WRB—June 10, 2026
“in the right mood”
“Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the Washington Review of Books knows.
Links:
In Nimrod International Journal, Clifford Thompson on Ralph Ellison:
Jazz musicians, in their versions of pop songs, have often either navigated their way through the chords underlying the songs’ melodies (as did the first great jazz tenor saxman, Coleman Hawkins) or built new melodies based on those chords (as did Hawkins’s chief rival on the instrument, Lester Young). Either approach alludes to the original melody while studiously avoiding it. Ellison manages something similar in the passage above. He mentions the “oppressor’s weakness” without saying, in words, what it is—while his other words, like a jazzman’s notes, give some clues: the allusion to the grandfather’s advice suggests that the “yeses” are well received by white oppressors, which in turn suggests that those oppressors are in the dangerous position of preferring affirmation to truth. Similarly, we are not told directly how saying yes “accomplishes the expressive ‘no’”—but we can deduce that the withholding of truth, from which the oppressor might benefit, acts as a rejection of, or “no” to, the oppressor’s well-being. Finally, there is “Samson, eyeless in Gaza,” an allusion that succeeds at both being off-topic and fitting right in, as do the snippets of other melodies jazz musicians often sneak into the ones they’re playing.
[More on Samson, eyeless in Gaza, below.
The narrator of Invisible Man, reflecting on his grandfather’s advice near the end:
“Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised. Hell, weren’t they their own death and their own destruction except as the principle lived in them and in us? And here’s the cream of the joke: Weren’t we part of them as well as apart from them and subject to die when they died? I can’t figure it out; it escapes me. But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself.
And in the final paragraph, rendering the complaint in the argot of jazz:
“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!”
In other words he “alludes to the original melody while studiously avoiding it.” —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication on Lake Erie, Chapman Caddell reviews Your Name Here (by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, 2025) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 22, 2025; we linked to an interview with DeWitt and Gridneff in WRB—Oct. 25, 2025.]:
The unspoken appeal of the The Last Samurai was aesthetically conservative, a return to adventure legible to Defoe but more efficient, more propulsive, closer to Borges. Like Macedonio, DeWitt has always taken seriously the phenomenology of reading, how a reader in a given technological paradigm might move through a text, what literary sleights of hand might resist attention or attract it. She considers and manipulates variables like the speed at which the pages of a book, a physical book, will be turned.
Macedonio’s insight into how his work will be read by a lector salteado leads him away from Adriana Buenosayres, a less radical text and “the last bad novel,” in his own assessment, to Museum of the Novel of the Eternal Woman, “the first good novel.” Since Museum, the bad novel and the good novel have both been said to be dying, as if either were sufficiently advanced in age to die. Architecture, painting, and style, their ancestor, are geriatric and at risk, but the novel is barely four hundred years old. It will evolve without them and achieve forms more appropriate to its age.
In retrospect, in English, The Last Samurai may prove to have been the last good novel. Your Name Here, a departure, would be the first bad novel, the first in a large and variable class that precedes it and will endure.
[Come for “On Substack there is vitality, experiment, invention, and maybe three or four newsletters with style and a real following, one of which is a series of annotations to other essays,” stay for the rest of the essay.
Lector salteado, per Caddell:
the distracted reader, the faithless reader who at the first intimation of tedium skips a paragraph. The lector salteado skims whole chapters or reaches for the next book without closing or setting aside the first.
“Faithless” is a moral judgment and “distracted” is not. But, whether we believe such readers will be numbered among the sheep or the goats, the novel being the ideal form for them is hardly clear. To suit them we might do better to go back before the novel and reinvigorate the sonnet cycle, which tends to depict more or less the same thing happening in sonnet after sonnet after sonnet, with most changes happening so slowly that our lector salteado can skip a few without losing the thread. I would also wonder whether anything text-based is the ideal, although distractions are infinite and can accompany any work of art.
