WRB—Nov. 22, 2025
“modeled monolith”
The Washington Review of Books is “the quintessential format of our time.”
Links:
In Literary Imagination, James Tussing on Alice Munro:
For Munro, the “use” of our feelings of guilt is ultimately the same as the use of our erotic desires: both provide material for art. In Giles Harvey’s well-reported New York Times Magazine article, a psychiatrist explains that Munro’s behavior was typical of women whose husbands have abused their daughters, and Shelia Munro speculates to Harvey that Gerald Fremlin may have “groomed” her mother just as he groomed Andrea. I don’t think these theories get you very far, however, because if staying with a child-abuser husband is sadly typical behavior, writing icily unsentimental stories inspired by your decision to do so is not. If Fremlin’s behavior was normal at least from the perspective of criminal psychopathology, Munro’s is harder to fathom. Her decision to allow herself to become practically and emotionally dependent on an eccentric pedophile was strange enough even before he abused her daughter. No doubt she sincerely loved him, but surely a large part of why she remained in this bizarre domestic situation was because it created the conditions that she needed in order to write, to produce the art that was (as she told an interviewer) “the final thing” in her life. To use Bea Doud’s language from “Vandals,” Munro’s was a greater or at least a far stranger insanity than Fremlin’s, and her family lived inside of it.
[A sign of quality is an incredibly fine observation appearing in a footnote, and Tussing supplies one: “The American writers whom Munro most resembles are those David Foster Wallace famously called the Great Male Narcissists.” He then characterizes said writers:
These writers returned to something like nineteenth-century realism and even its hoary-seeming central convention, the adultery plot. They were convinced that the changes in sexual mores experienced by their generation gave this antique-seeming preoccupation new relevance.
If I may speak generally about a rather diverse group of writers, their male narcissism hindered their attempts to do something that the great nineteenth-century realists did routinely: create iconic female characters. They did not write Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Tess of the d’Urbervilles because they could not write Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Paul Franz recently quoted a gay male friend of his on the straight male imagination: “An intense focus on women, intense interest in women—what one might think to be the most heterosexual thing—is in fact slightly ‘suss’ from a straight perspective.” The nineteenth-century realists are (to use these terms) “suss,” and the Great Male Narcissists are not. Their desire—better to say their unwillingness or inability to separate themselves from their desire—was an impediment to their art.
The connection to Munro is this: the difference between “For Munro, the ‘use’ of our feelings of guilt is ultimately the same as the use of our erotic desires: both provide material for art” and “[The Great Male Narcissists] were convinced that the changes in sexual mores experienced by their generation gave this antique-seeming preoccupation new relevance” is not very big at all. The “our” in the first sentence and “their generation” in the second are not wrong, necessarily, but they are faux-universalizing; the things that really matter here are Alice Munro’s feelings of guilt, Alice Munro’s erotic desires, and the changes in sexual mores experienced by the Great Male Narcissists (and Alice Munro) as individuals. If the purpose of these things is to be material for art, where does that leave the vast majority of people who are not artists, let alone artists on the level of Munro? —Steve]
In Harper’s, Geoff Dyer’s introduction to a NYRB reissue of a novel of New Orleans (Lives of the Saints, by Nancy Lehmann, 1985, April 7, 2026):
So the editor at the London party who thought the book “slight” was both wholly wrong and slightly right: it is, in the same way that Jean Rhys’ first four novels are slight, or Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1992). There is more—and less—to this than page count. The magical capacity of fiction means that some slight novels can contain more than books ten times their length, scale, and ambition. Funny novels are invariably more serious than humorless ones. The weirdly democratized art of fiction means that writers with only a fraction of the cerebral heft of a Susan Sontag can produce novels far better than something as weighty as In America (1999). After Mr. Collier answers a humdrum question by quoting from the classics (“I know in my heart that one day Troy will fall”), Louise explains that the true eccentric is entirely unconscious of his eccentricity: “When you ask him why, the true eccentric does not know. He does not know why he does it. He just does it.” The same is true of certain novels. The form has no explanation for why it is as it is except itself. Slightness in such instances means irreducible. The book itself is the only possible diagram—always somewhat blurred, sometimes inscrutable—of its inner workings.
