Near the beginning of each term, I tell my writing students that they’re all going to fail. It’s a rhetorically charged claim; a few students giggle or snicker, clearly uncomfortable, and then everyone grows pretty silent. And then I tell them that I don’t really mean fail in the traditional, F-on-the-transcript-and-uncomfortable-calls-home sense (sometimes there’s more uneasy laughter here); I mean that writing is always the practice of failure. Most things that are valuable, worthwhile, or offer anything like real meaning are developed through long patterns of failure. I construct an x-and-y coordinate plane on the whiteboard and draw in a sweeping exponential curve that levels out right at the horizontal axis: the limit at Y = 0. And I say, look: this line will get closer and closer and closer to the axis over time, but it’s never going to get there. That, I claim, is what it’s like to learn to write.

My students who decide to stick around academia in some capacity post-graduation eventually realize, as I am, that living and working and studying in the academy is also a practice of failure. Rejection can be as frightening for a Ph.D applicant or article-writing professor as for a lovestruck student. It’s the middle of December as I write—application season, the season of submission. Hopeful undergrads- and grads-to-be are filling online forms’ blank fields, pressing SUBMIT, and bedding down into anxious hibernation for a few months.

Having filed my sixth and final application a few days ago, I write from the thicket of those feelings. And I’ve noticed that the well-meaning encouragements offered by friends, family, and beleaguered letter-of-recommendation writers echo the advice I give to my students, figuring failure as part of some long process: the necessary, though admittedly painful, antithesis of the personal dialectic. Hooray, goes the thinking, for personal growth, the fuel for which is failure, dry and ready to burn.

But I wonder if treating failure as the kindling for the future fire of success is to miss the point, to accede too readily to the gospel of growth and the bootstrappy forward-march-towards-progress narrative that fits too easily into the cultural paradigms that invent fictions like the welfare queen and tell my students to either major in STEM or starve. What happens when we think about failure as something else? Something meaningful and important, a thing-in-itself?

David Foster Wallace writes well about failure possibly because he is obsessed with tennis, and tennis is the sport most rooted in failure, besides maybe baseball. In Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a character reflects on the fact that baseball is an especially cruel sport not only for recording “errors” as an official statistic, but also for placing that statistic on the scoreboard, right next to hits and runs. The threshold of success in baseball is famously low: a .350 batting average is stellar, but 35% on a test is an unusually poor failing grade. Even the apex of baseball-related achievement, a perfect game, is ironically all about failure, really. In baseball’s perfect game, the losing team must fail twenty-seven times—or, flipping the perspective, the pitcher must successfully create failure twenty-seven times. Contrast this to bowling, the other sport with a “perfect game,” in which perfection is unmitigated success: twelve straight strikes. But tennis, like baseball, records errors—and, in fact, calls its statistic “unforced errors,” which goes so far as to assign singular, inescapable blame. A shortstop might reasonably dismiss an error because of a bad hop or uneven seam; a tennis player has no such recourse.

Maybe it’s unsurprising, then, that Wallace’s worlds are saturated with failure. Although sometimes instigated by a falling-apart of plans or a character’s inability to act in the world as they would prefer to, failure in Wallace’s work is really a vast network of feeling, identity, reflection, and action. In other words, it seems that Wallace is generally uninterested (or at least less interested) in offering a single definition of failure—or the sort of banal, flip-the-script encouragement that makes failure the alchemical beginning of success—than in exploring what failure does within and among living people. It’s also worth noting that—as several smart commentators, including Clare Hayes-Brady in The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace, have pointed out—Wallace’s writing exposes (a few of) its own failures, some of which are endemic to language and communication, the state of being a person.

In Infinite Jest, failure is rendered on both personal and political scales: the personal (failure) is the political (failure). The tragedy of, for example, Jim Incandenza, his inability to form intimate and meaningful masculine attachments with either his father or his son (that is, “up” or “down” the generational tree), is reflected in the national failure of the U.S. to form responsible political and ethical attachments with its neighbors (again, “up” to Canada and “down” to Mexico). (Not to mention the national failure to acknowledge the always-present intimacy between the nation and the thing that encompasses it, makes it possible: the natural world; the too-relatable ecological mood of Infinite Jest is catastrophe made banal.) In both cases failure spurs a scrambling action, a reaching-out made desperate by failure and caught in one of Wallace’s trademark positive-feedback loops. Jim concocts increasingly absurd (and eventually menacingly engrossing) strategies to reach his son Hal, while the U.S. attempts almost literally to cover up its failures by enforcing intimacy through the creation of O.N.A.N.: the Organization of North American Nations. Of course, as its name suggests, O.N.A.N is not really intimacy at all, and its political attitude is not unlike the solipsism that emerges, however accidentally, from James’s desperate attempt to communicate with Hal: the deadly engrossing videotape known as the Entertainment. The solution proposed to conflicts both interpersonal and intracontinental is the elimination of the other; the Entertainment hollows out the viewer, destroys will and agency, while through the creation of O.N.A.N. the U.S. has de facto annexed (in the text, “vichified”) its neighbors.

In both cases failure provokes an affective and emotional response: a desperation or mania for connection that ironically tumbles into solipsism. What’s more, the failure does not lead anywhere; the failure is never transmuted into success. In the cases of Jim and the U.S., tragedy lies not really with the “original” failure. Instead, the pathos and irony emerge from the shape and form failure assumes. Infinite Jest (and Wallace’s work generally) is replete with positive-feedback loops, and failure, regardless of scale, tends to follow this basically addictive pattern that Wallace explains in similar language early in Infinite Jest and in his essay on fiction and advertising and American culture “E Unibus Pluram”: the addictive thing causes problems that the addictive thing promises to solve, or at least make less painful. Likewise anxiety, self-consciousness, and not-obviously-addictive-but-still-internally-recursive phenomena like IRS examiner David Cusk’s excessive sweating—itself caused by his anxiety about the excessive sweating—in The Pale King. In other words, failure is a series of actions as well as a framework through which those actions are read, interpreted, and deemed to be failures. In this way failure becomes something like an emotional geometry. It is a field of feeling, a collection of repeated actions, a method of self-determination, and (fittingly for Jim Incandenza, the filmmaker) a lens. In a sense, failure does not cause the inwardly bent Wallacean spiral—rather, failure is that spiral, or maybe it’s the fact of simultaneously constructing and walking down that spiral.

And this is not, or not only, high-concept abstraction or meta-structural play. There is something emotionally urgent about this form of failure. After all, I suspect most of us have, after some minor error or small mistake, found ourselves caught in a way of living and thinking bounded and shaded by that mistake, and our subsequent actions have done far greater harm, both to others and to ourselves.

But this geometry of failure doesn’t necessarily do harm. The mise-en-abyme spiral isn’t so dissimilar to the quiet, habitual practice of sacrifice and worship most famously extolled by Wallace in “This is Water” and embodied in Infinite Jest by recovering addict and halfway-house counselor Don Gately. In fact, the habitual confrontation of failure becomes the foundation for Gately’s religious praxis. Much has been made, and rightly so, of Don Gately’s unusual (what I would call postsecular) religiosity, his dedication to prayer and ambivalent relationship to a Higher Power. But Gately’s prayer is also an evocation of ongoing failure, and it positions failure as a sort of generative absence. Although he kneels and prays every night, Gately considers that prayer a sort of failure because while praying he feels capital-N, Hemingway-esque Nothing. As the text describes, Gately’s recovery really begins after he begins to “Ask for Help from something he still didn’t believe in,” despite the fact that Gately’s religious ambivalence still occasionally spills over into sneering antagonism: “how can you pray to a ‘God’ you believe only morons believe in, still?” Gately’s prayer is neither supplication nor conversation; Gately does not imagine or picture a divine presence with whom he, to borrow the language of contemporary evangelicalism, can have a personal relationship.

But while his prayer does not ask for the intercession of external, divine power in his ongoing sobriety, Gately nevertheless makes meaning through the failure of his prayer. Not only a carefully sustained and physically embodied practice, Gately’s prayer is specifically a practice of confronting Nothing, of doing prayer outside of some intercessory or exchange-based model. The text points toward this apparent paradox, noting that Gately feels “like a true hypocrite just going through the knee-motions that he went through faithfully every A.M. and P.M., without fail”; what at first might seem like contradictory terms, “hypocrite” and “faithfully” and “without fail,” are positioned as compatible, simultaneous descriptors—maybe even synonyms. It’s not that Gately’s failure becomes success; Gately experiences prayer as an emotional network characterized by feelings of failure—insignificance, pointlessness, being thwarted, confusion, disorientation—that are themselves generative, life-giving. In fact, the freedom (from addiction, from solipsism, from gray ennui) that Gately’s prayer offers is figured as a paradoxical limitation: “now they’ve got you, and you’re free.” In a way that recalls the vacated viewers of the Entertainment, Gately, though his prayer and his participation in AA, finds his freedom in becoming “a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will.” Infinite Jest, true to its Shakespearian namesake, sums up this paradox in an ironic phrase borrowed from Hamlet: “se offendendo,” the freedom of self-abnegation. Or, put another way, the freedom that exists in the repeated confrontation with profound failure.

As a reader, I find it less useful to think about Gately’s failed prayer as a movement somehow “towards” the success of abstention and sobriety. I find more helpful the notion that failure itself makes the possibilities of sober life possible. Of course, there are further questions we ought to ask: who, for example, gets to fail? It’s a political question. I have suggested that not all failure is alike, and the especially harmful sort of failure tends not to be distributed equally. So we should continue to ask: who is offered the opportunity to fail, and who possesses the social and economic foundations that make certain types of failure bearable? Put briefly, Wallace’s socially and economically marginal characters rarely do; the ramifications of their failures tend to be brutal. They are, I would argue, sites of broader political and social failures; we have failed them—as has, in some cases, Wallace’s writing and narrative emphasis.

*

It’s also important to note that Wallace’s rethinking of failure connects him with other writers who are reworking and stretching its definition. Failure, its possibilities and textures, seems relevant and urgent; failure is in the air. Philosopher Elaine Scarry, in her vivid and very popular book On Beauty and Being Just, argues that failure is the foundation of learning and right action towards others. She ties failure together with beauty, which we often place outside failure’s purview; we like to think about beauty as the successful application of an artist’s skill. But Scarry points out how often we fail to acknowledge or appreciate beauty, and the moment we recognize that failure is also the moment we reapply close attention to its particularities.

Together, beauty and failure allow us to suddenly feel, in other words, the usually abstract truth that we can be wrong, that our understanding of the world is flawed, limited, and tends towards self-aggrandizement. Scarry describes the moment she first found palm trees, which were once repulsive to her, beautiful, and I imagine many of us have similar stories. Failure in this sense means being aware to the world, to the fact that we are always adjacent to other objects and people who exist and are beautiful. It asks us to reconsider our often-deluded evaluations; to encounter the beautiful is, for Scarry, to come “face-to-face with one’s own errors.” Beauty and failure are inextricable. And from this position of failure, we can begin to interrogate our prejudices, rethink the people and ideas we’ve dismissed. Like Gately’s religious practice, the joy—and, as Scarry goes on to argue, the ethical responsibility—bestowed on us by beauty is shot through with failure, and wonderfully so.

I think the idea here is not really that failure or success need redefinition. Instead, there are aspects of, ways of thinking about, failure that come less readily to mind but which are nevertheless valid and important. We might think about failure the way Maggie Nelson, in The Art of Cruelty, thinks about cruelty: as varied and polysemic. Nelson, who describes the book as a “shaking” of the term, shatters and expands any singular notion of cruelty. Wallace and Scarry are interested in failure as something other than the rest stop on the highway of success, and Nelson is likewise bored by attempts to redeem cruelty or reduce it to the impetus for political action. Rather, she’s after “true moral complexity,” which requires “wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance.”

Failure lends itself to spatial and physical metaphors—wading into the swamp, spinning down the spiral, coming face-to-face—so well, I think, because failure so often feels like a place we inhabit. We say a work of art has “moved” us, but failure also moves us. It pushes and buffets the body, and types of failure have their own shapes and curves. In her most recent book The Argonauts, Nelson describes the “pleasure in recognizing that one may have to . . . relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” This is failure as recurrence, failure as long, cyclical abiding. Failure is not the beginning of progress; there is no progress, in the sense of forward movement, leaving the past behind, at all. But there is, as Nelson says, life.

Regardless of what failure might be for any of us at any particular moment—life, or a swell of sadness, or another look at a palm tree, or the long struggle of prayer—we can begin to understand that failure is particular and immense. It is certainly more complex than a big, red F or an email the first line of which begins, “We regret to inform you . . . ” Failure, we might say, signifies quite a lot.

Comedy Central on the Mall

On October 31, 2010, Peter Clothier, a 74-year-old author and retired professor, posted an entry on his blog, called The Buddha Diaries, about the wonderful day he and his wife, Ellie, had spent at the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30 at the Mall in Washington, D.C., between noon and 3 pm. “We stood there trapped for a good two hours, surrounded by people who, like us, had showed up. We saw nothing, heard nothing of what was happening on the stage. It was great!” Clothier writes. He and Ellie had risen at 5:30 am to catch a 6:45 Amtrak train from New York, which should have gotten them to the rally in time to not see and not hear for the full three hours. But they were detained by a horrendous and dangerous crush of people in the Washington Metro.

“The Metro system was utterly unprepared for the invasion,” Clothier writes. The station was “a mob scene.” “People were waiting in lines ten deep to board,” and train after train went by “so full that not one single person could squeeze aboard.” However, with the exception of one angry man, who was “quelled by fellow passengers,” everyone kept his frustration in check and no one behaved badly.

Joseph Ward, a student at the University of Illinois, had been on a bus all night when he entered the little hell in the Washington Metro. And yet—as he wrote in the Daily Illini, where he is an assistant news editor—“I could not muster up the courage to get pissed at my situation. How could anyone not be positive?” He went on to describe the crowd of “young, old, black, white, hippies, yuppies and ex-servicemen pushing their comrades in wheelchairs” who “understood why they were there.” When Ward finally boarded a train it was

packed beyond belief to the point where the conductor would come over the loud speaker and remind people not to panic, push or get on a car that was already at maximum capacity. I felt like telling the conductor that his points were moot, that this was the sanest population in the western world he was addressing and that we would not buy into his Colbertian fear mongering.

After he got off the train Ward revised his opinion of the conductor’s “points” (“Turns out, he may have been on to something”). “I feared for my life when the crowds uncontrollably pushed me to within six inches of the train as it began to speed away from the station.” At the rally, Ward, like the Clothiers—and almost everyone else there—couldn’t see or hear what was going on onstage. (There were a few, but hardly enough, TV monitors on the Mall.) For a moment his determination to be positive even if it killed him faltered. (“Uneasiness began to settle over the crowd, which was virtually stuck in its position.”) But he ended his story on a cheerful note, praising the musical numbers and comedy skits he had not seen or heard.

I did not take the test of character in the Metro—I had come to Washington the night before and had time to make my way to the rally on foot. And I flunked the endurance test on the Mall. After a few minutes of standing in radical proximity to the sanest people in the Western world, I managed to make my way back to the street and then joined the people who were sitting on the steps of the National Gallery. From there one could see the phalanx of battleship-gray portable toilets that lined the Mall, and, beyond them, the Mall itself colorfully glistening with trapped people.

Everyone I talked to during and after the rally said it was great. It was as if the sunny Stewart had sprayed the place with his aura. Not seeing or hearing didn’t matter. What mattered was being there and, proleptically, having been there: several people characterized the event as a “historical” occasion. Evidently over two hundred thousand people came.

In the final minutes of the show Stewart gave a speech (I saw it on C-SPAN the next day)—“I thought we might have a moment, however brief, for some sincerity, if that’s okay”—in which he explained the point of the rally, in case anyone had missed it. Stewart confirmed that we had all come to Washington in order to congratulate ourselves on our decency and rationality. We were at a giant preen-in.

To illustrate our collective fineness, Stewart used the image of cars entering a tunnel under a river one by one, and of drivers politely deferring to each other: “You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go.” “Sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in.” But he—like the angry man in the Metro station—“is rare and scorned.” The rest of us are made of the right stuff:

We know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Promised Land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey.

Nice line. But what is he talking about? How do you work together in a car in a tunnel?

Stewart’s and Colbert’s following is largely liberal, but their rally was nonpartisan. “Most Americans don’t live their lives as only Democrats or Republicans or liberals or conservatives,” Stewart said.

Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do, often something they do not want to do. But they do it. Impossible things every day that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

What compromises? (Didn’t this kind of blurry apoliticality give us George W. Bush via Ralph Nader in 2000?) Stewart made no mention of the coming elections, nor did he blame the right for the darkness we live in now. He blamed the press—“the country’s twenty-four-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictinator”—for making things look worse than they are. “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” he said, and went on,

There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned, you must have the résumé. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and tea baggers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.

