SPRING 2024 VOLUME 30, ISSUE 4

Constance
Debré’s Fiction of
Metamorphosis
BY CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD

The Life of
Warhol Superstar
Candy Darling
BY MELISSA ANDERSON

Hanif Abdurraqib’s
Basketball Diaries
BY GENE SEYMOUR

Tradwives Unlimited
BY MOIRA DONEGAN

Nicholson Baker
Learns to Draw
BY LISA BORST

Vladimir Sorokin’s
Broken World
BY JOY WILLIAMS

Aaron Bushnell,
Power, and Protest
BY HANNAH ZEAVIN

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 Spring 2024 Volume 30, Issue 4

FEATURES
7

Absence Makes the Heart

CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD ON CONSTANCE
DEBRÉ’S NOVELS OF TRANSFORMATION

Ways of Seeing
LISA BORST ON NICHOLSON BAKER’S MEMOIR 16

OF LEARNING TO DRAW

11

Sugar Rush
MELISSA ANDERSON ON THE LIFE OF
WARHOL SUPERSTAR CANDY DARLING

COLUMNS
3 KARAN MAHAJAN interviews linguist Ross Perlin
5 HANNAH ZEAVIN: Aaron Bushnell, protest, and pathology

FICTION
13 CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN: Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations
15 JOY WILLIAMS: Vladimir Sorokin’s Red Pyramid: 6
Selected Stories and Blue Lard
16 ANGELO HERNANDEZ-SIAS: Justin Taylor’s Reboot
17 KATIE KADUE: Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite
FROM TOP: CO URTE SY O F TH E A RTIST A ND G RE E NE N AFTALI , N EW YORK. PH O TO B Y JA SON MA N DELLA . P H OTO: COURTE SY OF THE KEI TH HA RIN G FO UN DATIO N . CO URTES Y O F

18 BECCA ROTHFELD: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s

THE ARTIST A ND AN AT EBGI, LOS A N GELE S / NEW YORK. P HO TO: YVON N E O F LON DON . CO UR TESY OF JULIAN PEM BE RTON . COV ER: PHO TO : © MON I CA NOUWE NS 2022.

The Golden Pot and Other Tales of the Uncanny

20 HANNAH GOLD: Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe

NONFICTION
6 ZACK HATFIELD: Brad Gooch’s Radiant:
The Life and Line of Keith Haring
18
21 GENE SEYMOUR: Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always
This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
23 HARMONY HOLIDAY: Paul Alexander’s Bitter Crop:
The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year
25 LIZZY HARDING: Avril Horner’s Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence
27 PHILLIPPA SNOW: Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest:
A True Story and Sophie Calle’s True Stories: 66 Short Stories
28 MICHAEL ROBBINS: Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis
30 DAVID KLION: Joshua Green’s The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics
31 MOIRA DONEGAN: Lisa Selin Davis’s Housewife:
Why Women Still Do It All And What to Do Instead
33 ANN MANOV: Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment

From top: Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (PCH), 2019, acrylic and bondo on fiberglass, 96" × 84" × 4". Keith Haring, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts,
Pittsburgh, PA, 1978. Marisa Adesman, Snake Eyes, 2019, gouache and colored pencil on paper, 11" × 14". Barbara Comyns in her twenties.
25
Cover: Constance Debré, West Hollywood, 2022

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 JOY WILLIAMS is the author of several novels and story collec-
tions. Her novel The Quick and the Dead (2000) was nomi-
nated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent books are The
Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (2015; both
Knopf), Ninety-Nine Stories of God (Tin House Books,
2016), and the novel Harrow (Knopf, 2022). A member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of
its Strauss Living Award, Williams was also a finalist for a
National Book Critics Circle Award for her essay collection
Ill Nature (Lyons Press, 2001). In this issue, she reviews two
books by the heretical Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin.
JOY WILLIAMS photo: anne dalton

PHILIPPA SNOW is a writer and critic. Her work has appeared

in Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview,
Frieze, the White Review, Vogue, The Nation, the New States-
man, and the New Republic, among other publications. She
was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize,
and her first book, Which as You Know Means Violence: On
Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, was published by
Repeater Books in 2022. Her next book, Trophy Lives: On
the Celebrity as an Art Object, will be released in March by
Mack. For Bookforum, she reviews books by Sophie Calle and
Grégoire Bouillier and asks what we can learn about love from
PHILIPPA SNOW
breakup narratives. photo: laura cooper

CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD is a contributing writer for the New

York Times Magazine and has written essays and criticism for
Harper’s Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine,
the New Yorker, and other publications. In 2023, she received
the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize from n+1. Her novel, Life
of the Mind, was published by Hogarth in 2021, and Fireflies
Press has just published her short book on Chantal Akerman,
La Captive. Her fiction has been published in the Paris
Review, n+1, and Vice. She holds a Ph.D. in English from
Columbia University. Here, she reads Constance Debré’s Play-
boy and considers the French writer’s stories of love, lust, and
CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD
transformation. photo: rose lichter-marck

HANNAH GOLD is a freelance writer based in New York City.

Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Drift, and CUBA: HAVANA TO TRINIDAD
the New Inquiry. Her nonfiction has been published by the April 27–May 4, 2024
New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Nation, the
New Republic, The Intercept, the Yale Review, The Guardian,
and other outlets. Previously she worked as a writer for The
NATIVE AMERICAN VOICES
May 12–20, 2024
Cut, Jezebel, and Gawker, and as an editor at Mask magazine.
She is working on a story collection. She lives in Brooklyn with
her boyfriend and their zero cats. In this issue, she reviews CROSSING THE CAUCASUS:
Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Parasol Against the Axe. ARMENIA AND GEORGIA
HANNAH GOLD September 4–16, 2024
KARAN MAHAJAN is the author of Family Planning (Harper
Perennial, 2008), a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas
Prize, and The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, 2016), FROM SLAVERY TO THE
which was shortlisted for the National Book Award and was CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT:
named one of the New York Times Book Review’s “10 Best NEW ORLEANS TO CHARLESTON
Books of 2016.” In 2017, he was selected as one of Granta’s
September 8–15, 2024
Best Young American Novelists. His writing has appeared in
the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New
York Review of Books, and other venues. He is an associate JAPAN: TRADITION
professor in Literary Arts at Brown University. His third novel, AND INNOVATION
The Complex, will be released in 2025. In these pages, Maha- September 19–October 2, 2024
jan interviews Ross Perlin about endangered languages in
KARAN MAHAJAN New York City.
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2 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024

 I N T E RV I E W
Tongues Untied
ROSS PERLIN ON THE FLOURISHING OF LOST LANGUAGES IN NEW YORK CITY
Lucas van Falckenburg, La Tour de Babel (The Tower of Babel), 1594, oil on panel, 16 1⁄8" × 22 1⁄4".
T
he linguist Ross Perlin is an ency-
clopedist of New York City’s
microworlds. In 2016, when he
took me and ten others on a tour of Ridge-
wood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence
of a dozen languages spoken in a two-
square-mile radius, including Syriac, Yid-
dish, Malayalam, Haitian Creole, and
Kichwa. He led us into an ancient, black-
and-white-tiled, espresso-scented Sicilian
social club, where a retired nonagenarian
factory worker proudly discussed his dia-
lect, Partanna. Later, we drank beer and ate
bratwurst at the Gottscheer Hall, a tavern
and cultural center for the Gottscheers, a
tiny community of Germanic people who
fled their native Slovenia following the
World Wars. Their language, Gottscheer-
ish, is a thirteenth-century dialect of Ger-
man that now survives largely in New York.
Such diversity is easy to take for granted
in New York, ambient wallpaper for a city
powered by finance, but as Perlin writes in
his comprehensive and brilliant new book
Language City: The Fight to Preserve
Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
(Atlantic Monthly Press, $28), the situa-
IMAGE: WIKICOMMONS/LOUVRE MUSE UM.
tion is more complex than meets the eye—
or ear. Half of the world’s seven thousand
languages “are likely to disappear over the
next few centuries,” which makes New
York, with its teeming biome of seven hun-
dred languages, “a last improbable refuge
for embattled and endangered languages.”
But New York—and the United States—
KARAN MAHAJAN
exerts its own relentless pressure on immi-
grants to assimilate into dominant mother
tongues like English and Spanish, and we
may have already reached “peak linguistic
diversity.” Perlin’s heroic task in the book
is to provide a linguistic snapshot of this
moment of language explosion and implo-
sion. He does this by profiling six speakers
of six endangered languages in New York,
languages that many readers will never
have heard of, such as Seke, a Tibeto-Bur-
man tongue used in five villages in Nepal
and now transplanted into a single apart-
ment building in Brooklyn; Wakhi, “an
endangered Pamiri language spoken by
around forty thousand people in the
remote high-mountain region where Tajik-
istan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China
converge”; and N’Ko, a script for the Man-
ding language group in West Africa that
may have been partly revealed in a dream
to a “young teacher of the Quran who was
also starting to trade in kola nuts” in Bin-
gerville, Ivory Coast. Though Language
City is often Borgesian in its profusion of
delicious, esoteric detail, it is ultimately a
closely observed, empathetic account of
the struggles of immigrants in the city and
their tenuous and fraying ties to their
homelands. It is destined to be a classic of
immigrant literature.
I recently talked with Perlin on the
phone about his new book and the chal-
lenges of capturing the city’s dizzying and
often opaque linguistic diversity.
KARAN MAHAJAN: You write in the book
that “there are no linguistic histories or
portraits of any city.” Why is that the case?
ROSS PERLIN: Even just the linguistic life
of a single person, especially a single mul-
tilingual person who may speak six or
seven languages, as is common for many
New Yorkers, would be almost impossible
to trace without intense surveillance.
There’s a fluidity to real oral language, in
all its multimodality with gesture and
facial expressions, that is beyond the reach
of any documentation, even with all the
new recording technologies.
Nor have most linguists, especially
those who care about Indigenous, endan-
gered, and minority languages, taken
much of an interest in cities. Authenticity
is seen as being elsewhere.
I’m a linguist who loves cities, who has
always lived in cities. I wanted to turn an
anthropological and linguistic lens onto
my hometown, to look within, to see the
world in a single city. I’m interested in the
goal of bringing all languages to what phi-
losopher Philippe Van Parijs calls a “par-
ity of esteem,” of fostering a world cul-
ture where every language is part of a
common human inheritance but also an
articulation of specific history, way of
being, a lifeway.
You met the speakers you profile through
your work as codirector of the Endangered
Language Alliance (ELA). Can you describe
the work you do?
The Endangered Language Alliance is this
small, strange organization/clubhouse
which was founded in New York in 2010.
It’s the only organization of its kind focused
on linguistic diversity in cities, growing out
of the fact that contemporary New York is
the most linguistically diverse city in the
history of the world. I became codirector in
2013, and a few years later, among other
projects, we started mapping the city’s lan-
guages—the first linguistic census of any
city, spotlighting hundreds of languages
that the Census Bureau doesn’t record.
With proceeds from a print map people
donated for, we created languagemap.nyc.
More broadly, much of what we do is
documentation: recording narratives or
conversations, creating dictionaries and
grammatical descriptions. In an unre-
markable building on West 18th Street in
Manhattan, languages that would never
come into contact with each other any-
where else converge at least for a moment.
It’s like the Aleph described by Borges, but
in the middle of New York City.
What’s hard for speakers of dominant
languages to imagine is how the entire
record of a language can come down to a
few people, a few recordings, a single
book. It’s humbling, and it makes us real-
ize how partial and puny the records of
humanity are. We have to be living in and
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 3
hearing those languages while we can,
because any record is going to be so small.
What were the challenges of rendering the
complexity of dozens of endangered lan-
guages in the flat world of English—a lan-
guage that you describe as “the real
empire of our time”?
English is the matrix, but I have tried to
bring as many other languages into it as
possible. For one thing, that meant plenty
of challenges around typography, charac-
ter rendering, translation, transliteration,
standardization. The audiobook includes
recordings with some of the six speakers.
So it’s a medley of voices, and these practi-
cal challenges reveal how much most
books are really in one language. A multi-
lingual book is a major challenge.
A book about the languages of New York
is naturally a book about diaspora; all six
speakers profiled are immigrants, and you
even travel with a few of them back to
their home countries. On a macro level, is
the preservation of these languages in
diaspora affecting the status of these lan-
guages back home? For example, are
Nahuatl activists in New York engaged
with Nahuatl activism in Mexico?
The first question is whether there’s any
access to the home region. The groups that
have lost that are the most diasporized. For
them, the future of the language rests on a
place like New York. They know they have
to preserve it in diaspora, whether it’s Yid-
dish or Gottscheerish or Garifuna. In an
opposite sense, the story of Lenape raises
this question of homeland as well. New
York City and surrounding areas are the
traditional ones, but one of the new home-
lands, after centuries of displacement, is
Ontario, where the last speakers and reviv-
alists are. Can we somehow embrace dia-
sporic identity and find sovereignty within
diaspora, or does the diasporic condition
prompt even more longing for the homeland
and even a kind of diaspora fanaticism?
The situation is quite different when the
group still has a clear homeland. Nahuatl
speakers like Irwin [one of the profiled
speakers] can look to the Aztec empire or
even periods of Spanish rule, as a time
when Nahuatl was the baseline language
of Mexico. The very name “Mexico” is a
Nahuatl word. On the other hand, Spanish
has conquered and displaced, and all the
resulting displacements eventually led to
thousands of speakers coming to places
like New York, where a new kind of
awareness and relationship to Nahuatl can
bloom, away from the particular challenge
brought by Spanish. That doesn’t mean
that the future of Nahuatl is entirely in the
Bronx—most would probably say it’s in
Mexico—but it’s in both. Every language
described in the book has experienced con-
tractions, but also expanded into spaces
like New York. That paradox of endan-
gered languages now being on the move
and arriving next door is what I’ve been
seeking to understand. It’s also an oppor-
tunity. Far from the idea of a passive last
speaker on a mountain or an island, we
now see migration flows bring people
together, even as the language is under
intense pressure. Through ELA, we want
people to realize that they can speak their
language in New York, that migration is
4 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
not a one-way ticket to a dominant lan-
guage.
But the economic pressures to adopt a
dominant language must be huge, right?
As you write in the book, it’s hard “for even
the most dedicated activist to keep a lan-
guage alive in their own home.”
Economic incentives today certainly seem
to point to larger languages. But one
MAHAJAN 2/2
Nin Oozora, The Modern Tower of Babel 2, 2018, acrylic and oil on paper, 35 1⁄2" × 22 1⁄2".
caveat is that there’s also a lot of aspira-
tional movement towards larger lan-
guages that is not necessarily practical.
Massive numbers of people around the
world are learning English and dreaming
of a kind of career that may not actually
work out. In many cases, doubling down
on a local or regional or even national
language could be just as practical. I put
myself in this category. When I first
started learning Mandarin, I had the idea
that I was going to speak to a billion peo-
ple. But nobody speaks to a billion peo-
ple. The languages that we need are the
ones that we’re going to speak with the
people who are closest to us.
You write astutely about how “nonstate
spaces” such as inaccessible highlands
tend to foster linguistic diversity. Is New
York such a “nonstate space” where
minority languages can flourish away from
their own oppressive nationalisms, or does
the US government—at the federal, state,
or city level—play a suppressive role?
If I can speculate, perhaps there’s a distinc-
tion here between empires and nation-
states. To the extent that the US actually
behaves more like an empire, it may, like
certain past empires, such as the Ottoman
empire or the Austro-Hungarian empire,
be more amenable to linguistic diversity
then nation-states. The US does not have
an official language and never has. At cer-
tain times and places, English arguably has
functioned more as a lingua franca than a
national language. No single standard was
consciously promoted by the government.
It’s quite different from having an Acadé-
mie Française or Real Academia Española
or a language planning office in Beijing.
This is most intensely felt in an imperial
cosmopolis like New York. So in that
sense, there is a certain amount of benign
neglect or laissez-faire [by the State]. But
New York has also fundamentally been
patterned along ethnolinguistic, immi-
grant-driven lines, where ethnic-bloc poli-
tics have been determinative. So the pres-
sures are different. It’s not always to shift
to English—it actually may be that a
Nahuatl speaker is under pressure to shift
to Spanish or a speaker of Seke is under
pressure to switch to Nepali or a Pamiri is
under pressure to switch to Russian. It’s a
city of many overlapping, multilingual
assimilations.
A lot of that imperial laissez-faire is also
that people didn’t even know what was
going on around them. People thought that
they were dealing with Italians, when they
were dealing with Sicilian speakers. Or with
Germans when they were dealing with Gott-
scheerish speakers. Or with French Ameri-
cans when they were dealing with Breton
people. These ethnic, linguistic, religious,
and other minorities were always overrep-
resented in the history of the city, but were
not necessarily so visible to anyone else.
You’ve said that covid provided an impetus
to your writing. Can you talk about that?
When I started my work with ELA, I was
full of joyful excitement about all there was
to do, all the possibilities for languages in
New York City, documenting things that
hadn’t been documented. But, beginning
with 2016 and Trump’s election, and accel-
erating under covid, I felt more acutely the
vulnerability faced by the city’s diaspora
and immigrant communities. That’s what
finally got me to put pen to paper and write
a book. I could feel the possibility that this
could be “peak diversity” and that these
worlds of words wouldn’t necessarily be
here forever. The most multilingual places
like Jackson Heights were the ones most hit
by covid, and language was one of the rea-
sons. covid became a language crisis as
well. Many elders and keepers of languages
were taken by covid; it was a deep disaster
for many languages. We shifted our work
with ELA and threw ourselves into ques-
tions of language access, barriers, and
health.
One powerful and positive thing that
came out of covid was the impetus
around language access, the necessity of
making information available, as well as
translation and interpretation. No other
public health crisis in history has gener-
ated such a range of messages in different
languages. It was a global situation, and
communities responded in their languages.
One of the speakers profiled, Husniya, who
speaks Wakhi—and eight other lan-
guages, out of necessity—tells you that
“the deeper she goes into her language . . .
the more her perspective actually broad-
ens.” Can you expand on that feeling?
I think what Husniya meant is that going
deeper into Wakhi has led to a deeper
inhabiting of herself—that a valuing of
one’s own mother tongue grounds you in a
way that enables you to go, transformed,
into other spaces and other languages. In
studies that connect language and mental
health, there’s a correlation between lower
levels of youth suicide and mother tongue
maintenance. There’s an alienation that
can come from language loss, especially in
the ensuing generations, whose parents or
grandparents may have given up or been
pressured to give up a language. People
may feel that loss intensely, even at a sub-
conscious level. They may now be lower on
the hierarchy, dialect- or accent-wise, in
terms of a dominant language—speaking
a variety of English or Arabic or Russian
IMAGE: RIN OO ZO RA (IN STAG RAM: RIN O OZORA_A RT).
that is considered lesser but without a sep-
arate identity anymore. It’s pervasive in
New York as well. You get people who feel
an identity intensely and articulate that
identity, but they’re not able to inhabit it.
They long for the language, and some then
embrace it and try to revitalize it. n
Karan Mahajan is the author of two novels, including
The Association of Small Bombs (Viking), a finalist for
the 2016 National Book Award. (See Contributors.)
Diagnosing Resistance
WHAT AARON BUSHNELL’S DEATH SAYS ABOUT POWER, PROTEST, AND PATHOLOGY
A
aron Bushnell was a twenty-five-year-old
active Air Force member, employed as a
cybersecurity expert. After growing up in
a conservative religious sect on Cape Cod,
he joined the US military a few years after
Donald Trump was elected. Soon after
George Floyd was murdered, Bushnell had a political
awakening, became critical of the military, and started
participating in mutual-aid projects. An autodidact who
eventually identified as an anarchist, Bushnell moved from
San Antonio to Ohio, where he prepared to transition out
of the military. You likely know how his story ended: on
Sunday, February 25, 2024, he died by self-immolation
outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, protest-
ing the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He wore his military
uniform. As the poet Wendy Trevino recently wrote: “But
that / He be active duty was important. / It was important
for the uniform. / It was important to not put it off.” Bush-
nell carefully plotted how his self-immolation would be
broadcast and disseminated. He set up a Twitch live
stream and sent the link to leftist organizations, planning
for the video’s safekeeping. The story was broken by
reporter Talia Jane, who circulated a blurred live stream.
After he left this life, almost five months into a geno-
cide, we were asked to consider whether Aaron Bushnell
was the sanest American. Many considered him the oppo-
site, his fatal act immediately and resoundingly framed as
beyond reason. By that evening, there was a rush to dis-
avow his protest. The arguments were pat: being well
means wanting to live and so wanting to die is insane.
Bushnell gave his life because he wanted to change this
reality. He was living in that change, naming it from
within the fire, for as long as he could. He chanted the
change for which he was prepared to die: “Free Palestine.”
Bushnell did not want the image of his death separate
from the image of ongoing death in Gaza. But his self-
immolation was taken up as an act about an individual,
not an individual act performed with others in mind. We
might say none of this matters because Bushnell’s protest
was effective—in getting people to scream, which must be
what he, in part, wanted: to make people feel that the
destruction of other bodies and other places can, should,
show up in our own.
Rather than screaming about Gaza, many screamed
about a generic, medical vision of mental health as if this
were somehow still a generic case. Notices about mental
ill health and suicidality were appended to articles about
Bushnell, referring readers to suicide hotlines (that also
routinely call the police on those suffering). Never mind
that he didn’t die by “suicide.” Never mind that no such
notice is appended to any article that pretends to cover the
thirty thousand dead Palestinians and a genocide by star-
vation, by bomb, by land invasion. Never mind that
almost no therapeutic resources are now available in Pal-
estine, though psychiatrists and psychotherapists still dog-
gedly care for their patients after five months, after sev-
enty-five years.
By collapsing suicide and self-immolation via what they
share (self-killing), psychologists and commentators
rerouted Bushnell’s message (freedom) to deprive it of
one. Political self-sacrifice, particularly self-immolation,
may be extreme—and Bushnell said it was—but it has, for
that very reason, been a tactic recognized for centuries,
handed down in both protest movements and religious
ones . Bushnell should be remembered as part of this
diverse lineage. Like him, those who came before were
stripped of their militancy and their minds, rendered flat
zealots. There are many who, for the collective, die alone:
other self-immolators, including veterans who brought
the tools of war home, and activists who persist through
HANNAH ZEAVIN
hunger or medicine strikes. Self-immolation, despite hav-
ing a 50 percent chance of death in someone of Bushnell’s
age, is the bomb that tries to hurt no one and nothing else.
Suicide is often framed as the most selfish act (though we
might dispute and despair of this framing). Political self-
sacrifice—however upsetting—might be the most gener-
ous one. In making the deliberate category error of calling
Bushnell’s self-immolation a suicide, commentators com-
mandeered his agency, attributing his death to an afflic-
tion because it was easier to think of him as ill than to
consider the message of his reasoned death.
As he prepared to die, Bushnell said, “This was what
our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Using the
word “normal,” Bushnell made a profound point about
how power works. He seemed to know that his response
to the pain of this world would be cast as abnormal while
the genocide was (and is) considered business as usual. In
trying to flip that script, Bushnell points us to how “nor-
mal” is enforced by the psy-fields: notions of medical
pathology have always corralled us, literally counseled us,
to accept what cannot be accepted. Pathologizing protest
allows one to say, “Never mind,” and that’s what was said
of Bushnell. While his ashes were still on the sidewalk in
front of the embassy, the meaning of his death was already
changing. He dedicated his death outward but a number
of those who heard his message wanted to put it back
Aaron Bushnell seemed to know
that his response to the pain of this
world would be cast as abnormal
while the genocide in Gaza was (and
is) considered business as usual.
inside him, where they presumed there was no political
mind, only an emotional one.
Since anti-fascist philosopher Georges Canguilhem at
least, we have understood that what is pathological can
only be stated in terms of what is made to be normal.
Psychiatry has often been called in to miscast political
acts—let alone self-sacrifice—as ill. And this is only if the
person in question is granted a psyche; militants often are
black boxed under the category of “terrorist.” Even Bush-
nell, white and wearing his fatigues, had a gun drawn on
him as he died.
Resistance, especially militant protest, has long been
medically pathologized. That work is carried out by cat-
egorizing whole groups as ill and marking individuals
within those groups as extreme cases of same. This should
be self-evident, but it is so totalizing as to be naturalized.
Palestinian militants are called psychotics or terrorists,
and anti-Zionist Jews are said not just to be outside the
faith but also mad, ill, and self-hating. The mainstream
psy-fields, endowed with great power to determine inner
and outer realities and the relationship between the two,
have long been the State’s handmaidens, ready to come
up with new taxonomies that pathologize protesters and
then hold them—containing them in the popular imagi-
nation as well as the asylum or prison. Or else they have
already pathologized whole groups of people, portraying
any protest they instigate as a symptom of disease. (There
is, of course, a long-standing set of countertraditions,
both of radical groups that have sought to recuperate
pathology and of clinicians who work against typical
notions of pathology.)
When Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, the ini-
tial cause of death was “excited delirium syndrome.”
Although the diagnosis received some press during the
trial, it was only two years after Floyd’s murder, nearly to
the day, that Physicians for Human Rights named it what
it is: tactical pseudoscience. Despite not being listed in the
DSM-V, the diagnosis has been functioning as a plausible
cover for nearly forty years, frequently adduced by police
and their lawyers to legitimate police brutality, especially
ex post facto and after deaths in custody or during an
attempted arrest. What was pathologized in Floyd? His
running, his resistance, his struggle to stay alive in the face
of a cop who wanted him dead with the force of history
and its systems of power behind him. After he was mur-
dered, a weaponized diagnosis was close at hand.
Excited delirium has its origins in forensic pathology—
the form of psychiatry that, in part, is used to backform
narrative evidence for crimes. First formulated by Dr.
Charles Wetli as a description of the state of mind result-
ing from cocaine overdose, it was soon applied to crack
users at the height of the drug wars, becoming deeply
racialized, much like the drug use that ostensibly brought
it on. Pathology is always invested in containment, and
behind this contemporary diagnosis stands a history that
extends as far back as the eve of the Civil War. We can
trace excited delirium’s antecedents to 1851, in Dr. Sam-
uel Cartwright’s address to the Louisiana Medical Asso-
ciation, where he coined “drapetomania,” “an uncontrol-
lable and insane impulsion to wander” he associated with
those running from slavery. Cartwright contended that
there was no such thing as a formerly enslaved person—
only one who was unreasonable enough to flee the institu-
tion; for Cartwright, Black freedom was mental illness.
The nineteenth-century diagnosis was used to justify the
practice of fugitive-slave patrols, out of which modern-
day police forces sprang. The diagnosis has shifted guises,
but the symptom pathologized has not.
We have seen diagnoses emerge and be attached to pro-
test with almost every great social movement of the twen-
tieth century. The historian Jonathan Metzl tells us how,
between Cartwright and Wetli, psychiatry separated
autism from schizophrenia, making the former the
domain of white children and took the historic demo-
graphics of the latter (white women, mostly middle-class)
and shunted them into other diagnoses. Freed up, and
now with no obvious demographic etiology, schizophre-
nia became the diagnosis for Black protesters at the core
of the civil rights movements, especially militants. To
resist was to be medically pathological, unable to contact
reality. We know, instead, that Black militants were trying
to remake it. We see how this lives on in bunk diagnoses
like excited delirium today, and we can see it in how Bush-
nell was immediately understood to be unwell.
Protest gets pathologized when justice movements pro-
duce impermissible disruptions: to traffic, business as
usual, or—most vehemently—to thought. We must pro-
tect Aaron Bushnell from this playbook so that the mean-
ing of his death is not taken from him—or from us. We are
likely to fail in this task, but it is urgent. Huey P. Newton
once defined the difference between a revolutionary sui-
cide and a reactionary one: “Revolutionary suicide does
not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it
means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to
live with hope and human dignity that existence without
them is impossible.” Newton helps us resee Bushnell’s
death as a hopeful one: hopeful that protest still might
serve liberatory ends. n
Hannah Zeavin is a historian at the University of California, Berkeley,
the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press,
2021), and the founding editor of Parapraxis magazine.
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 5
Angels with Dirty Faces
How Keith Haring got his halo
ZACK HATFIELD
RADIANT: THE LIFE AND LINE OF KEITH HARING BY BRAD GOOCH NEW YORK: HARPER. 512 PAGES. $36.
Y
ou know Keith Haring. He drew
breakdancers and mushroom
clouds and triclops and dicks and
death and he drew Warhol’s envy. He
painted on the Berlin Wall and on Bill T.
Jones and on Grace Jones. He painted
CRACK IS WACK and SILENCE =
DEATH. He smuggled SAMO into SVA to
tag the school’s graffiti-blitzed stairwell. His
chalk ikons perfused Ed Koch’s decrepit
metro, scrawled on seemingly every empty
ad space. They called him Chalkman and the
Degas of the B-boys, they called him genius
and sellout. Club 57, Danceteria, Area, the
Roxy, the Pyramid, the Palladium, the
Mudd Club, Paradise Garage. Uniqlo,
Coach, Nike.
“The first believable twentieth-century
halo,” one critic called his Radiant Baby,
that eureka light bulb of an infant. “It looks
as if it’s always been there,” wrote Rene
Ricard of the signature tag in “The Radiant
Child,” his 1981 Artforum essay on East
Village art now best known for boosting
Jean-Michel Basquiat to greater promi-
nence. “If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet
had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it
would be Jean-Michel,” Ricard surmised.
And if Dubuffet had a tryst with Warhol,
their radiant child would be Keith, his
“primitive” Pop flowing from a seemingly
endless élan vital cut short by the artist’s
death at thirty-one from aids, in 1990.
Thirty-four years later, everybody knows
his name. But do we still believe that halo?
He was born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsyl-
vania, not to Andy Warhol and Jean Dubuf-
fet, but to Allen and Joan Haring. Keith’s
parents encouraged his passion for drawing
but frowned on his obsessions. He wor-
shipped Disney. He worshipped Davy Jones.
And he worshipped Jesus, deluging his
neighborhood in Kutztown with “One
Way” stickers of fingers pointed heaven-
ward. Contrary to Haring’s later claims to
have embraced only “the paraphernalia and
the surrounding symbols” rather than the
tenets of Jesus freakdom, his juvenilia betray
a real belief in God. And he never abandoned
Christian afflatus in his art, so replete with
angels and apocalypse, crosses and Madon-
nas and bleeding hearts.
Haring’s teenage fling with evangelism,
Brad Gooch writes in a new biography, Radi-
ant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring,
stemmed from a lifelong “desire to belong to
something larger.” Drugs helped with this,
too. In 1986, Haring would explain in a letter
to Timothy Leary that his first acid trip, at age
fifteen, “became the seed for all of the work
that followed and that now has developed
into an entire ‘aesthetic’ view of the world.”
By seventeen, Haring had dropped out of the
Ivy School of Professional Art (too commer-
cial); acquired a girlfriend; and become a
Deadhead, hitchhiking across the United
States to sell custom merch. By twenty, he had
come out as gay, had his first solo exhibition
(at Pittsburgh’s Center for the Arts, where he
worked a menial job for two years), and
enrolled at the School of Visual Arts.
“I arrived in New York at a time when
the most beautiful paintings being shown in
6 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
the city were on wheels,” Haring wrote.
This was 1978. His infatuation with the
graffiti enveloping the city’s trains and
buildings was hardly anomalous; many an
East Village artist (e.g., Jenny Holzer, Rich-
ard Hambleton, David Hammons, David
Wojnarowicz, his classmate Kenny Scharf)
took inspiration from aerosol art, be it the
baroque wildstyle of Fab 5 Freddy and
Zephyr or the recherché poetry of SAMO,
aka Basquiat and Al Díaz. But none rivaled
Haring’s hustle, exemplified by the thou-
Keith Haring, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA, 1978.
sands of cartoon automatisms he dashed off
in white dust in the subway—transient
amusements with a power, as critic Carlo
McCormick put it, both “apocalyptic and
rescuing.” With Scharf, Haring organized
influential one-night-only exhibitions at
Club 57. He minded the gift shop for
Colab’s “The Times Square Show,” a 24-7
Salon des Refusés in a shuttered massage
parlor. He was in Diego Cortez’s “New
York/New Wave” at P.S. 1 and Documenta
7 with Basquiat in 1982, and in the Whitney
Biennial with Basquiat in 1983. He showed
at Tony Shafrazi and bombed Patti Astor’s
FUN. Unveiled in SoHo in 1986, his Pop
Shop followed Warholian “Business Art”
to its logical conclusion. (Gooch sees Har-
ing as heir to Warhol, with a caveat:
“Unlike for Warhol, irony was not Haring’s
métier.” Or was it that Haring understood
more than most the sincerity at the heart of
the Factory?)
Haring’s art advertised a new pluralism,
reembodiment, urgent ecstasies. If the Pic-
tures Generation brought representational
art back to the galleries in the 1970s with
their icy appropriations of mass media, Har-
ing’s generation made it hot, shattering the
critical distance between artist and image
and embracing their own status as media
subjects. (Tseng Kwong Chi alone took
more than twenty-five thousand photo-
graphs of Haring and his work.) Where
some saw audacious self-invention, others
saw mere marketing. In a 1984 Art in Amer-
ica essay titled “The Problem with Pueril-
ism” (unmentioned in Radiant), Craig
Owens bemoaned the ongoing gentrification
of the avant-garde, historicizing in real time
a Potemkin East Village “scene” that, he
argued, offered up “generic signifiers for
‘Difference’” for global consumption. Need-
less to say, such dissenting opinions have
faded as the milieu congealed into myth,
though Haring’s output remains markedly
undertheorized among critics and curators
even today, as if mainstream success pre-
cludes his work from serious inquiry.
As the mid-’80s art-market boom pro-
pelled Haring to aboveground celebrity, a
necklace of underground nightclubs became
his muse. Ingrid Sischy once wrote that Para-
dise Garage was, for Haring, “what Tahiti
was for Gauguin.” So enchanted was Haring
with Paradise that he planned his global
travel itinerary around legendary disc jockey
Larry Levan’s “Saturday Mass” at the
mostly Black discotheque. Haring sur-
rounded himself with Black and Puerto
Rican boys and men, among them his young
collaborator Angel Ortiz, aka LA II, and his
two great loves, DJ Juan Dubose and Juan
Rivera. He remained oblivious of power dis-
parities in the studio, on the street, or in his
bedroom (which was actually a huge tent
pitched in his apartment). Art, dance, fuck-
ing: he felt these things would let him tran-
scend his skin. “I’m sure inside I’m not
white,” he wrote in his journal. Gooch cites
the line offhandedly, as one of Haring’s occa-
sional “exaggerations,” but one wonders
how this feeling of racial incongruence man-
ifests in his iconography, in those faceless
everymen who collide in illustrations of
sameness and difference, erupting in acts of
violence as much as love.
If Haring’s line is alacritous, narcotic,
imparadising, then Gooch’s is straightfor-
ward, sober, dutiful. Radiant is the first biog-
raphy of Haring since John Gruen’s 1990
Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography, a
useful collage of quotes by Haring and those
who knew him. Gooch takes a similar tack
here; remembrances from others (many
drawn from the Gruen) form the architec-
ture of his book. This can lead to inconsis-
tencies, as when Gooch writes that Haring
“never allowed the pleasures of fame to
change his demeanor with his old friends,”
only to quote Haring’s friend Carmel
Schmidt six pages later: “When Keith got
really famous, things got difficult. Suddenly,
most of us old friends were relegated to sec-
ond place.”
Still, Radiant is compendious and com-
passionate, even if its subject remains some-
what elusive. In his afterword, Gooch—
who has also published lives of Flannery
O’Connor and Frank O’Hara—notes that
he had, for two decades, wanted to write a
novel about Haring. That he wrote a biog-
raphy instead is telling; to inhabit Keith
Haring in a work of fiction would require
understanding his motives and meanings,
and the artist was opaque in this regard. He
believed that a mystical force moved
through him when he made his “art for
everybody,” and he disliked saying what his
work was about, even as he framed it as
self-evident (“The message is the message,”
he said, tweaking Marshall McLuhan’s dic-
tum). His prodigious horror vacui seems, at
times, to arise from a fear surrounding his
own interiority, as a way to fill the empti-
ness that darkens around desire. “I’ve never
really understood love or had a relationship
that went smoothly,” he wrote in his jour-
nal after a fight with Rivera. “I always seem
to seek rejection and the more I am loved,
the more I don’t want to accept it because I
want to be hurt.”
Like so many artists of his generation,
Haring never got to have—or only got to
have—a late style. By the end of 1983, 1,851
aids cases had been diagnosed in New York
City, with 857 deaths. By 1988, 82,764 New
Yorkers had aids, among them Haring, who
first noticed a purple spot on his leg in a hotel
in Tokyo, where he was opening a second
Pop Shop. Once diagnosed, he redoubled his
output, seizing death by the horns—horned
“demon sperm” becoming a new motif. In
one work, this black basilisk oozes from an
egg strapped to a quivering Sisyphus. He
painted SAFE SEX and IGNORANCE =
FEAR for ACT UP. He gave an intimate,
unprecedented interview to Rolling Stone
about his diagnosis, and he railed against
Reagan’s unforgivable inaction in address-
ing the crisis. For the twentieth anniversary
PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE KEITH HARING FOUNDATION.
of the Stonewall riots, in 1989, he muraled
the lavatory of the Gay Community Services
Center (now the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center) in New
York with a daedal paean to sexual free-
dom—paradise lost—that one critic
declared the “Guernica of priapism.” He
called it Once upon a time. He initialed his
last will and testament with Radiant Babies.
Toward the end of his life, Haring moved
into a new apartment continued on page 36
 Absence Makes the Heart
Constance Debré’s novels of transformation
CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD
PLAYBOY BY CONSTANCE DEBRÉ, TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY HOLLY JAMES SOUTH PASADENA, CA: SEMIOTEXT(E). 176 PAGES. $18.
LOVE ME TENDER BY CONSTANCE DEBRÉ, TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY HOLLY JAMES SOUTH PASADENA, CA: SEMIOTEXT(E). 168 PAGES. $18.
CONSTANCE DEBRÉ’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL Playboy is the story of a metamorphosis.
We meet the narrator just after she has left her husband, Laurent, and started dating
and having sex with women. She had been with Laurent for fifteen years. They were
both bored the entire time. The boredom was “a solid foundation,” “a bomb shelter.”
PHOTO: ADAM PETER JOHNSON © FLAMMARION.
The essence of couple life is being bored shitless. Couple life and life in general. In that sense,
we were compatible, Laurent and I. . . . We were both the same height, we wore the same
clothes, we were both as bored as each other. . . . What we liked doing was waking up together
every morning and saying How is it possible to be this fucking bored? We thought it was funny.
It worked pretty well.
She might have stayed bored with Laurent forever, she writes, if she hadn’t had their
son, Paul. She bridled under everyone’s “sentimental bullshit” about motherhood. She
didn’t like spending so much time shopping and preparing food. “There was no more
space for emptiness.” After leaving Laurent she throws away all her stuff. She keeps two
pairs of jeans and a jacket and a bed for Paul when he’s there. (She sleeps on a couch.)
Constance Debré, 2021.
Desire for women consumes her and converts her. It turns her into a writer. I don’t mean
that it gives her “material.” It’s like she meets Rilke’s torso of Apollo, and, reborn by the
curved breast, must change her life.
Like Debré herself, the narrator is trained as a defense attorney. “I like the guilty
parties, the pedophiles, thieves, rapists, armed robbers, murderers,” she writes. “It’s
innocent people and victims I don’t know how to defend.” What interests her about her
clients is not the fact of their guilt (she never imagines that they haven’t done something
wrong). “It’s seeing how low a man can stoop. . . . It takes a special kind of courage to
get that low.” Eventually she quits her job and begins writing the book we are reading,
which tracks her attempt to, in a certain sense, get low. She sheds everything most
people spend their lives trying to acquire—possessions, security, comforts. Her temper
is as caustic as detergent. She hates other parents, how concerned they are with home
renovations and summer plans. “People get scared by the slightest thing,” she writes.
“I get bored by the slightest thing. That’s the difference between them and me.” Some
things do scare her. Chapter 23 of Playboy reads, in its entirety:
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 7
 I’m so scared of not being able to come. It’s terrifying how much it terrifies me. I don’t know what times he says he doesn’t want to see her. D. remains at once passionately devoted and
I’d do with the emptiness. That’s why you have to be tough, you have to keep your body strong. indifferent. She treats her son with respect, not solicitude. She holds the pain of separa-
To get through the fear. Fear of desire, fear of love, all the fears. Then everything will be OK. tion at arm’s length—not denying it, but not describing it, either. This pain is the void
that her life is organized around. By the end of the novel, D. has stopped going to Lau-
The word “playboy” in English conjures up images of expensive liquor, fancy clothes, rent’s to pick Paul up. They text sometimes. “Sometimes he replies, sometimes he
mansions, etc. But Debré is more focused. Her “never-ending desire” is for women, and doesn’t.” The “sadness”—a sadness all the bleaker and deeper for never being opened
writing about them. Things begin clumsily. An affair with Agnès, a married woman ten to the reader—“is gone.”
years older, builds slowly. There are walks in the Jardin des Plantes, fumbling almost- In Love Me Tender, D. tells the story of awakening to her desire for women a little
touches, embraces that go on too long but don’t build to more. The narrator loves Agnès, differently than she did in Playboy. In Playboy, it was about rebelling against the cage
though she doesn’t much like her, and is embarrassed by her in public. Eventually she of sentimental motherhood and domesticity. In Love Me Tender, she writes that the
realizes that she has to be the one to bring matters to a head. Debré’s voice is like a dia- honesty of her relationship with her son pushed or required her to be honest with herself.
mond drill boring through stone. “The thought scared me. I liked it, too. I liked the idea “I might never have become a lesbian if I hadn’t been his mother first.” Her gratitude, if
of being the boy.” that’s what it is, is as pitiless as her grief.
Desire, as it usually does, curdles. Agnès is a selfish lover; the narrator gives more than
she gets. But disgust is more of an issue outside the bedroom. Agnès “arrives early, she D. CHANGES IN SIGNIFICANT WAYS over the course of these novels. Her taste in literature: “I
wants to have dinner right away. Eating is important to her.” The narrator makes her didn’t understand why Proust and all the others had been so important to me.” Her body:
pasta and doesn’t eat any herself; she smokes instead. She rarely cooks. Usually she gets swimming every day makes her strong and muscular. She gets tattoos (a pinup on one shoul-
by on sandwiches from Così and Japanese takeout, or veggie patties, which she eats cold, der, a trail of ink down one arm) and an earring, cuts her hair short. She grows sexually
with ketchup. She goes out for dinner a lot but doesn’t seem to care about how things confident, even swaggering. The pursuit of sex goes from rapturous to cynical to compulsive.
taste. With one exception, naturally: “A cunt is made for a face to go down on . . . that “People who fuck a lot aren’t doing it for fun,” she writes in Love Me Tender. She compares
fucking sweet taste.” herself to “a teenager in front of a PlayStation, giving myself brain damage from playing too
Writing explicitly about sex is provocative. Being too interested in food would be much Call of Duty, a teenager that might just end up hanging himself in his room, killing
tacky, domestic. Debré’s narrator is comfortable with the upper classes and the down- half his class, or, just as likely, doing nothing at all.” She can’t stand the expectations of
and-out—“when your parents are upper-class junkies, you get good romance. She doesn’t want to hold hands, talk about nice restaurants,
training”—but with Agnès has her first experience of a member of There’s no agony or go on vacation, talk about jobs. She didn’t change her life in order to
the “petty bourgeoisie.” She’s cast off the comforts of her class posi- rebuild it the same way, swapping a husband for a wife. “I did it for a
confusion around her
tion, but she’s still rich on the inside. She tries to get used to Agnès’s new life, for the adventure.” She writes, “I wish I could’ve been a fag.”
mannerisms—the phrases like “Oh shoot” and “the little ones,” the sexuality. She isn’t But even as she changes, growing more disciplined and lonesome, more
habit of taking one’s shoes off at the door—and can’t. She admits to interested in bemoaning fearless and convicted, her voice persists. She has a lawyerly apprecia-
speaking with a “snobby accent.” She’s related to duchesses on her how or why she lived tion of the facts. But she’s funny, too, as when she describes herself as
mother’s side; her grandfather on her father’s side was the prime so long as a straight “a cross between the Baron de Charlus and Sid Vicious.”
minister. (Debré doesn’t spell it out, but the reference is to Michel woman. She doesn’t There’s no agony or confusion around her sexuality. She isn’t
Debré, who held office for three years under de Gaulle, and drafted interested in bemoaning how or why she lived so long as a straight
use the language of the
the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.) She loves filthy language, woman. She doesn’t use the language of the closet or repression.
and bourgeois striving and planning make no sense to her. She lives closet or repression. She’s been converted, yes, and everything is different, but everything
cheaply and insists that her change of station involves real risk, cast- is also the same; she doesn’t dwell on the moment of revelation; it
ing aspersion on the middle-class assumption that “when your family name’s in the seems like there wasn’t one. As a child, she was a tomboy who preferred boys’ clothes
dictionary you must automatically have money invested in mutual funds.” She writes and toys. “At the age of four I was a homosexual. I knew full well and so did my parents.
that making money “stresses me out,” that “it’s only when I’m poor and the bailiffs are After that it kind of passed. Now it’s coming back. It’s as simple as that.”
on my ass that I feel like I’m where I belong.” She seeks extremity. But no bailiff actually Part of this narrator’s appeal is how simple she makes things, especially in Playboy.
comes to call. She’s “so rich that I don’t care about being poor.” One has to assume that, Almost everything for her is simple, or easy. It was easy to act feminine for men; now it’s
mutual funds aside, there must be some other account she is drawing down. Her descent easy to pick out the girl who will sleep with you. It’s easy to get back together with Agnès,
in the world is an adventure, an existential victory. Being an outsider is a matter of prin- and it’s easy to love her less. (She saves the word “hard” for describing her swimmer’s
ciple, and it also happens to be less tacky than being middle-class. body, or the intensity with which Albert comes.) Love Me Tender acknowledges more
There can be no separating the author’s family name from her public persona, or from difficulty, but the language is not any more embellished. She addresses Paul: “It’s going
her narrator’s experience. But despite giving us all the autobiographical details, Debré to be OK, you know. Even if it’s hard.” The agony of thought that is the focus of so much
does not actually name her narrator. Perhaps this is a form of disavowal or repudiation. literature has no place here.
Or it could be that while going by another name would feel needlessly coy, using her own In interviews, Debré cites Guillaume Dustan as an influence. (Dustan also came from
name would make it too easy for readers to forget the difference between a character and the world of law; he was an administrative judge before he became a writer.) Like
an author, a book and a life. Still, I’m tired of calling her “the narrator” over and over; Dustan’s, her prose is free of metaphor and figurative language; she uses ordinary words
from now on I’m going to call her “D.” to describe ordinary activities. The narrative is broken into small episodes that have a
D.’s sexual odyssey takes her from Agnès to a “girl” named Albert fifteen years younger. photographic quality. Most of the book narrates everyday action. And she shares
They have “mind-blowing” sex for several chapters until D. loses interest. In the last Dustan’s sense that sex opens up possibility. But Debré is also philosophical: “I’m rich
chapter of Playboy, she’s sleeping with someone new and is “getting a little bored again. and she’s poor. That’s why I’m going to win. It’s inevitable.” Or: “There’s always a
The problem is that even with girls, it’s all become banal.” That’s one arc. The other con- moment when you see their face, the face of a drowning person, the expression they’ll
cerns her relationship with her father, who is cared for by an eighty-five-year-old aide. D. have when the time comes to die, all that despair.” Her interest is not solely in surfaces;
complains about him, but she cares enough to confront him, to force him to know her; it’s she also stargazes from the gutter. But these jetsam of self-discovery are washed up from
a relationship in flux, which makes it interesting. The third arc is about Paul. She comes a sea of unknowable feeling and experience. It’s easy to get fooled by the simplicity and
to think of herself as Paul’s father, rather than his mother: “fathers have no fear, they don’t directness of the style, but there is nothing intimate about what she reveals. Withholding
have this need to be loved by their children, so they leave them the fuck alone and let them her own feelings, she gives the reader room to feel.
grow up.” When Paul is hostile to her, she is understanding: “maybe he’s decided to hate Some of the emptiness is attributable to her lack of interest in objects. Her idea of descrip-
me to make his dad happy.” She divides hate and love between her father and her son, tion is a phrase like “my ripped APC pants” or “battered red espadrilles and an old pair of
protecting one and flaying the other, but demonstrating deep, pained attachments to both. jeans.” Objects have no histories in her world; nothing has been passed down or saved or
Laurent starts keeping Paul away from her, “collecting evidence” that she is “danger- imbued with meaning; the only attachments are those that language can make, a bond
ous” to use against her in court. Paul doesn’t always want to see her. A child psychologist entered into for as long as it takes to read a sentence. The reader doesn’t see the world laid
asks her if she loves Paul. “I looked at her red Lancel bag and her Hermès watch with out; it’s not a visual text. A voice speaks. Debré writes at one point that she wants to “extri-
the double strap and told myself it wasn’t even worth answering.” cate” herself “from life” like one of her father’s old junkie friends. I don’t really believe her.
What she wants, I think, is to maintain the slimmest, thinnest thread of a connection. To
PLAYBOY IS THE FIRST IN A TRILOGY, but the second to be published in the United States; Love be a voice rather than a body, even as the voice lavishes attention on its desire for bodies.
Me Tender, the second volume, came out here two years ago. Where Playboy is tough Love Me Tender ends with D. and a new girlfriend, S., entertaining the idea of moving
and sexy, Love Me Tender is devastating. Laurent files a court order accusing D. of incest in together. “I’ve thought about it. There aren’t that many different solutions” is the last
and pedophilia, “directly or through involvement of a third party.” As evidence, he line of the book. It’s a disillusion as profound as that at the end of any plot of any bil-
submits a list of books that D. owns by Georges Bataille, Tony Duvert, and Hervé Guib- dung. Debré has paid a high price to turn her life into art. But after finishing the draft of
ert. At the hearing, his lawyer reads passages of Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent out loud. Playboy, D. feels no regret. “Even with a gun to my head I wouldn’t have done anything
The judge wants to know what the book D. is writing is about. The book tracks the differently.” In Nom, the third volume of the trilogy, which has not been published in
maneuvers that keep mother and son apart. the United States, Debré writes that her books “are not about telling my life” but about
Flattened in the wringer of bureaucratic absurdity, ground up in the violence of the “explaining what has happened and how we should live.” I think she means that she
law, D. maintains her cool. She compares herself to Socrates, Jesus, Oscar Wilde, and cares less about identity than about actions and consequences. Still, I find Debré’s exqui-
Spinoza. “No great life is complete without a trial, you have to ruffle a few feathers, you site achievement not to reside in the realm of advice or guides for living. It’s in that cold
can’t just be a good little child all your life.” She’s flip; incest was not a crime she had sliver of voice, conducting electricity at a high voltage, sending the occasional shower of
ever imagined committing. “It’s such a rich crime. . . . A real man’s crime. Almost a mark sparks off the page. n
of recognition for a woman.” She waits months for psychological evaluations, and Christine Smallwood is the author of the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021) and the nonfiction book La
eventually earns the right for supervised visits. Sometimes Paul doesn’t show up; other Captive (Fireflies Press, 2024). (See Contributors.)

