The Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.
Links:
In The New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal on Rachel Cusk:
I once heard Cusk speak in Paris, at the sort of literary event she is famous for skewering—those parades of authorly self-commodification. She spoke haltingly, weighing her words, and then suddenly veered off, into an odd tangent. She envied those who perform menial work. Bus drivers, for example. Imagine the simplicity of those lives, I recall her saying—“to go home and be done with work for the day.”
I copied down her words, marveling at the condescension. She had lost the room and seemed to know it. She vaped discreetly and slumped a little in her chair. “Life hasn’t been very fun for me.”
The unheralded martyrdom of the novelist! To understand Cusk and her relationship with criticism requires little in the way of literary detective work. She is one of those writers invested in her own mythology, and often truthful about her motivations. For Cusk, a writer is someone trapped in childhood, trying to see its truth.
John Stuart Mill:
Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchild-like age, the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry: the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. . . . The most idle and frivolous persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative: the excitement it affords, is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so because they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different.
In New Left Review, Mao Jian on the current state of Chinese culture:
Such criticisms are understandable, and not without merit. Yet it would be a mistake for cultural theorists to dismiss outright new forms that are entrancing hundreds of millions of China’s citizens. Moreover, as we shall see, the “highest” modes of avant-garde literary production have been adopting comparable strategies of speed and action for quite some time. History has its reasons; and it makes sense to try to understand this cultural moment before we condemn it. “Hysterical realism” was the phrase coined by James Wood to describe novelistic reactions in the Anglosphere—by largely oppositional writers: Pynchon, Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith—to the Thatcher–Reagan shock: fictions that “operated like a perpetual motion machine, fleshing out inhuman stories with wild plotting and larger-than-life characters”; the pursuit of “vitality at all costs.” In some respects, this “hysteria” might be said to describe the operating principles of contemporary Chinese art and literature. Television dramas and films are driven by the relentless multiplication of situations and actions; when one device or protagonist can no longer sustain the plot, a new one is rapidly drafted in. This game-like expansion of the narrative constitutes a new grammar, one that finds its most concise expression in the cultural capsule of the micro-drama form. Nevertheless, I shall argue here that actions imply actors, as verbs imply subjects; it may be mistaken to identify these new forms with passivity and isolation. To explore this, we need to shift perspective, setting them in a longer cultural history as part of a larger contemporary condition. In doing so, we can perhaps offer a more nuanced and cautiously hopeful account of their social meaning.
[I can’t speak to China, but it strikes me that hysterical realism is no longer the approach employed in the West’s avant-garde literary production. We have—as discussed above, and elsewhere—what Rachel Cusk is doing; we also have the flat approach of something like Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (2025), as attentive to objects as people. We all, like Jackie Treehorn, treat objects like women. This is an intrinsically passive position, one ill-suited for the hyperactivity of hysterical realism and its demand that the reader attempt to make sense of it all. As implied at the end of the quoted paragraph, the piece goes on to argue that Chinese culture today has a certain activity to it; perhaps this is the difference.
The end of hysterical realism and the approach it represents here, though, is I think best explained by something Sam Kriss said in his review of William Gaddis’ J R (1975):
I think Franzen’s problem, though, is that he was writing in 2002, which was too early; J R is absolutely a novel for the present, our present. That protean slop of unattributed voices doesn’t read so much like an obnoxious literary technique any more. Rather, it’s essentially the same as a form we’re now all deeply familiar with: social media. Thousands of nameless people, all chattering inanities, all of it pouring out of nowhere into your awareness through some algorithmic process we can barely manage to conceive of. If you only know how to read self-satisfied middlebrow novels, J R is difficult. If you know how to listlessly scroll on your phone, it’s a breeze.
Reading J R is listlessly scrolling on your phone avant la lettre, and listlessly scrolling on your phone beats J R at its own game. One of Gaddis’ achievements there is so purely depicting American life as endless noise, but you don’t need obnoxious literary techniques to see that clearly now. You can just pick up your phone and experience it without the mediation of art. And one pleasure hysterical realism offers—that of wading through endless information, obscure and convoluted, and making sense of it—is also now offered by life, which has even more information, accessible in ever more obscure and convoluted forms. It is a good thing to understand a book; the appeal of understanding life is rather more apparent.