David Carr, after quoting these words in The New York Times of November 1, told a brutal truth: “All due respect to Mr. Williams and Mr. Sanchez, not many people know or care who they are.” Carr further pointed out that

Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television. In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.

Of course, the 200,000 people who came to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear are among the 5 million who do watch cable TV—specifically, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The scriptwriters assumed this was the case, and the rally skits were filled with references and allusions that only watchers of these shows would grasp. Who but a watcher of his show would know what Colbert was supposed to represent as he crazily pranced around the stage? Stewart’s bland rally persona similarly drew on the resonance of his sharper Daily Show image. No doubt it was an accident of organization that required most of the people at the rally to defer their enjoyment of the stage show until they could watch it at home on a screen. But it couldn’t have been a more fitting accident. The world of TV is the world that Stewart and Colbert inhabit. To have seen them in real life, or even on a live video monitor, might have felt inauthentic, perhaps even transgressional.

“An incredible gathering here in the Mall today,” Stewart said after showing clips of “real stories of momentary unreasonableness,” such as that of the irate flight attendant who got off his plane on an exit chute after a passenger dissed him. Stewart beamed at the crowd and went on, “But I think we all know that it doesn’t matter what we all say and do here today. It matters what is reported about what we said and did here today.”

On their late-night shows, Stewart and Colbert brilliantly satirize TV news and news commentary. At the rally they had to struggle with the lack of a subject to satirize. There was some fun with the Colbert character as an embodiment of irrational fear (Stewart: “FDR once said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’” Colbert: “Yes. But just twelve years later he was dead.”) But mostly there was more gesturing toward comedy than comedy itself.

If there is one thing that liberal Americans can legitimately pride themselves on it is their talent for creating irreverent signs. Who will forget, from the peace rallies of yesteryear, WHEN CLINTON LIED NO ONE DIED or THE ONLY BUSH I TRUST IS MY OWN? Here are a few examples from the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear:

WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF AND SPIDERS

MODERATION OR DEATH

JEW AGAINST INVOKING HITLER FOR POLITICAL POINTS

ATHEISTS FOR MASTURBATION

GAY MALAYSIAN MUSLIMS FOR SARAH PALIN

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WAS A WHITE SOX FAN? HITLER

SUPPORT SEPARATION OF HEAD FROM ASS

On October 2, I’d attended the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial, sponsored by, among others, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the Sierra Club, and supported by groups that included the National Urban League, the National Baptist Convention, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Communist Party USA. The signs there had a different character:

GOOD JOBS NOW

STOP CORPORATE GREED

GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER EQUALITY

I WANT SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE GET OUT AND VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS

The October 2 rally was a sober affair. The crowd wasn’t very large. (I noticed many minority and working-class families with children.) Most of the speakers (visible and audible on large TV monitors) were earnest and un-practiced. They were teachers and unionists and secretaries and veterans and carpenters and students and waitresses, as well as a few politicians like Al Sharpton, who spoke well. But when he exhorted the audience to vote—“We better get ready for the midterm exam”—there was only tepid applause.

Walking back to the train station on Constitution Avenue, my spirits lifted when I saw a man in an elaborate Colonial costume. I went up to him and asked him what his role in the rally had been. He gave me one of the most incredulous looks anyone has ever given me in my life. Then he stiffly informed me that he was the leader of a guided tour of Washington.

The New York Review of Books (NYR Daily), 2010

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Excerpted from Nobody’s Looking At You: Essays by Janet Malcolm. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 19th, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Janet Malcolm. All rights reserved.

The director Lois Weber had a habit of signing her films, such that several end with a title card in florid script, “Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber.” The obvious analogue is a letter; in this case a letter misplaced for a very long time. Weber was a master of silent film, and for a time she was the highest-paid director in Hollywood. The only woman admitted to the Motion Pictures Directors Association, she was also the only female director among the 250 founding members of the Academy of Motion picture Arts and Sciences. Her notoriety, credentials and budgets rivaled those of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Yet while the birth of cinema can’t be discussed without reference to these names, Weber’s remains largely unknown. Film historian Richard Koszarski wrote in 1975 that she had been “forgotten with a vengeance,” as if the forgetting were aggressive, even calculated. Strategic forgetting is one of the most Machiavellian tactics of the dominant culture: in response to it, the task becomes not only to reanimate the dead but to puzzle out the motives and mechanics of their effacement.

Weber’s films are primarily domestic dramas, stories about family ecosystems and the financial and emotional obligations that bind people together. Behind these narratives are the social and political issues that divided Weber’s audience: abortion, drug addiction, capital punishment, prostitution, anti-Semitism and birth control. emboldened by a medium without traditions or conventions, Weber saw no reason why film should aim to merely amuse when it was possible to change the world.

Weber was called a “propagandist,” but she resisted the word. Propaganda, she said, was too simpleminded. A man would shift his thinking on birth control, for instance, not because Weber advised it, but because he came to feel obligated to remedy the distress of a specific young woman who worked as a laundress and wore her hair pinned at the nape of her neck. Weber understood social change to be the sum of tenderness meted out to individuals. Her films were a concerted experiment to coax this tenderness from viewers reluctant to extend it.

Trade publications and industry transactions establish that in early Hollywood Weber had great clout and a reputation for “intellectual athleticism.” But only a fraction of the output responsible for her stature survives. of the 153 films she wrote and directed between 1913 and 1934, just sixteen have not crumbled to dust or disappeared, and they are scattered in archives from Tokyo to Wisconsin. I have managed to see eight. Some are short, like Suspense (1913), about a woman home with her baby when a burglar breaks into the house. Another, The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), starring ballerina Anna pavlova, was the result of a studio assignment, and is stylistically unlike the other seven. eight films could hardly be considered a strong sample size, and prudence checks the impulse to celebrate. Yet it’s enough to be convinced that Weber made a kind of film—principled, homely, honest—that was antithetical to what Hollywood has come to represent.

Weber’s 1916 film The Hypocrites, rereleased in November 2018 as part of Kino Lorber’s “pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” collection, made her a household name. it begins as an allegory. A priest sequestered at a medieval monastery is so ardently devoted to God that it irks his fellow priests. He is working intensely on something secret, which he plans to unveil at a grand fête. The camera pans slowly over gathering crowds, representatives of the Family, the trades, the Monarchy, the politicians, etc., all chattering in anticipation. A sheet falls away to reveal the priest’s creation: a life-size statue emblazoned at the base with the title “Naked Truth.” naked truth is in fact exactly what her name suggests—a naked woman standing on a pedestal.

“The people are shocked by the nakedness of truth,” states Weber’s intertitle. Some snicker and some hide their eyes, others pantomime dismay. The sculpture is quickly re-covered, the priest attacked by a mob. Stabbed in the heart, he dies as Weber cuts to the typewritten script of a sermon. A contemporary priest, played by the same actor, preaches to his congregation about hypocrisy. His parishioners yawn and glare and murmur about having him dismissed. Dejected, the priest dozes off after the service, returning in his dream to a search for Naked Truth. She is secluded on a mountaintop, but the parishioners refuse to follow the priest there. The trail is steep and their clothing unsuitable; one man is carrying bags of gold and refuses to set them down.

When the priest, alone, reaches the summit, he entreats Naked Truth to come to his parish. She consents, and the two begin making visitations. Naked Truth carries a mirror, which after each meeting cleverly reveals the hidden truth of the encounter. A politician stumps with a sign, “My platform is honesty,” but the mirror shows him receiving bribes. A man sweetly romances his date, but the mirror reveals his other life as a philanderer and gambler.

Naked Truth is a coquettish phantom. Superimposed on the scene via double exposure, she holds her forearm to her breast to gently hide her nipples. It is sometimes claimed that the actress wore a flesh-colored leotard, but the defined nubs of her backbone—which cloth would have muted—say otherwise. The film ends with one final scene of hypocrisy. The evening after his sermon, the contemporary priest suddenly dies. He is found slumped in a chair at the chapel, clutching a newspaper confiscated from a choirboy. His hostile congregation uses the newspaper to besmirch his reputation. (Reading the Sunday paper broke the Sabbath.) “After preaching a sermon on hypocrisy,” a local paper reports, “it was unfortunate that he should be found with a Sunday newspaper in his hand. the congregation was much shocked.”

In terms of career strategy, Hypocrites comes off like an arcane chess opening. Weber combines scenes guaranteed to attract censors with a narrative that insults their intentions. I imagine her with a gleam in her eye, wielding the title as a dare. If a painter or sculptor could use full-frontal female nudity for high-minded purposes, so would she.

Weber professed annoyance when the film did face censorship, indignantly arguing that the nudity was “too delicately carried through” to be anything besides “a moral force.” The debut was delayed, and Hypocrites was ultimately banned in Chicago, Minneapolis and the state of Ohio. The police in San Jose seized prints, but a court decision eventually allowed them to be screened; in Tacoma, the police captain took a private viewing and declared it acceptable. In Boston, authorities protested they would not allow the film to be screened unless clothes were drawn on Naked Truth frame by frame. Most viewers, though not all, seemed to agree with Weber, and despite the scuffles Hypocrites sold out theaters across the nation. There were extended runs and return bookings.

In New York City, the most expensive tickets moved most quickly, suggesting that Weber had attracted the upperclass audience that was early cinema’s holy grail. Hypocrites broke records for highest-grossing film in Los Angeles, Detroit and New Orleans; the year it was released it was reputed to be the “most productive money-getting box-office attraction ever shown in the South.”

Cinema was originally thought to have a special relationship with femininity, and women thrived in the industry’s early days. “In no line of endeavor has woman made so emphatic an impression than in the amazing film industry,” noted a journalist in 1915. Studios prized “female” dexterity for the nimble-fingered work of coloring, gluing, splicing, polishing and editing. In addition, their reputed emotional intuition was often considered a boon for screenwriting and directing.

It’s estimated that women wrote at least half of all silent films, while narrative film—film that tells a made-up story—is arguably the invention of Alice Guy-Blaché. Bored by the Lumière Brothers’ footage of workers leaving a factory, she made La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) in 1896. There are actors, costumes, props, sets and a whimsical story; in the surviving clip, newborn babies emerge from giant heads of cabbage with the help of a fairy-midwife. The birth metaphor seems deliberate; the first narrative film may also be the first film about film. Between 1918 and 1922 there were upwards of twenty production companies with women at the helm. At the behemoth that was Universal, eleven women directed an estimated 170 films between 1912 and 1919. Women in film earned some of the highest salaries of any women, in any field, in the world.

Lois Weber on set of The Dumb Girl of Portici, 1915

Women were also symbolically useful as totem gatekeepers of middle-class legitimacy. Considered the weaker sex, but also the more virtuous, they lent their supposed moral superiority to a business with a rough-and-tumble reputation. Hollywood welcomed them. An industry staffed with women like Weber—white, educated, married, Christian—assured middle- and upper-class audiences that cinema was good clean fun. On Hollywood’s path from sketchy nickelodeon theaters to grand cinema palaces, it was women who played the ushers.

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The name Weber was associated with religion in Pennsylvania long before Lois was born in 1879, outside Pittsburgh in the town of Allegheny. Her father was an upholsterer, but her grandfather and great-grandfather were preachers, and another relative had established the city’s first church in 1782. After a brief stint as a concert pianist, Weber began volunteering with the Church Army Workers, a group very much like the Salvation Army, where she proselytized and sang hymns on street corners. (The Church Army still exists; it was recently headed by the Archbishop Desmond tutu.) As part of the work, she visited brothels, offering prostitutes jobs with the organization. She spent one Christmas with thirteen women she’d enticed to leave sex work, and found it a very satisfying holiday.

Weber turned to filmmaking after her father died, as a means to help support the family. She represented the career shift not as a rupture but as a continuation of her religious work, insisting that her films were an elaborate form of proselytizing. “In moving pictures,” she said, “I have found my life’s work. I find at once an outlet for my emotions and my ideals. I can preach to my heart’s content.”

Weber understood preaching to be an elastic term, one with little relationship to an actual pulpit. The Church Army, like the Salvation Army, embraced unorthodox forms of proselytizing. Services were held in public parks to attract working-class passersby, and converted former criminals often served a special role in exhorting crowds. Both groups were better known for their service than their doctrines. During World War I, the Salvation Army became famous for their “doughnut lassies,” women who fried doughnuts for soldiers in combat helmets. The organization’s unofficial motto was “First, soup; second, soap; and finally, salvation.” Like doughnuts or a warm bath, film seemed to Weber a tool in the conversion toolbox.

Weber wasn’t the only woman to envision an evangelism informed by cinema. Long before megachurches, the twenties and thirties preacher Aimee Semple Mcpherson mesmerized crowds at the largest auditoriums in Los Angeles. Known as Sister Aimee, she performed miracles under colored spotlights while seated on a throne of roses. Her sermons were accompanied by brass bands and her velvet robes trailed the stage. (“I sat under Aimee yesterday, and had 2 ½ spells of tumescence,” confessed H. L. Mencken to a friend. “Her Sex Appeal is tremendous.” His profile of Sister Aimee for the Baltimore Evening Sun was less forthright.) Sister Aimee grew up in a protestant religious family much like Weber’s. As a teenager she began exploring other churches; she was especially attracted to the performative aspects of conversion at pentecostal revivals, and earned an early reputation for the way in which the spirit of God left her convulsing on the ground.

Sister Aimee advised her followers not to go to movies but was herself a master of costume and staging. She occasionally preached in a police uniform, incorporating skits and props into her sermons. She took the stage by running, often with bouquets in her arms. The effect was full-blown spectacle, which Sister Aimee appealingly tempered with humility: “I’m just a little woman, God’s handmaiden, the least of all saints,” she liked to say. The crowds went wild.

Weber likely would have judged Aimee’s doctrine as too fast and loose, but she might have appreciated her populist touch. The new evangelism offered both women opportunities to hold crowds in the palm of their hand, and to do good works even as they earned fortunes.

In spring of 2018, the saviors of almost-lost cinema at Milestone Films released Weber’s 1916 production on DVD. The film had been unseen and practically unknown for nearly a century, but following a revival screening late last year, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis deemed it “brilliant.” Weber’s inspiration for the film had been a report by Jane Addams about how easily shop girls fell into prostitution. Shoes begins with a subtitle—“She sold herself for a pair of shoes”—and then backtracks through the chain of events that led Eva, the young protagonist, to exchange sex for footwear. It’s a Pretty Woman story turned inside out.

Eva works long hours in a five-and-dime store, and her job is the sole support of her father, mother and three younger sisters. Her wages go straight into a pouch pinned to her mother’s bra. Week after week, her mother promises there’ll be enough money to buy Eva a new pair of shoes, but there never is.

The particulars of Weber’s plot are drawn from the report. At that time, according to Addams, shop girls made about $6,000 a year, barely a living wage, while prostitutes earned more than four times that amount. Activists argued that stores cultivated a desire for luxury goods far beyond the means of working girls, whose ten-hour days behind the counter left them standing prey for would-be pimps. It was apparently easy to slide into lunch-hour prostitution, and Weber was horrified that so many young women did.

Shoes doesn’t stray far from its title; Weber attends almost obsessively to Eva’s disintegrating boots. The camera addresses them as a character, lingering over their poignant creases, and following along as they walk gingerly in the rain, stand on rough wood floors or sit abjectly next to Eva’s chair. Every morning, Eva traces and cuts out inserts from cardboard to protect her soles; in the evening, she shakes out these fragments, now dirty and crumbled, and soaks her feet in steaming water. Her hope for redemption seems to hinge on the state of her footwear; if Weber can convey how tattered the boots and sore the feet, we will forgive Eva her prostitution. At the end of the film, passed over by her mother one more time, Eva finds her own solution. She comes home one day wearing a gleaming pair of boots, and tearfully collapses in her mother’s lap.

Footwear is important in many Weber films, to such a degree that her biographer Anthony Slide puzzles over her “fetish.” Fetish is not the right word, but Weber does treat footwear with special care, as another director might treat a locket, or cigarettes, or a cross. Shoes seemed to have been part of her personal symbology, a shortcut to a feeling of loss. She was furious when censors removed a shot of a dead baby’s shoes from Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916). The film is about a mother so devastated by the death of her child that she becomes addicted to opium. Her husband, a customs inspector, is responsible for confiscating opium shipments from china; one day, he finds his wife huddled among the addicts in an opium den. The shot of the baby shoes was pivotal, Weber argued, to establishing the mother’s suffering and furnishing an explanation for her addiction, but this was precisely the censor’s problem: Weber was treating addiction not as a failure of self-control, but as a consequence of grief.