8 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024

 Ways of Seeing
Nicholson Baker learns to draw
LISA BORST

FINDING A LIKENESS: HOW I GOT SOMEWHAT BETTER AT ART BY NICHOLSON BAKER NEW YORK: PENGUIN PRESS. 352 PAGES. $35.

ALEXANDER POPE, WROTE NICHOLSON BAKER in a roaming 1995 essay about allegorical uses of narrators bubble with what The Mezzanine’s Howie calls “mechanical enthusiasms,” and
the word “lumber,” was “one of the most skilled word-pickers and word-packers in literary their inner monologues slip into warm and jazzy studies of twentieth-century manufactured
history.” Across three erotic novels, seven non-erotic novels, four nonfiction books, two objects: staplers, dustpans, milk cartons, HVAC systems, stamps. Baker’s associative, detail-
essay collections, and one work of autocriticism about John Updike, Baker has proved rich descriptions of this stuff can resemble an especially exuberant species of product pho-
himself to be among the great picker-packers too, especially in the fertile, anything-grows tography, entries in history’s most charming industrial supply catalogue. “Anything, no
orchards of figurative language. Similes, analogies, metaphors, and euphemisms are Baker’s matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it
uncontested territory. Few areas of knowledge have down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean
evaded his encyclopedic curiosity, which means he can background,” Howie muses. “Anytime you set some
compare a piece of machinery to another piece of machin- detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its
ery, or a piece of machinery to a sex organ, or a sex organ true stature as an object of attention.” What flowed from
to a New Yorker staff writer, and it’s usually persuasive. this philosophy—which Finding a Likeness, in its own
Get a load of the breathtaking density of objects crammed way, returns to—was an experiment in the near-total sub-
into this single sentence about a vacuum cleaner: “To ordination of storytelling to image: in cheerfully material-
restore the machine to full suction, you had to dig around ist white-collar fiction that really sees the means of produc-
in the curved whisps of dog and cat fur that collected in a tion.
tub, like cotton candy in a floss bowl, and twist to release
a central perforated tube, then pry out a sandwich-sized WHO WAS DOING ALL THAT EXTRAORDINARY SEEING? Baker’s
filter and thumb it manually, as if you were strumming a early narrators were affable, horny, ecstatically attentive
zither.” Or the scene in his 2016 memoir about working noticers, almost always men, who have in common a Pnin-
as a substitute teacher in Maine public schools, in which like delight in the physical infrastructure of modernity.
Baker and some fifth graders “walked to the cafeteria, (Nabokov: “Electric devices enchanted him. Plastics
where there was a massive molten fondue of noise.” The swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the
narrator of his first novel, The Mezzanine, appreciates zipper.”) The comedy lay in the scalar discrepancy
old-school turn-signal levers that “move in their sockets between their all-seeing knowledge of “the way the world
like chicken drumsticks.” “I can and do wear socks all works,” as the title of a 2012 collection of Baker’s essays
day,” Baker writes in 2003’s Box of Matches, “that have has it, and the uneventful, zoomed-in, low-stakes subjects
a monstrous rear-tear through which the entire heel proj- they gamely applied it to, like if DeLillo wrote an episode
ects like a dinner roll.” “Formerly dull-seeming tidbits of of Seinfeld.
history,” collected in a recent book, “glowed like cherry One does occasionally get the sense that these guys’
tomatoes in the picnic salad of the twentieth century.” mechanical enthusiasms may flourish at the expense of
This kind of thing can make a person positively hungry. other kinds of understanding. They’re curiously unaffili-
(Baker’s descriptions of literal food are just as good: at a ated: typically they have jobs—solid ’90s jobs like word
publishing party, he describes being “forced to eat sliced processor—but little sense of institutional belonging; they
and stuffed things at traypoint.”) More broadly, the effect might have wives or girlfriends but conspicuously few
is an expansive, energizing sense of de- and re-familiariza- friends. (“Friends, don’t have any” appears in The Mez-
tion, a psychedelic recognition that the built environment zanine in a catalogue of Howie’s thoughts—sorted by
is linked to itself in all kinds of mysterious and pleasing frequency—below “Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum
ways. One begins, in heavy-duty Baker-reading periods, Two self-portraits by Nicholson Baker. cleaner, greatness of.”) When they encounter other people
to look around and feel that the entire physical world—its who aren’t babies or John Updike, it is often via some medi-
glimmering matrix of information technologies and engineering triumphs, plastics and ated or object-oriented process: Howie surfaces from his mesmerizing private reveries only
snacks—is up for associative grabs. to speak to cashiers and secretaries behind desks and machines; the narrator of 1994’s The
Finding a Likeness, the title of Baker’s new memoir, is suggestive of his career-spanning Fermata (a terrific and under-theorized novel that allegorizes the temporal powers of fiction
analogical concern. What’s Baker been doing all this time, if not finding tender, outré like- as even Proust couldn’t do) has the supernatural ability to pause time, and spends most of
nesses everywhere he looks? Now he has tried out a different kind of looking: Finding a the book freeze-framing the human world so that he can do dirty things to women. One
Likeness chronicles two years in which Baker took a break from fiction and literary journal- novel, Vox, takes place entirely over the phone.
ism to teach himself “how to draw and paint on the far side of sixty,” recasting his interest In his middle novels, Baker’s preoccupation with objects and images—with making them
in figurative language as a new focus on figurative art. The mechanics of getting “somewhat knowable and, unique among his TV-and-tchotchke-obsessed contemporaries, with making
better at art”—the mimetic skill that drawing demands, the “erasefully slow” temporality them likable—began to accommodate an expanding interest in character. Vox, the first book
imposed by shading a landscape or still life, the robust universe of instruments and tools in Baker’s loose erotic trilogy, contains some of the old emphasis on solitude and mediation;
(longtime Bakerian subjects) available to the amateur artist—echo many of his lifelong liter- one character admits that an evening spent with a coworker, watching porn on VHS, was
ary concerns. But the essential irony of the book—one Baker is way too humble to name—is “probably the best sexual experience I’ve had, or at least one of the elite few.” But the novel,
that we spend much of it watching one of the best describers alive struggle with the basics of occasioned by a chance encounter via sex hotline, also registers real connection between
representation. strange minds casting about and alighting not just on objects and how they look but on
Long before he turned to visual art, Baker was writing images. (There’s a generally synes- people and how they feel.
thetic quality to much of his prose—blurbs on the back cover of my copy of Vox compare
the novel to both Chagall’s drawings and Ravel’s Bolero—but the dominant mode, the “Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and
sensory system to which he defaults, is the visual.) Baker’s exhilarating similes belong to a I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I’m talking to. Is that
too odd for you?”
larger project of capturing how everyday things look in ultra-high-resolution detail; his
sensibility, he admits in the early memoir U and I, is “image-hoarding.” Also in that book,
“No, I think that sometimes,” he said.
in which Baker reflects on his literary indebtedness to John Updike, he refers to Updike’s
image-forward style as “Prousto-Nabokovian,” one of many admiring epithets in the mem- Something has shifted here: a newly outward-facing orientation, a wider aperture of
oir that could equally apply to Baker himself. (I just don’t believe Baker, who in his previous attention. Rereading these surprising and funny mid-career novels, I remembered one of the
book had described a woman’s pregnant belly as “Bernoullian,” and her pubic hair as many tossed-off kernels of publishing sociology in U and I. Auditing his own tendency
“brief,” when he claims to envy Updike’s “adjectival resourcefulness.”) Nabokov’s crisp toward “louped scrutiny” in contrast to Updike’s mature works, Baker wrote that “the
molecular comedy, his tendency toward anthimeria and dryly upcycled technical language, metaphorical sense, along with the flea-grooming visual acuity that mainly animates it, fades
his cliché-demolishing descriptive precision; Proust’s luxuriant digressiveness, his great sub- in importance over most writing careers, replaced, with luck, by a finer social attunedness.”
ject of time, and above all his sublime animation of psychological riffs by visual cues: already, Flea-grooming! He really had his own number. But social attunedness did arrive in Baker’s
by 1991, it was clear that these were Baker’s gifts too. later work, which became larger in scope and less buoyed by pure enchantment as the mellow
The two novels that preceded U and I—1988’s The Mezzanine and 1990’s Room Tem- ’90s came to a close. Seinfeld ended. Underworld came out. It became clear that emergent
perature—had established Baker’s imagistic method. Both novels take place over the span digital systems threatened to destroy all kinds of library collections, newspaper archives,
of less than an hour. Each records the thoughts of an appealingly intelligent first-person film-storage methods—the very best of the twentieth-century world of things—and Baker
narrator as he attends to a routine task: workday lunch break; feeding infant daughter. These wrote a series of books and reported pieces about analog media preservation and the people

BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 9

attempting it. The United States invaded Iraq, and Baker, possibly the most famous pacifist Already this is, as Baker likes to say, awfully good. But then, over the course of the book,
in contemporary American letters, adjusted his lens again. His fiction and nonfiction has, something like his career in miniature unfurls. Baker’s initial interest in visual art as a means
since the beginning of the war on terror, circled the subject of American war crimes, from a of paying attention to the inanimate world—to still scenes, small tools and landscapes, cool
controversial work of history about the unjust aims and methods of the Allied powers during clouds—gives way to a fascination with the human form, specifically the human face. He
World War II to the 2004 novel Checkpoint, which follows two guys chatting about assas- becomes prolific in portraits, sourcing references from a Reddit forum. “I especially liked
sinating George W. Bush. (Bakerian pacificism and uneventfulness triumph in the end: the drawing smiley couples,” he writes. “And parents and children, and people and their dogs.
guys don’t go through with it.) In 2020, Baker published Baseless, a diary of his only partially Actually I liked drawing every sort of person, except people with septum piercings, because
successful attempt, using the Freedom of Information Act, to learn about the United States’ it’s too difficult to draw shiny hardware when it’s lurking in the shadows of a pair of nostrils.
likely use of illegal biological weapons during the Cold War. Nostrils on their own are hard enough.” Taking a light detour into art history, he argues
These are heavier, lower-key books, anchored by a tone of powerless disappointment in persuasively that smiles, generally, are underrepresented in Western art.
a country that, in addition to producing all kinds of interesting machinery and realist fiction, Baker’s portraits improve in a big way as the book goes on, especially as he incorporates
also kills civilians with impunity. The subject is now undeniably people (the individual per- tracing into his drawing method. (Baker’s search for visual accuracy—for the sort of realist
petrators of war, and their victims); the scope increasingly far-reaching and historical. But precision that his fiction has always elevated—provides the memoir with about as much of
even Baker’s most systems-level, bird’s-eye writing can’t quite shake the old enthusiasms. a plot as his books ever have.) The later drawings are confident and warm, especially as he
Baseless, in particular, veers between the global and the granular, placing Baker’s harrowing begins drawing his children, parents, and wife. “The thing about drawing someone you love
research findings—declassified CIA documents; evidence of inhumane epidemiological is that you have a chance to think uninterruptedly about the nature of your love and the
experiments conducted by the Air Force—alongside scenes from his daily life: Quaker meet- details of your love,” he writes. The process, on the whole, forces him to look closely at his
ings, dreams, funny stuff his wife says, updates on the couple’s human subjects. “As soon as I began sketching, usually at the per-
dogs. The book unfolds like a FOIA document from some alternate son’s right eye, I felt a quietness and a surge of attentive commit-
and more transparent universe, with no part of political life tedness.” Or, elsewhere: “I drew him, and I knew him.”
redacted: not the unbearably gigantic horizons of atrocity and left
defeat that loom over the American project, nor the small pleasures IS IT TRUE THAT TO DRAW SOMETHING IS TO KNOW IT? I was reminded
that one might turn to in the shadow of those losses. “The recent throughout Finding a Likeness of one of the last books by John
overarmed era in the million-year history of our species has been Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook. Berger and Baker share a lot: an invit-
difficult,” he writes. ing and companionable appreciation for sensory experience, a gift
for erotica, an unusual investment in seeing aesthetic beauty as it
And yet think of all the greatness of the twentieth century. The music,
exists alongside—sometimes as the result of—imperial violence.
the magazines, the movies. The Russians Are Coming, for instance . . .
(They also have in common a certain tactile sensibility: an extended
Saul Steinberg, Tracy Chapman, Nabokov, Maeve Brennan. Aretha
Franklin. The century of observation and improvisation. analogy in Bento’s Sketchbook between the mechanics of sketching
and of piloting a motorbike—“You are riding a drawing”—
AFTER BASELESS, BAKER WAS “WIPED OUT. I needed a rehabilitation rhymes nicely with this description, in Baker’s Box of Matches, of
program. A less bleak way of looking at the world.” As it did for falling asleep with his wife: “She turned and shifted her warmly
Bush himself, visual art seems to Baker like a good choice—a way pajamaed bottom towards me and I steered through the night with
to zoom back in and return “observation and improvisation” to my hand on her hip.”) Berger, of course, was a painter as well as a
central focus. In 2019, after handing in his book and a few months writer, and in his book, as in Baker’s, annotated sketches are repro-
before the pandemic began, Baker set about learning to paint. duced alongside short meditations on drawing and what it does to
Finding a Likeness gathers artwork that Baker sees online and the mind. Berger draws flora from his mostly rural surroundings:
likes—a nicely egalitarian selection of nineteenth-century master herbs and fruit in France, an olive tree in Palestine. Even more than
portraiture, Art Deco magazine illustration, and contemporary a way of encountering place, a sketching practice, for Berger, was
realist paintings in oil and gouache—alongside Baker’s own a means of finding solidarity with people. In between portraits of
attempts. His first subjects recall the small commonplace objects his neighbors, the writer Andrei Platonov, and Jesus, he considers
that starred in his early novels: leaves and glassware and a metal the practice’s effects at the human scale. When drawing, Berger
easel clamp. He hopes to get good enough to paint clouds (“puffy, writes, “I’m aware of a distant, silent company.”
huge, lunglike, breathing, hippopotami of the sky”) and seeks out Baker reaches for company, too. As his skills improve, he begins
examples from modern art history: “Maxfield Parrish’s heaped, sketching artists and political figures who have been meaningful to
beehive-hairdo clouds fill me with shuddering, bulbous joy.” him. A sense of purpose settles in as he makes a portrait of Tracy
Baker’s paintings and drawings appear on nearly every page. Reference photograph and painting by Chapman, one of the gems of the twentieth century he named in Base-
The earliest works have the lumpily dutiful quality of high school Nicholson Baker. less. “When I was working on the drawing I was calm,” he writes.
art class projects. “The brush was an impossibly clumsy tool—not
The world was a mess, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren weren’t getting along, but the impor-
a rational way to apply pigment to a surface,” he writes. (Elsewhere, more baroquely, he
tant thing at that moment was to try to do right by Tracy Chapman’s wistful, glowing smile. While I
calls his paintbrush a “glop-tipped eraserless mop-flopping palette-puttering art wand.”)
worked I sang bits of her songs to myself. . . . I want to do this from now on, I thought—draw people
He’s bashful about, occasionally “disgusted” by, his own work, and some of the book’s best whose lives add beauty. And paint them, eventually.
lines—its best similes, especially—come from his most self-critical self-ekphrasis. One draw-
ing “looks a little like Beavis in Beavis and Butt-Head.” In a suburban landscape painting, a An idiosyncratic personal portrait gallery takes shape. He draws Jean Cocteau, Alexan-
car “comes out looking like a pool table.” Trying another car, “I lost my temper at one point dria Ocasio-Cortez, and a version of René Magritte that “looked like George Harrison.”
and typed, ‘I HATE THIS TOAD OF SHIT THAT HAS EMERGED FROM MY BRUSH.’” John Lewis, Anaïs Nin, Nabokov, the guy who invented the Swingline stapler. (“I used a
The comparison is apt, as usual—his Honda painting really does have an amphibian quality. wiry sort of style, as if all the world was made of bent staples.”) Rachel Carson, E. B. White,
There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately a very good Jean Stafford, antiwar activist Frances Crowe. Susan Sontag, Gary Shteyngart,
becoming virtuosic, like Ornette Coleman teaching himself to play Mary Cassatt, Adam Schlesinger from the great power-pop band
the trumpet. But it’s not the first time Baker or one of his semi- Fountains of Wayne. Even when he gets his idols wrong (“I got the
autobiographical characters has switched forms. Before he was a
Central Maine, where urge to draw the founding editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross.
writer Baker played the bassoon, and his fiction surely features Baker lives, furnishes I thought he might be easy because he has such strong features, and
American literature’s largest quantity of failed bassoonists. Paul him with with all kinds such a flume of hair. I tried twice and stopped. I’d made him look
Chowder, the narrator of two essayistic later novels, is a bassoonist of half-ugly, half-beautiful like a boxing promoter”), the process encourages a humane clarity.
turned poet who, in 2013’s Traveling Sprinkler, decides to switch subject matter. “I found Despite Baker’s self-avowed attempt to take a break from political
gears again and write songs, as “a way of paying attention to a single some good clouds near writing, a pacifist current surges through the book, evident in the
event by surrounding it with many notes.” He buys a guitar and subjects Baker has gathered. “It was a privilege to be tracing the
composes protest songs about Obama’s foreign policy, plus folkie
a Chipotle restaurant,” outline of her cheekbone,” Baker writes about drawing Dorothy
numbers about his daily surroundings: “Native peaches / fresh toma- he writes. Day, “feeling the strength of it, knowing how many days and years
toes / lots and lots of corn / Hot blueberries / cold chicken / and she spent writing editorials against wars.”
ridiculous amounts of porn.” There is no great effort made to persuade us that these are This is far from the hammy, self-conscious, slightly neurotic influence-anxiety of U and I, in
especially artful songs. “What is it when you have an urge to produce something,” Chowder which Baker the young novelist positioned Updike as a maddening “imaginary friend” whose
wonders, “to make something, and it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not?” aesthetic shadow had to be wrestled with. Yet it’s hard not to read Finding a Likeness as a
The same spirit of easygoing exploration surfaces in Finding a Likeness. Baker takes a companion to Baker’s first memoir, a return to the questions of craft and influence that U and
couple painting lessons, experiments with different methods and tools, finds “gorgeously I set out to explore. Finding a Likeness is a quieter book, as Baker’s later work has tended to be.
unremarkable” objects and scenes to sketch. (Central Maine, where he lives, furnishes him You feel that Baker has grown out of certain things, or grown into them—maybe even into the
with all kinds of half-ugly, half-beautiful subject matter. “I found some good clouds near a “air of rangy assurance” that he once envied in Updike. What could be more rangy and assured
Chipotle restaurant,” he writes, contentedly summing up all of contemporary America.) than showing the world your first wobbly artworks? (Updike, I remembered while reading the
There are perhaps fewer descriptions of materials than one might expect from a writer who new book, was himself a trained artist.) In place of Baker’s old image-hoarding style is a less
once gave us the memorable paper-goods anthem “Perforation! Shout it out!” but the med- flashy, smudgier, more serene approach; in place of solitary preoccupations, a more expansive
itations on sandpaper grain and oil pastels are highly satisfying. “Pastels: loaves and lozenges embrace of artistic indebtedness. “I started to feel that I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing
and ingots of baked radiance that would stain my fingers and dust my optic nerve,” he writes. portraits,” writes Baker. “In fact I wanted to draw every person in the world.” n
“It’s dry from the beginning. No brushes needed. You just wipe your hands on your pants.” Lisa Borst is the web editor of n+1.