And the novel is about 400 years old, which is also about how long the bourgeoisie have had a self-understanding of themselves as such. It has always at its core been—many of the defining achievements in the form certainly are—an interrogation of (as I always say around here) bourgeoisie mores around marriage and money (in some proportion, although the two are always connected). Even the most recent broad developments have not quite gotten away from this as much as it might initially seem. The sprawling systems novel proposes that, in order to understand money, we need to understand everything, since the whole world is interconnected and money touches every aspect of it; autofiction proposes that, in order to understand marriage, we first need to understand on the most granular level what it is like to experience the world as a bourgeois, so that we can then understand what it is like to experience the world as a bourgeois in love (or something like it). Whether the bourgeois are going anywhere is—beyond the scope of this newsletter, but as long as they are with us I think the novel will be with us too. (What do the bourgeois look like in a post-literate world? “What they look like now.” Further answers are beyond the scope of this newsletter.) —Steve]
In The Baffler, Michael Barron reviews William T. Vollmann’s latest (At the Table of Fortune, August 25):
The assorted typography brings a surreptitious vitality to Vollmann’s narration, as if he were testifying on declassified material. Fonts are often proprietary and expensive to rent, and Vollmann’s insistence on keeping them is what led, along with a fattening manuscript and dizzying printing cost, to him being dropped by his longtime publisher Viking. Had he listened to his editor’s advice, Vollman admits, “I could have made a living and expanded my readership. Well, I had to fight against both of those dangers. And in the great words of Bush Two: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!”
Vollmann’s documentarian sensibilities, foundational to his legitimate bid as our preeminent literary chronicler, are underscored by his tectonic imagination. Without its quake, At the Table of Fortune might resemble something of a novelized Fahrenheit 9/11 or Ken Burns special on the CIA rendered in prose. But whether it is the duty of the novelist to commit to the highest levels of verisimilitude is debatable. When he says his extrapolations of Langley are as accurate as “a 1940s science fiction novel about Venus,” what he means is he didn’t quite nail the colors of Langley’s elevators or the species of potted plants in its lobby. Even for writers wiretapping into reality to enrich their prose, such faults are often the most capable of moving us.
In the New York Times, William T. Vollmann reviews James Ellroy’s latest (Red Sheet, June 9):
I read James Ellroy not quite as I would Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, those L. A. noir maestros whose lyrical loneliness is simply beautiful and whose plot-machines (call them trick coffins) I can never admire enough, right down to the last countersunk death’s-head screw. In place of the twentieth-century moral code of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the family neuroses of Macdonald’s characters, I find in Ellroy’s books the semi-despairing ugliness of Georges Simenon.
But Ellroy also likes to be semi-funny, his specialty being sadistic slapstick (which sometimes disgusts me), and unlike these other authors he likes to meditate on the American dream of financial and reputational success. For Otash, that means sliding into Nixon’s limousine to get his cash—and scoring an extension on his beloved concealed-carry permit.
[“Reputational success” is not a phrase I’ve ever seen before—at least, not that I can recall—but I can tell it’s going to become a standby. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Liffey, Eamon Maher reviews a book about Proust’s influence on Irish writers (The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern, edited by Max McGuinness and Michael Cronin, 2025):
Richard Robinson discovers traces of Proust in McGahern’s Memoir, which regularly highlights the lapses and unreliability of memory, something that struck the Irish writer most forcibly when he consulted his sisters about certain experiences they had lived through but remembered differently from him: “This very admission,” Robinson writes, “reveals how Memoir is pregnant with questions about what has been occluded—forcefully suppressed, unconsciously repressed—from the narrative.’ He shows how McGahern borrows almost word for word some of Proust’s ideas expressed in Days of Reading. I would add that passages from Beckett’s Proust are very close to ones that can be found in McGahern’s literary credo, “The Image,” with few, if any, changes. The sense of place as a trigger for involuntary memory is another aspect found in both writers’ work. For example, walking through the lanes of Leitrim in later life brings McGahern back to the time when he went to school along those same lanes hand-in-hand with his mother, with whom he was fleetingly reunited through involuntary memory. He observed in Memoir: “I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss.”