Still from Shoes, 1916

The state of the shoes in Shoes seems to refer to the loss of Eva’s virginity, but there’s also a more basic reading: Weber is outraged that a functional necessity has become too expensive for a working girl’s income. Another Weber film juxtaposes the poverty of a theologian’s family with their neighbors’ wealth. Weber treats the neighbors with disdain, taking pains to show the ostentation of their car and the excess of their meals. It’s no surprise when she explains that they got rich by selling shoes, priced, she reports, at “$18 a pair!”

Critics treated Weber’s attention to detail as a feminine quirk. They would marvel at her dedication to representing the texture of real life, but it was a cursory wonder, the kind that emphasizes the hours spent. Her approach was sometimes used to imply that she was a filmmaker of small ambition: “obsessed with little things”; her films “infected with the disease of detail.” A review of The Blot (1921) likewise accused Weber of smothering her subject matter “under a mass of plausible but unnecessary detail,” while another sniffed that there was something improper in Weber’s fixation on domestic life, akin to airing dirty laundry. “Many of the scenes are exceedingly painful,” this critic wrote, “and a few seem to invade the privacy of domestic life with unnecessary frankness.”

It is true that affection for domestic objects is Weber’s hallmark. Her films usually take place in homes, with many scenes set in the kitchen. She lingers on frayed rugs, buttons, wooden stools and tea service. Mushrooms are served in folded-parchment paper packets, and potatoes spooned onto chipped enamel plates. Her pacing is slow enough that the mood of a room registers as a presence. A critic observed in 1919, “When [Weber] shows a boudoir scene it is not an accumulation of papier-mâché props . . . she pictures the place as it actually is.”

Weber liked to call her independent studio—so unlike any other in Hollywood—“My Old Homestead.” it was situated in a Southern-style mansion on Santa Monica Boulevard near Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. Studios were moving to lots during the late teens and early twenties, but Weber insisted on shooting domestic scenes in actual domestic interiors, with the assistance of enormous portable batteries and special lights. A visitor to Lois Weber productions remembered it as a studio like no other, outfitted with rockers, pillows and wide couches. There was a tennis court for staff, and the surrounding acres were landscaped with lemon and loquat trees, jasmine shrubs, and birds of paradise. “Nothing suggests business,” noted the visitor with pleasure. Weber’s habit was to keep the front door ajar.

Helped by the critic André Bazin, cinematic realism would eventually acquire a respected reputation. Writing in 1948, Bazin praised the Italian neorealists of the 1940s for their “revolutionary humanism.” “They never forget that the world is,” he wrote admiringly. Films with a documentary quality—“a perfect and natural adherence to actuality”—left Bazin refreshed, feeling the “urge to change the order of things.” Realism became a celebrated aesthetic, and even a political mode of filmmaking.

Bazin, however, was too late for Weber. he never referred to her work, as much of it had already been long forgotten. As for Weber’s contemporary critics, they noticed her fidelity to domestic detail, but failed to connect it to her true-to-life characters and their true-to-life dilemmas. Insightful criticism might have provided Weber with support and cover for a still more ambitious cinematic vision; without it, she simply insisted that she made the kind of films that people wanted to see: “the time can’t be far off,” she predicted, “when the man or woman who comes to a picture is going to look about and realize that no such perfect creature as the time-honored hero exists either on this earth below or the heaven above. And they are going to even more willingly pay their nickels and their dimes to see a flesh-and-blood person whom they can recognize out of their own experience.” Her forecast turned out wrong; Weber and Hollywood were parting ways.

Lois Weber at her typewriter, 1926

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Weber’s obituary remembered her not as a director, but as “Lois Weber, Movie Star-Maker.” By the end of her life, her reputation as a talent scout had eclipsed her work as a filmmaker. She truly did help many women, and some men, to stardom—Mary MacLaren, Lenore Coffee, Marion Orth, Jeanie Macpherson, John Ford, Henry Hathaway—but she was not a “star finder” in the conventional sense. By dint of time and energy, she nurtured a system of patronage that brought women into the industry and moved them up the ranks. The invisible gears behind career advancement are mentor relationships, as people in power help their likenesses ascend. Rarely do these networks favor women, and even more rarely does a woman become powerful enough to anchor her own. Weber did.

On Friday nights she often had drinks with Hollywood’s female elites. These soirées—the press called them “hen parties”—took place at Frances Marion’s house. Marion was a prolific screenwriter who transitioned from silents to sound without a bump and saw well over one hundred of her screenplays produced. In the thirties, she was making some $17,000 per week. Screenwriters were writers for hire, paid by the week or day, and rarely informed of the destiny of their work. Marion, on the other hand, was allowed to shepherd her projects through production and often presided on set. Her first job, however, was as a jack-of-all-trades for Lois Weber. When the two women met, Weber told Marion, “I have a broad wing, would you like to come under its protection?”

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn offers her appreciation of biography finalist Mark Lamster’s The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (Little, Brown).

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Philip Johnson used his inherited fortune to pursue his passions—fine food, high society, art, architecture, and for a time, radical right wing politics.  A colleague and contemporary of the Rockefeller family, founding curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture department,  Johnson was also a Nazi sympathizer in the runup to World War II, advocating for Third Reich principles in the U.S. and meeting up with Nazi officials on his European tours. A consummate socialite and Harvard graduate, he supported populist Louisiana governor Huey Long and anti-Semitic radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin.

Just as his political beliefs shifted (he would spend the rest of his life downplaying his right-wing sympathies), so did his professional career. Though he was considered a pioneer of 20^th century modernist architecture, his styles and influences shifted and morphed. “Johnson was a historicist who championed the new, an elitist who was a populist, a genius without originality, a gossip who was an intellectual, an opportunist who was a utopian, a man of endless generosity who could be casually, crushingly cruel,”  writes architecture critic Mark Lamster in his new book “The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century” (Little, Brown).By the end of his long life, Johnson was still, in many ways, unknowable.

Lamster captures a brilliant, restless, conniving, ambitious man. Improbably gifted, richly supported by family money, Johnson mounted landmark architecture and design exhibits at MOMA and donated thousands of artworks to the museum. He mentored young architects and created his own architecture firm.  By the second half of the 20^th century his influence had turned him into  “the godfather of American architecture,” wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a New York Times review of Lamster’s book.  He designed some landmark buildings, including his own residence, the “glass house” in New Canaan, Connecticut, Pennzoil Place in Houston, the original Four Seasons Restaurant in New York and Manhattan’s AT&T tower.

But many other Johnson designs were pedestrian, jarring or forgettable. His architectural allegiances shifted over time; originally a Mies van der Rohe acolyte, Johnson embraced postmodernism, and by the end of his career, many of his buildings, built for corporations in the boom years of the Reagan era, were mashups of clashing influences and his clients’ practical demands. “I do not believe in principles, in case you haven’t noticed,” Johnson once told fellow architect César Pelli. 

It is this shapeshifting quality that makes Johnson hard to grasp, and he was never much for self-disclosure. How could a man who supported the Nazis, who watched Polish villages burn from the sideline as the Nazis invaded them, later design synogogues and an Israeli nuclear research reactor? How could a tastemaker who followed and preached modernism become a convert to the baubles and trimmings of post modernism? Lamster does not try to fully explain, extoll or damn Johnson; he presents him in all his contradictions, and views the inner workings of American architecture with an unblinking gaze.  His book is an acute profile of both a man and his profession: in The Nation, Kate Wagner wrote that The Man in the Glass House “reveals in great detail how Johnson, in collaboration with a small number of powerful cultural institutions (and the billionaires that funded them), determined who would become the next generation’s architectural stars. Little by little in Lamster’s book, the hoary narrative—still bafflingly predominant in today’s architecture world—of the scrappy young draftsman pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a great architect through hard work and talent is relentlessly dismantled.”

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Mary Ann Gwinn writes about books and authors for the Seattle Times, Newsday and other publications. She won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and has chaired both the nonfiction and biography committees for the NBCC. She’s on Twitter at @gwinnma.

During the height of the holiday season, in December 1860, Louisa May Alcott and her neighbors in the tranquil town of Concord, Massachusetts, were buzzing with worry over the bitter divide of the United States. In November, Abraham Lincoln had won a contentious presidential election and had plans to prevent slavery in the westward-expanding nation. Shortly after he was elected, South Carolina was the first slave state to rebel and secede from the Union, and more Southern states were threatening to follow.

The Alcott family supported Lincoln, and if women had been allowed to vote, Louisa would have joined her father, Bronson, at the Concord Town Hall to cast her ballot. It was no secret that the Alcotts were red-hot abolitionists as well as feminists. They were outspoken and unwavering in their belief that men and women, regardless of race, deserved equal rights and opportunities.

Louisa was so passionate in her belief that when the Civil War broke out in April 1861, she wanted to be a soldier in the Union army. Since women weren’t allowed to join the military, Louisa resigned herself to any opportunity to help abolish slavery and focused on more ladylike, acceptable pursuits, such as sewing uniforms for soldiers.

But then the door of opportunity opened just a crack, and Louisa was eager to push her way through. The Union army announced it was allowing women to be paid nurses, an unheard-of development at a time when it was not considered respectable work for a woman. Even so, practicality and the needs of wartime won out in this particular gender fight. The fierce and bloody battles of the war had resulted in an overwhelming number of casualties. There were too many sick and wounded and not enough male nurses to help, convincing the military to relent. Despite this new opportunity, there wasn’t a mad rush of women signing up. Louisa, however, made the exceptional decision to enlist right away.

But Louisa wasn’t from a typical family, and she wasn’t a conventional woman. An avid runner—also unheard of for women at the time—and single still at age twenty-eight, her belief system had been shaped intellectually and emotionally by the environment she grew up in, and it was one of exceptional educational riches and desperate poverty. Her parents, who were friends with some of the greatest philosophers and reformers of the time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, embraced ideals and beliefs that remain progressive by today’s standards. Louisa had a front row seat watching her father and mother risk their livelihood, freedom, and lives hiding, teaching, and even living among freed and fugitive slaves.

But her father’s self-absorption in pursuing his philosophical dreams and his careless disregard for his family’s most basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter kept the Alcotts teetering on the brink of ruin. Louisa’s mother tried to find work to support the family, but there were few respectable and profitable job opportunities for women. Many times, Louisa’s mother felt like a beggar, having to ask her relatives again and again for money, writing, “My life is one of daily protest against the oppression and abuses of society.”

While her mother fought for the family’s survival, Louisa was writing her observations, thoughts, and feelings in her journals and letters. She was working on her plan to not only rescue her family from poverty but also to help drive change in the fight for human rights. Like her parents showed her, Louisa was going to lead by example.

The Civil War offered Louisa the opportunity to go to the front lines, where she would push the boundaries for women and test her beliefs, while gaining life experiences that would translate into an influential and lasting literary contribution—Little Women.

When it was first published in 1868, Little Women was a “radical manifesto.” Louisa expertly wove her progressive beliefs and empathetic insights into her novel, creating original and unforgettable characters. Little Women was an instant best seller and has never been out of print. Millions of copies later (and counting), the trials and tribulations of the March sisters are still relatable, speaking universally to the hearts and minds of readers worldwide. Reading Louisa May Alcott’s classic coming-of-age story is a rite of passage for most young girls, many of whom find themselves reading it again and again throughout their lifetime and passionately recommending it to the next generation of little women.

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From Louisa on the Front Lines: Louisa May Alcott in the Civil War by Samantha Seiple. Used with the permission of Seal Press. Spiegel & Grau. Copyright © 2019 by Samantha Seiple.

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Lori Feathers offers her appreciation of fiction finalist Anna Burns’ Milkman (Graywolf Press).

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Reading Anna Burns’ Milkman is a singular experience. The novel is a statement work: as original in its presentation as it is profound in its exposition of the familiar and not so familiar terrors that daily assail its young hero, a woman who faces persistent, insidious predation, both sexual and politically motivated.

The unnamed narrator, a resident and native of Belfast, is coming of age in the early 1970s during “the Troubles,” that long period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland that pit nationalists against loyalists and Catholics against Protestants, with each side inflicting an ever-growing number of civilian deaths upon the other. These hostilities distort everyday existence and human interactions. Here ordinary objects become signifiers of personal allegiance, being surveilled is commonplace, and innocent comments are weighted with hidden meaning.

The narrator evades assimilating this coded and dangerous world by immersing herself in nineteenth-century novels as she ambles among the bombed-out buildings, shadowy parks, and colorless streets of her district. This steady routine of “reading-while-walking,” she maintains, is her way of being vigilantly non-vigilant about her surroundings. The community considers her behavior strange, “beyond-the-pale,” and, in short, unacceptable.

One of the few who refuse to judge the narrator for reading-while-walking is “maybe-boyfriend,” a sensitive, local car mechanic with whom she is romantically involved. The shared reluctance to put their “maybe” relationship on solid footing is a symptom of the unrelenting volatility of the times. Their relationship is further strained by the narrator’s desire to keep maybe-boyfriend a secret from her mother, who is excessively impatient to marry off her eighteen-year-old daughter.

While the threat of political violence permeates Burn’s narrative, it is the menacing, inchoate sexual aggression against the narrator and her helplessness in the face of it that is the most compelling thread of the novel. The narrator is stalked by the so-called Milkman, a married forty-year-old who is a powerful and feared vigilante. Confronted with the Milkman’s invasion of her personal space, misogynistic insinuations, and veiled threats to harm maybe-boyfriend, the narrator is left inert, believing that without witnesses or physical manifestations of the Milkman’s malicious intentions the threat that he poses to her is less real, somehow almost excusable. The narrator’s observations about her silent victim-hood and her felt lack of agency as regards the Milkman’s predatory behavior are described in a way that is true and timeless.     

Yet for all of its weighty themes there is a lightness to Milkman that defies the gravity of its subject and setting. The novel is funny and full of warmth. Burns’ characters are engaging and wonderfully original in their idiosyncrasies; their quirky habits and turns-of-phrase demonstrate the author’s extraordinary imagination. Burns’ writing is rich, full and constantly surprises and delights. In this big, sprawling and brilliant novel Anna Burns brings us into a world hostage to misunderstanding and fear but where the human spirit and one young woman’s resilience, shine through.

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Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic who lives in Dallas, Texas. She authors the essay series “In Context” for Literary Hub as well as the Words Without Borders‘ regular feature, “Best of the B-Sides.” Lori is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, and her work appears in various online and print publications. She co-owns Interabang Books in Dallas, where she works as the store’s book buyer.

Before wokeness became a hashtag on the internet, there was a refrain on Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher,” a collaboration with Bilal and Georgia Anne Muldrow, where they rotate singing the words “I stay woke” nearly 100 times in a foggy, dreamlike melody of keyboards and percussion. “Master Teacher” stands out as one of the quieter yet more complex songs on Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part One 4th World War, an album trilogy that she has yet to complete.

Released in 2008, the album has relatively faded from memory, while the principle of “wokeness” has become a colloquialism that has been simultaneously reified and misused in the era of Trump. If wokeness today stands for being truly politically aware (not to be confused with being politically correct), it is all the more fitting that Badu, through her vantage point as a black woman, sings narratives of a “woke” America personified both as individual and collective self.  In “Healer,” Badu’s chorus pays homage to what she considers to be gods: “Alhamdulillah, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Dios, Ma’at, Jah, Rastafari, fyah dance, sex, music, hip-hop.” She continues, “It’s bigger than religion. Hip-hop. It’s bigger than my n****. Hip-hop. It’s bigger than the government.” The narrative turns inward on both “Me” and “Master Teacher,” where Badu is in typical form, musing on the self as personal and political, where the two cannot be so easily disentangled.

In hip-hop, every rapper’s nomenclature functions as a persona, but the most nuanced rappers rhyme through multiple personas, lyrically layering selves that have the capacity to carry depth, introspection, sorrow, and arrogance, to name a few (Kendrick Lamar’s Kung-Fu Kenny or Kanye West’s Ye are interesting examples of this). And while Erykah Badu’s multiple personalities—Serra Bellum, Badoula, Maria Mexico, Annie, DJ lo down loretta brown—have lasted through her impressive career, New Amerykah’s creation of a musical narrative of Badu’s multiple personalities, as well as America itself, shares many tenets of the latest literary craze consumed by the question of persona: autofiction.

“Autofiction” can at times appear to describe everything, while simultaneously describing nothing, and once you hear the word “autofiction” once, it becomes impossible to escape. In an ongoing literary moment of experimentation with the form, much of how we think about autofiction stretches back to the 1970s, when French writer Serge Doubrovsky became the first to name the term. According to Doubrovsky, it is the “fiction of strictly real events or facts, if we want, autofiction, of having entrusted the adventure of language with the language of an adventure, outside the wisdom of the traditional or new novel.” Catherine Cusset clarifies this to mean, “the only fiction in autofiction is the work on language. The facts are real, and the project is to reach a certain truth.” Autofiction in this sense is heavily credited to French writers such as Doubrovsky, Marguerite Duras, Catherine Cusset, and Annie Ernaux, even though autofiction certainly precedes Doubrovsky’s naming.

