WRB—July 16, 2025

“beautiful carapace”

The Washington Review of Books is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

Links:

Reviews:

• Two in Bookforum:

  • John Jeremiah Sullivan reviews Geoff Dyer’s new memoir (Homework, June) [An Upcoming book in WRB—June 7, 2025; we linked to an interview with Dyer in WRB—June 18, 2025 and an earlier review in WRB—June 21, 2025.]:

    It’s coherent, or maybe stable is a better word, free of the comical overstatement and fictional swerving that characterize Dyer’s other books. It’s formally recognizable in pretty much every way. It is also extremely good. So good, in fact, that it makes me want to quote an obscure couple of lines from Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste that have been stuck in my head, at times self-reprovingly, since I encountered them in college: “Au Romantiques Teste dixit: ‘Les extrêmes sont pauvres.’”

    To the Romantics, Teste says: “The extremes are poor.” In more prosaic language: the experimental forms can be thin. I don’t always agree with that, of course. One would never want to side with it too completely—to the extent, for instance, of wishing that Dyer’s previous books had been different, had lacked their impudent brilliance. Here, though, is an example of what I think Valéry’s great character meant. Sometimes we fear the conventional—not in the pejorative sense of banal or bourgeois, but literally conventional, as in, the things we do by convention, including the conventional genres—precisely because the wood can be so thick there. Either drill deep or go home (or have your shallowness exposed). The other, more “extreme” modes are forever offering outs. Come up against the most painful and difficult parts, the places where you are required to reach down and really say what you mean? There is always another formal trick to pull. Hit the genre-shift button. Or break the whole thing up and call it a “lyric essay.” Pray that formal game-playing will somehow generate the meaning from which you had shied and shirked. Whereas, when you commit to the major, conventional forms, “the only way out,” as Robert Frost wrote, “is through.”

    [“Pull down thy vanity, / Paquin pull down! / The green casque has outdone your elegance.” The other problem with working in conventional genres is that the work will inevitably be compared to previous examples, and if it doesn’t compare to them readers will notice. —Steve]

  • Jessi Jezewska Stevens reviews a new novel by Michael Clune (Pan, July 22):

    A major symptom of panic is that it heightens Nick’s ability to uncover hidden meaning in the world—one precursor to becoming an artist. At the onset of an attack, he finds himself “becoming prophetic, becoming retroprophetic, looking back over the past year and seeing patterns, seeing the patterns and listening to the words.” He draws connections in “the world of things” others would dismiss. When he finally tries to write down these impressions, he discovers that literature tames the panic induced by his proto-artistic “premonitions” by lending them form: “If the writing was strong enough, what remained after the purifying transcription would be Pan’s beautiful carapace. The god itself absent.” What started as a Bildungsroman has by this point become a Kunstlerroman. As in Clune’s memoirs, all that fumbling “outside reality like a child at a locked door,” all those extended struggles with panic and addiction, become an allegory for developing the preliterary imagination.

• In the Times,

  Christian Lorentzen
  reviews a book about Condé Nast (Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, by Michael M. Grynbaum, July 15)

  What these editors have in common more than some Horatio-Alger-with-a-pica-ruler climb is that they were good at their jobs. They had strong visions and were good at marshaling talent to execute them. They were also the avatars of a major generational turnover in Anglophone culture. The term Grynbaum uses is “yuppie,” but a more relevant one might simply be “baby boomer.” With the exception of Cooper, who was born in 1937, these editors were of the generation born between 1945 and 1960, the first to grow up with television from the cradle.

  That’s one way of explaining their comfort with the celebrity-infused high/low editorial formula Brown brought to Vanity Fair that quickly spread across the rest of Condé Nast. The new guard of editors were uninhibited in matters of sex and unrestrained in their pursuit of buzz. There was no shame in chasing whatever was hot. The embrace of vulgarity caused a few resignations when Brown took over The New Yorker, but now it seems to most readers and magazine hands the natural order of things.

  [I’ve always preferred to trace my high-low bounces back to Eliot—“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— / It’s so elegant / So intelligent”—to avoid reckoning with the idea that it came from the “now, this” of television. —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:

• Contributions to two important discourses (The Future of Poetry and Sally Rooney)

• Why everyone stopped making psychedelic rock after 1967

• Grace on a Poem by D. H. Lawrence and music

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]