WRB—June 18, 2025

“an astro-priest”

Exit, pursued by a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books.

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Sophie Haigney interviews Geoff Dyer about his new memoir (Homework, June 10) [An Upcoming book in WRB—June 7, 2025.]:

  Haigney: There’s quite a bit in the book on your collecting of objects as a child and a teenager—Action Men, model airplanes, bubblegum cards, records. How did you think about these objects, as tools for memory but also as things that might be put literally in the book?

  Dyer: The objects are part of a larger universal specificity, as it were. It was related to Ernaux’s project in The Years (2008), where there’s a lot of information about various gadgets that became available at defining moments for her generation. The mistake some memoirists make is to write “We would go down to the shops,” or “We would go for walks.” It’s all generalized. But the continuity has to be particularized, and the objects in this book are all tied to particular moments. It’s about substantiating a time and place. In The Age of Innocence, for example, you hear all about the furnishings of a room, but something is always happening in that room, and the stuff happening is complex human and economic interaction. What’s happening in my book—in my rooms—is more self-centered, but I am the locus of social and economic forces. Sticking with toys for a moment, my fondness for inventory is such that my American editor Alex Starr said, “I’ve had enough of all these toys, can’t we move on to the human relationships?” And I said, No, you don’t understand, because you have brothers and sisters. But if you’re an only child, it’s things that you have relationships with. There’s a line in Billy Collins’s poem “Autobiography” in his book Water, Water (2024)—he’s an only child, too—where he writes of an ironic ambition to compile “a catalogue raisonné of my toys.” In this book, I surrendered to the same urge.

• In The Point,

  BDM
  on Fritz Leiber:

  But the other suggestion in “A Deskful of Girls” is that if a woman like [Marilyn] Monroe reclaims herself, that will break reality as we know it. It would not be a slapstick break with reality, either, like tiny women running around a doctor’s office. It would be something that would bring to the surface all the sublimated violence that has gone into generating her image. And when she’d succeeded, she might become someone we’d be unable to see at all, stepping out of our fantasies and wet dreams into a real and solid life nobody else could touch. Like the Shakespeare that Leiber grew up absorbing, it is a story that suggests the possibility of righting primal wrongs through supernatural means. In Shakespeare, that might mean being lost in a fairy forest, or living on an enchanted island, or resurrecting someone’s lost wife first as a statue and then as a woman. These are stories in which wrongs are righted through healing; order is upended so that it can be restored. Leiber, more pessimistic, goes another way. Wrongs are righted through violence. The order should be upended and it should not be restored.

  [Cf. a review of a book on Shakespeare’s second chances in WRB—May 18, 2024. I’ve met a few people—all women, I think—who despise The Winter’s Tale. One running theme in these objections as I recall them is that Hermione does not “become someone we’d be unable to see at all,” and the (explicit!) violence Leontes employs because his wife does not conform to his image of her is, even if repented of, not really something that can be repented of. In other words, it’s not a second chance; it’s a man getting away with it, and because the man gets away with it the play isn’t taking female suffering seriously. At the end Hermoine merely asks about her daughter and says nothing about how she feels about all of this. What could she possibly say? At least Alcestis doesn’t say anything at all at the end of Euripides’ play. —Steve]

• In our sister publication across the pond, Andrew O’Hagan on Joan Didion:

  In the last period of her life, when she was living with the losses in her family and trying her best to protect Quintana, I think you can see in Didion’s writing that she was finally coming home to how afraid she had always been. Looking back, you might wonder not only about the writer and mother she was, but about the girl she had been all along, the girl to whom her adopted daughter, among other things, was an objective correlative. We have children, some of us, in order to be fully ourselves, then we discover a mystery beyond all that, of how hard it is to be responsible for somebody else. “Once she was born I was never not afraid,” she wrote. “The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?”

  [When it’s put like that I guess having children for the sake of having an objective correlative isn’t particularly uncommon. Whether it’s good is another thing. —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:

• My favorite passage by William Langewiesche (R.I.P.)

• Brian Wilson and poptimism

• Grace on a Poem by Wordsworth and violets

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]