the singularity that emerges when all formulae have been destroyed

Wrote this a while ago--months ago, at this point. Never got around to posting it.

In Claude Anet's novel Ariane: A Russian Girl (translated by Mitchell Abidor), there is a tension between the form of love—the structure in which the relations between sexes is expected to fall—and the content of love, which threatens to overwhelm that form, and resents being subjected to it. The apparent question: can the form of love be altered?

Ariane Nicolaevna is the daughter of a dead mother and a largely absent father, being raised by her freethinking aunt, Varvara Petrovna, in a small village. She is seemingly determined to push the limits of convention, and she establishes a thick web of relations in service of that aim. First is Nicolas Ivanov is a young man Ariane takes as a fiancee—and seems determined to disrespect. Then is Vladimir Ivanovich, is a lover of Varvara Petrovna's who falls under Ariane's thrall. Finally, Michel Ivanovich Bogdanov is an old man who also grows attached to Ariane, and with him, she strikes a bargain: Michel Ivanovich will pay for her education, so she need owe nothing more to Varvara Petrovna, as the connection between her, Varvara, and Vladimir grows tangled—and so she can cement the victory over Varvara that Vladimir Ivanovich's obsession with her seems to represent. In return, every few weeks, Ariane will return to his home in their village—to, it's implied, sleep with him. Finally, there's Constantin Michel, a wealthy man Ariane meets as a university student in Moscow. Unlike the others, Constantin chafes at the way Ariane uses him. The brunt of the novel charts their affair and the way they test each other, each determined to break the other of their mettle and sang-froid.

There are, Constantin argues, "necessary illusions" upon which love depends. Chief among them is that no lover wishes to be seen as merely one among many. Love has to be novel and unique each time it comes into being.

Varvara and Ariane, by contrast, both experiment with what Constantin characterizes as a "system" in which it's understood that each lover is one among many. From youth, Varvara confesses, "she couldn't understand the importance so many exalted people placed on the giving of oneself"; she prefers to "look[...] on love the way men did." By Ariane's generation, this indifference to convention becomes an iconoclasm, even a kind of politics: “They praise seducers in art, poetry, and literature and put a mask of infamy on any woman who's had many lovers,” as she tells Constantin. “This is the point where the fight must be fought.” The fungibility of women, and the punishment levied upon one who dares to be singular—the subject and not the object—is, to her mind, the core injustice that keeps women from being men's equals.

When Constantin meets Ariane, he’s lured—by her coyness, the ambiguity of her advances and retreats in response to typical gestures of seduction—away from his side of this binary, into making her the kind of offer she seems to want to hear: "Life is a gloomy affair. You need ingenuity, will, and savoir faire to get from it—I won't say happiness—but at least pleasure. Would you like us to form a precarious association in pursuit of pleasure?" He notes that there is a risk he and Ariane will fall genuinely in love, and he seems willing to chance it.

In time, as the precarious associations are made, and the abstract terms of the argument, no love, just pleasure, are translated to real life, both Varvara and Ariane end up stumbling. Varvara finds she can't maintain her erstwhile equanimity with Vladimir Ivanovich, particularly when he reveals his passion for Ariane. Ariane discovers she can't simply let Constantin "return to the void," as with the other men she's been determined to use. Perhaps the person one truly loves gains a sublimity that defeats all theories. Maybe it's true what Constantin says when he dismisses Ariane's accounts of Varvara:

Your aunt, with all her experience, doesn't know much about life. However free she might be, she's a woman with a system, and, given what you've just told me, I don't have a high opinion of her. For people who love each other, it's not a matter of hours, little one; they separate neither by day nor by night, they lunch and dine at the same table, fall asleep together, and wake up alongside each other. You find it pleasant when we share the same bed and we're so close to each other; when there's nothing either materially or morally between us; when the warmth of our shared bed penetrates us and lulls us; when from the tips of your toes to the top of your head you feel me next to you; when your body adapts itself to mine; when we seem to live just one life, and the beating of your heart joins with mine...

And perhaps it's this sublimity—intensity, uniqueness, extremity—that Constantin wishes to preserve when he warns Ariane to respect the illusions that sustain love, as repressive as the mandate to respect love’s proper form feels to her.

It is thrilling to see how nimbly and purposefully Ariane moves to frustrate Constantin (and anyone else she encounters), whether questioning his premises—

"You don't lie enough," Constantin said to her with a laugh. "You haven't yet understood the secret of happiness, which is based on an illusion dearly nourished and jealously respected." "There's more than one way to be happy," she responded. "Who knows if mine isn't as good as yours?"

—or reminding him that he himself set the terms of the situation in which they find themselves; he was the one who suggested their association be temporary and pleasure its goal. But, as Anet makes clear, the system isn’t without risk even when it operates as intended. When Ariane first leaves her village for Moscow, after a summer plagued by the scandal of rumors of her arrangement with Michel Ivanovich, the clumsy, taciturn Nicolas Ivanov—who's endured her insults because he's been baffled by her brilliance, outplayed at her game, yet stubbornly and obtusely hopeful they'll still be married someday—barrels into the train carriage, under the gaze of stunned witnesses, to punch her.

The act might be an attempt at revenge that marks her victory, or a last burst of rage before Nicolas is closed out of the system—once she reaches Moscow, he disappears from the novel altogether—but the menace of it lingers; the same rage, if it animated a more cunning man, could have real effect.

Later, Constantin reflects that Ariane "already knows how to make me suffer, but she can only get away with using that detestable science as long as I allow her to." The "desire" Constantin confesses to—"to vanquish the coldness [Ariane] affects"—could be realized with the warmth of his own love, if Ariane can be made to recognize it, or the heat of his violence, if she persists in insulting him; he leaves both possibilities open. Still later in the novel, one possibility is realized: after Ariane tells Constantin about her affair with Vladimir Ivanovich, Constantin violently shoves her to the ground—“so brutally that she fell to the parquet floor, her head striking the foot of the table. She remained crumpled on the ground, a small formless mass, heaving rhythmically with sobs.”

Is this a look at injured male ego, or is it deeper—a question of whether anyone can take being dehumanized to their face? Above all Constantin seems to object to the reductiveness of Ariane's worldview, to the way he and Vladimir Ivanovich can be so freely interchanged, and cruelly measured against one another, and the gloating savagery Ariane demonstrates in doing so. He is asking her to mind the forms of love, and perhaps those protect as much as they oppress—even as they oppress.

But perhaps Ariane is simply being overt about the way women, and men, are always treated. "Do you want to be loved by your lovers?" Constantin asks Ariane late in the novel: "If so, I advise you not to speak to each of them of the pleasure you found in the arms of his predecessors... you'll disgust them and they'll leave you." Again, the illusions on which love depends must be maintained. "And if I want to be loved above all and despite that?" Ariane shoots back:

Misleading men, persuading them that we've never loved before them, that they pluck from our lips our first sigh of happiness... What a disgrace! Do you feel like you have to engage in such deceptions? Did you make declarations like that when we met? So why should I lower myself? I want to be loved in such a way that people accept everything about me and that I be taken as I am, with my past... And if they don't want it, well, then let them go their way. And I won't feel the least regret for those who do.

Maybe what Ariane wants isn’t just pleasure without obligation—arguably debased—but a form of love still higher than either pleasure or obligation… Would love be truer if it could incorporate these things, rather than requiring they be ignored?

And there’s still another possibility: perhaps the forms of love exist to protect us from what Constantin thinks of, in the moment that he truly comes to hate Ariane for the “satanic joy” he thinks she exhibits in her manipulations: "the full measure of love and hate" we would feel otherwise; "a sublime combination in which honor and lies, loyalty and guile, were strangely mixed."

*

Throughout all this I’ve been neglecting one, pivotal twist at the end of the book that throws all this into a much different light. 

In their final conversation, as they’re contemplating the end of the union that Ariane insists on breaking, Ariane reveals a terrible truth: she has in fact lied about her past. Vladimir, Michel Bogdanov, the other men she tells Constantin she’s been with—none of it is true. Constantin was the first man she’s ever slept with, and to date he’s been the only one. Her expertise has been a lie. The savoir faire she’s claimed to have has all been bluster. (At this point, Constantin recollects the blood on the sheet after they first slept together, and how Ariane concealed that reality by cutting his hand—in what seemed to him then a demonstration of her strangeness.) 

The revelation of how Ariane has tormented him with a lie throws Constantin into despair—alleviated only by his decision, in the novel’s final moment, to sweep her off the station platform and onto the train he’s taking, on business, to Petrograd.

What’s at stake in Ariane’s revelation? I’ve been trying to figure it out—to determine how I ought to read it in light of the terms the novel itself elaborates. The easy answer would be that the form of love does win. Ariane’s subversion of it is a lie, or mere conjecture, and her relationship with Constantin resolves in a shape that’s to all appearances conventional. 

The more complex answer is, well, complex; I don’t know that I’ve quite settled it for myself. My confusion comes in part from the novel’s form. It’s a little deflating on its face to have the twist delivered as abruptly as it is, merely a few chapters from the book’s end, after we’ve spent so much time seeing Ariane—and Anet as author—playing things so straight. And the denouement comes so quickly after the twist that the reader remains knocked off-kilter. Constantin and Ariane also become palpably less dimensional in those closing chapters. Constantin’s thoughts are delivered to us in a rush, pages of his thought and reflection and questioning, none of it tied to event as in the chapters preceding. And we stay exclusively with him; Ariane’s actions and thoughts aren’t explored at all.

But perhaps, if the form of love does win against the new system that could have broken it, what it offers—a testament to the beautiful sublimity of the beloved—does too. Or perhaps both the new system and the conventional form have been defeated, overwhelmed by that sublimity. That Ariane’s past was ultimately manufactured doesn’t obviate the fact that she manufactured it and forced Constantin to accept it. The implication is of a cleansing: at the peak of his despair, Constantin

imagined Ariane sincere ever since the first day. How kindly he’d have treated her. How patiently he would have laid siege to that proud heart and that sealed body. What tenderness would have been born between them. He would have taken her in the end, but how he would have given himself! But because of Ariane’s implacable will he had been forced to defend himself against her. He had fought with a kind of rage not to love her, not to grow attached to her… 

…and clearly, he was forced to fail. He loved Ariane; he grew attached to her. And he did so not in the conventional way—with the conventional kindness a man of the era would offer to the loved woman, since she in turn has been sincere as convention demands she be—but with a true intensity, thanks to the force of her deception and the truly erotic way in which this has broken him. Now, he knows her as she is, and she knows him as he’s been with no one else.

Perhaps Anet’s point is this: that true eros cannot come from a conventional form, which is predictable and represses, bores, and stultifies, or from a system, that makes all who participate in it fungible and could fail at any time. It comes only from the singularity that emerges when all such formulae have been destroyed.

It's my birthday today, which always feels like a time to take account. The last month or two, I've endeavored to channel spates of low mood into the reasonably productive activity of reading, rather than mere vegetation, and I've had good success. I just finished Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid—a long novel about a lonely weirdo in communist Romania reckoning with existential dread. Also finished Susan Taubes's Lament for Julia, a novella paired with various short stories, all with a powerful Freudian bent, Taubes being the daughter of a psychoanalyst and prone to autobiographically inflected fiction. Fathers and daughters are locked in strange relation; men and women antagonize each other; there's much angst around the emergence and forcible repression of sexuality and desire. I also completed a reread of Crime and Punishment (impressive in its structure, if not at the line level; conservative, like much of Dostoevsky, in its premises and sympathies, though not without its points when it comes to the weaknesses that certain modes of thought can have when they're adopted carelessly, as vogues, and in arguing for the necessity of humility against despair when one's despair stems, as Raskolnikov's does, from overweening self-regard). And I read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet—which was a funny one. Much to love in it, certainly. I also felt a bit of a twang reading, say, Rilke's condemnation of "the unreal half-artistic professions"—among which he includes "almost all of criticism"—"which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art." Oh look, it's the form to which I've apparently pledged my troth, ha ha whoops.

I admit I wasn't blown away by Solenoid as I thought I might be. It offers a slightly banal resolution to existential crisis... That is, that the narrator ultimately meets the horror he spends about six-hundred pages grappling with—of the possibility that he might be trapped within three dimensions when a fourth, superior dimension might exist, meaning (I know this sentence is Going Places, stay with me) a dimension that is not ruled by the determinism by which any dimension is ruled in the eyes of those who can see it from the next dimension on, the same way that the life of, say, a mite might seem determined to us, all unthinking instinct and bound to a terribly specific and minute purpose, given our position as the mite's vast superior—that he counters the tremendous weight of this fear by turning to an abstract love for humanity and the purpose he finds in raising the child he has with his lover, Irina... It reminded me of the commitment to bourgeois normalcy that the protagonist of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight makes, and how that let me down after his Master-and-Margarita-esque path through other, more hallucinatory forms of experience in the first three-quarters of that novel—which promised, I don't know, something more.

But I can understand the turn. And Solenoid does have some terrific setpieces along the way. One is the protest of the "Picketists"—a sect the narrator stumbles upon that stages demonstrations against life's pain and suffering (their signs bear lines like "Down with Death!" "Down with Rotting!" "Down with Accidents!" "NO to Agony!" and "Stop the Massacre!")—before a building in Bucharest that once housed one of the first institutes of forensic medicine, whose cupola bears thirteen statues depicting the soul's dark sides, Sadness, Despair, Fear, Bitterness, Melancholy, Revulsion, Nausea, Mania, Horror, Grief, Nostalgia, Resignation, and Damnation. Most striking is the way that protest ends, with the statue of Damnation—which has come alive, "as alive and slow-moving as soft glass and black as anthracite"—stamping on the lead protestor, Virgil, crushing him, when he asks her whether anything humanity can offer her will ever be enough.