10 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024

 Sugar Rush
The life of Warhol Superstar Candy Darling
MELISSA ANDERSON
CANDY DARLING: DREAMER, ICON, SUPERSTAR BY CYNTHIA CARR
Candy Darling with the director Werner Schroeter during the filming of The Death of Maria Malibran, Munich, 1971.
TO TRAVEL FROM MASSAPEQUA PARK, a small town on Long Island, to Penn Station on the
LIRR takes about an hour. It was a commute that Candy Darling made countless times
PHOTO: © BPK BILDAGENTUR / DIGNE MELLER MARCOVICZ / ART RESOURCE, NY.
between 1962, the year she turned eighteen, and 1974, the year she died, at age twenty-
nine. The return trip from Manhattan—where she would first meet Jackie Curtis, Andy
Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Jane Fonda, Werner Schroeter, and so many other important
collaborators and friends—often required Candy to travel under the cover of dark and
to take a cab from the station directly to the Cape Cod house where her mom, Terry
Slattery, lived, the same home that parent and child moved to in 1957 following Terry’s
divorce from Candy’s violent, alcoholic father. A loving mother, though never entirely
without shame about her trans daughter, Terry did not want her glamorous child to be
visible to gossiping neighbors. Candy, who never had a permanent home as an adult,
whose underground cachet never translated to a living wage, had no choice but to endure
the ignominious treatment whenever she had nowhere else to go. On those sixty-minute
LIRR sojourns, she had time to think. She would often write in her journal. Some of her
entries are exceptionally profound, like this one, seemingly anticipating Judith Butler’s
ideas by decades: “I am not a genuine woman, but I am not interested in genuineness.
I’m interested in the product of being a woman and how qualified I am. The product of
the system is what is important. If the product fails, then the system is not good. What
can I do to help me live in this life?”
NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX. 432 PAGES. $30.
How she answered that question during her too-abbreviated time on earth—she died
of lymphoma, likely caused by the potentially carcinogenic female hormones she’d been
taking on and off since 1965—is the subject of Cynthia Carr’s compassionate and richly
detailed Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, the first full-fledged biography of a
performer and personality who had a particular genius for interpreting and refracting
the blonde goddesses of golden-age Hollywood. Carr’s is also the first major remem-
brance that discusses Candy using an evolved discourse about trans lives. Nearly all the
prior notable Candy commemorations, in various media, contain language or choices
that today would be considered archaic at best.
The two Lou Reed–written songs that name-check her, for example, are putative
homages laced with derision. “Candy Says” from 1969 begins: “Candy says, ‘I’ve come
to hate my body / And all that it requires in this world.’” Reed’s most successful single,
1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” says this about Candy: “In the back room she was
everybody’s darlin’ / But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head.” The
selection of Stephen Dorff to play Candy in Mary Harron’s Valerie Solanas biopic, I Shot
Andy Warhol (1996), would be an unthinkable transgression in this decade, though the
fact of the actor’s cis manhood may be less vexing than his terrible portrayal. The year
after Harron’s movie saw the publication of My Face for the World to See: The Diaries,
Letters, and Drawings of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar, a pale-pink volume
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 11
styled as a clasped diary abounding with indelible first-person reminiscences, a few of Carr seamlessly incorporates these professional triumphs and setbacks within the
which reappear in Carr’s book. Some of the terms and phrases used in the otherwise larger context of Candy’s “inchoate” and “paradoxical” life. The adjectives are apt,
loving prefatory material for My Face—inconsistent personal pronouns, “drag queen,” reflecting the era in which she lived. It was a time when the term “transgender” would
“she was born a he”—now scan as injurious. Even a tribute from as late as 2010—the not be widely used until at least two decades after her death (“transsexual” would be the
melancholic documentary Beautiful Darling, produced by and prominently featuring politest word, though Candy rejected it, identifying simply as a woman with a “flaw”:
Jeremiah Newton, one of Candy’s closest friends and the executor of her estate, and a her penis); when the concept of “gender fluidity” was all but nonexistent; when an
key resource for Carr—includes comments from talking heads that rattle with their immutable binary reigned supreme. “Candy would never be a sixties person,” Carr
impolitic declarations about the subject’s gender. (Casting here is also a problem: though writes, explaining one of her subject’s many contradictions. “As the culture went
never seen, Chloë Sevigny provides the “voice” of Candy when excerpts from her jour- through its sea change, into something rich and strange and occasionally violent, Candy
nals are read. Would a cis woman’s ventriloquism for a legendary trans woman’s inner- wasn’t really in sync. Issues that preoccupied so many of her generation . . . didn’t inter-
most thoughts ever be tolerated in 2024?) est her. Nor did she ever assess her own situation as political. . . . Yet her very existence
Deftly, without a trace of sanctimony, Carr, who dedicates her book “to the trans was radical.” Her own vision of femininity was conservative—“If I am going to be a
community,” recounts Candy’s life in a way that most honors and respects who she was, woman, I want the whole thing: a home in the suburbs, a husband, and strange as it may
without erasing the terminology of a more benighted era. On reconciling the name Candy sound, children,” she wrote in her notebook. At the same time, she keenly sensed how
was given in 1944—James Lawrence Slattery—with the name she chose for herself, Carr constructed that ideal was, as the journal entry cited above indicates, a presaging précis
writes in her introduction: “The terms ‘dead-naming’ and ‘misgendering’ did not exist of gender studies. Likewise, her attention to the superficial had its own kind of depth.
during Candy’s lifetime. . . . She began her life as a tortured effeminate boy because she “Candy knew that she was beautiful—but was it the right kind of beautiful? Her obses-
wasn’t really a boy. She was always she, and I will be using she/her pronouns for her sion with appearance was not rooted in narcissism,” Carr observes. “It was how she
throughout.” Carr always refers to her subject as Candy. But she lets stand the references affirmed her female identity in a world where there was very little support for even the
to Candy as “Jimmy,” “son,” and “he” from her family and childhood friends. As Carr idea of gender fluidity. Beauty was also useful to her as armor. She preferred that people
astutely explains, to do so otherwise would risk an ahistorical, less complex analysis: focus on the surface.”
“To change their words is to deny the context that surrounded her—the disorienting Beyond Carr’s discerning overview of Candy’s life and epoch, she vivifies her biog-
childhood she had to negotiate while living in a homophobic, transphobic world with a raphy with piquant details, the result of her thorough reporting. Lily Tomlin, then at
boy’s name and a boy’s body. I have not sanitized that context.” the height of her Laugh-In fame, was so impressed by Candy that she arranged for her
Born in Queens, Candy spent most of her miserable childhood in Long Island. She to have an audition at the renowned midtown cabaret Upstairs at the Downstairs. (The
noted in a 1970 journal entry that she “was a recluse at seven,” shutting herself away tryout went nowhere, but a year before her death, Candy landed the most lucrative gig
after being tormented so often by other kids. She hated going to school—avoiding it of her career: the opening act at the hot new nightclub Le Jardin, a forerunner of Studio
“became the focus of her life”—and dropped out at sixteen. Her greatest salve and a 54.) Tomlin’s partner in love and work, Jane Wagner, paid for Candy’s badly needed
foundational influence was the Million Dollar Movie, a kind of precursor to TCM, in dental care. Lauren Hutton, nearing her zenith as a top model, was immediately
which starry productions from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s were broadcast on television. enchanted with the Superstar on their first meeting, a chance encounter at Halston’s
Rapt in front of the TV set, Candy was especially besotted with atelier. The most bizarre detail of their friendship: Hutton
one studio-era blonde in particular: Kim Novak, whose oeuvre, showed Candy how to tame a tarantula. The most touching:
especially Picnic (1955), Jeanne Eagels (1957), and Bell Book and Hutton accompanied a terrified Candy to Cabrini Medical Cen-
Candle (1958), would greatly inform her sardonic salute to highly When Candy walked into ter, the hospital where she would later die, insisting that she
stylized Tinseltown acting. the women’s dressing room have a private room and giving her sick friend some of her own
At sixteen, seventeen, her world began to expand, as did her for Small Craft Warnings, negligees.
ideas about herself and who she could be. (Carr notes that the first So many of Candy’s performances, the truest index of her
reference to “Candy” appears in ’62, though monikers like
the lead actress screamed, genius, were never documented or are difficult to access. There
“Hope” were also used; she settled on “Candy Darling” in ’65.) “Get it out of here!” isn’t even a reliable description of her Le Jardin show; Carr notes
A job at a beauty parlor in nearby Baldwin, Long Island, gave her Candy was assigned the “there were no reviews, and the few remaining accounts do not
a stage, a showcase for her blonde-bombshell imitations, and a broom closet, onto which quite correspond.” Fortunately, Flesh and Women in Revolt,
very sympathetic female boss and confidante. At Baldwin, Candy she affixed a star. featuring two of her greatest star turns in her slim filmography,
also went to her first gay bar, the Hayloft. She began to wear are available on the Internet Archive. They demonstrate her sub-
makeup and women’s clothes, changes she tried to keep hidden lime gift for conjuring a specific kind of acting magic, in which
from her mother. When a meddling neighbor tipped Terry off, her loving, studied replications of silver-screen luminaries are
she confronted her child. Candy simply asked her mom to wait at the kitchen table; she spiked with wry shrewdness. The mimicker is transformed into an original.
returned “in a dress, looking gorgeous.” As Terry explained to Newton years later, she Candy Darling is the second of Carr’s comprehensive studies devoted to a New York
had an immediate realization: “I couldn’t hold my son back.” City legend who died much too young, following her superb 2012 biography of artist
Manhattan beckoned. She gravitated to Washington Square Park, then a major queer David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly. That book never privileged the life over the work;
hangout. The Bleecker Street apartment of an unsavory character named Seymour paying assiduous, passionate attention to Wojnarowicz’s polymathic output, Carr dem-
Levy—Newton calls him “a chicken queen”—served as Candy’s crash pad for several onstrated her subject’s brilliance and originality over and over again. Oddly, when it
years. She did occasional sex work. She “had entered the demimonde . . . and that was comes to writing about Candy’s acting—her work—Carr often seems indifferent or
a comfortable spot for someone who was reinventing herself,” Carr writes. “She’d obtuse. When writing about Flesh, in which Candy and Jackie are seated on a couch and
become an outlaw the moment she put on a dress,” Carr continues, owing to ancient city read aloud from old movie magazines while Joe Dallesandro gets a blow job from Geri
laws still on the books that criminalized cross-dressing. It was in this milieu that Candy Miller, Carr merely recapitulates what happens in this segment and transcribes the
would meet two other trans titanesses: Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. The latter, dialogue. There is no analysis: no mention of how funny the incongruity is between
as movie-mad as Candy, wrote a tart spoof of Hollywood titled Glamour, Glory, and Candy and Jackie’s actions and Joe and Geri’s or of the ways that Candy’s supercilious,
Gold, in which Candy made her Off-Off-Broadway debut, in ’67. prudish delivery delights as a meticulously rendered takeoff on the affected, remote sex
Friends, rivals, costars, these three would all become the last Warhol Superstars. symbol that someone like Kim Novak epitomized in the 1950s. (Why Carr included this
Andy, who met Candy in ’67, always had a soft spot for her; as Carr bluntly states, “he synopsis without offering any commentary is all the more puzzling in light of the fact
admired the way [she] could pass.” Her entrée into the Factory led to two Paul Mor- that, during her 1984–2003 tenure at the Village Voice, she ranked among the preemi-
rissey–directed films: 1968’s Flesh, her screen debut, and 1971’s Women in Revolt (more nent critics of avant-garde performance.)
on these movies in a moment). Candy was often Warhol’s plus-one at parties and open- Carr’s discussion of Women in Revolt—a riotous spoof of feminism, in which Candy
ings; Carr notes that “she was beautiful, polite, witty, poised—the perfect date.” She stars with Jackie and Holly as members of PIG (Politically Involved Girls)—proves even
now sat with Warhol’s crowd at Max’s Kansas City, where she likely met Roger Vadim more dispiriting. She complains of “scenes that go on way too long” and the film’s
(who would become one of Candy’s many short-term lovers) and his then-wife Jane “implausible notions” and incoherence: all hallmarks of the entire Warhol/Morrissey
Fonda (with whom she would share a scene in the 1971 neo-noir Klute). It may have corpus, movies that were made to showcase personalities and cared nothing about plot
been at the Factory that she met Werner Schroeter, the German auteur who cast Candy or realism. Carr dismisses Candy—portraying a Park Avenue debutante who briefly has
in a supporting role in The Death of Maria Malibran (1972), a feverish tribute to the her consciousness raised only to abandon women’s liberation to make it big in Holly-
nineteenth-century opera singer of the title. Candy’s work onstage continued apace: wood—as “seem[ing] wooden in some of her scenes, playing the rich-girl as high-toned
Jackie gave her the lead in the smash downtown production Vain Victory: The Vicissi- and snooty. It’s a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” But Candy isn’t after class veri-
tudes of the Damned in ’71; the next year, Candy graduated from Off-Off to Off-Broad- similitude; her acting is informed by her movie fandom, her idols cannily saluted and
way, with the role of Violet, a waifish seductress, in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft razzed at the same time.
Warnings. Carr holds in higher regard a performance by Candy in a still, not moving, image:
Many of these career milestones, though, were accompanied by indignities and humil- Peter Hujar’s Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, taken in September ’73, shortly after
iations. She was paid $25 a day for her work in Women in Revolt. When Candy walked she was admitted at Cabrini Medical Center and the day before exploratory surgery
into the women’s dressing room for Small Craft Warnings, the lead actress screamed, revealed an enormous tumor that her doctor described as being “like a tree root grow-
“Get it out of here!” Candy was assigned the broom closet, onto which she affixed a star. ing.” In full maquillage, lying on her side, cocooned in her hospital-bed duvet, a long-
Her most crushing disappointment was not being cast in the role she considered herself stemmed rose next to her, Candy masks her fear by assuming a pose she must have seen
the most eminently qualified to play: the lead in the 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s countless times before—when, as a lonely, bullied child, she studied the Million Dollar
Myra Breckinridge, his best-selling ribald satire about a trans woman with an encyclo- Movie with exacting scrutiny, dreaming of the woman she would become. n
pedic knowledge of ’40s movies (Raquel Welch was given the part; Candy never even Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph
got an audition). on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.

