The Washington Review of Books is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only the Managing Editor knows what it means to want to escape from these things.
Links:
In Public Books, Spencer J. Weinreich on the settings of mystery novels:
I suppose the time-space continuum is partly to blame, because the mystery story is an exercise in reconstruction. Roger Ackroyd lies dead, a dagger in his chest. The mystery consists in working out how it got there, a constellation of circumstances enmeshed in time and space. Every crime must take place somewhere; and that place shapes how it could and how it could not have been done. An entire subgenre, the “locked room” mystery, turns upon the way space constrains the possibilities of explanation. Thus, too, the diagrams of the apartment complex or the train carriage that detectives are forever sketching out. Mystery calls for a particular kind of attention to place. The scene of the crime must be scrutinized, turning details—where the body was found, what was on the table, whether the door was locked—into clues.
[Think of all the murderers in the worlds of mystery novels who kill people in boring and nondescript locations and so never get caught. —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Nation, Nick Burns reviews Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1969):
Kesey thus emerges in Wolfe’s portrayal as a kind of nationalist figure at the heart of an anti-nationalist moment—something that shows up in Kesey’s politics, too. Wolfe doesn’t disguise his glee in describing Kesey’s speech at an anti-war march in Berkeley in the fall of 1965, in which he accused another speaker of resembling Mussolini and said, “You’re not gonna stop this war with this rally,” and added that by marching, “You’re playing . . . their game.” If psychedelic adventurism could be made to serve political quietism, Wolfe wasn’t opposed.
But he was convinced that the Pranksters represented more than just a patriotic counterweight to a more general liberal anti-Americanism. For Wolfe as for Kesey, the Pranksters formed a bridge between the Beat movement of the ’50s and what became known as the counterculture of the ’60s—symbolized by Haight-Ashbury, the “Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park, and all things long-haired and flower-adorned. The Pranksters, Wolfe argues, reconciled the icons of the previous decade (Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady) with figures whose stature would grow in the years to come (Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl). But in making this connection, the Pranksters also threw a dose of conventionality into the midst of a cultural revolt.
[“Psychedelic adventurism could be made to serve political quietism”—I have known people who argued in almost as many words that ’60s drug culture was the creation of the CIA because getting into drugs might distract you from getting into Marxism. (On the other side of the issue, there is definitely a kind of writer, probably overrepresented on Substack, whose worst nightmare is that the ghost of Theodor Adorno is out there and about to call the cops on them.) I suspect that Wolfe saw in Kesey a version of his own project, which employed experimental prose in support of conservative politics. Wolfe’s advancement, if it can be called that, over any number of figures who employed a similar approach in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century (Eliot and Pound foremost among them) comes down to three things. First, his prose lacks the dense allusions of high modernism. As Burns says, Wolfe viewed the East Coast as “Europeanized, derivative, inherently institutional,” and high modernism could, uncharitably, be described the same way. Second, the kind of right-wing politics he espoused was within the mainstream of American discourse. Third, he was better at branding. The New Critics’ approach of removing the artist and his intention was not for him, and neither was Yeatsian worship of the artist-genius-hero, which found itself discredited after the Second World War and did not really appear again until Megalopolis (2024). Wolfe had a look, and he had a style, and he knew how to take advantage of both. —Steve]
- reviews a collection of stories by Kit Reed (The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories, 2013):
With Sayaka Murata we talked a bit about normalcy—Normalness Studies?—and I think one thing you find in these Kit Reed stories is a similar interest in the way there is something a bit unnerving about the plastic nature of the normal. People have the wrong priorities, such that they cannot be reasoned with; people are either too easily changed by changes in circumstances or too rigid to change at all (or a freakish combination of the two, as is the case in “The Wait”). Reed very much exploits the fact that her readers will already be primed to find new and strange worlds in her stories; there’s a constant negotiation at play among what you expect, what you get, and what you can assume.
[Nobody normal has ever thought about being normal. (Every novel should be titled Normal People.) —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:
Sex and time travel
One thing Norm Macdonald taught me about comedy
A Poem by Philip Sidney and being compelled to write poetry
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]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Washington Review of Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.