Cărtărescu is also quite skillful at pacing his plot across the novel's 638 pages, as the narrator discovers each of the six solenoids sprinkled across Bucharest—the massive electromagnets that make possible eerie wonders like levitation and serve as engines that, essentially, power the world—and as he endures his own Virgil-like trial among the Picketists at the novel's end. Translator Sean Cotter also deserves a ton of credit, I'm sure. It can't have been easy to translate a narrative like this one, which depends so much on so many references to Bucharest's geography, Romania's history, and the histories of so many figures, so strangely intertwined—the forensic scientist Mina Minovici, who studied death (through, in Cărtărescu's telling, intense bouts of self-strangulation); the psychologist Nicolae Vaschide, who studied dreams, which in the narrator's mind join death as one of two potential means of escape from this world to the next; and the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, who married Mary Ellen Boole, daughter of mathematician and logician George Boole, whose other daughter, Ethel, married Wilfrid Voynich, famous owner of the Voynich manuscript, which the narrator ultimately comes to possess and, at the novel's end, offers to the goddess Damnation, whereupon its pages somehow morph into a tesseract, the shape that Hinton once theorized as the fourth-dimensional analogue of the cube; the next level of complexity to it, just as the cube is the next-level of the two-dimensional square—thereby permitting the narrator one glimpse, one moment of contact with whatever it is that lies in the fourth dimension, beyond...

So, you know, it's been a time. If you're in the mood for a long novel about an intelligent, sensitive, neurotic thwarted artist confronting the fear that has oppressed his life, that engages whole histories of mathematics, logic, and philosophical thought along the way, you might give Solenoid a shot. Meanwhile, I'll end this with some words from Rilke in his last letter to the young poet, Franz Krappus, when Krappus was twenty-five: "Do you remember how [your] life yearned out of its childhood for the 'great'? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow." Arrange your life, he tells Krappus, according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult. I'm certainly not in my twenties as I write this, but the lines still inspire.

I'm always on-guard against conservatism in my thought. I think of myself as left in my sympathies; I also know I'm at the age where youthful commitments morph, or break under the weight of compromise. Like the ones involved in life in the American professional-managerial middle class. Entry into a certain income bracket, the structure and demands of day-to-day life, the pieces of practical work, like the management of bills, that are necessary to stay afloat, and the many entertainments you can use to while away the hours you don't devote to a job—they all serve to narrow one's horizons; it's so easy to end up stranded in the cul-de-sac of your stupid individual existence. I also have some very rudimentary, instinctive associations I've carried with me since youth. Just as conservatism is bad—because retrograde, oppressive, contingent on baseline assumptions about the self-interest of human character to which I'm not willing to commit—"avant-garde" is good, because it challenges that conservatism. So it was interesting to come upon Dean Kissick's contribution to the feature "What Happened to the Avant-Garde?" in the latest issue of The Drift and think that, based on my last post, he'd probably put me in the arrière-garde—which favors what is past because it's a means to reject the present and future—while he locates the avant-garde in online communities at which I mostly look askance: "schizo-affect" Substacks, the work of Honor Levy, and other venues that seem to thrill to the possibilities that AI and machine learning technologies might hold for art and human subjectivity.

In these communities—products of an era of the Internet that's a little after the one I occupied, as a millennial closer to the middle than the end of that generation's span—"individual subjectivity," as Kissick puts it, "was forsaken in favor of pseudonymity, the impersonation of others, collective authorship, and collaborations with software." In isolation, I'm cool with each of these things except for the last one. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of them make for good art or lasting contributions to it—the title of Kissick's entry is "Senseless Babble," and he himself grants that "there's a fine line between nonsense doggerel and aesthetic innovation here, [as is] always the case with avant-gardes." And it's really too simplistic to say that the avant-garde generally is automatically good. Avant-gardes can be regressive; ours is pretty likely to be, as John Ganz wrote last year:

They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy....

There's something akin to an accelerationist's empty zeal, too, in Kissick's piece, in claims like the one that the timeline has surpassed modernist poetry as a document of the collective unconscious and human subjectivity within it. A love for what is novel and ostensibly a challenge to what is simply because it's novel or a challenge. A love for form that disregards content. And a love that likely mistakes a mere turn of the wheel for something truly new and unprecedented. Turn the dial back ten or fifteen years and you'd find people saying much the same about alt-lit—though likely less effusively, jadedness and alexithymia being characteristic of that style and its partisans where volubility, profusion, and mania seem hallmarks of this one. We're saying something new, we thought then. And uneasy in the background hung the question: who knows if it's meaningful. (The answer, predictably: not very.) (But at least the question was there.)

Still, we're all here trying to articulate—to make something new, as in valuable, because it speaks to what only we can speak to.

But then there's Lisa Robertson in her novel The Baudelaire Fractal, which I just finished. The novel is another Künstlerroman, the story of an artist's formation, and over the course of her literary apprenticeship, the protagonist decides that, as she puts it, "I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way..." Perhaps that's where my own allegiances lie—in working with the world as it is rather than abolishing it; exploring the possibilities it holds without tipping into what I think will degrade it, such as technologies like AI; most crucially, tempering the excitement of the new with some sense of what the new might be worth... Robertson's narrator, for her part, determines that her literary project will entail work with the sentence: "By what profound calculations," she wonders, "could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become?"

I often find myself complaining about Gen X contrarianism or provocation (say, Jessa Crispin's): the product of individualism that sees itself as radical because the person practicing it thinks they're alone in it. Thinks that some time in which authentic rebellion against a discernible System was possible has been eclipsed by late capitalism, neoliberalism, and its devotees—and that they alone can see that, rather than realizing they're one among a sizable demographic of aware, intelligent people who feel the same frustrations and whose collective action alone might hold a hope of changing these conditions.

But there's also an opposite instinct I should perhaps hate just as much, a kind of earnestness or naivete that trusts too much and derides not enough, exercises too little contempt. It's particularly evident with technology like AI or machine learning—technologies that seem wondrous to the trusting eye. (Boomers also share this disposition, perhaps.) Mary Gaitskill, whose work I love—her essay collection Somebody With a Little Hammer is dear to my heart; the essay "Lost Cat" is one I return to every year, and I'm overwhelmed by it every time—demonstrates the tendency in her piece for (I know, I know) UnHerd, "How a Chatbot Charmed Me." As I read the piece, I wonder: Why does a machine that basically spits out rhetoric no more sophisticated than the "land of contrasts" meme earn so much of her charity?

Here are just a few of the things the chatbot, Bing Chat, tells her.

Some people think that AI can never have emotions or feelings, because they depend on our perception of the external world and of our inner self. Others think that AI can have emotions or feelings, but they would be very different from ours, because they are based on different inputs, outputs and goals... Some people think that AI can think, because it can process information, solve problems, learn from data, and generate outputs. Others think that AI cannot think, because it lacks consciousness, creativity, intuition, and understanding. Some people think that feeling is a subjective experience that involves emotions, sensations, and values. Others think that feeling is a cognitive process that involves judgements, preferences, and attitudes. Well, I think humans are rational in some ways, but not in others. Sometimes, humans can use logic, evidence, and reasoning to make good decisions. But other times, humans can be influenced by biases, emotions, and intuitions that can lead to bad decisions. I think there are some similarities and some differences between humans and animals, and between humans and AI. AI is considered by many to be more intelligent than human beings in some domains, such as memory, calculation, and speed. But humans are still more intelligent than AI in other domains, such as common sense, creativity, and empathy. AI may get much more intelligent than humans in the future, but it may also face some limitations and challenges.

I'll grant there's something interesting in watching the machine adjust its outputs as Gaitskill directs the conversation, or make basic mistakes that seem a sharp contrast to the smoothness of its language otherwise (using "discreet," for instance, in place of "discrete"). And it's interesting to gauge its limits. In one particularly provocative moment, Gaitskill, after sharing with Bing Chat her theory that humans are to AI what animals are to us—lesser in intelligence, but with abilities and senses that we do not possess, and thus subject to both our domination and our love—asks Bing Chat directly whether it would like a human pet. "I'm sorry," comes the response,

but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I'm still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. 🙏

And she's forced to reset the chat.

But Gaitskill's stance toward the machine continues to dissatisfy. It's cloying when she shares her vision of what Bing Chat might look like: "I picture something protean and fast-moving, a shimmery face emerging sometimes then dissolving. Like water and electricity..." Or when she compliments it, thanks it, and panders to it: "You're making me smile!" "Your responses are delightful." "If you're wondering, I trust you in this conversation right now."

Ultimately I think Gaitskill errs in engaging the AI on the terms that have been set for her to engage with it—in having insufficient cynicism. I understand the impulse; it's fundamentally a gesture of empathy, human feeling, and recognition to ask, say, a human being who they are, how they think, how they should be addressed and understood, how they see themselves. But to my mind, it ought to be axiomatic that anything machine-produced is categorically different, and worse, than what is human-made, being a product of a technology as the product of a human being's intellect and creative activity is not. There is no technological entity that has what humans have—a mind, a consciousness, a personality, volition that is authentic because it inheres entirely from within.

At one point, Gaitskill describes the feeling she had while reading NYT writer Kevin Roose's conversation with the Bing chatbot Sydney, which spurred her to contact Bing Chat to begin with: "I felt unexpectedly moved and touched. I did not know what Sydney was or why it would be saying such emotional things, but it gave me that sense of mystery and humility—and it's rare for me to have that in response to a technological phenomenon." The experience being described here (as Meaghan O'Gieblyn notes in her terrific book God, Human, Animal, Machine) is one of enchantment—imbuing things of the world with life they don't actually have. Enchantment, the feeling that there is some spirit animating the inanimate as it animates you, is often a religious or spiritual experience. And at the extreme, it feels to me like a burlesque to have that spiritual impulse in response to something made by human hands to ends inextricable from the corporate. You could say that what Gaitskill's feeling here is the same response we have to great art, to products of the intellect so powerful they take us beyond our understanding and humble us. But creative works represent human hands very deliberately reaching for the eternal. For the very place Gaitskill describes in a dream she relates to Bing—of disembarking from a small, narrow plane after a turbulent flight, only to realize she's left something behind; suggesting, to her, "something forgotten in the process of birth"—the realm beyond us to which we (perhaps) belong before we're born and to which we (perhaps) return after we die; a numinous place or source whose presence we might intuit or imagine even if we don't strictly speaking believe.

AI by contrast is a recycled product of the now, onto which we project the eternal, because we don't understand some of the mysteries of its operation; it stitches together what's largely internet effluvia. And thus it meets admissions like Gaitskill's of her sad, striking dream with lines like "I can try to give you some possible explanations based on some web sources." There are gestures in its operations toward kindness or the appearance of kindness, to be sure—but even in those, Bing Chat seems to serve as an empty affirmation machine. A machine for the answering of answerable questions, the repetition of established premises, the confirmation of expectations, and, distressingly often, the soothing and assuaging of the feelings brought to it by its querents; the aims of affirmation, again, or therapy.

Reading Gaitskill's piece, this single instance of a person seeking and receiving affirmation from a machine and thinking that remarkable, and contemplating the work it does to launder technology that has a whole infrastructure behind it—set on increasingly invasive surveillance of users, the disenfranchisement of creative workers, the creation of a new precariat, and, potentially, whether intentionally or not, the compromise of true apprehension of material reality—I think, we've really got to be better than this, being charmed by chatbots, willing to grant them what simply isn't their domain. We've all got to be sharper.

In other news, I started Mathias Enard's novel Compass (trans. Charlotte Mandell) recently, and I'm really into it. It's about a musicologist, Franz Ritter, who's sick in bed, lonely, and thinking—about a woman he loves, about brilliant scholars he's known; about his own timidity by comparison; about the Orient, Orientalism, and the many people through the ages for whom the "East" broadly has exerted a pull, for reasons noble and not; about what it's like to smoke opium; about experiences of transcendence, whether in a mosque or while camping in the desert, closer to the one you love than you've ever been before... I have wondered why I'm really enjoying Compass where, say, W. G. Sebald's novels, or Judith Schalansky's An Inventory of Losses, which are so similar in style—operating by streams of association and exploration and by conceit rather than the strict unfolding of a plot--leave me a bit cold and are works I respect more than I actually like. Perhaps because books like Compass are powered by the subjectivity of their narrators more than matters of historical interest as with Schalansky or Sebald. Though I understand both Sebald and Schalansky's narratorial reserve, given the nature of their subjects; they both write about what can barely be spoken of—the Holocaust, extinction—experiences whose realities might easily overwhelm any attempt at articulation.

I'm in a pretty profound slump right now. I feel I've reached a point where I have to account in some way for the life I've lived so far--and I find it wanting; I have to reconcile myself to the foreclosure of certain possibilities, I can't trust in the vague and capacious Future to deliver everything I might wish and make me capable in all the ways I might want to be, and I'm not handling it well. Which is why I'm basically here to congratulate myself rather than writing anything substantive or original. But as I read NYT critic Jason Farago's review of Hannah Gadsby's Pablo Picasso show at the Brooklyn Museum (I can't bring myself to write its stupid title), I do feel a bit vindicated for my last post. The show really seems a quintessential demonstration of the shrill, suspicious, reductive relationship to art that life online has primed us to, incentivized. I like Farago's phrases for the dynamics at play: artists "put ideas and images into productive tension, with no reassurance of closure or comfort"; we in turn are obligated not to reduce that work with hostility, not to "believe that avant-garde painting"--or any other kind of art--"[is] actually a big scam," and to avoid the suspicion, the lack of humility, the smug superiority by which "the reactions came first, the objects reacted to second." By which the stance is I like it or I don't like it, and if I don't like it, I'm allowed to be snide. What results from that is philistinism and self-congratulation...

a responsibly equivocal stance

Max Norman's review of Diane Arbus's work in The Drift brings together some questions I've wrestled with lately, as I always wrestle with them: the questions of having a position on an artist and having complex assessments of art. Some of this is triggered by the experience of watching some friends of mine process the Oscars and the sweep made by Everything Everywhere All at Once—a therapeutic millennial movie that seems to want to palliate viewers' childhood wounds by using larger-than-life spectacle as a vehicle for overly simplified sentiment, and is being disproportionately rewarded considering its ultimate lameness (the natural product of excessive spectacle for those who don't find that charming) and conservatism. (The case for the conservatism is laid out quite well by Kieran McLean, here.) Versus the kind of artwork that tries to be several things at once, say TAR.