I said above that technology has made it possible to experience all kinds of things straight that once required mediation by art—or at least art-shaped objects. As Adorno and Horkheimer have it, “works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.” There was, perhaps, something to be said for the culture industry. It could only be so pornographic and so prudish; the hacks had to put their names on things and live with themselves. On the internet no one has to put their names on things, and nobody lives with themselves, and so the extruded product can be more pornographic and more prudish than ever before. “Pornographic” and “prudish” are a little abstract, so let me say instead that the next few years will see new lows in violence and sentimentality. —Steve]
In The Yale Review, Bilge Ebiri on directors who don’t make a lot of movies:
But even, and perhaps especially, if their silence is not permanent, the years that go by in which we hear nothing from them similarly impart to their work a retroactive power and authority. As the novelist Bill Gray puts it in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” And that, in turn, lends fresh gravitas to any new work they do produce, which must on some level live up to our expectations: if God finally does appear, we want him to make an impression. Besides, each new effort from a reticent auteur could be the last.
These filmmakers don’t all fit the same template. While some withdraw by choice, others are, in effect, forced to be reticent. Cinema is not, by and large, an art form that can be created in solitude. Even the most antisocial filmmaker must be to some degree a social animal—hustling for funds, giving instructions to their crew, or directing actors—who is dependent on others to be able to produce work. So the history of movies, both in the United States and abroad, is dotted with directors who made a few films, or just one, and never got the chance to make more.
Reviews:
In The Ringer, Adam Nayman reviews Coyote vs. Acme (2026):
Their other, even more daring, leap of faith has to do with the Road Runner and potentially violating the boundaries of his mutually antagonistic relationship with Coyote. Suffice it to say that Coyote vs. Acme breaks the golden rule only to reinforce it. Green and Burch are wise enough to understand that harm and healing are part of the same love language, and they use this vocabulary to engineer a crucial late-film exchange that manages to be genuinely emotional without ruining the theater-of-cruelty vibes. It would take a couple of pretty smart filmmakers to pull that off, especially under the noses of executives who can’t sniff the difference between art and content. What the beep do they know?
[I can’t figure out what to call these characters on second reference, so I’m going to steal a page from the New York Times and refer to “Mr. Coyote” and “Mr. Runner.”
Their relationship is mutually antagonistic, yes—Mr. Coyote is Petrarch and Mr. Runner is Laura, and they are faithful to each other after their fashion. At one point in the film Mr. Runner testifies before Congress that he is difficult to catch. This would be meaningless, though, unless somebody were trying to catch him; the most essential fact about Mr. Runner is created by Mr. Coyote—created specifically by Mr. Coyote’s art.
And it is art; what distinguishes Mr. Coyote from any number of other coyotes out there hunting roadrunners in the American southwest is the ingenuity of his schemes. That he keeps on trying one thing after another and that none of them ever work makes him Petrarchan. As Samuel Daniel puts it in Delia 4:
These lines I use t’unburden mine own heart;
My love affects no fame nor ’steems of art.
If Mr. Coyote were really interested in catching Mr. Runner he might revisit his tactics; his real interest lies elsewhere, and so he does not. He is not catching Mr. Runner but unburdening himself of his desire to do so. As one of Chuck Jones’ commandments for the cartoons reads, “The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: ‘A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.’ —George Santayana)” It doesn’t matter whether or not he catches Mr. Runner; in fact, doing so would ruin him. He has turned his life into performance art about his failure, and so succeeding would deprive his art of meaning. It can only be so humiliating if it works, after all. (Jones has a commandment about this too: “The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.”) In his own way, Mr. Coyote outdoes Petrarch, who, after being confronted with the death of Laura, changes. Mr. Coyote never changes, and never will.
Or, as Petrarch puts it in Canzoniere 131:
I’d sing of Love in such a novel fashion
. . . .