[We linked to a piece on the poetry of nostalgia in WRB—May 6, 2026.
A friend about to move wrote to me in a letter recently about feeling something we could perhaps call “pre-nostalgia”—being in a place and having the thought that in the future she’ll look back at being there nostalgically. There’s a being out of time to it that resonates with the last quote from McGahern here. —Steve]
N.B.:
Adam Roberts on Thomas Otway influencing Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy.” [Always a highlight of my week when Roberts gets to use a phrase like “It hasn’t hitherto been noticed that.” —Steve]
What it is like to be an orchestral musician performing a film score live.
Screenshots as preservation.
The Chinese-language literary scene in Australia.
The guy adjusting American Airlines’ flights based on World Cup results.
New issues:
Dublin Review of Books Issue 161, Summer 2026 [As linked to above.]
The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 2 | Summer 2026
Marjane Satrapi died recently. R.I.P.
Gordon S. Wood died on Sunday, June 7. R.I.P.
In The Lamp, Nic Rowan on Wood reading Proust at 90:
For Wood, to encounter Proust at all was the most important thing. He told us again what he had said to Will: he really wanted to read this novel before he died. And, standing next to him, his wife Louise confirmed. In fact, it had become something of a family project. When I asked which translation he chose, Wood grinned and said he could not remember—whichever one was on Project Gutenberg. (That’s Scott Moncrieff.)
As I drove home, I couldn’t get the image out of my head: the renowned American historian, seated at his computer or perhaps holding an iPad or a Kindle, on a seemingly infinite scroll through the great French novel of the last century. This was incredible. It made me want to read more, to study harder, to do the things I was put on this earth to do. I had to know more about this. Everyone had to.
Poem:
“Villainelle of His Lady’s Treasures” by Ernest Dowson
I took her dainty eyes, as well
As silken tendrils of her hair:
And so I made a Villanelle!I took her voice, a silver bell,
As clear as song, as soft as prayer;
I took her dainty eyes as well.It may be, said I, who can tell,
These things shall be my less despair?
And so I made a Villanelle!I took her whiteness virginal
And from her cheek two roses rare:
I took her dainty eyes as well.I said: “It may be possible
Her image from my heart to tear!”
And so I made a Villanelle.I stole her laugh, most musical:
I wrought it in with artful care;
I took her dainty eyes as well;
And so I made a Villanelle.
[A friend recently pointed out to me how ominous the move from “I made a Villanelle!” to “I made a Villanelle.” is—the exclamation mark expresses an innocent joy in creation, but the period is clinical and detached. Violent, even, as the first line of the last stanza suggests by moving from “took” to “stole,” picking up on the idea in “I took her whiteness virginal” and its two ideas of purity to be sullied.
The other repeated line, taking the lady’s eyes while leaving the poet’s intact, draws on a long tradition of eyes in this kind of poem going back to Petrarch, as in Rime sparse 3: “And I could not, my lady, turn and fight, / for you transfixed me with your lovely gaze.” (Translation by A. M. Juster.) To have eyes is to have power. Juster’s choice of “gaze” connects his translation to the great English poet of blindness and sight, Milton, who in Paradise Regained has the Son describe Satan as
. . . now depos’d,
Ejected, emptyed, gaz’d, unpityed, shun’d,
A spectacle of ruin or of scorn
To all the Host of Heaven . . .
“Gaz’d,” reinforced with “a spectacle,” makes the fact that Satan is looked at the chief evidence of his powerlessness. And Samson in Samson Agonistes, “eyeless in Gaza,” is eyeless in gaze of the Philistines, or, as he puts it, “both my Eyes put out, / Made of my Enemies the scorn and gaze.” They look at him; he, like the lady in Dowson’s poem, has no eyes with which to look back. (Later English misogynists would take up this idea of gazing as explicit power struggle: “Under my thumb her eyes are just kept to herself / Under my thumb, well, I, I can still look at someone else.”)
