Let’s Do Launch

The Clinton Hill brownstone where Kathleen Alcott’s second novel, Infinite Home (2015), is largely set is about as far away from the Apollo program’s Lunar Module—Lem, in NASA-speak—as fictional territory can be. Edith, the elderly landlord of this neglected five-unit dream factory, hasn’t raised the rent in fourteen years and lives in closer communion with the neighborhood’s past than its multi-racial, gentrifying present; the tenants are eccentrics with maladies and psychic wounds that make it impossible for them to traffic in the world outside. One night, when Edith wanders disoriented into the stairwell, they all gather around to try and ground her by naming a quality about her that they appreciate. Paulie, a keyboard-playing savant with a rare developmental disorder, plugs in a moon-shaped lamp for atmosphere. “Maybe you should hold my moon for help,” he suggests when one of the other tenants, a self-loathing stand-up comic who once wrote a holiday blockbuster while on a “five-day cocaine binge,” falters.

It’s possible to log this scene with the moon-shaped lamp as a throwaway on first reading, a moment of peak twee in the kind of hermetic reality that only exists in the imagination of certain film auteurs, or the authors of literary fiction. But Alcott is a wider-angle novelist than this, and the book’s final third opens up a different frontier altogether, following Edith’s long-lost daughter Jenny, a dropout of the 1960s, to a forgotten commune in Northern California. Now known as Song, she has been living silently apart from the world for decades in a community that reveres her as an original Mother—the same honor, we realize, that Edith’s tenants have bestowed on her in Clinton Hill. The ceremony in the stairwell that we passed over so easily is harder to dismiss now that we see the elemental connection between these two mothers; the moon-shaped lamp is no longer just a prop meant to disarm us with its manufactured innocence, but a reminder, planted strategically, of the moon’s ancient status as the closest heavenly body in the sky, and the root, as Mary Ruefle tells us, of all lyric poetry. It’s also one of those moments when a novel contains the seed for the one that will follow it—an idea that demands a fuller exploration in a very different context.


Two stills from Malena Szlam’s ALTIPLANO, 2018, 35 mm, color, sound, 15 minutes 30 seconds.
Two stills from Malena Szlam’s ALTIPLANO, 2018, 35 mm, color, sound, 15 minutes 30 seconds.

America Was Hard to Find, Alcott’s latest novel, trades the moon in plastic for NASA’s Apollo program, the comforts of a Brooklyn brownstone for the safe houses used by a 1960s radical group known as Shelter, and the private neurotic conditions of Edith’s tenants for the AIDS crisis in San Francisco under Ronald Reagan. It is an overtly feminist response, in the covert action of fiction, to the literature of the space program that came before it—think of Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979)—and a bold self-guided launch into the thermosphere from which the Major American Novel winks down indifferently at us, secure in its status and in its version of the national history. The novel’s ambitions will make comparisons to Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document inevitable, but Alcott’s channeling seems more attuned to primary sources like NASA launch transcripts and to the hallucinatory shiver of Renata Adler’s fiction.

Fay Fern, the novel’s central character, is a ’60s radical in the mold of the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton: privileged, zealously committed to the cause of ending US imperialism at home and abroad, self-denying to the point of erasure. Vincent Kahn, the first man to walk on the moon, is a test pilot by training and an American cipher who speaks in “stark, lucid imperatives” in the cockpit and hardly at all when he’s on the ground. Wright Fern, Fay’s son, is raised in exile and on the run, a situation that only gets more dire when one of Shelter’s bombs explodes in a New York brownstone and kills a schoolteacher. Wright is hounded by his resemblance to the national hero Kahn, and the question of his paternity grows into one of the novel’s most satisfying story lines. It’s not easy to graft so many cultural touchstones and political movements into one convincing narrative whole, and the procedure doesn’t always take; then again, the novel has been doing the historian’s work imperfectly at least since Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

The novel’s opening section is set at the dawn of the US space program—NASA is still called NACA and the X-15 is the greatest hope for reaching space—and Fay, nineteen, has followed her older sister Charlie in flight from the family estate to sling drinks at an airmen’s hangout in the California desert clearly modeled after Pancho Barnes’s Happy Bottom Riding Club. In The Right Stuff the club is the backdrop for the pilots’ nightly displays of virility and righteous womanizing; for Alcott, the same displays of masculinity have an air of empty desperation about them, and even a little camp. “You should know I’ve got a wife,” Vincent tells Fay on their first drive into the desert in his truck. It’s less a confession than a line from a familiar masculine script that will absolve him of any responsibility for what happens next. For Fay, the pilots are objects of scorn, and only of interest for what they can teach her: “It was a law she’d bought into without realizing,” Alcott writes, “that the only apology a man needed offer the world was his talent.”

Of course, there is the problem of sex, and Alcott is unsparing in her account of the depersonalizing effects of sexual relationships with men like Vincent—Fay is more herself when Vincent’s wife, Elise, comes to confront her about the affair one afternoon “in the depth of two p.m. blue.” She is also less alone in the world. “Walking toward Elise,” Alcott writes, Fay “believed that if someone were to push a hand up the other woman’s neck and into the blue-black of her hair, she would feel it in hers.” (It’s no coincidence that Fay is reading Whitman at the bar the first time Vincent approaches her. Her project is expansion.) The men Fay becomes sexually dependent on have a hollowing effect on both her life and her politics—none more so than Randy, the Vietnam veteran who introduces Fay to “symbolic action” in Ecuador and initiates both Fay and Wright (he is an imperfect child-revolutionary) into the underground dissident life of Shelter. Wright witnesses the brutal Group Criticism sessions, designed to strip the members of their egos so they can be reinvented as more perfect revolutionaries, and listens in on their arguments about the value of abolishing monogamy. Alcott describes the living conditions in the Shelter safe house in upstate New York pitilessly:

A fight had raged for a week in the boarded-up house, which was heated only by the detritus burned in a cracked granite fireplace. Wright watched the splintered legs of end tables disappear into ash, cheap sneakers curl like dead leaves.

The chapter devoted to the Apollo 11 mission to the moon is only fourteen pages long, and it is a marvel of compression and controlled description. Vincent and the other astronauts wake up at 4 AM and have a last breakfast of steak and eggs before they suit up and connect to all the “apparatuses” that will monitor them in space. There is a crowd of over a million people watching live at Cape Kennedy, untold millions more on TV. “It was a place without analogue,” Alcott writes when the launch is over and the men have been delivered into space, “speed here unlike speed anywhere else. Nothing out the window became anything else, reminded them of their modern power.” In this place without precedent or workable metaphor, Vincent, for a fleeting instant, finds the solitude he has “hunted all his life.” Looking out into space from the moon’s surface, he sees “a black he had never seen before, dynamic and exuberant.” It reminds him of the patent leather of “baby girls’ church shoes.” With that his life as a dynamic thinker comes to a close, and Vincent returns to Earth to be pelted with confetti at an endless series of parades and to stew in the privacy of his life as a reclusive American hero. It’s one of the novel’s master-strokes to take Kahn on a trajectory from young hotshot pilot to Lone Aggrieved White Man. Vincent is just a red MAGA hat and a few decades away from attending a Trump rally in Ohio when we last see him.

Wright ends up growing into the most compelling and fully inhabited character in Alcott’s novel, an autodidact from his years of fitful homeschooling in the company of revolutionaries and a failed attempt at norming with his grandparents once Fay has sacrificed herself—quite literally—to her ideals. While he is never entirely sure of his paternity, Wright’s letters to Vincent animate the novel’s final third with a searching intelligence and a depth of insight that make Vincent’s thought about the child’s patent leather shoe seem pedestrian. “I believe I’m the loneliest man in America,” he writes to his father. The response, once it comes, is predictably vague and noncommittal, as if it has been transmitted from the Lunar Module. Wright arrives in San Francisco in 1981, “twenty and objectively beautiful,” and concocts a résumé that will gain him entry into the merry-go-round life of a restaurant server. He discovers a fullness in having sex with men that seemed to elude Fay. He never showers afterward, because he “liked smelling foreign, liked the idea that his body had become partially the province of someone else.” Is it cruel to invent a character like Wright Fern out of whole cloth and drop him in San Francisco at year zero of the AIDS crisis? Is it stupid to invest your heart in him when you know how it will end? Fay’s ambition, at the start of America Was Hard to Find, is to make life “happen more deeply inside her.” Alcott’s novel is a finely calibrated machine that does the same for us.

Benjamin Anastas is the author of three novels and a memoir. He is fiction editor of the Bennington Review.

Are Your Commie Children Right?

A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, is a manual for the dad side, a work of rousing reassurance for open-minded men who are nonetheless sick of losing political debates to teenagers whose meals they buy.

The book is epistolary—though Gopnik drifts in and out of that frame—with the rhetoric directed toward his daughter, Olivia, whom The Guardian once described as “bright and precocious” and whose politics (as represented to the reader by her father) are recognizably Marxist. “It’s not an accident that the fullest throated defenders of the rigging of the existing order are middle-aged white men who have benefitted from the way it’s rigged,” he writes in his daughter’s voice. Gopnik’s answer is to open his throat just a bit wider.


George Frederic Watts, John Stuart Mill (detail), 1873, oil on canvas, 26 × 21".
George Frederic Watts, John Stuart Mill (detail), 1873, oil on canvas, 26 × 21″.

A Thousand Small Sanities is 250 pages of large type broken into four sections: a definition of liberalism, an analysis of critiques from the right and then the left, and a conclusion. Gopnik prides himself on offering strong versions of his opponents’ arguments, and for the most part he does so here. The book is not a work of scholarly history or political theory, it’s a rhetorical survey, more akin to the volumes of right-wing punditry that used to populate the best-seller list. But—befitting his presumptive audience—Gopnik’s register isn’t aggressive bombast, it’s humanist sentimentality. “Liberalism depends most on personal examples,” Gopnik writes, and true to form, he draws his universal lessons from dramatic biographical snippets. The juxtaposition of John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, and Bayard Rustin (among others) is supposed to bring the philosophy to life, but it reads as underdeveloped and haphazard.

The content will be familiar to anyone who reads Gopnik’s reviews in the New Yorker, which frequently focus on liberalism’s big questions and key personalities. Rather than a grand philosophical lineage, the author is interested in instances of practice (thus the title’s “small sanities”). To his credit, Gopnik doesn’t copy and paste his magazine pieces, though he seems to treat his own work as a primary source, and occasionally an unfortunate game of telephone ensues. In one particularly egregious example, referring to his hero and ideological lodestar Mill, Gopnik writes that “he did as much as anyone to make the American Civil War won by the right side by enlisting the mill workers of Britain to reject processing cotton from the Confederacy, at some cost to their own immediate interests.” This is quite a claim, and it reveals something important about Gopnik’s method as well as his ideas.

