WRB—July 1, 2026

“racy papers”

I don’t think being purely the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books is very appealing.

Links:

• In The Ideas Letter, Leonard Bernardo interviews Leo Robson about criticism:

  A problem for the critic who writes fiction is just not doing it enough. Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, and Lionel Trilling all published novels that people have read with pleasure. Allen Tate’s The Fathers—though he was a poet, not only a critic—was hailed as a masterpiece. But you need to do it a lot to get better, or to increase your chances of encountering those elements of serendipity that a really good book requires. Not many people write a good enough first book to publish nothing else and be remembered for it. If Henry James had stopped publishing fiction after Watch and Ward, he would be remembered differently—probably as a critic who couldn’t really write fiction.

  Nowadays readers are accustomed to fiction that has things in common with non-fiction forms. A list of writers who people have gotten very excited about would include practitioners of “autofiction” and the essayistic novel, but also novelists who wrote other things readers care about: Woolf, Milan Kundera, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, Zadie Smith, John Berger, Chris Kraus, Camus. I’m not saying people don’t prize novels, but not many of the people you’d see on a t-shirt or a tote bag were purely novelists. I don’t think being purely a novelist is very appealing, and many novelists who could get away with doing nothing else appear to agree with that. Being just a reviewer is also crap, of course. You have to work in different forms. Someone I love is John Jeremiah Sullivan, who is a fiction writer, reporter, personal essayist, critical essayist, a kind of ad hoc historian. No part of me wishes he’d specialized in any of those things.

  To be clear, I do realize that to Ian McEwan the idea that a magpie career involving a lot of journalism is as worthwhile as devoting patient solitary labor to writing twenty novels about psychology, history, science, and morality would sound utterly mad.

  [Can we one-up Tom Townsend? “I don’t write novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way et cetera.”

  (The only things the Managing Editor writes, by the way, are criticism and lyric poetry. I have no aptitude for prose fiction and tell myself that some of our greatest artists, Thomas Hardy foremost among them, gave up on the novel and proceeded to work entirely in other forms. Nobody gives up on poetry, though. They just stop writing entirely—although can you imagine Rimbaud’s Vice-style online documentaries about the coffee trade in East Africa?) —Steve]

• In Notebook, Katie Kadue on Vertigo (1958), remaking women, and remaking Vertigo:

  A common complaint among detractors is that Obsession’s (2026) form is as dark and ugly as its content, and most striking about Barker’s film as a Zoomer rendition of Vertigo—a film about the pleasure and pain of looking, exemplary for Laura Mulvey of the camera’s male gaze—is its lack of interest in images. . . . Barker’s insistently center-framed shots take a central conceit of Vertigo—that the visual field has been composed so that the viewer sees exactly what they need to see—and literalizes it: We have nowhere to look but straight ahead. When Scottie looks at Madeleine looking at her doppelgänger Carlotta’s portrait, Madeleine’s chignon is done at the back of her neck, while Carlotta’s is at the side; Madeleine’s nosegay sits beside her on the bench, pointed back at Scottie, while Carlotta’s, in her lap, faces forward. He doesn’t notice that this tableau has been set up so that he can take in every detail at once; he doesn’t realize that he has been set up. “I wanted to shoot this center-composed and have extra head space because I wanted it to feel uncomfortable in its loneliness,” Barker told Variety. “There’s something about center-composed that forces you to look and pulls you in in a way that traditional composition may not.” Yet what could be more traditional in the history of cinema, and what more reflective of the vision of Vertigo, than forcing the viewer to look, the filmmaker framing his obsession as our own? Barker’s flat-footed forcefulness betrays a similarly narrow perspective to that of his friend-zoned antihero, who resorts to black magic before really trying anything else.

  [I had some notes on the importance of gaze to this whole tradition, going back to Petrarch, in WRB—June 10, 2026.

  One important difference between Scottie and Bear, the protagonist of Obsession, is that Scottie spends the whole movie looking at stuff only to be confronted at the end with the limits of looking:

  He made you over, didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over, only better! Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words!