The repetitive nature of both lines, however punctuated, are the poem’s central idea, underlined by one of them explicitly identifying it as a villanelle: whatever the poet says, the form itself is evidence of his inescapable obsession. He hopes that, by taking all these things and writing them down, “it may be possible / Her image from my heart to tear!” The poem, then, is intended as a kind of purgation. But the two set lines repeated over and over again know better. The recreation—not even of her, but of her objectified and reduced to body parts—will not tear her image but further keep it in place. And in the end it isn’t the poet’s main concern either way. The last line besides the two repeated ones, after all, says nothing about her: “I wrought it in with artful care.” I broke her apart and put her back together how I wanted, how my art demanded. What was the poet’s love? Did he know this woman? The horrifying triumph of that final “I made a Villanelle” comes from a mind not particularly concerned with these questions.
The Petrarchan tradition (object of obsessive revisiting in this newsletter) gets a lot out of this transmuting of women into poetic triumphs. It comes from one of the most basic of human fears: do we know the people we love? How can we, when our perceptions and communication are so faulty and limited? How much of what we think of them is something we constructed in our own heads, which can be a more comforting place to live than the world outside? And do we love not the people out there but our own constructions? As Janet Malcolm put it in an article sent to me by the friend who made the observation about punctuation marks:
The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.
Poems like Dowson’s find it better to reign in hell than serve in heaven: “I see the problem, but to me all these women are simply the raw material out of which I make my art.” Even those poems describing the woman ignoring the poet recapitulate the ignoring, but with a difference: now the poet is in charge, crafting the scenario as he sees fit. And something seemingly more optimistic, like “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” is a statement of the superiority of poetic art to the actual person being described. It throws back our selfishness and our smallness in our faces, adding the additional humiliation of our failure to at least make art out of it. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Cornell University Press | June 15
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity
by Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche
From the publisher: A Protestant Air focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought: André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland Barthes. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the “spirit of protestation.”
Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France’s Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counterauthority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. As such, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself.
Out Tuesday:
Astra House: Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body by Erin Maglaque
Hogarth: The Frenzy: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
What we’re reading:
Steve read most of Money by Martin Amis (1984).
Critical notes:
Victoria Moul on Horace’s ode to a wine-jar:
One way of understanding this stanza is that it casts into hymn form a pragmatic hope for the imminent dinner party: that there’ll be plenty to drink (Bacchus), uninhibited conversation (Bacchus as Liber, god of free speech) and, perhaps, some sexual activity (Venus, if she’s in the mood); that there’ll be something of the beauty, joy, song and dance suggested by the Graces, who typically accompany divine feasts; and that the whole thing will last until dawn (Phoebus = the sun).
This is obviously in some sense what the lines mean. But it would, I think, be very wrong to feel that Horace’s invocation here of Bacchus, Venus, Apollo and the Graces is just a poetic convention, a way of varying the register, as religiously inert as Milton’s invocation of Urania. On the contrary, these final lines are a real hymn, intensely moving despite (or because of) its straightforward language. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what makes these lines so beautiful, but it must have something to do with the choice of details and the way in which Horace sounds at once both reverential and familiar. Venus only si laeta aderit, “if she comes in the right mood” (suggesting an acquaintance with Venus in various moods). And amid the gods we have the ordinary details of the lamps still burning around the jar of wine (vivaeque . . . lucernae).
[So much of the magic of the Odes is in Horace starting you in one place and ending you in a very different one without you realizing how far you’ve gone until you look back at the start of the poem. My personal favorite in this category is probably Odes 1.22 (Integer vitae), which begins with basic Stoic concepts, moves into a sendup of silly conceits of love poetry, and ends with Horace rather more seriously describing the sound of his lover in such a way that love attaches almost to sound itself—to poetry, in other words. —Steve]