Best I can tell, Gopnik confused himself with regard to Mill’s importance. In a 2008 piece on the philosopher (“Right Again”), he concludes that the support of Lancashire cotton workers for the North on moral grounds was crucial to the Union victory, noting that “when the great American historian John Jay Chapman listed the English liberals whose words were most responsible for the workers’ resistance to slavery, he placed first the name of John Stuart Mill.” That’s not exactly what Chapman wrote. He named members of the British gentry whose “influence educated and sustained the working classes upon this whole matter,” and while it’s true he listed Mill first, that seems to have been for his fame rather than his efforts. This is classic “history from above,” where the philosopher’s thoughts are accorded more importance than the workers’ actions.

From Olivia’s perspective, it’s not surprising that Chapman would have given too much credit to bourgeois liberal intellectuals and not enough to self-organized workers—because he was a bourgeois liberal intellectual. A product of St. Paul’s, Harvard, and Harvard Law, Chapman was the son of the president of the New York Stock Exchange and a direct descendant of founding father John Jay. Right before he credits Mill, Chapman expresses surprise that the workers were quicker than the “governing classes” to understand the importance of opposing slavery—a serious failure of the historian’s imagination. Liberalism will do that to you.

To put it simply, Gopnik organizes the Right, Left, and liberals according to reaction, revolution, and reform. There’s a certain clarity and accuracy to the division, but because Gopnik’s idea of politics is primarily based on individual temperament, he’s drawn to a classification system that is essentially psychological. In his schema, conservatives are reactionaries, leftists are revolutionaries planning to bomb their way to utopia, and liberals are reformers committed to what Max Weber called the “slow boring of hard boards”—that is, parliamentary politics. This is how they’re oriented under liberalism, but liberals turn revolutionary when exposed to kings, and Marxists plan to proceed from proletarian dictatorship to communism step by nonviolent step. Hell, there’s even an important place in monarchism for wise royal reforms. But Gopnik is so committed to the temperamental model that he has been moved to question the wisdom of foundationally liberal campaigns up to and including the American Revolution.

Perhaps because it has absorbed so many of them into liberalism, the book is not overly concerned with conservative criticisms. Gopnik gives a relatively sympathetic read to Patrick J. Deneen’s (Obama-endorsed!) Why Liberalism Failed—a bland critique of liberal capitalist democracy’s spiritual deficiencies. Defending his system’s communitarian aspects, Gopnik writes, “From the devotees who travel to Comic-Con impersonating Chewbacca, to those who travel to Skepticon impersonating Christopher Hitchens, liberalism is full of community,” which is a solid trolling of everyone involved. But when it comes to the left wing, we see the author’s real frustration: Leftism is cool. As Gopnik observes:

The objections we liberals can offer always feel as feeble as a dad telling a teenage girl that she should be very careful riding in cars with other teens who drink. You sound like a schmuck compared to the cool boy who drives seat-belt-less with artfully tossed Hunter Thompson paperbacks on the back seat.

But that dad is simply, invariably right—driving drunk is an insane practice, and the liberal reproach to leftism is right, too, on more or less the same basis.

Gopnik claims that the new radical assault on liberalism doesn’t propose a practical politics “that seems likely to win elections rather than impress sophomores at Sarah Lawrence.” But there’s no actual analysis of socialism’s electoral prospects, and it all reads as thinly veiled psychological projection. Rather than analyze this historical moment with any specificity, Gopnik defaults to archetypes of parental moderation and childish radicalism that are older than Turgenev. It’s lazy, skill-less, and embarrassing. Gopnik refers to Philip Roth a lot, and though he doesn’t mention American Pastoral, the story of a prosperous, assimilated Jewish American father whose daughter falls in with dangerous radicals lurks not far behind the author’s anxiety.

For Gopnik, judging a statement based on the speaker’s identity is one of leftism’s sins. “What matters is not who says it but the sanity of what’s said,” he writes. Even more than the title suggests, the book is obsessed with the idea of sanity. As a critic I have to appreciate how honest Gopnik is with his language, though any leftist could tell him it’s considered analytically weak (and ableist) to call your adversaries “crazy.” But for him the work of liberalism is “a thousand small sanities communicated to a million sometimes eager and more often reluctant minds.” The policy choices we have to make are easy: Pick the good ones instead of the bad ones, based on science. Getting those choices made is only “hard because the self-evidence of even self-evident moral propositions is not immediately evident to every self.” If that sounds condescending, well, take a shot of liberalism and sober up, pal. And if it sounds like a recapitulation of “civilizing” colonial logic? Having been raised Canadian makes Gopnik think his nation’s crimes are small enough to excuse when compared to those of the Soviets: “Removing aboriginal kids from their homes is wrong; it is not on the same wavelength of wrongness as murdering thousands of dissidents without trial or starving whole nations into submission.” The self-evidence of that moral proposition is not evident to this reviewer’s self.

There is a small but growing industry devoted to picking apart liberals like Gopnik from the left for their brittle pomposity, their comfortable hypocrisy, their proud ignorance. A Thousand Small Sanities adds plenty of grist for that mill: The book praises William Gladstone as a “liberal internationalist avant la lettre” without mentioning his campaign (contra the brave workers of Lancashire) to protect the “rights” of Confederate slave breeders. Gopnik thinks he’s caught leftists in a bind with his new term “opportunistic essentialism”—criticizing the contradiction between the simultaneous use of essentialized identities and the critique thereof—apparently unaware that “strategic essentialism” has been an important concept in postcolonial theory for decades. There’s an asterisk for each arrogant “sanity.” But as an exercise, dunking on liberals is unfulfilling: Odds are not many people will reach for this book except to be reassured, and it does a good job of that. While good Marxists hold to the slogan “Always historicize,” Gopnik offers the alternative: “These problems are permanent.” Human nature vs. human reason is the only real conflict we’ve ever had, Trump plus global warming is a mere speed bump, and liberalism has plenty of time to make its case. Gopnik’s pop-history platitudes are “Live. Laugh. Love.” needlepoint for the MSNBC set, and the book could make a good gift. But no one should read A Thousand Small Sanities and get cocky. Any socialist teen with access to Wikipedia could rip it apart. I can’t imagine the man convinced his daughter.

Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (Little, Brown, 2017) and a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.

Huston, We Have a Problem

First published in 1952, Lillian Ross’s Picture, an eyewitness report of director John Huston’s adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, remains the paradigm of a slim genre, the nonfiction account of a movie’s making (and unmaking): from shooting to editing to studio meddling to publicity planning to preview screening to more studio meddling to, finally, theatrical release. The book is populated by raffish heroes (Huston) and tyrannical philistines (Louis B. Mayer), by the beleaguered (producer Gottfried Reinhardt) and the overweening (MGM head of production Dore Schary), and by various hypocrites, toadies, greenhorns, and wives. Envisioned by Ross as “a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form,” Picture endures as a key work of proto–New Journalism. Though Ross, a writer for more than sixty years at the New Yorker—where Picture, under the title “Production Number 1512,” was first published, in five installments—was renowned for her fly-on-the-wall reporting, she is not always invisible in the book; “I” pops up intermittently.

Ross is especially transparent in her introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Picture from 2002—included in the current reissue from NYRB Classics—in which she discusses one of the factors that led her to accept Huston’s invitation, extended in 1950, to follow him and the production of The Red Badge of Courage. “I actually was taking that opportunity to try to escape from my personal entanglement with my editor, William Shawn,” she writes. “He was then the managing editor of The New Yorker and was married, with young children. He had told me he was in love with me; I was in love with my work, and I was becoming dangerously drawn to him. I had intended to stay in Hollywood a few months; I stayed for a year and a half.” This confession appeared four years after the publication of Ross’s semi-scandalous memoir from 1998, Here but Not Here, a glowing remembrance of her four-decade affair with Shawn—a relationship that began in earnest when she returned to New York after her eighteen-month Los Angeles sojourn. Picture, considered Ross’s signature achievement as a reporter, might be thought of, then, as an oblique prequel to the book regarded (primarily by the ex–New Yorker staffers who reviewed it and/or were mentioned in it) as her most unseemly.


John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage, 1951.
John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage, 1951.

If Picture came about, in part, from a wish to avoid a deepening romance, it also provided an opportunity to solidify a burgeoning friendship. As Ross details in the introduction, she first met Huston while in Hollywood to report a piece, published in a February 1948 issue of the New Yorker, about the effects of the red-baiting hysteria of the House Un-American Activities Committee on the film industry. “Conversation with him was like fresh air,” she notes of those initial encounters. After the article ran—Huston liked it—the two began an “unusual friendship” that lasted until his death, in 1987; she would write at least three other pieces for the magazine about the actor-director. (Ross died in 2017, at age ninety-nine.) “Hanging out with him was always high-spirited fun; it invariably felt as though I were part of one of his dramatic, intriguing movie scenes,” Ross recalls.

Anjelica Huston, who was born a few months before her dad’s movie opened in 1951, also joins the love-in. In her foreword to the 1993 edition, also reprinted in the NYRB reissue, she writes, with a touch of sanctimony, “It was my father as an artist that fascinated Lillian Ross. She never sought to write gossip or to go beyond a particular line that she drew for herself in his personal life.” To illustrate why her parents “loved,” “respected,” and “trusted” the New Yorker writer, Anjelica includes a long excerpt from Ross’s introduction to her 1964 book, Reporting, part of which reads:

Just because someone “said it” is no reason for you to use it in your writing. Your obligation to the people you write about does not end once your piece is in print. Anyone who trusts you enough to talk about himself to you is giving you a form of friendship. . . . If you spend weeks or months with someone, not only taking his time and energy but entering into his life, you naturally become his friend. A friend is not to be used and abandoned; the friendship established in writing about someone usually continues to grow after what has been written is published.

The passage, insisting on journalism as an act of amity, alarms. (Taken to the extreme, the words have inspired countless mediocre celebrity profilers to post selfies with their subjects as a trophy.) It seems hopelessly sanguine and square compared with later, scaldingly self-abasing definitions of the profession. Four years after Ross’s Reporting, Joan Didion concluded her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem with this pronouncement, the original italics adding maximum chills, as if she got up from her typewriter, looked in the mirror, and saw REDRUM scrawled all over it: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” In 1989, Ross’s New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm would infamously define a journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

More to the point, Ross’s cheery Reporting 101 principle is disingenuous—and frequently violated in Picture. But that contradiction is what makes the book such a fizzy pleasure. Not everyone is a “friend.” “I happen to like forthright, up-front crooks and villains, and I gloried in finding some of them in Hollywood,” she writes in Picture’s introduction. The most contemptible of the book’s figures, unsurprisingly, is studio boss Mayer, the savage sentimentalist who never hid his antipathy toward Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel. Scribbling in three-by-five-inch notebooks, Ross waits for the damning quote—which, in the movie mogul’s case, means simply waiting for him to open his mouth. This staccato outburst typifies Mayer’s vulgar grandiosity:

“Art. The Red Badge of Courage? All that violence? No story? Dore Schary wanted it. Is it good entertainment? I didn’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong. I know what the audience wants. Andy Hardy. Sentimentality! What’s wrong with it? Love! Good old-fashioned romance!” He put his hand on his chest and looked at the ceiling. “Is it bad? It entertains. It brings the audience to the box office.”