12 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024

 Loose Change
Vinson Cunningham’s novel of the Obama campaign
CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN
GREAT EXPECTATIONS BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK: HOGARTH. 272 PAGES. $28.
T
he nostalgia among liberals for the
Obama presidency has lately
crested such that it’s a surprise
that proposals to overturn the 22nd
Amendment haven’t gained traction, even
in the fantasy realm of non-feasibility
where a lot of American political thinking
occurs. Given the centrist fetish for norms
and process, a restoration of Barack
Obama would be beyond the pale. Let him
podcast, produce content for Netflix, and
issue biannual lists of his middlebrow fic-
tion faves. Still, there are believers in the
restoration of another Obama, both on the
paranoid fringe and in the dismayed mid-
dle. Lately my primary source of oral polit-
Barack and Michelle Obama in one of their final campaign stops before the Iowa Caucuses, January 7, 2008.
ical commentary has been the Stephen A.
Smith Show, a YouTube broadcast by the
ESPN host and longtime sports journalist.
In February Smith and guest Charles Bark-
ley speculated on potential Democratic
replacements for Joe Biden, who is very
old. (Or as Smith put it: “It’s not that
you’re old, it’s that you look it. You clearly
have lost a step, and we can see it.”) Bark-
ley, surprisingly bullish on flailing Repub-
lican challenger Nikki Haley despite her
recent comments that the United States
“has never been a racist country,” favored
California Governor Gavin Newsom “for
the simple fact that he’s been in politics and
ran a big state before,” but Smith cast his
wish for Michelle Obama. “I think
Michelle Obama could beat Trump,” he
said. “I don’t think Gavin Newsom could
beat Trump.” Indeed, the odd thing about
the Democratic Party since Obama is that
it hasn’t furnished any politicians born
after 1950 and not named Obama who
PHOTO: WIKICOMMONS/LUKE VARGAS.
even seem capable of winning national
elections at the top of the ticket. Sports-
casters, who make their reputations on bet-
ting advice, are realists on this subject—
cynics, you might say. Yet any regular
observer of athletes, no matter how cyni-
cal, knows that miracles do happen and
sometimes the underdog wins.
One of the things that always bugged
me about Obama—aside from his exten-
sion of his predecessor’s neoconservative
foreign policy, the bonanza for private
health insurers in Obamacare, the supine
orientation toward financial institutions,
and so on—was his hostility toward cyn-
ics. In his usage, the word tended to desig-
nate anyone opposed to him, his policies,
or hope itself. He generally meant Repub-
lican naysayers (right-wingers took notice:
the Cato Institute issued an item on
Obama’s “War on Cynicism”), but also
disaffected millennials from among his
original core of supporters, the recently
hope-deficient. “Cynicism often passes for
wisdom,” Obama would say. Some of
these “cynics” were moving not to the
right but toward a less pliant idealism, one
that would fuel the left protest movements
of the past decade and a half. And after all,
Obama himself, like any politician, was
clearly a cynic too. How else to understand
his ironic boast, “Turns out I’m really
good at killing people”?
David Hammond, the narrator of Vin-
son Cunningham’s not quite ironically
titled first novel Great Expectations, isn’t
exactly a cynic, but he is possessed of a
pessimism beyond his years. Twenty-two
at the novel’s start, a college dropout and
single father of a toddler daughter, he’s
recruited as a staffer for a senator’s under-
dog presidential campaign in 2007. The
name Obama does not occur in the book.
The words “cynic” and “cynical” appear
once each. The campaign’s “more cynical
activities” occur in big cities, where the
money is raked in from rich dinner guests
(called “twenty-three hundreds” for their
maximum donations), as opposed to the
evangelical efforts pursued in the prov-
inces of Iowa, New Hampshire, and
South Carolina in advance of primary
elections. The one man in the novel called
a “cynic” is a guest at a dinner with the
campaign manager (David Axelrod, one
presumes, introduced anonymously, as
are a rapper and singer who seem to be
Jay-Z and Beyoncé Knowles). He
expresses skepticism when someone says
the candidate’s “high-class chin,” “the
accident of his black skin,” and “his class
camouflage” make his “ivory tower com-
portment” “exotic,” and the “mixture . . .
God, who knows, but I think on his best
days it works.” The dinner guest “ginning
up a suspense only a cynic can muster in
his audience,” says, “We’ll see.” Behind
the curtain of uplifting slogans, cynicism
turns out to be both the source of political
power (that is, money) and the zone of
bracing skepticism.
Obama’s class camouflage did work for
two elections and eight years, and the nar-
rative frame of Great Expectations abides
mostly by the familiar history of the 2008
campaign: aside from one plot twist
involving a few strictly fictional charac-
ters, there’s little counterfactual material
in the book. Cunningham was a staffer on
the Obama campaign and in the White
House; he is now a distinguished theater
critic for the New Yorker. That he has
waited sixteen years to write a book draw-
ing on his experience and chosen to write
a literary novel rather than a résumé-bol-
stering memoir or a Beltway potboiler
speaks to an idealism divorced from poli-
tics. And though the novel obviously folds
in autobiographical material and David
mentions several times a vague ambition
to become a writer, I wouldn’t call it auto-
fiction in the way the term has been
applied to Karl Ove Knausgaard, who
framed My Struggle as an act of confes-
sion, or to Ben Lerner, who draws atten-
tion to his similarities with his alter egos
even as their stories deviate from his own
biography. Cunningham is up to some-
thing more old-fashioned. David’s status
as a youthful observer of events and people
larger than life (and larger, it seems to him,
than his own life) makes him something
like Nick Carraway, though the novel
mostly steers clear of tragedy, even if some
of its characters face public disgrace.
Despite the title (which could be applied to
the campaign, to David himself, and to his
daughter), Great Expectations isn’t par-
ticularly Dickensian: though there’s some
suspense its plot isn’t full of cliff-hangers
or twists, and though some of its charac-
ters are recognizable types, they’re hardly
just types.
Cunningham’s novel partakes of three
modes—the political, the personal, and the
critical—and some of its most fascinating
moments occur at the intersections. In
political mode, Cunningham is neither
particularly dishy nor exactly revelatory,
but at his best he is sharp and cynical (in
the good way). David is initially drafted to
the campaign by an acquaintance from his
earlier, brighter days as a high school star
at the fancy Horace Mann School. Beverly
Whitlock, a member of the board of Hor-
ace Mann—where, David says, “people
still vaguely remembered and liked me”—
has become a business success, founder of
“one of the first black-owned investment
banks,” and appeared on the cover of the
magazine Black Enterprise. She first hires
David to tutor her son, then informs him
that the nascent campaign of the senator
from Illinois (“I’ve been a supporter since
he ran for state senator, right?”) asked her
if she knew “anybody young and compe-
tent. (The thought that, by asking Beverly,
they had also been implicitly seeking
somebody black swung athletically
through my mind.)” The anxiety within
the campaign, and tacitly between David
and Beverly, about just how black the
campaign of the first African American
president is lingers throughout the novel.
At one campaign stop Peter Yarrow—of
Peter, Paul and Mary—meets David, who,
as a fan of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” is
awestruck, and says:
“You work for the campaign?” he asked. I
nodded yes, starstruck for the first time in
more than a year. Yarrow looked me in the
eyes, quiveringly sincere, and made a sigh-
ing sound. Then, as if compelled by an out-
side force, he quickly grabbed my neck and
pulled me close to him, settling into a har-
rowingly static full-body hug.
“Oh God,” he said. “Finally, a person
of color!”
When I couldn’t find words for a
response, he kept going.
“You know, I’ve been back and forth
across the country for this campaign”—all
over this land, I thought—“and you’d be
absolutely shocked by the demographics of
the staff. . . . ”
But white anxiety about the candidate’s
and the campaign’s authenticity is a side
note to the project’s larger implications.
Beverly, as the novel’s avatar of the rising
African American elite class, expresses
these expectations succinctly:
“You know,” she said once, not long before
I left for California, “everybody talks about
how he’ll change race in America. Erase it
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or whatever. By this they mean he’ll change
white people, which, if it happened, would
be amazing enough. But nobody mentions
the better thing, Dave. How he could abso-
HEAD OF lutely, all at once, with one big stroke, end
black politics forever. A ‘special interest
group’ is a group in which nobody’s really
ZEUS interested. That shit’s over. All these stupid
debates I listened to as a kid, going
nowhere. Assimilation against separatism.
Markets or collectives. Malcolm, Martin.
Du Bois, Booker T. All these fucking men,
first of all, and their precious ideologies.
When the real thing is: How about you get
some power and then use it?”
These are the hopes of a woman who can
already think of herself as a player in the
realm of big finance and national politics.
But Beverly’s ambitions for power will also
draw her into corrupt transactions, though
the campaign can quietly wash these infrac-
tions off its hands. One of the historical
coincidences of the Obama candidacy was
that it occurred when maximum donations
from the wealthy, a necessary motor to get
the effort off the ground, were soon dwarfed
by small donations from regular voters, the
cynical yielding to the evangelical.
The aspirations of David and others he
meets on the campaign’s lower rungs have
a less ruthlessly transactional valence.
After a stint working as a fundraising
On sale assistant in New York City, where he lives
July 9 in Morningside Heights with his mother
and shares custody of his daughter with
her mother (called only “the dancer”),
Defne Suman’s
One of the things that always bugged me about
brilliant third Obama was his hostility toward cynics.
novel is a story
of womanhood David goes to New Hampshire in advance
and fidelity, of its primary. Among the other young
staffers there is Regina, and they have a
nationhood and brief and sweet romance. The first time
cultural identity, they get together, David tells her of his
daughter, “the facts of dematriculation,
and the secrets ‘co-parenting,’ tenuous employment.” Her
silent and tender response indicates that
she “understood herself to be the recipient
of some grave trust” even though “nothing
I told her was secret.” There is a paragraph
“Dazzling.” break, and then Cunningham writes: “Her
confession was that she’d like someday to
—The New York be mayor of San Francisco.” As in the
Times, on At The encounter with Yarrow, here is an exam-
ple of Cunningham’s subtle way with com-
Breakfast Table edy. Of course, the hinterlands were can-
vassed by young careerists with their own
grandiose political dreams that they hardly
“Fiercely dared speak of. Regina, the daughter of a
intelligent, black American woman and a largely
absent Ghanaian father in California, has
her own childhood traumas to get over
and her own reasons for wanting to
achingly change the world. Most novels about
beautiful.” young people are written by young people
and tend to rely on comic exaggeration,
—Elif Shafak, which tyro novelists lean on to cover for
on At The Breakfast
their lack of experience. Coming to the art
form in middle age, Cunningham doesn’t
Table need that crutch. His humor is hard-
earned and dry.
Since David is only an accidental worker
in the realm of politics, his mind is often on
Order your
other things. There are many passages
copy wherever
where his narration seems to fuse with Cun-
books are sold
ningham the critic, and we read pages on a
painting by Renoir on the wall of a rich
donor’s apartment; found photographs
sold by a man at a flea market in Los Ange-
les; a basketball game playing on a televi-
sion at a bar in New Hampshire. These
digressive passages are about real-life
things (like similar digressions on Cornell
West and Jeremiah Wright), and sent this
reader googling for them. Unable to track
down the Renoir and at a loss about the
found photos, I wished that Cunningham
had availed himself of W. G. Sebald’s tech-
nique of including images among the text.
The basketball game, however, was easy to
find, a December 20, 2007, game between
the Detroit Pistons and the Boston Celtics.
The game prompts a conversation at the
bar between David, Regina, and a Haitian
cook called Prince. David is a fan of the
Celtics star Paul Pierce, who “looked like
he could’ve played back in the seventies or
eighties, when even the best players never
worked out over the summer and, during
the season, rode charter buses and smoked
cigarettes.” Prince prefers Ray Allen, lean
and sleek and notorious for the practice
ethic that made him the greatest long-range
shooter of his era. (Regina, being a Lakers
fan, hates them both and prefers Kobe Bry-
ant.) Prince compares Allen to Obama,
whose story about himself involved a trans-
formation: “Have you seen the pictures of
him as a kid? Bit pudgy—looks like I used
to. He talks all the time about how he was
lazy in school too. How he’s this skinny
workaholic who went to Harvard or wher-
ever. He’s a model of hard work. He did
fucking coke, and now he’s . . . this.”
The idea connects to a strain of religious
thinking David engages in throughout the
book. David was raised in the Pentecostal
Church, and his first impressions of the
senator remind him of a pastor from his
childhood: “We believed in predestina-
tion, he said, not in destiny . . . your life—
and this was freedom—was a gesture
minutely choreographed by God. To seek
salvation required free will, but the one
who had planted, and could count, the
hairs on your head had also engineered
your mechanisms of choice.” Was
Obama’s appearance on the scene as a fig-
ure of national racial redemption some-
how divinely ordained, or a matter of bru-
tal politics and historical circumstance?
Are the problems of David’s life—father-
hood, dropping out, the death of his father
during his childhood—strokes of bad luck
or part of a larger system of blessings? I
would normally be inclined to a material-
ist view of these questions, but Cunning-
ham’s novel makes them impossible not to
consider. David himself, watching the can-
didate declare victory in Chicago in the
novel’s last pages, lands in a place of
ambivalence: “He was a moving statue,
made to stand in a great square and eke
out noise. He mattered and didn’t, just as
my own history did and didn’t.” When he
raises his phone to photograph the presi-
dent-elect, he does so “unprayerfully.” It’s
the gesture of a disappointed young man
with a walk-on part in an episode of his-
tory that has both restored his idealism
and hardened his cynicism. n
Christian Lorentzen is a writer splitting his time
between New York and Albania.
 Into the Wild
Vladimir Sorokin’s high-risk fiction
JOY WILLIAMS
RED PYRAMID: SELECTED STORIES BY VLADIMIR SOROKIN, TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY MAX LAWTON
NEW YORK: NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS CLASSICS. 320 PAGES. $19.
BLUE LARD BY VLADIMIR SOROKIN, TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY MAX LAWTON NEW YORK: NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS CLASSICS. 368 PAGES. $19.
V
ladimir Sorokin is genius, pure and
simple. Or Daedalian.
Slowly, slowly Sorokin has been
introduced to us. At first he was suspected to
be too “esoteric” for American tastes. Jamey
Gambrell, who knew him via the literary and
artistic underground of ’80s Moscow, was
his first English translator. It was not until
2007 that a novel, Ice, centerpiece of a tril-
ogy, appeared in the United States. In an
interview with the Paris Review, Gambrell
recalled that her early efforts troubled her
because they made the work sound so odd.
“It’s like, This is going to sound so weird.
But then I stopped . . . and reread the whole
thing in Russian and realized, Well, yeah, it’s
extremely strange in Russian. And so there’s
nothing else to do with it. You have to go
with that weirdness.”
She also translated Day of the Oprichnik
and The Blizzard before her death in 2020 at
the age of sixty-five.
Gambrell was calm. She found balance, a
path. She was on a long date with a wild man
but could be trusted to bring us all home by
midnight. Max Lawton, Sorokin’s new inde-
fatigable translator, is willing to hang out
much later, eager to push further toward an
ever-receding dawn.
Two years ago, Dalkey Archive Press and
New York Review Books respectively pub-
lished Their Four Hearts (published in Rus-
sia in 1992) and Telluria (2013). Telluria is
set in a medieval futuristic post-humanist
landscape; with fifty chapters told from fifty
points of view, it is linguistically and concep-
tually impressive, in vivid counterpoint to
the gleefully abhorrent Their Four Hearts, of
which Lawton wryly says: “It’s a light read.
It’s hilarious.”
Now, New York Review Books is pub-
lishing a selection of Sorokin’s stories, Red
Pyramid, and his infamous 1999 novel Blue
Lard. In the latter, the sex scene featuring
Stalin and Khrushchev only goes on for a few
pages:
“Oh . . . how often I think of you . . .” Stalin
murmured. “How much space you’ve come
to take up in my boundless life . . . ”
“Masculinum . . . ” the count’s lips
touched Stalin’s burgundy glans.
Stalin cried out and grabbed Khrush-
chev’s head with his hands. The count’s lips
teased the leader’s glans—tenderly at first,
then more and more carnivorously.
“A spiral . . . a spiral . . . ” Stalin moaned,
digging his fingers into the count’s long silver
hair.
Khrushchev’s strong tongue began to
move in a spiral around Stalin’s glans.
“You know my dear . . . no . . . sacré . . .
I . . . but no . . . the tip! the tip! the tip!” Stalin
thrashed around on the down pillows.
The entire book is a vigorous scatological
and satirical romp. A Russian-German meet-
ing proceeds like so:
PHOTO: MARIA SOROKINA.
“There were also a lot of problems with the
Holocaust,” Stalin pronounced. . . .
“Was there even a Holocaust?” Göring
asked.
“Well, six million people died . . . ” von
Ribbentrop remarked.
“That’s the Americans’ number,” Hitler
said. . . . “Six million isn’t even that many. We
lost forty-two million during the war.”
“Forty-five million, Mr. Reichskanzler,”
Khrushchev interjected.
“I’m sticking with the German data,”
Hitler noted drily.
There was a tense pause.
In an “Extroduction” Lawton says that
Blue Lard isn’t to be read as much as borne
witness to, its “quiddity” being “its own
reward.” It will not tolerate the formal nice-
ties of an introduction. The reader has to
enter this . . . this substance unaccompanied.
Vladimir Sorokin, 2020.
The thirteen stories in Red Pyramid more
graciously accept discussion and are illumi-
nated by Will Self’s fine intro, which comes
close to articulating their glittering incom-
prehensibility by pointing out the mix of
zaum, futurism, mysticism, masochism, and
panpsychism that fuel their disturbances.
Self also pinpoints nicely the moment of
“helium lift,” a Sorokin specialty, when the
story becomes something much other than
the reader could possibly have imagined.
The first story in the collection, “Passing
Through” (1981), concerns shit, also pre-
sented as “something brown” appearing
“between . . . cachectic cheeks,” a “brown
sausage”—produced on an underling’s tidy
desk by a squatting party official.
That’s pretty much it. Though the shit
deposit comes as some surprise actually.
Sorokin had mastered the helium lift even at
the age of twenty-six.
Shit has a role in the 2000 story “Nat-
sya,” in which it contains the undigestible
black pearl that reflects everything in the
world as black, and in “Violet Swans”
(2018), a beauty of a story, in which an
excommunicated monk uses excrement as a
binding agent to seal himself into an opening
on a cliff’s rock face.
This hermit, who had performed worldly
miracles in the past, is approached by mem-
bers of the Russian military, who have dis-
covered that the uranium tips in their nuclear
warhead arsenal have turned to sugar . . .
refined sugar. This, of course, if left uncor-
rected, would be the end of Mother Russia,
Eternal Russia, Celestial Russia. A young
soldier, Sasha, is chosen to ascend to the cave
via an air-conditioned cube and convince the
ascetic to change the sugar into thermonu-
clear triggers, much as he had once inadver-
tently caused holy bread—the prosphora in
Orthodox liturgy—into stone. The scene is
antic, the quest unfulfilled. And then Sorokin
achieves helium lift, not just once but twice.
The story ends with a flock of brilliantly
plumaged birds awakening from a night’s
slumber on the Ionian Sea to assemble in
flight and head north toward Ithaca. Hom-
er’s Ithaca, home in the most classical sense.
Or Cavafy’s, journey’s end, in the poet’s
words:
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give to you now.
Perhaps. A strange ending, Sorokin’s, as
the birds in “a smooth violet wedge rose up
in the matinal sky.” It brings to mind Kafka’s
old saw: “There is an infinite hope; only not
for us.” Sorokin’s birds are swans, of an
improbable end-times violet, but they also
recall Putin’s white Siberian cranes. In 2012,
Putin, in a motorized hang glider, attempted
to encourage a flock of young cranes, their
kind critically endangered, to begin a six-
thousand-kilometer migration to China and
Iran. They would still be picked off by hunt-
ers representing many lands, but it was a nice
gesture. He was widely ridiculed for this—
Putin, leader of Russians and a few hereto-
fore captive cranes. What a goofy guy, sim-
ple of mind and heart, a poseur. But now
there is the Ukraine assault and the death of
Navalny and reports of a new Russian satel-
lite weapon, quite possibly nuclear, which is
“troubling” and even annoying as we,
America, would certainly want to be the first
in developing and deploying such a treasure
into space.
In “Violet Swans,” the disbarred monk,
referred to by his beseecher as Father Pan-
cras, does not address the reverse-transfigu-
ration issue. When Sasha asks him in all
earnestness, “What’re we to do?” he replies
out of the cave’s darkness:
“Sleep!”
“What do you mean . . . sleep?”
“Sleep deeply!”
“Why?”
“So that you have more dreams.”
An extended purifying fast with Mor-
pheus might not be a bad idea. Stumbling
through this life in what we consider alert
waking has brought nothing but imbalance
and woe. Our fantasies have become more
real, the real ever more incoherent, more
foul. Could the world heal if we stopped
engaging with it for a while? The Amazon,
the steppes and seas, the pounded, bloodied,
dis-lifed earth of Gaza? Could current condi-
tions of consumption, war, and extermina-
tion be negated? Unlikely, for this is the
Anthropocene, and the Anthropocene disal-
lows such moony thinking, and so it will be
until the Anthropocene is itself disallowed.
Anyway, it would take too much time, an
inhuman amount of time, a God’s own
amount of time, even beyond the kind of
timeless time Sorokin plays with in his star-
tlingly realized anti-utopian fictions. Sorokin
the man might find change—correction—
desirable, but Sorokin the artist finds
humankind’s self-inflicted dilemma irrevers-
ible.
Sorokin has professed his admiration for
literature. He finds beauty in the literary pro-
cess. He likes the universality of it, the poten-
tial to inform, to have an effect upon people.
Yet . . . it’s just lines on paper, too . . . it could
be prank or goad, even code. Certain parties
wish to view his work as primarily political
and therefore useful, but that would be to
simplify it, seal it, doom it to future irrele-
vance. Like Russia herself, which he mocks,
mimics, and tears apart like a wolverine, his
work is cruel, unpredictable, destabilizing,
and extreme. It provides no comfort zones.
Everything is paradox, wit, reversal, fear-
some revelation, sometimes ecstatic, some-
times banal. It depends. The naughty ditties
of childhood hold as much meaning as the
prattle of elders discussing Nietzsche. The
depths in a blind horse’s eye reveal the fear-
some disorder of the future. A shining pickax
of revenge bears the inscription Procul
Dubio. Without a doubt.
That Sorokin can fashion the excessive
energies of his novels’ recklessly assured
plotting into the more confining structure of
the short story is wondrous. He does this by
dynamiting the form, shattering its veneer of
melancholy modest disclosure (or its more
recent giddy narcissism).
In “Horse Soup,” a wealthy man pays a
young woman to consume carefully pre-
pared dishes of nothing. Watching provides
him with the most delicious orgasms, for
watching another eat nothing in a kick-
fueled society is the continued on page 36
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 15
Hollywood Babble On
Justin Taylor’s novel takes on the celebrity memoir
ANGELO HERNANDEZ-SIAS
REBOOT BY JUSTIN TAYLOR NEW YORK: PANTHEON. 304 PAGES. $28.
Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (PCH), 2019, acrylic and Bondo on fiberglass, 96" × 84" × 4".
M
eet the cast: David Crader, a
washed-up child actor, author
of the celebrity memoir that
constitutes the bulk of Justin Taylor’s second
novel, Reboot; Amber, David’s long-suffer-
ing second ex-wife, mother of his child, in
whose life David appears, in his own words,
as “an occasional cameo”; Grace Travis,
David’s first ex-wife and former costar,
diversifier-of-portfolio par excellence (“We
can’t all be Gwyneth or Busy,” Grace says,
“but we do what we can”); Shayne Glade,
David’s best frenemy and former costar, a
buffer and more talented foil; Molly Web-
ster, culture writer, bartender, holder of an
MFA in “speculative nonfiction”; Corey
Burch, once the cast’s “Designated Fat
Kid™” (as Molly puts it), now a gun-toting,
iron-pumping deep statist running for mayor
somewhere in Florida; and a few extremely
online rogue elements we won’t @. The
premise: Rev Beach, the (fictional) early-
aughts teenybopper that David, Grace,
Shayne, and Corey acted in, is due for a
reboot. Why, exactly, no one knows. “It
popped up on streaming during lockdown,”
Molly speculates in an online explainer that
the novel reproduces, “and the algorithm got
a hard-on for it, and people—you ridiculous
people, you clicked.” One small problem:
the cast members hate each other, and it’s all
David’s fault.
David could use the money (his current
gigs include voice-acting for a video game
“for stupid incel babies” and managing a
small bar), and a little fame wouldn’t hurt—
so he’s very pro-reboot. He also knows he
must make amends for his past betrayals; he
doesn’t hide how badly he’s screwed things
up and screwed friends over. On the whole,
he abides by a principle one character states
outright: “Memoir only works if the author
is willing to indict herself as much as all the
16 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
other characters.” (Taylor too: in his 2020
memoir, Riding with the Ghost, he frankly
assesses his relationship with his late father.)
Reboot is replete with self-deception that
recognizes itself as such. Of a bender, David
notes, “I was a few over my limit and wrote
myself a mental IOU for the days ahead,
when I wouldn’t drink at all, so this week
would average out to me having met my
limit, even though that wasn’t exactly—
wasn’t remotely—how this was supposed to
work.” Lest you feel sorry for him, David
mocks his own bids for sympathy: “I was
someone who, at sudden and unexpected
moments, needed to be pitied in a deep and
ugly way.”
Reboot, by David Crader, is a celebrity
memoir, which isn’t saying much. By the
rules of “personal branding,” every memoir
is a celebrity memoir. The genre must satisfy
both the reader’s desire for confession—I
want to know, Prince Harry, that you are
like me—and the celebrity’s desire to control
the performance of confession. The personal
brand, like many a video game villain, can
absorb attacks to grow stronger. To truly
destroy it, through the admission of a sin
egregious enough to ensure one’s banish-
ment, would be to forgo the brand’s object:
fame. As David puts it: “the pleasure, the
glory, the thrill of being the center of atten-
tion, the star of the show, the grinning head-
shot ripped from the magazine and taped to
the bedroom wall.”
The celebrity memoir is concerned with
the maintenance of an image because it has
to be—it is occasioned by that image. If
someone, whether a reader or a publisher, is
going to give you a lot of money because of
who you are (David is candid about receiv-
ing an “undeserved book advance”), then
you better, in your book, be that person—or
else differ from him in a redeeming way.
David doesn’t hide his mistakes in his mem-
oir, but he’s not forthright about them either.
Sure, he’s pushing a lot down. Sure, he wants
to look good. Less cynically, you could say
he’s discovering his mistakes by writing
about them. He putters for a couple hundred
pages before fully disclosing the details of his
betrayal and only then answers to his reti-
cence: “I’ve held off telling it because I
believe that when you speak, you are always
also listening—or you should be. You are
trying, in a sense, to ‘overhear’ yourself, and
so to be changed by what you have heard
yourself reveal no less than if someone other
than yourself were the one revealing it to
you.” David’s writing process is therapeutic.
Relatively late in his story, we learn that
as a teenager, fearful of being outperformed,
David sabotaged a castmate and cut his
career short. The reboot is David’s only hope
of making things right. His effort is earnest
and noble and comedic for its failure: “I’d
done this one thing right today,” he says of a
heartfelt monologue delivered during the
aforementioned bender, “and perhaps
redeemed myself after all, maybe not com-
pletely but in part, yes, a small down pay-
ment on redemption that I made this day,
whatever day it was, and now I could rest.”
With some self-consciousness, David acqui-
esces to the expectation that the memoir of a
once-beloved child star be sincere and
redemptive.
Reboot, by Justin Taylor, is a Hollywood
satire, which, like any satire, runs the risk of
being too like the thing it is poking fun at.
The best orientation a satirist can have
toward their subject is ambivalence, because
ambivalence yields complexity, and com-
plexity is interesting. How much could Cer-
vantes have hated chivalric novels, to have
read them all? How much can Taylor,
opposer of trite and sentimental narrative,
hate the celebrity memoir, to have packaged
his novel in one?
Last year, while you were watching Netf-
lix, Justin Taylor was writing at length on
Cormac McCarthy, Lorrie Moore, Charles
Portis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Lexi Frei-
man. Dude is erudite. But he was watching
Netflix too. Reboot is a Borgesian feast of
real and invented films, Broadway shows,
video games, records, and television. The
elephant in the room, BoJack, appears early,
and is followed by Buffy, Noah Baumbach,
Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Béla Tarr, and
Stanley Kubrick (“you’re not sure you’ve
ever stayed awake through the middle hour
of 2001”).
Taylor’s expertise far surpasses name-
dropping. His cultural references are func-
tional; they build the world, propel the plot,
develop character, make us laugh—and
occasionally squirm. Shayne Glade, David’s
former costar, sings six nights a week in an
invented stage adaptation of David Cronen-
berg’s film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cos-
mopolis: “Shayne played Sheets/Levin as a
comic figure, a holy fool like something out
of Beckett, rather than as a blithering puddle
of David Mamet rage like Paul Giamatti did
in the Cronenberg film.” The whirlpool of
names is beside the point: anyone who
knows these works knows Shayne, knows
Shayne’s work, and knows, by the novel’s
end, that Shayne’s aptness for his role has a
tragic dimension.
Voiced by David Crader, the novel’s ency-
clopedism poses a threat to its verisimilitude,
but Taylor anticipates our doubt. Consider
David’s application of Henry IV, Part 1, to
his life: “I haven’t read the play, and I’m not
going to, but I did watch The King (2019),
with Timothée Chalamet and Ben Men-
delsohn, directed by that Australian guy who
made Hesher.” David disclaims having read
the play, or even wanting to read the play,
and omits the name of Spencer Susser (who’s
American, but works with an Australian col-
lective), as if to suggest that the references
here are offhand. Don’t be fooled. David is
addicted to alcohol, Taylor to being a critic:
“To eulogize Hotspur, therefore,” ends the
above note on The King, “is to eulogize the
life he’s forsaken as much as the one he took.
Hotspur has led Henry across the border of
fate.” Taylor’s knack for explication is a
good thing, so far as I’m concerned, because
he’s very good at it—exceptionally learned
in arts high and low, registers high and low,
and refreshingly, often hilariously, indeco-
rous. To narrate from the perspective of a
Hollywood star, therefore, is to back himself
into a corner, or, perhaps, into the company
of Ryan Gosling, who, in character as Ken in
a GQ video to promote Barbie, describes the
value of books: “Books make people think
you have interests.” Taylor’s constraint is
ostentatious, imposed for the same reason, I
suspect, that Houdini opted to escape from
a straitjacket while hanging upside down
from a crane or Perec wrote A Void without
the letter e: to make things harder for him-
self, and, by extension, more fun.
To escape, Taylor exploits the celebrity
memoir’s built-in loophole: the fact that it is
not generally written by the person whose
name and face appear on its cover, but by a
ghostwriter. The ghostwriter may be very
unlike the memoirist. In Reboot, this differ-
ence yields what David’s ghostwriter might
call a dialectic: the “apparently spontaneous
formation of an opposing faction.” Through
the ghostwriter, Taylor grants himself access
to an erudition otherwise implausible. He
can have his Shakes and eat it too.
A dialectic, if it ever resolves, is supposed
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GREENE NAFTALI, NEW YORK. PHOTO BY JASON MANDELLA.
to yield truth. The problem, to quote David,
is that “nothing is less plausible than the
truth.” Nor is anything more boring. David
says of Molly that she is “still young enough
to believe that the worst thing a cool person
could do in this world was say something
boring and obvious, even if it happened to be
true.” David’s insistence on being a chill guy,
not the sort of guy who quotes Shakespeare,
is not exactly chill. To continue David’s
reflection on “overhearing”: “[My ghost-
writer] said Harold Bloom said that this
capacity for self-overhearing is what Shake-
speare’s characters do in their soliloquies—
they listen to themselves, are changed, and
then act based on that change—and that this
is the foundation of modern human con-
sciousness. Or something.” Perhaps “or
something” is a continued on page 36
 Lo Countries
Lucas Rijneveld’s novel takes Nabokov to the farm
KATIE KADUE
MY HEAVENLY FAVORITE BY LUCAS RIJNEVELD, TRANSLATED FROM DUTCH BY MICHELE HUTCHISON MINNEAPOLIS: GRAYWOLF PRESS. 344 PAGES. $28.
L
o. Lee. Ta. This is the trip the tip of the
tongue expects to take when reading
a novel from the point of view of a
man currently incarcerated following the rape
of a teenage girl he’s groomed. And at the ten-
der age of thirteen pages into Lucas
Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite, an atten-
tive reader may indeed murmur “Lolita!”
when the unnamed narrator, a former farm
veterinarian from the Dutch countryside,
refers to the titular “favorite,” also unnamed,
as “the fire of my loins.” So far, so Lo.
Initial press for the novel, originally writ-
ten in Dutch and translated by Michele
Hutchison, has fed the frenzy of Loli-
tapalooza. It’s been called “a modern Lol-
ita,” “a novel that wears its debt to Lolita . .
. pinned on its chest with abject pride,” “a
queer and profane take on the Lolita arche-
type,” “Lolita-esque,” “a cowshit-splashed
Lolita.” Someone who picks up a copy and
skims the blurbs might wonder if we really
need another male-authored Lolita from the
first-person perspective of the pedophile, no
matter how spruced up with shit, no matter
how daringly different.
And at first, the difference doesn’t seem
that daring. The narrator is a somewhat
more humdrum Humbert Humbert, lum-
bering from farm to farm, cultural references
sloshing in his head along with hebephilic
fantasies, mixing memory and desire like the
mingled odors of Axe shower gel and
manure that eventually envelop him in the
favorite’s farmhouse bedroom. He’s less
high-minded, more heavy-handed than H.
H.: Nabokov’s narrator desecrates Proust by
burlesquing the title of one of his volumes;
Rijneveld’s does so by ejaculating into the
pages of In Search of Lost Time while day-
dreaming of his own teen Albertine. But his
narrative voice, like Humbert’s, is mesmer-
izing and hysterical, incriminating himself,
as well as his readers, with style. He some-
times interrupts himself with apostrophized
outbursts (“I ran, dear judges!”) to those he
knows are finding him guilty, morally or
legally. The phrase “fire of my loins” flares
up twice more in My Heavenly Favorite, but
in the context of agricultural veterinary
medicine, a profession that often thrusts our
protagonist elbow-deep in a cow’s vagina,
the expression loses some of its literary lus-
ter, falling closer in connotation to a venereal
disease afflicting livestock that has made a
zoonotic leap.
The action takes place over the summer of
2005 in Het Dorp, a fictional rural commu-
nity haunted by trauma. An outbreak of
bovine foot-and-mouth disease, requiring
massive culling, has sunk the local economy
and led at least one farmer, a client of the
narrator’s, to take his life. The fourteen-year-
old favorite, whose father’s farm the narra-
tor regularly visits to tend to cows and sheep,
PHOTO: WIKICOMMONS/TXLLXT TXLLXT.
is mourning the death of a sibling. The nar-
rator has nightmares about the suicided
farmer, whose body he found when he, the
proximate cause of woe, came in from cull-
ing the cattle, and about his mother, who
sexually abused him when he was the same
age as the favorite is now. On the farm, he is
undeterred by the unsexy surroundings
(“hairy foot warts,” prolapsed sheep uter-
uses, “yellowish colostrum”) as he milks his
time with the favorite for all it’s worth, often
talking about books and music; she calls him
Kurt, as in Cobain. It becomes clear that she,
sheltered by her conservative Christian
upbringing, lacks basic sex ed. Increasingly
ill at ease in her body, she expresses a grow-
ing wish to possess a penis and believes Kurt
can give her one—a desire, and an ignorance,
he exploits. She is tortured by the idea that
she caused the collapse of the World Trade
Center; an unconventional thinker even by
the standards of 9/11 trutherism, she believes
she is a human plane, and at one point jumps
off a silo to test her aeronautical engineering.
She spends hours deep in imaginary sessions
with Freud and has heart-to-hearts with a
hallucinated Hitler, with whom she shares a
birthday and like whom, she fears, she will
cause untold destruction.
Lambing season, Oosterenderweg, Texel, The Netherlands, 2011.
This is all recounted over rolling hills of
stream-of-consciousness prose, that hypnotic
parataxis that works as charmingly as a siren
song for readers of European fiction in Eng-
lish translation. You feel borne along by the
flow of language, the language of flow,
knowing you’re supposed to feel like this
seamless stream, which suddenly you’re
drinking, goes down too easy—and “you,”
referring most often to the favorite but also
to the judging reader, are the narrator’s pri-
mary addressee. (The dedication, creepily, is
“For You.”) Rijneveld’s reviewers tend to
jolt themselves out of a style-induced reverie
to assure us they were appropriately
unnerved by the content. His previous novel,
an International Booker Prize winner also
translated by Hutchison, encodes both jolt
and reverie in its English title: The Discom-
fort of Evening (2020). What if evening,
diurnally ordinary, contained a discomfort
that evening can’t even out? (In that novel,
the content that must be ritualistically
repelled as “repellent” includes sexual exper-
imentation between very young siblings.)
Like the narrator of My Heavenly Favorite,
who “slowly crawled under your skin like a
liver fluke in a cow, there isn’t a more pleas-
ant way of putting it: I was a parasite,” and
who compares his first time kissing her to
jamming a syringe of antibiotics into a reluc-
tant ewe’s mouth, Rijneveld favors a method
less subtle than subcutaneous.
But lurking beneath those relatively
superficial shockers, deep in the bile ducts of
your brain, is something more discomfiting
about My Heavenly Favorite: the creeping
understanding, if you decide to start
Googling midway through reading, that
Rijneveld has slipped into the role not of nar-
rator but of nymphet. The more you know
about Rijneveld, who switched from they/
them to he/him pronouns in 2022, the less he
seems the sinister shadow behind his narra-
tor and the more he shares with the figure of
the favorite. Both were assigned female at
birth and started fantasizing in adolescence
about having a boy’s body; both grew up in
a devout family on a Dutch farm; both lost
an older brother in an accident; both typed
out the entirety of a library copy (forbidden
by father, illicitly filched, secretly returned)
of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone;
both were born on April 20, 1991, though
only the fictional character, to my knowl-
edge, cultivated an imaginary friendship
with her genocidal birthday twin. (The Dis-
comfort of Evening also draws its setting and
some identifying information from
Rijneveld’s childhood.) Whatever uncom-
fortable biographical similarity exists
between Nabokov and Humbert, two
roughly middle-aged European men of
refined tastes living in American exile, has
been overwritten by a differently uncomfort-
able similarity between Rijneveld and his
Fauxlita—and yet, at least until The Anno-
tated My Heavenly Favorite is published,
this hermeneutical cheat code has been writ-
ten in invisible ink, not even an inkling in the
mind of any reader who isn’t, Humbert-like,
obsessively following quilted threads of
clues. You thought you were unsettled
because you were reading a cis man rewrit-
ing Lolita, but then you’re unsettled because
you realize you were reading a trans man
writing from the perspective of a cis man
sexually preying on a gender-dysphoric
child. If this is autofiction, Rijneveld is driv-
ing it in manual.
Rijneveld does not, as far as I can tell,
quote Lolita anywhere beyond the three “fire
of my loins” incidents, and he never cites title
or author—an elision that perhaps wouldn’t
be worth ruminating on if not for the active
bibliographical network that populates My
Heavenly Favorite like a bovine gut microbi-
ome, as if to help narrator and reader alike
digest his heavy crime. The two main charac-
ters exhibit intimate knowledge of a wide
array of literary and popular novels, poetry,
the Bible, film, and song lyrics, name-check-
ing Jean-Paul Sartre, Moby-Dick, the Psalms,
Samuel Beckett, Lars von Trier, Leonard
Cohen, T. S. Eliot, Stephen King, Proust, and
others. The flickering flames of Humbert
Humbert get lost in this citational haze, per-
haps because the novel’s basic outlines are so
self-consciously derivative of the greatest
pedophilia story ever told that we hardly
need more explicit reminders. The plethora
of citation may itself be citational: Lolita is,
famously, an enchanted forest of allusion in
which one could hunt forever. But the narra-
tor, who at one point worries he’s “read too
much of Swann’s Way” recently and that it’s
making his style “too Proustian,” never
betrays an anxiety that he’s overly influenced
by Nabokov. Proust doesn’t pose a real
threat, either. The narrator gets bored after
the first volume, which failed to change his
life as advertised, and in any case, he only
really has one book on his reading list: “That
favorite book was you, my sweet darling, you
read like the story I had always wanted to
read and I dreaded the day I’d have to close
the book for good.”
There’s another literary source that goes
unnoted within the text, revealed only in an
acknowledgment at the end: Rijneveld him-
self, who wrote (in English) the lyrics that the
favorite, an aspiring singer-songwriter when
we meet her, sings on an album released
years later that the narrator now sometimes
hears on the prison radio. (The lyrics are
credited to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, the
name the author used while identifying as
nonbinary.) Not entirely unlike Lolita, bud-
ding actress by the end, here the survivor is
the one who gets to be the artist. But
Rijneveld doesn’t give us a feminist revision
of Nabokov (like Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary), or
even a transmasculine revision of Nabokov,
so much as the record of a love affair with
revisionary intertextuality itself. Intertextu-
ality, according to Freud, one of the favor-
ite’s favorite interlocutors, is also the condi-
tion of love: we transfer old fantasies onto
new people like a modern author rewriting
a fairy tale. The citationality of the pedo-
philia plot turns this psychic reality into a
sick joke. Behind Rijneveld’s favorite lies
Lolita; behind Lolita, Humbert’s doomed
childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh;
behind her, the doomed childhood sweet-
heart in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,”
herself perhaps modeled on Poe’s teenage
bride. This story never gets old. n
Katie Kadue is a critic from Los Angeles. She teaches
English at SUNY Binghamton.
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 17
The Burden of the Ordinary
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s obsessive revolt against reason
BECCA ROTHFELD
THE GOLDEN POT AND OTHER TALES OF THE UNCANNY BY E. T. A. HOFFMANN, TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY PETER WORTSMAN BROOKLYN, NY:
ARCHIPELAGO PRESS. 425 PAGES. $24.
Marisa Adesman, Snake Eyes, 2019, gouache and colored pencil on paper, 11" × 14".
T
he diligent Prussian bureaucrat
E. T. A. Hoffmann had a mischie-
vous double. By day, he worked as a
jurist in the courts of present-day Poland and
Germany; by night, he wrote impassioned
music criticism in the voice of his alter ego
Johannes Kreisler, a tempestuous composer
who also appears in several of Hoffmann’s
stories and novellas. The wild cry that rings
out in his first novel, The Devil’s Elixirs
(1815), could just as well describe his own
adventure in bifurcation: “I am what I seem
to be, yet do not seem to be what I am; even
to myself I am an insoluble riddle, for my
personality has been torn apart.” Hoffmann
seemed to be a fastidious civil servant; in
reality, he was a magician.
Then again, he knew better than anyone
that a doppelgänger and the life it apes are
closely imbricated. That is to say, Hoff-
mann’s fantastic fiction is more autobio-
graphical than it seems. Born Ernst Theodor
Wilhelm Hoffmann in 1776 in Königsberg,
Prussia, he endured a lonely childhood after
his parents separated, leaving him in the care
of a severe uncle and a horde of batty aunts.
Music was his core consolation—he later
adopted the middle name Amadeus in hom-
age to Mozart—but he was destined to suffer
the artist’s characteristic curse, that of mis-
judging his own talents. His opera Undine
(1816) survives as a minor classic, but he is
much better remembered as the visionary
writer who intrigued Charles Baudelaire,
inspired Fritz Lang, and anticipated Edgar
Allan Poe. His contemporaries, however,
were somewhat less impressed. He was never
successful enough to make a living from his
18 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
art, and he earned his bread as a lawyer until
he succumbed to syphilis at the age of forty-
six. As he once put it, “On weekdays I’m a
jurist, and a bit of a musician, my Sundays
are devoted to drawing, and come evening
I’m a quick-witted author until late at night.”
The banalities imbued with secret sorcery,
the adults stalked by the specters of child-
hood traumas, the days dry with drudgeries,
the nights dusky with divinations—all of this
makes its way into the fiction. Hoffmann’s
stories are delirious enchantments populated
by living dolls and seven-headed mice. Their
narrators are at once ironic and ingenuous,
scornful of middle-class stuffiness yet quick
to credit magical potions and talking trees.
Like so many of his contemporaries, Hoff-
mann was not exempt from the obligatory
Romantic obsessions: his stories contain
their fair share of sinister scientists, stormy
artists, and celestial maidens. Yet his night-
mares are possessed of a humor and an eeri-
ness all their own.
Who but Hoffmann could imagine a liter-
ate cat who pens a pompous memoir? Who
but he could devise such remarkably modern
experiments in unreliable narration, among
them a novel purportedly written over the
pages of another book, which keeps butting
into the text we are reading? Hoffmann is the
most charming and the most contemporary
of the Romantic cohort (with the possible
exception of the brooding Heinrich von
Kleist), yet he has gone underappreciated in
an anglophone world with a pigheaded pref-
erence for Goethe.
A little more than a century after his
death, there are happy indications that his
time has come at last. This past year brought
two new anthologies of his work, an illus-
trated volume from Yale University Press
and a thick collection from Archipelago
Press. The Golden Pot and Other Tales of
the Uncanny omits several of Hoffmann’s
best stories, among them “The Mines of
Falun” and “The Nutcracker,” but it also
contains essential writings that have long
been difficult to find in English, such as “The
Automaton” and “The Fermata.” Its center-
pieces, “The Golden Pot” and “The Sand-
man,” are two of the most singular classics
of German Romanticism, works that bur-
row deep inside anyone who reads them. All
the light in the world cannot dispel the
strange shadows they cast.
W hile Hoffmann was a child day-
dreaming in Königsberg, another
resident of that picturesque city was busy
codifying the laws of human nature. Rumor
had it that the man in question was so pre-
dictable that you could set your watch by his
daily constitutionals. This inflexible figure,
steady as clockwork, was none other than
Immanuel Kant, high priest of the Enlighten-
ment and human avatar of Reason. The
world wrought by Königsberg’s most cele-
brated thinker and his rationalist predeces-
sors was every bit as regular as he was. To
hear them tell it, nature was a neatly ordered
affair, governed by the placid principles of
Newtonian physics. It was thoroughly mech-
anistic—and utterly unmysterious.
What, then, of the humans left to make a
home amid these arid formulas? Were they
permitted outbursts that the laws of nature
did not sanction? Could they fall in love, or
lose their minds? The Romantics feared that
human agency would not withstand the
onslaught, a prospect vividly illustrated by a
burgeoning fad for automata. The human-
oid contraptions displayed at festivals and
commissioned by noblemen throughout the
German-speaking kingdoms told a caution-
ary tale. They were walking demonstrations
of the fate that might befall us if we did not
muster every ounce of irrationality at our
disposal: that is, the quaint phenomenon of
the person might grow obsolete.
Fittingly, Hoffmann’s stories are crawling
and clanking with the machines that
threaten to usurp humanity. In “The Sand-
man,” a student named Nathaniel falls in
love with Olympia, a peculiarly inert woman
who lives across the street. Unlike his child-
hood sweetheart, who “could by no means
be considered beautiful,” his new fixation is
suspiciously perfect. She dances without
stumbling and sings without faltering, yet
everyone besides Nathaniel is disturbed by
her stilted movements and the glassy tint of
her eyes. Olympia is less creepy than she is
comic: when Nathaniel goes on professing
his love, undeterred by her obstinate silence,
the doll is not the one who chills us.
At least as offensive as the prospect of
automating affection is that of mechanizing
music, by Hoffmann’s lights the most intran-
sigently human of the arts. When two friends
in “The Automaton” visit a professor who
has constructed an orchestra of androids,
they recoil. One tells the other, “the effort of
mechanics to imitate more and more closely
the effect produced by human organs in elic-
iting musical notes, or by mechanical means
to substitute for the same, constitutes for me
a declared war against the human spirit.”
Hoffmann was by no means the only
notable soldier in the battle on behalf of
humanity. Many of his contemporaries,
among them Ludwig Tieck and the operati-
cally named Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué,
opted for similar stratagems. Their weapon
of choice was the Kunstmärchen (the literary
fairy tale), a form so suffused with the super-
natural that it promised to baffle even the
most determined Newtonians. Like its
cousin, the Volksmärchen (the folktale), the
Kunstmärchen sparkles with sorcery—but
unlike stories with oral origins, the Roman-
tics’ efforts were erratic. Evil might be pun-
ished, but it might just as easily be rewarded;
good often failed to prevail.
IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND ANAT EBGI, LOS ANGELES / NEW YORK.
In none of the Kunstmärchen is there any-
thing resembling a template, but Hoffmann’s
revolts against the expected are especially
spirited. Like his peer’s stories, his strange
fables dramatize the volatility of artists and
the unreliability of the supposed “laws” of
nature. Yet they also go further, for they are
devices designed to invite, then playfully
thwart, explanation. At the end of “The
Automaton,” one character asks how the
story’s various conundrums are resolved,
and his interlocutor replies that the tale
“must necessarily remain fragmentary.
What I mean is, the reader’s or listener’s
imagination should only receive a few hefty
jolts and then string out the rest for itself.”
We never learn how the mysterious automa-
ton of the title works, or whether there is a