[Appian has Scipio Aemilianus quote the same part of the Iliad as he watches Carthage fall at the end of the Third Punic War. Appian also reports that Polybius heard him say it and wrote it down, although the line doesn’t appear in what we have of Polybius. Scipio Aemilianus quotes it “either voluntarily or otherwise”—he might not have known why he did it. He just did it. —Steve]
In Granta, Madeline Cash on Boomer ellipses in texting:
It’s of course unreasonable to compare my mother’s texting quirks to Virginia Woolf’s prose. That “thrown it away . . . ” is deliberate. It speaks volumes. But in a way, my mother’s “OK . . . ” performs the same work, though unwittingly. Her ellipsis is a modernism of its own: the pause of someone caught between analog warmth and digital brevity. Like Woolf, she’s hedging against the limits of form, trying to insert tone into a foreign medium. What has become a signature of our parents’ digital awkwardness may really be their own adaptation to the medium.
Have I not been giving this generation enough credit? Are the over sixty crowd as intentional in their punctuation as Virginia Woolf? Enlightened even? It was a Boomer who invented the smartphone after all. Maybe . . . -ers know exactly what they’re doing.
[I think not so much of Woolf but of the ellipses of fragments: imagine Ezra Pound’s
Spring . . .
Too long . . .
Gongula . . .
as three text messages, all in a row. Achilles Fang (coolest name anyone’s ever had, by the way) traces it to a chunk of a fragment of Sappho so slight that the scholars give many uncertain readings: “Doctors disagreeing, the poet may have a fling at the thing.” This injunction should also apply to some text messages.
(When Fang came up with that jingle at the end, was he thinking of “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”? And if he was, was he also thinking of Pound’s “poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music”?) —Steve]
Reviews:
In The New Statesman, Terry Eagleton reviews a new collection of newly discovered poetry by Iris Murdoch (Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936–1995, edited by Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson, Rachel Hirschler, and Frances White, November 6 in the UK):
In a rather effusive introduction to the collection, Sarah Hall speaks of it as displaying “an astonishing talent”. She also adds rather coyly that “when you finish reading and close this book, you might feel a little closer to Iris.” Feeling closer to T. S. Eliot, however, isn’t the point of reading The Waste Land. Poetry is an art, not a record of one’s emotional life. Shakespeare was probably never out of his wits in a howling storm, but King Lear has an authentic ring to it all the same. The Murdoch industry, however, is now at full throttle, with the author and her sexually turbulent life reverently enshrined at its center, and a sizable crowd of people seem anxious to get in on the act. This volume has no less than four editors, while eight other individuals are acknowledged as transcribers of the poems, along with various editors, copy-editors, archivists, advisers, translators, proofreaders, researchers and administrative supporters. It’s surprising there isn’t a list of runners, chefs, chauffeurs and make-up artists.
[We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Nov. 1, 2025.
Say what you will about the Murdoch industry, they haven’t yet managed to get the book a publication date in the United States or the discovery of these poems any coverage in American magazines and newspapers (that I can recall). Having managed to edit this newsletter for long enough, and considering myself worthy of the style and title “one of America’s leading readers of book reviews,” I still feel at a loss to identify what from Britain will make the jump over here. (The exception is anything about any era of British history besides the Tudors and the Second World War. Those will not.) I recall someone pointing out that Frances Wilson’s recent biography of Muriel Spark got reviewed in places that hardly acknowledged the hundredth anniversary of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and I would have been sure that these Murdoch poems would have gotten some attention. Maybe I just know a lot of Americans who are into Murdoch. —Steve]
In The New Criterion, Eric Gibson reviews a biography of Douglas Cooper (Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso, by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi, May):
There is one aspect of Cooper’s taste the authors overlook, however: he didn’t understand Cubist sculpture. More precisely, he didn’t understand—to borrow his own term—the “essential” Cubist sculpture, that is assemblage. For a collector, that wouldn’t have been an issue; for an exhibition organizer, it’s disabling.
Alongside the revolution he effected in the language of painting, Picasso brought about a similar one in sculpture with his invention of assemblage. It broke with the ancient tradition of the carved and modeled monolith, creating open-form, planar structures made by attaching disparate parts. This was a language Cooper couldn’t grasp.