More insidious is Schary, who at first presents himself as an ally to Huston and Reinhardt—and more generally, as an executive who understands, and will champion, Mayer’s loathed “art.” Ross notes the bronze plaque with a Ruskin quote in the reception area outside Schary’s office. During her first meeting with Schary, at Chasen’s restaurant, she is alert to his self-importance:

He spoke earnestly, as though trying to convey a tremendous seriousness of purpose about his work in motion pictures. “A motion picture is a success or failure at its very inception,” he told me. “There was resistance, great resistance, to making The Red Badge of Courage. . . . The story—well there’s no story in this picture. It’s just the story of a boy. It’s the story of a coward. Well, it’s the story of a hero.” Schary apparently enjoyed hearing himself talk.

Though Schary will later tell Ross he thinks Huston’s film “is a beautiful picture . . . a moving, completely honest, perfect translation of the book,” he demands major cuts and the inclusion of a distracting, redundant narration, which he partly wrote. (The film, which I watched on iTunes, runs sixty-nine disjointed minutes.)

Mayer and Schary are easy, and justifiable, targets. Less so is Gottfried Reinhardt’s wife, Silvia, included in Picture, it would seem, simply for the rococo non sequiturs she provides. Ross writes of Silvia’s visit to the Red Badge set: “‘We are in a constant state of osmosis,’ Mrs. Reinhardt said, paying no attention to Reinhardt’s agitation. ‘Osmosis has been going on for a very long time. A liquid of a lesser density flowing towards a liquid of a greater density through a thin membrane.’ She uttered a shrill, hopeless laugh and gave a hitch to her Army suntans.”

Gottfried, son of the eminent theater director Max, is perpetually agitated, especially after Huston leaves California, following the second of four disastrous preview screenings of Red Badge, to start his next film. Largely incommunicado, Huston is in what was then called the Belgian Congo, shooting The African Queen—an experience that led to Peter Viertel’s roman à clef White Hunter, Black Heart (1953), which presents a much less flattering portrait of the filmmaker than Picture. Ross, already a friend of Huston’s by the time she arrived in California to do her Red Badge reporting, lionizes him. Huston is charming (addressing his interlocutors as “kid” or “amigo”), witty, unruffled, bigger than life, inseparable from the magnificence of his films. “In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual ‘shots’ . . . and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture,” Ross writes early on.

That’s a bit high-flown, but Huston—at least as Ross presents him—is good company. He’s also, it turns out, clairvoyant. He doesn’t share an assistant’s anxiety about the threat of TV to the movie industry: “We’ll just make pictures and release them on television, that’s all. The hell with television.” Perversely distorted, that innocuous sentiment could be seen as a forerunner to the odious term “platform agnosticism.” What would a twenty-first-century version of Picture look like, read like? It could have only one title: Content.

Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns.

Show Your Work

Bhaskar Sunkara’s Socialist Manifesto begins by entering an imaginary world. It’s 2018 and “you” are a die-hard fan of Jon Bon Jovi, “the most popular and critically acclaimed musician of this era.” So devoted are you to the singer-songwriter that you’ve found work at the pasta sauce factory his father owns in New Jersey. The job isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing. After a year, your wages rise from $15 an hour to $17, a 13 percent increase that fails to match your recent 25 percent increase in productivity; meanwhile your colleague Debra, who’s been working there for three years, is still only making $13 an hour. Your grievances lead to the formation of a union.

Yet the rigors of the global sauce economy—low-wage competitors in India are fierce—strain the firm’s owners and its workers to the breaking point; though the union blocks management from issuing layoffs and extending the workday by an hour, things are bad regardless: “At the end of every day you’re physically and emotionally exhausted and unable to do the things outside of work you used to love.”

The scene then shifts to a fantasy Sweden, “the most humane social system ever constructed,” where strong labor laws and unions ensure your wages are high and an ample welfare state permits you to choose and change jobs with far greater ease; it’s good, Sunkara says, but we can do better. Now imagine that you’re back in Jersey, here transformed into “the epicenter of a radical political upheaval” that eventually catapults “a new left-populist movement fronted by Bruce Springsteen” into power. Controlling the White House and a congressional majority, the movement passes laws remaking the United States into a Swedish-style social democracy. Since “the economy is still driven by private enterprise,” the gains of social democracy are resented and assailed by a capitalist class eager to recover its former privileges and profit margins. Yet the organized Left now firmly controls the political high ground and successfully pushes to abolish capitalism as such: Though markets for nonessential goods continue to operate, primary resources such as food, affordable housing, and education are guaranteed and the banks are nationalized. “The decades pass on, and you eventually retire, cared for by the society that you contributed so much to, while enjoying the love of friends and family.”

Who is this scenario written for? The narrative tends to abstraction, but Sunkara does not entirely skirt the question of his audience’s identity. “Your ancestors were peasants,” he stipulates. Much later, near the book’s end, he returns to “your” medieval history. If you lived centuries ago, you would have been conscripted for war by your feudal lord: “You rallied under a blue banner with a griffin or some such creature on it.” In the present you recognize Bon Jovi and Springsteen as cultural touchstones; furthermore, “You’re an above-average student, a hard worker, and capable of thinking creatively and solving problems.” Like the final porridge bowl to Goldilocks, like Eddie Van Halen to David Lee Roth, you’re just right. If you’re not educated, pale, and left of center already, you can certainly imagine reaching that level of development; a little bit of bland imagining is all it takes. In other words, “you” are part of the 99 percent of the United States, a formation understood to be essentially white; as with Jacobin, the magazine of politics and policy Sunkara founded as a DC undergraduate in 2010, the core audience for the Manifesto is swing voters who prefer their critiques of capitalism unsullied by identitarian cant about racial divisions. The “ordinary people” the Manifesto cites are simply united; and who can fault Sunkara as he deigns to appeal to the people as they are?

A former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Sunkara can plausibly present himself, at the age of twenty-nine, as the éminence grise of a nascent American socialist movement. The Socialist Manifesto is written in the same style and bears much the same tone as his regular columns for The Guardian. A stickler for concision, Sunkara packs into its 288-page frame, alongside the inaugural speculative fiction, a condensed history of prior socialist movements across the world and a program for what is to be done politically by “our” present-day American Left. This trinity—what might be, what once was, what will be—is elaborated with a clarity best described as Orwellian. No sentence is difficult to diagram; the imposing analytic thickets typical of Western Marxist writing have been leveled down to the simplicity of grass.

Sunkara’s history of socialism begins by detailing the early decades of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), where for the first time ever Marx’s pupils headed a mass organization of the urban proletariat; the book retraces their arguments regarding policy and strategy—reform or revolution? for or against imperialism?—with diligence and insight. As a narrator Sunkara aspires to flat description. Yet his preference for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the “radical democrats” who founded the German Communist Party, is unmistakable. Their murder in 1919 by protofascist paramilitaries in collusion with the ruling SPD represents the closure of two historical paths: Capitalism remained undefeated in the West, and socialism, forced to fend for itself outside the developed world, was barbarized. “In its most formative period,” Sunkara writes, “isolated in the harsh conditions of Russia, socialism became synonymous with a bloodied collectivism.”

The book’s survey of Third World socialism presents similar evidence in the service of the same conclusion. After recounting the experience of Chinese Communism in substantial detail—its birth in the extremities of foreign invasion and civil war, its dictatorial triumph, its apocalyptic famines, its waves of mass political killings, its eventual stabilization without democratic freedom—Sunkara delivers the same verdict he did on the Soviet Union: The Chinese Communist Party’s revolution “is best understood as a national, authoritarian project, capable of delivering progress at times but far removed from the classic vision of socialism.” A cursory tour of the rest of the Red Global South (too poor, too bad, Cuba’s workers don’t have rights) concludes with an authoritative statement: “The Third World’s experience with socialism vindicates Marx. He argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces and that a robust socialist democracy requires a self-organized working class.” In other words, the presence of undemocratic socialism in the Third World is taken as proof that democratic socialism is possible only in the First World.

During the vogue for Maoism in the 1960s and ’70s, the variant known commonly as Third Worldism posited that since there existed a racialized class system between nations just as within them, revolution could only take place in the peripheral, proletarian, poor zones of the Global South. Though acknowledging in passing that the United States is “the capital of capitalism” and that “capital’s drive is global,” Sunkara seems to have arrived at an exact inversion, a First Worldism that flatters his core audience by ascribing to it transformative potential it has yet to display, a unique opportunity to create what he describes as a “better sort of socialism.” It is much to his credit that, as he reviews the fortunes of the Left in the civilized, wealthy, industrial Global North, he admits that socialism has yet to exist there. The fate of Olof Palme’s Sweden proves how social democracy, having harnessed capital without abolishing it, becomes vulnerable in stagnant times to demands for a freer rein, a rollback of welfare benefits to restore profitability. Meanwhile François Mitterrand’s France demonstrates the hazards of leaping from social democracy to democratic socialism. Faced with expropriation, the captains of finance and industry retaliated with a capital strike, crushing an already weak economy by withdrawing and withholding investment until Mitterrand capitulated. “The French socialists were forced into a dramatic U-turn, not just halting their march forward but embracing the politics of austerity.”

And what’s left in these United States, generally regarded as a developed country? Sunkara presents an encyclopedic knowledge of various American anti-capitalist parties, many of them socialist, some of them playing important roles in larger fights for social equality, but none of them close to taking power. By the end of the recital a lamenting tone creeps into his measured prose. “Why was the United States different from other advanced capitalist countries? Why didn’t it have an independent working-class party to build, if not socialism, then at least a social-democratic welfare state? . . . Why is there no socialism in the United States?” In answer, he attributes the disarray of the American working class primarily to “the threat of violent repression.” (One wonders, then, why mass socialist parties succeeded in China and Russia under no less brutal conditions.) Still, the “popularity of the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and the inspiring activism of the last several years” give him hope in the darkness. The book’s final section consists of a summation of Western neoliberalism; a recollection of Corbyn’s Labour takeover and a relitigation of Sanders’s 2016 Democratic primary campaign; a fifteen-point road map for building a socialist party in America; and a promise that socialist politics is the best solution to the looming perils of nationalism and global warming.

How does one review a manifesto fairly? As Sunkara’s fifteenth point says, “History matters.” Like The Communist Manifesto, his book exemplifies how the past dictates the future. The reading of what was determines the horizons of what will be. The difference is that while Marx interpreted the history of capitalism to justify the future emergence of world communism, Sunkara is interpreting the history of Marx’s own apostles as he hopes for the future emergence of American socialism. The novelty of Marx’s manifesto electrifies; knowing that nothing like communism has existed before, it speeds toward the day when communism will be everything. The Socialist Manifesto is restrained, almost apologetic; it is haunted by the specters of pessimism and belatedness, the knowledge that socialism has already been tried, already been found wanting.