All this I’d do because I do not mind
my discontentment in this one short life,
but glory rather in my later fame.
(Translated by David Young.) Mr. Coyote’s endless humiliation, inflicted on himself, has made him fit to be the subject of films the better part of a century after his first appearance in our culture. —Steve]
In our sister publication Down Under, Damian Maher reviews a biography of A. D. Hope (A. D. Hope: A Life, March):
The poem’s first stanza ends frozen on that frame the speaker has replayed all too many times. “But,” the second (and last) stanza begins, “the telephone does not ring”; the woman does not come. Dispassionately, the speaker states, “I have only used you as one puts fresh-cut flowers / In a dingy room—I shall often change them again.” Could there be a more pitiless prosthesis, a more remorseless “objective correlative” for a man’s wasted desire than fresh-cut flowers in a dim room? He spirals. This second, and closing, stanza trundles through years of tormented repetition, arriving at “the man of thirty-three who no longer pretends / that it gets him anywhere much or brings love nearer,” but still chooses “your face, your sensitive body, for ends / no subtler.” Freud might help to make sense of some of the speaker’s despairing, disintegrating self-analysis in “Private Screening.” The speaker, a Freudian might say, is compelled to screen an unpleasant experience to somehow master or bring back a lost love. (Evidently, Hope’s response to Freud does run deeper than the easy mockery found in a poem like “Private Dick”—“Call that a tree? That’s a Phallic Symbol! Boy, is that psyche of / yours a wreck!”) Freud, though, does not determine the end of “Private Screening.” The speaker does what Prufrock cannot and draws a “clever / comfort, illusion of force and growth in a brain / stopped growing, and fixed in its adolescence forever” from the singularity of his love: “that it is you, and not anyone.”
In Literary Review, William Whyte reviews a biography of M. R. James (For the Dead Remember: The Life of M. R. James, by Darryl Jones, September 10) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 5, 2026.]
Yet if he made his name as an academic, he nevertheless loathed all abstraction, all serious speculation. The leader of what was called the “Stupid Party” at King’s, James was famous for his injunction, “No thinking, gentlemen, please.” More than anything, he resisted reflection on questions of subjectivity, selfhood or sex. “Monty is a delightful companion,” noted Benson, “so long as you keep to the lawn & the shrubberies.” In this affectionate if rather rambling biography, Darryl Jones cannot quite decide whether this refusal was the product of a deep, dark secret or simply that James was “a man with no interior life at all.” As much as anything, it seems likely that this superficiality was a strategy—and a highly efficacious one—enabling him to operate successfully in two institutions sustained by solid chaps and rather suspicious of swots, not to mention weeds.
[Anyone saying “no thinking, gentlemen, please” is doing a bit. —Steve]
N.B.:
Why narwhal tusks are so straight.
New issues:
The Baffler no. 85—Over Under
Literary Review Issue 555, September 2026 [As linked to above.]
New Left Review 160•July/Aug 2026 [As linked to above.]
The Yale Review Volume 114, No. 3 | Fall 2026 [As linked to above.]
Wendell Berry died on Monday, August 31. R.I.P.
Poem:
“Blame Not My Lute” by Thomas Wyatt
Blame not my lute, for he must sound
Of this or that as liketh me:
For lack of wit the lute is bound
To give such tunes as pleaseth me.
Though my songs be somewhat strange,
And speaks such words as touch thy change,
Blame not my lute.My lute, alas, doth not offend,
Though that perforce he must agree
To sound such tunes as I intend
To sing to them that heareth me.
Then though my songs be somewhat plain,
And toucheth some that use to feign,
Blame not my lute.My lute and strings may not deny,
But as I strike they must obey:
Break not them then so wrongfully,
But wreak thyself some wiser way.
And though the songs which I indite
Do quit thy change with rightful spite,
Blame not my lute.Spite asketh spite, and changing change,
And falsèd faith must needs be known;
The fault so great, the case so strange,
Of right it must abroad be blown.