person concealed inside it. Instead, we are
left to wonder: Is the machine really acting
of its own accord?
Throughout The Golden Pot and Other
Tales of the Uncanny, the antidote to the
Enlightenment’s mania for answers is ques-
tions and more questions, in particular ques-
tions about whether Hoffmann’s heroes are
inspired or insane. In “The Sandman,”
Nathaniel is plagued by memories of Cop-
pelius, a brutish lawyer who conducted
alchemical experiments with his father when
he was a boy. He is convinced not only that
Coppelius is the wicked Sandman of child-
hood legend, and not only that this ogre mur-
dered his father, but also that an Italian sales-
man named Coppola is Coppelius’s
doppelgänger. “Let me confess here and now
my firm conviction that all the awful and
frightening things you speak of only hap-
pened in your imagination,” an intimate rep-
rimands him. Hoffmann never quite clarifies
whether this sober acquaintance is right, or
whether Nathaniel is losing his mind. He is
so volatile that his own account is suspect,
but Coppola’s unearthly air is difficult to
square away. Regardless of the truth, by the
end of the story, its protagonist is so
anguished that he leaps to his death. And
what makes a monster real if not our terror?
“The Golden Pot” presents us with more
whimsical but equally intractable confu-
sions. One evening, another student, this one
named Anselmus, is smoking his pipe on the
banks of the River Elbe. Moments later, he
hears a tree whispering his name. Formerly,
he had the sensible ambition of becoming
“privy councillor,” a position not unlike
Hoffmann’s; now, he is bent on marrying a
beguiling snake named Serpentina, the
daughter of a magical salamander masquer-
ading as a local official. “The gentleman is
not in his right mind!” an onlooker remarks
as Anselmus embraces the tree that
addressed him. Hoffmann provides just
enough evidence to support this withering
assessment, at least if we are determined
believe it. A snake who seems to serenade
Anselmus might be an illusion produced by
fireworks reflected in the river; a friend of
Anselmus’s who embarks on a nocturnal
adventure with a witch might only have been
fitfully dreaming.
But these deflations are not serious temp-
tations: they are only a test that mediocre
imaginations are bound to fail. “Do you
believe in me, Anselmus?” Serpentina asks
her suitor when his faith in her existence
begins to waver. “You can’t love without
believing!” You can’t read fiction, especially
Hoffmann’s, without believing, either.
W alter Benjamin desperately wanted
to believe, even when it hurt him. In
one of his radio broadcasts, he puzzles over
the oddly masochistic effect that Hoffmann
has on his readers. “My eyes clung to the
pages of the book, the source of all these ter-
rors, as if to a life raft,” he recalls.
Like the young Benjamin, riveted by
appalling visions, the characters in Hoff-
mann’s stories cleave to the very phantoms
that menace them. In The Life and Opinions
of Tomcat Murr (1819), his final novel,
Johannes Kreisler is disappointed to learn
that what seems like a stroke of black magic
is only a clever conjuring trick. He reflects
with considerable irritation that “dreadful
terrors please a man more than their natural
explanation.” Our friend Nathaniel agrees.
“There is no Sandman, my dear child,” his
mother assures him when he is a boy, but as
he relates years later, “mother’s answer didn’t
satisfy me.” He keeps asking around until his
nanny informs him that the Sandman is
a bad man who comes to visit children when
they won’t go to sleep and flings a handful of
sand in their eyes, so they scratch themselves
bloody. Then he flings them in his bag and
carries them off to the half-moon to feed his
children. They sit up there in their nest and
have crooked beaks like owls with which they
pick out the eyes of naughty human brats.
At last, a villain that vindicates all his trem-
bling!
The Sandman is ominous not because he
is alien but, on the contrary, because he is
like a dimly lit memory, like a tune we hum
but cannot place. When Nathaniel sees Cop-
pola, the man’s resemblance to Coppelius
unnerves him, but Coppelius was not an
original, either: he, too, was only an echo of
an apparition first conjured up by a bedtime
tale. In his classic essay on “The Sandman”
and the uncanny, Freud characterizes that
curious category as “in some ways a species
of the familiar.” An uncanny occurrence is
the physical form of a memory that is at once
recognized and repudiated; it is, in Freud’s
justly famous phrase, “a return of the
repressed.” When Nathaniel reads a poem
that he has written aloud, he screams,
“Whose terrible voice is this?” But he soon
realizes that the shriek issues from a region
at once remote and proximate: from his own
recesses.
The posit of Hoffmann’s fiction is that we
can all access our guts, if only we can be
coaxed to cast off what Serpentina describes
to Anselmus as “the burden of the ordi-
nary.” The narrator of “The Golden Pot”
prescribes the appropriate method, a kind of
therapy for pathological rationalists: if you
are tempted to question the reality of the
events related in the tale, “put yourself in
Marisa Adesman, Blue Bind, 2020, oil on panel, 10" × 8".
that state of mind so often at the very least
revealed to us in dreams,” he instructs. “You
will then, as I most sincerely hope, believe me
when I maintain that this marvelous realm
lies much closer to you than you previously
suspected.” This dark domain is abominably
other, yet it is already ours.
A funny thing about Hoffmann’s fiction
is that it is true, or so it loudly pro-
claims. Most of his stories and novels begin
by assuring us of their accuracy: The Devil’s
Elixirs purports to be “from the posthumous
papers of Brother Medardus, a Capuchin
Friar,” and the narrator of The Life and
Opinions of Tomcat Murr vows to repeat
only what he can verify. He declines to elab-
orate on a story because he has discovered
“that all the information on this point he has
at his disposal is poor, scanty, inadequate
and disconnected,” and when Murr is giving
an inflated account of his honorable conduct
in a duel, the narrator gleefully interjects, “I
catch you out in an authorial lie!”
Elaborate framings lend almost all the
pieces in The Golden Pot and Other Tales of
the Uncanny a pseudo-documentary air. The
first part of “The Sandman” is told in letters,
the second by a narrator who goes out of his
way to insist that he was scrupulous about
collecting the facts. “The Golden Pot’s” thor-
ough narrator treats us to a meta-textual
interlude in which he visits one of the other
characters in order to obtain more authorita-
tive information about the land of the sala-
manders. “At times, truth may not seem prob-
able,” a character reminds us in “Madame de
Scudéry,” a detective story about a murderer
“who in the daylight hours fulfilled all the vir-
tues of . . . the upright burgher.”
Just in case all of this carefully marshaled
evidence is not enough to persuade us that
the truth is often improbable, Hoffmann
resorts to the occasional threat. “The
Golden Pot” cajoles us into believing, and
The Devil’s Elixirs warns us that it is danger-
ous to dismiss fantastic stories as mere alle-
gory. When a visitor stops to peruse the reli-
quary of an old monastery, he is skeptical
that a potion in the monks’ possession has
been brewed by the Devil, as legend has it.
“As for stories such as the one you have just
told,” the visitor scoffs, “I believe them to be
simply ingenious allegories invented by the
saints, which have mistakenly come to be
regarded as events from real life.” But when
a monk tastes the elixir, he discovers that it
is real—as real, anyway, as anything in Hoff-
mann’s writings. Whether it is a psychic
apparition, a repressed desire returning, or a
cocktail mixed by Satan himself, it is power-
ful enough to drive the monk to murder and
debauchery.
Like Hoffmann the bureaucrat, the inani-
mate landscape of the rationalists has a lively
double: a shadow world in which any object,
no matter how seemingly unexalted, can
house spirits both benign and malevolent. A
magician takes up residence in a kettle to spy
on a party in “The Golden Pot”; gingerbread
men distributed to children at Christmas
awaken at night in “The Nutcracker.” Noth-
ing—not even the Prussian civil service—is as
drab as it looks to inattentive observers. As
Benjamin remarks on his radio show, “this
storyteller insists with a certain obstinacy
that all the reputable archivists, medical offi-
cers, students, apple-wives, musicians, and
upper-class daughters are much more than
they appear to be, just as Hoffmann himself
was more than just a pedantic and exacting
court of appeals judge.”
The haunted world of his fiction is horri-
fying when it is cursed by cruel sorcerers,
sweet when it is charmed by well-meaning
ones. But in either case, it is infinitely prefer-
able to a province annexed by automata, in
which the last ghost has been exorcised from
an empty machine.
T he human clock of Königsberg was
dogged by a dissolute doppelgänger, a
man as syphilitic as Kant was chaste and as
eccentric as he was punctilious. Even as a law-
yer, Hoffmann was prone to lapses: he was
exiled to the Polish provinces when he drew
unflattering caricatures of Prussian officers,
then nearly sued for a satirical novel mocking
a superior. As Benjamin writes, “Sometimes
in the middle of the most innocent dinner-
table conversation, over a glass of wine or
punch, more than once he interrupted one or
another of his dinner companions with these
words: ‘Pardon me for cutting you off, my
dear, but do you not see that accursed little
imp creeping out from under the floorboards
in the corner, just over there to the right?’”
The imp was Hoffmann’s reward for
escaping “the burden of the ordinary” when
he sat down at his desk each night. He knew
that fiction, the world’s double, was abso-
lutely real: when the narrator of “The
Golden Pot” laments, “Oh you lucky Ansel-
mus, who cast off the burden of the mun-
dane responsibilities of daily life,” the sala-
mander king replies, “Don’t be so upset!
Were you not yourself just transported to
Atlantis, and do you not yourself at least
possess a goodly domain as the poetic estate
of your spirit?”
Like all spells, Hoffmann’s are as effective
as we are willing to allow them to be. They are
at least as true as reality, at least as alive as we
are. Don’t we prove it every time we read? n
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at
the Washington Post. Her debut essay collection,
All Things Are Too Small, will be published by
Metropolitan Books in April.
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 19
Czech Mate
Helen Oyeyemi’s story within a story within a story
HANNAH GOLD
PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE BY HELEN OYEYEMI NEW YORK: RIVERHEAD. 272 PAGES. $28.
H
elen Oyeyemi’s new novel Parasol
Against the Axe, set amid a bach-
elorette party weekend in Prague,
abounds in side quests breezily undertaken
and abandoned. You don’t need to think
about the bachelorette party all that much.
Actually, you can’t. The rate at which Oyey-
emi invents thickets of problems without
answers, obstacles to bounce over, mysteries
to shrug at, is frantic, like in those dreams
where you have to run very fast in order to
move slowly.
Take, for instance, a scene that comes
toward the end of the book (Oyeyemi’s ninth),
in which a tourist visiting Prague named Dor-
othea (Thea) Gilmartin arrives at a library
seeking a novel. The situation seems straight-
forward enough, but the novel, the library,
and the circuitous route Thea has taken to get
there are anything but. The novel that Thea is
tracking down changes each time it’s read. It
is always set in Prague, but in a different his-
torical era (Nazi-occupied, Late Middle Ages,
Cold War). At times it seems to be aware of its
reader, but it’s not clear to what extent it is
reading her in return. Only its title and author
are consistent: Paradoxical Undressing by
Merlin Mwenda. Many of its first chapters
appear throughout Parasol as they are read by
Thea and the book’s other protagonist, Hero
Tojosoa, a fortysomething former journalist
who has decided at the last minute to go to her
friend Sofie Cibulkova’s bachelorette party.
Thea is also friends with Hero and Sofie—or
used to be. She’s come to Prague bearing
grudges, and so begins her circuitous path,
which leads her not only to mar the festivities,
but also to chance upon a copy of the magical
book. Which she loses. So she’s at the library,
the same one Jorge Luis Borges wrote about
in his short story “The Secret Miracle.” Borg-
es’s writer-protagonist Jaromir Hladík, con-
demned to death by the Gestapo, dreams
about this library, the Klementinum, from
prison. In the dream he has come to the library
looking for God, and the librarian tells him,
rather unhelpfully, “God is in one of the let-
ters on one of the pages of one of the 400,000
volumes of the Clementine.”
Thea and the librarian at the present-day
Klementinum have a little exchange of their
own: they get into an argument about the plot
of Paradoxical Undressing. Given that they
have read entirely different books, any pre-
tense of literary interpretation is clearly a joke
that neither of them are in on, and the scene’s
resemblance to Borges’s story is similarly riff-
like. Then the librarian informs Thea that she
is being sought by a ragtag bunch of Prague
officials who want her to leave town ASAP.
One of these so-called officials is a version of
a character Thea encountered earlier in the
novel, a woman dressed in full-body Krtek
costume who stole her money through trick-
ery. (Krtek is an educational cartoon mole
created in 1956 at the behest of Communist
Party leaders who were looking for a way to
teach the children of Czechoslovakia how to
construct a sturdy pair of pants.) Thea is dis-
mayed. This new information has thrown her
and she, evidently the sort of person who finds
herself arguing with a working librarian in an
unfamiliar city, doesn’t have much patience
20 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
for authority. “Oh, this is your first time get-
ting summarily rebuffed by some unfathom-
able Bureau?” asks the librarian, doing his
best to say he’s read Kafka without saying he’s
read Kafka. “I would suggest that you don’t
get accustomed to that. Outsphinx ’em!”
One becomes accustomed to precisely
nothing in Oyeyemi’s difficult marvel of a
novel. Its plot is both fascinating and beside
the point, branching and digressing in a fash-
ion the author’s fans will anticipate but can
never fully prepare for. Readers must pay
careful attention to chains of events if they
hope to find their way through Oyeyemi’s
maze. But just following these breadcrumbs
won’t suffice. When the possibility or useful-
ness of knowing what’s going on reaches its
limits, the novel’s ever-churning style can save
the day—or be resisted at the reader’s peril. Its
hallmarks include: side-eye, brazen interrup-
tions, cool dismissals, trickery, idling, cheek,
non-apology apologies, and doublings-back.
Whereas persuasion, order, manipulation
(emotional or otherwise), moralizing, and
prescriptions of any kind have no place in the
novel’s sentences or construction and are
often looked down upon by the characters
themselves.
Oyeyemi’s previous novels have featured
settings that think for themselves—a talking
house, a scheming train. This one is narrated
by the city of Prague itself, where Oyeyemi,
born in Nigeria thirty-nine years ago and
raised in London, has lived for the past
decade. We open on Prague making itself mis-
erable by scrolling through a WhatsApp
group chat dedicated to visitors’ complaints.
“I’m not even one of the grander metropo-
lises!” Prague huffs. “If I was I could have just
eaten you and yours alive! I didn’t, but no
need to thank me! My self-esteem is in good
health and doesn’t require your gratitude!”
Our narrator may only be a medium-grand
metropolis, but it’s still too sprawling to exer-
cise much control over the story. It can change
its point of focus, say what it thinks really hap-
pened, or dither, or fib, but it cannot find reso-
nance, coax beauty or coherence. The story,
composed of people who find themselves in
Czechia’s capital, walks all over its teller in a
million directions.
Following Prague’s preamble, most of the
novel centers on Hero as she develops a curi-
ous affinity for the city she thought she’d hate.
Perhaps the city takes such an interest in Hero
from the start because it recognizes her
nascent sympathies. Or maybe Prague is
watching Hero as nonchalantly as Paradoxi-
cal Undressing is, reading her slant and cast-
ing a spell that will eventually prevent her
departure. “It’s possible to liken her most
frequent facial expression to the ‘read’ receipt
that kills a conversation thread,” an ambiva-
lent Prague tells us of Hero, “or to a thumbs-
up emoji sent in response to a confession of
love.”
Eventually Hero will find that she is also
getting married, possibly to a golem, which
Prague definitely approves of, but initially
she’s there to celebrate Sofie. The two once
delighted in shared entrepreneurial pursuits—
like writing dirty messages for pay and operat-
ing a hedgehog café—but their relationship
has since become less close. And Hero has
dual motives, at the least, for being in Prague.
She is also strenuously avoiding the antici-
pated delivery of an unpleasant letter to her at
her home in Dublin. The letter is from the furi-
ous subject of Hero’s nonfiction book,
Faiblesse, which she wrote under a pseud-
onym and would like to disassociate herself
from entirely. That’s a whole other story.
Hero arrives already in possession of Para-
doxical Undressing and reads the new stories
it generates throughout her trip. She reacts
sometimes with consternation (“This wasn’t
a standard settling-down-for-the-night sce-
nario for Hero, or even a typical just-going-to-
bed-with-a-book scenario”), sometimes with
pluck (diving back in for more). Generally, she
accepts the abundantly fictional thinking that
goes on in the book, which quickly overflows
its pages as the plot of Parasol continues its
fantastic multiplication. Further contributing
to this frenzy is Oyeyemi’s fondness for tam-
pering with stock phrases: “a trip down false-
memory lane”; “she could just grit her teeth
and cuddle”; “the official name of the game”;
“Every bone in that story’s body is a mean
one”; “Do you even read, bro?” Characters
introduced before their time shuffle back into
their rooms and close the door behind them.
Information is divulged too late for it to mat-
ter. Prague itself is an unfathomable bureau-
crat, corrupting its files and fudging its English
clichés.
I read Oyeyemi’s fiction for the first time
late last year—her previous novel, called
Peaces, an off-the-rails mystery set on a train
about (well, how even to begin?) the haunting
powers of relationships foolishly thought to
have been ended—and felt at turns intrigued
and repelled by it. At the time I was peculiarly
obsessed with trying to understand the ways
that writers of fiction manage to convince us
to be taken in by their made-up stories. I
wanted to read writers whose voices never
tremble as they pile lie atop lie (I’d been get-
ting back into detective stories). Books you
can occasionally skim without getting lost and
this is in fact part of their charm—their famil-
iarity carries you along. It is often said that
books like this are up to all kinds of narrative
“tricks,” but they’re hidden so that the reader
can enjoy a pleasant stay. Readers of Parasol,
however, are constantly being hoodwinked in
obvious and uncomfortable ways. The experi-
ence is akin to walking around a foreign city
all morning and day in bad shoes over clunky
streets; at an hour known to everyone but you
all the shops and cultural institutions close
their doors. The sightseeing map quickly
becomes obsolete and you are forced to
encounter the city on its own terms, whatever
they may be.
And yet—for all the inconvenience—walk-
ing around the story in this way, I gradually
fell in love with it, and the besotted need no
convincing. When a writer has surrendered
her will to control in pursuit of a more anar-
chic approach, the reader must do the same,
or else set the book aside, go home. Parasol is
captivating precisely because it is not believ-
able. Instead, it is aware of itself thinking. But
not in an annoying, intellectually domineering
way; Oyeyemi is more interested in the imag-
ination’s unjustifiable demands than demon-
strations of her own brilliance.
What is the story, with all its tendriled tan-
gents and dizzying distractions, thinking of?
What does it want? In the novel’s final scene,
Hero has a run-in with Merlin Mwenda, the
author of Paradoxical Undressing, who’s
moonlighting as an ice-cream truck driver.
She has some questions for him, and he in turn
offers plenty of delectable notions about the
book he wrote so long ago he hardly remem-
bers it. One in particular captured my fancy:
Merlin tells Hero he’d originally intended
Paradoxical Undressing to be a Casanova
story, specifically “an account of Casanova’s
humiliation on the night of Don Giovanni’s
premiere” in Prague. At the after-party, Casa-
nova went around telling ladies that the opera
they had enjoyed so much was based on his
life. But he didn’t have any success with the
local women, so Merlin’s book could never
have just been called “undressing.” Still, it’s
interesting that the book driving so much
action in Parasol derives its inspiration from
such a hedonistic figure. After all, Oyeyemi’s
independent-minded novel has also been pur-
suing its own pleasures, staging its own seduc-
tion, one that Casanova may have found
PHOTO: FLICKR/ROB OO.
unduly perverse. In this story the chase is
everything, and satisfaction is an illusion the
reader can do without. n
Hannah Gold is a critic and fiction writer. (See
Contributors.)
 Holding Court
Hanif Abdurraqib writes a letter of love and loss to basketball and his home state
GENE SEYMOUR
THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR: ON BASKETBALL AND ASCENSION BY HANIF ABDURRAQIB NEW YORK: RANDOM HOUSE.
Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (30), 2015, digital C-print on Fujiflex, 56 11⁄16" × 78 3⁄4" × 2 3⁄4".
I
n today’s installment of “You’re Never
Too Old to Learn,” it turns out that it’s
not just its location that makes the state
of Ohio the heartland of America. It’s also
because, as its native son Hanif Abdurraqib
writes in There’s Always This Year: On Bas-
ketball and Ascension, the seventeenth state
of the Union is “shaped like a heart. A jagged
heart. A heart with sharp edges. A heart as a
weapon.” This disclosure, one in a torrent of
observations, ruminations, and reveries
tightly woven into the book’s narrative, gives
you some idea of Abdurraqib’s willingness
to pile everything he’s able into his quasi-
autobiographical, proto-philosophical
inquiry into turn-of-the-twenty-first-century
basketball, especially its prodigiously gifted
Ohio-bred avatar for both triumph and
© PAUL PFEIFFER. COURTESY PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK.
tribulation, LeBron James.
In this testament to both a sport and a
state, Abdurraqib leads with his own heart,
one that’s been broken over time by loss of
family, friends, even a home. His previous
works of cultural criticism (A Little Devil in
America, Go Ahead in the Rain, They Can’t
Kill Us Until They Kill Us) and poetry (A
Fortune for Your Disaster, The Crown Ain’t
Worth Much) are steeped in elegy and tem-
pered by irony. He goes all out to sustain this
difficult balance in his newest and, one could
argue, most ambitious solo performance
thus far, an awesomely discursive mixtape
of memoir, film criticism, tone poem, and
sports punditry interspersed with brief trib-
utes to “legendary Ohio aviators” in whose
company he includes Lonnie Carmon, the
Black Columbus junk collector who built a
plane from some of his salvage and flew it on
weekends to astonish and inspire his neigh-
bors. Other Buckeye State heroes need little
to no introduction to the rest of us: John
Glenn and John Brown, Toni Morrison and
Virginia Hamilton.
Though Abdurraqib doesn’t say so
explicitly, those last two African American
native daughters (Morrison was from Lorain
and Hamilton was from Dayton, where, by
the way, the Wright Brothers and Paul Law-
rence Dunbar were well acquainted with one
another) each wrote books declaring that
Black people could, indeed, fly. Morrison’s
novel Song of Solomon came out in 1977, by
which time skywalkers like Julius Erving and
David Thompson were exploding the
parameters of mid-air acrobatics “within the
paint” of a basketball court. And by the time
Hamilton’s collection of folktales The Peo-
ple Could Fly was published in 1985, further
affirmation of her title’s premise could be
found in Michael Jordan’s otherworldly
rookie season with the Chicago Bulls. It is
with that season that Abdurraqib (appropri-
ately) commences his inquiry; the beginning
of Jordan’s incomparable career “when,” as
352 PAGES. $32.
Abdurraqib notes, “he hadn’t yet begun to
take a blade to his scalp” and somehow lost
that year’s all-star dunk contest while strik-
ing an indelible pose “soaring toward the
basket, his arm cradling the rock with ill
intentions, eyeing the rim like prey, like he’s
already seen its demise.” It was upon this
image that millions of expensive sneakers
would be sold. Basketball’s profile was
raised all over the planet, and dreams as big
as other planets spawned and grew in gen-
erations of young athletes, the most promis-
ing of whom lived roughly 125 miles away
from Abdurraqib’s hometown of Columbus:
Akron’s LeBron James, described early on as
“a 14-year-old, skinny and seemingly
poured into an oversized basketball uniform
that always suggested it was one quick move
away from evicting him.”
Both James and his legend would grow
exponentially from there. But as you’ve
already surmised, There’s Always This Year
is in no way a conventional biography or
appreciation of one athlete’s career. It is
more a portrait of Abdurraqib-the-artist as
a young man, living his own tribulation-
laden life through the last decade of the
twentieth century and the first two of the
twenty-first while taking in everything going
on around him, even beyond the mean
streets of Columbus. The author would
eventually leave for New Haven, Connecti-
cut, just as James would leave (his despon-
dent-at-the-time fans would say “abandon”)
Cleveland and “take [his] talents” to Miami.
The alignment of the author’s life with
that of its guiding spirit is made evident
throughout the book. But it isn’t seamless,
and it isn’t supposed to be. There are many
ways of looking at basketball and basketball
players. Abdurraqib, in this spirit, submits
the names of hoop legends to consider from
his “jagged city” in the center of Ohio, such
as Kenny Gregory, later a star for the Univer-
sity of Kansas Jayhawks, whose participa-
tion in the McDonald’s All-American Game
for high schoolers “was the first time any of
us could turn on ESPN and see a kid we’d
fetched balls for in the park or hit up for cor-
ner store cash.” By contrast, there’s another
local hero named Estaban Weaver, consid-
ered the most gifted young baller in Colum-
bus history, who didn’t make the McDon-
ald’s all-stars and dropped out of high
school; whatever promise his talents augured
trailed off into litanies of “what happened”
and “what ifs.”
“The math of who makes it and who
doesn’t, or what making it even is,” Abdur-
raqib writes. “All of it, a series of accidents.”
Nevertheless, Abdurraqib rejects the tempta-
tion to make cheap melodrama of such out-
comes: “Don’t talk to me about any version
of making it that ends with someone like
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 21
Estaban Weaver being described as a failure.
. . . Not if you don’t know what it’s like for a
city to make you into a savior before you
finish ninth grade. Not if, despite that, you
survived.”
Paraphrasing that talented teenage goal-
keeper Albert Camus, the intellect, if it’s
worth anything in its own fields of play,
watches itself as intently and as unsparingly
as it watches others. Maybe that’s why
Abdurraqib’s book makes its most breath-
taking pivots when he probes the act of bear-
ing witness. While watching the fifth game of
the 2007 NBA Eastern Conference Finals
between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the
Detroit Pistons, he and his friends behold
LeBron James leading his Cavs to victory by
scoring the final twenty-five points of the
game by himself. “It was like entering a por-
tal, going from one game to an entirely
unique game, almost cartoonish in nature, a
game in which there was LeBron James,
maneuvering through five foes and emerging
victorious in almost every possession.” In
stark contrast to this seemingly miraculous
turn of events, Abdurraqib is watching this
in his “cramped one-bedroom apartment,
right before eviction, where I hadn’t paid the
rent for two months but managed to keep the
lights on and the cable bill paid.” But, as
Abdurraqib observes, the notion of “miracu-
lous” carries its own capacity for deception:
Who or what can make someone believe any-
thing that would be otherwise unbelievable? I
have no money for rent, but something will
come through. I go to bed hungry but will
wake up in the morning, and something
might fall in my lap to keep me full. A team is
losing until it isn’t. Until an architect of the
miraculous takes over a game, and the decep-
tion becomes real. This is really happening.
All of the good you believed would arrive,
suddenly has. All of the bad that is coming,
certainly will.
When athletic triumph and commonplace
travail intersect, it’s hard not to think of
Frederick Exley’s harrowing, mordantly
funny novel A Fan’s Notes (1968), in which
Exley, using a doppelgänger of himself as
protagonist, details his rueful encounters
with mental illness, shock therapy, and alco-
holism, all the while measuring his thwarted
lunges at the American Dream throughout
the 1950s against the seemingly effortless
ascension of his more illustrious USC class-
mate and New York Giants star halfback
Frank Gifford. But Abdurraqib is writing
nonfiction that is at once as intimately con-
fessional as Exley’s novel and far broader in
social, cultural, and political reach than any-
one from Exley’s “silent generation” would
dare. The 2014 police shooting of Tamir
Rice, a fixture of Ohio’s recent history as
unavoidable as James’s return from Miami
to Cleveland that same year, cast unsettling
shadows on the latter parts of the book, as in
this passage:
2:20
The spectacular isn’t all that unfolds in a mat-
ter of unstoppable seconds
there is more than a ball pirouetting
through an arena’s sky navigating a course
toward destiny have you considered how
quickly a heart can stop
2:19
beating how quickly blood can sprint from a
wound there is no clock that turns back so
quickly that life might be gifted to the dead
there is no resurrection from the panicked
ticking that haunts the already-eager fingers
on triggers and I am talking real triggers the
22 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
bullet travels faster than the speed
2:18
of sound and so what to make then of the cop
who pulls up in a car and maybe shouts but
maybe doesn’t but definitely fires
2:17
a bullet that arrives before the sound of his
voice what to make of this besides someone
who wanted someone else dead someone
who made up their mind who did not in
doing so imagine the casket or the mother
crying atop it
He is a poet. He is also, in this book, more
formally audacious with prose than he’s ever
been before. Abdurraqib divides his book-
length essay into the four “quarters” that
comprise a professional basketball game,
each quarter set at the requisite twelve min-
utes and counting down (as demonstrated
above) in subdivisions of minutes and sec-
onds in what ballers and refs alike label
“regulation time.” This narrative device
allows him to contain and control the teem-
ing flow of memories, ideas, analogies, and
digressions. Sometimes, as in the above pas-
sage, the flow of word, image, and thought
jukes, stutter-steps, reloads, and rushes
headlong toward open space, jolting the
reader in the same manner that a shooting
guard executes a head fake on a defender so
abrupt and violent as to be labeled by awe-
struck broadcasters as an “ankle breaker.”
Here he is with 11:11 left in the second
quarter:
Tough for me to tell the difference between a
prayer and a wish, though some might say a
prayer is simply a wish that punches above its
weight. A wish leaves the lips and depending
on how it is spoken—its tone or the desire
attached to it—it either gains wings or falls on
the ears of the living.
There’s Always This Year is the kind of book
that looks a lot easier to write than it actually
must have been. All that’s required, it seems,
is the willingness to play shoot-around with
your past selves in the presence of your sports
idol and let the platitudes about Overcoming
and Uplift do the rest of the work. But life is
not a pop anthem of uplift, and ankles aren’t
the only things that get broken when neither
your wishes nor your prayers get answered.
“As funny as it is to say,” Abdurraqib
confesses at one point, “I don’t remember
the exact reason I ended up handcuffed in the
back of a cop car in the fall of 2004.” It’s one
of several moments in the book when your
assumptions about time and chronology get
faked out. It’s not explained why or how he
was arrested (“no telling what the warrant
might have been for”). What matters is that
when Abdurraqib was in the stir, waiting for
his court date, LeBron James, from his
higher position on life’s stage, was a work in
progress, still trying to subdue the skeptics
even after he’d been named NBA Rookie of
the Year the season before. Abdurraqib sees
James through the static of a jailhouse TV,
giving an interview before the 2004–5 sea-
son. (“The minute he appeared on the
screen, the loud and reckless debate
unfurled” among Abdurraqib’s fellow
inmates. “He ain’t shit, or he is. Cavs ain’t
never gonna be shit, or they are.”) Another
flashback, another pivot in chronology:
Abdurraqib remembers the year before
when he was picking up odd jobs with local
credit agencies in Columbus, seeking escape
from the drudgery and dread by decorating
his cubicle with magazine pictures of LeB-
ron, the prized rookie. “As one life begins to
ascend, another begins its descent,” Abdur-
raqib observes of this period in their shared
existence. “It happens to everyone, every-
where, even if you don’t know the person
who is watching your rise from a distance
and cursing their own shit luck.”
Here and elsewhere in Abdurraqib’s nar-
rative, the resemblances between his fan’s
notes and Exley’s seem most evident. But
Abdurraqib the boundary-breaking cultural
critic, whose Go Ahead in the Rain made his
readers see A Tribe Called Quest with fresh
lenses, is never far away, such as when he
once again ankle-breaks away from the
chronological path to offer a disquisition on
what he calls “The Leaving Song” subgenre
of pop music, focusing on Otis Redding’s
cover of the Temptations’ “My Girl” and
how he “tiptoes through that chorus like he’s
walking around a hardwood floor, trying to
avoid stepping on glass.” Then he brings in
Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” (“a song
where the question unravels until you real-
ize, at the end, that nothing is being asked at
all”), the O’Jays, Boyz II Men, and the Soul
Children’s “Don’t Take My Sunshine.” All
these are brought up from the basement rec
room of his memories to get the reader ready
for a crucial moment in the LeBron saga: the
aforementioned “Decision” in 2010 to leave
the talented but underachieving Cavs behind
for the Miami Heat, with whom he would
win his first two league championships.
Though Cleveland’s heart was broken,
Abdurraqib says he understood why King
James did what he did. “I’m not immune to
the desire for exits. I’ve said already that I
once believed my salvation would be found
in another place.” Still, as the book recalls,
the manifestations of the city’s heartbreak
were, to say the least, intense—most espe-
cially, the setting of fires to replicas of
James’s Cavaliers jersey. Then T-shirts and,
“for some reason, a pair of Adidas sneak-
ers.” He recognizes these fiery rituals as a
stage of heartbreak. Still, as he notices, “so
many of the people with microphones
pushed into their faces in the aftermath of
The Decision were white, and so much of the
language affixed to that moment, out of
those mouths, revolved around death,
around burial.” (“He’s dead to me,” they
said of James after he’d left Cleveland
behind.) Abdurraqib can’t help seeing in
these flames a reminder of Black urban riots
in Los Angeles in 1992, in Oakland in 2009,
in Miami in 1980—“in any place where
black people have been conductors to a sym-
phony of fire”—and how often these Black
rioters were asked why they would set fire to
“their own place.” Abdurraqib retrieves a
welter of emotional responses, “about how
none of this shit is ours & you have mistaken
being in a place for having control over it.”
Implicit in his analogy is another one of his
wishes: that people who set fire to LeBron
merchandise understand that their reactions
are just as irrational, yet just as understand-
able, as the inevitable outcome of heart-
break.
I just realized I haven’t yet mentioned the
“intermissions” in Abdurraqib’s four-quar-
ter game, in which he takes deep dives into
two basketball movies, Spike Lee’s He Got
Game (1998) and Ron Shelton’s White Men
Can’t Jump (1992). Lee’s film—about the
mercurial coach-player relationship between
Denzel Washington as the convict Jake Shut-
tlesworth and Ray Allen as his basketball-
prodigy son Jesus—summons Abdurraqib’s
memories of his own father, who as with
Jake was a gifted player in his youth but was
swept up by “the wrong crowd” that “led
him to steal cars before he could even drive
them.” Abdurraqib unpacks the complexi-
ties of the father-son dynamics in Lee’s
movie and how the climactic one-on-one
battle between Jake and Jesus symbolizes the
poignant struggles of sons to shake them-
selves free from their father’s dominion: “a
son, shedding his father one last time and
becoming untouchable.”
With White Men Can’t Jump, Abdur-
raqib’s concerns are with the dynamics of the
hustle depicted in the way Woody Harrel-
son’s Billy Hoyle saunters onto a playground
court comprising sleek, supremely confident
Black ballhawks and uses their presump-
tions of his dorky-white-guy inability to keep
up with them as a means of separating them
from their cash. Abdurraqib spins off the
movie’s premise to recall how an Allman
Brothers sweatshirt he’d worn at a reading
in rural Wisconsin prompted confusion from
whites in the audience who insisted on
knowing “the deal” with the Eat a Peach
album cover he was wearing. “Hustling is
easiest when you are in a room people don’t
believe you belong in,” Abdurraqib con-
cludes. “All you have to do is show up and
refuse to give the people what they want.” It
may not be the most surprising or even reve-
latory of his many insights—except for the
credulous Americans for whom such cul-
tural transactions remain astonishing or
confusing.
And we’re back on the clock. If you’ve fol-
lowed basketball in the last decade or so, you
know how the story turns out: James returns
to Cleveland and finally delivers to his city
and their now forgiving fans an NBA trophy
in 2016, their first sports championship in
fifty-two years. Abdurraqib was in a Con-
necticut sports bar when Cleveland’s fondest
wishes were finally granted and watches the
historic seventh and deciding game of the
finals whose “fourth quarter felt like five life-
times, all of them hard on the heart, even if
one had no direct rooting interest.”
Not long after that game, and Abdurraq-
ib’s return to Columbus, a twenty-three-year-
old Black man named Henry Green was
walking back to his aunt’s house when he was
shot dead by Columbus police, a victim of the
city’s so-called Summer Safety Initiative. “I
wondered, foolishly, perhaps, if this would be
what it took to dislodge a city from its com-
forts, rattle people at least somewhat perma-
nently out of the self-made mythology of a
clean and holy place.” There were protests,
but Abdurraqib knows that protests aren’t
something you win or lose, as in a game.
Maybe, a reader might wonder, it’s just
gravity—a law guaranteeing that every
ascension that comes with the fulfillment of
a wish is followed by a fall to Earth, whether
soft like a feather or hard like a building.
Abdurraqib’s chronicle doesn’t directly say
this. But as the seconds tick away in the
fourth quarter of his riveting game, he
accepts the pattern, the persistence of dreams
continuing into their own ongoing cycle, the
way Brian Wilson says he wanted to fade
“God Only Knows” with a loop of the cho-
rus, “a sort of infinity spiral.” And if you’re
inclined to wonder, even at this late point in
the action, why Abdurraqib thinks Brian
Wilson has anything to do with basketball
or everything else he’s been dealing with,
then maybe you need to turn the play clock
back to the first quarter and, this time, be
prepared for the break. n
Gene Seymour is a writer living in Philadelphia.
 All of Her
Ways of being haunted by Bilie Holliday
HARMONY HOLIDAY
BITTER CROP: THE HEARTACHE AND TRIUMPH OF BILLIE HOLIDAY’S LAST YEAR BY PAUL ALEXANDER NEW YORK: KNOPF. 368 PAGES. $32.
Billie Holiday, Downbeat Club, New York City, Feburary 1947.
HER PLACE IN THE WINGS
B
illie Holiday, née Elenora Fagan,
is one of America’s few remaining
antiheroes, the last surviving muse
of the Jazz Age, and the only correct
answer to Amiri Baraka’s question: Who
will survive America? She survives by
haunting us, and in the same way that
Baraka declares himself one of Miles
Davis’s children in his conversational
poetic elegy for Miles, I am one of Billie
Holiday’s children, I am her elegy and
redemption. My mother was born a couple
of months after she died in 1959, and over
a decade earlier my father had formally
PHOTO: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/WILLIAM P. GOTTLIEB.
changed his name from James Brown to
Jimmy Holiday as he developed as a soul
singer, realized he needed a new name, and
picked the surname of a woman whose
music he adored.
I am one of Billie Holiday’s children, in
that I carry her chosen name with inten-
tion. Her father was musician Clarence
Holiday, so her stage name was in no way
arbitrary. We both have singer fathers
whose specter haunts us and teaches us
how to haunt back. Billie was so candid
about wanting children of her own that
many of her close friends, including jour-
nalist Leonard Feather, made her the god-
mother of theirs. She’s America’s last hero-
ine because she haunts us with the
alienation and scrutiny that ultimately
killed her, and because a nation that can
produce a woman stalked by fanatics
obsessed with her voice and style, and by
feds and jealous deviant lovers determined
to undermine her favor and confidence
with disgrace, is a sick nation, and Billie
Holiday is both diagnostic evidence and
the cure. She suffered acute illness and
addiction and an unbending will to work
and earn her keep despite these afflic-
tions—the repertoire of pathologies Amer-
ica drives even its most well-equipped citi-
zens to was both within her and
transcended by her, an addendum to her
repertoire of songs. She did not succumb
to her psychic injuries by dying. She mar-
tyred herself to expose the fact that she had
been hunted by the FBI for nearly a decade
after she chose to sing an anti-lynching
anthem; she was arrested on her deathbed
for possession of heroin that a nurse likely
planted on her, and then forced to leave
her estate, which earned more after she
was dead than when she was alive, to her
estranged and vengefully abusive husband,
who sat in the hospital with her practically
threatening her to survive and see what
happened. For Billie, death was rebirth, a
refuge from the violence inflicted on her
for having a body that aroused what hers
did and still does, and a return to forever.
I’m one of her children in namesake, tem-
perament, and will, and when her linger-
ing spirit is misused or tampered with, I’ve
always taken it personally, as if someone
is trying to make me an orphan. I am
always looking for redemption for her and
look askance at the many failed or half-
hearted attempts at it.
A VANITY
I check and examine this elective affinity
often; who earns the right to be envi-
sioned in the wake of Billie Holiday and
haunted by that glamoured blurring? And
while I see it as an honor, many seem to
regard her staying power and influence
with suspicion, disdain, and dismissive-
ness. The constant revisions of her biogra-
phy with snatches of what writers consider
more accurate and valid accounts than her
own, the persistent sense that whatever
can be appropriated of her must be, if she
is to be held onto as a commodity and an
idol—it’s as if the whole world is that
hawkish delinquent husband, waiting
eagerly at her death bed for his big break,
coaxing her to hush in her own viciously
stirring vernacular, Hush now, don’t
explain, then reworking the lyric to
account for his indecency: you’re my joy,
I’m your pain. In her husband’s case, he
relishes this. It’s very sinister, to seek
dominion over the fruits of another soul’s
unmistakable and inimical beauty and
mistake that bloodlust for love or even
care when it’s definitively careless love, in
the subject’s words, delivered in her
slanted trembling idiom. Love bent on
possessing to avenge her effortless posses-
sion of you, her ability to enliven desire
and longing so well that they’re pent up
and altered until, now that she’s gone, the
world is so much less romantic. Does it
serve her spirit or the personality of her
music to relitigate her story like she’s jazz
music’s black Sisyphus? And if it does,
who should be allowed the privilege of
navigating the endless loop alongside her?
What are the motives for seeking her ghost
as our companion? Why the fascination,
as if the story will conclude less tragically
if we tell it differently?
I’m asking myself these questions going
into the reading of Paul Alexander’s Bitter
Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Bil-
lie Holiday’s Last Year, the latest effort to
get a woman who loved being wrong,
right, to tidy and temper her slurs with rea-
son and linear sequence. To imagine a ver-
sion of her who, when asked to remove
profanity from her autobiography Lady
Sings the Blues, didn’t respond: Fine,
change bitch to whore. If you cannot look
the woman who said that in the eye and
laugh and cry with her, and know that she
was not exaggerating, that she felt it a fine
and complicit revision, then we aren’t
haunted by the same woman. Many are
hung up on who she might have been, on
how the jagged contours of each interrup-
tion she faced altered her destiny, and oth-
ers fixate on who she was and is, her inevi-
tability. This particular submission to the
tradition of Billie Holiday negotiates
between those who objectify her and those
who truly love her, pursuant of an impos-
sible truce between impostors and real
suitors. It’s a noble and worthy effort to
pretend these two worlds can reconcile in
a world where some unknown heir still
collects royalties in Billie Holiday’s name,
and cashes out whenever another sensa-
tionalized and ridiculous biopic emerges
and is lauded by Hollywood, kingdom of
the sensational and ridiculous award-win-
ning biopic about a black artist who never
asked for such a thing and would
denounce it if they could.
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 23
 We first must come to terms with this:
Billie Holiday was not a masochist. She
wanted to live, and she wanted to live well.
She loved and wanted to be loved well in
return. She worked constantly and wanted
to be heard as she intended, wry, languor-
ous, unrepentant. She listened and offered
a record of what she perceived in the world
as original songs, too often overlooked,
like “God Bless the Child,” the only fable
that I find more and less ineffable the more
time I spend with it: Them that’s got shall
get, them that’s not shall lose, she croons
with flippant conviction, as if losers are
just as willful and worthy of emphasis.
Once you realize she’s not referring to the
material aspect of having things, the God
in the title becomes more prominent, a pre-
monition. And the child in her gallivanting
among the gods is now less of a liability. In
a pleading letter to J. Edgar Hoover, Tal-
lulah Bankhead—Billie’s friend, lover,
eventual abandoner to save her own repu-
tation—refers to her as essentially a child
at heart whose troubles have made her
psychologically unable to cope with the
world in which she finds herself. Such a
shady attempt at rescue from the law,
complete with Bankhead’s sense of superi-
ority over Billie. Her associates displayed
little remorse or self-awareness for the way
they exploited the fun, sexy, brilliant Billie
Holiday when she could show up that
way, and discarded the often abject or ter-
rifying aftermath of all that resilience.
Perhaps the singer was in trouble a lot
and wanted to be saved, helped, rescued,
not jailed and chastised. She sought non-
judgmental companionship and found it
in a cavalcade of ambivalent enablers who
loved her insomuch as they could look
away from her trouble or use it to mini-
mize theirs. Many of them disappeared or
looked away obliviously while she self-
medicated with liquor and drugs. When-
ever she dared to raise the stakes of her
expectations of companions, they dared to
walk away. Many of her colleagues in jazz
were afflicted with heroin habits just as
precarious as hers, and also stripped of the
police credentials called cabaret cards that
allowed performers to work in New York
clubs at the time, but they did not sing the
lines blood on the leaves, blood at the
roots all over the world to integrated audi-
ences and in a cadence that made you feel
the blood dripping and hot, as if you had
inflicted and suffered the wound yourself,
and therefore the others did not face the
same scrutiny from the narcotics czar. Nor
did they receive equal acclaim, the price of
fame with a conscience, with substance,
becoming a convict for singing honest
songs.
THE SWEETNESS CREPT IN
funeral after his widow refused to let her
sing. No requiem for Lester Young.
By 1959, the press seemed to latch onto
the idea that the changes in Billie’s voice
marked the end of her career instead of its
Billie Holiday is America’s last heroine
because she haunts us with the alienation
and scrutiny that ultimately killed her.
next phase, and her efforts to remain chin-
up regal and poised through these snide
critical overtures flared her own severe cir-
rhosis and pushed her in and out of heavy
drinking in spite of it. Bitter Crop is
arranged as if it expects to be a film in the
future, the next definitive Billie Holiday
biopic, in that it’s cast in a vacuum. You
wouldn’t guess what else was happening
in jazz or literature inspired by jazz in
1959 unless it was happening to Billie her-
self—no mention of the pivotal jolt that
year was for black music. There is mention
of poet Frank O’Hara listening to her at
the 5 Spot’s weekly jazz poetry night,
where her stalwart pianist Mal Waldron
was in residence, and later writing Billie a
breathtaking elegy that goes from casual
she might have been appreciated for dues
already paid and not punished for them
repeatedly until her final capitulation.
We receive an accounting of her last
performances, one abridged by collapse,
and understated, blunt farewells to friends
and chosen family. The portrait is of a
woman stranded between reverence and
abjection and forced to behave as if she
doesn’t notice that she’s surrounded by
hypocrites and opportunists. She has a few
real friends, Mal Waldron, Leonard
Feather, Frank Sinatra, Hazel Scott, who
urges Billie to move to Paris so she can take
care of her. That’s about it. Others, like
protégé Annie Ross, are friends who dou-
ble as opps, helping her destroy herself but
watching admiringly, as if watching a
great actress rehearse scenes. To be fair
Billie rejects help because she knows the
State is chasing her and would take any
chance to entrap her on another drug con-
viction, so it takes falling into a sudden
year? Where were the people who would
give her something to live for other than
mirroring their unprocessed pain back to
them as her own and being eaten alive for
it?
WHAT ARE THEY GONNA DO FOR
AN ENCORE?
W hile I cherish the access to this
extensively researched new writing
on Billie Holiday, and note that it was
undertaken with care, I wonder if it’s fair
for us to keep behaving as superior under-
takers of the greatest antihero in jazz. I
wonder who has the right to be haunted by
her and why? If you look at her this way,
we might contend with vacant authorita-
tive inflections, you see the complete,
humanized (terrible word that invades too
much subtext) Billie Holiday. The other
attempts, including her own, were nice
tries, but look at how the culmination and
denouement of her life coincide like veer-
ing black swans in a soft-pink sky to the
tempo of “Good Morning, Heartache,”
interpreted by her of course. She’s dead,
but we still need her to sing to us to make
the shambles she left behind meaningful
and tolerable, so that we can make it
through. I close the book not resenting it,
even impressed by Alexander’s vision, but
disappointed nonetheless, because every
attempt to do right by Billie Holiday still
positions her as more scapegoat than hero,
slyly scolding every instance of self-
mythologizing and even self-eulogizing
that Billie Holiday performed during her
forty-four years visiting earth, to fact-
check and study her into smithereens when
her whole ethic was the bent note, the
truth you arrive at by misremembering and
snagging it on fiction so they both bleed
and blend and undo one another. Maybe
I’d rather understand why she thought her
invented self was more flattering, safer.
What if our obsession with her in the
forms it currently assumes has become
redundant and reductive, even from this
new sleeker, less faltering vantage? I’m not
saying it’s not virtuous to try and access
our heroes through details of their lives;
I’m saying these might not be details but
ideas of details, just like her own were, and
they make me a little restless because when
will she be free of all of our careless,
patronizing love?
I close the book fantasizing about
spending a day with my long-gone other
mother, Billie Holiday—not a year but one
long day, cooking, talking, sinning, sing-
ing. I think she’d confide in me that you
can ripen past bitterness even as its acrid
dark chases you into the afterlife, and you
can spawn there into a new day, and what-
ever they say about you beyond that is on
them, about them. Give her her embellish-