When autofiction is discussed, the names of writers that come up are typically European or American and white, along with the odd mention of black writers or writers of color who also play with the form, such as Teju Cole—who, I should note, does not describe his own work as autofiction. In a recent piece for the Guardian, Alex Clark suggests that in today’s literary moment the genre has resurfaced because “[it] offers an alternative, experimental narrative of self. [It] attempts to reshape and repurpose a literary form, and [its] sudden popularity speaks to the idea that to capture 21st-century experience writers must breach borders—blend fiction, memoir, history, poetry, the visual and performing arts.” This is maybe another way of saying that in today’s literary moment, autofiction is one path to writing within true wokeness, which is required in our current political climate.

But before this contemporary moment, I’d argue there’s another lineage to autofiction outside the French canon: the slave narrative. It seems only appropriate then, to revisit Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, the first novel penned by a black woman in America, self-published in 1859, which has been read as either autofiction, satire, or autobiography, and in true metafiction form is likely a hybrid between the three genres.

The title—“Our Nig; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North”—immediately tells the reader this is a story of multiple personas: “Nig,” “Free Black,” and “North.” Elizabeth Breau observes that while many argue that the book is a hybrid of a sentimental novel and autobiography, the first clue to our Nig’s satirical nature is in the title, where Wilson both takes interest in showing the reader that “slavery’s shadows fall even there” (the North), while the “juxtaposition of ‘our nig’ and ‘free black’ implies that the narrative concerns itself with an aberration from the status quo,” thus reinforcing Wilson’s endeavour to challenge the North’s persona as anti-slavery and the land of equality.

Wilson tells the story of Frado, the daughter of Mag Smith, a white woman, and Jim, a black free man in the North while slavery is still ongoing in the South. After Jim’s death, Mag marries a new partner, Seth Shipley, the former business partner of her late husband (it is unclear whether Seth is black or white), and together the two decide to offload Mag’s children to lessen their financial burden. Frado is taken the Bellmont family, where she works till she is 18, enduring savage abuse that leaves her unable to walk at times.

The novel is generally considered to be a sketch of Wilson’s life, of which few details are known,  and these gaps are perhaps what makes the work so compelling. By using elements of multiple forms—including satire, sentimental fiction, and slave narrative—Wilson not only radically creates a new form of fiction, but also performs a nuanced exercise of truth-telling. If Frado is WIlson’s persona, she does not just tell her story, but she also tells the stories of the family that employs her—writing a narrative beyond the self of the North and of America. By playing with the real and possibly satirical, Wilson attempts to do more than narrate Frado’s suffering. Our Nig escapes from the form of many abolitionist slave narratives to illuminate the nuanced reality of slavery in America, details that the genre did not allow for in many cases.

It also provides a compelling example of what it looks like when black women do auto-work, or the work of representing both a collective self and personal self. What else is Our Nig other than a call for America to wake up?

Alice Godfrey notes in a 2015 essay published in Writing the Self that, “black women’s literature, particularly autobiographies, has often been subject to severe criticism, such accounts often being deemed too personal, or not political enough.” This is also useful when we consider autofiction and the notion of self. Much of the literary canon’s preoccupation with autofiction involves discussing whether it’s a true genre on its own or a hybrid genre, but I think a more interesting question comes when we consider the autofictional through the construction or deconstruction of the self. When we consider the reality that “everybody wanna be a black woman, but nobody wants to be a black woman,” it points to a question of personhood that black women writing within any genre construct their lives and selves against: not being quite woman, and not being quite human in a larger sociopolitical structure. Perhaps that is what is so radical, not just about black women and autofiction, but black women’s writing overall: it holds the “I,” personally and collectively, writing the collective self as a black woman that is a person, and a person that is a black woman.

Another work which speaks to the construction of self is Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, her only work of fiction, which Sandra Jackson-Opoku cautions us against reading as autobiography since “we have two memoirs that elucidate Brooks’ life story much more fully.” Maud Martha, after all, is not a writer. Yet the epigraph, which opens the novel, “Maud Martha was born in 1917. She is still alive,” suggests Maud Martha the person “exceeds Maud Martha, the project.”

What does it mean to read this work as autofiction? Maud Martha is not necessarily a work of grandeur plot. Rather its marvel is in the quiet, intimate details and interiority of the main character, Maud Martha, who we witness as she grows from young age into adulthood. In one of the book’s early vignettes, Maud Martha observes her surroundings moments before a white classmate is set to come to her house. The event itself is not recounted; rather, we witness Maud Martha’s sudden awareness and shame of her feelings of gratitude to the white classmate for visiting her home, a black household. Maud Martha is written quietly, against the backdrop of a segregated America, intimately inviting the reader to both the beauty and rebuke of being a black American woman.   

The intimacy with which America is held as part of the self in these three works, and many other works of autobiography and autofiction by black women I haven’t explored here, is nothing short of radical. In Our Nig, Wilson challenges the conventions that hold the slave narrative hostage to the pleas of abolitionists, instead opting to write a personal narrative. This story, along with other black women’s writing within autofiction, problematizes the already unstable genre by allowing for self-mythology that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. As Melissa Spin argues, “This is autofiction—the power of creating a multitude of narratives for the Self, whether fragmented or not, broken or not, colonized, erased, or maligned.”

In Badu’s New Amerykah, personal and collective narratives of addiction, depression, paralysis, perseverance and the collective, almost mystical strength of black people are impossible to ignore. (Interestingly enough, it is also male-identified—“Soldier”—which I think speaks to Badu’s larger politics and patriarchal outlook, including her comments on R. Kelly, even if her work is deeply affecting.) When black women say “I,” it holds a very different meaning. When Erykah Badu mythologizes about herself and “Amerykah,” it is a nation that is “lone to stay awake,” a space that is radical, audacious, and black. This is the feat of black women’s autofictional work: recasting the boundaries of personhood, as well as the nation.

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Ismail Muhammad offers an appreciation of fiction finalist Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man (The New Press).

*

Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man tells the compact tale of a nameless black Martinican slave who turns fugitive. His flight from subjection is also a flight into an enchanted realm freighted with New World history: the bones of murdered Caribs, fetishes left by maroon slaves, and supernatural entities straight out of Creole folk tales haunt our hero. As a result, Slave Old Man is about a runaway slave the same way Moby-Dick is about a whale: the slave old man might take center stage, but he is really just the scaffolding upon which Chamoiseau hangs an expansive meditation on the world that chattel slavery created, and the ways we are all enfolded in a terrifying history of genocide and enslavement. Chamoiseau asks us how we can write histories of people whom history has forgotten; in doing so, he crafts an epic origin story of African Caribbean culture.

When we first meet our protagonist, he is a completely remarkable thing, a person only in the vaguest sense of the word. While his fellow Africans reject the abjection that slavery would impose on them, the vieux-nègre is more like a thing than a human, a resource used up in the plantation’s operations, a “mineral of motionless,” “inexhaustible bamboo.” On a plantation wholly bereft of enchantment, he is entangled in numbing mindlessness.

That changes when the master brings a mastiff over from Europe. The dog is monstrous, a beast endowed with “muscles supple as cables” and a preternatural silence. It’s is an object of loathing and fear for the slaves; yet, it is mysteriously linked to our protagonist. Like the slave, the dog “as well had voyaged on a ship for weeks in a kind of horror.” They are united in a shared bondage to the master, and in their subjection to the Middle Passage’s depredations. Our protagonist catches sight of the animal and awakens to a new understanding of his life, “[rediscovering] in the mastiff the catastrophe inhabiting him.” He flees the plantation, aiming his anxious feet towards the “Great Woods” just outside the plantation’s borders. The master follows, setting his mastiff loose.

Slave Old Man is a short book, more of a fable than a novel. Its plot is thin, consisting almost entirely of the slave’s breathless flight from the plantation, and the mastiff’s frenzied pursuit. Chamoiseau’s lush prose undulates with this sense of movement, and just as the slave sinks down into an ancient spring at the novel’s end, we sink into Chamoiseau’s portrayal of a forest pregnant with hallucinatory images: a woman carrying souls in an oxcart, devils hunkering down in trees, people who transform into dogs. Translated with care and nuance by Linda Cloverdale, the novel abandons trite stories about slavery’s demise and Western progress on the question of race. In place of these sentimental tropes, we get a bold, inventive statement on how the ghosts of slavery are rooted in the heart of the present.

__________________________________

Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic based in Oakland, California, where he is the reviews editor at The Believer.

For my book club this January—kicking off its 20th year in operation—I asked my members to read Balzac’s novel Old Goriot, set in Paris in 1819, exactly two centuries ago, and four years after Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena. For decades, to no avail, I had pushed Balzac’s Cousin Bette on my group, so I was thrilled when Old Goriot made it through the sorting hat. (Among its many attractions, the novel is short—about half the length of Cousin Bette—always an advantage for a book club.)

It is a curious fact that even lifelong Francophiles—people who have read Flaubert, Stendhal, and multiple volumes of Proust, who recite Baudelaire for kicks, watch the newest French comedies on Netflix, and mainline Époisses—often have skipped Balzac. This may be because his name sounds silly in English, or because his titles can be clunky (one of them translates: “At the House of the Tennis-Playing Cat”; another, “Ferragus, Leader of the Devourers”), or because the epic scale of his project dwarfs even Proust’s. Both Old Goriot and Cousin Bette are part of Balzac’s vast “Human Comedy”—a sprawling collection of novels and stories (he published more than 90 of them, and dozens more were underway when he died at 51) that paints a thickly detailed portrait of French society in his day.

This is a shame, because Balzac’s writing is engrossing, entertaining, revelatory and merciless. He has an artist’s eye for visual detail, and a hard-boiled newsman’s aversion to euphemism. In his age, he frequently came under attack for his unsparing portrayal of human foibles and folly. If you visit his house in Paris, a green-shuttered villa with a tiny garden, hidden on a verdant hillside in Passy, with creaking floors that make you feel you are being tailed by Balzac’s suspicious ghost, you will see plaques on the wall that set forth the scathing rebukes he received from his critics. His reputation survived the fury of his peers; and two hundred years on, reading his novels still produces frisson—and recognition that human vices and vicissitudes have not changed all that much in two centuries, though they do not always feel as Balzackian as they do at the present moment.

Old Goriot tracks the climb up the slippery, clattery Parisian social ladder of a handsome, passionate, earnest young man in his early twenties named Eugène de Rastignac, who arrives in Paris from the south of France (think of it as the French version of the American Midwest—the provenance of down-to-earth, straightforward folk), determined to make his mark. Picture Timothée Chalamet as Eugène—or at least, that’s what my book club members did, as they clamored for this novel to be filmed.

Everyone in Old Goriot, including the hero, is constantly rising or falling in social status, with abrupt consequences in their treatment by others—like the characters in the Jules Verne fairy tale “The Rat Family,” who change species (up or down on the evolutionary continuum, from man to mollusk and back) as their luck changes. While Eugène studies law (half-heartedly) and falls in love (ardently) in Paris, he lives in a grimy boarding house run by a blowsy penny-pinching widow named Madame Vauquer, who treats her boarders rudely when their fortunes flag, and knows the price of every comestible she serves, down to the half sou. Eugène’s doting provincial family pays his tuition and board, and sends him extra money (which they cannot afford) when he needs to buy fashionable clothes to gain entrée to elite circles. This is not as frivolous as it sounds: the family’s long-term security depends on Eugène’s success at cutting a dash, and his ability to monetize his éclat.

Among Madame Vauquer’s boarders (besides Eugène) are a naïve, pious, penniless maiden named Victorine, whose selfish brother has persuaded their wealthy father to disinherit her; and a Lear-like retired pasta merchant named Goriot, who has bankrupted himself to launch his two daughters into the haut monde, converting his lifesavings into dowries to buy them titled husbands. Eugène falls in love with one of the daughters. But there is yet another notable boarder at the Maison Vauquer: a schemer named Vautrin, who knows all the ins and outs of the enclaves of influence. Vautrin takes a shrewd interest in Eugène, hoping that, if he succeeds in elevating the boy into the Bourbon Elysium, he will be rewarded with a sizable nest egg, which Vautrin intends to use to leave France, and reinvent himself in egalitarian America.

Balzac’s writing is engrossing, entertaining, revelatory and merciless. He has an artist’s eye for visual detail, and a hard-boiled newsman’s aversion to euphemism.

I chose Old Goriot as our first book of 2019 for a very particular reason, beyond Balzac-boosting. For two years, since Donald Trump’s accession to the U.S. Presidency, I’ve been teaching a course called “Facts/Alternative Facts: American Media from Tocqueville to Trump,” at the New School in New York City. The class draws on Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial examination of the social and political life of the United States, half a century into our country’s existence. Last December, it occurred to me that Tocqueville and Balzac wrote at the same time and were about the same age (Balzac was five years older); and, furthermore, that Democracy in America and Old Goriot were published in the same year, 1835. If there had been a National Book Awards in France at the time, those two books would have been shoo-ins for Best Work of Non-Fiction and Best Work of Fiction. 

I doubt the two men ever met. Tocqueville was posher than Balzac, more sociable, and better groomed (and dressed); and he and his family were intricately connected with French politics. It was that connection, in part, that prompted Tocqueville to set out for America in 1831. The July Revolution of 1830 had unseated the Bourbon kings, who had favored Tocqueville’s parents and, by extension, their clever son. The Bourbons were brothers of the guillotined Louis XVI, whom Tocqueville’s parents had served (they nearly lost their own heads during the Terreur, but they squeaked by). During the 15 years of the Bourbon Restoration, the loyalty of Tocqueville père and mère was rewarded. The July Revolution brought a new king to power, Louis-Philippe, upsetting the patronage game board. Tocqueville was 25 then, only a couple years older than Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac; and it was prudent for him to keep his distance while new rules took shape. He applied for, and got, a commission from the July Monarchy to travel to America to write about our prison system, a topic safely irrelevant to the new king’s amour-propre.

During the nine months he spent in America, Tocqueville traveled widely, gained a prodigious amount of information about the customs and convictions of the populace, and schooled himself in the foundational documents of this country, like the U.S. Constitution [246] and the Federalist Papers. Echoing Alexander Hamilton (Federalist 67-77), Tocqueville held that a U.S. President (whom he referred to as the “elective magistrate”) likely would not act as tyrannically as kings often do; and that if he tried to, the Senate would slap him down. Because of Senate supervision, he explained, “in his relations with foreign powers,” the American president “can neither corrupt nor be corrupted.”

It’s interesting to look at Alexander Hamilton’s attitudes on the Presidency, given that they informed Tocqueville’s thinking and paved the way for the passage of the U.S. Constitution. The creation of the office of the Presidency was a major stumbling block to the Constitution’s ratification, back in 1788. Many Americans fiercely opposed the creation of a Chief Executive; the memory of the oppressions of King George III was too near. Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay published the essays that later came to be called The Federalist Papers in 1787 and 1788, months before the Constitution was ratified, to refute the detractors. In Federalist 67, “The Executive Department,” Hamilton poked fun at scaredy-cats who thought an American president might succumb to monarchical excesses, like wanting to be “surrounded with minions and mistresses, giving audience to the envoys of foreign potentates in all the supercilious pomp of majesty.” He derided the notion that a democratically elected U.S. President would ever embrace “images of Asiatic despotism,” or defend “murdering janizaries.”

Hamilton could not have anticipated Presidential tweetstorms and statements cozying up to a North Korean despot, embracing a Russian autocrat, and endorsing a Saudi Arabian potentate, who (the CIA has concluded), ordered the ambush and murder of a Washington Post reporter last October in Istanbul. Tocqueville (by my reading) was less wary of Presidential abuse of power than of the “omnipotence” of public opinion in America, the “tyranny of the majority.” Famously, he wrote: “I know of no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.” 

Tocqueville did not anticipate Donald Trump, of course; but arguably, he foresaw Twitter.

Like the contemporary novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard—who warned in 2015 that writers in the current age were censoring themselves, hiding their true thoughts behind an “invisible wall” for fear of being shunned or shamed on social media and beyond, Tocqueville saw the danger of the herd mentality, and recognized the media’s power to influence that herd. Warning that “the word of a strong-minded man which alone reaches to the passions of a mute assembly has “more power than the confused cries of a thousand orators,” he showed more wariness of the mute assembly than of the “elective magistrate” in America. Tocqueville did not anticipate Donald Trump, of course; but arguably, he foresaw Twitter.