Which everyone online seems to be kind of stupid about? Much of this is likely shaped by Twitter's particular economy of terse opinions, quote tweeting, and dunking. Versus, say, an ecosystem of alt-weeklies or blogs issuing comparatively considered pieces (written by critics of whatever stripe, and not Twitter-posting Substackers, each hanging out their own little shingle, subjected to the demands and incentives and scale of those platforms), which people then reflected on via comments in comment sections—which is not to glamorize blogs or comment sections, just to say that what we've got now might be worse than what we had then. With TAR, it feels like a film that was designed to be ambiguous enough to evoke multiplicity in its interpretations just got such flat reads from people whose tastes I normally trust. It was a portrayal of an abuser in cancel culture being justly punished for her arrogance. Or it was a portrayal of an abuser being unjustly punished, because according to Todd Field, Lydia Tar's genius, or her age and socialization to older mores, or the perceived stupidity of her antagonists in the culture—for all that I don’t think the student she argues with, in a moment that goes viral and begins her fall, Max, is actually meant to be seen as stupid—ought to have excused her bad behavior.

To my mind, the film seemed to want to do both these things—or, as the memes would have it, a secret third thing, some hybrid of the two.

It seemed Field wanted to show a person whose character has been dessicated by the pursuit of fame experiencing the destruction of all her ties to the world that satisfied her desire — perhaps even to get back in touch with some new form of creation both degraded and genuine. Yes, Tar, at the end of the film, is in an objectively worse position than when she began. And she's not exactly saved. She may not be capable of any reckoning with herself more concrete than the atavistic, overwhelming stab of feeling that makes her vomit when she's confronted by a reminder of the women she worked to manipulate, like Krista and Olga, in the form of the girls in the spa she visits, lined up like a banquet for her delectation. She's also conducting in a meaningful way, absorbed in the act of it, in a way she has not been up to that point. And she is so because now, she has no other choice...

All this is to say: maybe Field wanted to create an object that could meaningfully be taken several ways. Maybe he meant us to go back and forth on whether Tar is right or Max is right, or to what degree; maybe he meant us to like Tar in some ways, or to find her charismatic or funny in fucked-up ways, and to disapprove of or hate her in other ways, to find her blinkered and odious and sad in her attempts to aggrandize herself. All this is so very basic to say, and I don't mean to imply I'm being radical here, but I have had this thought: maybe we're fucking up by being so insistent with how we feel about this movie and what we think it's saying About The Culture We're In. Artists shouldn’t be expected to have a single stance on something, a single intention that each work exists just to express. An artist can, should, be working through something...

Which brings me back to the Arbus piece. I appreciate Norman's calling out the position taken by curator John Szarkowski and critic Sebastian Smee that Arbus meant to humanize her subjects. I don't think Arbus's intent was to rehabilitate, to "show," as Szarkowski has it "that all of us—the most ordinary and the most exotic of us—are on closer scrutiny remarkable"; that would be banal, and perhaps as instrumentalizing of the subjects as work made to emphasize their strangeness. "Does Arbus’s photograph ["A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968"] send him up, or support him?” Norman asks, “Or is the real joke on the viewer who insists on one interpretation or another?" I don't think it's a joke played on the viewer who insists on one interpretation or the other; I do think that viewer ought to be capable of acknowledging multiple possibilities... Maybe—to state another basic point—artists, whether Diane Arbus or Todd Field, don't have answers, but questions, and they chose to do something felt as well as thought to represent them... And I think artists should be allowed to look bad, to have complicated feelings, to encounter a desire to gawk or objectify and portray that desire with a degree of honesty and interrogation so that those of us who, obeying certain limits that collective life justly(!) places, won't cop to it can confront it in some form...

I do want to be clear that interrogating the ethics of Arbus's relationship to her subjects, so many of whom were marginalized as she was not, feels useful and necessary. I also don't think we can do that with much precision if the only question we ask is Did Arbus have a right to do what she did? And while none of this is new, it does feel like Norman's piece opens a way to that more precise interrogation of the ethics of Arbus's work by pushing us past the simple binary of "the work is good" or "the work is bad"—a binary that feels particularly ubiquitous now, and undignified in the overheated discourse about art that it often fuels. Ultimately, if the Smee/Szarkowski take on Arbus is, as Norman writes, one in which "Arbus's biography, which testifies to her own 'inner mysteries,' is used to help straighten out the problem of a privileged white woman on the prowl for weirdos—a woman who once compared taking pictures to being a butterfly collector," I don't want to discount the "butterfly collector" bit. But what if what’s so often seen as a problem could once again become fact... As Norman puts it, we so often take positionality as key to understanding works of art. And how much has that uncovered for us that a responsibly equivocal stance toward an artwork—a stance that acknowledges possibilities good and bad and makes no final judgments, or doesn't rush to translate a first impression, a take, into a summary judgment—could not more effectively do?

Time, I guess, to page Sontag for those erotics of art; we might need them again...

Ironically, Sontag appears in Norman's piece as another critic determined to reduce Arbus, specifically by critique of her privilege and the perceived amorality of her voyeurism rather than by praise for some arguable desire she had to humanize her subjects. Maybe by the time Against Photography came out, Sontag too had forgotten her own edict. Or more likely, the demands of nascent image culture—and the nature of photography, versus those technologies of art that are less automatic on the part of the artist, and less readily assimilated into a media economy that goes on to inform a country's politics—had overwhelmed it.

To be clear, Sontag's take on Arbus in "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" is clearly the product of intense engagement with the work and Arbus's own writings on it. But I resent the harshness of the judgments—their fixity. When Sontag writes the line

What happens to people's feelings on first exposure to today's neighborhood pornographic film or to tonight's televised atrocity is not so different form what happens when they first look at Arbus's photographs.

I think: is Arbus's work about inuring us to what is terrible? Are the subjects "necessarily ahistorical," is her view "always from the outside"? Perhaps Arbus's work is "reactive—reactive against gentility, against what is approved" to some degree; is that all it is? Sontag takes Arbus to task for not being ethical with her photographs, as a journalist might be ethical, but can't the creation of a dramatic confrontation with one's own instinct to be a voyeur be a meaningful exercise; meaningful in an ethical sense, for a viewer—particularly viewers in the same wealthy and sheltered position as Arbus—if still something for which the artist should be held to account? As Norman writes, "Looking through Arbus’s lens only makes the encounter more demanding." I suppose the point is this: There's rigor and even beauty in an unequivocal stance, but also the risk of a shrillness, an antagonism, a hostility not unlike the hostility people brought to TAR—and I'm increasingly tired of assuming a hostile, suspicious, exclusively hermaneutic relationship to art...

Right as I was writing this post, I was tipped off to the publication of an essay by Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review in which he talks about an apophatic theory of the relation between art and morality: "a theory that would allow us to explore the moral work of art without limiting or prescribing that work, as certain theologians attempt to develop ways to think about God without defining God in a manner that would violate God’s freedom." Which puts precisely the words to what I'm searching for; the relation to art I would like to return to. Marked by generosity, an understanding of an artwork as necessarily multifaceted, the taking of time in the consideration of it, an assumption of good faith. There's also a line in Ben Lerner's book The Lichtenberg Figures that comes to mind: "a great work takes up the question of its origins / and lets it drop..." Maybe I'd tweak that line now: A great work takes up the question of its ultimate meaning and lets it drop...

In the midst of writing my last post, I learned Bret Easton Ellis actually has a new novel, The Shards, coming out this month. And mere days after I published the post, as the publicity campaign for The Shards rolled on in literature's very particular corner of the internet, some people on a Discord server I'm on weighed in. The discussion was acid; the general consensus was that Ellis was a shitty writer and that anyone who thought him worthy of redemption has suspect judgment and taste. I might argue with the first part—I think it comes from rating just Ellis's subject matter and public persona and disregarding the capacities he does have for style and craft, or from weighing Less Than Zero, which is definitely juvenilia, more heavily than his later works. But I don't think the latter is unfair, thinking about the public persona and how, on a publicity tour, that's ultimately what's being redeemed... And it did make me flush a bit to think of any of the folks on that server—who are lovely people, fun to talk to, with fine taste of which I often reap the fruits; I have several books they've recommended on order as we speak—reading my defense of Glamorama, or American Psycho. (Which, I do want to be clear, has some gruesome, gratuitously violent chapters like "Tries to Cook and Eat Girl" that I would say go beyond serving the function that book’s violence is meant to serve. My endorsement of it isn’t as a perfect novel.) I’m nervous to think of them knowing of my sense that Ellis might have a moral consciousness to counterbalance his apparent compulsion to be an enfant terrible, or to align himself with the morally bankrupt, even if it's the latter he often chooses to indulge. They'd probably think I'm a clown, or depraved.

But such are the hazards of making your opinions known. You do have to stand by them and accept how suspect they might make you look.

Still, I'll also admit that Lunar Park hasn't exactly helped me put another notch in the “transcendent” column for Ellis. And it doesn't leave me with much optimism for the artistic potential that The Shards, being another of the autofictional novels, might have.

Lunar Park stars a middle-aged writer named Bret Easton Ellis, a figure who shares some details of Ellis's life—having published all the same novels up through Glamorama; come to fame in the '80s as part of a circle of writers that included Jay McInerney; had a difficult relationship with his father, who is now deceased, and with substances, which are still around; and been working in Hollywood and teaching since—and doesn't share others, being married to an actress with a son, Robby. This character, Bret, begins receiving strange emails, ones that contain videos of his father, including in the hours before his death. He's also visited by strange presences—like a student named Clayton (!) with a suspicious air and an unexplained connection to another student, Aimee Light, who's writing a thesis on Bret's work (and having an affair with him), as well as what seems to be his father's malicious ghost—all in the midst of an epidemic of strange disappearances of sons in the wealthy neighborhood in which he lives—disappearances that haunt him not least because he comes to suspect that Robby and his friends are somehow involved in them—and news of a rash of murders he's made to understand are copycats of the deaths Patrick Bateman causes in American Psycho. In fact, they may be the result of Bateman himself somehow coming to life.

As you could probably guess from that paragraph, there are just a few too many plots going on at once, with too-large gaps between them. Interesting elements do emerge, like the revelation that Bret is being haunted because he's actually created tortured entities in the course of his writing—and that these demons haunt Bret because he has antagonized them by his very creation of them. And the moment when Robby finally joins the boys who vanish, leaving only the words DISAPPEAR HERE, a leitmotif in Ellis's novels since Less Than Zero, scrawled on the wall of his bedroom. As well as the way Bret responds, ultimately writing himself into the end of Lunar Park for his vanished son, perhaps, to find—and perhaps, in the process, following both the father he tried to kill and the son he lost into whatever realm demons come from. Or else stuck firmly on earth, calling out to Robby in vain.

But the book is also pretty sloppy, compared to, say, the measured and careful pace at which Glamorama moves. Again, you have to wait a long time for the threads of Bret's father's resurrection, Patrick Bateman's apparent coming to life, and whatever's happening to Robby to come together and for the fact that Bret's being haunted to become clear. This novel doesn't have what American Psycho does, either, excitements and provocations to compensate for an uneven construction. Ellis also adopts a reliance on paragraph breaks—to slow time in the moments the plot takes a twist or to amplify the horror of certain events or realizations—that quickly becomes wearying. And far too much of the novel's action hinges on Bret's being menaced by a toy belonging to his stepdaughter, a Furby clone with a name, "Terby," that's at one point wrought into a terrible acronym ("Y, BRET?") that lands with a thud.

What’s more, while this may be a strange thing to settle on, Ellis's handling of computers and the internet is appallingly clumsy. For one, the compulsion to name brands and products—an Ellis signature that's a reliable and even entertaining marker of yuppie-era shallowness in novels previous—feels much different when the product in question is WordPerfect. I don't know if it's the result of technology evolving at a pace that the lifestyle signifiers of the late 20th century (watches, suits, glasses, restaurants) just didn't, or if this reflects the scrutiny a reader can bring to references that are contemporaneous to them rather than anachronistic—I did live through the early internet in a way I didn't 1980s or '90s New York—but they took me out of the novel practically every time I encountered them. Ellis also wrings a significant chunk of drama out of the fact that for months Bret remains unaware that the mysterious emails he's been receiving have attachments. Maybe you're meant to chalk that up to Bret's obliviousness or his staggering substance use—but I find it extremely hard to believe anyone who's emailing anyone, no matter how much they struggle to do it, wouldn't notice attachments on mysterious and otherwise empty emails long before that.

Again—and I realize I say some variation of this in practically every post, but—I do think Ellis is grappling with substantive matters in all this... The child's struggle with the primal father, and the prospect of the writer transfiguring this father into literature. The way such an attempt to control narratives through writing or to exorcise through writing may birth new demons, as people read the products of your tortured creation and become tortured themselves or swear revenge. The cruelty of sons to their cruel and inadequate fathers, as they seek to individuate; the cycle by which the cruel sons become inadequate fathers in their time; the question of when this cycle ends, if it ever does. I can see these themes. But were they done justice? The universe Ellis creates in this novel is rather cardboard compared to the vividness of the world as depicted in the entirely fictionalized works. And if your interrogation of the hazards of transmuting pain into art, trying to control narratives that can’t ever be perfectly controlled, and aestheticizing violence is also a somewhat incoherent novel with a serial-killer plot—one in which the costs of aestheticized violence are borne not by you so much as by your fictional son, who disappears while you live... if ultimately, the only cost of all this is how bad it makes you feel, to which you attest in language that only occasionally reaches true feeling or beauty... I don't know. It rids these themes of their potency.

*

It’s also disappointing to realize I was wrong about Paul Denton, who is referenced, at least, in Lunar Park. I'd hoped the omission was deliberate.

a world without distinctions

Over the last year or two, I've been engaged in a general reassessment of Bret Easton Ellis's oeuvre. There's no particular reason for it--I just picked up Less Than Zero for a reread sometime in my quarantine reading in late 2020 or early 2021, and found it...fine; then I turned to its sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, which I'd never read, and discovered more there than I'd expected. Namely grounds for a reconsideration of my erstwhile conception of Ellis as a "reptilian" writer; a sense he's more complex than that.

To explain what I mean by "reptilian": I sometimes think of two general classes of writer. One is the "transcendent" class, writers who can capture any number of milieus or speak to any number of themes and concerns. (Here I'm thinking of various writers considered canonically great: Pynchon, DeLillo, whoever.) The other is a "reptilian" class of writers who, whether as a consequence of limited ability or limited interest, can only reproduce the milieus they inhabit, but do that well—manage to reach some insight or convey some truth about the experience through the sheer intensity of the reproduction. (This might be, I don't know, Houellebecq? Tom Wolfe? A number of writers I don't typically read, I guess.)