Lacking dialectical prowess, what’s left to fall back on? It’s no accident that Sunkara’s approach to facts resembles nothing so much as that of a Southern Baptist youth pastor; readers are coached like kids ready to stray at the slightest indication that faith is difficult to keep. The book applauds the lively disputes between socialists in prewar Germany and Russia, but the existence of Western Marxist currents other than its own is buried in silence. The pervasive and all but insoluble bigotry that characterized most of the American labor movement throughout its “long and distinguished history” is stowed away in endnotes. The critical role of the American state in exterminating socialist movements across the Third World is mentioned once; its role in shutting socialist parties out of power in Western Europe is not mentioned at all. The Cold War is barely mentioned and never examined.

The intent behind this airbrushing appears to be tactical, to render American socialism more palatable by playing down the degree to which socialism has been anti-American and America has been anti-socialist. Yet what is lost, really, by acknowledging how much the extreme hostility of the American capitalist state to socialist freedom movements across the world has contributed to their failure? By demonstrating how that state’s tremendous military, covert, and financial power has been consistently deployed to besiege and undermine its enemies, to the point that socialists must adopt a paranoid, militarized, hierarchical organization to survive (thereby surrendering democracy), open up to capital investment and exploitation (thereby surrendering socialism), or else surrender unconditionally? Why obscure the fact that capital, in the West, under neoliberalism, is on permanent strike, its primary profits divorced from both employment and the manufacturing sector, and thus essentially immune to labor agitation? Why pretend that an America under socialism would retain its privileged status in the world economy, despite that status being dependent on the linked imperial rents of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, fossil-fuel conglomerates, and the military-industrial complex? “Better than others, we [socialists] can perceive class relations and how they offer common avenues of struggle,” Sunkara claims. But a sustained and penetrating analysis of present-day America—its economy, society, culture, and politics—is as absent from The Socialist Manifesto as the hard accounting of how much risk one runs in seeking to improve America for its most oppressed citizens. Not only does this book begin with make-believe, its unrealness never ends.

Frank Guan is a writer living in New York.

You Better Work

If I see Joan Didion’s packing list on Instagram one more time, I’m going to scream. And then I am absolutely going to click. We all have our baggage, we just want to know how to organize it. What if a streamlined suitcase is the missing link, the unheralded key to writing sentences like skate blades? Best to memorize the method, just in case. And so Didion’s scribbled checklist lives inside my head: two skirts, two jerseys, cigarettes, bourbon, Basis soap, Tampax, mohair throw, baby oil, aspirin, etc. I’ve seen this list most often on social-media feeds, but it also pops up in publications from time to time: Vogue, or Into the Gloss, or Racked, or Elle, or Smithsonian magazine, or the blog for the Ace Hotel. It usually comes with a self-help-ish headline. “You Too Can Pack Like Joan!” And no matter what, I stop to gaze. Maybe this time, I’ll learn.

I really want to know how everyone else does everything. It helps if the person is accomplished in some tangible way, but, really, you do not have to be a paragon of crisp anxiety standing next to a Stingray for me to care about your quotidian rituals. I once spent an entire afternoon of my one wild and precious life reading a Twitter thread about strangers’ skincare regimens. I live for those “here’s my process” threads on social media where someone lobs an open-ended question into the void like a jump ball and everyone pounces: How do you find time to read? What’s your go-to healthy lunch to make while working from home? What film scores are best to listen to while writing? What YouTube clips do you watch at two in the morning? How many towels do you own? No one answer to these queries is ever earth-shattering; it’s the quantity of replies that I find comforting. I like being reminded that there are so many ways to live, stuck as I am in my own body, my own tightly coiled routine.


Marisa Takal, Open Processing IV: What Are You Going to Do? (detail), 2018, oil on canvas, 36 × 52".
Marisa Takal, Open Processing IV: What Are You Going to Do? (detail), 2018, oil on canvas, 36 × 52″.

The impulse to dive into other lives in order to find attractive templates is not new; I mean, one could argue (as I’m sure many hip youth pastors have tried to) that Jesus was the original lifestyle blogger. The internet, however, does exacerbate and capitalize on this voyeuristic desire. Nearly every site has a jeweled showcase for the day-to-day habits of other people: money diaries, food diaries, sex diaries, bathroom “shelfies,” Sunday routines, “By the Book” interviews about authors’ nightstands, Q&As with high-powered women about “how they get it done.” And this is just what’s mediated for the official record by publications. Flick on Instagram Stories, and you can sit for hours traipsing through the bedrooms and kitchens of celebrities you will never know, or visually babysitting the children of distant acquaintances whose names you forget when you run into them at a party. Proust spent a decade going to parties so that he could linger in his bed and write about them while lying down; nowadays he would never have to assume a vertical position again.

When Mason Currey, a writer in Los Angeles, published Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, in 2013, it felt destined to be popular. Perfectly giftable and suited for the nightstand or the back of the toilet, the squat, chunky volume contained brief meditations on the ways 161 artists got through the day. Currey did archival research to gather his facts, but, much like his blog, Daily Routines, the book is a pleasure for its breadth more than its depth: seeing all of these artists’ lives jammed together into the same slipstream, the same desire to transcend the doldrums of everyday existence and leave something, anything, behind. Currey’s entries often read like a whimsical Wikipedia in which he seizes on idiosyncratic details from each writer/painter/performer’s life (Balzac’s obscene coffee addiction, Nikola Tesla’s Waldorf Astoria dinners, James Joyce’s tendency to sleep in). Each entry is a portrait in miniature—a person’s work process as synecdoche for the work itself. The book became a cult hit, especially among writers, who are always looking to avoid deadlines by reading about how someone else met them.

Entertaining as the book was, it also had some serious blind spots—namely, that of the 161 figures featured, only 27 were women. (As Currey himself calculated, the book was exactly 17 percent women.) Currey regrets this disparity, or at least understands that people were angry at him about it, and he comes to the introduction of his new sequel, Daily Rituals: Women at Work (Knopf, $25), with his hat in his hands: “How could I have let the book go to press with such a glaring gender imbalance? I don’t have a great answer,” he writes. He continues:

My idea for the book had been to profile the “great minds” of Western culture from the last few hundred years, and I thought that its success depended on the high-low juxtaposition of famous names and their mundane daily habits. Unfortunately, the side effect of focusing on the most well-known figures in Western literature, painting, and classical music is that they are overwhelmingly men.

Currey’s bias toward Western culture aside, it is more than a bit disappointing to find him explaining away his erasure of women artists with the broad term “great minds.” And yet here he is, offering up a mea culpa in the form of a new volume, with 143 lives and routines and not a man in sight. If you think it’s odd to separate women into their own volume, as if there is one book about the real artists over there, and then this addendum if you care to venture into the B sides, Currey writes that he thought the very same thing. “Of course, I’m aware of the danger of separating ‘women artists’ from just artists (and in a book by a man, no less!).” But he didn’t think this was enough of a reason not to sally forth on the project; nor did he feel the need to bring on a woman collaborator.

Currey’s method, pulling out quirky threads from the broader fabric of a life, is still irresistible; flipping through this book is as soothing as clicking the “random article” button on Wikipedia at three in the morning until you are lulled to sleep with minutiae about the Battle of Thermopylae. And yet many of the entries seem to lack a center. Currey nods dutifully to the commitments, blockades, and extracurricular demands that hamper many creative women’s lives: childcare, relationship maintenance, housework, overt and covert sexism, creepy men, controlling men, men who are the gatekeepers, men who are professionally jealous, systemic barriers. But he never wants to lean into them, lest he be accused of stripping women of their creative musculature. So, of the writer and activist Grace Paley, he repeats her flippant comment about being both an artist and a mother (Paley famously said her secret was “pure neglect”) without investigating the confounding pressures that might have led her to make an offhand joke about bad parenting. He writes about Octavia Butler’s series of “horrible little jobs” as a “dishwasher, a telemarketer, a warehouse worker, and a potatochip inspector” but does not mention her race, nor the struggles she overcame to find acceptance in the science fiction community as a black woman inventing fantastical worlds.

Here, the cracks in Currey’s formula begin to show: The entries are too mediated, too curated, too burnished. He manages the trick of squeezing 143 women into a tight and portable carrying case, and even works in some original interviews, but it feels strange to abridge these lives when so many of the women were not given latitude to roam through history as it happened. I found myself wanting so much more information about each woman, and her very particular challenges, and how those challenges intersected with those of the women on adjoining pages, than Currey could ever pipe between the covers of an illustrated giftbook. Of course, Currey is simply following the current publishing formula for recovering women’s history: Treat them like novelty items, like something shiny you might pick up at the register along with a scented candle and gum.

I far preferred reading another new compendium about women’s creative labor, Women at Work, Volume II: Interviews from the Paris Review (Paris Review Editions, $20). Emily Nemens, the editor of the Paris Review (the magazine has only had women editors for two of its sixty-five years), writes in her introduction that expanding the “Women at Work” series was one of her first tasks after taking over the magazine in the summer of 2018. Choosing twelve interviews to reprint for the new edition, she says, “made room for discovery, for surprises, and for a bit of strangeness.” She notes that the first volume, published in 2017, included heavy hitters from the archives (Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Morrison, Simone de Beauvoir, Dorothy Parker, Didion) but was centered on the Western canon. Volume II expands the scope somewhat to include Latin American and American Indian perspectives (Luisa Valenzuela and Louise Erdrich), plus several interviews with writers who are not American (Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Jeanette Winterson). Expanding the range of literary genres was also a goal: Here you find poets (Maya Angelou, May Sarton) and playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein) among the novelists and essayists. But mainly the “Women at Work” series offers a chance to hear women define ambition in their own words. As Nemens notes, all Paris Review interviews are collaborations between the questioner and the author; there’s a chemical reaction that takes place within the Q&A format that changes what tumbles out. The interviews are also long—luxuriantly so—and the women taking part are invited to wander. No woman is ever reduced to a sound bite, or to what sort of breakfast foods she likes.

Perhaps this is why I keep clicking on that Didion list—it offers a glimpse of how someone lives, unmediated by judgments or summaries. Didion made it in her own hand, and it reminds me of all the times I have scrawled a list on the back of a deli receipt the night before a reporting trip, anxious not to forget anything, bursting with the opportunity, worried I’m going to mess it all up. I can relate to that immediacy, as I relate to Didion’s comment, revealed in her own Paris Review grilling, that the most important writing ritual she observes is “an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day.” For his entry on Didion, Currey mostly quotes from her Paris Review interview. Perhaps he realizes that unfiltered words are the most potent, the best chance to commune with another person and hope that their experience can bleed into our own.

Rachel Syme lives in New York City. She currently writes the “On and Off the Avenue” fashion column for the New Yorker.

The Socialism Network

Sally Rooney. Sally Rooney! Sally Rooney, the twenty-eight-year-old Irish novelist celebrated as the “first great millennial author,” is interested in weird relationships, or relationships that seem weird but are quietly common within the young, educated, and progressive milieu she depicts. Her debut, 2017’s Conversations with Friends, concerns a nonmonogamous not-quite-affair between Frances, a twenty-one-year-old student/budding writer, and Nick, a sexy, depressed actor in his thirties; judging, resenting, and flirting from the edges of this initially secret romance are his wife, Melissa, and Bobbi, Frances’s dazzling best friend and former girlfriend. This year’s Normal People (Hogarth, $26), which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, follows Marianne and Connell, an on-again, off-again couple, from their final year of high school (in the country) through the end of their university years (in Dublin). Though it’s clear they love each other, what’s going on with them—their friends frequently want to know—is contingent on pride, their immature senses of what their relationship should be, and good old-fashioned miscommunication.