And yet, Tocqueville was exhilarated and fascinated by the equality he found in this country, believed it would stick, and believed it augured “the approaching irresistible and universal spread of democracy throughout the world.” He dreamed of a republican France, in which the fortunes of Balzac’s Rastignac and all the other denizens of the Human Comedy, in Paris in 1819 or in any country, in any year, would no longer depend on the fickle whims and tyrannical impulses of rich, corrupt, powerful autocrats and their courtiers.

In 1848, after another French revolution brought republican rule to France, Tocqueville wrote an elated new introduction to the 12th edition of Democracy in America, (which by then was an established classic). “The laws of the French republic can be, and in many cases, should be, different from those prevailing in the United States,” he wrote. “But the principles on which the constitutions of the American states rest, the principles of order, balance of power, true liberty, and sincere and deep respect for law, are indispensable for all republics: they should be common to them all; and it is safe to forecast that where they are not found the republic will soon have ceased to exist.” 

During the next three years, Tocqueville helped draft the constitution of the French 2nd Republic, served briefly as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and more prolongedly, as a member of the French National Assembly. But on December 2, 1851, the French 2nd Republic ceased to exist, when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (later known as Nap III) staged a coup, dissolved the Assembly, and declared the Second Empire. Tocqueville joined an effort to have Nap III tried for “high treason” for violating the French constitution, and when that failed, he left politics, retreated to his castle, and kept writing.

Balzac had died the previous year, 1850, while still toiling on his neverending oeuvre; knowing that, whatever governments—aristocratic or democratic—might rise or fall; whatever good or bad presidents and kings might come along, the frailties and fungibility of the human condition would stay the same, and needed to be recorded. “Mankind lives under changing conditions,” Tocqueville had observed in 1848, “and new destinies are impending.” Under whatever conditions—democratic or autocratic—the  shape of those destinies will always be easier for a novelist to capture in hindsight than for a social observer to predict.

Do the mountains and the blue Bavarian twilight cause the drum march to rattle into existence—is the music an emanation of the mountains?—or are the peaks and valleys hauled into view by the march of drums? Are these Heideggerian questions, or is it just that the Teutonic opening credits—as red as the background of a Nazi flag—could not be any redder against the mountainous blue of snow-clad mountains and the deep blue sky passing for night? The wind is blowing through the mountain peaks, howling in that snowy, Alpiney way, and the drums are more strident, more martial, and there are possibly even more of them than there were a few moments earlier, marching in formation, flying.

“We were over Germany, and a blacker, less inviting piece of land I never saw,” writes Martha Gellhorn in The Face of War. “It was covered with snow, there was no light and no sign of human life, but the land itself looked actively hostile.” We feel the same, even if the hostile land is not black—but if it was “covered with snow” then it probably wouldn’t have been black when she soared over it in 1945—so the point that needs to be made is that active hostility can look rather scenic too.

An aerial view from a plane becomes a scenic view of the plane, flying in lone formation: seen and heard, propelled by full Brucknerian orchestra now, with a howling tailwind and drums marching so powerfully they could invade the soundtrack of a neighboring cinema. Then it’s a view from the plane again, peak-surfing over the snow-scored mountains, tilting and gliding through the mountain passes, affording Panavision views of . . . Where are we exactly?

Font-wise, as the credits continue to roll, there’s a hint of Castle Dracula and Transylvania—of Christopher Lee and Hammer horror—but the plane is a German plane, a Junkers Ju-52, and it’s giving a very persuasive demonstration of not only its maneuverability but also the excellence of its camouflage as it blends in with the motives for doing a picture like this, which will bring in fabulous amounts of money: so that he can buy his modern-day Cleopatra (“money for old rope” was her verdict on this caper) things like a jet with burnished gold thrones instead of seats.

Or it could just be that he’s nursing a killer hangover (symbolically suggested by the way that, stacked up near him, are what appear to be metal beer barrels), so that as they approach the drop zone he looks at the blinking red light, pulsing like a headache, like a warning of imminent liver failure, and we are suddenly back in the pre-mission briefing room where another red light is flashing—a nice touch by director Brian G. Hutton—as Patrick Wymark (Colonel Turner) gives the briefing as though it’s been scripted not by Alistair MacLean but by William Shakespeare.

Pre-mission briefings are always addressed to the audience as well as the actors gathered around to listen, sitting or standing (Eastwood at the back, half in shadow, a shadowy presence), who are effectively our surrogates, eager to know what we and they are in for. Wymark points with his stick to the map on the wall, to the Schloss Adler, the Castle of the Eagles. Well named, he says, because only an eagle can get in there. He’s right, it (the film) is well named in the way that book or movie titles beginning with “Where” (. . . Angels Fear to Tread . . . the Green Ants Dream) or “When” (. . . Eight Bells Toll . . . Worlds Collide) or (For ) “Whom ” (. . . the Bell Tolls ) always are. Where Eagles Dare anticipates the widespread popularity of the SAS motto “Who Dares Wins,” even though it was made a dozen years before the storming of the Iranian Embassy (1980), of which the film could be seen either as a prophetic allegory or a direct inspiration.

And the title is not just a sonorous bit of rhetoric plucked from Shakespeare by producer Elliott Kastner, who needed something better than the “awful fucking title” MacLean had come up with (Castle of Eagles). Kastner’s title cleverly inverts or, as is said in the world of agents and double agents, “turns” the intended sense of the lines in Richard III: “The world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch,” words that Burton could have enunciated with the clarity Larry Olivier would later bring to the voice-over of all twenty-six episodes of The World at War, starting with the famous opening shots of Oradour-sur-Glane (“Down this road, on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came . . .”), a clarity Eastwood neither attempts nor envies, especially since the English officers in the briefing all look like they’re kitted out in uniforms from the previous war or a shelved episode of Dad’s Army while he lounges at the back in something much sharper, more contemporary, more American-looking, sporting a post-Elvis haircut and wearing the shoulder flashes, as Wymark points out, of the American Ranger Division.

A plane, a de Havilland Mosquito (as featured, a few years previously, in 633 Squadron, about another raid on an otherwise impregnable target),[1] crash-landed near the Schloss where one of the plane’s passengers has been taken for interrogation. The mission is to get him out. Get him out before he talks, before he starts singing like a canary. The only way to do this is with stealth and secrecy. And you gentlemen, Wymark adds with a flourish, are all stealthy and secretive. So stealthy and secretive that none of them betrays the slightest reaction to this rhetorical compliment.

The purpose of the mission is now clear—and how could it not be clear when it’s all being enunciated with such impeccable clarity? Essentially the briefing is a virtuoso display of syllabic carving, an elocution demo, and given that the film often reflects on what it’s up to it’s a shame that the word “enunciate”— couldn’t the mission be code-named Operation Enunciate?—is not itself enunciated in the course of this briefing, in which Eastwood (Lieutenant Schaffer) is entirely silent even when he’s introduced to the others, so although he might be taken as a representative of the new American style of nontheatrical acting he’s also a leftover from the silent-movie era.

All of you, Colonel Turner continues, besides being fluent in German, are expert at survival “behind enemy lines”—a three-word phrase which has never lost its appeal, which still describes the allure and glamor of the special forces, and which exerted such a hold on my childhood that it sometimes seemed that the purpose of enemy lines was primarily to afford small teams of highly trained soldiers the chance to go on acting missions and utter their lines behind them.

A subset of soldiers who find themselves behind enemy lines are POWs who want to break out of prison, ostensibly to get back to Blighty, in front of enemy lines, but also in order to behave like real soldiers behind enemy lines: darting around, evading capture and generally making a nuisance of themselves (Steve McQueen and his motorcycle most spectacularly, in The Great Escape), though none will cause as much of a nuisance as this seven-man team, one of whom now feels compelled to enquire—presumably as a representative of potential audience skepticism about the planned mission—why they don’t just send in a Pathfinder squadron of Lancasters and blow the Schloss to kingdom come?[2]

Because, replies Michael Hordern (Admiral Rolland), clearly determined not to be out-enunciated by Patrick Wymark, the prisoner, General Carnaby, is one of the architects of the Second Front and blowing up the Schloss would involve blowing him up too, thereby threatening the UK-US alliance on which the fate of the world depends. Which means, more immediately, that the fellow who asked the question can only sit there like a kid in a history class who’s been given a rap over the knuckles by a teacher whose dedication to the annual production of the school play is a matter of proven record.

So that’s it, they’ve got to get in and get Carnaby out, before he spills the beans on the Second Front. Over and above this possibly impossible mission the larger importance of special operations has been emphatically affirmed. This is in keeping with the way that the role of the Special Operations Executive was “puffed by a powerful lobby of historians, some of whom were its former officers.” The truth, John Keegan continues, is that the SOE “largely fails in its claim to have contributed significantly to Hitler’s defeat.” It all depends, I suppose, on what is meant by truth. Isn’t it true, for example, that when Max Hastings summarizes the hopes of Operation Biting—a 1942 plan to capture Luftwaffe night-fighter radar systems from Bruneval on the coast of northern France—in his book The Secret War, he does so in terms that echo Wymark’s? “Surely it should be possible for a daring raiding party to get in—then, more important, out, having secured priceless booty.”[3]

Operation Crossbow, The Guns of Navarone, Cockleshell Heroes, The Heroes of Telemark and The Rat Patrol enacted the (repeatedly heroic and daring) truth of my boyish perspective on the war. That perspective has since been altered, corrected, radically changed, but nothing can erase it entirely—any more than an acknowledgement of the decisive importance of the Battle of Stalingrad can downgrade the formative role of the local Battle (of Britain) or the retreat from Dunkirk in my enduring interest in the Second World War.[4]

And if director Brian G. Hutton cannot comfortably sit alongside auteurs such as Tarkovsky, Herzog, Antonioni et al., Where Eagles Dare still seems, fifty years after its first release, to contain some essence of what cinema means to me now, when action movies have become a form of explosive torpor. “Every onlooker who fancies his powers of discrimination has a wonderful time when a blockbuster flops on the opening weekend,” writes Clive James in Cultural Amnesia:

But the blockbuster that we actually have a wonderful time watching is a more equivocal case. Where Eagles Dare has always been my favorite example: since the day I first saw it, I have taken a sour delight in rebutting pundits who so blithely assume that the obtuseness onscreen merely reflects the stunted mentalities behind the camera, and I go on seeing its every rerun on television in order to reinforce my stock of telling detail—and, all right, in order to have a wonderful time.

It’s not just that I’d rather watch Where Eagles Dare than Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World because it’s more fun; I’d rather watch Where Eagles Dare because it’s better than Until the End of the World—but then, what could be worse?

Before we’ve had a chance adequately to reflect on such matters—or on the preponderance of Ws in the preceding sentence—we’re back in the plane, which is now over the drop zone. (Since the drop zone is almost always behind enemy lines it serves as a vertically concentrated essence of the horizontal expanse of generalized danger evoked by the latter term.) They’re clipping their parachutes to the static line, the red light is flashing green, and they’re tumbling out of the door. First out are the beer barrels, as if the whole mission is really a pretext for a behind-the-lines keg party, except we can see now that they’re actually canisters of equipment, bigger and longer than kegs but surprisingly small given the scale of the mayhem their contents will inflict on the host nation. Last out, several seconds after the last of the seven-man stick—and unseen by them—is a woman.

Landing in cushioning snow and trees, the silver canisters have the quality of seasonal hampers stuffed full of guns, explosives and other weaponry—exactly what we wanted for Christmas as kids. After the hamper-canisters come the men, their mushroom canopies drifting slowly and softly over the soft and silent snow in which they land softly and safely, silently and whitely, discreetly, very whitely. It’s so idyllically wintery it could be a scene on a Christmas card from jump school. They’re behind enemy lines, but there’s not an enemy in sight (because the enemy is even deeper behind enemy lines than they are?). One member of the team is missing and they spread out to look for him, trudging through the knee-deep snow, all wearing their snow-patrol parkas and over-trousers.[5]

It doesn’t take long to find the missing man. “Major!” bellows one of the search team, loudly disregarding what might reasonably be assumed is the first rule of stealthy survival behind enemy lines. The missing man is no longer a missing man; he’s a dead man. His neck’s broken (the snow is not as soft as it seemed), so now there are just six of them. It’s a bad start, possibly an ill omen, but missions behind enemy lines have a habit of going wrong: the Black Hawk shot down over the Mog, the attempted rescue of the hostages in Iran that put paid to Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the helicopter crash that jeopardized the mission to whack Bin Laden, the discovery of the sniper team by Afghan shepherds in Lone Survivor . . .

In combat anything that can go wrong will go wrong—at the worst possible moment, before the combat, properly speaking, has even begun in this fictive instance. So Burton (Major Smith) doesn’t waste time crying over spilt milk—he tells the rest of them to continue unpacking the hampers while he tests the dead man’s radio. Makes sense—though as soon as they’ve trudged off he becomes more interested in the dead man’s address book or notebook, which isn’t necessarily so weird since it contains much-needed call signals; but the music has turned a little spooky, positively Hitchcockian.

There’s more to this mission than meets the eye—which becomes more apparent when they get to the cosy, conveniently located Alpine barn and are shuffling off their snowsuits and changing into their German uniforms. This just isn’t me, says one of the team, a guy whose name, whether his actual name or that of his character, we haven’t even bothered learning, so that we don’t know or care whether “this” (the uniform) is “me” (him) or anyone else (not him). Burton announces that he can’t use the radio because he’s left behind the codebook which we’ve seen him tuck into his own tunic just a few minutes earlier, when they were out in the cold snow, before they got to the cosy cabin.

To retrieve the notebook that doesn’t need retrieving he trudges out into a blizzard that doesn’t look like much of a blizzard, but he only goes round the corner to a neighboring hut where, rather conveniently, Mary Ure—last seen jumping out of the plane—is waiting in her winter-espionage wardrobe. Without so much as a by-your-leave Burton rummages through her luggage, where he discovers some undercover, lacy underwear, which he holds up admiringly, though to 21st-century eyes they seem like bloomers.

So far Burton has done nothing but give orders, so this is an important exchange in that he might reveal another side of his character. This side of his character also involves giving lengthy and complicated orders about what to do and where to go, but for Ure it’s a definite improvement on getting her head snapped off every time she opened her mouth—or didn’t open it—when they played opposite each other as Jimmy and Alison Porter in Look Back in Anger ten years earlier. He doesn’t even raise his voice while putting her straight after she says she has a right to know what’s going on. And he does offer up a useful bit of intel, namely that the radio operator didn’t die accidentally in the drop: he was killed, his neck broken after he’d been knocked out.

So now, in addition to intrigue (what’s Ure doing here?) and mystery (why was the radio operator killed and by whom?), there’s also suspense. And love interest (Ure again), which is usually conspicuously absent from MacLean’s books. There might be love interest but there’s no love time, so after a quick filmic snog—which might stand in for a roll in the hay, of which there is plenty in this annex to the main cabin—Burton is on his way out and heading back to the lavishly appointed (relatively speaking) boys’ dorm where they’re all sleeping.

Except for Eastwood, who’s walking around in his German uniform as though he’s still up late at one of those fancy-dress parties that get members of the royal family in trouble because they haven’t twigged that there’s more to wearing a German uniform than wearing a German uniform, a fact cleverly or stupidly exploited by the Polish artist Piotr Uklański in his 1998 work The Nazis, featuring 164 stills or posters of actors playing the parts of German soldiers (not Nazis necessarily), including Eastwood in his current role of Lieutenant Schaffer, even though, strictly speaking, he’s neither a Nazi nor a German soldier but an American Ranger on his first night out with his new English pals who, for all he knows, are no strangers to this kind of politically questionable costume romp.

There’s a bit of snoring in the cabin, but Eastwood is too alert—in a relaxed sort of way—to sleep, so he’s waited up for Burton like the concerned parent of a teenage son out on a date on a snowy New Year’s Eve. Checking his watch in a checking-but-not-overly-anxious way, he kills time cleaning and disassembling his Schmeisser submachine gun. The idiom is no accident. His relationship with time— killing it—accurately anticipates what will turn out to be a homicidal relationship with almost everyone he encounters outside this little cabin. When Burton comes back in with an implausible story about meeting a stunning blonde in a snowstorm Clint squints at him suspiciously, quizzically, Eastwoodly, all the time applying lube to his Schmeisser, as if he knows the Major has been up to something, especially when Burton—having gone to the trouble of retrieving the codebook from a dead body in the dead of night in the midst of a notional blizzard—gives up trying to contact London after a few seconds and says it can wait till the morning.

There was a slight redundancy in the preceding sentence when I said that Clint squints at Burton. Squinting is pretty much the limit of Eastwood’s facial range as an actor. Eastwood has basically squinted his way through five decades of superstardom, squinting in a variety of outfits (poncho and tweed jacket, most famously) and in response to a variety of stimuli (guns, chicks, gags; danger, love, humor) in a way that renders him, in facial terms, monosyllabic. Or duosyllabic, since the squint crops up with such regularity as to become the default setting of the Eastwood face, so that not-squinting—expressing nothing—becomes expressive of the entire range of human emotions that exist beyond the limits of the squint.