  The obsession with how things look becomes a coping mechanism for the inability to alter how things are.

  Bear, though, never looks at anything, and his wish transforms the object of his desire internally. The questions this setup poses (to the extent it makes sense to interrogate the not-fully-baked premise of a horror movie) are about what it would mean for love to be compelled. Even this, though, gets bogged down in the “rules” of the magic at issue—one thing Obsession could have taken from Vertigo is how to set up your ludicrous premise in-movie so that it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Bear’s just not a very imaginative guy. That’s fine; look where being imaginative got Scottie. But it creates a disconnect between what the movie is about and how it is about it. Vertigo is Hitchcock turning his gaze, and his camera, on himself. Obsession sidesteps the issue.

  All this to say that Alfred Hitchcock was interested in how things look, and Curry Barker is not. Alfred Hitchcock was also interested in making sure audiences could see what was happening on the screen, and he was not interested in setting up shots so that they could be easily clipped for vertical TikTok videos.

  And Kadue puts Vertigo and its imitators in the tradition of “the mythic stories of Orpheus and Apollo,” with “male figures have been losing the women they love only to recover them through art.” If we are mining the Metamorphoses, two other myths seem more to the point: first, Pygmalion, who channels his hatred of all existing women by creating one perfectly to his taste, and second, Narcissus, which gets at the fundamental nature of this obsession. Not even a woman who can merely echo his own words back to him is enough; he must have himself alone. These are much nastier myths, and much more open about their nastiness, which to me explains their relative lack of cultural prominence. Compare Vertigo to the most famous cinematic adaption of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady (1964). Scottie and Henry Higgins are not all that different, but Scottie cuts a pathetic figure and Higgins spends nearly the entire movie exulting in how awful he is. And he knows what he’s really about; “A Hymn to Him” opens with “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” and ends with “why can’t a woman be like me?” That’s the question it comes down to, and always has—Laura, as Carla Freccero said, is “Petrarch in drag.” —Steve]

Reviews:

• In the TLS, Nicholas Murray reviews a book about the reception of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by Guy Cuthbertson, May):

  F. R. Leavis, whose innate puritanism made him dislike the novel, preferred to talk, like Raymond Williams, of the indictment of urban ugliness. Others were more positive. Burgess, while thinking it a poor novel to end Lawrence’s career on, agreed that it was “hot with a message that the smut-seekers miss.” One of the book’s most eager advocates was Philip Larkin. As an Oxford undergraduate during the war, in 1943, he described it to his friend James Sutton as “a great book . . . It is the greatest idealistic work since Prometheus Unbound.” Sylvia Plath, who had a few years earlier married her Lawrentian he-man from the north, makes a perhaps unexpected appearance in Cuthbertson’s roll call of writers who took an interest, and he has examined her annotated personal copy of the novel: she enjoyed reading it “drawn back again with the joy of a woman living with her own game-keeper,” as she put it. Evelyn Waugh disparaged Lawrence as a writer, especially Lady Chatterley, but Cuthbertson persuasively demonstrates its influence on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Iris Murdoch was another disparager who thought it a flawed novel, and she made the fair point that the portrayal of Sir Clifford, a damaged soldier, lacked pity. Others have also seen it as “ableist,” and point to phrases such as “vacancy of a cripple” in the opening pages. James Joyce disliked the novel’s “cerebral obscenity”; for Dylan Thomas, Lawrence was a “talking prick.” And somewhere in between was T. E. Lawrence, who read Lady Chatterley at least three times, yet declared: “Poor D. H. I’m dreadfully sorry for a man who’s gone right through life and found that it means no more than that at the end.”

  [Tag yourself. (More on the young Larkin being the sort of person with opinions like “Prometheus Unbound is a great idealistic work” below.) —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• A history of newspapers

• Why my father (not actually my father) Philip Larkin was like that

• K. T. on a Poem by Stephan Torre and memory

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.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. 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 sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]