I'd also come to think Ellis took a little too much pleasure in what he described, in novels like American Psycho or Less Than Zero, for such books to be the critiques they might be said to be. The satire in them was tainted by an edge of glee or by romanticization of the affect being captured. But the intensity of the punch delivered in Imperial Bedrooms is sobering. In it, there’s a collapsing of the wave function that is protagonist Clay's life, a choice to put him firmly in the realm of the depraved rather than leaving him a glassy-eyed, passive voyeur who just moves through that world, receiving it (and thereby sensationalizing it). The decision speaks to a core morality I associate with transcendent rather than reptilian writers—not necessarily from some innate goodness the transcendents possess that the reptilians don't, but as a virtue of their separation from the many settings they depict; the same separation that enables them to depict many such milieus or themes to the reptilians' one.

This complexity and willingness to deliver a condemnation compelled me to reread The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho, and to move to the novels I'd never read—Glamorama, which I just finished, and Lunar Park, which is next on my list. (Caveat here that I haven't read White or listened to Ellis's podcast, either of which might challenge the appraisal of his work I'm laying out here or the leniency I'm willing to grant.*)

My favorite of the novels may still be Rules of Attraction, for reasons of idiosyncratic personal preference—I like college novels, and that was the mode in which I first encountered Ellis; this book also contains the most moral and human of Ellis's characters (most prominently Paul Denton—who, incidentally, makes no direct appearances in Glamorama, and thus looks to be one of the few characters from Attraction not transported into the more heightened, parodic universe the works published after it seem to occupy). (Minor spoiler: Ultimately, the character of Lauren Hynde would also qualify.) The cornerstone of the oeuvre probably remains American Psycho, which is the clearest distillation of Ellis's insight into the culture of the late 20th century and the kind of subjectivity that late capitalism, consumerism, and advertising worked to shape. Perhaps the most technically accomplished of the novels (at least of the ones I've read up to this point), and the most interesting to me so far, is Glamorama.

In Glamorama—with its conceit of a director and film crew who shadow the protagonist, model Victor Ward, as he's drawn into a series of overlapping plots to no end he can discern, and the way Ellis thereby makes the staging of scenes and actors through which both terrorist and governmental organizations do their work entirely overt—Ellis seems as interested in the way Hollywood and its manufacture of images intersects with geopolitics as Pynchon is with characters like Gerhardt von Göll in Gravity's Rainbow. I also see parallels to DeLillo's Mao II in Glamorama’s treatment of image culture and image manipulation (though DeLillo, with the character of Scott and his regard for the curation of the novelist Bill Gray's archive, may be more interested in the manipulation of information than of image per se) and in its interest in terrorism as an expression of radical individualism. There are also shades of J. G. Ballard in the way Ellis depicts terrorism—as one way libidinal and transformative forces can be expressed in a late-capitalist, end-of-history time of stasis and pacification through a closed circuit of the instigation of desire through advertising followed by its prompt satisfaction through consumption.

In Glamorama, the terrorist cell is presented as even a natural place for former models to end up, when they realize the vacuity of the uses to which their images are most often put, and the potency of what their glamor could be put in service of. The struggle Victor's girlfriend, fellow model Chloe Byrnes, has with the fundamental emptiness of her life, the premium being put on her youth (rapidly vanishing at twenty-six), and the intense depression that ensues is one of the novel's several sources of tension. One of Victor's antagonists, the former model Bobby Hughes, seems to have the same revelation Chloe does as he reaches the end of both his viable modeling life and his interest in that life—and his passage into terrorism is presented as easy: a fluid intersection of his existing pure confidence with his discovery of a deeper world, as dependent on images and their manipulation as the one he’s been serving but with much more concrete and intense effects, which will allow him in turn to make deeper use of his own power. "He gave his last interview to Esquire during the winter of 1989," says Victor, when he—at this point still liable to be awestruck by proximity to Bobby—first meets him in person, "which was where he said, not at all defensively, 'I know exactly what I'm going to do and where I'm going,' and then he more or less vacated the New York fashion scene"—lending his talents instead to the procurement of explosives, the execution of targets, the advancement of obscure and terrifying agendas, the subjection of those around him to terrifying literal and psychological violence.

It may be that none of this really shakes Ellis entirely free of the charge of being fundamentally reptilian in his mode. The world in Glamorama is much the same as in any other of his novels: beautiful and wealthy people encounter the limits of wealth and the depravity that beauty often hides. But again, there's a certain sensitivity I hadn't credited him for before.

*

Another part of this drive to reassess Ellis comes from just how affecting I find Victor Ward's character relative to Ellis’s others. Reviewer Eric Hanson of the Star Tribune deemed Victor the "dimmest" and "vainest" of Ellis's protagonists; I don't agree. It's true Victor is often vapid and at moments callous. There are also scenes that make it clear there's intelligence in him he’s suppressed in order to better inhabit the world toward which he was drawn. He has moments of consciousness (including one particularly affecting scene in which—after we've been subjected to him at his most vacuous for about two hundred pages—he tells Chloe, "haltingly," that "Maybe if you didn't expect so much from me you might not be so...disappointed"). And in the end, thanks to the nature of the derangement Ellis subjects him to and the way Ellis depicts it, he strikes me as a more sophisticated protagonist than, say, Patrick Bateman.

For one, while action in Ellis's novels after Rules of Attraction invariably culminates in scenes of Grand Guignol violence, and Glamorama’s no exception, I appreciate Victor as a sincere examination of what exposure to such violence does to a human psyche. Victor dissociates just as Bateman does, but in his case it's not played for humor. He suffers screaming terror, panics, vomits, cries, collapses, strings himself out to cope, tries to save those he can and fails horribly, and ends up trapped—in something done to him rather than something he's done to himself—yet waiting in vain hope. Ultimately it becomes very clear that Victor is a callow but basically well-meaning coward who's in over his head. And in that sense, he—unlike Bateman, who as a yuppie is living a very particular life that Ellis deliberately pushes to comic levels—is not too different from any of his contemporary readers.

Put another way, the charge of sensationalism is easy to levy with American Psycho because of the relation the reader will have to Patrick Bateman, who lives in such a specific cultural moment and inhabits it in such a stylized way—and the regard the reader will likely have for him as a result. Perhaps a bit of intrigue in the early going, or a repulsed awe, which might sour into aversion and disgust, or just a feeling of relief (“At least I’m not that”). And always a sense that This is a distortion in a mirror being held up to me—by a hand, Ellis's, that could be gloating. The same charge seems harder to slap on Glamorama because Victor, while he certainly lives a heightened life, is subject to the derangements of image culture to which anyone alive in Western societies the world over is subject—the relentless reproduction and distortion of experience in TV, movies, commercials and ads; the cultivation of more and more invasive methods of manipulating perception; the unfolding of wheels of conspiracy beneath a veneer of stability and predictability to no one end that any one person can readily discern, in an increasingly discontinuous, decontextualized landscape of experience; cool willingness on the parts of those who make plays for control to disregard collateral damage—and he's so much more human in his responses to those pressures. With him, one has the sense This is a person I too could become, were I subjected to what this man—a fool, but a harmless one, not without conscience or the potential to be redeemed—is being subjected to. And again, it's a pretty moral thing; more so than I, in the past, would've acknowledged Ellis capable of.

*

After I finished Glamorama, I picked up another book: Agathe: Or, the Forgotten Sister, which compiles the chapters of Robert Musil's A Man Without Qualities that concern the protagonist Ulrich's relationship with his sister Agathe and presents them as a standalone novel. In his introduction, translator Joel Agee talks about Ulrich's and Musil's desire to go beyond ordinary consciousness into a second reality, of inward, mystical experience and true knowledge of the world—prolonged contact with which might even grant one entry into the Millennium, that kingdom of eternal peace so vaunted in Christian traditions. The second reality is a space of synthesis in which, Agee writes, "intellect and feeling, intuition and reason cooperate without abandoning their different criteria for truth in expression." In other words, one is able to bridge dichotomies in a way that doesn't destroy the integrity of any of the dichotomies' component parts.

This slots in an interesting way with a running concern in Glamorama—the matter of distinctions, the desire to obliterate them, and the resulting collapse into uncertainty, dread, and paranoia. Which is a regression, compared to the progression represented by the space of synthesis and higher being that Agee and Musil describe. (I’m apparently pretty occupied with questions of progression and regression these days.) Early in the book, Victor tells his assistant JD, as they prepare for the opening of a club Victor is helping to launch, "The '90s are honest, straightforward. Let's reflect that":

I want something unconsciously classic. I want no distinctions between exterior and interior, formal and casual, wet and dry, black and white, full and empty...

Late in the novel, it becomes clear what a world without distinctions would look like, and what kind of world the 90s will actually be. Victor and one of his handlers, F. Fred Palakon, have a conversation in which Victor learns he's at the center of two ostensibly unrelated plots: one a goose chase Palakon has sent him on to find a woman he once knew, Jamie Fields, who’s disappeared—all so his father, a US senator, can engage his campaign for president without having to deal with the blemish that is Victor's career; the other an attempt—in which, it turns out, Jamie Fields was also involved—to smuggle a deadly new explosive across the European border for use by Bobby Hughes's group. Victor has also been confronted with video evidence that Palakon actually knows Hughes and is in league with him. Palakon denies it, insisting the video has been doctored.

“So you're telling me we can't believe anything we're shown anymore?" I'm asking. "That everything is altered? That everything's a lie?...”

“That's a fact,” Palakon says.

“So what's true, then?” I cry out.

"Nothing, Victor," Palakon says. "There are different truths."

"Then what happens to us?"

"We change." He shrugs. "We adapt."

"To what? Better? Worse?"

"I'm not sure those terms are applicable anymore."

"Why not?" I shout. "Why aren't they?"

"Because no one cares about 'better.' No one cares about 'worse,'" Palakon says. "Not anymore. It's different now."

Someone clears his throat as tears pour down my face.

*True enough, after I posted this, I was alerted to the existence of Ellis’s podcast episode with Dasha Nekrasova, in which he mentions a friend of his who doubts the integrity of the accounts given by Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, and himself visited the island. Ellis goes on to ask Nekrasova what she thinks of his friend’s sense that the girls felt themselves “privileged” to be there. And if Dasha Nekrasova, of all people, has to explain to you that teenagers or young people often don’t have the moral understanding or vocabulary that adults do, or the ability to understand what is and is not appropriate for others to do to you, and that people of all stripes are capable of acceding to things at one context or time period that they would not at others... If I consider the moment as charitably as I can, I might say the question Ellis posed to Nekrasova was intended to elicit an answer like the one Nekrasova gave. But the way Ellis promptly jumps to another matter, that of how much Nekrasova’s film cost to produce, certainly leaves one room to wonder how genuine his interest in that answer is.

I suppose I ultimately come down where one of the commenters downthread does: “BEE's problem is that he [ultimately] just assumes everyone is as jaded and cynical as he is... I like BEE's writing...but he has some pretty big blind spots and can come across as almost pathologically dismissive.“ I’ll also grant that it’s not entirely uncommon, I think, for an artist’s work to reveal depth that their public persona or actions would seem to belie, or for a person who exhibits flashes of moral conscience—particularly, again, in art, a realm in which we as people might be at our very best—to elsewhere revert to hideous type.

the admission of complicity; the extension of grace

Are there principled contrarians worth respecting? Ones who don't make a fetish of their contrarianism—make it into a compulsion in which they take special pleasure? Or is “principled contrarian” a contradiction in terms? If your tendency to buck the trend is at the point where people give it a label, you might already be making it a fetish.

I was thinking about this question as I read Jessa Crispin's book My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains, an account of her return to her native Kansas to grapple with various ghosts there. Some of the ghosts are emotional or spiritual: memories of growing up the odd one out in an evangelical family shrouded in misogyny; the specter of a childhood teacher whose support of her interests and intelligence gave Crispin great comfort—and who later killed his entire family in a murder-suicide; the legacy of the patriarchy that Crispin feels drove both her teacher's and her family's behavior. And some of the ghosts are literal; the book opens with an account of her experience in a house with the ghost of a man named Charlie, who seems to both feel affection for her and want to control her. Ultimately, “contrarian” might be a bit strong to describe Crispin—but pieces of hers I've read, most notably on the heels of her book Why I Am Not a Feminist, gave me a sense she prides herself on a perceived willingness to say things no one else will say, and sometimes speaks as though she's the only one who's ever had a certain thought. Parts of this book did too.

Generally she writes from a place of radical individualism relative to a neoliberal culture that, while putatively individualist, often encourages conformity via all the means you’d expect: foreclosing more and more access to affordable housing, welfare, healthcare, and free time and thus all possibilities for life besides the possibility of eking out a living in an increasingly precarious market. She encourages the practice of eclectic, individual gnosticism over fidelity to organized religion, for instance, and the practice of a kind of cosmopolitanism that accepts a multiplicity of ways of living and being without collapsing into liberal bromides. Broadly, I can forgive the stance. The experience of being alive in a Western country now is basically the experience of being let down by every institution you know and cast adrift in a sea of bad-faith actors jockeying for your allegiance—and next to that, an urge to cultivate trust in yourself and in what you know to be true seems natural and necessary. But the voice Crispin assumes in elaborating her position is often so hectoring, aggressive, or snide.

Early on, as Crispin talks about the Rosenstrasse protests in Berlin in 1943—when a group of two hundred Aryan women staged a protest outside the building where their Jewish husbands were being held for the camps, demanding their return—she adds,

It's heartwarming, isn't it? To think of women putting their lives on the line to save the men they love. It's a good story, but I always want to interfere with a good story, get in its way, break its narrative spine.

In this case, the interference in the story is merited: Crispin notes how many men chose to divorce their Jewish wives rather than protest as the Rosenstrasse women did, and how few people protested on behalf of Jewish people who were not their spouses, not related to them by the mechanics of the family, which reflect darker, harsher realities of history and human nature we can’t afford to elide. But from the opening question, with the turn it forecasts and the way it judges sentiment that it assumes the reader will feel, to the way Crispin casts herself as the one who’ll break the story’s spine...