Rooney writes in a way that satisfies the literary Goldilocks: Her books are plotted but not too plotted, stylish but not too stylish, political but not too political, modern but not too modern. The novels are love stories but not too much so, mostly because their endings are nontraditionally happy, on the good side of what a woman recounting her romantic situation to a friend might call “complicated.” What makes the works representatively millennial is not just the way Rooney’s characters communicate (electronically and with a qualified, almost defensive irony); it’s also that the author herself seems representatively representational: A painstaking awareness of class and gender dynamics guides her characters’ inner lives as well as how they interact. “I don’t really believe in the idea of the individual,” Rooney told the New York Times last year—a very millennial thing to say. “I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy, and the way we construct one another.”


Sally Rooney, 2017.
Sally Rooney, 2017.

Her characters are charming and intelligent enough, but what sticks out about them is their circumstances, which Rooney mines to produce individual personalities and social expectations; they do not seem real so much as realistic, identifiable, relatable. The first sentence of Normal People— “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell”—establishes the power dynamic of their relationship on two levels. The first is that his single mother is her family’s maid, and he is coming to pick her up from work in their shared car. The second is that Marianne will always come when Connell calls. In school, both are “smart”—which of them is smarter is a recurring topic in their banter—but she is a sassy loser with no friends, “an object of disgust” who neither wears makeup nor shaves her legs, while he is, despite his shyness, a popular soccer player. None of their classmates know they’re friendly after school, and when they begin sleeping together, he makes her promise not to tell anyone.

Despite the cruelty of Connell’s request—for which he is scolded by his saintly mother—Marianne complies; we come to understand that her submissiveness, which extends to her sex life, is a legacy of her abusive family, who are as awful as Connell’s mother is lovely. (Both main characters are fatherless: Hers died; his has been kept a secret.) Their romance develops—she encourages him to apply to Trinity College Dublin rather than settle for university in Galway like his friends—and when she tells him about her family, it feels like the “beginning of [her] life”; previously, she’d “had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.” He tells her he loves her and will never hurt her, and then he asks a mean girl to a dance. Marianne is so upset that she leaves school and stops speaking to him for the rest of the term.

Once they’re at university, the situation flips: Marianne is suddenly cool and in demand socially, her mild cynicism and worldliness having found an environment where they’re appreciated; Connell relies on the kindness of rich kids for party invites. They begin sleeping together again, for a while, and the rest of the narrative charts the issues raised by the asymmetrical aspects of their relationship. But even when they hurt each other, the result is oddly harmonious; every advantage in a character’s life is balanced with a disadvantage, such that Connell and Marianne end up “like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions” or “like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it surprises them both.”

Rooney is a “lifelong Marxist,” but in both of her novels a character’s relative money problems are solved, or at least eased, by convenient contrivances. Connell’s discomfort with his working-class roots does have consequences for the couple, but his issues more or less vanish about halfway through the novel, when both he and Marianne are awarded large scholarships. It’s less a plot device or source of tension than an opportunity for Rooney to make a point. For Marianne, the money is merely “a happy confirmation of what she has always believed about herself anyway: that she’s special,” but for Connell it is “the substance that makes the world real,” that allows him to travel and to think about stuff besides rent. Luckily, they’re both smart and reasonable enough not to resent each other for the imbalance. “I guess we’re from very different backgrounds, class-wise,” Connell says when they get the news of their windfalls. “I don’t think about it much,” Marianne replies, before quickly adding: “Sorry, that’s an ignorant thing to say. Maybe I should think about it more.”

I didn’t appreciate the voice and humor of Rooney’s debut until I read Normal People, which is so even-toned that it’s not disturbing. Conversations with Friends likewise features an attempt to straighten out a “power disparity,” but because the debut is narrated in the first person, the effect is less forced; appropriately, most of the effort to balance power takes place on the level of conversation, rather than within the novel’s structure. “I couldn’t decide if I had complete control over you or no control at all,” Frances, who is definitively smarter but also poorer than her older boyfriend, tells him. When he asks what she settled on, she says complete control; his reply is that “He thought it was healthy for us to try and correct the power disparity, though he added that he didn’t think we would ever be able to do it completely.” When she tells him his wife has called him “pathologically submissive,” he points out that “helplessness was often a way of exercising power.”

Though sex is something all Rooney’s characters think, talk, and worry about, descriptions of the act in both novels are mainly notable for how not-embarrassing the writing is; they don’t necessarily dramatize the power imbalances between the characters, which are made explicit elsewhere. Marianne’s submissiveness in bed is fraught, the subject of campus rumor, and directly linked to her abusive upbringing, minor eating disorder, and self-loathing; she tells other people about it with the confidence of someone who is confident in little except her relative superiority. Most of the time, that’s all she really needs, though her intelligence occasionally does her more harm than good. “Feeling worldly,” she tells a jerk boyfriend, “You know, I like guys to hurt me.” At which point he does, and she hates herself for it, which only makes her want it more. Meanwhile she muses dismissively of Connell, who is “wholesome like a big baby tooth” and now awkwardly in the friend zone: “Probably never in his life has he thought about inflicting pain on someone for sexual purposes.” Their sex, when they’re in a romantic phase, is good, but she’s right—he eventually refuses to hit her when she asks, which destabilizes her: He’s denying her the power in helplessness she seems to want, the ability to control her circumstances by intentionally relinquishing control.

In Rooney’s novels, writing is a way for the lower-class characters to establish agency and selfhood; if you can’t control the world, or other people’s impressions of you, you can approach control over your work. Early on, Connell, who is “moved” by literature, attempts to interpret Marianne like a character in a book, transforming her into something he can study and coolly analyze:

Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them . . . long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. Then he turns a new page in the notebook so he doesn’t have to look at what he’s done.

Rooney doesn’t write like this now, with lots of clauses, as if overcome by emotion; she writes as if emotions are phenomena to be observed, if not external then at least not fully attached to the person experiencing them. (She has this in common with Tao Lin.) At university, Rooney was a champion debater—ranked first in Europe—and in an essay about the experience she expressed her horror at being described as “passionate.” She wanted to be “aloof and cerebral.” In her novels, it seems she’s advocating a balance she hasn’t yet achieved; the unwavering neatness of her books leads to pat lessons and characters totally lacking in mystery. Both her writer protagonists—Frances and Connell—enjoy success only after they learn to be vulnerable in their relationships, but formally, Rooney ends up enacting the kind of control over the text that its content argues against. What I mean by this is that the ending of Normal People is really cheesy. Eventually Connell’s writing improves, and he’s accepted to a creative-writing MFA program in New York. While it means they’ll have to be apart and maybe break up, Marianne encourages him to go, content in knowing that each of them has given the other something in their lives. It’s so reasonable it’s almost absurd, though NYU acceptance as happy ending is very millennial.

Lauren Oyler is a writer based in New York.

The Drama of the Gifted Children

Fifty pages into this novel—Susan Choi’s fifth—I was ready to write about it. I understood its design and I admired its execution. So let’s just start there—with what I knew. Two fifteen-year-olds, Sarah and David, attend a prestigious arts school, the Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts (CAPA). Neither can drive, but both can have sex. They fall in love, though this is probably not the right word for what they experience. Their love is colossal. Monstrous. Steamy and feral. They are kids entrained by desire into appearing older and more savvy than they are.

He looked alien to her, unhandsome, though this quibble peeped faintly at her from beneath the hard weight of her lust. The lust in its turn was eclipsed by another and unprecedented emotion, an onrush of sad tenderness, as if the man he would be, full of unguessed-at darkness and weakness, had for a brief instant shown through the boy.

It is the early ’80s. CAPA and its esteemed faculty are teaching Sarah, David, and their assemblage of friends how to act—in this case, how to be. Among the faculty is Mr. Kingsley, a prime mover for the school and the kids, who mobilizes Sarah and David’s rapport for the betterment of the class, himself, or both. There are trust exercises. Repetition—the Meisner Technique—in which students take note of each other, voice their notes, and repeat. Observe, articulate, repeat. Dispense with pretense; embrace the spontaneity of the real. I liked this novel. You liked this novel. I liked this novel.

The atmosphere of these early pages is ripe, and the body is uppermost. Teenagers!

Joelle, precociously fleshy and pungent, so obliviously manifests the carnal that Sarah’s own self-conscious carnality becomes disgusting to her, along with her own flesh, her own scent. Joelle’s enormous breasts are heavily freckled, their trapped clefts and creases are constantly sweaty; Joelle’s crotch, encased in her jeans, trails an olfactory banner like some sort of sticky night flower to inflame jungle bats.

And so it goes, as Choi documents with flair what happens to these kids over the course of the school year. There’s almost an anthropological component here, a David Attenborough–like pleasure in looking at this strange species from afar, as they eat their Funyuns and SweeTarts, shoplifting some of it but always throwing the wrappers in the garbage. As they purport to know everything about each other, even as they know nothing. What a strange and marvelous lot.

It might bear mention that it is pretty difficult to write about teenagers—especially young teenagers—and expect an adult readership to care. The melodrama. The histrionics. The solipsism, which will seem especially galling in these apocalyptic times. For an adult readership, teen stories usually come off as nostalgic at best, banal at worst. How many novels can you think of that deliver a teenager with sufficient tenacity and aplomb to make her interesting? Five? I tend to like young characters when they’re able to offer up a different perspective on well-trodden terrain. A four-year-old who sees the Holocaust from the knees down. A thirteen-year-old whose menses syncs up with the destruction of Hiroshima. But a bunch of fifteen-year-olds in thrall to dramas of their own devising? Only an exceptionally good writer with a surfeit of guile and guts will be able to pull that off. Which makes the first half of Trust Exercise a feat in its own right.

And yet, something about these early pages felt off. The plotlines that never got going. The red herrings. The unrelenting fury of Sarah and David’s relationship as it implodes silently. The uniform intensity in which nothing is modulated. For instance: “The force of the wind as Karen’s car speeds along isolates Sarah in the back seat, her tornado of hair intermittently blinding and gagging her.”

Blinding and gagging. What will be left to say should Sarah actually be blinded and gagged? From a writer’s point of view, if you want to render with fidelity an especially profane snatch of dialogue you overheard on the subway, you don’t transcribe it verbatim. You stylize it so that in dropping much of the profanity, you actually capture just how profane it was. I am paraphrasing an argument in Douglas Bauer’s excellent chapter on dialogue in his book The Stuff of Fiction, but it applies equally to, for instance, rendering the molten-hot inner life of a teenager. You calibrate tone; you turn the volume up and down. Which is all to say: I expected a sentence maker of Choi’s caliber—and she is first-rate—to know something was off.

Which, it turns out, she did.


