WRB—May 10, 2025
“equilibrium shot”
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room and read the Washington Review of Books alone.
Links:
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Andrew Delbanco reviews an annotated version of The Great Gatsby (The Annotated Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L. W. West, March):
One of the early reviewers, Gilbert Seldes, marveled at the “intense life” with which Fitzgerald rendered “crowds and conversation and action and retrospects” and agreed that he had “mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight.” The new book should “be read, the first time, breathlessly,” as it sends everything, animate and inanimate, into exuberant motion. Outside Tom and Daisy’s house the lawn “ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens”; inside, “two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon . . . their dresses . . . rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.” Across the bay, at Gatsby’s parties, there’s also perpetual movement, but it feels more frantic than ebullient—couples dancing to the “tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn . . . old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles,” or “superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably,” locked in solitude despite their bodies converging and diverging under “the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket.” Fitzgerald was acutely observant of manner and style in his major and minor characters and equally attuned to the veiled disquiets of their inner lives. He had accomplished something uncommon in fiction: a work of social realism from which there emanates a shimmer of allegory.
[Nothing America loves more than imbuing its deeds with a shimmer of allegory. It goes back to John Winthrop:
Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it likely that of New England.” For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.
And if you make of your existence an allegory you get to live forever as a kind of art. As Fitzgerald’s favorite poet put it:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man . . .
—Steve]
Anna Della Subin reviews a new collection of poetry by Dunya Mikhail (Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, 2024):
While she looks back to the Sumerian age, Mikhail refuses to privilege any one period of Iraqi history or identity. She interlinks Arabic with cuneiform and weaves together references to the Qur’an, to Catholicism, and to Arabic modernism, from the pomegranates of paradise in the surah al-Rahman to dissolving communion wafers to elegiac gems from al-Sayyab’s most famous poem, The Rain Song. “O Gulf, giver of pearls, shells, and death,” al-Sayyab laments. The image that opens Tablets is a nautilus of poetry—in a sketch of a seashell, the Arabic spirals from the inside to the outside: “She pressed her ear against the shell: / she wanted to hear everything / he never told her.”
[I was not familiar with The Rain Song before reading this; it’s great. (Of the few translations I could find online this one, by Sam Reichman, is the best as poetry.) It feels very modernist, and the debt to The Waste Land is evident—there’s some English-language commentary about that, focusing on the similarity of al-Sayyab’s rain to Eliot’s water. After reading it it’s clear to me why Mikhail would want to invoke it in her project. But reading it I kept coming back not to The Waste Land but to one of its sources; the line Subin quotes calls back to “those are pearls that were his eyes,” and eyes appear in the first line (“Your eyes are forests”) and later as the victim of drowning:
Your eyes drown
in a fog translucent as the sea
stroked by evening’s hands, the sea
of winter’s warmth, autumn’s shivering,
and death, and birth, and shadow and light;
“But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” —Steve]
In 4Columns, Brian Dillon reviews Heather Christle’s memoir (In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, April) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Apr. 12, 2025; we linked to an earlier review in WRB—Mar. 1, 2025.]:
The answer is the same as the justification for writing a memoir “with appearances by Virginia Woolf” (or any writer, artist, thinker) in the first place. That is, our most intimate stories don’t only belong or connect to us alone—and they may not even be stories at all. In the Rhododendrons can in places seem an oddly reticent work, both in terms of Christle’s pursuit of fact and feeling from her family, and as regards her own frankness about her wayward adolescence and vexed relationship with her mother. Narrative swerves often toward other voices, texts, authors: Woolf of course, but also Walter Benjamin, Jamaica Kincaid, Michel Foucault. “How good, the books behind which one can hide!” The wager with this approach is that the map of reading is a map of the heart, and both compose the more honest and accurate portrait of what a life is, or has been, or might become, than the straight story.
[Somebody somewhere—I can’t recall who or where—makes the point that when the neoterics, or the modernists, or other poets of this type construct poems mostly out of references to other poems, it is not necessarily affectation for affectation’s sake, nor is it necessarily trying to hide from life in art. It is also, at least in part, a true record of the intellectual dweeb’s experience of the world—all those books are so much with us that we think and feel through them.