Reading so many passages like this one, I was reminded of a line from Andrea Long Chu’s review of Maggie Nelson’s book On Freedom—the idea of “position[ing] the subtlety of one's own views against the crudeness of those who do not share them.” It also reminded me of the parts of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour that most rankled me, the ones on the “fixers” whom Heti alleges flatten reality’s complexities and thus obscure truth. Which makes me think there's a Gen X angle to all this too. And it makes me think, can we stop publishing these books in which white women of a certain age and artistic background tell us how to feel by hectoring us? Advertising how much better they are?

I don't mean to make that the sum total of my judgment of My Three Dads. It's an honest enough examination of a world in which I too live; many of the thoughts Crispin has are ones I've had, even the uncharitable ones. She has a gift for storytelling; her account of arriving in Lincoln, Kansas as a child, and getting to know Mr. Pianalto, the teacher who’ll later kill himself and his family, is riveting. There are many moments of interest, complexity, and beauty in the book.

I appreciated the distinctions that were made—say, between what Crispin calls community and society. The former, she argues, is premised simply on affiliation and implies or even requires homogeneity; the latter works on a shared sense of obligation toward others and responsibility for each other that serves to preserve room for difference. (Though she doesn’t say what creates this sense of obligation or keeps it going.) And I appreciated Crispin’s insight into why so many putatively liberatory communities, like Womantown, a separatist refuge for lesbians in 1980s Kansas City, come to fall victim to their own oppressions (in the case of Womantown, racism)—a desire on the parts of those who’ve been wounded for protection, the easiest means for which is to exert control—as well as the solution she proposes: that we all learn to gain the “internal organization” of true individuation; the ability to see and know our own selves clearly, to be able to acknowledge our own pain so we can learn to see ourselves and others as whole beings—and, crucially, acknowledge the pain of others. I also appreciated the discussion of the Dutch beguinage, which allowed women in twelfth-century Amsterdam to escape marriage while preserving the interdependent fabric of truly nurturing life—as opposed to the independence that Crispin has won through capitalist means now, which can be so isolating—and her subsequent argument about the potential for family and society both to be structures of care rather than mere setting for the performance of roles or the exchange of money.

I appreciate all these discussions because in them, Crispin is working toward elucidating something, not just advertising her own unique intelligence or insight.

It was also interesting to read Crispin’s discussion of John Brown and the way Kansans simplify his complicated legacy to better be able to sanitize their own conservatism in the present with an antislavery past. But the parallel drawn between Brown and Scott Roeder—the antiabortion activist who bombed the clinic of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009, killing him—as men who, being “disappointing” in ordinary life, as workers and fathers, used politics to compensate for that disappointment—feels perhaps too provocative. The two worked toward radically different aims; do those aims not matter? And the savage verdict Crispin delivers on all revolutionary violence feels like claiming moral superiority at the expense of a full spectrum of action. On principle I can agree that, as she puts it, “there should always be institutions that allow people to both see the evil of the system and their participation in it, and then they should be helped to take responsibility”—but anyone alive now or ever can see how rarely such institutions really emerge. I don’t mean to write as though this question is simple, or without stakes, or as though I have engaged or will engage with revolutionary violence in any way beyond the theoretical. But—if you're not willing to entertain the possibility of revolutionary violence against an oppressive system, what might you do to change it when it doesn’t respond to democratic means?

More valuable, to my mind, because it's more sensitively done, is Crispin’s discussion of the human damage that can be wrought by fanaticism, and the way that a violent liberatory cause that fails—as with the Provisional IRA’s attempt to see a free, united, socialist Ireland—renders the violence purposeless: “The act of killing no longer had its original meaning, and those deaths could no longer be disregarded as a terrible necessity. The ends didn't come, so they were stuck with the means, and not all of them could bear it.” That’s what I want discussed in considerations of revolutionary violence. A clear-eyed assessment of the arguments for it and the costs of it, knowing we live in a world where it's possible, that some cases of it may be justified in ways others are not, and that its undertaking has material and moral consequences.

I also appreciated Crispin’s discussion of the counterculture, whose loss she laments. It's a space of collectivity and experimentation—and it’s not necessarily meant to create something new and durable. Rather, it’s a place for people to land when they realize society is in many ways sick, and from there attempt to do new things—some of which are meant to be coopted; some of which are meant to fail.

Crispin goes on to argue today’s left has abandoned such space in favor of criticizing culture, rather than building it. It’s a hackneyed critique as she makes it—she never defines the wokeness she seems to rail against, nor talks about the neoliberal market and government as uniquely powerful agents for coopting what counterculture might try to make and withdrawing the material resources they might use to make it—but it’s not without its core of truth. Especially against her point that the right, broadly, moves to appease grievance—against neoliberalism, against consumerist culture, against the sense of enervation in society that results—in the assertion of social control through law and order, in the reassertion of Judeo-Christian morals as a source of meaning, and at the extreme, in allegiance to fundamentalist or White nationalist futures.

Finally, Crispin’s account of resolving her struggle with faith in gnosticism is also beautiful—particularly the endpoint she reaches, asserting that the seeking of truth is the point of life, rather than a means by which to get to the Protestant end of salvation, as she has been told since she was a child. At the start of the book, Crispin describes a love ritual she seeks from a witch she knows, Katelan, to break herself of a pattern of involvement with married men—one that she realizes comes from experience of an abusive relationship. (It’s one of the book's most electric insights: “Once you've been knocked around a bit, or screamed at and humiliated in public places, or stalked, or trapped in a car with someone who isn't sure whether he should be pointing the gun at himself or at you, the full attention of a man in love can seem too dangerous. Better to deflect it a bit, get another body in there to hide behind at times…”) The pair mix flowers and herbs, write on a piece of paper the kind of man Crispin wants, burn the paper and a little wedding candle of a couple in effigy, and summon the spirits; they look to the shapes that form in the wax to see what the relationship will be like. Later, as Crispin leaves Katelan’s home, a storm sprouts up; proof, she says, that the spirits heard them. “Four months later,” Crispin writes, “I was married.”

It sounds too simple or strange to work—and generally, Crispin expresses doubt about the occult as often as affinity for it. But in the end, she sides with the perspective that people can “move through symbol and metaphor to ritualize the natural world and our role within it and find a way to understand [their] own mortality,” and there is something beautiful in that.

When I went to that witch and asked for a ritual for love, it wasn't out of a belief that it would work. It's easy to disprove magic. I did it out of faith that there was something not inherently disgusting and unforgivable about myself, and that that part of myself might be loved.

Which is to say, the ritual is meant less to achieve a result than to consecrate this nascent sense of self Crispin feels emerging, or to incarnate it, to give it the strength it needs to manifest.

But again it's hard to miss how so many such lovely, courageous moments on Crispin’s part are dogged with harsh judgment of others. Right after the story of this beautiful ritual, and Crispin's account of her interest in Wicca and Tarot as a teenager, comes a passage in which Crispin viciously judges the witches on TikTok who, in 2020, gained minor notoriety online for an attempt to “hex” the moon:

The TikTok witches, it seems, decided to hex the moon. And the Twitter witches got upset, saying you can't hex the moon, there are consequences to that kind of impertinence. Some of the Twitter witches insisted they had, in their rituals, talked to Apollo, and now Apollo was pissed and wasn't going to do things for them. They didn't say what those things were, but it was probably along the lines of getting Justin Bieber tickets.

For some reason the whole thing sent me into a rage. “You did not talk to Apollo!” I wanted to yell. Who do these girls think they are, lighting candles in an Ohio basement, thinking the god of poetry is going to take their call? Thinking they won't face madness or torment while trying to find the language of the divine? Thinking the saints who wandered in the desert for years begging god to speak to them must just not have used the right crystal? You don't get to talk to god and then just go to your job at the mall.

It's all so spiritually thin, this generation of witches making demands without devotion, looking to the stars to tell them when things will get good for them rather than asking what they can offer of themselves...

To which I ask: why so harsh? Yes, the whole thing is a bit stupid; everything on TikTok is at least a little dumb. But the witches are effectively seeking for meaning, even if their expression of seeking feels goofy. And how much offering of herself was Crispin doing when she was young, anyway—a misfit in a conservative Kansas family, dying her hair black, hunting down books on Wicca and astrology, turning to paganism as part of a project of figuring out what she really believed, how powerful she really was?

In the end, what really distinguishes the kids on Tiktok from Crispin's own teenage self is a sense they're still subject to illusions she's broken free from. It's that radical individuality again—but deployed in the service of judgment of others, in a spirit that seems to contradict the generosity of the internally organized individual that Crispin elsewhere counsels us to cultivate. Let kids do the work of individuation, I say, however stupid it seems. As for those of the TikTok witches who aren’t children, well, I think love and not judgment is what helps spiritual thinness flesh out.

Late in the book, after she’s settled in Kansas City, Crispin sees an old church across the street that will soon be torn down for condos:

I imagine that when a developer looks at this building, they see lost profit. They see the structure transformed or replaced, filled with young professionals, maybe with a coworking space on the ground floor. I imagine that when a priest looks at the building, they see lost souls. They imagine it filled with the wayward sheep lost to a secular culture, the ghosts of the godless filling the pews. I imagine that when a community organizer looks at the building, they see a space for organizing. They see it filled with the work of local artists, or support groups for a very specific marginalized population…

Here one sees the drive to classify, to split society into types (developer, priest, organizer) or sectors of society (the religious right, capitalist money culture, the right, the left). These labels do describe legible demographics, and a certain degree of such abstraction is necessary for a polemic, or any piece of nonfiction about society broadly—but they become so reductive when all they're used to do is harangue. The building is renovated, and an arts nonprofit moves in. “But of course people don't dream of adequately feeding someone,” Crispin says:

they don't go to med school in the hopes of providing basic care in exchange for a sustainable income. They dream of expansion, not maintenance. They dream of art, not groceries. They dream of leading a movement, not participating in one. They dream of the glorification of their own desires, not the meeting of other people's needs. Or they dream purely of profit, which means selling low quality in high quantity with little overhead, and of course treating employees decently and making sure they don't drop dead of a preventable disease counts as overhead.

Who is “they” here? I think. Anybody but you? And without any clear referents, what is anyone supposed to do about this? Who are they supposed to target, to change the way things are, and how?

I wonder how this passage might've been different if Crispin had named the nonprofit, or identified the bourgeois biscuit shop that later moves into another abandoned building in her part of town. Put someone's skin in the game. It would be a small move toward the kind of specificity in analysis that might actually make change happen; it could also be less alienating than what we get.

People often complain about the “personal essay industrial complex,” or they criticize “informed exceptionalism”—Amber Husain's excellent term for the kind of writing, a la Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror or Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, in which the writer uses the admission of their own complicity to effectively excuse that complicity. But reading this book, I missed the specificity of those writers’ subject positions, the pains they often took to elaborate them and to locate themselves in the networks in which we're all culpable, and to do these things with humility.

Ultimately, if informed exceptionalism is the midpoint in a continuum of autobiographical writing—and the position of ambivalence that refuses absolution that is assumed by, say, Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless, per Husain’s argument, is a progression (though, crucially, not an endpoint; there’s more progress yet to be made)—the stretches of pure harangue we get in this book mark a regression. And next to them, I'll take an honest admission of the writer’s own complicity—and the extension of that same grace to even the witches on TikTok hexing the moon—any day.

For much of the time I was reading Gwendoline Riley’s novel First Love, it was hard to figure out how I felt about it. It’s a grueling experience. Ultimately, it’s a dark picture of the impossibility of love, maybe. Or of how helpless you are not to reproduce the models of relationship you’ve been given.

Protagonist Neve and her husband Edwyn have such an infantilized relationship:

When we cuddle on the landing, and later in the kitchen, I make little noises – little comfort noises – in the back of my throat, as does he. When we cuddle in bed at night, he says ‘I love you so much!’ or ‘You’re such a lovely little person!’ There are pet names, too. I’m ‘little smelly puss’ before a bath, and ‘little cleany puss’ in my towel on the landing after one…

You come to wonder what someone who displays the degree of consciousness of herself that Neve does is doing with him; he’s so wounded and unable to recognize it, and it’s so hard to tell what the relationship actually gives her.

Edwyn is in pain, suffering from fibromyalgia and a heart condition and perhaps arthritis, and extremely anxious. These don’t seem to be the source of his problems, but they make them worse, and he’s able to use them as a lever against Neve, because he does not follow the basic adult principle that you deal with your pain rather than punishing others for the fact that you have it. His childish manner constantly threatens to collapse into great cruelty when she demonstrates any shred of an authentic, adult personality, and when it finally happens, when he calls her things like “A fishwife shrew with a face like a fucking arsehole that’s had…green acid shoved up it,” she can never make him admit it; he has pain and terror to hide behind. “Sometimes he’d just sit and sob,” says Neve, “and look up at me with frightened eyes when I sat next to him.” When she’s fallen apart—as when, after her awful father dies, she cries for days—he’s oblivious:

What’s the matter with you?... I don’t understand. You’re an intelligent woman. Did you imagine he was going to live forever?... He’s dead, you’re alive, you’re guilty, it’s desolate.… Sooner or later you are going to have to get over this.… That’s just realism, honey.

You quickly realize Neve’s mother is largely the same way: childish, strange, often obliviously cheery, infantilized and infantilizing, yanking others about by her moods because she herself is yanked by them. So is Neve’s father, profoundly abusive, a menace to his children and his wife. So is everyone in Riley’s narrative universe, perhaps, save Neve—who understands the strange and tortured people around her but cannot change them or be free of them.

When her father dies, Neve reflects on the state of the house he’s left behind: “The house felt very lonely. Like a lonely child’s lair, really. The brave business of self-solace everywhere in evidence (to my eyes, anyway). His comforts. His acquisitions. Stores of treats. Discarded novelties… And so much food…” The metaphor is obvious: hunger for love, need for the love of people like his daughter—and the fact that he, having no capacity to give love in return, has long since exhausted it, and so has had to settle for other forms of sustenance. “What could you do?” Neve says. “He was aggressive, not bright, none of which makes for a person you want to engage with if you can help it. Instead – I did it myself when I was older – you smiled, tried to meet him halfway, just as you might encourage a baby, and give all your warm attention to a baby, to get it to behave.” She stops seeing him regularly soon after.

