I saw the best Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
Links:
In Harper’s, Lydia Davis on attention and observation:
The first thing [John Ashbery] said was that he first encountered the painting by the young Parmigianino titled Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in the form of a reproduction in a Times book review and that he was “immediately grabbed and bothered” by the painting and thought he would like to “do something” with it. But he did nothing at the time. Many years later he happened to see the painting itself in a museum in Vienna. He said, “And that did it. I knew I had to do something about it then.” And he used the word “bother” in this way, in this interview or another, about at least one other thing that inspired a poem.
The formulation “do something about it” is a blunt and truthful way of expressing your response to material that “bothers” you—in a good way—when you encounter it.
I encountered the Ashbery interview when I was beginning to struggle to answer the question of why I write. Here is a very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because something—which I call “material,” as in “raw material”—bothers me until I “do something” about it. In these cases, “bother” is wholly positive. The beauty of black cows across the road, the geometry of the positions they adopted, bothered me in that way, and the shadow of a grain of salt on a counter bothered me one late afternoon.
[I can say that basically every editorial note in the WRB, with the exception of the one-liners, is the result of me feeling like I need to work something out by writing about it. It really is amazing how much you realize in the process of turning inchoate feelings into a piece of text you want other people to read. —Steve]
In , Brian Brodeur on various brief lyrics in American poetry:
Responding in 1978 to the erroneous notion that artifice of any kind in poetry should be considered “bogus,” [Donald] Justice reminded readers that “it was never the obligation of words [ . . . ] to imitate conditions so reflexively.” Yet this is exactly what Justice does in “The Thin Man,” albeit from the opposite perspective; Justice would never conflate compositional sloppiness with naturalness of speech. Instead, the poet compresses a meditation about compression, stretching himself so thin that he becomes “a horizon”: a honed line that spans an entire vista. Surely Justice had in mind the misapplication of Whitmanian sprawl by Justice’s own contemporaries, the Beats. Allen Ginsberg, for example, in his most slapdash “First thought, best thought” poems, mistakes verbal exhibitionism for ecstatic vision. In “Footnote to Howl,” which begins with multiple iterations of “Holy! Holy! Holy!,” one wishes that Ginsberg had indulged in restraint rather than crowding his lines with the faux-mystical yammering and fatuous exclamations that afflict his most widely anthologized poems.
[It will not come as a surprise to regular readers of this newsletter that I am—not a fan—of the Beats. (Quick! Guess the one line of “Howl” I think is any good! It’s not any of the three at the top of this newsletter!) As for the fatuous notion that it’s possible to escape from artifice in the creation of an artistic work, cf. the notes Julia and I made on that subject in WRB—July 17, 2024. —Steve]
Reviews:
- Taylor reviews a new novel by (Glass Century, May) [An Upcoming book in WRB—May 3, 2025.]:
Here, I believe, we see what has become of the social-historical novel after the golden bowl broke, so to speak, with the dissolution of all the old coherent myths. The historical novel survives into the contemporary moment much reduced in scale and altered in its aim. Rather than serving to illustrate the development of the social process through character conflict, where the characters themselves serve as emanations of distinct social forces (the revolutionary spirit vs. conservatism, for example), the contemporary historical novel is more akin to a chamber drama whose elucidations are merely descriptive. At least in the case of Glass Century, where there is no demonstrable evolution in the social process through the characters or their conflicts. Rather, history is a thing that happens to them with the strangeness and randomness of weather. The reader recognizes history solely through the recognition of certain brand names that pass over them. The novel feels rather more like a birding expedition than a true explication or exploration of the social forces at work in New York over this fifty-year span. . . . But to me, this is where Glass Century represents a pivot in the Historical Novel. Because the characters’ passivity betrays a very contemporary mode of historical understanding. And also, they don’t illustrate any of the social process. Instead, it unfolds around them and they note it from time to time. I think the project of Glass Century and perhaps the project of any social-historical novel of the contemporary moment is divergent from the previous mode of the Historical Novel in this aspect. No one does anything. No one brings about anything. All of the interpersonal drama stays interpersonal or intrafamilial. For all of the wonderful texture of Mona and Saul’s background, their trenchant observations about their family histories and the habits of older Jews, it all feels rather inert, like background.