F or the latest installment of attempts to

recalibrate Billie Holiday with an
emphasis on imparting something like jus-
ment, give her the ugly beauty of her cir-
cumstance, give her her intense physical
beauty, give her her children, let the rest
tice to her, writer Paul Alexander has exhaust itself. Maybe all these books and
PHOTO: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/WILLIAM P. GOTTLIEB.

decoded her life in 1959, also a major year
for jazz that saw paradigm-rupturing
albums from Ornette Coleman (The Shape
of Jazz to Come), Miles Davis (Kind of
Blue), and John Coltrane (Giant Steps).
Early in the year Lester Young, Billie Hol-
iday’s best friend and soulmate in jazz,
whom she had nicknamed Prez for his
importance to the music, died of complica-
tions from cirrhosis of the liver. A dis-
traught Billie was heard wailing at Prez’s
Billie Holiday with her dog Mister, Downbeat Club, New York City, Feburary 1947.
to gasping as he reads her death note on
the cover of the New York Post on his
lunch break. Throughout Alexander’s
book, arrayed in staggered and staggering
parts and flashbacks that stray from the
conceit for context so that 1959 becomes
many other years, Billie’s misadventures
seem aligned with a fantasy world wherein
coma for her to receive any treatment.
There are rumors of nightclub owners try-
ing to pay her to go home and rest instead
of singing, but where were the people who
understood that she sang to stay alive, that
she needed an in-home caregiver, visitors,
the chance to not have to throw herself a
birthday party and toast herself her final
films are the people doing what she did,
playing and singing until they collapse
under the weight of the fixation, unable to
crack it into something easy to under-
stand, interminably unsettled and forced
to make peace with it or be stunted and
upheld by it, as she was, both. And
reprieve is: one day done right, done well,
lived fearlessly, can outrun all the years. n
Harmony Holiday is the author of Maafa (Fence Books,
2022) and Life of the Party (Semiotext(e), 2024).