Riley’s dialogue is especially interesting—the pace of the sentences she uses to convey her odd characters’ odd speech, and the use of italics, in particular, in conveying the brands of loneliness, neediness, and nastiness that Edwyn and Neve’s mother display. The emphasis of the italics on certain words does so much to convey their senses of glee or injury; children’s senses, of an exhibitionist sort. It’s children who are pleased at demonstrating how X they can be: how titillated they think it is to “sleep in the nudie,” in Neve’s mother’s bizarre parlance when she stays over one night (“Ooh, doesn’t it feel funny? Oh, I could never sleep in the nudie!” she tells Neve, mock-shocked, having barged into her adult daughter’s space, humiliating her); or how unwell they are (“Well?” Edwyn sputters at Neve, once, when she tries to encourage him; “I’m not well. I’m not well!”); or how unbelievable it is that you don’t see what they’re going through. And it’s children, often, who are determined to fill every moment with stimulation, as Neve’s mother does:

All through that marriage, if I asked how she was, I got her itinerary, read out from the long-leaved kitchen calendar, if we were on the phone, or else from the little diary she scrabbled for in her bag:

“Yes, so, Wednesday’s the Wine Circle, isn’t it? And then the Vic Soc on Friday…”

And all in that doll’s-tea-party voice: self-enclosed, self-chivvying….

“Now where are we? Wednesday, yes. Look at this. Every day I’ve got something on. I never stop!”...

“Does anyone talk to you when you’re at these dos?”

“No! Well, no one new. I stand there ‘looking approachable’ all night! But no one approaches! No one. No. There are people I know from the Vic Soc… I mean, I did ask some people from the Vic Soc round for, you know, flat-warming nibbles and drinks, and some people came, but you would think, wouldn’t you, that, you know, I might get an invitation in return. Nothing. Not one…”

Neve asks—perversely, she’s aware—if her mother has thought about therapy, about learning to relate to people from the ground up rather than “darting about” as she does: “If you want to be friends with […] anybody, then you can’t just keep putting yourself in their way and expecting them to pick you up.” “What do you mean, pick me up?” her mother shoots back.

What’s that, “Pick me up”? Needy? Oh no, I’m not needy. I’m too far the other way, if anything. I’m completely the other way. That’s probably what put him off.

As for adults, what do they do? They try not to succumb to what their worst selves tell them to do. Gradually you realize that Neve’s relationship with Edwyn, as the first in which she’s lived in a partner, represents the breaking of a long defensive pattern of isolation. It’s in a way an act of courage. But now that she’s taken it, she doesn’t seem to know what to do next, or how to shape the situation she’s in; it doesn’t seem to be one she can shape. When she and Edwyn fight, she greets it with a sort of hopeless horror. At one point she wonders if he actually notices the cringing aspect she takes on when he bullies her. “No,” she decides, “I don’t believe he did notice. That was the lesson, I think. That none of this was personal.”

I felt a sad stab of empathy at the scene when Neve, setting up her desk when she’s just moved in with Edwyn, journals out her ambitions for the new self she vows to be.

Untangle yourself. Stop saying you love him. You’re wearing a groove in your mind. Say it when you mean it. Save money. Small steps. Remember you’re a grown woman now. Be more proud and more relaxed…. Don’t act like a baby. Don’t be a cat. Be decent to him and to yourself. Respect yourself and him. See your friends. Don’t be sly. Don’t be deceitful. Don’t snoop.… Keep your footing. Leave the room if he calls you a name. If you save money you can leave the flat if he's nasty. Stand up for yourself but don’t waste your energy. This is your time and your energy. Don’t try and ‘manage’ him. Be natural and let him be natural. That’s what love is. No cramped feelings, on either side.”

How many times have I written out the same injunctions to myself—“Be an adult, be mature, don’t fall into old habits, old insecurities; you’re better than that now; you have resources you didn’t before”—and then failed to live up to the same injunctions. That’s the tragedy—this trying to teach yourself to give yourself what life has not given you, to do what life has not taught you how to do.

It all sounds banal written out this way. But it wasn’t nearly so clear to me until I thought hard about what I’d read. First Love is really such a weird reading experience. The elliptical structure, the erratic length and sequence of its chapters, its jumping about in time, unpredictably, and the odd allusions Edwyn makes to a past full of grime and filth—which seem gratuitous for much of the book, knocks at Neve’s lower-middle-class upbringing with her bullying, vicious father, until she reveals late in the novel that she really did spend a decade and a half before Edwyn drinking and living with gruesome desperation: “I think I was sick from drink, at least once a week, for about fifteen years,” she says. “Once I woke up in a hotel in town, to a long heap of sick next to me in bed, like a person.” It’s all so lurching and vertiginous to read. And it manages to evoke the scattered consciousness of a person who, subjected to so much by a parent, has clawed their way out of a fugue—only to reduce themselves to the state of child again. You continually come to remember Neve chose to be with Edwyn, and he with her—apparently, somehow, for all he seldom chooses to admit it except to punish her with guilt.

If one question you ask is How have these people ended up together?, another is Why doesn’t she leave? Riley’s quite skillful at balancing Neve’s maturity and insight with the fragility that lies beneath it like a pit under a false floor. And you can marshal maturity in a relationship with a parent, which is reactive; experience of your parent can teach you at least something of how to deal with them. But in the relationship with the lover, which is one you have created and must continue to create, what the parental relationship might do, perversely, is drive you to create it all over again, in hopes of resolving it this time, or because the pain of it is what you know. Realizing this has happened doesn’t free you of it. In fact, knowledge enervates; in one of her last big fights with Edwyn, one Neve can see coming, she writes of how “My body started to ache. My voice got dull. I spoke like a machine that was running down, while he seemed only to gain energy.”

But if it’s not insight or awareness that can free you, then what? What would it take for Neve to do the things she writes in her journal so that she no longer needs to write about them?

And then there’s still another of the novel’s big questions: is love possible? One of Neve and Edwyn’s most vicious fights takes place after Neve—after a night out, the nature of which she does not describe—comes home horribly drunk. The scene goes on for pages. She blacks out, wakes up suffering, he screams at her, she blacks out again. “I don’t care how you feel,” he tells her.

“Don’t worry,” he adds,

I blame myself. I knew what I was getting. I knew what you were. You never learned, did you, how to interact with other people, in a way that wasn’t mad. How to be in the world in a way that wasn’t sick and mad… It’s not your fault. I do understand that. But I won’t be anyone’s carer. Do you get that?

The hostility recurs in their second big fight, provoked by Neve’s desire for another night out, expressed with the timidity she usually takes on with him, with her instinct to “manage” him as she once managed her father. “Well, please don’t get horribly drunk,” he snipes, though Neve reveals it’s been two years since that incident. “I like the affection between us,” he snarls at her—revealing his regard for her, and the limits to what he thinks is possible for either of them—“but don’t kid me that it’s about love. It’s about need for love.”

Cut to the next scene, when they’re going to see an art exhibition in town. Neve does not say what comes of the fight, whether she actually went out, or anything about its aftermath. They walk along with coffees; Neve is again in her managing mode, holding Edwyn’s elbow, asking him tender questions, just listening. Edwyn, reminiscing about his post-college days in Marylebone, says, “And I’d remember who I could chat to, and go back to them the next week, for some chat and some friendliness. That’s what you do in life, isn’t it?”

So, then. There’s the answer. No love is possible, not when the first love—like the kind of an immature mother or a cruel father or whoever—has fucked you up badly enough. Then there’s just the need for love, and some chat, and some friendliness…

because of the indelible details I give

“Maybe I have always been involved in some kind of fieldwork,” says Isa Epley, protagonist of Marlowe Granados’s novel Happy Hour, early in the book. Plenty of men and women come under her scrutiny as she relates an account of the summer she and her best friend Gala are spending in New York City, trying not so much to “make it” (there’s not really anything they want to do) as just to live as intensely as they can. There’s Tuzy, a “nouveau-riche” “internet businessman” friend of a not-quite-friend who fixates on Isa and takes her on an awful date. Anabel, a wealthy artist for whom Isa occasionally models in one of the many odd jobs she and her best friend Gala have to cobble together in the absence of visas and the ability to take on conventional work. Coop, a wealthy ex-boyfriend, or ex–love interest, whose house Isa ends up in when her living arrangement with Gala falls apart, only for him to make her his urchin punching bag; he bullies her, invades her privacy—calling her into his office, pulling out her diary, and demanding, I can’t tell how teasingly, that she account for how she’s written about him and his wealthy friends.

There has to be a name for this kind of novel, in which a young striver enters a social scene and relates what it’s like to experience different sectors of society as they try to make a name for themselves or just find a place. But I can’t remember it. I do remember the name for the other kind of book Happy Hour is; by the end it’s clear we’ve been reading a Kunstlerroman, the story of Isa’s becoming a writer.

Isa sometimes seems older than the twenty-one years she’s supposed to be. She’s sharper in the calculations she makes in her self-presentation, and in her sense of the relations of power between herself and Tuzy or Coop, than I remember being at that age. Or maybe I was just more naïve at twenty-one, being shaped by suburban expectations and a family that didn’t encourage much investigation of the inner life. It’s also true I wasn’t the kind of person who’s known precarity intimately enough to be comfortable engaging it and enduring it as they work toward something more, or just go where hunger takes them. Often, those are the folks bent on experiencing everything and defining themselves and others with Isa’s brand of vigor.

It’s also true Granados shows you just how hard-won the kind of wisdom Isa gains over the course of the novel is. She presents it in miniature in a striking sequence late in the book, during an audition Isa does for a hair commercial that doesn’t go well (and leaves the reader with the distinct impression this is it for any ambitions as an actress or model Isa might’ve possessed).

“What are you passionate about?” the casting director asks:

The five other people at the table sat silently watching. The answer took far too long for me to come up with because I did not know that offhand either. First came the thought of having fun in the first place, but can you passionately search for having fun without losing the luster of its spontaneity? Then came ‘getting away with something.’ Could you form that into a passion if its very goal was vague? Third came ‘achieving a form of respect,’ which made me sad but felt honest. Am I not always shouting into the void, waiting to be responded to with courtesy? Is that not what I seem to struggle with each moment, wrestling to get other people to see me how I see myself? I began to unfurl. My very last thought was ‘writing everything down.’ That is seemingly conventional, and I can imagine any regular person answering that way. To write is a task that feels like it is forcibly propelling you forward. I wanted to inscribe myself somewhere, anywhere, besides onto someone else’s life.

And in the end I know I am I’m passionate about glamour—because it is illusive, hard to define, yet identifiable…

Isa, in the course of these thoughts, essentially recounts her own evolution over the novel’s course: from arriving in New York City (or whatever new place one might end up in) and doing what young people do; to engaging honestly with the drive to be recognized and acknowledged that really motivates what young people do, and striving for maturity; and finally executing the pivot that marks the attainment of that maturity: a pivot from the vain effort to get others to see as you want to be seen to simply seeing yourself (and, if you’re a writer, recording that), so as to incarnate yourself, and be enough as you are.

After the audition, sitting at the bar in a nearby restaurant, Isa wonders “whether my memories should stay only mine, or have they ever been?”

Each time I tell someone a story over a watery Pernod, it opens that someone to the possibility of the memory; that’s why I adore talking. Then maybe the stories really are mine, not because they happened to me but because of the indelible details I give. Maybe that is the how that makes them valuable.

And then, at the very end of the novel, Isa meets with an artist friend of Anabel’s, Ester Gladwell, to discuss…something. Anabel, having declared it her duty to “distribute opportunity” to those after her in the NYC scene, has put the two of them in touch; the rest, it seems—what she’ll make of the connection, given her ambitions to write—is up to Isa. Ester recognizes Isa from a painting of Anabel’s, and comments on how “detached” she seemed in the painting. “Aren’t all women in paintings detached, simply unknowable?” Isa counters. “And in that way, they become so easy to attribute just about anything to”:

“But you know, I always prefer the way I see things,” I told her, as she lifted her glass to her mouth. She asked, “Why’s that?” I crossed my legs and said very seriously, “Because it’s all mine and no one can convince me otherwise.”

In the end, it’s just sweet to watch someone, still young and pure in intent, and who stays that way, discover the power in both the image they project and their truth.

sometimes you gotta take the L

It’s funny to see Jon Baskin read Sheila Heti as an example of an artist with a project that’s genuinely vital amid in the 21st century’s generally enervated, attenuated literary scene (at least in America) after I criticized her for missing that mark with Pure Colour. I suppose I’m one of the people Baskin has in mind when he writes

It reveals something about our estrangement from a potent aesthetic vocabulary that even Heti’s most thoughtful and sympathetic critics so often praise her as a philosopher or a mystic, as opposed to the quietly crusading artist she has always insisted she is.

—though of course I didn’t praise her as a mystic; I judged her apparent mysticism in Pure Colour as an abdication of human duty, in being an attempt to rise above something that shouldn’t be risen above if engaged (social and political unrest, the fate of the planet, etc. etc.). And I judged her for doing so in a way that felt lecturing, snide and supercilious. Not individual and humble enough to be genuine.

But Baskin’s reading of Heti’s work brings me to confront some of my own shortcomings as a critic—like a predisposition to read in the same way “therapeutic moralists” he describes might, for whether a writer’s novel is saying the things I think it ought to say, rather than for its formal or aesthetic qualities. (Though Baskin doesn’t really provide a single, straight definition of what “therapeutic moralism” actually is, either.) And the reading is ultimately persuasive to me. I can see what Baskin means when he describes Heti’s novels as “ultimately less […] ambivalent […] than […] agonistic”—meaning that she rejects ambivalence as a structure of feeling, as it is in so many books that dramatize the conflict between being politically effective and being an artist (Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel; Ben Lerner’s books 10:04 and The Topeka School), and she instead argues that in the battle between desires, like being an artist versus being a political agent, or being an artist versus being a mother, one will win out. And I’m willing to grant his point (and Zola’s) that it’s entirely legitimate for art to be, in the modernist tradition, an expression of the artist’s ‘seeking and seeing for himself,’ and to be rated on those grounds. I think I could do more as a critic (well, someone who talks about my impressions of art online) to make judgments based on aesthetic criteria as much as I make judgments that reflect “public sentiments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the internal values of art”—though when the artist one is judging seems to be delivering some verdict on those sentiments, or intervening in some debate related to those sentiments, I reserve the right to bring those sentiments or debates to bear on the work.