This shortcoming appears in his 1949 review in The Listener, a BBC publication, of The Sculptures of Picasso, a book of photographs by Brassaï of some two hundred of the artist’s works covering his entire career, with an introduction by Kahnweiler, Picasso’s longtime dealer. It was the first comprehensive study of this aspect of Picasso’s work ever published. Photos of three assemblages were included, among them a large still-life arrangement whose centerpiece is a cardboard guitar that was the maquette for MoMA’s sheet-metal Guitar (1915). Cooper in his review treats them as a subset of Cubist painting (“Sometimes he has resorted to sculpture to solve pictorial problems”) rather than seeing them as independent works of art with their own set of properties and imperatives.
[Clark and Calvocoressi quote Cooper himself to explain the appeal Cubism had for him:
Although these works seemed harsh and aggressive, I felt them to be essentially alive, and I began to get excited. Was my artistic vision, still underdeveloped, instinctively drawn to an uncompromising modernism?
Since this also applies to Cubist sculpture, it seems like Cooper just thought of art in terms of painting. —Steve]
In Engelsberg Ideas, Nicholas Morton reviews a book about horses (The Medieval Horse, by Anastasija Ropa, November 28):
Across its constituent chapters, The Medieval Horse shows close sensitivity to different cultures and their varied use of horses, with her analysis ranging from the Rus’ territories to China, and from Europe to India and the Middle East. Cultural differences in the employment of horses could take many forms. For example, while European knights showed a marked preference for riding stallions, rather than mares and geldings, in many parts of the Muslim world—notably among nomadic communities—this preference was not in evidence.
Of all the things I hadn’t anticipated from a history of the medieval horse, the relationship between horses and moles is one of this book’s most fascinating eye-openers. According to traditional Livonian practices, drawing on local magical beliefs, a young foal should be rubbed with a live mole to prevent it from becoming thin. This kind of belief was not confined solely to Livonia; moles also feature in the medical treatments recommended for horses in Early Modern Italy and in a Middle-English book of equine lore.
[How did they get the moles? Was it someone’s job to find an area with a bunch of molehills and wait for one to show up? —Steve]
N.B.:
The invention of “Philippine mahogany.” [“Mahogany” is such a plush word. —Steve]
Greek saffron.
A history of job listings. [You can’t get work “on the Aqueduct in this town” anymore. I’m writing to Agrippa. —Steve]
New issues:
Harper’s Magazine December 2025 [As linked to above.]
Literary Imagination Volume 27, Number 3, 2025 [As linked to above.]
The New Criterion Volume 44, Number 4 / December 2025 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“Small Actors” by Jameson Fitzpatrick
Never to be someone’s mother, no.
But someone’s friend—someone’s mother’s friend
to whom two girls, late and soaked-through,
come home:to the two of us at the table, drinking.
How is it
I’m no longer one of them, running in from the rain, butsomeone’s friend’s mother’s friend
[Just this morning I wrote a card congratulating an acquaintance on her pregnancy and received a photo from another friend of their 10-month-old learning to walk. I am turning 29 before the end of this year and I imagine that the feeling in this poem will only grow more familiar in the coming decade. But the feeling I sense is not static. Perhaps there is grief that Fitzpatrick will not be a mother, perhaps bewilderment at the passage of time. But perhaps there is comfort in being out of the rain, perhaps there is gladness to be entwined in a heterodox genealogy of women, someone’s friend’s mother’s friend. —K. T.]
