WRB—Oct. 4, 2025

“diet of news”

In all the history of reviews of books, there has never been a Managing Editor who has had to go through what I have to go through!

Links:

• In The New Statesman, Catharine Hughes on the America reflected in Peanuts:

  Strikingly, there are no adults in Peanuts. Schulz had stopped drawing them years before when developing his style, but claimed this wasn’t intentionally philosophical: “I drew [kids] because that’s what sold.” There was an assumption that childhood was a joyous time. Schulz and Peanuts subverted this: “Even in this happy-ending nation, Schulz’s strip rarely ends happily,” wrote the Saturday Evening Post.

  Charlie Brown never wins a baseball game and never manages to kick a football; his love for the Little Red-Haired Girl goes forever unrequited. Lucy offers psychiatric advice, which simply rehashes her own insecurities. Linus clings to a “security blanket”, a concept popularized by Schulz. Snoopy is a dreamer, but even in his dreams, he doesn’t come out on top. His novel is never published, the Red Baron—the fantasy nemesis to his Flying Ace persona—wins every battle. For Schulz, the adult world and childhood carried the same weight, the same sadness, the same anger. “Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy,” Schulz once said. “It’s not cute. There are a lot of bitter and sarcastic things in [it].”

  [I had some notes comparing Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes in WRB—Aug. 16, 2023, which I mention here because one of the bigger differences between the two is the presence of adults in the latter. Since there are no adults in Peanuts, the characters exist in a limbo between childhood and adulthood, one aided by the endless repetition of a comic strip and the specific bleakness of Peanuts. Has there ever been a kid as completely worn down by life as Charlie Brown? Calvin has the rage of youth, but Charlie Brown, the Balthazar the donkey of comic strips, merely absorbs punishment. Good grief indeed.

  And, since it is October: the best Peanuts special is It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) is wonderful, of course, but “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord”? In the Peanuts universe? No. God is absent here. Nobody is being saved from anything. Charlie Brown will never kick that football. And this is the world It’s the Great Pumpkin depicts. First Snoopy fantasizes about being a flying ace during the First World War; then he gets jerked back and forth between blithely marching and uncontrollably weeping by Schroder playing the likes of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Roses of Picardy.” As the night drags on, Linus, having nothing else to cling to, insists more and more on his sincerity—after all, the Great Pumpkin visits “the most sincere pumpkin patch,” and it has to be his. The Great Pumpkin’s failure to visit does nothing to disabuse Linus of anything. He only asserts with even more fervor that next year will be the year. And this hope, destined to be unfilled, is one of the characteristic traits of the Peanuts characters; in spite of all their past failures, Charlie Brown thinks one day he’ll kick the football, and Snoopy imagines that one day he’ll shoot down the Red Baron. We must, I think Camus said, imagine the Peanuts gang happy. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In

  The Metropolitan Review
  ,
  Paul Franz
  reviews Greg Gerke’s debut novel (In the Suavity of the Rock, 2024) [The Upcoming book in WRB—June 26, 2024; we linked to an interview with Gerke about it there as well.]:

  What Rick rejects—art’s need for living, for maturation, letting things sit—is one of Gerke’s central themes. Yet if this suggests fermentation, there is also, at a deeper level, a notion of achieved distance between subject and material, which must finally reveal itself in a distant prospect—or, as the novel puts it elsewhere, “the nearest minor Alp.” (A more successful image, it seems to me, in its concreteness than that “infinite territory,” and more illustrative of the novel’s strengths.) For Rick, living is seeing, and seeing requires a certain withdrawal: “Many people claim to be living their most when they are involved in their most risky behavior. The reverse for me. Instead of seeing more, I was seeing less,” he writes in a revealing aside. To truly live requires a separation from which one can take the measure of things, and it is tempting to say that the retrospective angle of the narration reflects the same effort at taking distance from living, such that the true living is that which is able to hold life at a distance, to view it in a certain prospect and evoke, and by evoking, distill some conclusion from it.

  [That reference to “the nearest minor Alp,” along with a title taken from The Cantos and a sense that great art forces you to sit with it, suggests Basil Bunting’s “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos”:

  Here they are, you will have to go a long way round

  if you want to avoid them.

  It takes some getting used to. Here are the Alps,

  fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

  The last two lines are both solicitous, understanding the difficulty and giving the reader time to work through it (“It takes some getting used to.”), and demanding, recognizing that great art poses a challenge and insists on a response (“Here are the Alps, / fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!”).