In this regard he faces, so to speak, stiff competition from numerous American actors from the 1970s, all vying with each other to see who can do most with least—or least with less. David Thomson admiringly evokes “the sculptured Lithuanian rock” of Charles Bronson’s face as he dispensed “monumental violence, always with an expression of geological impassivity.” And whereas the face is usually the main way of identifying a person, in Point Blank the face of Lee Marvin (Walker) gives nothing away; it’s the way he walks that establishes who he is (which is ontologically synonymous with what he does; he is he who walks).

But in terms of the non-manifestation of whatever is going on inside—or, possibly, the clear manifestation of an interior nothingness—Steve McQueen was the master. By comparison with McQueen, Eastwood was the Jim Carrey of his day, a virtuoso gymnast of the visage. I said that Marvin gave nothing away; McQueen does—and gives away—less than nothing. Hence the beautiful redundancy or double negative of his role in The Cincinnati Kid, in which he has to enact an ideal of the poker-faced poker player.

But it’s in Bullitt that he took things (logically, the opposite of giving) to another level, even if the nature of that level is, by definition, impossible to discern. In Bullitt McQueen’s face takes us into a kind of submarine world whereby the oceanic depths of impassivity suggest the dense topography of the Mariana Trench with all the dead weight of multiple atmospheric pressures bearing down on it and him; a case, perhaps, of what Thomas Bernhard calls “exaggerated understatement.” It helps that McQueen’s face has no distinguishing features apart from the eyes; Eastwood is strikingly handsome, gorgeous, but he has that essential ability—especially important when playing the part of a cowboy or gunslinger—to be seen to be gazing into the middle distance even when doing up-close work such as obsessively lubing his Schmeisser. So when he looks up across the table at Burton it’s as if he’s gazing clear across the horizon, through a blizzard of radio static, into the Welsh valleys of his costar’s troubled, booze-addled psyche.

[1] By the time I was twelve the idea of the impregnable had been so thoroughly impregnated by notions of pregnability that to describe a place as impregnable was to suggest its extreme vulnerability to infiltration and attack.

[2] The Avro Lancaster was my second-favorite—and the second-most-complex—Airfix model aircraft after the American B-17 “Flying Fortress.”

[3] The comparison is helped by the way that the “Bruneval raid was the most successful such operation of the war.”

[4] Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was an overwhelming experience, partly because I saw it on IMAX, as Nolan intended. But also—and perhaps this too was intentional—because it was like witnessing a dramatized, massively enhanced projection of some of the components of the national culture that had formed me and my contemporaries. The film was designed to be immersive; what it immersed me in—symbolically expressed by the Spitfire gliding silently onto the beach where the stuff of consciousness yields to and is cushioned by the claims of the unconscious—was the experience of seeing what was already there, waiting for the film as it landed in my head.

[5] One of the most prized items in my Action Man’s ward- robe was his ski patrol outfit. I remember it vividly—the green goggles, the oven-glove white mittens that rendered the white rifle unholdable—because my parents bought it for me on an inappropriately sunny day when I had a tooth pulled at the dentist’s. On the way home my mum told me off for spitting blood onto the pavement and gave me a handkerchief to spit into. Later she took a picture of my dad and me in our garden, in the sun with our shirts off, while Action Man toiled away conspicuously on the grey grass of the lawn in his white parka and skis like some totemic warning about the looming catastrophe of climate change. That was the nearest we ever got to a skiing holiday.

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Excerpted from Broadsword Calling Danny Boy by Geoff Dyer. Copyright © 2019 by Geoff Dyer. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Tom Beer offers an appreciation of The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown).

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To the roster of unforgettable American families in literature, we can now add a new name: de la Cruz. The San Diego clan at the center of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels is unruly, fractious, fierce, fun-loving—and so large that some reviewers have lamented the absence of a family tree in the book.

At the head of this remarkable crew is Miguel Angel de la Cruz, called Big Angel. As the novel opens on a Saturday morning, Big Angel has overslept and is late for the funeral of his mother, Mamá América. Big Angel will be celebrating his 70th birthday on Sunday, and relatives are coming from far and wide to celebrate, but death hangs over that gathering, too: Big Angel has been diagnosed with cancer, and it will be his last birthday.

The House of Broken Angels takes place over this eventful weekend, though it also carries us back in time to La Paz, Mexico, where Big Angel grew up enthralled (and intimidated) by his charismatic policeman father, Don Antonio, and where he first met his future wife, Perla. We also linger in the town of Tijuana, where Big Angel crosses the border (“There were regular corridors in those days,” Urrea writes, “and day workers often commuted through the dirt canyons.”) He will settle on the U.S. side, with Perla, and together they raise their brood.

Over the course of the novel’s weekend, readers meet the many, many members of this extended family: children, stepchildren, brothers, sisters, and—significantly—one half-brother. Little Angel is Don Antonio’s son by his American second wife; he is an outsider to this family, held uncomfortably in its passionate embrace.

For a novel set in a single weekend, The House of Broken Angels contains multitudes; for a novel shadowed by death, it teems with the messy realities of life. It’s also gloriously funny on nearly every page. Every single page brims with Urrea’s vivid language, spiked with choice bits of Spanish slang (vato, cabrones, pendejo).

At a time when Central American immigrants are demonized and a border wall is part of the daily national conversation, Urrea’s novel makes no overt political arguments, pleads no special cases. (An Anglo perspective is heard only fleetingly from a woman at Target: “You’ll be out of this country on your ass very soon.”) Instead, The House of Broken Angels presents the de la Cruzes in all their heartbreaking and comic complexity—as real to us as our own families, wherever we came from.

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Tom Beer is the Books and Travel Editor of Newsday and a past president of the NBCC.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Tom Beer offers an appreciation of Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton).

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Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics constitutes a veritable rogues’ gallery of larger-than-life characters from history and literature—Julius Caesar, Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth. Yet one name hovers unspoken over nearly every page of this sly, astute study of tyranny in the Bard’s histories and tragedies: that of the 45^th president of the United States.

Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard and winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, acknowledges that the 2016 presidential election inspired him to write this volume.  (Greenblatt has written frequently about Shakespeare and his works, most notably in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, an NBCC award finalist in 2004.) Still, the author shrewdly leaves the reader to draw her own connections between the plays and our contemporary politics.

Although Shakespeare did not write about Elizabethan England—his plays drew on histories of the ancient world, England and Scotland—the context of his career, Greenblatt writes, was the decades-long reign of Elizabeth I, a powerful ruler without an heir, and the threat posed by Roman Catholicism, from within and without, to the Church of England. If Elizabeth was not a tyrant, her rule raised the many issues of political legitimacy and that Shakespeare’s work so thoroughly explored.

Tyrants, in Greenblatt’s analysis are made, not born—but there is certainly a character profile that underlies these authoritarian leaders. Of Richard III, Greenblatt writes, “What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully.” King Lear, he observes, “governs by impulse.” King Leontes, in The Winter’s Tale, is “autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic.”

But tyrants, in Greenblatt’s accounting, do not arise in a vacuum. He shows how, in Shakespeare’s plays, they are made possible by passive apparatchiks and a populace lulled into complacency or willingly manipulated by fear mongering. How do the “cherished institutions” of the state, he asks, “seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to?”

If Tyrant speaks unmistakably to the present political moment, it makes a larger point, one for the ages: Tyrants, and those who enable them, have always been with us.

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Tom Beer is the Books and Travel Editor of Newsday and a past president of the NBCC.

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Tess Taylor offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Ada Limón’s The Carrying (Milkweed).

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Over the past two decades, Ada Limón’s work has honed a deft music against her gift for trapdoor syntax, where suddenly a verse drops us into a plush red heart or clambers out of itself to see the sky. A line from her current book, The Carrying, reads “Some days there is a violent sister inside me, and a red ladder/ that wants to go elsewhere.” Violent sister or no—her poems have gained tautness and emotional resonance, in particular in her haunting, fiery collection Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Now Limón’s fifth book, The Carrying, opens a new chapter in an already beautiful and accomplished oeuvre. Indeed, in The Carrying Ada Limón asks, “what if instead of carrying a child/ I am supposed to carry grief?” 

Among other things, this book is about pain in the body, about trying (and failing) to conceive a child, but these are also poems which struggle to care for the world, to care for the self. In the midst of her days—in parking lots, on the way to the doctor, as people and animals she loves die—Limon is also trying bear herself, to bear witness to all she bears.  

Even as she passes dead deer on the road or watches a raccoon decompose, she also wants to grow things and care for a garden. She wants to stay open to magic, music and transformation. While exploring pain, anger and even anguish, these are also poems about tenderness, which is something we all need more of this (and every) year. These are poems where the speaker can tell her doctor that “I’m made of old stars and so’s he” and where a poem can watch bees “tipsy, sun drunk/ and heavy with thick knitted leg warmers/ of pollen.” The self here is tough, is toughened, but is also able to hold “real gladness.” In showing the struggle to keep the heart open, this book actually helps each of us carry our own lives a bit more bravely, too.

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Tess Taylor’s books include The Forage House and Work & Days, named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Taylor currently chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, and is on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. She was recently a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Anne Spencer Writer in Residence at Randolph College.

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Tess Taylor offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Random House).

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Sadly, American racism keeps finding potent ways to reinvent itself—finding new forms in our lives, in our voices, in our bodies. The way such a force can reinvent itself—in different but linked forms—is the terrain of Terrance Hayes’s stunning, virtuosic book American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin. In this book, each of his seventy sonnets—different in context, but all titled identically, and alike inside the cage of 14 lines—lock together to depict the changeable, durable form of American racial violence.

As Hayes knows and the title suggests, there is no one assassin, but rather a series of violences, past and to come, which continue to manifest old and haunting pain. Sometimes his sonnets explore whether there was or was not ever “a black male hysteria”; some ponder “how it is that you and I have remained/ alive.”  One poem traces how the word “life” gets used in a series of canonic poems before ending: “I live a life/ That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life/ That makes me weep for another life. Define life.”

What kind of life does each of us get to have? How does the assassin’s violence get passed on? And, if this pervasive violence is corrosive both to black lives and to all our lives, how do we address it?  Even as his sonnets serve as a form of poetic address, Hayes’s explorations defy easy answers. One poem speaks to the ultimately penitent segregationist George Wallace. Another reads, “Assassin, you are a mystery/ To me, I say to my reflection sometimes./ You are beautiful because of your sadness, but/ You would be more beautiful without your fear.” Hayes’s speakers range wide, but he too lives with an assassin inside, and he also turns the camera on himself.

Hayes—winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim—tosses off his chosen form with enviable ease. In a final act of bravura, even the 5 page index of 14 “first lines” at the back of his book form 5 bonus sonnets. Ponder that: Hayes’s first lines also link together. Hayes dazzles us all with sheer potent recombinance.

Yet volta after volta, sestet after sestet, Hayes also leaves us with open questions. Renaissance scholars conceived of the sonnet as a mask for stylizing the voice, for crafting a dramatic speech more powerful than any found in ordinary life. Yet this dramatic space was also meant as a tool with which to name the ordinary world. Hayes seems well aware of this history as he leaves us, centuries later, to ponder our shared, deeply broken inheritance. He leaves us to ask:  In depicting cages all around us, may we also break them? In addressing our assassins in lyric space, may we heal our real and fragile lives?

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Tess Taylor’s books include The Forage House and Work & Days, named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Taylor currently chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, and is on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. She was recently a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Anne Spencer Writer in Residence at Randolph College.

In the late 1990s, I was an editorial assistant at Hyperion, and my boss had recently acquired a nonfiction anthology called Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women. One morning, the editor of the anthology, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, told me she was aiming to cover voices from as many countries as possible and wondered if I knew any Russian-American writers who might want to contribute. She could think of one or two but they weren’t available.

“I’m a Russian-American writer,” I said. In reality, I was in my early twenties and I hadn’t written a thing. But it was 1998 and there was no one else I could recommend but me.

So I received my very first writing contract and busied myself with becoming understandable to an audience I assumed would be unfamiliar with the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience. My primary model for this type of narrative was Eva Hoffman’s luminous memoir of immigrating from Poland to Canada, Lost in Translation, and I set about earnestly imitating its meditative style, trying to pin down the feeling of belonging nowhere, a sense I’d felt at the time of displacement and invisibility. Looking back now, my first work was an act of introduction, a translation.

Since then, of course, “immigrant literature” has exploded as a book category. American population demographics were changing and those with the privilege to tell the story were coming of age (often children of immigrants or immigrants who came as children or young adults), and more and more readers saw their own experiences reflected on the page. In 1980, immigrants accounted for 6.2 percent of the US population. By 2010, 25 percent of U.S. residents under 18 were first- or second-generation immigrants.

Amy Tan spoke of writing Joy Luck Club in the 1980s from the experience of being the only Chinese student at her school. At that time “multicultural literature” was “building bridges;” the author was the authority on her culture and her literary task included introducing this culture to an American reader unfamiliar but presumably fascinated by its exoticism. There were some common themes in those earlier books: the immigrant as outsider in America, a person torn between the demands of the outside world of the English language and the domestic world of the native one, an “American” child grappling with the growing chasm between herself and her “Old Country” parents.

A little bit later, when immigrant and global literature started to gain more visibility and even bestseller status with writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith, writers found themselves facing new challenges, of not being from the country trending at that moment or being told that their publisher already had a “similar” book on their lists. 

Chimamanda Adichie was purportedly told by an agent that selling Purple Hibiscus would be less challenging if she were Indian. At the same time, some writers I spoke to were also facing authenticity questions from readers who hailed from their native countries. When my first novel was published, at least one older Russian audience member asked me if I even considered myself Russian. What right did I have to Russia at this point, so many years after immigration? At a recent Association of Writers and Writing Professionals conference, sitting on a panel about immigrant writers, I received a question from a young writer in the audience doubting his own voice: I wasn’t born there, do I dare to write about it?

I hope that this concern is easing as our stories are now rich with fluid identities carrying a multiplicity of allegiances and touchstones. “The idea of this great anguish of living between two worlds has diminished somewhat for many immigrant people, artists and non-artists alike. Not that there is not some uneasiness, but it is no longer the single most urgent anxiety of every immigrant’s life,” Edwidge Danticat recently said. “I would like us to move beyond these tropes of speaking to or for, and of being only between two worlds. We are at the same time speaking to no one and everyone.”

This past semester, I taught a graduate readings course on immigrant writing. I wanted to understand the trajectory of this literature in America. We immersed ourselves in texts from writers like Tan and Garcia, to Danticat, Lahiri, Dinaw Mengestu, Yuri Herrera, Mohsin Hamid, and Min Jin Lee. In part, I suppose by rereading these writers, so many of whom influenced my own work in many ways, I wanted to trace my own creative trajectory from my first essay in Becoming American to my third novel Mother Country.

In my first novel, What Happened to Anna K., I remember a conscious desire to make aspects of Russian and Bukharan immigrant life visible to readers. There were all the hallmarks of pleasing, the lingering on food and party scenes, a discursion into the Great Russian Soul. These characters wondered where they belonged.

In my second book, The Imperial Wife, I moved toward an assumption of global identity. The immigrants in that book navigated the world with ease. They were no longer pulled by the one-way ticket of nostalgia.

In my new book, Mother Country, assimilation, acquisition of language and socio-economic struggle is no longer the largest challenge of immigration. It is about government policy, guilt, the creeping unwelcoming climate, the fissures within immigrant communities. With each book, I noticed a greater ease, less explanation, more taking for granted that my readers will not only be willing to take the leap into the unfamiliar but will incorporate my world into their own.

In the novels we were reading for class, texts I now happily consider the canon of American literature, I saw similar shifts in concerns. I noticed how each writer inserted non-English languages in their stories to allow their characters to speak without the intrusion of authorial translation or explanation. If depictions of food once steeped a voyeuristic reader in a foreign culture, now people in a scene simply ate because they were hungry. Once America and the West was a harbor for immigrants, an unambiguous path to a better life. Over time, as these books attest, this assumption was being questioned, interrogated.

“Immigrant literature” is a redundant category, and I’m optimistic about a future where authors from a certain country will not solely be compared with authors from the same country or lumped together with other immigrants, when immigrant writers will not feel pressure to either write or avoid the vast and multi-varied subject of the immigrant experience, where we move beyond native countries as trends, and simply treat all stories as human stories.

Between 1880 and 1920, America was fixated on the future. To many, it felt as though society was on the verge of breaking into a utopian, dystopian, or post-apocalyptic new world order. Modernity was closing in around them: railroads belted the country, dissolving the frontier. Gender roles were being renegotiated as more women sought education and work outside the home. The Great Migration from rural Southern states to the great cities began, and racialized tensions reached a post-slavery crisis point. Thinkers and readers turned to fiction to explore questions and anxieties about what the future might hold.

