WRB—July 5, 2023

Beer sales are declining.

Homer’s world is a real world. And the poet belonged to a civilization that grew in harmony, not in opposition, with nature. And the beauty of The Washington Review of Books lies precisely in this belief in reality as it is. 

Links:

• Idra Novey on Domenico Starnone, who denies being Elena Ferrante, and the role language plays in his novels in The Atlantic:

  Like any narcissist, Federí remained oblivious to any deprivations other than his own. When his wife became ill, Federí didn’t notice. He was too busy obsessing over the gatekeepers of the local art world, swearing about the “shitheads” who ignored his work and demeaned him at openings. Mimí regards each of his father’s obscenities as if they are beads on a string, what he calls “the rosary of my youth.” Despite his general impulsiveness, Federí was intentional with language: One of his greatest sources of pride was his ability to pronounce certain words with upper-class intonation. In one scene, Federí corrects his wife’s clipped articulation of pronto on the phone, gloating about his ability to pronounce the word like a highly educated person would.

  For Federí, speech was one of the few areas of his life where he felt entirely in control, and Mimí inherits his father’s reverence for language as a form of self-determination. Starnone’s exacting approach to writing exhibits a similar faith that identifying precisely the right word might very well change his destiny. He scrubs every sentence to shiny perfection with a determined ferocity similar to that of Federí scrubbing the railroad grease from his hands before an art opening.

• Parul Sehgal on the narrative turn in The New Yorker:

  Return to storytelling’s primal scene: Scheherazade telling tales in order to live to see another dawn. Before it is anything else, a story is a way we can speak to one another without necessarily being ourselves; that is its risk and relief, its portable privacy. The fact that children ask for stories at night is used to defend the notion of storytelling as natural, deeply human—a defense against the dark. But Margaret Wise Brown, the author of “Goodnight Moon,” was convinced that children didn’t care much about plot; it was their parents who did. When children ask for stories, what they’re asking for is the presence of the adult. One wonders just whom Scheherazade was regaling in that room. When did her gaze shift from the king to the children, as it must have? What kind of armor did she think she was providing them?

  [“Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” —Steve]

• Casey Cep on some early unpublished stories by Tennessee Williams, also in The New Yorker:

  If elsewhere Williams struggled to light a fire, this story is all ashes. Immediately following an epigraph from Edna St. Vincent Millay, two nuns and a candy vender are nearly hit by Edward’s dismembered body parts after he jumps to his death from the roof of the twenty-five-story factory. The story’s macabre first lines read, “It made an oddly fluid, splattering sound as it struck the concrete. One limb, amputated by the cornice, slid several feet along the walk.” Top marks for the creative molding, but, as a beginning, it just doesn’t work. Before Williams introduces Edward by name, we get the newsboy version of what’s happened: “Somebody just done a Steve Brodie off the Continental roof!”

• Brian Patrick Eha on three short novels by Alfred Hayes—In Love (1953), My Face for the World to See (1958), and The End of Me (1968)—recently reissued by the NYRB in City Journal:

  Acute perceptiveness is their equivocal blessing. Nothing themselves, like Wallace Stevens’s snow man, they can behold the nothing that is. From the vantage of his eighth-floor hotel room, a “well-furnished cave” he has slunk off to, the betrayed Asher awaits a kind of anti-dawn: “At precisely 7:05 the sun would rise. As over a battlefield. As over a junkyard. As over a devastated star.”

  Though Hayes shies away from many of the big themes (war, race, social revolution) that filled the doorstop novels of his era, the personal crises of his characters, fleshed out with period detail—the actress’s high-priced, twice-a-week analyst is deferring payments until she makes good—resonate beyond the personal. They seem to reveal a fundamental unsoundness in things, an unsuspected emptiness at the heart of the American Century. 

• Daisuke Shen interviews Parker Young about his debut collection of stories (Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane, May) in Full Stop:

  As for what my narrators look for first, the simplest answer, as you noted above, is probably that they tend to be expecting something terrible to happen. There’s this move I noticed Bolaño making—later I noticed Poe doing it too, and Bolaño loved Poe, so he must have stolen it from him—and it’s just that early in a scene, the narrator will say something along the lines of, “I knew something terrible would happen.” It’s so straightforward that it’s almost ridiculous, but it works; it helps create this totally menacing atmosphere. And the best part is that it’s not always clear in retrospect if the narrator was right. Did something terrible actually happen in that scene? It’s an important question, but the answer isn’t always apparent at first glance. Anyway, I guess that’s the kind of atmosphere my narrators in this book tend to find themselves in as well.