Derek Ridgers, Stoke Newington (detail), 1981, silver bromide print, dimensions variable.
Derek Ridgers, Stoke Newington (detail), 1981, silver bromide print, dimensions variable.

Vladimir Nabokov famously likened his characters to galley slaves. They do what he wants. Choi’s relationship to narrative is similar; she is in complete control. Everything is by design. If the executing of this environment of teenagers seems even slightly dubious, it’s because Choi wants it to be.

Which brings me back to my initial observation re: what this novel was about. I thought I knew, but I had no idea.

Unfortunately, to engage with Trust Exercise’s second half, which means engaging with its actual project, is to disclose what that project is, which I cannot do without ruining its power of effect. So I will dance around it. Dance with me.

Sarah’s and David’s adult selves haunt the novel’s early pages from the wings, so it’s not a huge surprise to encounter these adult selves later. They both end up in the arts. They have a complicated relationship to their past. And their story gets told by someone else. Sort of. Consider the latter half of the novel full of new perspectives on the material we’ve just lived through. The heat gets turned off, and in its place: analysis, in the guise of an adult voice that is shrewd and tempered—essentially the opposite of what we’d gotten comfortable with. What once flew in the rarefied air of teen feeling plummets into the dark, petty, and mean streets of adulthood. If nothing else, this new voice is testament to Choi’s facility with voice—she can do it all.

In the second half, vantage becomes an issue—who’s telling this story, anyway? Likewise, new characters emerge as loci of pain and vectors for Choi’s thematic concerns. To what degree can we let ourselves be known? To what degree do we permit ourselves to believe we know each other? These are some of the questions that come up as the novel takes a closer look at just what transpired that sophomore year so long ago, but which fated so many lives to veer in the directions they did.

If these characters as we meet them now are less introspective than they could have been, it’s because the novel does the introspecting for them. It is self-aware. And involuted—less in the sense of being abstruse than of being turned in on itself to have a closer look.

This novel is bold.

This novel is bold.

This novel is bold?

It is. And just by reemphasizing some parts over others, the novel gives us a different way to think about what we’ve learned so far. Just what did happen?

Well, there were the English People—a performing troupe from a high school in Bournemouth—who tangle enough with Sarah and her friend Karen to warrant pages of the troupe’s chaperone and star engaged in simian banter. Why?

There is a sexy and revolting scene (Choi is a master at depicting how mutually exclusive feelings often coexist) between Sarah and her new, albeit temporary, love interest from the English troupe:

He didn’t touch her so much as he yanked, poked, jabbed, squeezed as if her body were some sort of toy—and yet she heard herself, a rising note of protest or a siren of warning, “Noooo, noooo, noooo.” And the horrible pleasure, pushing outward from her like a flower of flesh with great muscular petals like tongues, in its enormous agonizing opening so overpowered her she could not even feel his “willy,” or any other part of him anywhere in or near her, as if he’d shrunk to a speck and been swept out to sea on the flood of her unwanted pleasure.

Jesus.

There is innuendo and insinuation and a hint of the sinister that gets explored more aggressively as the novel proceeds. Trust and, by extension, consent are not exercises anymore. Turns out they never were.

In the end, there’s no shortage of insight in this novel. Or pathos (there is a wonderful set piece with two girls on a plane that is heartbreaking in the extreme). But what we really have here is a meditation on trust. Trust between people in a power dynamic, but also, importantly, trust between reader and narrative. How much can we trust what we’re being told by this novel? How much can we trust what we’re being told by anyone?

In sum, this novel is not as it seems.

Now, look: There’s always someone crying “gimmick” at a writer who departs from tradition. But what distinguishes gimmick from strategy depends on how necessary that strategy is for prosecuting a work of art’s central argument. In this novel, it’s necessary. Choi has us acquiesce, with reservation, to her design. And then she works us over. Not everyone likes to be worked over. But I do.

Fiona Maazel is the author of the novels A Little More Human (2017), Woke Up Lonely (2013; both Graywolf), and Last Last Chance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

Home Truths

In her new book, Women’s Work, celebrated war correspondent Megan K. Stack remembers scoffing when she first read Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate-feminist manifesto Lean In. “Who were these women who didn’t speak at meetings or take their seats at the table?” Stack wondered. She had thought she knew how to navigate life as a woman; she’d earned a place of respect in a high-stakes field. She was used to a certain amount of quotidian sexism, but it was “basically manageable,” she writes, “not ideal, certainly, even enraging, but navigable.” Or at least it seemed that way—“right up until the baby came.”

After the baby arrives, “basically manageable” goes out the window. In the early days of parenthood, trying to make sense of her new circumstances, Stack types these notes to herself:

You become unable to take seriously any feminist who hasn’t had children in a heterosexual relationship. You have learned that’s where the bloodiest, hardest most intractable battle lies, and that it lies there mostly hidden because millions of families balance on the silence.

Women’s Work is the story of Stack’s efforts to reconcile her previous understanding of the world as a journalist with her new understanding as a mother. Writing is the work she wants to do, her “real” work, but “women’s work” is the labor that now makes up her life: childcare, housekeeping, and managing the women hired to help. The last of these tasks is the one she finds most troubling. Yet she also knows that, without it, everything else falls apart. It’s an uneasy combination and the book’s central tension: Stack wants to better comprehend her situation, but she’s also afraid of what she might find.

The book, too, is an uneasy combination. The first quarter or so of Women’s Work is largely a memoir of early motherhood, with all its pain and anxiety, in the tell-it-like-it-is tradition of Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. The final quarter finds Stack in journalist mode, bringing her professional skills to bear on her own story. In between, she describes her experiences alongside the three women who make her family life possible: Xiao Li, Pooja, and Mary.

Stack’s husband, Tom, is also a foreign correspondent. Work brings them together—they met on the job at the Baghdad airport—and structures their shared life. When she becomes pregnant with their first child, they’re living in Beijing, where Stack covers China for the Los Angeles Times. She’s just been nominated for a National Book Award for her 2010 volume of dispatches from the Middle East, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War, and now she wants to write a novel. She decides to quit her day job and work from home with their child.

Accustomed to being on equal footing with her husband, Stack had always assumed that when they had a baby, “to the extent that our lives would be exploded, the disruption would be evenly shared.” But Tom returns to work two weeks after the birth. Stuck at home with postpartum hormones and no sleep, Stack struggles to explain where her days go. Time vanishes into the fog of chore. What’s preventing her from doing her work isn’t a boys-club boss or internalized misogyny: It’s all the other work, Stack writes, “the work we pretend doesn’t exist.”

That invisible labor has long been a feminist concern, with solutions ranging from the chore-chart practicality of Alix Kates Shulman’s second-wave “A Marriage Agreement” to the Wages for Housework movement conceived by Italian Marxists in the 1970s. It’s the phenomenon that sociologists Arlie Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung called “the second shift” in their 1989 book of the same name and a theme that runs through a modern microgenre of magazine stories inaugurated by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic feature “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Stack does not discuss or acknowledge this history, and the omission manages to work both for and against her. This is not breaking news, you want to tell her. Do the homework. But, at the same time, Stack’s sense of discovery is fresh, her anger is still hot, and these qualities give her story its force. Instead of applying existing frameworks of feminist analysis, she mostly keeps the reader pressed right up against the glass, observing her day-to-day experience. This makes it hard to look away but also hard not to feel claustrophobic. Women’s Work brings the reader into uncomfortable intimacy with Stack’s family, right alongside the women she hires.

“Help is affordable,” other expatriates are quick to assure Stack and Tom. “It was a euphemistic phrase,” she writes. “It meant ‘Human beings are cheap here.’” The woman they hire in Beijing, Xiao Li, cooks, cleans, and helps with the baby; she works ten-hour weekdays, plus Saturdays with overtime pay. (She also has a two-hour commute.) They pay her “less than five hundred dollars a month.” Stack is ecstatically grateful to Xiao Li but also feels guilty. “Like Apple computers or Goodyear tires, I reaped the benefit of cheap Chinese labor,” she writes. “But unlike those companies, I lived in my own factory, and spent more time with the cheap laborers than I spent with my spouse.”

That proximity also means that the family’s employees become a presence in Stack’s marriage, a frequent subject of squabbles and disputes. In one early episode, Xiao Li’s young daughter, who lives with grandparents outside the city, gets sick; Stack has given Xiao Li time off. But her absence is a strain. Stack doesn’t have any time to write. “So fire her,” suggests Tom. Stack demands to know what he’d do if their own son were hospitalized and she had a boss who fired her for visiting him.

“Obviously,” he said unrepentantly, “I would be furious.”
“But you’d do it to somebody else.”
“Because I have to worry about our family. And we are not a welfare state.”

No one was asking if they were a welfare state; the question was whether they felt bound to treat the woman in their employ as they themselves expect to be treated.

Stack senses something poisonous in the power they wield and in what it’s doing to them. The family moves from Beijing to Delhi just before they have a second child; there, they hire two women, Mary and Pooja, to replace Xiao Li. Their intimacy becomes even more inescapable: Unlike Xiao Li, the women speak fluent English, so there’s no language barrier, and Pooja lives with Stack’s family, in servants’ quarters behind their home. Xiao Li’s personal life remained entirely unseen; now they must decide what to do about Pooja’s husband—they discover that he’s abusive. Tom doesn’t go so far as to suggest firing Pooja, but he does wonder whether it would be better for all parties if she chose to leave. “Her private life is part of our private life,” he tells Stack. “We can’t have our kids around domestic abuse.” She writes:

Sometimes when Tom and I stretched side by side in bed, having a conversation like this, I’d mentally slip out of my skin to eavesdrop on a couple discussing their servants. It was a disgusting sensation, and I was filled, each time, with a yawning despair. In order to liberate ourselves from the chores, to continue the work we believed was crucial, we had converted our home into a job site. I was a manager—not of a bureau or a newsroom, but of a claustrophobic domestic universe. We held a dismaying amount of power over vulnerable people, and that meant grappling with the ethics, finances, schedules, and personalities. Every time we talked like this—which was often—I disliked Tom and disliked myself and felt a queasy certainty that Tom, too, must share this disgust.

She resents Tom’s freedom from her domestic universe, and senses his resentment when she attempts to pull him into it. He “was still at large in the world,” she writes. “He stuck up for the underdogs. He interviewed dissidents and human rights lawyers and Tibetan monks. He had become a parent and kept his career without making any degrading compromises.” Distance allows him to keep his idealism intact. Somewhere between Xiao Li’s daughter’s illness and Pooja’s abuse, Tom receives a phone call from Ethel Kennedy informing him that he’s won the Robert F. Kennedy award for human rights reporting. “He would travel to New York to be feted,” Stack writes. She remembers this call a few days later, when the two are eating lunch in a café and he asks how her book is going. She begins to answer, but before she’s finished, his attention wanders; he pulls out his phone. “Do you mind if we get the check?” he asks her. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

Have structural factors drafted Tom into the role of The Man? Is this some kind of Tom-specific problem? Is he actually as bad as he sounds? Stack can’t quite say, but, regardless, she’s the one left alone with a sense of being inescapably conflicted and complicit. Worrying about the women and wanting to do right by them becomes yet another kind of women’s work. She finds herself in an impossible position, her self-preserving avoidance directly in conflict with her instincts as a journalist. “If I found out too much, if the facts were too grim, then I might conclude that my domestic arrangement was fundamentally unfair,” she writes. “That was my formless and underlying fear: That if I understood too much, I might have to rip apart the status quo.” Stack can’t look too closely or ask too many questions. If she did, she might not be able to do any of her own work at all.