[Taylor doesn’t mention him, but in the background here is Georg Lukács; in his The Historical Novel he argues that Walter Scott created the historical novel (the good historical novel, at least) by taking as his main characters “average people” in classes and situations affected by historical developments, and then having the characters adapt—and, in their small ways, contribute to—the historical transformations in his plots. (I am not blaming Taylor for not mentioning him. For better or worse, very few people read book reviews hoping to encounter the words “Georg Lukács.”) There are then two different ways a historical novel can fail. The first, and more obvious, occurs when the novelist writes characters who are all twenty-first-century Americans, or the novelist’s time and place, except for the fact that they wear corsets, or say “forsooth,” or attend gladiatorial games, or whatever. The second is more subtle. It is basically what Taylor suggests is happening in Glass Century, where the novel is not working through historical changes as represented and encapsulated in its characters; instead, the historical changes are merely window dressing. (I have not read Glass Century and so cannot comment on the truth of Taylor’s suggestion.) But, since Lukács’ feelings about the historical novel are motivated by his feelings about History with a capital H, maybe Barkan’s approach as described by Taylor indicates some new feeling towards history, a sense that, if it is not quite irrelevant, it is at least outside of our immediate lives, merely texture. What the historical novel would look like from this perspective I cannot say. No doubt this is how we all feel as we go about our lives—I have enough problems, I don’t need to worry about History—but novelists have to, in some senses, know more than their characters. —Steve]
In ,
reviews David Szalay’s new novel (Flesh, April) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Mar. 26, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Apr. 23, 2025.]:István’s life is shaped not by strategy or optimization, but by a seemingly random series of events. A neighbor’s fall. An IED that explodes. A stranger’s death, interrupted. An employer’s request, acquiesced to. A car crash he wasn’t involved in. The moments that mattered most were the ones he couldn’t really control. In truth, as Szalay rudely reminds us, very little of life is actually lived on purpose. Not playing to win, nor to lose—but never quite realizing we’re playing at all.
By the end, he’s done enough living anyway, trading in his receipt- and can-strewn Bentley for an altogether simpler life. What’s left? Just a few old photos on a phone, to look at from time to time; Szalay’s version of the epilogue at the end of Barry Lyndon (1975).
“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor—they are all equal now.”
In our sister publication across the pond, Tom Crewe reviews Ocean Vuong’s new novel (The Emperor of Gladness, May):
Once again, the success of the novel hinges on its mode of presentation, and Vuong proceeds to exhibit all the same tendencies. Once again, there are hundreds of incoherent sentences and images. The text on a wooden sign is “rubbed to braille by wind”; seeds from a bird-feeder “fall like applause”; a girl pours Coca-Cola into the eye socket of some roadkill, or rather “into that infinite dark of sightless visions”; we are given a glimpse of “moss so lush . . . that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae, like the glacial flood returned overnight and made us into what we were becoming all along: biblical”; fathers watching their sons play football “could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood”; water churns “like chemically softened granite.” All these appear in the first eight pages. Please take my word for the remaining 389—though I can’t help noting, for its medical interest, the moment on page 33 when Grazina’s “bones unbuckled from their stiff joints.” Once again, we have the absurd similes and images: “[he] lent his face to the overcast sky, a bowl so emptied it was hard to imagine it held anything at all, let alone entire flocks of geese”; a scream is “like someone falling through air without ever touching ground”; a man has “a laugh that could probably vanquish depression in an elephant”; the world is “vignetted at its edges”; heroin users trace “the drug’s ascent with their fingers as if pointing to ruined cities on a map”; “he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel, finally good”; “there’s a way an old Connecticut town feels when you pass through it at night. Hollowed out, blasted yet stilled into a potent aftermath, all of it touched by an inexplicable beauty, like the outside has suddenly become one huge living room.”