• Lily Felsenthal interviews Hannah Pittard about her new memoir (We Are Too Many: A Memoir [Kind of], May) in the LARB:

  I think it is. I think writers are great and I can’t imagine being anything else, but boy, can I imagine at the same time how annoying I am to be in a room with. As my ex-husband used to tell me, I was only ever a certain percentage present. And the other part of me was always trying to figure out: How can I take what I just saw, what I’ve just heard, and translate it into a good story? And I still do it. My family will sometimes just start chuckling and say, “Everybody pay attention, because Hannah’s paying attention—it’s going to show up in a story.”

Reviews:

• For LRB, Patricia Lockwood reviews the posthumous DFW novella cut out of The Pale King and released by McNally Editions last year (Something to Do with Paying Attention, 2022):

  What Infinite Jest is creating is a future in which it exists. What it fears most is one in which it is not read. All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed. Whether he’s living up to his potential, to his regional titles, bending and trimming himself like a boy bonsai, sleeping at night with his talent in a pair of vaselined gloves. There is something grinding and awful and wrong in this, the same thing he observes in his essay about the young tennis phenom Tracy Austin: that there is something unnatural in watching a human being shape their mind and body so completely to a task. But then there’s the moment where he does—live up to it, I mean. “Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.” I am saying this as much to myself: to really be read you have to admit that you’re playing an even match. And he could have really had it, so why all the rest?

• Brian Dillon reviews Deborah Levy’s new novel (August Blue, June) in 4Columns:

  Levy contrives in August Blue a less-gothic double plot, playfully picaresque rather than insidious. And here the protagonist and double are women: the novel deliberately rhymes with aspects of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 film The Double Life of Veronique, in which Irène Jacob plays both a Polish soprano and a French music teacher enigmatically connected in life and death. Levy’s narrator is Elsa M. Anderson, an English concert pianist in her thirties who has lately flunked a performance of Rachmaninoff in Vienna and now finds herself reduced to tutoring teenagers in Greece and France. (The spectral afterlife of concert-hall fame brings to mind—accidentally this time, I imagine—the more dramatic downward arc of Cate Blanchett’s character in Tár.) In the opening pages, in Athens, Elsa first spots her double at a flea market, buying a pair of mechanical horses. “We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was.”

• Emma John reviews Roger Domeneghetti’s book on what its sports said about Thatcher’s Britain (Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Britain, Sport and the 1980s, May) in The New Statesman:

  Meanwhile, the tabloid circulation war was moving sport stars from the back pages to the front, delving pruriently into their private lives and breaking the previously cosy omertà between the press and the talent in the process. “If the Sun embraced the spirit of Thatcherism in the 1980s,” writes Domeneghetti, “[Ian] Botham embodied it.” A true believer in free enterprise, the cricketer was one of the first British sportspeople to recognise his worth as a commercial brand. It’s the violence and tragedy in the rear-view mirror that really shocks, however. In his 1990 book Sport and the British, the historian Richard Holt placed the football hooliganism of the previous decade within a far longer history of violence among sportsgoers, but also asked whether its intensity was a modern phenomenon, and “how far… money and the media [were] responsible”.

  [Chris left me in charge. This is a sports newsletter now. I eagerly await the book that will reveal to all that only college football fans are capable of truly understanding the United States of America. —Steve] [Happy Independence Day. —Chris]

N.B.:

• “Is the currency of little magazines readership? Readership being that logistically unknowable but palpable audience not quite conveyed by circulation or print run, especially given the range of time. For a magazine can come to mean in different ways over time.”

• “Skyhorse Publishing, the House of the Canceled”

• The world of art consultants: “I sold my soul to the art industry,” she says. “But Warhol would be proud.”

• “Kreiner understands distraction as being drawn into doing or thinking something we did not want to do, and argues that we have inherited “a set of cultural values surrounding cognition that are specifically monastic and, to an extent, specifically Christian”. While our own distraction no longer signifies a distance from the divine, it gets in the way of our current secular version of salvation: productivity.”

• Beer sales are declining. [I hope our American readers were not drinking beer on the Fourth—best, as with many things, to leave it to Teutonic philologists with walrus mustaches, on such a day—and were instead drinking cider, an American drink, and one particularly associated with New England, the most American part of America. —Steve]

Upcoming book:

July 18 | Penguin

Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
by Terrance Hayes

From the publisher: Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes’s brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison’s aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark (“I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography”), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. “If you don’t see suffering’s potential as art, will it remain suffering?” he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes’s astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet’s routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.