  And Franz’s idea about living requiring life to be held at a distance in order to draw conclusions from it echoes something Housman said:

  It is a clear morning towards the end of winter: snow has fallen in the night, and still lies on the branches of the trees under brilliant sunshine. Tennyson could have surveyed the scene with his trained eye, made search among his treasury of choice words, sorted and sifted and condensed them, till he had framed three lines of verse, to be introduced some day in a narrative or a simile, and there to flash upon the reader’s eye the very picture of a snowy and sunshiny morning. Keats or Shakespeare would have walked between the trees thinking of whatever came uppermost and letting their senses commune with their souls; and there the morning would have transmuted itself into half a line or so which, occurring in some chance passage of their poetry, would have set the reader walking between the same trees again.

  The mode of work attributed to Tennyson is different from that attributed to Keats and Shakespeare, but they have in common that the poet is both attentive to the snowy morning and also thinking about something else. The thinking about something else is precisely what enables the poet to understand the experience and capture that understanding in words that will duplicate the poet’s experience in their readers. And while not everyone can express an idea as well as Keats, everyone is always trying to understand their life and articulate its meaning—usually to themselves, sometimes to others. —Steve]

• Two in our sister publication across the pond; first, Erin Maglaque reviews a new translation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Theses (900 Conclusions, edited and translated from the Latin by Brian P. Copenhaver, March), a book about him (The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language, by Edward Wilson-Lee, January), and a book about the Renaissance in general (Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer, March):

  Palmer makes the historiography intelligible; she introduces a wide range of characters and anecdotes and lesser-known details, and because of this, the book is a useful introduction to the period. But I found it unbearable to read. The writing is often patronizing and silly: from the epithets (calling the Florentine Priori “Nine Dudes in a Tower”) to the made-up dialogue (“Machiavelli: WTF?!?!”) to the use of the word “badass” to describe the mercenary Federico da Montefeltro. Sometimes she is simply confusing, as when she tries to “ground” us in historical time by mapping Renaissance chronology onto modern, so we get unhelpful sentences such as “Pope Paul’s death in 1471 = 1971 saw the rise of Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), so the political turmoil around the Pazzi Conspiracy corresponds to Watergate”—which prompts a surreal image of a Medici bleeding to death on the steps of a D.C. hotel. There are many, many exclamation marks (Michelangelo’s David is “super naked!!!”) and dollar signs and theatrically spelled words (“The Renaissance was . . . loooooong”; scholasticism was “increeeeeeeeedibly booooooring”—I counted the vowels). There are spoiler alerts for things that happened five hundred years ago. There are flights of fancy that veer into farce, as when Palmer imagines Machiavelli weeping at Florence acquiring Unesco protected status and then imagines herself weeping for Machiavelli weeping. Throughout, she writes about herself in a cloying third person, most notably in a chapter titled “Why did Ada Palmer start studying the Renaissance?” Readers surely deserve less excruciating forms of enthusiasm for the subject.

  [We linked to earlier reviews of The Grammar of Angels in WRB—Feb. 5, 2025, WRB—May 28, 2025, and WRB—July 9, 2025 and an earlier review of Inventing the Renaissance in WRB—May 31, 2025.

  I do wonder what it means to be “super naked.” My limited imagination had heretofore failed to envision any additional levels of nakedness beyond the standard one, which already involves not wearing any clothes. And I am not necessarily opposed to the image of a Medici bleeding to death on the steps of a D.C. hotel (even if it sounds like a particularly outré Warren Zevon lyric), but I cannot think of a less interesting way to superimpose Renaissance Italy onto twentieth-century America than going date by date. Are there really no other resonances? Can we learn nothing about one by comparing it to the other except for the speed at which time passes?

  At one point Magalque quotes Christopher Celenza’s definition of a humanist: “A humanist is someone who receives a letter from Erasmus.” Why not go further, though, and let Erasmus inhabit the voice of Wyndham Lewis—an unlikely combination, I admit: “Humanism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said at a certain period.”

[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:

• I exhort the readers of this fine newsletter to act like the readers of newspapers in early modern Europe

• Writing fiction is like mapmaking

• K. T. on a Poem by Alice Fulton and a father-daughter relationship

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 telling your friends about us. —Steve]