[Many of these (and Crewe quotes many more in the course of the review) have the feeling of someone trying to imitate Wodehouse’s metaphors without understanding, first, that Wodehouse was trying to be funny, and second, why Wodehouse’s incongruities are funny. I will say that I laughed at “Blood so red, so everywhere, it was Christmas in June.” That’s great. —Steve]
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews Geoff Dyer’s new memoir (Homework, June 10) [An Upcoming book in WRB—June 7, 2025; we linked to an interview with Dyer in WRB—June 18, 2025.]:
As ever with Dyer, in Homework he shows an enviable knack for turning humdrum or low-key shameful details of his life into jokes that are metaphysical in both the philosopher’s and the poet’s senses. Abject details blossom into bold metaphors, flourishing but undercut in the same winking moment. “I am struck by how much rust there was in my childhood; was it, more generally, a rustier epoch or has it only become rustier in retrospect, part of the active corrosion of memory?” Such turns of thought belong to Dyer’s trademark light profundity, or his profound lightness: a style indebted equally to the likes of Proust, Barthes, and Berger as it is to a strain of English comic writing that runs from P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh to the novels of Martin Amis. And stops there, with the possible exception now of Geoff Dyer.
[As someone who grew up near the ocean in a place where they salt the roads all winter, I just assume there’s rust on everything. I have to thank Dyer for indicating to me the symbolism here. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Mitch Therieau reviews a book about ABBA (The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover, by Jan Gradvall, June 17) [An Upcoming book in WRB—June 14, 2025.]:
These kinds of lossy translations would become a secret source of power for ABBA. “Waterloo,” which gets its own chapter, sounds a bit like someone trying to draw rock and roll from memory after getting a partial glimpse of it. The peppy shuffle rhythm and the bright chords ground the verse in familiar territory, but Andersson’s martial piano flourishes on the minor chord in the pre-chorus briefly pull the song somewhere older and darker. With its Phil Spector-by-way-of-schlager sound and its winning E.S.L. lyrics—“My, my! / At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender / Oh, yeah! / And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way”—the song is a spirited exercise in trying on musical styles, even as a resigned ambivalence bubbles just below its surface. The quality that ABBA’s detractors criticized as inauthenticity was always something else: a playful theatricality, a delight in assuming roles and guises. ABBA albums are full of genre exercises—a chanson on “Ring Ring”; glam and prog-rock excursions on the mid-seventies records; a more sustained interest in disco toward the end of the decade; no shortage of tropical-flavored numbers like “Sitting in the Palmtree” and “Happy Hawaii.” Before they settled on a name and a group identity, the members briefly toured together in a cabaret-style variety act; this spirit is carried forward in their music.
N.B.:
A man drove a car down the Spanish Steps in Rome. [Not Tom Cruise, alas. —Steve]
“Minnesota’s Hormel sues Wisconsin’s Johnsonville alleging stolen sausage secrets” [I love the upper Midwest. —Steve]
If being the subject of a trendpiece in the Times is an indication of anything [It is. —Steve], we can soon put a wrap on people saying “crashing out” and elaborate second weddings.
New issues:
Harper’s July 2025 [As linked to above.]
Literary Review of Canada July | August 2025
Lou Christie died on Wednesday, June 18. R.I.P. [“Lightnin’ Strikes” is a great song. (Klaus Nomi’s cover is also great.) —Steve]
Poem:
“Arms” by Richie Hofmann
Even far from home, we felt safe.
We walked around the ruins. Bodies of men whose heads and privates
Were smashed off. None of the statues had arms.
We heard about the boy
Who drowned while swimming
With a dolphin.
Later, we were by the pool.
My father read
A magazine. I could see pictures in his sunglasses
When he turned a page.
On the island where boys drown,
I remember his arms pulling me from the water,
An archeologist in a bathing suit.
The night was humid, the stone he put me down on
Warm. It would have been a catastrophe for my father,
But it wouldn’t have changed a thing in the world.
I was a boy who drowned, the old women would say,
Drawn from the water
By his father’s arms.
The tide came in.
You wouldn’t have known there was ever a beach.
[Hofmann’s forthcoming book, The Bronze Arms (2026), seems as though it will expand upon the ideas set forth here, as the collection apparently flows from “a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete.” Reading this poem, I was reminded a little of Call Me by Your Name (2017) and La chimera (2024), and subaquatic statuary as a potentially erotic object. But here, decapitated, castrated, and amputated, the statues instead foreshadow the author's narrowly avoided peril.