24 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024

 Comyns Core
An English novelist’s art of getting by
LIZZY HARDING
BARBARA COMYNS: A SAVAGE INNOCENCE BY AVRIL HORNER MANCHESTER, UK: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS. 372 PAGES. $40.
A
vril Horner begins A Savage Innocence, the first
biography of the English novelist Barbara
Comyns, with the story of her parents’ non-court-
ship. Once upon a time, a mustachioed man named Albert
Bayley was visiting a cottage his parents rented out to a
widow named Annie Fenn. Playing in the garden was
Annie’s daughter Eva. Albert watched the ten-year-old girl
skip around and before leaving informed Annie that once
her daughter could cook, he would marry her. At the wed-
ding, ten years later, Eva was already five months pregnant.
According to Bayley family lore, Annie permitted the mar-
riage because Albert offered to forgive her debt. Annie’s
family, descended from hobnobbing horse breeders who
claimed that a haunted Irish castle was their ancestral home,
disapproved of the marriage because the groom and his
relations were “in trade.” There was bad blood. Years later,
when Annie had moved in with the Bayleys and their brood,
her son-in-law tried to push her out a window. Granny was
saved, as Horner notes, “only by the width of her hips.”
This origin story has all the makings of a Barbara
Comyns novel: the importance of propositions, economic
and otherwise, in women’s lives, and of property owner-
ship in English society; dependence and dependents; and
life as a series of moments in which one looks around and
settles on whomever or whatever is nearby. Comyns’s
stories are domestic tragicomedies, concerned with mate-
rial circumstances as much as with the people living under
them. Motherhood has a way of happening to her hero-
ines whether they like it or not; Comyns was a product of
not liking it. By the time her mother was the same age her
father had been when he saw her skipping in the garden,
she had delivered the last of her six children and gone
deaf, in part due to her pregnancies. When Eva wanted to
communicate with her children, she would use sign lan-
guage. When she didn’t, she declared, “I won’t look at
your hands. I hate you all.” She loved to paint and consid-
ered herself a thwarted bohemian.
Comyns was the fourth child, born in 1907. She grew
up in shabby respectability at Bell Court, a fifteenth-cen-
tury manor house on the Avon River that was always full
of animals: dogs and cats, several birds, a monkey for Eva
and a peacock for Albert. Also, if Comyns’s near-memoir
Sisters by a River is to be believed, pet rabbits that the girls
liked to “ride” until they were “squashed.” The five sisters
were minimally educated and grew up feral in comparison
to their milquetoast brother Dennis, who would become
a manager at a manufacturer of protective paints for
yachts. Governesses were always coming and going;
young Barbara kicked one down a flight of stairs. She was
“spirited,” Horner writes.
Comyns was eighteen when Albert died of a brain hem-
orrhage, forcing Eva and her daughters to live temporar-
ily in a rented cottage. Eva just wanted the girls to marry,
but Comyns thought “hard about how her main inter-
ests—painting, reading, keeping dogs, messing about on
the river and observing people—could be put to good
use.” She answered an ad seeking a kennel maid in
Amsterdam. In A Touch of Mistletoe, the narrator Vicky
Green does the same, and reflects, “It was better to be a
stray dog than a stray human because they are not so
PHOTO: YVONNE OF LONDON. COURTESY OF JULIAN PEMBERTON.
noticeable.” Like Vicky, Comyns returned home with a
septic finger and a story about a good Samaritan who had
picked her up off the streets, penniless, and sent her back
to England. The gentleman wrote to Eva: “That I met your
dear daughter here seems to have been the Will of Provi-
dence. My intention was to take another street where I
could impossibly have met her but I felt something which
forced me to go to the left instead of going straight on.”
There is a similar sense of destiny in Horner’s patient
account of Comyns’s life. She likes to describe Comyns as
a “risk-taker” and “survivor,” and borrows a quote from
her novel Mr. Fox for an epigraph: “In the back of my
mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting
for me, but I’d got to get through a lot of horrors first.”
Horner assures us straightaway that Comyns will eventu-
ally become “a successful author,” and proceeds with
composure to summarize the horrors that will come first—
an abortion, a suicide attempt, heartbreak and disillusion-
ment, and years of poverty. When Comyns started writing
in earnest in her mid-thirties, she craved recognition,
which would come sporadically. Graham Greene champi-
oned her work when he was directing the fiction list at Eyre
& Spottiswoode in the mid-1940s and long afterward,
Barbara Comyns in her twenties.
recommending her around as “a crazy but interesting nov-
elist.” Her admirers were devoted, but much of her career
was spent scrimping in Spain with her second husband, the
former spy Richard Comyns Carr, while trying to replicate
the success of her 1959 novel, The Vet’s Daughter, which
was adapted for the radio and stage. She died in 1992 hav-
ing happily witnessed a revival of her work when Virago
reissued several novels in the ’80s. She was retroactively
hailed as a predecessor to Angela Carter and a more
wackily attuned Barbara than Ms. Pym. There have been
bursts of posthumous appreciation every few years since
2000 as publishers like New York Review Books, Dorothy
Project, and Daunt Books have reissued her novels.
Horner hopes to “help that revival” but doesn’t conde-
scend to boosterism. In response to critics who “damned”
Comyns’s novels with “faint praise” (the phrase appears
three times), Horner writes diplomatically: “Dyed-in-the-
wool realists never quite understood Barbara’s fiction. But
many readers did.” Comyns is easy to root for anyway. She
wrote her first book, Sisters by a River, before World War
II to entertain her children, but it wasn’t published until
1947, when Comyns was forty, and only after the maga-
zine Lilliput excerpted it under the heading “The Novel
Nobody Will Publish.” Sisters established the childlike yet
unsentimental perspective Comyns would become known
for, complete with frequent misspellings (“distroy,” “ter-
rable,” “toast and marmalaid”) and a seasoned narrator
who pops in intermittently to say things like, “Now I am
grown up myself.” The ten novels that followed over the
next four decades are a mix of realist fiction and dark,
fantastic tales that digest, reimagine, and dramatize events
and characters from Comyns’s own life. Her fiction fre-
quently looks backward to draw on the restless episodes
of her twenties and thirties, years taken up with making do
and getting by. As the novelist Jane Gardam once
observed: “I find her movements as hard to track as those
of her heroines and in some ways very like them: the ado-
lescent marriages and escapes, the curious jobs, the pov-
erty, the rescues, the bundled-up babies, the messy art
school bohemianism, the fecklessness and the bravery.”
Horner ventures that Comyns’s novels “are perhaps best
regarded as ‘autofiction,’” and reaches for Serge Dou-
brovsky’s 1977 daisy-chained definition: “Autofiction is
like a dream, a dream is not life, a book is not life.”
When Comyns was twenty-two, she moved to London
with great expectations of becoming a sculptor. She
attended the Heatherly School of Fine Art and lived with
her favorite sister, Chloe, in a flat that Dickens, one of her
favorite novelists, had once rented. The money the girls
had inherited from their father didn’t last long. Scrappi-
ness meant a coming-of-age: Comyns was soon working
at an ad agency and writing stories and falling in love with
an art student named John Pemberton, whom she had met
as a child (“He had such sad, shining brown eyes”). They
were married within months. John lived for his painting
and Comyns loved him for that until she hated him for it.
On her wedding day, she wore a tweed suit and brought
along her pet newt in a damp hankie, as Sophia Fairclough
does in Comyns’s autobiographical novel Our Spoons
Came from Woolworths. Before marrying, Comyns
destroyed all her writing, which she had decided was “imi-
tative and self-conscious.” Now, “she would focus entirely
on art, like her husband,” Horner tells us. In Our Spoons,
there is no mention of Sophia having anything to destroy.
Horner’s chapter on the early days of Comyns’s first
marriage is called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Woman,” but it’s more a portrait of a young woman who
couldn’t become an artist because she had married one.
The Pembertons had little money; John’s father had cut
him off, and Comyns didn’t earn much. She had to settle
on being “arty” and working as an artist’s model. John’s
uncle Rupert Lee and his partner Diana Brinton ushered
the younger couple into the London exhibiting scene, and
Comyns discovered Surrealism. She still sculpted and
painted occasionally, but the medium most readily avail-
able to her was daily life. She had prided herself on her
unconventional sensibility since the early days in London
when she and Chloe would make dresses out of cheap,
colorful scraps. Now she painted her furniture sea green
and tucked her hair behind her ears to show off “elabo-
rate” earrings. And in the spirit of Surrealism, she paid
close attention to her dreams. One day when she was preg-
nant with her first child, she fainted. When she came to,
she was convinced that she had been visited by the Holy
Ghost, who had, per Horner, “perched on a spectral mat-
tress-like object” and told her that she would have a son,
and that “he shall be called Diagram.” This idea scandal-
ized Comyns’s in-laws, who already thought she had
wrecked John’s bright future with her feminine wiles.
Comyns changed her mind about the name before the
baby was born, but that child, Julian, remembers his
mother continuing to spite her husband’s family. At one
point, she briefly became a Catholic, to the horror of her
in-laws. But it was more flirtation than conversion: rather
than bother with a prayer book, she would take a leather-
bound, gilt-paged copy of Alice in Wonderland to Mass.
Her marriage didn’t last either; after three years, both
husband and wife were seeing other people.
Reading Comyns’s short, eventful novels, one learns to
expect bad news anytime things are placid; either someone
will die, become unexpectedly pregnant, fall out of love, or
lose their job. Her characters seem to know it too: “Then
another horror happened,” one reflects. It can seem like
upper lips soften only to check that they can still stiffen.
News comes as a matter of fact, ringing with understate-
ment. (This is true even when things get supernatural.
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 25
Here’s the narrator of The Vet’s Daughter realizing that
she is levitating: “In the night I was awake and floating. As
I went up, the blankets fell to the floor.”) When it comes
along in the novels, WWII is almost a relief—the Blitz is
consistent with the worldview that the sky could fall at any
time. Critic Sadie Stein addresses the almost extra-literary
quality of Comyns’s prose in her introduction to the reissue
of The Juniper Tree: “There is something deeply haphazard
about her powers of attention. Holding her to normal stan-
dards of literary propriety can be a thankless exercise.” A
character you just met might die by the end of the para-
graph, but good luck also comes unexpectedly. In A Touch
of Mistletoe, the sisters based on Barbara and Chloe are
walking one day in Hampstead Heath. They have been
living off oranges and crackers and need real food badly.
“Fortitude!” Vicky Green keeps repeating to herself, barely
able to keep it up. “Damn fortitude,” her sister says. “The
only thing I want is roast beef with roast potatoes and
Yorkshire pudding.” Just then, two boys arrive in their
father’s car and chat the girls up, asking them to lunch.
“We felt as if we had rubbed a magic ring and a couple of
genii had appeared.”
Comyns’s luck also oscillated dramatically. Horner calls
her life “extraordinary,” but extra ordinary would do just
as well: Comyns lived exuberantly on limited means. She
wrote about mundane things in a high key. She wanted to
be an artist but had to pay rent. That dodgy quip, “Every-
thing in moderation, including moderation,” suits the way
she lived: always moving flats and changing occupations
(“commercial artist, keeper of chickens, dog breeder,
antique dealer, piano restorer, imaginative house renova-
tor, cook-housekeeper,” and even, eventually, “landlord”)
frequently saved from ruin by people giving or lending her
money at just the right time. It was usually Diana Brinton
who came to the rescue, even though (and while) Comyns
had an affair and a daughter, Caroline, with Diana’s hus-
band Rupert. Diana was an “empathetic and complex”
heiress who could never get a grip on her grudges. When
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she died, she left a grand house in Spain to Caroline.
During the war, Comyns found herself living with a red-
headed man named Arthur Price who loved sports cars and
was always coming up with surprisingly successful money-
making schemes. Comyns helped Price, flipping pianos and
breeding poodles, and started taking notes; she later based
her character Mr. Fox on him. Her second husband, Rich-
ard, was an entirely different animal: a quietly distinguished
man who couldn’t drive and carried around a “swizzle
stick”—a device used to take the bubbles out of champagne,
lest they cause him indigestion. They married in 1945, nine
days after her divorce from Pemberton was finalized. On
their honeymoon, Comyns started drafting The Vet’s
Daughter, which would become her fourth novel. It was
through Richard that Comyns first got in touch with Gra-
ham Greene and published Sisters. She could work on more
than one book at a time and liked to revise her ideas in her
sleep: if she dreamed about a novel in progress, it would
“often result in altering whole chapters the following day.”
In the late ’50s, when Richard was let go from MI6 because
of his association with Soviet double agent Kim Philby, the
couple moved to Ibiza, and later Barcelona, hoping their
money would last longer in Spain, even as Richard persisted
in wearing good English suits. He reported on Spanish news
for London papers while Comyns wrote, interrupted peri-
odically to type his sometimes “very long, dull grey articles.”
The locals called Richard “Mr. Thin the Mystery Man.”
Horner delivers just the kind of details one would want
from a biography of the woman who wrote of a newborn:
“He even had eye-lashes; nothing had been forgotten.” Yet
her telling lacks the alchemy of how the changes of address
and changes of men and the horrors and the strokes of luck
amount in Comyns’s novels to something more peculiar
than the dailiness of their parts. This is not a count against
the biographer but a coup for the novelist. When writing
about Comyns’s fiction, one must note what Horner
describes as “the disjunction between the potential tragedy”
of the stories and the distant way she tells them: with a
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“jaunty frankness.” This mismatch is the means and mys-
tery of her style, which can seem to hide nothing but reveal
little, which sounds like a bad thing, but is more compli-
cated than that. For Comyns, whether a heroine is naive or
stoic depends on how her story ends. Comyns doesn’t linger
along the way on how her narrators are buffeted by the lives
she’s handed down to them; they grin, they bear it. “I was
full of hope, as usual,” Sophia Fairclough says. Comyns
builds character the way a childish guardian might want
their charge to understand what it was like to walk to school
uphill both ways in the snow. Still, there is often a sense that
she is writing toward fears and trespasses her narrators
remain unable to face, and in so doing must skirt above or
below or around what is as yet unknown. Emily Gould has
pointed out that when the daughter in The Vet’s Daughter
starts levitating from bed, it comes after she is raped.
Comyns’s life is a study of making do, and her writing
of doing more with less. Her chapters open and close with
circumstance and no pomp: “Then the morning came and
it was light”; “I never went there again.” Between the
breaks and before the light, anything might arise. In the
novels that manage to end happily, these endings are sud-
den: “This is the end of my book, but not the end of my
story, which will go on until I die; but now we have come
to such a happy part of my life there is very little to say
about it.” The unanswerable question in these cases is
always: Was it worth it? Is the happiness equal to the hor-
rors? It feels right to leave off on a high note for Comyns,
one unconcerned with the book sales or bulging savings
accounts we know are coming for her in the actual end,
not that she ever stopped worrying about money. (There’s
more than one way to thwart a bohemian.) The year is
1968. Every morning over breakfast, Comyns told Rich-
ard her dreams. He would take out a notebook and tran-
scribe them. One day, he presented them all to her in a
folder. For a time and without even knowing it, Comyns
had that rare thing, a male amanuensis. ■
Lizzy Harding is Bookforum’s associate editor.
 We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
Two French authors’ dueling narratives of heartbreak
PHILIPPA SNOW
THE MYSTERY GUEST: A TRUE STORY BY GRÉGOIRE BOULLIER, TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY BEN TRUMAN NEW YORK: MCNALLY EDITIONS. 104 PAGES. $18.
TRUE STORIES: 66 SHORT STORIES BY SOPHIE CALLE ARLES, FRANCE: ACTES SUD (DISTRIBUTED IN THE US BY ARTBOOK DAP). 152 PAGES. $22.
O
ne of the worst things about breakups—aside,
obviously, from the heartbreak and the
acrimony, the division of belongings, and the
general sense of loss—is their ability to make even nom-
inally normal people behave like abnormal people, by
which I mean writers. Few other situations lend them-
selves quite so definitively to casting ourselves in the lead
role in our own personal drama. Minor coincidences
become dazzling signs and wonders, or dark omens;
lovelorn anecdotes are streamlined in the telling, edited
and punched up as if we were not merely recounting
them to our uninterested friends, but preparing them for
future publication. Pity, then, the actual writers who find
themselves being unceremoniously ditched, leaving them
with no option other than to commit all these shameful
fantasies of suffering and heroism to the page. “In those
days cold and oblivion were all I wanted,” the French-
Algerian memoirist Grégoire Boullier writes in the open-
ing lines of The Mystery Guest, a slim book about a
breakup first published in English in 2006, and which is
being rereleased by McNally Editions with a new trans-
lation by Ben Truman. “This was fine with me: one day,
I knew, it would be time to rejoin the living, and that day
could wait.”
That day, as it turns out, is September 30, 1990, when
the action of The Mystery Guest begins. By its second
paragraph, Boullier’s ex—who left him suddenly and
apparently cruelly some years earlier—has called to invite
him to her friend’s birthday party, sending him into an
existential tailspin. He spends the next ninety pages lurch-
ing between maudlin self-admonishment and a kind of
awful, funny swagger that at one point sees him likening
himself to Jesus Christ. To call The Mystery Guest only
“a slim book about a breakup” is somewhat disingenu-
ous, in fact, since the event Boullier has been invited to is
not your typical soiree, but something more conceptual:
the host is the celebrated artist Sophie Calle, whose con-
fessional, quasi-documentary works have made her a
celebrity in intellectual circles. Each year, Calle throws a
party for as many guests as there are years in her age;
Boullier is to play the role of her “mystery guest,” an
anonymous attendee who, per tradition, Calle allows a
friend to invite as a living representation of her future. For
Boullier, this is a chance to reinvent himself, and to prove
that his life hasn’t “turned into one long hibernation.”
“Quite the opposite,” he writes, seeming desperate to con-
vince not just the reader but himself: “My life was one
party after another, and I was in top form.”
Throughout The Mystery Guest, Boullier certainly does
not sound like a man in top form, and his willingness to
make himself appear buffoonish saves the book from
being an agonizing exercise in flowery self-pity. In the
kind of perfectly ironic detail that could only come
directly from real life, he decides to distinguish himself by
spending more than a month’s rent on a bottle of 1964
Margaux, only to learn that as part of her artistic practice,
Calle keeps all of her birthday gifts in storage in their
original wrapping. (If he really had been Jesus Christ, a
bottle of Evian would have sufficed.) At the party, Boullier
talks shit, and crosses the line between anonymous, icon-
COURTESY OF D.A.P. | DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS.
oclastic interloper and garden-variety wine-drunk jerk.
The prose is breathless, sometimes drunk seeming itself,
and there is something realistic, even touching, about its
perpetual ricocheting between hope and despair, often
within the span of a single sentence. It is a tightly written
portrait of the artist as a young(ish) mess, and its ingenu-
ity lies in its positioning of the “mystery guest” as an ide-
alized state that exists in diametric opposition to the thor-
oughly unmysterious position of the ex-lover. Familiarity
breeds contempt, and it can also hasten breakups. If Boul-
lier can make himself unknowable enough again, perhaps
he can represent not only Calle’s future but also that of the
woman who once loved him.
His problem—much to our delight, since this dilemma
is what lends the book its jittery edge—is that he cannot
be mysterious to save his life. In the final pages of the
book, Boullier and Sophie Calle meet again some years
later, and despite his misogynistic flinching at her age (“in
five years she’d be fifty-five, and then sixty, and that vision
Rêve de jeune fille (Girl’s Dream) from Sophie Calle’s True
Stories (Actes Sud, 2023).
was hopeless and implacable”), it becomes clear that they
are twin souls, if not necessarily cut out to be lifelong
soulmates: obsessed with fate, and to some degree with
themselves, they have an eye for the kind of minor details
that make for terrific fiction, even when they are suppos-
edly recording facts. For a time after this meeting, they
were lovers, until Boullier eventually sent her a meander-
ing, self-important breakup email. Calle—in a move that
a man so obsessed with signs surely ought to have fore-
seen—anonymized him as “X” and turned the email into
her 2007 entry for the Venice Biennale, Take Care of
Yourself, asking women from 107 different professions,
from a cruciverbalist to a Talmudic scholar, to interpret
his words. If dumping a writer is a risky move, dumping
an artist might be more dangerous still: like an invading
force, they tend to recruit collaborators.
The subtitle of The Mystery Guest is A True Story. True
for whom? Every relationship has two narratives, two
conflicting sides. Calle’s work trades in perceived truths,
and her “documentary” projects tend to be at least a little
falsified—burnished like a breakup story, the result a little
better than real life. This spring, Actes Sud is rereleasing
her ever-expanding 1994 artist’s book, True Stories, with
the addition of three new pieces. Pairing text and image,
it’s not quite a memoir, not quite a short-story collection,
and not quite a photographic compendium, either. Many
of the events depicted therein are familiar from what read-
ers might already know of Calle’s biography, but they are
often reduced to the level of metaphor, pared down into
oblique symbolism and Freudian suggestiveness. For
years, Calle has had a reputation as an oversharer, an
early adopter of the kind of frightening, often sexual
frankness that would go on to define both the (largely
female-led) 2010s personal-essay trend and the internet
at large. In 2024, there is something rather quaint about
this characterization of her candor: many of the texts that
appear in True Stories are coolly evasive, and the overall
impression is that of an exercise in self-mythology where
the “true” self feels almost entirely absent, as if each recol-
lection were a crime scene photograph in which Calle
appeared only as a chalk outline.
Unlike Boullier, Calle is not really attempting to be
funny—or if she is funny, it is a very specific kind of
humor that arises from the collision of her stark,
unadorned style and the ghoulish, almost gothic details
in her stories. These touches often appear in the final line,
a sudden wham of nastiness: a piece about her consider-
ing a nose job ends with the prospective surgeon’s suicide;
one about her mother’s lodger ends with him setting him-
self on fire. We learn that the young Calle had a phobia
of penises, but we’re never informed why, and the refusal
to disclose a reason seems designed to encourage sinister
interpretations. The Mystery Guest and True Stories
being rereleased concurrently presents an opportunity to
compare two spare, art-centric, nontraditional memoirs;
the fact that each of them deals, to some degree at least,
with the subject of sexual and romantic disillusionment,
to say nothing of the fact that the authors were at one
time in a relationship themselves, adds a further bit of
intrigue. Per the aforementioned cultural connection
between women and the personal essay boom, one might
expect Calle’s account of her history to be the most emo-
tional, the most lurid. In fact, she is the one who seems
steely and in control of her image, whereas Boullier—to
use a word that is more typically applied to female writ-
ers—borders on hysterical.
His is the messier book—the more embarrassing
book, even, with its frantic run-on sentences and wob-
bling moods, and his admitted willingness to cling to
superstition. When he finally does speak with his ex-
lover at the party, they are both admiring a floral display,
and she makes a passing comment about roses being the
only flowers she can bear to see cut. It is, he thinks, a
reference to Mrs. Dalloway, one of her favorite books,
and he imagines she is trying to apologize in code: “A
reunion at a fancy party, yes,” he reminds himself
delightedly, reconsidering Virginia Woolf’s plot, “a
woman reconnected with the great love of her youth dur-
ing a big reception.” If every relationship has two con-
flicting sides, I recognized them both with wincing horror
here: Boullier’s desperation to read casual conversation
as if it were tea leaves; his ex-girlfriend making what was
likely to be nothing more than a little literary joke. After
reading True Stories, I knew that Calle had shoplifted as
a child, that she had refused to look at her first boyfriend
naked for a year, that she had worked as a striptease art-
ist, and that a man had once tried to strangle her to
death, and yet somehow, I felt that I failed to recognize
her in the book at all. Like Boullier, I could rack up
details; I could make connections that might have sug-
gested something meaningful, but that might just as eas-
ily have meant nothing. In my consciousness, she
remained—still remains—a mystery guest, an X where a
woman might have been. n
Philippa Snow is the author of Which as You Know Means Violence
(Repeater, 2022) and Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object
(Mack, 2024). (See Contributors.)
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 27
This Is a Testament
Marilynne Robinson goes back to the beginning
MICHAEL ROBBINS
READING GENESIS BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX. 352 PAGES. $29.
Rembrandt, The Angel preventing Abraham from sacrificing his son, Isaac, ca. 1634–35, chalk and wash on paper, 7 3⁄4" × 5 3⁄4".
“
I
n the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.” You have
to admit it’s a hell of an opening
line. “When I think there was a day when
a human first wrote those words,” Mari-
lynne Robinson says, “I am filled with
awe.” And that, for better and worse, is
the kind of book Reading Genesis is—
Robinson muses through Genesis, telling
you what she thinks, getting filled with
awe. It’s a book-length reading response.
But it’s a reading response by Marilynne
Robinson, who has written a few of the
finest novels in English, so I’ll take it.
Of course, she’s not really thinking of
the day when a human first wrote those
28 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
words—those particular words were writ-
ten in the sixteenth century. They’re the
opening of the King James Version of Gen-
esis, very slightly adapted from the 1560
Geneva Bible. (The KJV Genesis is pro-
vided in its entirety at the end of Robin-
son’s book.) Of the Hebrew book of
Bereshit, the first book of the Torah, Rob-
inson has not much to say. She writes, as
she tells us up front, as a Christian, about
the most authoritative Christian transla-
tion of Bereshit. There is a long history of
admirable Christian writing about Gene-
sis. But Robinson aims to read the text
freed from the encumbrance of familiar
interpretations, and she is too steeped in
Christianity to entirely succeed.
Robinson’s essay proceeds casually. She
assumes the reader’s acquaintance with
the text, quoting little, with no citations or
notes. Her method is to read the familiar
stories—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel,
Noah and the ark, Sodom and Gomorrah,
Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and his broth-
ers—against the grain of their most com-
mon interpretations. She tries to come to
the text with fresh eyes, without assump-
tions, as if she had not lived with this
strange narrative since childhood. As if she
were its first reader. And although she
can’t quite pull this off, the virtue of Read-
ing Genesis is that Robinson (not always
intentionally) forces even those well
acquainted with the Bible to see how much
of our understanding of it has been shaped
by received readings.
I first encountered Robinson’s work in
The Death of Adam, a book of essays,
which is an unusual entry point. The
woman wrote Housekeeping, for God’s
sake. I am at best a reluctant reader of con-
temporary fiction (I was recently reminded
why by the encomiums heaped on the late
Cormac McCarthy, the H. P. Lovecraft of
Oswald Spenglers). But The Death of
Adam was weird enough—a defense of
Calvinism!—to send me to Gilead, Robin-
son’s second novel, published twenty-four
years after Housekeeping. I think this epis-
tolary account of the life of the Reverend
John Ames, Congregationalist pastor in a
small town in Iowa, superior in every way
to its fan-favorite predecessor, which I
read next. I’ve since decided that everyone
is either a Housekeeping person or a Gil-
ead person, even if they’ve never read
either.
In Gilead and its three companion nov-
els—Home, Lila, Jack—Robinson peers
into the dumb black heart of American
Christianity and finds its many small gold
flecks. Here is the eponymous Lila, wife of
the Reverend Ames, in the third install-
ment of the Gilead series, shaking her head
over the cruel, ridiculous notion of hell:
“Boughton mentioned a Last Judgment.
Souls just out of their graves having to
answer for lives most of them never under-
stood in the first place.”
Empathy pervades the novels, while
Robinson’s critical work has become
increasingly brittle, culminating in a 2018
essay on her friend Barack Obama, in a
repugnant attack on those who “condemn
drone warfare or the encroachments of
national security, never proposing better
options than these painful choices, which
by comparison with others on offer, clearly
spare lives.” Obama’s drone program
failed to spare the lives of hundreds of
civilians, including more than a hundred
children, according to the Bureau of Inves-
tigative Journalism. In a recent interview
published in the New York Times, she calls
President Biden “a gift of God.” Biden is
currently arming the Israeli military that
has killed over 12,000 Palestinian children
since last October.
Reading Genesis is, blessedly, closer in
spirit to the novels than the other nonfic-
tion, perhaps because Genesis is a book
about how lost we are and how little we
know. Robinson tells us that “the story”
IMAGE: WIKICOMMONS/THE BRITISH MUSEUM {{PD-US}}.
of chapters fifteen through seventeen
“knows utterly more than Abram and
Sarai can know.” And again: “The story
knows what the reader or hearer does and
doesn’t know.” Partly this is just a way of
saying that the characters and readers of
the story are not privy to information that
the narrator (or God himself) will unfold
in time. But it also rebukes the assumption
that we know what these “stories” mean,
that they cannot surprise us by revealing
aspects of themselves that cast them in
unsuspected shades. The text is wiser than
we are, a sphere confronting the planar
surfaces of our reading.
This often takes the form of a reminder
of what the text does not say. Thus, of the
nature of the mark or sign that protects
Cain from avengers we are told nothing.
“For all we know, it could have made him
disarmingly beautiful.” Or consider Noah,
spared from the waters to be established
within God’s covenant. That covenant
includes the requirement that whoever
spills another’s blood will have his blood
spilled. Robinson reads this divine sanc-
tion of retribution, which seems hard to
square with Yahweh’s leniency toward
Cain and others, as “a sad concession to
the human penchant for violence.” He sees
how we are, and he can’t just go around
flooding the world all the time, so he
makes a few grudging allowances.
Or consider Isaac, “the least interesting
of all the patriarchs.” The story of the
binding of Isaac—God said to Abraham,
“Kill me a son”—might be the most diffi-
cult in all the Bible to square with God’s
supposed goodness. Sure, he spares the
boy in the end, but not before conducting
hardcore psychological warfare. I’ve
always seen the tale as a test, not of Abra-
ham and Isaac but of the reader: if you can
read it without concluding that Abraham
should have told God to go fuck himself,
there’s something wrong with you.
Robinson has found an elegant way
around this, which might amount to spe-
cial pleading, but which nevertheless bears
the weight of a problem that has been
worked through. “It is surely reasonable,”
she notes, “to assume that we are not
always the Bible’s primary audience.”
Here she flirts with historicism, arguing
that the story could be didactic, intended
as a lesson that child sacrifice—which
some contemporaries of the Hebrews,
worshippers of Moloch, seem to have
practiced—is neither necessary nor effica-
cious. If child sacrifice was observed in the
ancient Near East, it would be nice to
know that your god will never require the
blood of your children. The point of the
story is thus not “Abraham’s patient obe-
dience” but the “dramatizing of child sac-
rifice” as “something shocking and trans-
gressive, rejected by God.” Not that this
interpretation would be of much comfort
to Abraham or Isaac, whose thoughts and
feelings, Robinson reminds us, we do not
know. “Nothing,” at any rate, “distracts
from the unspeakable imminent act.”
For Robinson, these famous tales con-
stitute “a study in the fact that people see
what they want to see, even in Holy Scrip-
ture, whose presumed authority should
encourage careful reading.” She sums up
her critical method thus: “I am assuming,
always, that there is a point of view of the
text, that these stories have been consid-
ered together, seriously and reverently and
in the light of experience, that their antiq-
uity does not mean they are naïve.” She sets
her capaciousness as a reader against a
putative “tendency in biblical scholarship
to treat these stories as if they are too prim-
itive to arise from or to sustain a context in
light of which they can be interpreted.”
Indeed, she dismisses such scholarship
per se, without actually engaging or even
quoting any of it. It’s true that academic
work on the Bible can get quite weedy: the
University of Arizona’s Bible and Interpre-
tation site informs me that “it is somewhat
interesting that we should find the periph-
rasis with wehayah + participle and also a
following lqr’t in only these two chapters
in Samuel.” (Only somewhat?) But
Robinson’s invective is a bit lazy. Has she
read, say, Thomas Römer’s The Invention
of God, with its thesis that the Hebrew
Bible contains traces of an earlier Israelite
polytheism that only gradually evolved
into the monotheistic worship of Yahweh?
At one point, Robinson says that “the
great figures of Scripture are not at all
Homeric. They do not absorb the energies
of the narrative into themselves.” She
surely knows she is paraphrasing Erich
Auerbach’s famous argument in Mimesis.
But Auerbach is not mentioned. Nor, in
her discussion of Abraham’s readiness to
sacrifice Isaac, is Kierkegaard’s authorita-
tive reading of this terrible story, Fear and
Trembling; nor Kafka, for that matter,
whose parable “Abraham” anticipates
some of Robinson’s own observations.
Reading Genesis, at Robinson’s level,
involves having read influential readings
of Genesis, but she has nothing to say
about them.
No one can shed all her assumptions,
for no one can be aware of them all. For
example, Robinson points out that, when
Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the forbid-
den tree, they do not die, as Yahweh had
told them they would. “Satan was right to
reassure them,” she concludes. It’s
remarkable that so egregious a sentence
made it past a fact-checker. The serpent in
As my students concluded the last time I taught
the Bible, Yahweh needs a good therapist.
the garden is not Satan. Satan doesn’t
show up in the Hebrew Bible until the
Book of Numbers, and it is only in the
New Testament that he starts to sort of
resemble the malevolent figure of horror
movies and black metal. (Nowhere in
scripture is he said to be the ruler of hell.)
The snake is identified with Satan only in
later Christian tradition.
As noted above, Reading Genesis is not
really about the Hebrew book of Bereshit.
Jesus is mentioned five times in the first
twenty pages. Robinson is candid about
this, writing that she will illustrate “points
about the Hebrew Bible with instances
from the New Testament” because “it is
relevant to interpretation that this aspect
of the older text is sustained in the newer
one despite all the time and cultural
change that stands [sic] between them.” Is
it also relevant to interpretation that Rob-
inson comes out of the Calvinist tradition
of Protestantism, which has its own ideas
about Genesis? She has written eloquently
elsewhere of the Geneva Bible, the beauti-
ful predecessor of the King James. Geneva
was the Bible of Shakespeare and Donne,
of the Mayflower, of early America. Its
theological presuppositions are printed in
the very margins of the text, as annota-
tions of an overtly Puritan and Calvinist
character. The note to the serpent’s first
appearance in Genesis reads, “God suf-
fered Satan to make the serpent his instru-
ment and to speak in him.”
Furthermore, Reading Genesis is a
product of Western Christian learning.
Robinson tacitly assumes points of theol-
ogy that would raise eyebrows in the East-
ern churches. She also contradicts herself
(we all do; this is one of the themes of the
Hebrew Bible). When God comes to
destroy Sodom, Abraham gets him to
agree to spare the city if even ten righteous
men are found there. Robinson says that
this agreement “elicits a scriptural state-
ment about the nature of God—not that
He would spare the righteous in punishing
sinners but that He would instead spare
sinners in protecting the righteous. His
care for the good exceeds His readiness to
punish evil.”
But ten righteous men are not to be
found, so God destroys Sodom, after
removing Lot and his family. Robinson
then argues that, though it is “a real ques-
tion” whether “Lot should be considered
righteous,” the question is moot, since the
Lord whisked him and his out of harm’s
way. Huh? True, God agreed to spare the
city only if ten righteous were found, not
nine or five or two. But if Lot and his fam-
ily were in fact righteous, and God
removed them and destroyed the city any-
way, then he plainly spared the righteous
in punishing sinners, the opposite of what
Robinson claims. She points out that Lot’s
pretty sketchy—he offers his virgin daugh-
ters to a mob and later impregnates them.
But his righteousness is either a real ques-
tion or it isn’t.
For Robinson, the God of Genesis is
good, as the text declares. This is what dis-
tinguishes him, for her, from the gods of
Babylon, who “were volatile, impulsive,
but also needy.” And, um, Yahweh isn’t?
Throughout the Hebrew Bible he is at
times spiteful, hysterical, irrational, hypo-
critical, and downright murderous—in a
word, human. He sics bears on children
and wipes out cities. He creates humanity
then drowns the world when we get too
out of hand, as if our existence weren’t his
fault in the first place. As my students con-
cluded the last time I taught the Bible, Yah-
weh needs a good therapist.
But this is as much as to say that there is
no single Yahweh in the Bible. The text
was produced by various hands over cen-
turies; inconsistencies and contradictions
abound, as they do also in the New Testa-
ment. Robinson doesn’t gloss over this
question, but I think it deserves more con-
sideration than she allows. “I have dwelt
on this sequence of stories,” she writes,
“exploring the ways in which the faithful-
ness of God is manifest in the world of
fallen humankind.” And though she
acknowledges that “it is not always obvi-
ous that God does love humankind as
such,” she quickly allows that “this is, of
course, a human view of the matter.”
Well, sure. “For as the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts
than your thoughts.” But I think of poor
Job, of poor Isaac, of the poor world in
general, and I am not sure that a little
more skepticism about God’s faithfulness
might not be called for in a book of this
sort. This may seem a rather banal point,
but it is one that Robinson shies from,
almost as if she were reluctant to look too
closely into the question, afraid of what
she might read there.
Reading Genesis is not for everyone.
Ronald Hendel’s The Book of Genesis: A
Biography is much better as a general
introduction, though his prose is far dim-
mer than Robinson’s. And I must note that
there are two kinds of reader who are
mostly beneath Robinson’s notice: the lit-
eralists—who believe that, for instance,
there was a real Noah who built a real ark
(“Moreover,” Origen wrote scathingly in
the third century, “we find that God is said
to stroll in the garden in the afternoon and
Adam to hide under a tree”)—and the
smug illiterates of Darwinian scientism.
Such readers are incapable of appreciating
that “the Bible does not exist to explain
away mysteries and complexities but to
reveal and explore them with a respect and
restraint that resists conclusion.” We all
succumb, at times, to the temptation to
leap to conclusions where we should
respect complexity—that is one of the les-
sons of Genesis’s many misunderstandings
and confusions.
Indeed, Robinson dwells on stories that
hinge on misinterpretation—wives taken
for sisters, sons for elder sons, angels for
men, brothers for strangers—as if to sug-
gest that the recurrence of themes of
deception, of things not being what they
seem, is a key to exegesis, a guide to how
to read the Bible. Do not assume that you
know what these stories are saying. As
readers, we are more like blind Isaac than
cunning Jacob. “Sustaining paradox,”
Robinson says, “is the genius of the text.”
She twice draws attention to broken or
unfinished sentences. The first, Genesis
3:22, is not broken in the original (to
which, as far as I can tell, Robert Alter is
the best guide in English), but the second,
from 25:22, is revealing. Isaac’s wife
Rebekah is carrying twins that war within
her womb. Robinson writes:
Rebekah’s voice is heard in her distress at
the miseries of her pregnancy: “If it be so,
why am I thus?” In the Hebrew, her sen-
tence is unfinished. The word live is nor-
mally supplied in translations—Why do I
live? But the break, as if her feelings exceed
her power of expression, seems in character.
Alter translates Rebekah’s cry as “Then
why me?” and adds that “her words might
even be construed as a broken-off sen-
tence: Then why am I . . . ?”
All this puts me in mind of a famous
broken-off sentence in American literature:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgastic future that year by year recedes
before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no
matter—to-morrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one
fine morning — —
Genesis is the story of a seemingly end-
lessly delayed fine morning, “Time is
implicated,” Robinson says, “in the idea
of a covenant or a promise. Destiny will be
fulfilled, loyalty will be maintained, into a
future unlike all the misery and unhappi-
ness that must intervene between now and
then.” But then again, one of the Bible’s
great themes is that “disappointment is a
very familiar turn in human affairs.” n
Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collection
Walkman (Penguin, 2021) and other books.
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 29
Oh Say AOC
Joshua Green’s chronicle of the Democratic Party’s left flank
DAVID KLION
THE REBELS: ELIZABETH WARREN, BERNIE SANDERS, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW AMERICAN POLITICS BY
JOSHUA GREEN NEW YORK: PENGUIN PRESS. 352 PAGES. $30.
W
ant to feel old? Some Ameri-
cans born during the 2008
financial crisis will be getting
their driver’s licenses this year. These
youngest Zoomers have never known an
America where serious people think that
the free market can work without signifi-
cant government intervention, and they’ve
likely known the names Elizabeth Warren,
Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez for as long as they’ve been politi-
cally aware. They have never believed
capitalism would deliver for them, never
experienced the disillusionment of seeing
it fail for the first time, and never known
the thrill of seeing it challenged by upstart
politicians or the disappointment of seeing
those politicians co-opted by moderating
forces. They were born disillusioned.
Their parents’ generation, typically
born in the 1970s, grew up in a completely
different America, one in which the neolib-
eral consensus was first taking shape. This
is the America of journalist Joshua Green’s
childhood. In his new book, The Rebels:
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alex-
andria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for
a New American Politics, Green traces the
neoliberal turn to 1978, when he was six,
and when Jimmy Carter’s populist pro-
posal to restructure the US tax code to be
more egalitarian was rejected by a Demo-
cratic Congress. In grim economic circum-
stances, Carter then succumbed to pres-
sure to sign a bill that prioritized tax cuts
over redistribution, two years before Ron-
ald Reagan would unseat him with a plat-
form promising even more of that. The
stage was set for thirty years of market-
driven policies, during which Wall Street
bankers would become steadily more
entrenched in both political parties and
would set the terms of national debate.
Green uses this backstory to explain
how the Democrats, a party once primarily
accountable to unionized blue-collar work-
ers, became so dominated by the finance
industry that his titular protagonists had to
mobilize for an ongoing struggle to restore
the party to its working-class roots. If
you’re my age (forty) or a bit younger, it’s
a story you’ve probably spent much of
your adult life immersed in. As the genera-
tion old enough to have grown up with the
neoliberal dream and to have watched it
come crashing down right when we were
supposed to claim our stake in it, millenni-
als are the base cohort for the genre of left-
wing populism Green describes in The
Rebels. Many of us have, or at least had,
passionate feelings about one or more of
the figures Green focuses on.
Speaking for myself, between about
2015 and 2020, an attack on Sanders felt
like an attack on my whole identity. Like
many Sanders supporters—and like our
New Left antecedents after about 1972—
I’ve spent the pandemic and the Biden
presidency contemplating the limits of
romantic, youth-oriented left-wing elec-
toral politics. When you’re emotionally
invested in a politician’s success, it can be
30 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
hard to objectively assess their role in his-
tory, especially in the face of bad faith
criticism from defenders of the status quo.
It’s to Green’s credit, then, that he’s able
to tell a positive story about Warren, Sand-
ers, and Ocasio-Cortez from the perspec-
tive of a mainstream political reporter who
is broadly sympathetic. The Rebels is not
the first book about these three or the
movements they represent, but it might be
the first to consider them soberly. Green
documents their undeniable impact on
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Council Bluffs, Iowa, November 8, 2019.
national politics without indulging in hagi-
ography or overinflated rhetoric.
For Green, as for many observers, 2008
is the key moment of rupture. After the
collapse of the housing market and the
resulting economic meltdown, millions of
people saw how both parties prioritized
rescuing Wall Street over helping ordinary
Americans. As a matter of fiscal engineer-
ing, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner’s program of Wall Street bailouts
succeeded on its own terms. As a matter of
political optics, it was a disaster, commu-
nicating to a broad swath of the public that
Washington had left them behind, as it
largely had. Elements on the far right
would eventually find ways to capitalize
on this, culminating in the presidency of
Donald Trump and the takeover of the
GOP by MAGA populists. (Green wrote
about this in his best-selling previous
book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon,
Donald Trump, and the Storming of the
Presidency.) But the populist left would
also see its first real opening since the
Carter era to at least attempt a remaking
of the Democratic Party.
Although The Rebels’ subtitle and cover
art suggest three protagonists with equal
prominence, Warren gets the most atten-
tion. Sanders partisans who are still
annoyed at Warren over the contentious
2020 primaries might look askance at this,
but it makes sense in Green’s time line: for
most of Obama’s two terms, Warren was
the administration’s most prominent critic
on the left, while Sanders was considered
a Senate backbencher and the young Oca-
sio-Cortez had no profile whatsoever. It
may be hard to remember now, but War-
ren’s reputation during Obama’s eventful
first term was as a populist firebrand capa-
ble of channeling the public’s anger at the
Wall Street bailouts through effective
political theater.
Before she ever ran or intended to run
for Senate, Warren drew national atten-
tion by becoming one of Jon Stewart’s
favored guests on the Daily Show, where
she had a gift for translating wonky policy
analysis into righteous, commonsensical
rhetoric (“We just keep pulling the
threads out of the regulatory fabric”). But
she also kept the administration on its
toes, leaking unflattering stories about
Geithner to reporters and leading success-
ful campaigns to sink Larry Summers’s
appointment as Fed chair and Wall Street
banker Antonio Weiss’s nomination to a
Treasury Department job. At the time,
Warrenmania and Occupy Wall Street
were seen as responses to the same prob-
lem. Both signified young progressives
becoming disenchanted by Obama’s fail-
ure to deliver real hope and change in the
wake of the financial crisis. By the time
Sanders emerged as a national figure in
2015—with Ocasio-Cortez volunteering
for his campaign in New York—there
was a significant network of leftists ready
to organize.
In the 2016 cycle, Warren decided not
to challenge Hillary Clinton for the presi-
dency (despite an energetic “draft War-
ren” campaign) because she feared that a
hard-fought primary would diminish her
influence on a likely Clinton administra-
tion. In Green’s telling, the Sanders cam-
paign inherited what might have been
Warren’s activist infrastructure almost
overnight. Sanders’s appeal lay in his
decades-long consistency and authentic-
ity—“a kind of anti-charisma, a truculent
refusal to indulge the bullshit and euphe-
mism that’s the lingua franca of electoral
campaigning”—which managed to draw
thousands of young people to rallies
across the country. It also attracted $228
million in small donations, demonstrating
the viability of campaigning nationally
without any support from Wall Street or
other big donors. These organizing efforts,
along with Trump’s unexpected victory
over Clinton, galvanized young progres-
sives and helped inspire a new generation
of activists of diverse backgrounds to run
for office.
One of them was Ocasio-Cortez, who
was working as a bartender when Sanders
first ran and who found herself drawn into
organizing by his calls for a “political
revolution.” Green casts Ocasio-Cortez as
a “natural” while also reminding us how
improbable her rise was. He recounts how
a group of Sanders campaign alums
founded an organization called Brand
New Congress that set out to recruit nov-
ice progressive candidates in all 435 con-
gressional districts. In the end, they
recruited only thirty, and of those, Oca-
sio-Cortez was the sole winner. Her upset
victory against consummate Democratic
insider Joe Crowley was a product of
organizing, clever local strategizing, and
demographic shifts in Queens and the
Bronx, as well as her own unique
strengths as a candidate.
“Thanks to the vagaries of New York’s
primary system, Ocasio-Cortez was able
to build her appeal among a small, very
liberal segment of her district’s voters—
she won fewer than seventeen thousand
votes in a primary that drew barely 5 per-
cent of the district’s eligible voters—and
that was enough for her to prevail,” writes
Green. “None of this precluded her from
becoming a force in the party or invali-
dated her full-spectrum leftist platform.
She played by the rules that Crowley and
his cronies had established, and she won.”
That’s all true, and it meant that the Oca-
sio-Cortez phenomenon would be difficult
to scale nationally, even though a handful
of like-minded candidates across the coun-
try have since managed to build up the
progressive “Squad” in the House. What
has kept Ocasio-Cortez particularly influ-
ential, Green argues, has been twofold:
first, she is based in New York City (with
strongholds in some of the fastest-gentri-
fying neighborhoods in Queens) and thus
enmeshed in the social universe of journal-
ists and political staffers with national
platforms; and second, she has skillfully
adapted to a different set of political reali-
ties in Washington. After initially trying to
legislate as an insurgent against House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic
establishment, Ocasio-Cortez moved
away from the “activist phase of her con-
gressional career,” toned down criticism
of her colleagues, and began taking advan-
IMAGE: WIKICOMMONS/MATT JOHNSON.
tage of the theatrical potential of televised
oversight hearings to drive national
debates—a tactic Warren had pioneered.
Watching Ocasio-Cortez’s trajectory,
some on the left have accused her of sur-
rendering to pressure from the establish-
ment; some liberals counter that she has
left childish things continued on page 36
 Wife Sentences
Lisa Selin Davis’s confused history of homemakers
MOIRA DONEGAN
HOUSEWIFE: WHY WOMEN STILL DO IT ALL AND WHAT TO DO INSTEAD BY LISA SELIN DAVIS NEW YORK: LEGACY LIT. 320 PAGES. $30.
S D
ometimes what conservatives seem to
fear most from liberals is not their
money or their ideology but their
judgment. Beneath the vast tide of right-
wing grievance, there is a current of pro-
found insecurity, a suspicion that liberals
don’t think conservatives are good enough.
There is nothing they desire more than the
sight of a liberal humbled into seeing the
light. To cater to this desire, the media has
produced a peculiar new kind of pundit: the
conservative who pretends to be a liberal—
one agreeing, in spite of themselves, with the
conservatives.
You will best understand Housewife: Why
Women Still Do It All and What to Do
Instead, Lisa Selin Davis’s new nonfiction
book about women’s role in the family home,
if you see it as a response to this demand. In
the book, Davis poses as a liberal coastal
feminist. She says she studied “experimental
feminist video” in college; naturally, she lives
in Brooklyn. Davis summons an image of a
comfortable yuppie life, surrounded by other
well-off millennial mothers: a scene heavy on
clogs, yoga, and latte art. Her actual friends
turn out to be less easily typecast figures: the
one she appears closest with is a professional
“libertarian” magazine editor. But it’s the
impression that counts.
These liberal bona fides are supposed to
lend authority to Davis’s assessment of
women’s work and ambition. But her argu-
ment is at its core a socially conservative one:
she thinks there’s nothing wrong with a
return to traditional gender roles. To Davis,
the burdens of working motherhood are
impossible to manage, and housewifery has
not so much been discredited as placed cru-
elly out of reach. The State must be mar-
shaled so that women can drop out of public
life and assume the unfairly maligned role of
the housewife.
At least, this is what Davis seems to be
aiming for. Housewife is a profoundly con-
fused book, frequently contradictory and
always intellectually undercooked. It would
be generous to say that it has a thesis. At
times, Davis’s sympathies appear plausibly
feminist, like when she laments the end of
World War II–era federal childcare programs
for working mothers. At other times, her
politics are straightforwardly reactionary,
like when she waxes poetic about the aspira-
tional lives of the “tradwife” influencers she
follows on Instagram. But the book’s incon-
clusiveness seems more like the product of a
rushed writing job than of a sincerely felt
ambivalence. Davis doesn’t doubt that the
housewife’s lifestyle is desirable; she merely
regrets that it has been made inaccessible.
Of course, she’s only talking about a few
housewives. Davis notes that the housewife
has historically been an upper-class phenom-
enon and that this has changed; these days,
the largest group of nonworking adult
women is the immigrant poor. This would be
PHOTO: FLICKR/CLOTHO98.
an interesting shift to examine, but Davis
doesn’t. Working-class women and women
of color disappear into the background.
Queer people, too, do not rise to relevance.
When Davis mentions what she calls “LGB
families,” she does little more than to note—
with a straight woman’s typical defensive-
ness—that a lot of lesbians get divorced. A
separate section, on trans women, makes only
the weird claim that they don’t do chores. But
these are little more than distractions: Davis
focuses almost exclusively on white, hetero-
sexual cis women of the middle class—and
the effort to reconcile them to domesticity.
Housewife’s brand of anti-feminist femi-
nism is by now an established genre of its own.
Illustration from Woman’s Day Magazine (February 1957).
Nonfiction books, usually padded with a
hefty dose of memoir, appear every year on
the lists of major publishing houses, written
by white women who issue dispatches about
their newfound, supposedly forbidden anti-
feminist realizations: that work-life balance is
hard, that children can be delightful, that they
enjoy the company of their husbands. Some-
times these books are pitched at twentysome-
thing women navigating heterosexual dating:
Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual
Revolution is one recent item; Katie Roiphe’s
The Morning After is a classic of the type.
Other books, like Davis’s, seek to intercept
these women a little later on in life—in their
thirties or forties, as they struggle with mar-
riage, motherhood, and working life. House-
wife can be seen as a modern update to Caitlin
Flanagan’s To Hell with All That: Loving and
Loathing Our Inner Housewife, from 2006,
which was itself a response to Lisa Belkin’s
blockbuster 2003 New York Times Magazine
piece, “The Opt-Out Revolution.”
Housewife at first seems to be situated
squarely within this genre, with Davis fol-
lowing the well-worn narrative grooves of
women who have gone before her, explain-
ing in detail where feminism led them astray.
Unsurprisingly, it was the birth of her first
child that began her ideological conversion.
“My compulsion to write vanished, replaced
by this shimmery thing I vaguely recognized
as happiness,” she breathlessly recounts.
“My daughter had cured something in me:
my ambition.” Later, the seed of an idea:
“To be a housewife required a husband or a
spouse willing to support a wife. I’d never
been presented with that option. But, upon
reflection, I might have liked to hitch my
wagon to someone, confident that he or she
loved me enough that I could be comfortable
in a state of financial dependency.”
Feminism emerges in Davis’s account as
the product of a deprived woundedness,
something that happens to women in the
absence of a secure attachment. Women’s
drive for independence is cast not as self-
respect, but as insecurity, compulsion, and
unhappiness. This is a common sleight of
hand in anti-feminist feminism, deployed
like a party trick: dependence, it turns out, is
the ultimate freedom.
avis is a noncommittal thinker. Her
admiration for the housewife is like
the nostalgia one might feel for a difficult
dead relative: she wants the housewife back
in her idealized form, even as she knows
that’s not quite the form the housewife took.
But if Davis is loyal to anything, it is the
aggressively equivocal notion that women
should pursue their own desires and
shouldn’t have to ask whether those desires
challenge or reaffirm the subordination of
women. This approach is sometimes called
“choice feminism.” By its logic, all choices—
no matter their motivations or outcomes—
must be judged the same.
Under this pretext of impartiality, Davis
argues for the return of the housewife as a
cultural fixture. She does not mean to force
anyone to be a housewife. She simply wants
women to have the choice to be one. This
approach requires some elisions. “Davis
builds a case for systemic, cultural, and per-
sonal change,” reads the jacket copy, “to
encourage women to have the power to
choose the best path for themselves.” To
encourage women to have the power to
choose—has there ever been a phrase so hos-
tile to meaning?
The book itself is equally confusing. For
one thing, Davis can’t quite decide what she
means by “housewife.” Some of her “house-
wives” lived before the invention of the
house. A chapter on “The Neolithic House-
wife” examines the available evidence—not
much—about the distant historical origins
of the sexual division of labor. In this realm,
Davis does what most pop-nonfiction writ-
ers talking about prehistory do: she concocts
just-so speculative narratives to create his-
torical justifications for her preferred ideol-
ogy. For Davis, these cavewives show that
the division of labor by sex is, if not natural,
then at least morally neutral, divorced from
any hierarchy of power. It is “not necessarily
about which sex is superior, or about what
women and men should do respectively,”
Davis says, wondering about who would
take care of the kids when early humans
needed to go and hunt a woolly mammoth.
“It’s really just about efficiency.” Efficiency:
a virtue we are supposed to admire in cave-
men. Pay no attention to power, Davis’s
hand-waving account of prehistory seems to
say. Pay attention, instead, to that glitter-
ingly neutral ideal.
There is a brief sojourn into early Amer-
ica, in which Davis pays deference to the
concept of “Republican motherhood.”
“Mothers’ and housewives’ premier task
was raising children to become proper
American citizens,” Davis explains. “(Espe-
cially sons).”
But Housewife quickly progresses to
twentieth-century America. This great jump
through time conveniently allows House-
wife to largely skip over the advent of capi-
talism and the Industrial Revolution. This
might have proved more fertile ground: the
definition of “housewife,” after all, relies on
a stark divide between the home and the
workplace that is historically quite recent:
for most of human history, these were one
and the same. It was only the advent of
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 31
industrial capitalism that divided work from
home—and, despite Davis’s forays into
speculation about cavemen, it was only the
Industrial Revolution that led to the Victo-
rian idea of “separate spheres,” and the sub-
sequent invention of the housewife. Davis
misses an opportunity to seriously examine
the work of women she calls “militant
housewives,” like the African American
activist Fannie B. Peck, who organized the
National Housewives League in 1933 to
encourage Black women to patronize Black-
owned businesses—a pointed politicization
of women’s consumer power. A serious his-
torian might dwell on these connections
between the ideology of gender and the
needs of capital, and many have. Davis
doesn’t.
Instead, Davis turns her attention to the
mid-twentieth century and the much-
demonized trend of medicating and loboto-
mizing housewives. “Why have housewives
historically been one of America’s most
heavily medicated demographics?” Davis
asks. A decent question, but one that her
allergy to analysis of gendered power makes
impossible to answer. Instead, Davis’s non-
committal framework here reaches its most
absurd form: a chapter so garbled that at
times it reads like she’s trying to see the good
side of lobotomies.
Lobotomies were popularized in the
1940s by the neurologist Walter Jackson
Freeman II. Freeman’s patients were dispro-
portionately women—about 75 percent—
and many of them were housewives. The
operations alleviated psychological distress
by muting most adult psychic capacities.
Lobotomized women were described as
lethargic, patient, fond of ice cream, and very
calm. Freeman called this state “surgically
induced childhood.” Davis, paraphrasing
the doctors, calls it “losing sparkle.” “63
percent improved—something people who
remember lobotomies only as a medical
scandal often forget,” she quips. Davis
reports that Sallie Ellen Ionesco, a housewife
who was lobotomized by Freeman, told
NPR of the man who cut out a large portion
of her brain, “He was just a great man.
That’s all I can say.” These are the chapter’s
last words and could be read as a moment of
portentous irony. But it’s hard to tell. After
all, the framing perfectly aligns with Davis’s
logic of choice feminism: we must respect the
desires and judgments of women whose very
capacity for desire and judgment has been
cut out.
F or a book with such an ambitious time
line, it’s not clear that Housewife’s
author has done much of the reading. There
is no mention of the Italian feminist Silvia
Federici, whose work on reproductive labor
has been essential to theorizing the house-
wife’s relationship to capital. There’s only
one brief mention of Arlie Russell Hochs-
child, whose seminal 1989 ethnography,
The Second Shift, revolutionized under-
standings of marital inequality and the role
of domestic labor in working women’s lives.
Davis’s book can be understood as a twenty-
first-century rebuttal to Betty Friedan’s 1963
anti-housewifery classic, The Feminine Mys-
tique. But it’s not clear that Davis has read it.
She recounts a famous scene in which
Friedan writes about a boyfriend who
dumped her for being too ambitious in her
Berkeley graduate school days. “It was
pointless for her to keep pursuing her studies
and outshine him” is how Davis glosses
Friedan’s account of the incident. “Reader,
32 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
she married him.” Except that she didn’t.
(The man Friedan ultimately married was
not that Berkeley psychology student; he
was, in fact, a children’s party clown.)
If the book is light on familiarity with
feminist critiques of housewifery, it is also
somewhat lacking in critical engagement
with the housewife’s contemporary boost-
ers. At one point, Davis takes to Reddit to
understand modern online tradwives. She
encounters a person who tells her that they
are a housewife whose nonworking domes-
tic lifestyle is part of a broader sexual
arrangement of full-time, eroticized submis-
sion to a husband. “CrinkleCrackleCrunch”
claims to be a mother to multiple “munch-
kins,” engaging in “Happy Cliché 1950s
Housewife Play” as part of an arrangement
of “Total Power Exchange (TPE).” “He’s
my Master and I’m his slave,” CrinkleCrack-
leCrunch tells Davis. “He’s my owner and
I’m his property.” Davis appears to believe,
and expects her readers to believe, that this
person is a real housewife, providing real
insights into the lifestyle.
This is one of many moments when reality
undermines Davis’s fantasy. In a chapter
bemoaning the economic vulnerability of
housewives, a woman tells Davis of how life
as a homemaker ruined her financially. She
married rich, had a slew of children, and
dropped out of the workforce to home-
school them. When her husband left her, she
was shocked to discover how few rights to
support she had in divorce court. Now she
had no income, no skills, and a brood of
dependents. The woman’s anguish and fear
are almost unbearable on the page—her
betrayal, her regret, her desperate terror of
the future. But Davis, ever the optimist, is
determined to look straight past this reality
and to fix her gaze on the bright side. If she
hadn’t been a housewife, Davis reasons, this
woman would not have been blessed with
her children.
H ousewife may be poorly researched
and incoherently argued, but it is try-
ing to address a real problem. Women’s
domestic lives really are in disarray. The
institution of the family home is in crisis—or,
really, the women who are tasked with
maintaining that family home are. The com-
bination of work and domesticity is too
much: working mothers are overburdened,
exhausted, short on time, and thin on
patience.
This issue is newly salient. When the pan-
demic shuttered schools and forced much of
the white-collar labor force into remote
work, the strains of 24-7 childcare, com-
bined with the farce of remote schooling, the
management of newly crowded households,
the unrelenting demands of their jobs, and
the confrontations with mortality that inev-
itably arose in an era of mass death, pushed
many American women to a breaking point.
Lots of them drank too much; others found
themselves driven to desperate anger. In
early 2021, the New York Times detailed the
rising domestic cataclysm in the series “The
Primal Scream: America’s Mothers Are in
Crisis.” The University of Wisconsin, Madi-
son, sociologist Jessica Calarco is following
up this June with her book Holding It
Together, an empirical study that supports
her viral pandemic-era quip: “Other coun-
tries have safety nets. The US has women.”
But perhaps what was most painful about
this private strain was women’s sense that
each of them was carrying it alone. They
could not help but notice—as they changed
diapers, wiped noses, attempted to sound
professional on a work call as they gestured
at a Zoom class with one hand and wiped
applesauce from their shirts with the other—
that their husbands weren’t doing very much
at all. Or at least they were not doing half.
The recognition of this reality has led to a
crisis in marriage, particularly in the kind of
middle-class marriages that people write
books about, the ones that Davis finds most
interesting.
Today, many middle-class women are
finding that their marriages are incompatible
with their dignity, and so they are leaving
them. Everybody is getting divorced. Lyz
Lenz’s pro-divorce polemic, This American
Ex-Wife, was released on the same day in
February as Leslie Jamison’s soul-searching
divorce memoir, Splinters. This summer,
they will be joined by the acerbic divorce
novel Liars by Sarah Manguso. Meanwhile,
defenses of marriage are springing up in a
kind of preemptive backlash. New York
magazine writer Emily Gould wrote a viral
essay about her own decision to remain mar-
ried, writing that a feminist politics of griev-
ance had led her to a narcissistic disavowal
of responsibility for her marital unhappi-
ness. February also saw the publication of
the latest dispatch from the anti-feminist
University of Virginia professor Brad Wil-
cox, who offered the right-wing response to
feminist critiques of marriage with his own
book—titled, straightforwardly enough,
Get Married.
But just because the problem of marriage
is trendy does not mean that it is new. Femi-
nists have been forced to confront this
conundrum every decade or so since the Sec-
ond Wave era. The issue is this: though
women have made some strides toward
equality in the public world, the private
sphere remains strongly unequal.
Women still perform the majority of
household chores, childcare and eldercare,
the social maintenance that academics call
“kin keeping,” (i.e., remembering their
mother-in-law’s birthdays), scheduling, and
the management of conflicts, resources, and
outside help. Men today do slightly more of
this than their fathers did; they do not do
nearly as much as their wives do. Women’s
domestic labor is relied upon and enjoyed by
everyone in their families, but always goes
uncompensated and routinely goes unno-
ticed. This inequality persists up and down
the income ladder, taxing women’s time
until they become rich enough to pay other
women to do it for them. A woman can be
high achieving, well earning, respected in her
field, and educated up the wazoo. Or, if her
career looks more like mine, she can be mod-
estly achieving, poorly earning, tolerated in
her field, and middlingly educated. It doesn’t
matter. When those two women get home,
they’re both still going to have to pick up
someone else’s socks.
For years, this was the bargain that femi-
nism struck with heterosexuality: give us our
rights in the public sphere and we will not
infringe upon men’s entitlements in the pri-
vate one. It was never a tenable arrangement;
the terms undermined each other. Being ser-
viced and tended to by women at home
made men less inclined to treat women with
respect at work; achievement and indepen-
dence at work made women less interested
in performing subservient labor at home. But
some feminists tried to keep up the lie that
this could continue, in part out of a desire to
avoid provoking men’s misogynist resent-
ment. This, more or less, was Friedan’s posi-
tion: that woman would assume equal status
in the public sphere through work and edu-
cation but remain compliant with the hierar-
chies within marriage that made her child-
like, dependent, and subservient in the
private sphere. Friedan, whose Feminine
Mystique is credited with puncturing the
myth of the housewife’s domestic happiness
and ushering in the Second Wave of the
feminist movement, was in fact quite frus-
trated with her own husband, Carl, and his
unwillingness to fulfill his half of the domes-
tic bargain: being the breadwinner. Accord-
ing to a recent biography of Friedan by
Rachel Shteir, when their bills arrived at the
end of the month, Betty used to hide her
pocketbook.
But if this bargain of public equality
paired with private subservience was always
untenable, then recent decades have made
matters worse. Paid work has become less
remunerative and more demanding, as
employee protections recede and new com-
munications technologies render workers
permanently available to their bosses. Par-
enting, too, has become more intensive, with
standards for parental attention, investment,
and involvement increasing. Friedan’s bar-
gain, in which progress in the public realm
would be paired with persistent responsi-
bilities in the private one, was always hypo-
critical. Increasingly, it is also simply impos-
sible.
W hat kind of woman fantasizes about
being a housewife? Maybe just the
kind who is overworked. The fantasy prom-
ises leisure, security, a life of gentleness and
low stakes. When Davis tries to live as a trad-
wife, she imagines “taking over the cooking
from my husband” and “cleaning way more
than I normally would”: dutiful little proj-
ects that don’t matter very much. Men’s role
in this fantasy seems hazy, and indeed, men
are largely absent from Davis’s book. In her
account, they are passive creatures, never
implicated in women’s overburdening; it
barely seems to occur to her that they might
do more housework so that women might
do a little less. But Davis does critique men’s
failure to earn, and their steadfast refusal to
play breadwinner so that women can play
house. When Davis tells her husband that
she is embarking on a weeklong stint as a
tradwife, he seems confused—before real-
izing what this effort means for him. “Oh,”
he says, his face falling. “I have to be the hus-
band.”
There is nothing suspicious—or particu-
larly gendered—about a desire to rest. But if
we can sympathize in this respect with
women who are drawn to the housewife fan-
tasy, then we must also address the house-
wife’s immature side: her refusal of respon-
sibility in the public sphere. The housewife
lifestyle abandons the struggles of feminist
advancement, community building, justice,
and political engagement. It trades them for
insularity, callowness, and superficial self-
regard.
And here we return to Davis’s initial char-
acterization of housewifery’s appeal: “I
might have liked to hitch my wagon to some-
one, confident that he loved me enough that
I could be comfortable in a state of financial
dependency,” she writes. This desire to be
taken care of, to be loved in a way that obvi-
ates responsibility, is not a fantasy of a mar-
riage. It is a fantasy of a return to childhood.
She’s not looking for a husband; she’s look-
ing for a parent. n
Moira Donegan is a writer and feminist.
Star Struck
Lauren Oyler’s meditations on Goodreads, anxiety, and gossip
ANN MANOV
NO JUDGMENT BY LAUREN OYLER NEW YORK: HARPERONE. 288 PAGES. $29
Review on Goodreads of Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, May 3, 2021.
“
L
iterary critics do fulfill a very
important role, but there seems
to be a problem with much
contemporary criticism,” Simon Leys once
wrote. “One has the feeling that these critics
do not really like literature—they do not
enjoy reading.” This was a line my mind
kept drifting to as I plodded through Lauren
Oyler’s debut essay collection, No Judg-
ment. The book was originally to be called
Who Cares, and perhaps that title should
have been retained. Who cares, really, about
any of this? Gawker, the firing of Ben Mora,
a TED Talk from 2010, Richard Brody’s
New Yorker review of Tár, an Instagram ad
for a meditation app Oyler once saw, bad
Goodreads reviews she once got, the fact
that customers leave negative Google
reviews for her friend Laurel’s “successful
bagel shop and café attached to an English-
language bookstore in Berlin” and thereby
“project a particular logic of capitalism onto
their relationship with . . . Laurel that lends
the consumer dictatorial power”? When
writing Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly
said he aspired to write a book that would
last for ten years. Much like Oyler’s debut
novel, Fake Accounts, with its Women’s
March plot, long meditations on social
media trolls, and thirty-nine-page parody of
Jenny Offill, No Judgment is already dated,
even before its release.
It’s not that all of Oyler’s subjects are unin-
teresting. The ethics of gossip and of autofic-
tion, how our culture has come (at least in
theory) to value “vulnerability” and to dread
“anxiety,” the purpose of professional criti-
cism, even the expat community in Berlin
(perhaps this last is a tad precious)—these
could be starting points that lead to terrific
essays. But Oyler is contemptuous of dis-
agreement, quickly bores of research, and
rigidly attempts to control the reader’s
responses. As a result, the writing is cramped,
brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person
who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler
of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks
the curiosity that would permit her to do so.
Oyler owes her present notoriety to
“takedowns” of a series of prominent
women—Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, Sally
Rooney, Jia Tolentino. These pieces broke
little intellectual ground but were full of fun
one-liners like “The essays in Bad Feminist
exhibit the kind of style that makes you won-
der whether literature is dead and we have
killed it,” and “I get the sense that [Jia Tolen-
tino] must feel overwhelming pity for ugly
women, if she has ever met one.”
It turns out that No Judgment displays
many of the flaws Oyler once so forcefully
identified in others. To begin with, it is often
hard to tell what she is trying to say. The
book is littered with meaning-averse state-
ments—“It was not a good look, as we said
a few years ago but don’t really say now”—
and punctuated by banal truisms: “Until the
revolution that would be our relief comes,
we must ‘do the work’ to get better our-
selves, as the internet phrase goes. It’s pallia-
tive, but it’s what we have.” In her essay on
autofiction, she writes:
There’s a certain nihilism, or at least literal-
ism, in expressing too much excitement about
the claim that objectivity is impossible and
truth a fiction. It’s nice in theory, but in prac-
tice, it is the writer’s responsibility at least to
try. Actually, it’s everyone’s responsibility to
try. By trying you can get surprisingly close.
No explanation how.
Reflecting on gossip, she rehashes that
Golden Rule well known to first graders:
“I’ve come to believe the best unfollowable
advice we are given about gossip is not about
gossip specifically, but about our relation-
ship to other people in general: do unto them
as you would have them do unto you.”
Vague passages are made blurrier by indul-
gent, under-explained shower thoughts:
“The on-again, off-again relationship
between gossip and fiction is on again”; “We
want life to be like a novel, and actually, it
often is”; “An opinion is objectively subjec-
tive. It can’t be wrong, but it can also never
be right.” Elsewhere, she resorts to bizarre
metaphors in lieu of arguments: “A
Goodreads review is Monopoly money in a
game you’re betting $50 on.” If you are
unhappy about your representation in some-
one’s autofiction, you will “start looking for
small business loans” to “set up shop” in
“whatever space opens between their inter-
pretation and yours.” Writing about Berlin
as an American is like getting your bicycle
stuck in a tram track because you’re “think-
ing nonstop about maneuvering at a strong
enough angle to avoid getting stuck” but
then you lurch too abruptly—that is, you say
something dumb. Sometimes, the writing
just collapses into gibberish: “I can’t remem-
ber my mother ever telling me that if I
couldn’t say anything nice, not to say any-
thing at all, which is the kind of lesson you
teach a child in order to shield her from the
overwhelmingly complicated truth. Same
goes with ‘You can’t subtract a negative
number,’ which has always bothered me. Of
course you can. Sometimes, you must.”
Lauren Oyler is tired, y’all, as we said a
few years ago but don’t really say now. Why
did people think the narrator of Fake
Accounts was her? Why did her ex-boy-
friends think they were mimicked in the
novel’s chorus of ex-boyfriends? Why, when
she set out to write the definitive essay on
autofiction, expanding on the 2,500-word
footnote her editor so unjustly insisted she
cut out of her novel, did all these people have
the audacity to suggest she do research?
Autofiction, she states, has “a history so long
and international it’s tiresome even to men-
tion: look, say critics with perspective, at the
I-novels of early twentieth-century Japan, at
what Russian formalists said about genre, at
gay literature of the 1980s and 1990s, at
anything happening in France in the past
120 years.” That is a joke, of course (it
always is), but the message is clear: can’t she
just talk about herself?
“Hysterical critics are self-centered,”
Oyler wrote in her Tolentino takedown,
“not because they write about themselves,
which writers have always done, but because
they can make any observation about the
world lead back to their own lives and feel-
ings, though it should be the other way
round.” Only a few years later, the same
critic turned an essay about the Goop cruise
into an extended comment on her throuple.
And now, despite her full-throated dismissal
of “confessional” writing (“a simple form of
writing”) in her personal essay on anxiety
(“My Anxiety”), practically all topics
addressed in No Judgment lead back to
Oyler. Her essay on gossip defends her right
to speculate that her friends are gay; her
essay on autofiction defends her right to
write about her boyfriends (and kiss other
men while dating them); her essay on literary
criticism defends her right to be hailed as one
of the millennial generation’s greatest writ-
ers. Her essay on Berlin explains why it’s
admirable she has bad German after eleven
years in the country, why she isn’t contribut-
ing to gentrification, and why she loves tak-
ing Ecstasy (all the more perplexing because
she once lampooned Tolentino for writing
about her enjoyment of the drug). If we for-
get Oyler’s fondness for Ecstasy in the next
hundred pages, “My Anxiety” reminds us of
it. “My Anxiety” also reminds us that the
author is “visibly fit.”
Of course, Oyler doesn’t want to be a
writer of personal essays; she wants to be an
erudite critic of the old school. But again and
again, she drifts toward personal recrimina-
tions and eschews any sustained discussion
of literature. In her essay on autofiction,
Oyler, who elsewhere identifies her taste as
“highbrow,” seems to like novels by Sheila
Heti, Ben Lerner, and Norman Rush. When
it comes to books written before 1990, she’s
on shakier ground, making some unbeliev-
ably clunky arguments premised on Emma
Bovary and Humbert Humbert being prac-
titioners of autofiction; in her commentary
about the latter, Oyler concludes that writ-
ing about intimate secrets “is not nothing,
ethically speaking.” (OK?) She dwells far too
long on spats with ex-boyfriends and
friends, dismissing everyone’s concerns with
disdain. You’re worried that if I write a novel
featuring a character with your name, some
readers might think the character is based on
you? Well, guess what—you’re showing up
in my next novel.
If Oyler seems to lack nuance when deal-
ing with “real life,” she’s even more blink-
ered when it comes to interpreting other
people’s writing. At one point, she quotes
Janet Malcolm: “As everyone knows who
has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not
‘own’ the facts of our lives at all.” For Oyler,
this solves the issue: there is nothing wrong
with writing based on one’s own life, and no
one should ever get mad at her (as men-
tioned, she’ll make sure to skewer anyone
who does get mad in a future work). She
seems not to see any complexity in Mal-
colm’s line, which is from a biography of Ted
Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In case you need a
refresher, Plath committed suicide after
Hughes’s adultery, Hughes destroyed her
unpublished poems about him, and Hughes
later published poems about her in his most
acclaimed work, Birthday Letters. In any
BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024 33
 case, spoiler, Oyler’s conclusion on the whole
S P R I N G 2024 issue of borrowing stories from one’s own
life is: “It just has to be interesting.”
Oyler claims she is well read, even a
“snob,” but great swaths of No Judgment
rely on the thinnest of online research. “Vul-
nerability has come to be seen as a first prin-
ciple of living,” Oyler concludes from a sin-
gle search for the term on the New Yorker’s
website. Having decided to write about the
concept, she shares, “I was hoping for some
surprising etymology, specifically involving
a relationship to ‘vulva,’ that would, in its
obviousness, lead me to my argument.”
When a Google search reveals to Oyler that
the terms are not related, she undertakes
“research”—these are her words—into “his-
toricizing” vulnerability and subsequently
“discovers” that professor-cum-corporate-
consultant Brené Brown’s 2010 TED Talk
on the subject is “accepted as the source of
the concept’s contemporary popularity.”
Typically, “historicizing” a concept entails
finding a “source” more than ten years old;
Oyler’s argument here is as impressive as
“historicizing” contemporary discourse on
“threats to democracy” with a Vox
explainer from 2016. Even were she not
quite to begin with Saint Paul’s “strength in
weakness,” Oyler might at least have dis-
cussed Freud’s concept of “original helpless-
ness”; instead, she drops the Freud quote
that comes up when you Google “Freud
vulnerability” but fails even to mention the
relevant theory. And rather than asserting,
without even this minimal evidence, that
Brown was “repackaging” Freud, Oyler
might have actually researched any of the pit
DISTRIBUTED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS | ONLINE AT ZONEBOOKS.ORG stops between Vienna and the TED stage. In
the ’60s, D. W. Winnicott developed his
theory of the “vulnerable self,” a “true self”
around which people erected the defensive
“false self.” In the ’70s, John Bowlby devel-
oped attachment theory, which urged
“avoidants” to become as comfortable with
vulnerability as “secures” and has since
metastasized into an unbelievably wide-
spread pop psychology. In the ’80s, transper-
sonal psychologists like John Wenwood
preached that vulnerability was “the essence
of human nature and of consciousness” and
that “getting in touch with our more basic
human tenderness and vulnerability can be
a source of real power.” In the ’90s, Carol
Gilligan’s “feminist care ethics,” with its
embrace of vulnerability and interdepen-
dence, came to the fore—certainly influenc-
ing Brown as she completed her social work
PhD. And while Oyler includes one of Sheryl
Sandberg’s many ridiculous utterances, she
seems not to know that Judith Butler, Mar-
tha Nussbaum, and Gayatri Spivak have all
recently called for what Spivak termed a
“radical acceptance of vulnerability.” But
Oyler, highbrow shock jock, has no interest
in changing her mind: she pitches “vulnera-
bility” as its dumbest possible version, bela-
boring tumblr argot like “radical softness”
rather than engaging potentially challenging
arguments. So the only history Oyler is con-
A Journal of Theory and Strategy cerned with begins in 2010, with Brown in a
jean jacket on that purple-lit stage. How
could Oyler have known about that other
stuff, anyway? Brown’s talk is the only sub-
ject discussed under “Emotional” on the
Wikipedia page “Vulnerability.”
In her essay on Goodreads, Oyler offers a
Jacobin’s scholarly journal brief account of the history behind rating
catalyst-journal.com books out of five stars, all of which is—you
guessed it—available on the Wikipedia page
for “Star (classification),” which comes up
when you Google “history behind rating
34 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
books out of five stars.” First, Oyler dis-
cusses Regency Englishwoman Mariana
Starke’s exclamation-point-filled guidebook
to the Continent (and a quote from The
Charterhouse of Parma mocking it, conve-
niently referenced on Ms. Starke’s Wikipe-
dia page). Then, she makes a brief foray into
the Michelin star (apparently less “whimsi-
cal” than exclamation points). And finally,
she visits the Best American Short Stories
series and its editor Edward O’Brien’s aster-
isks indicating “permanence.” Oyler
includes extensive quotes from totally for-
gotten American satirist Oliver Herford’s
nearly unreadable review trashing O’Brien’s
selections for the 1921 BASS (a review con-
veniently referenced on the “Star (classifica-
tion)” Wikipedia page). Oyler also quotes
Dorothy Parker (no surprise there) panning
the selections for the 1927 edition as “wholly
conventional.” But while Oyler gleefully
adopts Herford and Parker’s disdain for
O’Brien’s “mediocre” curation, she never
mentions what O’Brien in fact chose to
include. The 1921 story Herford decried for
lacking a plot (“gets nowhere”) was Sher-
wood Anderson’s innovative “Brothers,”
and for all her venom, even Parker admitted
that, in 1927, O’Brien published a “superb”
Hemingway story, “The Killers,” and
another that was among Anderson’s “best.”
O’Brien would also publish John Steinbeck,
Willa Cather, and William Faulkner—who
have, at the very least, proved “permanent,”
as has the BASS itself. Eager to claim her seat
at the Algonquin Round Table, Oyler seems
not to have found the time to even look up
the books’ tables of contents.
But what, beyond this inventory, is the
point of “My Perfect Opinions,” the essay at
the thematic core of this collection? It’s not
immediately clear. At the beginning of the
essay, Oyler announces:
What I am going to argue is that while I can’t
really assess whether criticism is deteriorating
per se, as it has always been said to be deterio-
rating, criticism is certainly threatened,
despite an undeniable flourishing of nuanced
criticism appearing in publications new and
old in recent years.
“Can’t really assess”? You don’t say. Per-
haps the problem is that it’s hard to squeeze
meaning from a sentence that is pitched
somewhere between “certainly threatened”
and “undeniable flourishing.” But meaning
isn’t really the point here. Rather, Oyler has
two (contradictory) goals: first, to defend her
own scathing reviews of others (by torturing
the obviously silly phrase “no judgment”),
and second, to discredit the widespread dis-
like of her book by Goodreads users. The
canny reader may recall the negative reviews
of Oyler’s novel in places like The Nation,
Harper’s, the New Statesman, and the Lon-
don Review of Books. But Oyler avoids
mention of these, making it easier for her to
draw a distinction between two sets of peo-
ple: “professionals” like herself and those
contemptible, lowbrow “Goodreads users.”
To shore up this point, Oyler insists on
her erudition:
The line about how Goodreads is for readers,
not for writers, has always irritated me. Am I
not a reader? I wonder, staring at my books. I
know, in my heart, that I am not. My problem
is not just that I am a writer; it’s also the kind
of writer I am. A snob, highbrow, elitist, I find
the concept of plot oppressive, value style
over voice, and enjoy an unfamiliar vocabu-
lary word. At the movies, I prefer subtitles; at
the museum, I can continued on page 36
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HATFIELD continued from page 6
and instructed interior designer Sam Havad-
toy to make it look like a whorehouse. When
Havadtoy asked him to elaborate, the artist
clarified: “My idea of a whorehouse is like
the suite at the Ritz in Paris.” His wish was
granted, and he died there on February 16,
1990. Since then, Haring’s line has grown
even more ubiquitous, the result of licensing
partnerships that (charitably put) extend his
contribution to “Business Art” while alienat-
ing his work from the matrix of libidinal
drives and solidarities and grooves through
which it arose. Without succumbing to what
Gary Indiana has called the “necrophile sen-
timentality of the ’80s,” Gooch honors the
village that raised this radiant child while
evoking the deceptively simple spirit of an
artist whose so-called universal language is
no language at all, really, but a place where
meaning breaks down, or breaks free. n
Zack Hatfield is a writer and editor living in New York.
WILLIAMS continued from page 15
biggest kick of all.
A Russian spends his summer vacation
(twenty-eight days) at Dachau, a sadistic
Sadean holiday that culminates in glossolalic
babble. A mother and daughter visit a grave
and chant obscene obsequies.
Thoughts to chew on are literally the
remains of a TV host who, leading a discus-
sion on “What is Russia?” loses control over
his drug-addled guests, is flayed, and ends up
as an ingredient—tasting vaguely like
tripe—in a poor couple’s supper.
In the unforgettable “Tiny Tim,” salva-
tion from life for a grievously injured woman
comes in the giganticized triumphal form of
a beloved childhood pet. And in the title
story, the pyramidical shape—long the sym-
bol of sacred geometries encoded in spiritual
consciousness—has been transformed into
a raw symbol of roaring, engulfing death, of
common stupid annihilation.
The collection ends with “Hiroshima.” A
naked woman suckles newborn pups in a
ruined landscape. “A bewitching sense of
peace emanated from her. . . . She didn’t
belong to the world, upon the ashes of which
she walked.” This is the literature of entropy,
the literature of wisdom. Procol Dubio.
Sorokin has restored the risk to reading. n
Joy Williams’s most recent novel is Harrow (Knopf,
2022). (See Contributors.)
HERNANDEZ-SIAS continued from page 16
necessary reassertion of David’s voice into a
temporarily hijacked narration. It may say
something about me, and not something
good, that I don’t quite buy it.
Exposition, too, is bracketed by apolo-
gies, despite being as absorbing as any part
of the novel, particularly for this reader, a
stranger to the online worlds of conspiracy
that Taylor depicts with great humor and
authority. “I hope the look on your face is
less bored than the ones on ours in the
photo,” David notes after a digression on the
history of the Koreshan Unity. “This turned
into a way longer detour than expected, and
I guess I ended up doing the whole
‘explainer’ bit after all.” Is it the mark of a
psyche shaped by the entertainment industry
to fret about boring the reader? To assume
that the reader, at the slightest decrease in
pacing, will press “back” and find some-
thing else to stream? Plausibility aside, I was
very rarely bored while reading this novel,
except when it feared I was.
That might be the novel’s aim. Boredom,
indeed, is its subject, and its enemy, and
36 BOOKFORUM • SPRING 2024
sometimes the best way to affect the reader
is to refuse to. In a world where boredom
drives people to believe in conspiracy theo-
ries—“always more tempting than the
truth,” David reflects, “not because it’s a
simpler story, but because it is a story”—
pine for reposts, wreck the earth for sport
and luxury, and kill strangers with pawned
assault rifles, perhaps it really is to be
avoided. But if there’s one thing that David
is clear about, it’s that what you run from
comes back to haunt you. n
Angelo Hernandez-Sias is at work on his first novel.
KLION continued from page 30
behind and sought greater influence inside
the system. Certainly, to Green, her
approach represents political maturity:
“Being on the inside isn’t the same as sell-
ing out. It means your interests are repre-
sented. You get a say in what happens.”
There’s something to that, but it risks los-
ing sight of why Ocasio-Cortez attracted
so much attention in the first place. Politi-
cians who pursue traditional routes to
public office don’t find themselves balanc-
ing their principles against the incentives
of the inside game, because they never had
principles to begin with. It is precisely
because Ocasio-Cortez ran as a sincere
activist that her adaptation to the ways of
Washington represents sophistication and
not simple careerism.
Green credits his three “rebels” with suc-
cessfully making the transition from outsid-
ers to insiders within President Biden’s
coalition, and in turn credits Biden with
taking on their priorities. “In a break with
past administrations, including Obama’s,
Biden has begun to remake the political
economy along many of the same lines as
his populist opponents wished to do,” he
writes. Green credits pressure from the
party’s left wing—and its committed con-
stituencies—for the fact that Biden began
his term by pushing a $1.9 trillion COVID
package through Congress “instead of wor-
rying about deficits”; for walking union
picket lines; for reinvigorating antitrust
regulation and labor law enforcement; and
for the record-setting climate investments
of the Inflation Reduction Act.
These are real accomplishments, and
Green is right that the activists, organizers,
and high-profile politicians on the left
deserve to be proud of pushing the Demo-
cratic Party. The Rebels represents the
mainstreaming of the contemporary left’s
narrative on economic policy, which itself
is a measure of the mainstreaming of the
contemporary left’s substantive agenda.
Still, the left’s narrative on Palestine
remains well outside the Democratic main-
stream. Since October 7, the Biden admin-
istration has squandered much of the cred-
ibility it built up with the left on its morally
indefensible support for Israel’s assault on
Gaza. To pro-Palestine activists, Warren,
Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez have all, to
varying extents, fallen short of holding the
administration accountable for its complic-
ity in Israeli atrocities, even as it may cost
Biden his reelection and return Trump to
Washington. If that happens, it will fall to
a new generation of leftists to organize for
political power in the face of a hostile and
intellectually exhausted establishment. As
Green’s relatively optimistic account
shows, that could take a long time. n
David Klion is a journalist and cultural critic working
on a book about the legacy of neoconservatisms.
MANOV continued from page 34
probably identify a decent percentage of the
permanent collection by sight. Unless you
count DJ sets, which I don’t, the last live
music I saw was at the opera; the last theater,
an adaptation of Kafka’s novel Amerika. I
hate theater, but I try to go anyway. I like tele-
vision, but I have not watched a series to com-
pletion in years. I feel shame about difficult
classics I haven’t yet read and pride about
those I have. There are few things more satis-
fying to me than recommending to someone a
book or film they’ve never heard of. I despise
a happy ending; a happy ending says, to me,
absolutely nothing about life except that
humans have a near-universal desire for a
happy ending that is basically unfulfillable if
you have any critical thinking skills at all. I
learned these values at the Ivy League univer-
sity I attended as an undergraduate; while not
everything was spelled out quite so bluntly
there, my education introduced me to the
resources that I used to develop these tastes
and beliefs, the books and magazines and
paths of inquiry. I could make use of my dor-
mant Goodreads account to log my reading
and tussle with the reviewers there, but I don’t
want to. I have an outlet, several outlets, to
discuss my reading, for pay, for now. I am a
professional, and I am in danger.
Having been a teaching assistant in the
department Oyler is so proud to have matric-
ulated at, I am familiar with the less-than-
Herculean intellectual labors needed to get an
English degree from Yale. But I digress.
Beyond the literal meaninglessness of the
claim to “value style over voice,” the sopho-
moric airs of saying one “enjoys an unfamiliar
vocabulary word,” the absurdity of claiming
to be able to “identify a decent percentage of
the permanent collection” “at the museum”
“by sight” (the Met has almost two million
items in its permanent collection), the half-
hearted allusion to “opera,” the boast about
seeing an adaptation of a Kafka novel—
beyond this arch guilelessness, this churlish,
half-ironic catalogue of her accomplishments,
there is something greater here: the way Oyler
conceives of her own claim to cultural elitism
as a series of adolescent signifiers flung on
with the pride of a Goth teenager donning her
first Hot Topic belt. “I despise a happy end-
ing”? If she’s so highbrow, I advise her to try
out the ending of War and Peace.
Of course, Oyler makes little reference to
this or any other of the “classics” she claims
to love. By this point in the book—nearly
eighty pages in—she has not discussed a
single work of literature. Nor will she do so
in the remainder of this essay. Instead, she
sticks to criticizing Taylor Swift and Marvel
movies, with the implicit message that those
9,894 unwashed plebeians who gave Fake
Accounts a Goodreads rating of 2.86 stars
are no different from the cultural wreckers
who have foisted the superhero movies
upon us, corn-fed Swifties from the heart-
land thumbing through Oyler’s novel
between Colleen Hoovers. Marvel movies
are stupid? I am much chagrined to only
now be so informed!
The point is: Goodreads users wanted her
book to have a “plot,” and Lauren Oyler
wants us to know that she’s more sophisti-
cated than that—that she “finds the concept
of plot oppressive.” They thought it was
“annoying” she called Australians “antipode-
ans.” This means they don’t like “big words.”
Oyler has every right to use as many “big
words” as she wants, but she needs to have
something to say. For all the passion behind
her meta cri du coeur, Oyler’s conclusion is
the exceedingly limp “I think ‘Why I’m
Right’ should be the subtext of any piece of
critical writing, balancing as it does subjectiv-
ity with objectivity.” Criticism is subjective,
but critics think they’re right? Mind blown.
“I would like to say that dedicating any time
or energy to criticism comes from a belief in
the importance of art,” she continues. “I fear
making this claim would be a bit too valiant
for me, so I will cite some other people doing
so.” From here, she proceeds to quote Martin
Scorsese making fun of Marvel movies, an
episode familiar to anyone who had a Twit-
ter account in 2019. If Oyler were serious
about drawing on the history of American
criticism, she might have mentioned that
Dwight MacDonald, sixty years ago, articu-
lated the points about mass culture she here
attempts to make, most specifically why it is
a “nonhuman,” infantilizing “article for
mass consumption” rather than art. Instead,
after a slew of nervous references to “privi-
lege,” “classism,” and “elitism” (“constantly
contradicting herself and referring to her
shortcomings,” as she once said of Misses
Gay and Tolentino, “getting in ahead of
criticism, PR-style”), she merely ends with:
“People who work all day are tired and just
want to relax in front of unimaginably dumb
movies. They’re not wrong to do so, but still:
I’m right.”
No Judgment is an Empress Wears No
Clothes moment even more embarrassing
than that occasioned by Oyler’s novel. One
wonders why her reviews, those diatribes
against such easy targets, ever made such a
splash. Perhaps the problem was that during
the Trump presidency, literature really was a
little bit too self-righteous, so people were
thrilled to have a politically acceptable
opportunity to call bad books bad. In the
context of that “Great Awokening,” people
were understandably eager to read Oyler’s
screeds against the “moral obviousness” of
contemporary fiction—the cruder, the better.
But what, beyond the thrill of the tweet-
able insult, is the point of reading Oyler? “I
don’t really know why I write criticism,” she
admits. The primary reason seems to be “a
feeling that I need to right some discursive
wrong being committed by my colleagues
when they praise bad books or misunder-
stand good ones.” But criticism can’t simply
be about bickering among critics. In this col-
lection, Oyler not once but twice deploys the
old saw that “Writing is often nothing but
revenge,” and her writing indeed seems
aimed at little more than scoring points
against her rivals, real or imagined. The
resulting collection reads like a juvenile burn
book, totally uninterested in the world out-
side her group chat.
Since Montaigne, the best essays have
been, as the French word suggests, trials,
attempts. They entail the writer struggling
toward greater knowledge through sus-
tained research, painful introspection, and
provocative inquiry. And they allow the
reader to walk away with a freeing sense of
the possibilities of life, the sensation that one
can think more deeply and more bravely—
that there is more outside one’s experience
than one has thought, and perhaps more
within it, too. These essays, by contrast, are
incapable of—indeed, hotstile to the notion
of—ushering readers, or Oyler herself, into
new territory, or new thought. The pieces in
No Judgment are airless, involuted exercises
in typing by a person who’s spent too much
time thinking about petty infighting and too
little time thinking about anything else. n
Ann Manov is a writer living in New York.
NYU Press Broadleaf Books Broadleaf Books
“ARE YOU CALLING ME A THE MOTHER ARTIST: WE REFUSE TO BE SILENT:
RACIST?” PORTRAITS OF WOMEN’S VOICES ON
by sarita srivastava AMBITION, LIMITATION, JUSTICE FOR BLACK MEN
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Broadleaf Books
1804 Books TRESPASS: PORTRAITS OF
THE TRINITY OF UNHOUSED LIFE, LOVE,
FUNDAMENTALS Broadleaf Books AND UNDERSTANDING
by wisam rafeedie // project THE WORK IS THE WORK: by kim watson
of the palestinian youth LETTERS TO A FUTURE Writer, director, and photographer Kim
movement Watson sheds light on the experiences
ACTIVIST of the unhoused people of Los Angeles
Follow the story of a young man called by brian c. johnson in this moving collection of photo es-
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ISBN: 978-1506493-3-74