(And if “somebody somewhere” is good enough citation for the author of a book in the Bible, it’s good enough for me.) —Steve]
In the Journal, D. J. Taylor reviews Andrea Barrett’s book about writing historical fiction (Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, February) [The Upcoming book in WRB—Feb. 19, 2025.]:
Where Ms. Barrett comes into her own is with the accounts of how her individual books came to be written and the particular hurdles that had to be cleared before she could finish them. Some subjects attract her but defy creative treatment—she is fascinated by the Victorian scientist Oliver Lodge yet can’t find a way to bring him authentically onto the page. The Air We Breathe (2007) was stirred into being when the author came across a public-health pamphlet from World War I titled “What You Should Know about TUBERCULOSIS.” But the work was thoroughly transformed by her experience of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Or as Ms. Barrett writes of her six-year creative impasse, “I went to New York with an idea for a book, which was inspired by another book; the world changed while I was there, and so did I; the book I meant to write changed as well.”
Is it possible, she asks at one point, to write subtle, allusive fiction set in the past in which history isn’t merely backdrop—in which the characters maintain the complexity of their inner lives? The answer would appear to be yes, provided a writer doesn’t leap headfirst into the flowing stream of facts, but has first checked out the hazards downriver.
[Great, but what should I know about TUBERCULOSIS? What’s the truth about TB? Who will be candid about consumption? —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Leo Lasdun reviews Lydia Millet’s new collection of short stories (Atavists, April):
The central problem that Millet (and other writers covering the same subject matter) encounters is that she’s trying to illustrate a set of extremely modern dilemmas and maladies from the refuge of what is a rather traditional narrative mode. It’s incongruent, and extremely difficult to do effectively. Millet’s writing (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2010) is conversational, and she sometimes slips into a confused rhythm of clipped, notational sentences (“Stole a quick glance at her.” “Googled Natalya Kovalchuk.”). Outside of this, the stories are presented conventionally, in clean, polished prose. Again, it’s entertaining, but it’s hard to glean anything submerged and therefore interesting about the loneliness-connection dichotomy, or about existential dread, from this kind of writing. Millet is circling around a ubiquitous feeling of fracture: our senses of time and distance have been abused and exploded into hyper-discrete and incalculable values. It’s a mood, a feeling, that deserves a fully charged voice, and prose that’s at least a little bit out there.
In the TLS, Diana Leca reviews two books about boxing (The Last Bell: Life, Death and Boxing, by Donald McRae, March; and Soft Tissue Damage, by Anna Whitwham, March):
Whitwham suffered a slew of injuries in training: the usual cuts to the eyes and lips, the fattened nose, a split knuckle, a dislocated jaw and—the injury that gives the book its title—damage to the soft tissues of her kidney. “Why do this to yourself?” she is asked in various ways by those who love her.
In taut, unfussy prose, Whitwham catalogues these hurts, how and why she seeks them out. Memories of her mother’s illness, and of their life together, open each chapter, offset in italics. Seemingly incongruous worlds (the hospice, the ring) are balanced by the author’s voice, which has heat to it. “I wanted her to be broken,” she writes of an opponent in her most important fight. But after Whitwham absorbs a ruthless “equilibrium shot”—a punch to the ear that buckles the legs, cartoon-like—her corner throws in the towel. With precision, she describes the “strange hurt” that she, like many boxers, feels after a loss: the boiling shame, the urge to retreat, the urge to cry or hold a daughter. Few boxing memoirs admit such vulnerability (though Plimpton does confess to crying through his entire fight with Moore), but anyone who has seen bloodied, panting boxers at the end of a grueling battle hold and whisper to each other, glad to have survived, knows that in this sport the brutal always nuzzles against the tender.
[We linked to Anne Carson on boxing in WRB—Aug. 10, 2024 and a piece on Regency-era boxing writing in WRB—Jan. 4, 2025.]