Eventually she arrives at what seems like a partial solution to this conflict: She decides to make the women themselves the focus of her work. In the book’s last section, she interviews Xiao Li, Mary, and Pooja; she hears about the circumstances that brought them to her household, about the choices they’ve made and the children of their own they’ve left behind. You get the sense that these were meaningful encounters for Stack, but as journalism they fall a bit flat. “I wanted to have a better life, to be able to buy myself little things if I liked,” Xiao Li tells her, through a translator, explaining why she left her family behind to work in the city.

Stack hesitates to probe any deeper. “I had never been so deferential and evasive during an interview,” she thinks, after their conversation. “But, then again, I’d never been so painfully conscious of cradling a person’s ego in my hands, fragile as a thin glass bulb.” However formidable Stack’s professional skill, reporting introduces a new power imbalance: She controls the conversation; she controls the story that emerges. And the employer/employee relationship is not so easily set aside. These women still call her “ma’am”; they still need her as a reference for future jobs. “I couldn’t do it,” Stack writes, of interviewing Xiao Li. “To write about her was to walk an uncertain line between exploitation and truth.” With Pooja and Mary, she has more success, yet she still finds herself stopping short. They aren’t as skittish as Xiao Li, but even so, Stack declines to press them in ways that might prove uncomfortable. She chooses to let confusing or improbable details slide. “Do you really want to take her stories away from her?” asks Stack’s own mother, as Stack grapples with Mary’s inconsistencies. Stack decides she does not.

Perhaps the most revealing thing she learns is about the work itself. “None of our people know we are working in these jobs,” Pooja tells her. What kind of work do they think she’s doing? “I dunno, ma’am,” Pooja says. “A call center.” Why? “They’d laugh at us. These aren’t respectable jobs.” Pooja’s sister elaborates: “They see we have money, and they think we have great jobs. . . . If they knew the truth they would make fun of us.” So much for any wishful fantasy that their arrangement looked more appealing to the women on the other side.

Stack lets nothing slide when it comes to herself, though; she’s unsparing, even brutal. Women’s Work is filled with moments of selfishness, patronizing judgment, neediness, and hypocrisy laid bare. Last year, the writer Amanda Hess noted that there’s an “obligatory paragraph in much online personal writing” wherein the author acknowledges that she is white, straight, cisgendered, financially secure, etc., and then returns to her story unburdened by these concerns. Stack doesn’t bother with perfunctory disclaimers. Her whole book stares directly at such disparities.

Of course, the obligatory paragraph Hess described also functions as a stamp of self-awareness: I know how this all sounds. It’s an attempt to preemptively disavow anything objectionable. Stack makes no attempt to protect herself against critique; she gives the reader no such reassurances, no comfortable distance from uncomfortable facts. Does she know how this sounds? I found myself wondering, as she judged a nanny’s clothes or Facebook habits or friends. And then I wondered: Does it matter? There’s bravery in a writer’s willingness to look bad. A genuine reckoning demands it.

Molly Fischer is a senior editor of The Cut and the host of the podcast The Cut on Tuesdays.

Southern Discomfort

The protagonist of the linked short stories in Bryan Washington’s debut collection, Lot, does not give us his name—at least, not until we have earned this privilege. First, we have to let him usher us through Houston’s working-class neighborhoods and into the lives of queer people of color clinging to their jobs and homes as the city changes around them. The stories unfold in the confines of restaurant kitchens and cramped homes, places where the hard logic of economic precariousness can turn people into enemies just as easily as it can turn them into kin. In Washington’s portrait of the Houston underclass, trust is hard-won.

Lot is a book about how the formation of small communities within a community can provide ballast against racism, economic disparity, and homophobia. It is also a book about how these forces make this kind of intimacy hard to attain. At its core is a novella told in stories and narrated by our anonymous protagonist, interspersed with other glimpses of urban life drawn from across Houston’s sprawl. With a light touch, Washington shows us the struggle of the marginalized to survive in a city ravaged by increasingly devastating hurricanes, spiraling rents, and the threat of economic displacement. Yet he never fails to delight in the moments of unlikely pleasure that outsiders often fail to see.

The novella’s protagonist is an unusually perceptive Afro-Latinx boy, the quiet child in a family of willful personalities, who rides out the waves in a chaotic home. His mother, a black Louisianan, is that home’s rock. Though Washington provides few details of her personal history, the specter of Hurricane Katrina and the black diaspora it flung across the American South hangs in the background. The boy’s Mexican American father, whose charisma is matched by the cruelty of his self-involvement, wears her down with his serial philandering. In an early story, he takes a bold, shameless pleasure in his infidelity, returning from affairs in the early hours of the morning and less than subtly removing his belongings from the family’s home in preparation for an exit. “My father was packing himself up from our lives,” the narrator reminisces. “That was his master plan. He could’ve been discreet, if he’d wanted, but he didn’t. So he wasn’t.” The boy’s siblings—his gang-affiliated, violent, abusive brother Javi and his haughty but perceptive sister Jan—absorb the lessons of their father’s cruelty. Intent on surviving in a home bereft of compassion, they fail to provide their brother anything resembling familial support. During a period of unusual kindness on their father’s part, the narrator asks Javi if he might be back for good; Javi’s response is to kick him in the head. “Idiotas,” he spits. “That’s what you and your mother have in common.”

The narrator’s sense of his own sexuality takes shape in this crucible. While his older brother begins to emulate his father, our protagonist discovers that he is attracted to other boys. Washington treats this realization with clear-eyed assurance; he presents the boy’s queerness as merely another facet of life in Houston, one he happens to share with a constellation of young men throughout the city. When a migrant Mexican family moves in next door, the narrator becomes fascinated with the son, Roberto. One of the hallmarks of urban poverty is the decomposition of the illusion of privacy. As Roberto’s family’s financial situation worsens and they struggle to stay in their home, a certain kind of closeness takes root; soon, the neighbors are in and out of one another’s homes. The narrator and Roberto don’t waste the opportunity to explore their attraction. “The first time we tugged each other his father was sleeping beside us,” the narrator recalls. “They’d cemented the 610 exit and he’d found himself out of work. It was silent except for the flies above us, and Ma on the porch with his mother, promising that they’d figure it out.”

That recollection speaks to what I admire most about Washington’s writing: He has a knack for deceptively straightforward images that collapse the distance between the city, economic forces, and personal lives—or reveal this distance never to have existed in any meaningful way at all. The stories in Lot often read like urban histories written at the individual level. “Lockwood” takes its name from Lockwood Drive, a street that demarcates the East End district of Houston, and we come to know the struggles of its residents through a quiet image. During one of the boys’ dalliances, Roberto climaxes in bed beside his father and the narrator covers his mouth; rather than the sounds of Roberto’s pleasure, he hears “our mothers sobbing, and the snores overlaying them, and the Chevys bumping cumbia in the lot across the way.” Here, Washington has crafted a social-realist aesthetic able to chart the complex emotional topographies of working-class life; his prose entangles us in these overlooked landscapes, giving us a visceral sense of such hidden spaces. At its best, his stark language, often shorn of names and concrete identifiers, achieves a lyricism that enlarges our awareness of the mesh of personal experiences that make up the city’s history.

Washington’s queer men are often in the closet or relegated to the margins, and the collection masterfully conveys the atmosphere of mingled dread, exuberance, and defiance that pervades their lives. Staring out at the world from the backs of crowded restaurants or beneath freeway overpasses, they see a city they must navigate strategically. Violence is a constant presence; after Rick, one of Javi’s gang associates and a closeted queer man, is shot to death in “Wayside,” the narrator’s family attends the wake. “This was what happened to fags,” Javi warns the narrator as the brothers stand before Rick’s casket. In the collection’s best story, “Waugh,” a sex worker named Poke reels after learning that Rod, the older worker who took him in while he was wandering the streets, has contracted HIV. The news strikes terror into their community. “They didn’t know much, but they knew about HIV. They knew the way it hung over Montrose.” When other sex workers find out Rod has contracted the virus, he is banished from the community that he built. These and other threats require Poke and his friends to find pockets of safety in which they can fall into and rely on one another. “Waugh” is a brilliant story because it makes clear that these retreats aren’t without their joys: Upon waking dazed and with only one shoe in a client named Emil’s apartment, Poke finds the immigrant standing “barefoot, in a plaid button-down and slacks. He held some naan in one hand and Poke’s second shoe in the other.” An endearing scene of domestic intimacy follows. The question is whether Poke, so shaped by his experiences of uncertainty, will allow himself to take pleasure in Emil’s affection. Lot’s chief protagonist does not appear in “Waugh,” but Poke’s struggle echoes his emotional journey. It’s a journey most of the characters must undertake.

Ultimately, though, Washington uses individuals to tell a story of Houston’s collective life. This is both the book’s greatest strength and a source of some frustration. Washington sings a Whitmanesque song of the city, hoping to encompass all of its aspects. At times, that song is beautiful. In the title story, the narrator describes the afternoon rush on the neighborhood restaurant that he runs with his mother, and the resulting image is riveting in its embrace of Houston’s cultural bricolage: “Same faces every day. Black and brown and tan and wrinkled. The viejos who’ve lived on Airline forever. The abuelitas who’ve lived here for two hundred years, and the construction workers from Calhoun looking for cheap eats. The girls from Eastwood my sister left behind. The hoods my brother used to run with downtown.”

In these moments, when single voices blend into an anonymous chorus, Washington’s stories take on the tone of fables with something vital and universal to say about communities of color. Elsewhere, this impulse to capture a sense of the city’s sprawl results in gorgeous descriptions of Houston but contrived narratives and vaguely drawn characters lacking convincing psychology. In “610 North, 610 West,” the narrator’s father inexplicably brings him on a trip along the title route to his mistress’s home in another neighborhood. Neither the narrator nor the mistress seems particularly disturbed by this episode. Walking out of the bedroom in a tank top and panties, the woman brings the narrator a cup of water “You look thirsty. . . . You should’ve said something earlier” is all she says. When the narrator and his father return home, the incident disappears into silence. “I sat at the table beside [my mom]. My father opened his mouth, but then closed it.”

Sometimes the collection’s language can be lyrical to a fault, smothering Washington’s meaning in layers of abstraction. “Once, I slept with a boy,” the narrator tells us in “Elgin,” the collection’s final story. “Big and black and fuzzy all over. We met the way you meet anyone out in the world and I brought him back to Ma’s.” The lover is “big and black,” but otherwise nondescript; he seems a bit thin to be a character in a social-realist drama. One can’t help, in these moments, but compare “Elgin” to a story like “Lockwood,” with its quiet yet intense tableaux of intimacy among queer people of color, and its insight into how society shapes and distorts that intimacy. Occasionally, such withholding of detail lends the feeling that we have been participants in one of the narrator’s many casual encounters rather than beneficiaries of his trust. Still, Washington has delivered a radiant picture of a city in flux—and of a community living simultaneously at its center and on its margins. Lot is a debut that announces a writer of uncommon talent and insight.