Highlights from Independent Publishers

Bookforum__Spring2024_31-2364_artJrnl 2/27/24 7:25 PM Page 1
new books for spring
Project UrbEx
Ikumi Nakamura
Foreword by Liam Wong
A thrilling photographic adventure
through an offbeat selection of the
world’s abandoned buildings,
captured by one of the videogame
industry’s most beloved creatives.
620 color and black-and-
white illustrations
$50.00 hardcover
Magnum Magnum
Edited by Brigitte Lardinois
Foreword by Olivia Arthur
Magnum Magnum showcases
the best of Magnum members,
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and brilliance of both the
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533 color illustrations
$175.00 hardcover
Venice
City of Pictures
Martin Gayford
A visual journey through
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186 color illustrations
$39.95 hardcover
Joel Meyerowitz
A Question of Color
Joel Meyerowitz,
with text by Robert Shore
Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color
traces the experiments in color and
black-and-white photography of the
young Meyerowitz, a pioneer in the
history of color photography.
194 illustrations / 120 in color
$27.95 paperback
thamesandhudsonusa.com | @thamesandhudsonusa | distributed by W. W. Norton & Co.
LAN Party
Inside the Multiplayer
Revolution
Merritt K
A loving photographic
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221 color illustrations
$45.00 hardcover
Collaboration
A Potential History
of Photography
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay,
Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas,
Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler
A radical new history of photography
from a team of esteemed writers
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complex collaborations between
photographer and subject.
724 color illustrations
$85.00 hardcover
Earthly Delights
A History of
the Renaissance
Jonathan Jones
Written by a leading art critic,
this new narrative history of the
Renaissance takes in the whole
of Europe and its global context.
170 color illustrations
$39.95 hardcover
Looking at Picasso
Pepe Karmel
A major new survey that offers
fresh insights on artworks by
one of the greatest artists of
the twentieth century, Pablo
Picasso, written by a leading
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124 color illustrations
$60.00 hardcover