N.B.:
The legacy of Carthage. [Among other things:
Maine’s Carthage was originally called Plantation #4. But the lumberjacks there wanted a name more meaningful than a term in a series. When the right to name the town was auctioned off, a schoolteacher who “delighted in the exploits of the Romans and the Carthaginians” paid two dollars for the right to name it Carthage. Just like that, the lumberjacks became Carthaginians.
There are still plenty of American eccentrics out there, but no one is letting them name towns in exchange for two dollars anymore. (I have driven through Carthage, Maine, but I have never stopped there.) —Steve]
“Americans Won’t Splurge on Beer.” [The Managing Editor is in the pocket of Big New England and would encourage you to splurge on cider instead. —Steve]
“How Millennials Learned to Sit at Their Desks and Love the Bowl” [Is it a salad? Is it rice and beans? Yes. —Steve]
On some artists who lived inside a mall for four years. [Always amazing when an episode of The Simpsons becomes real. —Steve]
Singing in Calvin’s Geneva.
A Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere today, if it hasn’t already done so.
New issue: The Dial Issue 28: Spectacle
Poem:
“Whale at Twilight” by Elizabeth Coatsworth
The sea is enormous, but calm with evening and sunset,
rearranging its islands for the night, changing its ocean blues,
smoothing itself against the reefs, without playfulness, without thought.
No stars are out, only sea birds flying to distant reefs.
No vessels intrude, no lobstermen haul their pots,
only somewhere out toward the horizon a thin column of water appears
and disappears again, and then rises once more,
tranquil as a fountain in a garden where no wind blows.
[I recently discovered Coatsworth’s work in an anthology of Maine poetry (for another selection from the same anthology, see WRB—Apr. 16, 2025). I love her somewhat unusual characterization here of the ocean as industrious and abstracted, quietly going about end-of-day business like a mother in after-bedtime reverie. The sea birds are not raucous ruffians, but something like serious late-night commuters on a mission, and then the titular whale itself brings the scene to a close, “tranquil as a fountain in a garden where no wind blows.” It’s a moment of peace, perfectly captured. —Hannah]
Upcoming books:
Yale University Press | May 13
The Holy Innocents: A Novel
by Miguel Delibes, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush
From the publisher: In the arid province of Extremadura in 1960s Spain, life on a country estate carries on as it has for centuries: wealthy landowners live in luxury while workers endure lives of poverty and humiliation. Amid this exploitation and injustice live Régula, an estate’s gatekeeper, and her husband, Paco, the hunting attendant of the contemptuous Señorito Iván. Régula’s brother Azarías toils as a farmhand, but he prefers chasing tawny owls at night, training his pet jackdaw, and caring for his young niece, who is bedridden. When Paco is injured, the nature-loving Azarías is forced to take over as hunting attendant. But after Señorito Iván commits an act of enormous cruelty following an unsuccessful hunt, it is only a matter of time before the simmering tensions between the aristocracy and the workers explode.
A perennial Spanish classic, translated into twelve languages but never before into English, The Holy Innocents is a searing tale of human cruelty and alienation, in which resistance and liberation are not just necessary but possible.
Also out Tuesday:
Atria Books: Metallic Realms: A Novel by
Bloomsbury Publishing: Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney
Dundurn Press: The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History by Benjamin Libman
New Vessel Press: The Remembered Soldier: A Novel by Anjet Daanje, translated from the Dutch by David McKay
Penguin Press: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow [We linked to a review in WRB—Apr. 30, 2025.]
Transit Books: Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—May 7, 2025.]
W. W. Norton & Company: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux [We linked to a review in WRB—Nov. 23, 2024.]