Upcoming books:
Princeton University Press | November 25
Timaeus in Paradise: Metaphors and Beauty from Plato to Dante and Beyond
by Piero Boitani
From the publisher: More than two thousand years after it was written, Plato’s Timaeus continues to fascinate and intrigue its readers. In Timaeus in Paradise, Piero Boitani traces the abiding legacy of the Timaeus, mapping an intellectual journey that begins with Plato and extends to Dante and beyond. In a series of short, lyrical chapters, Boitani sketches a lineage that includes Proclus, Boethius, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, John Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas. Focusing on Plato’s metaphorical language—which Dante considered comparable to that of the Bible—and the beauty of its images, Boitani shows that these images penetrate deep into European culture, inspiring the anonymous author of the treatise on the Sublime as well as the mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
Plato’s account of the creation of the cosmos in the Timaeus supplants Hesiod’s myths and Parmenides’ theories—and was described by Johannes Kepler as the best gloss ever on the first chapter of Genesis. Boitani finds its echoes everywhere, from the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral and the frescoes of the Anagni Crypt to the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. He connects the beauty defined in the Timaeus to the beauties of the Hebrew Bible and to the lilies of the field invoked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Bringing together philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, sculpture and painting, Boitani charts Europe’s intellectual history—a history of ideas and images—by capturing the enduring reverberations of Plato’s summa. Illustrations accompanying the text cover more than two thousand years of iconography.
Also out Tuesday:
Indiana University Press: Vigils and Nocturne: Black Notebooks 1952/53–1957 by Martin Heidegger, translated from the German by Scott M. Campbell and David C. Abergel
Semiotext(e): Last Week in End Times Cinema by A. S. Hamrah
What we’re reading:
Steve read more of The Recognitions.
Critical notes:
An essay by Eugène Delacroix, translated by Blake Bartlett and Alice Gribbin:
One remembers what Diderot said to the painter who made his father’s portrait, and who, instead of representing a simple man in his work clothes (he was a cutler), dressed him in his best clothes: “You have painted my Sunday father, and I wanted my everyday father.” Diderot’s painter is like almost all painters, who seem to believe that nature is wrong for making men as they are. They apply make-up, they Sunday their figures, and far from being everyday men, they are not even men: There is nothing under their curled wigs, their posed drapes. They are masks without spirit and without body.
If the style of the ancients imposed the limit, if we only find the last word on art in absolute uniformity, how do we rank Michelangelo, with his bizarre concepts, tormented forms, outrageous or completely false geometries, which superficially imitate nature? You will be forced to say that he is sublime to excuse yourself from granting him beauty.
Michelangelo saw the statues from antiquity as we do; history tells us of the cult that he professed for these marvelous remains, and his admiration was ours; however, the sight of and esteem for these fragments changed nothing about his vocation or his nature; he did not cease to be himself, and his innovations should be admired alongside those of antiquity.
In Commonweal, Alexander Stern reviews two books about, among other things, mediation in culture (The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, by Olivier Roy, translated from the French by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, 2024; and Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, by Anna Kornbluh, 2024):
Even in literature that is not in the strict sense “autofiction,” Kornbluh finds the increasing dominance of first-person narration a sign of the same disdain for interpretation, mediation, and depth. (A recent viral tweet suggested that young readers have trouble even reading third-person omniscient narration.) To put it in Roy’s terms, it is in the space between expression and meaning that culture can actually breathe. In a culture of immediacy, where meanings (or codes) exist only on the surface—completely explicit and legible without need of interpretation—the depths and ambiguity of genuine culture are lost. Immediate art like autofiction rejects that space, forecloses interpretation, and suffocates both culture and individuality at the same time.
One last example. Both Roy and Kornbluh discuss emojis as an example of the cultural tendency they’re trying to capture. For Kornbluh, they are “the quintessential format of our time.” “In their anti-semanticism,” she writes (in her characteristically overstuffed prose style), “emojis oppose symbolic delegation, auto-constructing as pure immanence and aesthetically crystallizing the political economy of instantaneity and flow.” In other words, they turn emotion itself into a circulating commodity.
[We linked to previous reviews of Kornbluh’s book in WRB—Feb. 21, 2024 and WRB—Mar. 9, 2024.
The theorist we’re really looking for here is the great Garth Marenghi: “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Not arrogant; not self-satisfied; not snobs; not supercilious; not obscurantist; but cowards. What makes subtext cowardly is its refusal to come to the surface, where everything is “completely explicit and legible without need of interpretation.” To use subtext is to take advantage of ambiguities and avoid declaring anything firmly one way or the other.
Is this correct? Well, no. And yet. Perhaps it will be taken as truth in a few years. (I’m adding this clarification to aid future scholars, studying the WRB at a time after subtext has been abolished.) —Steve]
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