Ismail Muhammad is reviews editor at The Believer.

Lust Never Sleeps

We’ve had half a century with The Second Sex, The Dialectic of Sex, Sexual Politics, and all the rest, yet straight men of letters still regard their fossilized sexism and quotidian horniness as windows into existential wisdom. Hard again! the male author marvels while streaming free porn in his book-lined office. What does it all mean? These are the inquiries of those who refuse to read feminists: How would a nerdy man have power over a pretty woman if she’s the one making him want her? How could a man be accused of disrespecting women when he’s so awestruck by their young, sexy bodies? David D. Gilmore’s attempt at self-exculpation in 2001’s Misogyny sticks in my memory as an example of this convenient cluelessness: “Like most baby-boom males, I consider myself a tolerant and enlightened man, and I harbor a sincere fondness for women as friends, lovers, colleagues, workmates, and, of course, paragons of physical beauty.” A sincere fondness for physical beauty—how could one tolerate a workmate without it?

This benevolent stance is shared by David Shields, a man who appreciates women so much that he’s eroticized their sexual rejection, disdain, and disinterest even more than their receptivity. In Shields’s latest, The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power, he slavers over “the sexy, young television actress” who makes him hate himself because he’s not beautiful, and he mentally admonishes a besotted girl walking with her boyfriend: “Don’t oversell the devotion.” Why ruin a good thing by enjoying it? Mutual affirmation has no place in his erotic universe unless it means two people agreeing on which one of them is inferior.


From left: Carroll Dunham, Left for Dead (3), 2017–18, urethane, acrylic, and pencil on linen, 52 × 46". Carroll Dunham, Left for Dead (4), 2017–18, urethane, acrylic, and pencil on linen, 52 × 46".
From left: Carroll Dunham, Left for Dead (3), 2017–18, urethane, acrylic, and pencil on linen, 52 × 46″. Carroll Dunham, Left for Dead (4), 2017–18, urethane, acrylic, and pencil on linen, 52 × 46″.

In Shields’s marriage, coldness reigns—or so he tells us. (In the past he has made much of his own unreliability as a narrator.) His wife doesn’t even like his books, and that’s how he wants it, though it’s also a source of constant anxiety. He praises her “icy temperament” and mostly addresses her in the form of wheedling questions, as if he’s playing Jeopardy! in hell: “Why do you always check to see how much I leave for a tip?” “Why don’t you have a single photo of me anywhere in the house?” “Why do all your favorite books about marriage include a dead spouse?” He claims he wrote The Trouble with Men in part to understand their union by exploring “the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy,” but he also claims this book could “risk” the marriage, and that might be what he’s ultimately after.

I can’t say what the book has done or will do to his marriage—in the end the only qualities I associate with his wife are patience and good taste in reading material—but I know that “human intimacy” is not actually Shields’s focus. What he’s beguiled by is what he sees as his own fascinating sexual complexity: “I’d always envisioned this book as an exploration of something about myself that I don’t understand, and my confusion is interesting to me,” he writes. That confusion has something to do with his erotic triggers: what turns him on and when and why, and how that affects his love life—fine material for introspection. But Shields is so enraptured by his ignorance that he’s fetishized it. He’s covetous of it. He craves exhibitionism, not connection: He wants to publicly luxuriate in the nooks and crannies of his lust while passing it off as an intellectual inquiry. He writes that he’s “obsessed” with sex, and “a lot of what I want to do is think about it.” But “think about it” here only means “dwell upon it,” not interrogate or complicate or learn. Ideas don’t develop or expand. We only look on as he presents variations on the same scenario, reaffirming that it turns him on.

Consequently, this work comes across as the tedious provocations of a man desperate for any negative attention he can get. “Women, asked to describe the best sexual experience of their lives, almost always mention an exceedingly brief thing they had decades ago with a near-convict,” he declares. Upon viewing scads of hacked celebrity nudes from 2014’s The Fappening, he is filled with “relief”: “these women are as sad and afraid and shy—above all, shy—about sex as we are,” he writes, hiding behind highly dubious collectivity. “The shape of a high-end sports car’s rear end is meant to replicate a bubble-butted woman’s,” he asserts, and “pink is associated with girls because it’s the color of their pussies; blue is associated with boys because it’s the color of the veins in their cocks.” Life is too short to indulge such rapturous dilettantism. Even immortals would roll their eyes.

I’m not always so aggrieved by a man lazily stroking his own libido. Accounts of someone’s arousal can be (and often are) comic, enlivening, and, at their best, contagious. Even chauvinism can be made delightful if delivered with enough panache; The Prisoner of Sex proved as much. But Shields’s presumption that his desire necessarily contains timeless insight—usually about women qua women and, less frequently, men qua men—makes him complacent, incurious: He quotes profligately, but what he shares simply reiterates his own tastes rather than building an argument or deepening comprehension. He excerpts a William T. Vollmann novel because he finds the “awful and sad” scene “thrilling.” A message tee he once saw worn by a waitress (BEAT ME, FUCK ME, EAT ME, WHIP ME, CUM ON MY TITS, AND THEN GET THE FUCK OUT) is presented without comment, as if it were profound and revealing enough to stand alone.

Compared to the other challenges of the twenty-first century, this preening, dogged ignorance is a minor problem, but it still corrodes the spirit to see willfully uneducated fumbling passed off as philosophy. At least Mailer had the courtesy to read Millett before he soldiered on with his regressive nonsense. Shields quotes some women, including Toni Bentley, best known for her paean to assfucking, and the witty, enthusiastically pro-sex Susie Bright, but the scarier feminists are rarely mentioned at all, and sometimes only through others’ lenses. (He quotes Bright’s critique of Dworkin, but not Dworkin herself.) Would it have killed him to read something written by a woman who doesn’t tell him what he so breathlessly yearns to hear? I suspect he knows that while he could emerge from such an experience with his life intact, his boner may never be the same.

In Screwed: How Women Are Set Up to Fail at Sex, Quebecois television host and journalist Lili Boisvert explains this phenomenon in gentler terms: “Many people are afraid of a paradigm shift when it comes to sex. They fear their fantasies will cease to excite them. . . . Fundamental values around which their lives are organized would become obsolete.” Boisvert has been on the sex beat for years, and she approaches her subject not as an academic, literary aspirant, or chronic masturbator, but as a committed educator. Read as a chaser for The Trouble with Men, Screwed is a mercy, offering little in the way of style and everything in terms of lucidity.

Boisvert’s basic premise is what she’s named the “cumshot principle”: Men transmit desire, women receive that desire, and much of each gender’s behavior before, during, and after sex is designed to obey and preserve this one-way arrangement. She has no objection to cumshots per se; they’re just a useful metaphor. “The woman acts as a target, and a target is passive,” she writes. The book is devoted to diagramming every gendered demand, expectation, and dynamic that grows from this foundation, so much so that there’s a literal diagram at the end, right before a glossary that includes definitions for male gaze and objectification. (I don’t know if teenagers are among this book’s target audience, but I hope they, as well as many technically adult men, read it.) Boisvert warns from the start that she paints with broad strokes because heteronormativity is similarly crude, even when those who live within its framework make choices that are nuanced and resistant. She intends to highlight the expectations and stigmas we assert ourselves against, not to deny that we make the attempt.

As translated by Arielle Aaronson, Boisvert speaks with the patient clarity of a middle school teacher or experienced babysitter: someone who can’t risk relying on implication, because her charges will exploit any potential misunderstanding. Her delivery is nonjudgmental and unemotional, an exceedingly rare combination given the subject. This is probably why, though her observations are familiar, their repetition is welcome. Consider her take on men hitting on women they don’t know: “Frequently, men immediately perceive a woman they consider sexy and attractive to be in seduction mode (which is, of course, a passive mode for her). The man’s logic might look something like: ‘I find you attractive, therefore you willingly provoked this reaction; you seduced me, which is a green light.’” In other circumstances, this painstaking explanation might exasperate me, but I came to see it as brilliant. It is quite hard to be rational about sex. We’re provided with so few tools to do so and assured that there’s nothing to examine anyway; intractable “biology” is always the culprit. “The truth is, we don’t actually want to understand our sexual mores,” Boisvert writes in the introduction. We prefer familiar answers “because they validate our current choices and behaviors.”

Boisvert’s most radical moment comes when she acknowledges certain pleasures granted to women that are usually denied to straight men, such as reveling in being lusted after and having “eyes glued to their bodies.” Many feminists would hold the party line that such thrills are unremitting burdens, or inherently degrading, but not Boisvert. “We can concede the injustice,” she writes. “Men do not have access to this power.” And with this concession, she touches on a vital element of the magnanimous chauvinist’s psyche. Men have for centuries told themselves that their obsession with women’s bodies is the real gendered injustice, that women are allowed to be parasitical because we’re sexually indispensable, and if men were (objectively, biologically) beautiful, or if women liked sex as much as men do, they would be the pampered gender. Mailer’s diagnosis still fits (who would know better than he?): “In the profound pussy envy of men there is the simple even sentimental suspicion that it is easy to be a woman—one need merely lie back and all Heaven will come into the cunt.” Many tenacious and deeply felt fantasies ride on this conviction, not only those pertaining to sex but those that prop up gender essentialism, misogyny, male supremacy—entire worldviews. True liberation is to be an idol: a “worshipped” object free from obligation, a valuable piece of property expected only to please the eye.

Sexual compulsion is as determined and illogical as an addiction, which means it might take someone like Boisvert—calm, focused, and firm—to counteract someone like Shields. When he claims that “all desire objectifies. There’s no such thing as desire without it,” Boisvert is ready with a factcheck: “Desiring someone does not equal reducing that person to a thing. The difference between the two lies in understanding that the object of our desire might not desire us in return.” It’s jarringly disingenuous for Shields to claim that a subject can’t desire someone they recognize as a fellow subject. Another person’s subjectivity—their unpredictable capacity to refuse us, lead us on, or respond in kind—is what makes them compelling, and Shields knows it. If the women he desired were truly objects, there would be no tension, no frisson, nothing worth writing about.

But here’s the ruse: Shields’s appetite for rejection is just another way of keeping women confined to the sexual sphere. Throughout The Trouble with Men, women are consistently tagged by visual appeal. A peer of his is “gorgeous”; an ex-student is “stunning.” And his “writer-friend” is “much better looking” than he is, which disqualifies her from collaborating on the book with him. These female figures are neither fully human nor fully object. They’re subjects, sort of, but their personhood becomes irrelevant beyond the bounds of the narrator’s libido. Shields desires, and women, those powerful paragons of beauty, are desired. It’s what any enlightened man would do.

Charlotte Shane is a frequent contributor to Bookforum.