bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, “Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;” or putting a delicate question, “Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?” But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbors wait at animal and anatomical distance.
[As far as I can tell nobody knows why the heart symbol is shaped like that (instead of being a pulsing fist of flesh). And as always I encourage people to send letters in the mail. (Maybe not Updike. But everyone else.) —Steve]
 | A guest post by
|