Then since that by thine own desert
My songs do tell how true thou art,
Blame not my lute.Blame but thyself, that hast misdone
And well deservèd to have blame;
Change thou thy way so evil begun,
And then my lute shall sound that same.
But if till then my fingers play
By thy desert their wonted way,
Blame not my lute.Farewell, unknown, for though thou break
My strings in spite with great disdain,
Yet have I found out for thy sake
Strings for to string my lute again.
And if perchance this foolish rhyme
Do make thee blush at any time,
Blame not my lute.
[Please don’t break my lute strings; they are doing their best. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
New York Review Books | September 8
Ambivalence: An Education
by Brian Dillon
From the publisher: When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films, and television. When against all odds he made it to college, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art, and ideas. Could he live up to the hopes and dreams he attached to culture? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of Dillon’s education seemed even higher.
Ambivalence is a memoir of the author’s native city of Dublin in the 1980s and ‘90s, a portrait of the author as a young man, and an intimate defense of radical thinking about literature and life. In vivid, present-tense passages, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by androgyny, ambiguity, and ambivalence on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure.
Also out Tuesday:
Seven Stories Press: Silencio by Clyo Mendoza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Yale University Press: Christmas Carols: An English Enchantment by John Potter
What we’re reading:
Steve finished Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories (edited by Brigitta Olubas, 2021). [I am not usually one for short stories, but these were wonderful. To describe them without making them seem impossibly slight is a challenge. They are, in that high-school-English-class-but-nevertheless-correct way, usually about moments of recognition. Sometimes the subject matter gives the story a sense of importance—many of these stories are about the ends of affairs—but frequently things are far less weighty than that. One of the best stories, “Harold,” is about dreading a poetry recitation by an awkward young man at a dinner party only to discover, as he goes on, that his poems are brilliant. Also visible in that setup is Hazzard’s interest in our lazy misreadings of other people and their thoughts; one of her funniest moves is to have a character muse on what another character is thinking, sounding reasonable the whole time, only to jump immediately into the second character’s thoughts and reveal how wrong the first character was. There’s a dry brilliance to it. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Alan Jacobs on Paul McCartney, bass player:
Now: Does Paul overdo it sometimes? Goodness gracious yes. For instance, I think—and George Harrison strongly agrees with me here—that his playing is way too busy on “Something.” But the song that precedes “Something” on Abbey Road is “Come Together,” which also has an elaborate bass line—and it’s brilliant. Almost universally revered, though probably Walter dislikes it. But a great musician trying to extend the possibilities of his for-too-long-marginalized instrument isn’t going to nail it every time; and it’s not an unforgivable crime for him to go overboard occasionally. Heck, Paul and Ringo both go nuts on “Rain” and it’s the best rhythm track in the whole Beatles catalogue.
One reason for Paul’s over-elaboration, I think, involves the way the Beatles recorded their songs in the latter stages of their career. Once the band, working with George Martin and the engineers, got a basic track established—drums and rhythm guitar usually—then the various Beatles would add any further contributions later, on their own. Often Paul’s bass would be the last element recorded: he sat in a studio by himself and listened to the rest of the song on headphones as he worked out his part. It’s the kind of situation that invites too-muchness, a problem that Paul was aware of, as can be seen by his enthusiasm for getting the band to record as a band again: thus the Get Back sessions. But being aware of the problem was not the same as overcoming it. The temptation to overdo was always right in his face.
[I love the bass on “Something” and don’t really care about “Come Together,” which is comfortably the worst song on Abbey Road.
The albums Paul made right after the Beatles broke up are additional evidence that his late-Beatles tendency towards busy bass playing is an artifact of the recording setup. McCartney (1970), on which he plays all the instruments, is not an album on which the bass is all that prominent (perhaps he wanted to remind people he could play other instruments), and neither is Ram (1971). Wings has more—“Silly Love Songs” is Paul’s statement of principles, and one of its tenets is prominent bass playing.
Finally, it’s fitting that George’s best moment as a guitarist on a Beatles track is the solo on a Paul song, “Let It Be” (the album version), and Paul’s is the solo on a George song, “Taxman.” —Steve]