Yale University Press: Horace: Poet on a Volcano by Peter Stothard
What we’re reading:
Steve read a thesis about Jane Austen’s use of free indirect speech by Hatsuyo Shimazaki at the strong urging of
. [Since the thing being discussed gets all kinds of labels it’s worth clarifying: Shimazaki distinguishes, within the category of “free indirect discourse,” between “free indirect discourse for speech presentations” and “free indirect discourse for thought presentations.” (She abbreviates them in the paper, but I am going to shorten these to “free indirect speech” and “free indirect thought” here.) That these get lumped together makes sense. But the combination obscures their differences; they work on the narrative in opposite ways. Free indirect thought brings the reader closer to the character than the narrator simply reporting “such-and-such character felt such-and-such emotions” would. On the other hand, free indirect speech distances the reader from the character when compared to simply quoting what the character said. Austen uses free indirect speech for several purposes—some are basic, like allowing the narrator to satirize a character’s speech or make a conversation seem more reserved, but some are more involved, like obscuring the motives animating a character’s speech. This allows the novel to deceive the reader in the same way that the characters are deceived.It may help to look at an example. This comes from Sense and Sensibility:
After a short silence which succeeded the first surprise and enquiries of meeting, Marianne asked Edward if he came directly from London. No, he had been in Devonshire a fortnight.
“A fortnight!” she repeated, surprised at his being so long in the same county with Elinor without seeing her before.
He looked rather distressed as he added, that he had been staying with some friends near Plymouth.
(The emphasis is Shimazaki’s.) She explains the effect of putting the emphasized sentence in free indirect speech:
It is used to embed Edward’s speech and veil its purport from the reader, because there is a secret connected to his two-week presence in Devonshire before his visit to the Dashwoods. The reader later learns that Edward met with his clandestine fiancé near Plymouth. . . . Edward’s speech presented in [free indirect speech] indicates covertly his embarrassment at hiding his engagement. The same narrative technique is used when Edward declares in Volume 1, Chapter 19 that he must leave the cottage after staying only for a week, without explaining the reason. His speech is likewise presented in [free indirect speech]. What is important here is, by embedding this hesitation and embarrassment, the author insinuates doubt into the reader’s mind while still concealing the truth at this stage of the story.
Even more interesting is her later treatment of Emma, in which she argues that similar technique to this helps conceal from the reader Mr. Elton’s pursuit of Emma and the secret engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax.
I am not sure that, as Oliver says, “you simply have to read this,” but I’m not complaining that I did. It’s worth reading. —Steve]
He also finished Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl (2021). [An extraordinarily funny line about autofiction:
The most basic contradiction visible in this mode is precisely this desire to publish social withdrawal, as though one felt the need to log on to Facebook every day to announce that one is quitting Facebook.
Or maybe the Managing Editor, a Zoomer who deleted his Facebook in 2018 or so, is just predisposed to find references to Facebook funny. —Steve]
Critical notes:
- Moul on epyllia:
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is an “epyllion,” a kind of medium-length narrative poem in a particularly extravagant style, often with an erotic theme, which had a brief but intense vogue in England in the 1590s. These poems have, oddly and confusingly, very often been described by literary critics as “Ovidian”; but, although some (far from all) of them tell stories which also appear in Ovid, and some (far from all) of them contain a final metamorphosis, none of them are written in anything like Ovid’s knowing but relatively straightforward style.
These poems do, however, have a pretty clear set of generic markers. As well as the mythological subject matter and erotic focus, they are characterised by an extravagant style marked by very prolonged and detailed description, many diversions and asides, and a self-conscious display of rhetorical techniques. There’s a link between the style and the subject—the lingering descriptions and constant diversions are a kind of foreplay, constantly suggesting, but also deferring, the erotic (or any other kind of) action.
[Calling things “Ovidian” because you can’t think of anything intelligent to say about them is the last refuge of the scoundrel. —Steve]
But I do wonder whether we spend too much time worrying about whether this moment is one characterized by creativity or stagnation. It is not as though the New is all that matters. One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal—things that happened this very term—it’s all new to them.
[One of Guy Davenport’s best provocations—“One can read The Cantos as a subtle meditation on whether stone is alive”—works because the poem regards every dead figure and every past moment it investigates as alive, and from there it is not too difficult to imagine even inanimate objects as alive. There is some precedent for this; like the man says, “if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” —Steve]
A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive.
[This is what getting the WRB out is like. —Steve]
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