WRB—Mar. 5, 2025

“merely one single reader”

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Washington Review of Books

N.B.:

[Reiterating a personal note: I am looking for a new job. Besides being the Managing Editor of this fine newsletter in my spare time, I’ve worked in data governance for the past few years, mostly overseeing the construction and management of a data catalog. I also have experience in journalism and majored in math and classics at Notre Dame. (All this to say that I’ve done a variety of things and am open to just about anything.) I live in New York City but am willing to move elsewhere. If you are interested in hiring me or know anyone who might be, please reach out. Thank you. —Steve]

This year’s first WRB Presents, featuring readings by V Efua Prince, Lisa Russ Spaar, Colette Shade, and Ryan Alexander, will take place on Wednesday, March 12 at Sudhouse D.C. at 6:30 p.m. Readings begin at 7.

March’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, March 29 to discuss the topic “Is there honor without revenge?”

Links:

• In The Hedgehog Review,

  Matt Dinan
  on the 25th anniversary of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (2000):

  Nevertheless, Chick is not theoretically helpless. When we become too familiar with the data of experience, he says, “[o]ur way of organizing the data which rush by in gestalt style—that is, in increasingly abstract forms—speeds up experiences into a dangerously topsy-turvy fast-forward comedy.” Art presents us with a means of slowing down the “chaotic acceleration” of our experience of the world. Chick therefore preserves the phenomena as “pictures,” and the goal is to express the world with fidelity, even if you know they’re only images. Chick’s love of these “pictures,” which might even offer us a glimpse of immortality, his attempt to grasp the “occult mystery” of the world, is what keeps him, in Ravelstein’s estimation, “too inward.” He has an aesthetic appreciation of the interesting, but the particulars risk crowding out what truly matters. If the novel has a “perspective,” it is that a sort of “friendship” between these approaches is required to encounter the things themselves, to become aware of our deepest conflicts and contradictions, and to therefore become capable of seeing the world as it really exists. Through the friendship of Chick and Ravelstein, the novel resists producing another “gray net of abstraction,” and shows that judgment cannot be reduced to a formula.

  [Very few people have told me to read Ravelstein, but everyone who ever has has pushed it on me with unmatched fervor. —Steve]

• In Amulet, Sheila Heti on writing “about the mystical realm for a mainstream magazine”:

  How to write about the ineffable for magazines—for readers who want to encounter a story? Beyond the difficulty of it, beyond the seeming-like-a-ninny of it, is the fact that a magazine outlines a specific, material-based world. That is one of its purposes: to create a subreality of the world, where certain articles can live in its pages, and certain articles cannot. A magazine gets its identity from having a strict sense of what defines it, and what defines it is wrapped up with what it believes reality is. A magazine gets its authority from showing in every article, its layout, its choice of writers and its design that reality is this. For Vanity Fair, reality is celebrities, the Kennedys, Annie Leibowitz, ingenues, mansions, all the most glamorous cities in the world, corruption, scandal, politics, gossip. For New York magazine, reality is New York.

  There could be so much more transformative thinking in the pages of magazines, and so much more delirious speculation, if the editor of New York wasn’t so certain what New York was; if the editor of Good Housekeeping was sort of confused about what constitutes good housekeeping; if the editor of Vogue was a little bit baffled about what was in vogue. Of course, there are magazines specifically about the metaphysical, but I am thinking about what it would look like to have fact-driven reportage side-by-side with articles that simmer in the unknown. Or what if the traditional journalist embraced those synchronous, unbelievable and uncanny events which truly make life life, which everyone encounters, which journalists must encounter constantly in the course of their reporting, details and tangents they have been trained, and trained themselves, to leave out?

  [The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books is unsure what Washington is, what a review is, and what a book is. That’s where the magic comes from. —Steve]

• Two in our sister publication in Hollywood: first, Manuel Antonio Córdoba on the search for “a Spanish-language David Foster Wallace”:

  What did DFW mean to these writers? In a word, he was seen as Spanish literature’s last chance to jump on the train of postmodernism. Even if the Spanish-language tradition includes some of the founders of metafiction (Cervantes, Borges) and still maintains some of its most interesting living representatives (César Aira, Vila-Matas), it was believed that Spanish literature had missed the chance to participate in the heyday of the American avant-garde. Then there was DFW’s “maximalist” style, his supermarket prose, which was adopted as an alternative to the tradition of baroque Spanish. An option that allowed writers to disavow the lineage of twentieth-century excess (Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Francisco Umbral, the Boom) while also indulging in the language’s addiction to stylistic play. Why the DFW school wanted to disavow this lineage is psychologically complex and speaks to what Mexicans call “malinchismo” (a Hispanic variety of the national inferiority complex). To this day, more than 50 percent of all translated literature in Spanish comes from English. The early push to bring DFW to Spanish contrasts with Bolaño’s miserable, readerless run while alive. Ultimately, we are talking about the cultural dominance of the Anglosphere. In that sense, the fascination with Infinite Jest (1996) is only a subset of Spanish literature’s worship of North American “experimentalism.” Of all the authors and editors mentioned above, none is more responsible for this fad than Javier Calvo, one of the most influential Spanish-language writers of his generation. I’m using the term “writer” loosely: it’s his ubiquitous translations that are influential.

  [No offense to David Foster Wallace, but trading Cervantes and Borges for him is trading birthright for pottage. The desire to make the trade indicates a misunderstanding of the American avant-garde: the wild experiments of the English-language twentieth-century novel, especially the postmodern ones, owe a lot to the wild experiments of the English-language eighteenth-century novel. If something like Tristram Shandy does not point the way forward it at least indicates to the potential author what is possible. I’m sure Cervantes and Borges can do something similar, especially for those who, unlike me, can read them in the original. —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:

• About that Dave Eggers quote on critics

• Technique: it matters

• Hannah on a Poem by Katha Pollitt and sparrows

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? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on your word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers to this newsletter as a recommendation from a friend.

—Steve]