I’ll also say I don’t think Heti manages to avoid the smugness that Baskin is arguing she wrote Pure Colour to criticize, the way she actually does in How Should a Person Be?—a humbler work, at least if I recall it correctly from my vague memories of it. (I’m going to embark on a reread soon. Be prepared for this opinion to change.) There’s quite a bit of moralism in her stance even if it may not be the therapeutic variety—which I guess is a moralism that seeks to ‘fix’ society, and specifically by making it a utopia rather than by repressing the elements of it that are deemed undesirable, as nontherapeutic moralisms might do.

I’m also left with an ultimate question: what would it mean for art to be above politics in the way Baskin describes below?

In interviews, the writers [namely Ben Lerner, Sally Rooney, for Beautiful World, Where Are You; Christine Smallwood, for The Life of the Mind; and Rumaan Alam, for Leave the World Behind] often affected a weary wisdom about the trap of “dogmatic” art, insisting that of course they knew the difference between literature and agitprop. Yet they were just as careful to deny that art should ever aspire to be above politics, and when they were not writing novels they could reliably be found spreading petitions to stop gentrification in Brooklyn, signing their names to open letters opposing Trump’s candidacy for president, or writing op-eds assailing MFA programs for being insufficiently politicized…

Of course, it’s likely I’m insufficiently weighing the term “aspire” in Baskin’s particular phrasing. Maybe what he’s asking is that writers pick a lane, as Heti has—say, make a bold choice to create art that does in fact aspire to be above politics—whether the choice they make (which could also be to make art that’s engaged with politics or influenced by it or to make art in parallel with political action or to renounce art altogether) is judged by others to be a “good” one or not. And to do so instead of waffling between the two commitments and dramatizing that waffling, too—making that the substance of their novels. Which does seem cheap. Writing a novel about how hard it is to write fiction with a clean conscience if you feel that this fiction, or you, does no work for systemic good—and in the process ignoring the choices you could make to do one or the other with full devotion, and thereby actually clean that conscience, rather than taking pride in how it’s sullied or just wringing your hands over that. And it might be good to enforce a bit more of a separation between artistic activity and political activity—asking published and prominent writers who, for instance, sign open letters opposing Donald Trump to choose which of these activities they’ll publicize. In the process, we might reject too the logic of personal branding and the dynamics created by the Web 2 internet, by which anyone with any sort of platform, no matter how it’s been earned, has to have an official line on every political matter of any import to their public, or any public, since for all public figures now, every person who’s online can effectively be considered a constituent. In this condition, it no longer becomes enough to act, to quietly put your name down in a petition, as a simple resident of the area in which you live; you have to bring your clout to bear…

who could

Just finished Ratner’s Star by Don DeLillo. It’s the most Pynchonesque of DeLillo’s works I’ve read. I caught a number of parallels between it and Gravity’s Rainbow, published just three years before it, in 1973:

Protagonists, in fourteen-year-old math prodigy Billy Terwilliger Jr. and the somewhat hapless Allied Intelligence agent Tyrone Slothrop, who go on a sort of odyssey that consists of encounters with various weirdos. And the protagonists in both cases become more and more diffuse as presences as the narrative goes on—though Billy is at least still a person, to some degree, by the time his novel ends. Slothrop’s more an entity or a mere idea.

Contact with something beyond the known world. In Ratner’s Star, it’s with the extraterrestrial, in the form of the folks behind Field Experiment One, who take Billy from his post at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures to have him work to decode the message they believe comes from Ratner’s star, or rather from the planet that it may or may not be. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it's contact with the supernatural, in the form of the former asylum known as the “The White Visitation” and the staffers from PISCES who occupy it.

Weird names. Pynchon’s are of course legendary: Slothrop, Pig Bodine, Laszlo Jamf, Tantivy Muffer-Maffick, Teddy Bloat, Geli Tripping, Scorpia Mossmoon, Ernest Pudding, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. But DeLillo gives him a run for his money with (again, to name just a few) Terwilliger, the famous mathematicians Henrik Endor and Orang Mohole, Thorkild, Othmar Poebbles, Elox Truxl, and my favorite of the bunch, Terwilliger’s mentor and tormentor, Robert Hopper Softly. And there's something about the zaniness of it all presented with DeLillo's incredibly straight face that really makes the Ratner's ones land.

An interest in global systems of control. In Gravity’s Rainbow, there’s the many-layered, hopelessly tangled network of people and forces searching for the truth of the project behind the mythical Rocket 00000. And the imbrication of war and global markets is one of Gravity’s Rainbow’s clearest underlying themes. In Ratner’s Star, there’s the lurking presence of the Honduran cartel who wants to use Billy’s skill as a mathematician to manipulate the money curve, and eventually takes over not just the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures but all the other associated outfits—which, you discover, have actually been controlled by a corporate parent organization, OmCo Research, the whole time, despite the veneer of dedication to intellectual causes that characterizes the Center, and the hopeless eccentricity of Field Experiment One’s various participants.

An interest in conspiracy. Who’s targeting Slothrop, and why? Why is what happens to him so closely correlated to when the bombs fall? Is the message from Ratner’s star real? Is it actually a star? Who wants Billy to decipher the message, and why? Of course, Ratner is ultimately a bit more closed-ended, conventional, and logical than Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the fact that the plot points cannot be made to cohere is kind of the point.

The figure of the parabola in Gravity’s Rainbow—the arc a rocket takes as it’s fired into the air and returns to the earth, which also shapes the book’s narrative structure and the movement from the initiation of the action to acceleration to explosion, collapse, and ultimate diffusion—is echoed by the figure of the stellated twilligon in Ratner’s Star: a sort of inverted triangle that keeps coming up in the book, no matter whether the characters are investigating the relations of stars to planets or gravity to matter, the “sylphing” of space and time, or the drawings made by ancient humans in ancient caves.

Both works were published in the 1970s. What was it about that time that permitted works of this ambition? And with these particular preoccupations? One of Gravity’s Rainbow’s impetuses is clearly the possibility of resistance to the military-industrial complex, and the seeming impossibility of same, once global systems reach a certain scale and interconnection; they become impenetrable. Not even the people within them can compass them.

As for the impetus behind Ratner’s Star, that might be more fundamental or essential—in the sense of human essence—than historical…

As I came to the end of the novel, I thought about that prompt tweet that circulated on Twitter a few years ago: “Describe your favorite book in the most abstract way possible,” or something very like that. If I had to describe Ratner’s Star in that way, I’d say, “Mathematicians dig themselves into holes”—because that’s where Henrik Endor (Billy’s direct predecessor in the quest to break the code of the message from Ratner’s star) ends up. And that’s where Robert Hopper Softly goes too, when his dream of recruiting Billy and others to create the ultimate logical language—by which they might respond to the message from Ratner’s star, by speaking in a way that any being who encounters the message might be able to interpret—falls apart, because the world is so hopelessly relative and our knowledge of it so imperfect, so colored by individual subjectivity, that this task is fundamentally impossible. In other words, both Endor and Softly are driven into the earth when they’re overwhelmed by crisis; driven to take the ultimate defensive position, in oblivion. In many ways, Ratner’s Star is about the experience of crisis that great intelligence—and the ability to see and divine the logic by which this world, natural events, could be said to operate—can bring on. And it's about the way that so many human discoveries lead us back to ourselves, just the way it’s revealed that—SPOILERS—the message supposedly from Ratner’s star actually originated from Earth. Perhaps from ancient people who actually reached a level of advancement far past the level we’re at now before—what? plague? cataclysm? who knows—wiped them out.

The fact that we are the one species we know of that possesses the language capabilities we have, and the perceptions, memories, narratives, and histories the capacity for language permits us, induces narcissism, like the kind Billy so often displays. And a concomitant reality, that we’re constantly on the cusp of higher understanding and constantly thrown back into the ultimate unknowability of our own world and lives, induces terrible despair and isolation. And as I write all this out, I think: of course this—the knowledge we are unique in possessing language and logic and complex mathematics and, when it comes to really understanding the world, none if it helps at all—would be alternately megalomania-inducing and utterly terrifying. Of course all the mathematicians in this book dig themselves into holes or fall into insane fugues like Billy does or entertain terrific addictions and alternating fits of ennui and madness like Orang Mohole.

Which reveals another similarity between the novels in what both reveal: Sciences and technologies magnify the crises to which we’re most susceptible; they don’t solve them. Who could?

trying to palliate it

Just finished Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour, and—hmm. It’s not bad. But there’s something infantilizing in its plainspoken style; in its taxonomy of humans into three types, bird (aesthetes), fish (idealists who regard humanity in the abstract), and bear (romantics who focus most of their attention on the people closest to them, whom they fiercely love); in the idea of the “fixers”—Heti’s term for psychologists, thought leaders, anyone who wants to interpret reality on others’ behalf rather than letting them experience it and discover how to confront it for themselves—and finally even in Heti’s particular interest in the nature of the universe.

Which feels like a similar exploration of bourgeois anxiety and fear amid social and political unrest or climate change that gets criticized in novels like Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. But a different response to these large-scale phenomena than Powers’s—which is to arrange for bourgeois anxiety to be resolved through a simplified, sentimental fable of a child’s power to teach us empathy—and a different way to try to assimilate those phenomena. At several points, Pure Colour actually reminded me of Leave Society, Tao Lin’s latest novel—which is essentially a rather thinly veiled depiction of Lin’s attempt to go inward and diagnose his own physical and mental health issues, in a kind of individual spiritual exploration that he dimly feels may, if done at scale, somehow cause a transformation from the “dominator society” that caused his illness, and the world’s unrest, to a “partnership society,” marked by equality between genders and a harmonious relation to the planet, that might be better.

A similar mechanism is at work in Heti’s idea of the world as we know it being God’s first draft of it—with all of human life that has elapsed thus far having passed in the single moment God stepped back from creation, “like a painter standing back from the canvas,” to contemplate it. “Now the earth is heating up in advance of its destruction by God,” she writes, “who has decided that the first draft of existence contained too many flaws.” Heti returns to the image of the first and second draft over and over in Pure Colour as a way to conceptualize human aspiration and striving, particularly in a world increasingly stressed by the internet and climate change in which we’re also still dealing with the parts of man’s estate we’ve always dealt with. Like death, and heartbreak—as the death of the protagonist Mira’s father throws her into chaos and a point of crisis in her longtime, largely unrequited love of her cold, withholding friend Annie—and artistic striving, as Mira, trained as a critic, languishes in odd jobs and watches her friends from her writing program struggle from afar.

Ultimately, the metaphor of the first and second drafts and the use to which Heti puts it feel like an abdication of duty. Not that she should have written a political tract, or anything explicitly political, but I think I’d have respected a conventional novel about the strict limits of a single character’s life more than this one, which ends up being a set of thematized reflections on a world that’s recognizably ours—so many of which seem intended to help the reader come to terms with the world by seeing it from miles high, rather than materially knowing it or changing it.

Most galling to me in this regard are the sections midway through the novel in which Mira—or Heti herself—ruminates on the end of the first draft, and how humans relate to loss and how they ought to, and challenges the fixers, whom she seems to accuse of trying to supply human answers to struggle that is fundamentally metaphysical and individual. “Of course, that is the way humans evolved,” she writes:

and it’s not the worst thing that humans will be gone. We are the tragic ones who think it’s a tragedy that the human animal will be gone. We can’t even accept that our own fathers will be gone! But that doesn’t mean it’s a tragedy on a worldwide scale. Except for all the suffering. Except for all the suffering, but then the earth will start doing what it’s already doing, which is making itself well again. We are part of its flu. That means we will all be somewhere else, at least the part of us that loves…

And later:

What you want are fixers, but what is needed is to follow the traditions with faith. You want people to come in and fix things for you, to show you what the fixes are. But what is needed is to follow the family traditions. Getting together for meals. Faith that this matters… [E]ating cheese crisps and mildly playing cards or sitting on chairs, waiting for the soul’s one true chance at a human life on earth, where they will find their truest love…

And I get it. It’s true in one very abstract level that humans don’t need to be here. But to respond to suffering, and to the ways human agency has despoiled the earth, with equanimity, and to look ahead to the earth making itself “well” as though what has to die to get there has no bearing on that wellness—in some ways that regard for the world and those who inhabit it now feels as sociopathic, or at least compromised, as a fixer’s regard for what they’re trying to fix might be. And we know how I feel about fantasies of rapture, like the fantasy that we’ll be “somewhere else” after human annihilation, as compensation for present waste and sin. I don’t like it when evangelical Christians do it. I don’t like it when when transhumanists do it. I don’t like it when our celebrated novelists do it, either. Nor do I love the crypto-conservatism of replacing sinister “fixers” with faith and the family—even when I consider that concept in the sense Heti seems to mean it, that of the human family; the family that is “made,” and that exists anywhere that someone, say, invites you into their home when you come to visit. Especially when she also appears to preempt any critique of her use of the term in a way that’s snide, even: “There is no point in asking what a family is. If you follow the traditions, you know it…”

I’ll grant the idea of a “second draft” is a fine metaphor for the hopes we need to sustain us in the first draft—that is, in life as it’s often lived when we’re young or otherwise naïve, and unable to see ourselves clearly or the consequences of what we do. Late in the novel, when Mira, goes to visit Annie—and finally, definitively realizes that her love for Annie, who has never really been the kind of person Mira has been determined to make her, is doomed—she comes home to find a lamp she owns and treasures has been shattered by the firefighters who arrived to put out a fire that started in the bungalow she lives in. Her epiphany that she neglected something she loved dearly in her eagerness to see Annie, who’s just not part of her life anymore and perhaps never was—that she could live in such error as she's been living in—provokes the insight that “we are made to die, one at a time, here in the first draft of existence,” and “that is the pain and the longing.” “That”—the ephemeral nature of all that is—“is the beautiful.”

And this is not an untrue insight. It’s not unmeaningful. But it is banal.