And yet fear is largely absent from the poem, the near-drowning itself omitted. Instead, Hofmann focuses on the mundane—the magazine his father reads, the reflections in his father’s glasses, the sensations of the air, and the stone beneath his rescued body. Where Stallings and Dickinson viewed the sea from afar, Hofmann’s intimacy with the water of the pool begets acceptance. “ . . . [I]t wouldn’t have changed a thing in the world” for Hofmann to become myth, eulogized forever in his father’s arms, like the boy who swam with dolphins. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Riverhead Books | June 24
Among Friends: A Novel
by Hal Ebbott
From the publisher: It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday.
Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games, and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.
This weekend, however, something is different. An unforeseen curdling of envy and resentment will erupt in an unspeakable act, the aftermath of which exposes treacherous fault lines upon which they have long dwelt.
Written with hypnotic elegance and molten precision, and announcing the arrival of a major literary talent, Hal Ebbott’s Among Friends examines betrayal within the sanctuary of a defining relationship, as well as themes of class, marriage, friendship, power, and the things we tell ourselves to preserve our finely made worlds.
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of J R by William Gaddis (1975). [One of the odder reading experiences of my life, both entrancing and exhausting. I read it in small chunks, eagerly eating it up until I feel like I’m too full to read any more. (Maybe I should avail myself of this opportunity to read multiple books at once, something I’ve never really managed to do.) To build on my notes about J R as “internet novel” Wednesday, the only thing I can think of with a similar effect is doomscrolling—all these people ignorant of the idea that you might speak to communicate something to other people instead of unburdening yourself of your thoughts whether anyone understands them or not, all these people talking over each other and hardly ever finishing their sentences, random noise from the TV or the radio interrupting them, just as solipsistic as they are. The difference is that all this noise, all this carrying on, has been carefully constructed for the reader by Gaddis instead of thrown up on the screen. And so the repetitive thematic elements have to be attributed, not to the Weltgeist, but to the author.
And I think it would have been helpful to watch the Ring Cycle before reading this, but I can only manage one famously long work at a time. (Maybe after this I’ll finally read Clarissa! Imagine how annoying What we’re reading will become! Ho ho!) —Steve]
Critical notes:
In minor literature[s], an excerpt from Israel Bonilla’s Phoretics: Goethe, Emerson, Hazlitt: Essays in Aphorism (June 14):
Within impersonality lies a curious paradox: aspiration toward it deepens the refractory aspects of personality. One believes that all emotions must be cast off until a supreme disinterest flowers forth; another, that only an amplification of emotion can overpower viewpoint and access universality; still another, that emotions have nothing to do with the matter. If any of these aspirants ever exhaust themselves in their slanted struggles, they will rest in the conviction of achievement.
[Tedious, perhaps, but necessarily to quote the Eliot lines:
Poetry 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 those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
—Steve]
- Moul on a poem by Gregory Leadbetter:
The end of the poem, though, opens out somehow tonally and allusively beyond the domestic and beyond Hardy. Hardy’s poems about grief and regret always, as far as I can recall, end—if they don’t begin—with the person who’s missing. But Leadbetter’s poem doesn’t make that move. The resolution of the poem comes not in naming the lost but in acknowledging the subject of the poem, just as the speaker finally comes to rest as it were in the chair: “The chair is the lull and the throne of grief.” His poem is more abstract and more restrained than any similar poem in Hardy. That element of abstraction comes in part I think from the hint of the metaphysical in its formal and emotional control, the Marvellian element. But also in the way that the whole of the poem is a kind of working up to and working around, before finally naming, the fact of that grief.
Just before the end the poet does something just a little contrived—as contrived as ironwork foliage—to ensure that grief can rhyme, as it so often does, with leaf. Here, too, I heard a mastery of the tradition, because if you’ve read a lot of English poems, you hear that grief coming as soon as you get to leaf. It’s so well established in English that it immediately brings a whole suite of other poems in its train, from the extremely well-known onwards. I think the most obvious examples are probably Larkin, Frost and Hopkins.
[This language is, as we all know,
A bit impoverished, as rhymes go,
So let the poets have their leaf,
And let the poets share their grief.
—Steve]
 |
|