The fact that the world was getting smaller was the focus of bewildered speculation. Jack London wrote in “The Shrinkage of the Planet” in January 1900, “What a playbill has this planet of ours become! . . . The telegraph annihilates space and time. Each morning every part knows what every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery in a German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within 24 hours. The death of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whiskey smuggler in the South Seas, is served up with the morning toast.” Prodigy and preacher Edward Everett Hale envisioned a future where people could be shot by pneumatic tube from Texas to Georgia; what we would today recognize as Elon Musk’s Hyperloop.

I’ve spent the past couple of years immersed in magazines and fiction from the Gilded Age for book research. Beyond the grand masters of speculative fiction, who predicted atomic warfare and submarines and so much else—H. G. Wells and Jules Verne—the writers who stayed with me included establishment literary heavyweights, a canonical children’s writer, an African-American Baptist minister, and a Bengali woman who created a utopian, science-worshipping place called Ladyland as early as 1905. Their ideas ranged from wireless communication, solar power, flying machines, augmented reality, and lab-grown food to socially radical visions of a black president, women as executives in the workplace, and the animal rights movement. Though I’m still far from having a complete collection of great speculative work from this time, these are—presented in chronological order—some of the works I’ve found that shine like beacons of weird insight, works that disregarded plausibility and ended up crazy as the proverbial fox.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888)

Looking Backward was a galvanizing bestseller that has sunk into obscurity today, though several of the stories featured later in this article were conceived as direct responses to it. Entire utopian communes, like the Oneida Colony in upstate New York, were founded because of it. Dozens of Bellamy Clubs were formed to discuss and enact the book’s ideas. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur outsold it just after its publication. It was published at a moment when working people were exhausted by a series of recessions in the 1870s and ‘80s, then stuck with laissez-faire capitalism in the form of giant monopolies willing to violently suppress collective action. 

Then-minor journalist Edward Bellamy imagined his hero awakening from a 113-year sleep to find his hometown of Boston—and the nation beyond it—transformed into a socialist paradise. Everyone works until age 45, then retires with the same comfortable income from the state. Electric light, credit cards, newscasts, and shopping malls are ubiquitous. Commercial advertising has been replaced with fine art. In this future, “all who do their best are equally deserving, whether that best be great or small.” It all sounds classically Marxist and extremely sweet.

Unveiling a Parallel by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant (1893)

Two women from Cedar Rapids, Iowa collaborated on this deliciously sarcastic novel set on Mars. The unnamed narrator, a man, travels via “aeroplane” to Mars (real planes would not take off for another ten years). He finds a lush planet that not only supports human life, but where women have equal social and professional agency as men. They vote, work as executives in business and government, have relationships out of wedlock, and otherwise seem designed to make their masculine visitor extremely uncomfortable—even as he becomes infatuated with one of them. Additionally, the Martian women gather in private clubs and special train-cars to “vaporize”: instead of smoking, they inhale a mixture of alcohol and valerian root, designed to soothe the nerves.

Besides the aeroplane and vaping, though, the story foresees the shattering of patriarchal views that would be accelerated in the Roaring Twenties. The narrator attends a festive day at which a secretive social club of women enjoy wine and song, and the next morning he is appalled when his love interest, a confident and successful banker, admits to being too hungover to leave home. At each turn, the visitor repeatedly expresses his unease with the enfranchised state of women on Mars, until his guide remarks with a smile, “Do you know, your loyalty and tender devotion to individual women, and your antagonistic attitude toward women in general—on the moral plane—presents the most singular contrast to my mind!”

Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs (1899)

Baptist minister Sutton Griggs self-published this lively novel and sold it door to door, until its merits were recognized and it became famous. Imperium in Imperio—literally “empire within an empire”—conjures an alternate reality focused on a secret nation-state within the United States, led by a black president.

It begins with a neat Dickensian conceit: the story follows two childhood friends, educated at the same excellent school but separated by fortune, education and skin color, forced to choose between assimilating into an oppressive society or mounting a revolution. The light-skinned, charismatic Bernard Belgrave is a mesmerizing orator: “His voice was sweet and well modulated and never failed to charm. Admiration was plainly depicted on every face as he proceeded. He brought to bear all the graces of a polished orator, and more than once tears came into the eyes of his listeners.”

The dark-skinned Belton Piedmont, meanwhile, is even more persuasive as a thinker and leader; when he speaks, “[t]he whole audience seemed as if in a trance. His words made their hearts burn, and time and again he made them burst forth in applause.” As Bernard starts a militant movement to take over the state of Texas, Belton advocates for peace and cooperation—jeopardizing his life in the process. The book was one of the earliest to envision the complete dismantling of predominantly white social institutions.

“Within an Ace of the End of the World” by Robert Barr (1900)

The Scottish-Canadian novelist Robert Barr published this tale in McClure’s magazine in 1900, predicting lab-grown food and electricity generated from the wind. It opens as a young scientist, a protege of a wealthy English aristocrat, gets to his feet at a banquet with a shocking revelation: “Gentlemen,—I was pleased to hear you admit that you liked the dinner which was spread before us tonight. I confess that I have never tasted a better meal . . . I have, therefore, to announce to you that all the foods you have tasted and all the liquors you have consumed were prepared by me in my laboratory.” It’s an ingenious pitch—for the scientists wants the rich men present to invest in his invention. In a couple of years—the story is set in 1904, barely projecting into the future—agriculture has ceased to exist, except as a hobby.

In Barr’s world, the process behind lab-grown food results in the depletion of nitrogen from the atmosphere. There is suddenly too much oxygen; people breathing it go joyously insane, and fire erupts and spreads uncontrollably. A group of somber young men at Oxford see what’s happening and survive the apocalypse by hunkering down in an iron house. At the end of the tale, they’ve managed to cross the Atlantic—encountering no other living creature on the journey—and traverse a melted, buried version of New York City startlingly similar to the final frame of Planet of the Apes. The first sign of life they detect is at Vassar, where a coterie of women also went into hiding and survived; the two groups repopulate the earth in their own, apparently perfect combined image. “It is doubtful if universal peace could have been brought to the world short of the annihilation of the jealous, cantankerous, quarrelsome peoples who inhabited it previous to 1904,” Barr’s narrator concludes. 

Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905)

Raised Muslim in colonial Bengal, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote, taught, and campaigned tirelessly, going door to door to persuade other Muslim families to loosen the strict purdah that stifled women’s education. Sultana’s Dream begins with the narrator falling asleep in an armchair, upon which she is transported to Ladyland, an alternate world where women and science predominate. Female scientists capture solar power, develop laborless farming, control the weather via hot-air balloon, and travel via flying cars.

These inventions predict the future in much the same vein as other speculative stories of her day, but Hossain’s radical commentary on gender and power is what stays with the reader. The visitor to Ladyland finds men, who are kept sequestered and occupied with housework, have adjusted to their limited lives. Rebellion doesn’t interest them; by accepting their captivity and declining the rock the boat, they are fully complicit in it.

As the narrator and her friend in Ladyland remark while moving through the house, “[W]e must leave it now; for the gentlemen may be cursing me for keeping them away from their duties in the kitchen so long.’ We both laughed heartily.”

“The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster (1909)

In between A Room With a View and Howards End, E. M. Forster published what might be the eeriest, most accurate vision featured here. It’s slightly comforting that even in 1909 there was so much anxiety about the enslaving qualities of the Internet, though in the story it’s called the Machine. Forster’s protagonist lives in an underground cell—as everybody around her does—and has a curated life of edutainment and consumption, tended to by gadgets and screens. In Forster’s words, “Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over . . . What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”

Our central character, the pale, formless Vashti, lectures to large crowds, exchanges ideas with her peers, listens to music, lives simply but comfortably—until her son, off in his own cell, hatches a disturbing plan to see the world. He pleads with her, “Cannot you see . . . that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.” Shortly after his disappearance, the Machine itself starts behaving strangely

*

Hard to say more, other than urge everyone to read this and gawp. How did he know?

“When I Was a Witch” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1910)

In the decades after The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman used fantasy to advocate for her version of a better world. In the novels Herland and Moving the Mountain, she followed male characters encountering feminist utopias (though Gilman was also a proponent of eugenics, and her fictional landscapes were only truly utopian for a chosen few). “When I Was a Witch” is something else: a slapstick short story focused on the plight of animals in New York City. Gilman believed in the humane treatment of animals, and hoped for a future where no one ate meat. Her story, silly as it is in some ways, brings home how common the sight of a horse being thwacked with a whip must have been, and on the smaller scale, the number of stray cats, restrained dogs, and birds in cages. “I was in a state of simmering rage,” the narrator tells us, when she is suddenly granted the power to make humans feel the pain of mistreated animals. The pained mews and barks of the city fall silent—our heroine has made them “comfortably dead,” the most expedient way she can think of to teach humanity a lesson.

On the last page, the witch turns her attention to the animal that interests her the most: women, who she sees as “blind, chained, untaught, in a treadmill.” Her powers, granted by Satan and not designed for white magic, run dry just before she can take action.

The Master Key by L. Frank Baum (1901)

A year after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum published this ambivalent tale of technology run amok, revealing layers of reality beyond what the eye can see. Young hero Rob tinkers with electricity in every spare moment he’s got, guided by intuition, not really sure what he’s after. After he randomly touches two wires together one day, he’s consumed by a great flash and visited by the Demon of Electricity, who bestows a series of gifts with the power to change the world. The first gift is a box of pills: each one contains enough nourishment for a whole day. Among other gifts, there’s also a “record of events,” where news from every part of the world is gathered in real time; a set of spectacles that, like an augmented reality viewer, allows the wearer to see the character of everyone he meets; and an Illimitable Communicator, a “simple device” that allows Rob to communicate with anyone, anywhere. 

In the end, Rob rejects everything the Demon has to offer. “I’ve had enough of you and your infernal inventions!” he cries. Once he’s calmed down, he tells his visitor to “Go home and lie down,” insisting the world can’t handle a future full of miracles. Not quite yet. 

In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Charles Finch offers an appreciation of criticism finalist Zadie Smith’s Feel Free: Essays (Penguin).

*

If, as the famous line from the famous book goes, personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then perhaps so is great criticism. Feel Free is a collection of essays, reviews, vignettes, and profiles by Zadie Smith, and it might so easily, like other books of its kind, ultimately feel like an arbitrary collocation of unrelated ephemera, a patchwork of unrelated scraps. Or in more cynical terms: a money grab.

But it doesn’t! Instead it feels blazing and whole, with the inward gravitational tug of a star. It survives—to quote Robert Lowell—the rainbow of its will.

Why? I wish the answer were interesting, but I think it’s simply that Zadie Smith is a better witness of the world than almost anyone else alive, and that no matter where she takes her mind, her mind, not the subject it’s addressing, is what remains most powerful there. In Feel Free she fixes in their places J.G. Ballard, among the most elusive of writers (he wrote, alone of his generation in Britain, from “an autonomous hinterland”), Jay-Z, among the most elusive of rappers (“an artist,” she points out with tenderness, “as old as his art form”), and camp, among the most elusive of art forms (“Camp begins in lack, in absence. It is the nuclear option of the disenfranchised”).

The only coherence here is her.

In some ways, indeed, Smith may have more of the qualities we associate with a great critic than with a great novelist. (David Foster Wallace was similar.) For instance, she’s always cutting back against the most inflated or grandiose version of whatever she’s just said. Standing with her mother and a friend, she laments the loss of a local library, “and the cultural vandalism we felt it represented. Or, if you take the opposite view, we stood around pointlessly . . . Luddite, fiscally ignorant liberals . . . complaining about the inevitable.” I revere critics who find the truth elusive in this way, because there seems to be so much more truth in that uncertainty—if this makes sense—than in any specific claim about the truth.

In the foreword of Feel Free, Smith is conscious that she is releasing a book full of Obama-era work into this new and extremely different post-Obama world, a place of daily disorientation, daily fear. So, she says, “I offer these essays—to be used, changed, dismantled, destroyed or ignored as necessary!”

The offer is both emblematic of Smith’s careful, second-guessing intellect, and at the same time superfluous. The restless curiosity of Feel Free never comes at the expense of its identity, and it certainly never dates her work. Indeed, the state of doubt in which we find ourselves at this gruesome moment of history is the one from which she—moving between worlds privileged and unprivileged, bookish and otherwise, European and American – has been writing all along. Do you want to interpret Smith’s worldly inquisitiveness as a rebellion, avant la lettre, against the parochialism of Trump and Brexit and red hats and walls? Feel free.

__________________________________

Charles Finch, a board member of the NBCC, is a critic and a novelist who regularly writes for The New York Times and Slate. His newest book is The Vanishing Man.

On April 5, 1971, 343 French women signed a manifesto.

“One million women have abortions each year in France,” they declared in the pages of Nouvel Observateur, a weekly French news magazine still in circulation today. “I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I’ve had an abortion. We demand open access to contraceptives; we demand open abortion.”

Led by the intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, and with the backing of a handful of French celebrities, according to Time magazine, the 343 women who signed the manifesto otherwise included everyday women—writers, performers, philosophers, etc. Their manifesto was the first of its kind in the modern era. In 1974, due in large part to the advocacy of the salopes—the French equivalent of “sluts,” a derogatory description the women reclaimed—the French Minister of Health, Simone Veil, introduced a bill that would eventually legalize abortion in France in 1975.

One year after Nouvel Observateur published the French women’s manifesto, the first issue of Ms. hit the newsstands in the United States. Inspired in part by the French manifesto, the magazine’s inaugural issue included a similar declaration. “Women Tell the Truth About Their Abortions,” promised the allusory cover line.

Similarly to the French women’s manifesto, the purpose of the Ms. petition was to spark legal change, “not to alienate or to ask for sympathy, but to repeal archaic and inhumane laws,” through the means of sharing personal truth. 

At that point in time, in the thick of the fight to legalize abortion, the mere act of admitting to having had one was revolutionary. As Ms. co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an original signatory of the “We Have Had Abortions” petition, recounted, “Women who got pregnant before Roe v. Wade had very few options . . . Women died. Lots of women died. When I found out I was pregnant, I was in my senior year in college. I would have killed myself. This isn’t hyperbole. If I couldn’t have had an abortion at 18, I would have killed myself—because I couldn’t see how I could possibly live my life. I had to work. I didn’t have rich parents who were going to support me. I didn’t have a husband.”

The fear and inevitability inherent in Pogrebin’s story reflected the rhetoric employed by abortion advocates at the time. The Ms. petition was published in 1972 during a period in which, under the umbrella of the women’s liberation movement, abortion speak-outs and consciousness-raising groups were popping up around the country. In 1969, the New York State legislature’s hearing on abortion law, featuring a panel of 15 so-called “experts”—14 of whom were men—was interrupted as several women, members of a new consciousness-raising group called the Redstockings, attempted to share their own abortion stories. When the hearing was cut short, the Redstockings organized their own hearing, which famously took place just one month later at the Washington Square Methodist Church, during which 12 women shared stories about their own abortions for an audience of 300 men and women.

In the midst of the consciousness-raising era of the women’s liberation movement that constituted the late 1960s and early 1970s, these petitions constituted a natural byproduct of the movement’s narrative and mission to legalize abortion thus far. As more and more women shared their abortion stories, whether through the spoken or written word, the abortion legalization movement gained steam and, in January 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Roe. 

Forty-six years later, a person’s right to an abortion is still constitutionally protected. And yet, with each passing day, that right feels more and more at risk as conservative factions do their best to find state-specific footholds for anti-choice advocates. As outlined by #VOTEPROCHOICE on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade last month, Missouri, South Carolina, Florida, and Kentucky have all introduced legislation this year with an eye toward the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade by a now decidedly conservative Supreme Court.

In the face of these threats to reproductive freedom, the narrative and literature surrounding the pro-choice movement has evolved, as evidenced in two recent books.

Shout Your Abortion, an anthology co-edited by Amelia Bonow and Emily Nokes, simultaneously celebrates the storytelling and acknowledgement that defined the reproductive rights movement of the 1960s and 70s while also introducing the reality of what reproductive rights advocacy would likely look like, should Roe be overturned by a now solidly conservative Supreme Court. The book documents a viral social media campaign that began in 2015, after the House of Representatives voted to defund Planned Parenthood and Amelia Bonow wrote about her abortion in a public Facebook post.

“I am telling you this today because the narrative of those working to defund Planned Parenthood relies on the assumption that abortion is still something to be whispered about. Plenty of people still believe that on some level—if you are a good woman—abortion is a choice which should be accompanied by some level of sadness, shame or regret.”

Bonow’s post ended up sparking #ShoutYourAbortion, which was used used in more than 150,000 social media posts in two weeks, according to The New York Times.

