WRB—May 21, 2025

“half in love”

Brandy, you’re a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life, my love, and my lady
Is the WRB

N.B.:

May’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Saturday, May 31 to discuss the question “Can lying be moral?”

Links:

• In the Financial Times,

  Henry Oliver
  on Jane Austen and Adam Smith’s moral philosophy:

  What marks out the capacity to improve, in Smith, is being able to see ourselves as an “impartial observer” would see us. That’s what happened to Marianne when she finally saw things from Elinor’s point of view. Smith calls self-deceit a “fatal weakness of mankind” and says it is “the source of half the disorders of human-life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or, in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable.”

  That reformation is the basis of the plot of Austen’s novel Emma. Emma is unable to see herself in the light in which others see her. She makes serious errors about who loves whom, and comes close to ruining people’s lives with her clumsy matchmaking. She represents Smith’s “man of system,” someone who is so “enamored of the beauty” of their own plans that they cannot see their errors. Knightley acts as the impartial observer: he can see what Emma cannot. His advice about her conduct turns out to be the right advice.

  [Austen works the difficulty of being that impartial observer directly into the narration of her novels. Nowhere does she get more out of it than Emma; the narration pretends to be objective even though it gets filtered through Emma’s view of the world. Emma learns that she is not the impartial observer she thought she was, and readers learn that they should have been paying closer attention to what the narrator reported and why. (I had some earlier notes on this function of Austen’s narration in WRB—Dec. 13, 2023.) —Steve]

• In n+1, Lisa Borst on “new TV novels”:

  As a rule the new TV novels make use of familiar Hollywood-fiction tropes. It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside. But from these familiar sex-and-rage dynamics a certain antagonistic energy has been drained. Absent from most of the new TV novels is an older literature’s icy confidence that what we’re reading is independent from — or even superior to — the entertainment business, once invariably portrayed as a phony and craven industry run by “intellectual stumblebums,” as West wrote. In the new TV novels, instead, a reader can detect a version of what Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in her study of “the American novel in the age of television,” called “the anxiety of obsolescence”: an apprehension — expressed sometimes bitterly, sometimes with acceptance or opportunism — about literature’s diminished, even parasitic status relative to TV’s cultural might. This is fiction that appears to see itself in the way the former sitcom star who narrates Reboot (by Justin Taylor, 2024) sees his ex-cable cohort: “Nobody cared how we defined our era anymore, because our era was over.”

  [There were some links, and I made some notes, on the danger of failing to understand that the novel is a very different art form from the TV show (or the movie) in WRB—Jan. 15, 2025. In lieu of repeating myself I will indulge in some light sneering at our self-styled intellectual class, which seems to regard watching prestige television as an adequate substitute for reading books. “Prestige television”—what a phrase. And so effective as a piece of marketing, too; I marvel that we cannot go to the store and buy prestige potato chips, which we pour into prestige bowls, which we eat out of as we sit on prestige couches and prestige chairs in our prestige homes and prestige apartments with our prestige wives and prestige husbands and prestige children as we watch prestige television. Marketers, attend! Only through your unceasing efforts can human civilization attain these heights of sophistication! —Steve]

• In Prospect, Francesca Wade on Gertrude Stein:

  But she remained anxious that her strategies had backfired, that her personal fame was at an all-time high while interest in her actual writing remained low.

  From this point, celebrity became Stein’s subject. Soon after her return to Paris, she began work on a novel she titled Ida, which she described to a friend as “a novel about publicity, a novel where a person is so publicized that there isn’t any personality left.” Ida becomes famous overnight, for no particular reason—she is famous simply for being famous. She is recognized everywhere she goes, people follow her around—and the more widely she finds herself known, the less she feels she exists. Drawing on Stein’s brushes with Hollywood and the disconcerting experience of writer’s block that had followed her rise to stardom, Ida is a fascinating musing on identity, asking what makes us real to ourselves and suggesting that being seen by others is not always the same as being known. Stein was increasingly interested in the idea of celebrity as something manufactured by the media: an illusion of intimacy, which not only renders authentic connection impossible, but risks losing the person in the cloud of their own inflated—and false—image. Stein’s main fear was that, in cultivating her celebrity, she had put her creative life at risk. Her awareness of her audience made her self-conscious, and she found their expectations stifling.

  [This is also what it feels like to be the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. —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:

• A book on the beauty of mathematics and literature (with appearances of incense, Japanese poetry, ballad meter, Gulliver’s Travels, and Dan Brown, among others)

• How many books is a lot of books?

• Hannah on a Poem by May Sarton and islands

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 sharing the newsletter with a friend. —Steve]