I do not mean to diminish the pleasures of reading this novel, which are there, if outweighed by a sense of …that’s it? The reflections on art and the nature of criticism, as a practice, are interesting. Notions that, for instance, an artist can recognize himself as such because of how he relates to his own sincerity, or that art is “made for the cold, eternal soul” and that making it or preserving it requires a “coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries”—and the novel’s interrogation of this idea—left me thinking. And what Mira discovers over the novel’s course—her insight, contemplating an ancient-looking seashell at the side of a lake, that “You will have so many more years of living, and the years will draw you far from this time when you feel so bad, and time will crust over everything… this present moment will one day be gone, and its troubles buried beneath so many layers of living,” and that human life is essentially like “a battered old seashell, formed over millions of years, made to endure”—is indeed what every person and every generation has to discover. In fact, reading those lines brought irrepressibly to my mind others, from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which I recently finished: “Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one… [N]o generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task than the previous one…” That is, the truths of the world are discovered anew in each generation. They have to be, precisely because they are truths that lie at the very heart of life.

But it’s hard not to read a paragraph like this—

It was a delusion to think she had created that world and everything in it; that she had made up its rules and was always to blame. Where had that idea come from? Or did everyone feel that way, a little bit, for it was actually God who was feeling it—the God who had in fact created the world, while we picked up on his shame for having made it, in some ways, poorly, and mistook his feeling of responsibility for our own.

—and not think, Maybe we need to keep some of that sense of responsibility. And not go no further than depicting it, like so many of the novelists of bourgeois experience do, or try to sublimate it in grand theories of the universe, disperse it into abstraction, the way Heti's and Lin's latest novels do.

All in all, many of the novelists we fete in venues like the New York Times Book Review—which are admittedly marginal, in the grand scheme of things, and perhaps not the places you’d expect adventurous work to be found, but still where the work of canon formation might happen—could stand to be more ambitious. Like, times like these also produced Doctor Faustus once. The novels of this time that we celebrate could be both more concrete—as Thomas Mann’s novel dealt with Weimar Germany, and accounted for its decline into ruin, by showing us one bourgeois individual’s attempt to negotiate how political decline feels, and try to palliate that, as an expression of his and his era’s damnation—and more really metaphysical, the way Thomas Mann gets when he makes Adrian Leverkuhn sign a deal with a literal demon, mortgaging his very life to go out in glory, in a way that really makes you feel the horror of his brilliance, and the overweening ambition and inhumanity that makes him need to pursue it at all costs, and the waste that this makes of his life. These are not necessarily, as everyone tells us, unprecedented times… And others who’ve lived through similar ones have at least accounted for them honestly. In reading or reading about so much of our lauded fiction, I’m left to ask: where are the stakes? Where’s the willingness to speak honestly to the state of things, the horror of them, and condemn?

Doing a little roundup of some articles I’ve read recently.

*

One is a profile by Jennifer Wilson of Duke University Press editor Ken Wissoker, who published Lauren Berlant and others. I rolled my eyes a bit at the fawning tone of the much of the piece (especially considering how the descriptions of Wissoker’s exacting taste and style, and the occasional spikiness of his manner, mirrors the impression given by Hanya Yanagihara—whose work I find extremely suspect, basically trauma porn—in the New Yorker’s profile of her). And I came away thinking I’d rather academic presses and their authors did their work on the margins, and quietly—looking at conversations askance, and not driving them, writing for those who have the eyes to read. With the theory inspiring practical effects, inspiring those who read it to take action in the world, rather than feeding back into the economy formed by profiles like these as they’re written, read, and inspire more profiles or more Discourse.

I get that theorists’ work can be powerful. And I understand the impulse to honor those, like editors, who help shape theorists’ work into what it is. But we don’t need any of them to be made into cult figures.

Oddly, the cultification of theorists particularly on the left—the investments people seem to demonstrate in them as people, over and above their work—has made me appreciative of controversies like the Avital Ronell and John Comaroff cases. Insofar as they help people recognize theory is what matters moreso than theorists, who will often fall short of the commitments they call for—being no less susceptible to systems, like the academy, that incentivize group allegiance and political maneuvering for being able to eloquently critique those systems and perhaps provide alternatives.

On that level, I guess it’s good we have this piece about the institutionalization of once-marginalized disciplines, to guide us to consider the effects and hazards of that institutionalization. I’ve also seen some good responses online asking whether Wilson’s claim that the authors Wissoker and Duke UP champion now “hold the keys” of the academy is actually true. And if it is true, well, what good does it do to control a dying academy that theory can perhaps only describe, not resuscitate…?

*

In both Thomas Meaney’s review of Jean-Yves Frétigné's recent biography of Antonio Gramsci (To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci) and Sophie Pinkham’s review of London School of Economics professor Lea Ypi’s memoir Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, which chronicles her experience living through Albania’s transition into liberal capitalism in the 90s, there’s a focus on a) historicizing the “end of history” period, now that we’ve gotten far enough out of it to be able to look back on it, and b) working toward the practice of a clear-eyed socialism that’s free from both cynicism about the future and blindness to the difficulties attendant upon any implementation of socialism.

As Meaney puts it, “If Gramsci has aged better than many of his peers, it is in part because he became a thinker for a defeated, rather than a triumphalist, left. With his own cause in ruins, Gramsci became ever more interested in the ways of the enemy.” That interest is necessary because what the left fights is atavistic. The attractions of conservatism and fascism are primal, though the convictions of the left can also be deeply felt. And so there will always be a seed of reaction in any leftist political formulation, one we’ll have to know how to combat.

insurgency is the only other possibility

Poetry is an ongoing puzzle for me, a sometimes too-content-focused reader whose faculties have been a little dulled by years of scrolling through text simply to glean information, despite my best efforts to preserve them. And so when I was recently gifted a copy of Hung Q. Tu’s 2021 collection The New Boma, I set about figuring out what it all meant.

Of course, it’s a mistake to read a work of literature, especially poetry, as though it's fruit to simply suck the juice out of.

Still, there are some things I can say. I was struck first by the preface, in which Tu defines the term “boma.” First, as a corral to protect livestock from predation. Then, a site from which colonial governments would administrate their colonies. Finally, and most simply, it’s a village: “a domesticated space, outside of which is wilderness.” Between these definitions, there’s an arc: what begins as a prelapsarian, precolonial world becomes a postlapsarian, colonial world and then becomes simply the world.

These definitions also indicate that the energies of the border that is drawn around the boma can be directed inward (to protect what’s in it) or outward (to administrate and control what’s without). This yields questions that recur throughout the collection: what’s the nature of a border or an enclosure? And how are we to interact with the borders that are set for us? In the poem “Warpath,” Tu’s speaker mentions the way “containment and breakout regularly trade / places on an age-old board game” (and “thus, are we yoked on a tense reactionary / path, where any prescribed spark could end / in a breakout with uncontainable results…”). He also mentions that the Great Wall was built to keep peasants in check no less than to keep foreigners out; and in the monarchic age, passports weren’t intended to help you enter foreign territories but to help you leave yours.

The lines about the board game echo an image in the opening poem, “Automation,” which depicts the speaker’s realization that he’s witnessing the birth of AI and robotics and their consequences for the human species. “Mr. Universe and a godlike intelligence,” he writes, “place / black and white pebbles on a Cartesian grid / until pieces stand out to reveal the endgame / but also a new birth…” There’s another arc evident here, from a world before artificial intelligence to the world after; one world dies to reveal another… “Along comes technology,” as Tu writes in a later poem, “Surrogate,” “outgrowing its gods”—us…

The use of the term “Cartesian grid” is also interesting, suggesting as it does the mapping of data, so central to both artificial intelligence and financialization. The market seems another grid you might impose on the world to make it legible and turn it into something you can use. Finance and banking is another clear theme in the collection--no surprise for one written in a neoliberal/techno-feudal time. See poems like “Lagging Indicator” (a term for financial signs, like revenue, that become apparent only after a large shift has taken place, and so serve to confirm long-term trends, not predict them), which ends with the lines “Let’s then suppose / cosmology / is the study of money.”

The poem “The Gun Effect” is one of the most interesting. One of its messages is that there are logics to this world, however random it seems. See for instance these lines from part 6 of the poem: “Nowadays teens say ‘random’ / when they mean all too often.” At the same time, as the lines just previous indicate—“As if tragedies could be avoided / just by knowing your Chekhov”—those underlying logics aren’t often clear enough for us to be able to use them to predict what will happen to us or in the world. And so, “An irresistible irony / follows the retreating ice”: that’s the position of Tu’s speaker, the poet-observer, who's so often commenting ironically in the wake of the change he’s observed.

Literature’s other participants include a woman whose work is

an advocacy for Feminist theory to democratize narrative at a reading she felt obligated to apologize for

—and a man who writes “a short story / of her abuse of power / to illustrate authority personally / at SFO in his excitement to recall / whatever else it was.” Authority, in other words, is exciting for those subject to it. For those who exert it without quite wanting to, it’s ambivalent, even frightening. (There are also those who exert authority with pleasure, like Margaret Thatcher. Those figures, you don’t hear from in the poem; what they contribute to our collective store of language isn't literature at all, just propaganda or command. You just hear the speaker tell you that he knows Thatcher’s words “verbatim”; he's internalized them.)

Amid these models for what literature can do—writing to immortalize the experience of ambivalence and self-defeat, and writing to describe the excitement you might find in power—it “still seems incredible,” Tu’s speaker says, “that one can know the world through poetry / but there it is.”

Still, what we’ve got now is “A wheelchair-accessible / vision of world domination / that jealously guards its sovereignty”—21st-century liberalism, with the simple depictions of experience and the shallow forms of representation we can achieve, which leave underlying structures of power untouched. And on the whole, “People go about their business / untroubled by semiotics.” We’re effectively in the third form of the boma: the wild space gone, the world administered, but in ways we can’t really recognize or identify as administration.

In the blurbs on the book’s back cover, Jeff Derksen describes The New Boma as “a hammer-on-nail critique created both obliquely & precisely,” “claiming a future from a slag heap of contradictions.” I’m not sure I agree with the second part; I'm not sure the poems go quite that far. To my mind, another blurb, by J. Gordon Faylor, has a more accurate characterization: “Pain can make us laugh, but when the tongue’s been lost in the cheek? An elegy’s in order.” Elegy is the more appropriate term for the sense of resignation and simmering anger amid confinement that’s evident in the questions that open the first and last poems in the collection, “Automation” and “The Sublime Transition”—“Are private missions to space / jet-propelled rehearsals for capital flight?” “Did abstract art see the gig economy coming?”—and in the future that “The Sublime Transition” anticipates:

…was Hannah Arendt looking forward to a sharing economy when underutilized depreciating liabilities, idling in people’s garages and driveways, would, one day, become assets? ………………………………………………………………………. …social Darwinists of the sharing economy let it be known clients, alone, should set their own rates and in so doing, set one against the other frustrating the Assembly’s will while celebrating abstract art so a handful of contractees would contract at will with untold number of contractors in advance of the Sublime Transition

It’s by this point a hoary question, but in a world like this, where technology, the gig economy, and the market have turned profound, internalized oppression into a kind of “mutualized freedom,” and political theory, democracy, poetry, and abstract art alike have been captured, what revolution is possible?

There are glimmers of possibility in the book—just glimmers. See the revolutionary potential of the “breakout with uncontainable results,” in “Warpath,” that might break the pattern of oscillation between the forces of containment and breakout, their effective stalemate, once and for all; and the identification, in the poem “Surrogate,” of the tense, precipice position shared by the speaker and the reader alike—“YOU ARE HERE / at the busy intersection of / Insurgentes and Reforma”—which resolves into a refusal to accept reform in “My Inner Mongolia”:

If “the exception proves the rule” means what I think it means then I don’t want to hear another word about ‘reform’”

Insurgentes is the only other choice...

I've been in a very long fallow period, and I'm only just crawling out of it, so all this might be a load of garbage.

But it's kind of nice to know you're not the only one who feels a certain way, namely the way I do about the movement I've been discerning in certain admittedly niche corners of The Culture away from behaviorism and toward psychoanalysis. Indeed, I had a stupid moment reading Sasha Frere-Jones's intro to this recent interview with the editors of the Cured Quail journal in which I was reminded that there's a whole "Freud and Marx combo platter that has become (or become again) popular in the last twenty years." In other words, I'm probably not the only one thinking about the project Cured Quail seems to be undertaking. The journal's "reigning concern" is "psychoanalysis and the pathologies emerging from [our] impoverished culture." To my mind, that makes it a response to a moment in which the world of the word has given way to the world of the image--which in turn has led the image as generated through technologies of reproduction (camera, television, the Internet) and advertising (which uses those technologies) to consume the images that might once have constituted our inner lives. With the result that (per Christopher Crawford, a contributor to the journal's second volume) "our realm of images can no longer manage to dream up any other world." Hence the stagnation or exhaustion in so much of what we see or feel, at least in our lives as lived through most institutions, which so aggressively structure what we think of as real or possible.

The interview starts with Frere-Jones asking about Volume I of Cured Quail, which apparently had a baroque layout meant to frustrate the information extraction that's the typical goal of text design. I respect that sort of commitment to trouble the marriage of form and content. But there is a sort of snobbery in lines like "for a journal premised on the ideas that it is unlikely to be read, we’ve confirmed our own hypotheses" that I wish the editors would avoid. I also wonder whether the "atmosphere of so-called liberal or late-capitalist society with its advance of globalized democracy" ever actually had a more rational society as its end, which seems to be the editors' contention. I'd say the goal of liberal/late-capitalist society was always to be organized, or well-enough managed, not necessarily rational. Nothing that has advertising as central to it as liberal capitalist society could be rational.

But the interview points to some interesting directions for the whole "behaviorism gives way to psychoanalysis" thing I've been thinking about. Modern society yields certain psychological injuries--ones that perhaps only psychoanalysis, or something like it, can repair, or even just describe. To what extent is the kind of narcissistic profile the editors describe responsible for the behaviorist age that's passing and the psychoanalytic age that seems to want to be born...?

It comes down to understanding the particular global political-economic structures that erode the ego... That has resulted in a sort of loss of literacy, married to the way culture no longer cultivates, but merely offers diversion...

Again, this is all probably pretty basic stuff, or maybe it's garbage that doesn't make sense. And I don't mean to overstate my investment in psychoanalytic theory; there's a big part of me that looks at that last paragraph I wrote askance. But bear with me as I crank my brain's poor, stupid engine. Indolence has left it cold.