Shout Your Abortion includes 40-plus first-person essays by people recounting their abortion experiences in addition to a handful of comics and photographs speaking to the same. In addition to essays and artwork, Shout Your Abortion offers interviews with abortion providers as well as additional resources on reproductive care. The diversity of perspectives and mediums adds an additional layer to the confessional, consciousness-raising narrative of the 1960s and 70s.

“There was a lot of activism before that happened, and there was an abortion storytelling movement that was very much centered around second-wave feminism and . . . New York and abortion speak outs and [figures] like Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine,” Bonow said. “In that era, stories were not as pervasively suppressed . . . there was a fairly broad movement to tell stories.”

But when the right-wing moral majority began to establish a Congressional foothold in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a person’s right to abortion was reframed, even by pro-choice politicians, as a non-ideal option, which reproductive rights advocates said contributed to a sense of shame around the procedure.

“We saw the progressive leaders of the late 90s, and even into the early 2000s . . . basically saying, ‘Abortion is a necessary evil, and we will ultimately defend a person’s right to choose, however it’s not a thing we’re down with, and you really shouldn’t talk about it, and if you do, you should express a lot of contrition and shame,’” Bonow said.

In the 1970s, prior to Roe v. Wade, to say, “I’ve had an abortion,” was to show the verisimilitude of an illegal act. In the eyes of pro-choice advocates at the time, doing so was a necessary step in legally securing the right to a procedure that was already happening around the country every day. Today, as anti-choice advocates work against those efforts, those moved to share their abortion stories are doing so with an urgency reminiscent of that which was yielded by the salopes, the women of Ms., the Redstockings, and others, and they’re sharing those stories alongside resources for legal reproductive care, a move that would have been impossible before.

Also tackling the possibility of a post-Roe America from a proactive perspective, Handbook for a Post-Roe America by Robin Marty is a guide to pro-choice advocates’ worst-imagined future. One chapter comprises a state-by-state dossier of abortion laws, including analyses of what would happen should Roe ever be overturned or weakened by the Supreme Court. Another is a self-reflective quiz that allows you to gauge the level of civil disobedience you feel personally comfortable engaging in by answering questions like: “Am I the only one who can help?” “Is my privacy important?” “Am I worried about my family?” There’s a section that breaks down the ins and outs of self-managed abortion care, including where to find the necessities for a medication abortion, how mifepristone and misoprostol work to end a pregnancy, and what to expect through the process of termination.

Handbook mirrors the covert systems of information dissemination that a group called The Jane Collective utilized in order to share information and perform abortions pre-Roe. A group of (mostly white) women in their late teens and twenties, the Janes offered counseling for people seeking illegal abortions in addition to performing first- and second-trimester abortions themselves.

Shout Your Abortion and Handbook demonstrate that storytelling and sharing information, including around abortion, is never a fruitless endeavor. “The impulse to stay silent is sort of based on some desire to conform to respectability politics,” Bonow said. “We’ve seen in the past few years there’s no reward at the end . . . for keeping your head down and not causing a problem. We’re totally fucked, so you might as well tell the truth about your life.”

In the fall of 2008, in New York, I was contacted—probably by email—by a young woman newly arrived in the city from Mexico City, Valeria Luiselli. Her cousin in Mexico City, Juanca, is a close friend. A lot of that period remains enveloped in a murky haze because my wife Aura had been dead for a little over a year. The earliest mention of Valeria I can find in my emails is one to my friend the writer and sometimes magazine editor Daniel Alarcon, passing on to him an early copy of Valeria’s essay “Papeles falsos.” In that email I wrote: “This is the weird thing— like Aura, she went to the UNAM, and is at Columbia with some of the same scholarships and in the same department. And like Aura had, she publishes in Letras Libres. She’s only 25. Anyway, this essay of hers blew me away, it’s so charming and smart.” Daniel soon wrote back, and was just as enthused about the essay.

Yes, like Aura, who’d died at age 30, Valeria had also come from the glorious UNAM, the public university in Mexico City, to study for a doctorate at Columbia, and was also full of brilliance and that chilanga verve and hilarity. They even shared similar obsessions with Mexican poets who had resided in New York in the early decades of the 20th century. For Aura it was José Juan Tablada, who’d introduced the haiku to Mexico—she’d wanted to write a novel in which she imagined him composing his famous “Japanese” poems without ever going there, as he claimed he had, all the time living in New York. Valeria of course would later imagine the obscure New York life of the poet Gilberto Owen in her haunting and haunted novel, Faces in the Crowd.

I remember that the Columbia University-owned apartment building where Valeria lived was so similar to the one Aura was living in when we met that I thought it might even be the same one. A memory of sitting at a table in her student apartment, maybe the one time I visited, staring in dazed wonder up at her bookshelves and listening to Valeria talk about her life, about poetry and poets especially, Pound, Zukofsky, Dickinson. I was amazed by her sophistication, her energy, the beautiful motor of her mind. It was all a little overwhelming, frankly. Meeting her was a bit like a haunting, a bittersweetly nostalgic one. I was happy and grateful to have this marvelous new friend in my life

*

I remember reading more of those earlier pieces, maybe the one about the doorman and the window of that same apartment building, maybe the one about looking for Joseph Brodsky’s grave in Venice.

“Searching for a grave,” she writes in that essay—“Joseph Brodsky’s Room and a Half”—“is to some extent like arranging to meet a stranger in a café, the lobby of a hotel or a public square, in that both activities are ways of being there and looking. At a given distance every person could be the one waiting for us, every grave the one we are searching for.”

That sentence alone, a soft explosion of poetry and thought, blows open shutters on a landscape your mind wants to go roaming in; it gives you a new way of being there and looking. She was a grad student from Mexico City then, but ten years on, there are now thousands and thousands of readers who, coming upon that sentence, maybe not having read it before, would immediately think, that seems like a Valeria Luiselli sentence.

The man she would soon be going out with, and would then marry, Alvaro, was also a good friend of mine from Mexico City, a writer I’d admired for years. By then I was living most of every year in Mexico City, and only occasionally got to see them, usually at boozy, festive dinner parties in their little apartment in Harlem. Our paths now and then intersected, at the Oaxaca Book Fair when Valeria came, with Alejandro Zambra, to give our annual Aura Estrada Prize reading at the fair, and through our separate involvements with Still Waters in a Storm, Stephen Haff’s miraculous “learning sanctuary” for immigrant kids in Bushwick.

Over those years, Valeria published four acclaimed books: a pair of novels, a book of essays, a book-length essay, each of these formally unique, ranging from the nearly demented dervish playfulness of Story of My Teeth to the morally urgent, nothing remotely-like-it-ever-before, and indispensable Tell Me How It Ends, a surgical yet emotionally wrenching inquiry and meditation on child refugees of Central America and the lethal absurdities of our immigration laws and courts.

I knew beforehand that Valeria was in some way novelizing that book, incorporating the experience of a trip she’s taken into the Southwest to the border with Alvaro and their children. I was expecting something remarkable, but I wasn’t expecting to have my mind utterly blown like this. Lost Children Archive is a novel that already seems destined to become synonymous with our time, one that somehow transforms that time, the way we are in it, the way we look at it and read it. Has anybody expressed what it’s like to be alive in the USA right now so perfectly and concisely as Valeria has when she writes: “Something changed in the world. Not too long ago it changed, and we know it… We feel time differently. No one has been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable.”

*

How to describe that book, which is like nothing else? Lost Children Archive is as dazzling and manifold in its inventiveness and playful seriousness as Pale Fire or Hopscotch, yet as intimate and lovely and grave, at times even mystical, as Chekhov, if you hold in your memory at the same time, say, stories like “About Love,” “In the Ravine,” and “Ward Six” (this comparison comes to me because I’ve been re-reading Chekhov—all I mean to do is evoke a work of staggering beauty, honesty and moral urgency). It’s a novel about a road trip taken from New York City to the American Southwest by a young Mexican couple and their two small children. The couple at first seem so engagingly and touchingly right for each other that you find yourself reading about their disintegrating marriage with an empathetic ache in your heart. He is a sound documentarian headed to Apacheria to carry out a resonantly ambitious project recording the ghosts of the vanished and doomed 19th-century Apache resistance; she is a radio documentary-maker and journalist who has become—initially through her work as a New York immigration court translator—intellectually and emotionally obsessed with the situation of migrant children facing deportation, mostly from Central America, and the harrowing and growing crisis of the many thousands of children fleeing the brutal conditions of their countries, headed to the US-Mexico border.

Prosaic denunciation of unfathomably cruel circumstances we are, by now, well aware of, is not Luiselli’s or her female narrator’s aim. Rather it is to immerse us in a multi-sided, rigorously kaleidoscopic, almost insomniac evocation and questioning of every facet of that experience: how we travel through this landscape that is then (2014) and now; what we read, look at, bring with us and collect along the way in order to keep a record of where we’ve been and of how we each tried to comprehend it and ourselves (the archives); the story of what is really happening out there, with Central America’s lost journeying children, brilliantly staged through an empathetic imagining and—one almost wants to say shamanistic—retelling of how they, the journeying children might tell it; and, finally, at the end of the novel, the experimental transgressing of boundaries that “in reality” are never transgressed, when the mom narrator’s son and daughter, fleeing their parents’ brutal unhappiness, lose themselves in a version of that often lethal journey that no child should ever have to endure and yet is out there happening every day… All that narrated by the little boy in a breathtaking, harrowing, dizzyingly visceral sentence that runs for some 20 pages.

It would be impossible here to name everything I love about this novel, partly because with every passing hour since I finished reading it something else occurs to me. This is a book, like others of Valeria’s, that by making its radically original processes transparent to us, seems to include us in it so that we experience its writing and thinking, the living that went into it, its pain and rapture, its ghostliness and visceral vivacity, in the reading of it, all at once, in surround sound, surround vision, surround thought. This is an American road trip novel simultaneously elevated into every classic road trip in literature film and art—how smart it was to leave that GPS behind! A novel whose patterns and structure are deeply musical, orchestral, but rock and roll too, circular and driving forward at once. This is a book that executes the humble writerly disciplines, reminding me time and again of the Ford Maddox Ford dictum that you can’t have a man appear long enough to sell a newspaper in a story unless you put him there with enough detail to make the reader see him, that radiant specificity that lets the reader see and sense its vast emptinesses as well, its silences and ghosts.

The narrator asks: “How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum?” Let’s think of that as an existential question. Probably most of us would like somehow to be useful in this way, but how? One step is not to forget what it’s like to be a child, whether loved and nurtured, or lost and alone in the most treacherous landscape.

“Don’t stop being a little girl,” thinks the narrator to her daughter. “Always defend yourself from this empty fucked up world; cover it with your thumb.”

Among this novel’s many gifts to the reader are the ways in which it repeatedly shows how “children’s imaginations destabilize our adult sense of reality and force us to question the very grounds of that reality. The more time one spends surrounded by children,” writes Luiselli, “disconnected from other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.” In ways both concrete and abstract, isn’t our true job on earth to protect and guide and look out for children, whether as parents relatives or citizens? It is in all the ways that it brings the often unfathomable world of childhood closer to us that Lost Children Archive engenders a love of that transcendent and manifold duty, and begins to change us.

The morning after the Brexit referendum I walked to the supermarket in a daze of depression. My East London neighborhood was silent, as if some terrible falling sickness had lay humanity low. On approaching my destination I spotted a gang of white kids at the entrance. They were jeering at anyone who looked “foreign”: “We won, go back to your own country!” they snarled. It didn’t bode well.

The weeks passed and the gravity of the situation became apparent. A monumental mistake was filling the streets like sludge. The same sick feeling of astonishment hit me when Donald Trump was elected. Surely it can’t get any worse, I mumbled as a sea of MAGA caps flashed across the television.

Over two years later, with the Trump/Brexit horror show in full swing, I’m sorry to say I was wrong. Things can get worse, a lot worse. It feels like the global system is spiralling out of control. Climate change is nearing the point of no return. Twenty-six of the world’s richest people own as much as the poorest fifty percent. Species extinction is soaring. Artificial Intelligence is being weaponized at an alarming rate and who knew that geopolitical relations between the superpowers would get this bad.

Back in 2016 I really thought we’d “hit rock bottom.” The only way was up. A reassuring conceit for sure, but clearly groundless in light of subsequent events. It seems that no flowering summer lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of unimaginable darkness.

I explore this theme in my book The Worst is Yet to Come. Its premise is straightforward. The present crisis (of capitalism, democracy, the natural environment, you name it) has pushed us to the brink of an even greater plunge, one that will make the Trump years look like a tiptoe through the tulips. A new dark age is upon us, fueled by Learjet billionaires and a civilization in love with its own demise. Taking to the streets with angry placards or voting for Bernie Sanders won’t make much difference by the way, but that’s another story.

Here the inevitable question arises: if I truly believe that modern society is now circling the drain and is probably unsalvageable, then why even bother writing about it? That would be like watching a killer tsunami roll in from the horizon and scribbling a few words of protest seconds before it wiped you away forever. Critical commentary in particular requires at least a modicum of hope, otherwise the whole endeavor is pointless. So what compels someone to write in the shadow of the apocalypse? Especially if they know that it’s already too late.

We can dismiss some obvious justifications from the outset. For example, it could be argued that even in the direst circumstances, the basic human impulse to create endures. There is an irrepressible spark in us that refuses to be snuffed out, with writing a key manifestation of that drive.

It’s a comforting thought, but ultimately unconvincing. I don’t think writing—or any other creative enterprise for that matter—is that natural. Often the opposite, involving a struggle against human nature. It’s the overwhelming possibility of having never been—nonexistence—that gives a text of philosophy, fiction or criticism its positive vitality, not some inexorable necessity. Literature is a minor miracle in this respect, a victory against the entropy and emptiness of the human soul.

Nor do I get any nihilistic pleasure in documenting the end times, like those crazy folk who rush to the foot of a volcano as it’s about to blow. This is a joyless task and certainly no object of fasciation.

So as the inescapable tsunami grows skyward, three reasons to write still remain, irrespective of one’s chances of survival.

The first is dignity, of knowing exactly why your existence will soon be altered for the worst, especially if there’s nothing you can do about it. The act of rejecting self-deception and confusion is a basic principle in Western ethics. It means being worthy of what happens to you. Otherwise, as German author W.G. Sebald noted, we learn from our predicament much like a rabbit learns from an experiment that’s performed upon it. In other words, knowing how to face the awful truth permits us to finally face ourselves. Better late than never.

While some kind of global collapse is almost certain, there is a second justification for continuing to write, criticism in particular. This concerns its testimonial function. Bertold Brecht’s unnerving poem “To Those Who Come After Us” helps us here, written in 1939 when escaping the Nazis: “Truly I live in dark times!” the narrator begins. He is addressing mankind far into the future, long after his fellow men have reduced the world to ash. A litany of injustices are catalogued, but the poem isn’t just a chronicle. To the reader who does not yet exist, a desperate plea for clemency and forgiveness is being made: “but when the time comes at last / and man is a helper to man / think of us / with forbearance.” We never learn whether the appeal was granted, but it was worth a try. Those who follow in our wake, they’re the ones who will inherit the dust. And they haunt us for that reason.

The third motive is a more esoteric, but ties together these thoughts about dignity and forbearance. As the French writer Maurice Blanchot pointed out in his wonderful book The Writing of the Disaster, the impending catastrophe is not necessarily something waiting out there in objective form (although it is partially that). For instance, whereas I envisage a vast cultural desert drawing near, Mike Pence speaks of a roseate future. Although I believe my narrative is more accurate, the disaster still has to be textually evoked and carefully pieced together from the signals around us. That’s not too difficult given the material at hand. But for Blanchot there’s a catch. Rather paradoxically, you can only write about this devastating future if you are already living it. Want to know what hell looks like? Take a walk down to your local supermarket and find out. By describing the imminent disaster that lies ahead, we can identify its faint outlines in the here and now, during the daily commute, walking the dog, in the office and so-on.

It is this feature that differentiates my method from millennial fatalism and hack futurism. I’m not predicting the future; only soberly recording its advance shock troops as they arrive in the most unexpected places. Could such a record help avert the catastrophe, perhaps inspire a renewed fight for freedom, liberty and hope? I’m doubtful. All indicators suggest that the unstoppable juggernaut of global capitalism has its controls set on self-destruct. And no one’s at the wheel. In seeing this, however, at least we can better prepare for what’s to come. I call this “revolutionary pessimism” because it follows the various threads of negativity that run through the texture of the present to the nth degree.

As the gang of kids outside my local supermarket rounded on another hapless victim, this time an elderly Asian man, a stranger yelled out, “you boys ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Twisting optimism into a weapon of infinite menace, the ringleader grinned and replied, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”