June 28, 2018 Arts & Culture How to Live in a Dystopian Fiction By Adam O’Fallon Price Albert Robida, Le vingtième siècle, ca. 1880. A curious feature of most dystopian fiction is that it begins in medias res. It’s a stylistic convention of the genre, and it applies to most dystopian lit that comes to mind, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Brave New World to Never Let Me Go. As pure narrative strategy, it makes sense. After all, novels in general must hook a reader quickly, and there are few things hookier than unfolding disaster. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, for example, begins with twenty utterly gripping pages of the first hours of a superplague wiping out Toronto (and the world). There is something compelling about this type of introduction—it carves narrative down to a brutal logic in which the only two options are survival and death. The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which will wrap up its second season in July, is the most recent popular example of this phenomenon. The viewer is dropped, from the first episode, into the fresh hell of Gilead, alongside Elisabeth’s Moss’s Offred. We are given the broad strokes of how Gilead came to power (ecological disaster, plummeting birth rates, a coup in Congress) but only the occasional flashback to normal life before the coup, when the show’s world much resembled ours. The first season was released in April 2017, and Offred’s disoriented struggle felt topical, consonant with an American body politic waking up to the reality of the Trump era. My wife and I watched it, as I know so many people did, with rapt, grim fascination. It showed our worst fears about the new government dramatized. As time—and the show—has gone on, however, I find myself increasingly drawn to the scanty scenes of America before Gilead, the tender, doomed moments of Offred’s previous life. The glimpses of that hazy, vanishing world are the most painful and perhaps the most resonant with our own unfolding dystopia. This is what all dystopias—fictional and real—specialize in: erasure of what came before. Read More
June 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Spooning By Lawrence Weschler I was paying a visit to the studio of Jessica Anne Schwartz, a promising young San Francisco artist recently transplanted to New York, and over in the corner, on the floor, off to the side—she hadn’t particularly been intending to show them to me—she had ranged a series of small painted studies on board from several months back. She’d pulled them out earlier for the first time since she’d made them, across the last several months of 2017, and was trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with them. All images of a single spoon, from a wide range of vantages—“I’d first found the spoon abandoned out in a garbage pile on the street,” she explained—and in a tumbling array of alignments. She and I gazed upon the assembled panels for a while, she leaning over, assaying a few other arrangements, sighing. “Single Serving” was the name she’d assigned the entire set. Back then, she explained, she’d only just recently broken off from a long-term relationship, really only the second serious relationship in her life. Fresh out of high school, she’d married. The marriage had lasted eighteen years, and then she’d almost immediately taken up with this second guy, and that had lasted another eight. This new period, in the middle of 2017, had really been the first time in her life she’d found herself living alone. She’d gone into fierce mourning, this business of being all alone being all she could think about—that and, of course, how she was no longer with the boyfriend. Read More
June 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Girl, Interrupted, Twenty-Five Years Later By Tara Wanda Merrigan Susanna Kaysen. Photo by Michael Lionstar. When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like “an anthropologist in the loony bin.” She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands—“a standard anthropological thing, a study of a village, of who married and who didn’t and what were the feuds,” Kaysen told me. Her husband’s study made her realize that “McLean was sort of like a village but somewhat larger. Our ward was a tiny little village with our doctors and nurses and aides.” Kaysen hired a lawyer and got ahold of her medical records and began writing. She pared down details about herself and her struggle with mental illness so that the resulting memoir, Girl, Interrupted, reads today like a comedic travelogue of an extended stay at a young women’s ward. Lines like this one, about restrictions on sharp flatware, are typical: “We ate with plastic. It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital.” And yet the readers of twenty-five years ago—Girl, Interrupted was published in June 1993—were not quite ready to recognize the book’s detached perspective. Instead, Kaysen said, many took Girl, Interrupted as some sort of stigma-defying big-t Truth about life with mental illness. During the book tour, readers would line up to tell Kaysen how her book had spoken to them. The author recalls hearing things like “nobody else has ever said these things” and “I feel like I’m not alone.” Or: “You wrote this book for me.” “I would say to myself, I didn’t. I don’t know you. I wasn’t try to reach you,” Kaysen said. “What had spurred me to write was rage and a desire to dissect this world. And that didn’t seem to register for a lot of these people.” Read More
June 26, 2018 Arts & Culture A Life of Reading Is Never Lonely By Edmund White Photo by Nadja Spiegelman. Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice murmuring in your ear. No wonder Victorian parents used to read out loud to the whole family (a chapter of Dickens a night by the precious light of the single candle); there’s nothing lonely about laughing or crying together—or shrinking back in horror. Even if solitary, the reader’s inner dialogue with the writer—questioning, concurring, wondering, objecting, pitying—fills the empty room under the lamplight with silent discourse and the expression of emotion. Who are the most companionable novelists? Marcel Proust and George Eliot; certainly they’re the most intelligent, able to see the widest implications of the simplest act, to play a straightforward theme on the mighty organs of their minds: soft/loud, quick/slow, complex/chaste, reedy/orchestral. But we also cherish Leo Tolstoy’s uncanny empathy for diverse people and even animals, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyricism, Colette’s worldly wisdom, James Merrill’s wit, Walt Whitman’s biblical if agnostic inclusiveness, Annie Dillard’s sublime nature descriptions. When I was a youngster, I loved novels about the lost Dauphin or the Scarlet Pimpernel or the three musketeers—adventure books enacted in the clear, shadowless light of good and evil. Read More
June 26, 2018 Arts & Culture How to Write a Feminist “Dead Girl” Story By Emma Copley Eisenberg John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1952. This past Sunday, the governor of Virginia quietly signed into law Senate Bill 565, which adds misdemeanor assault and battery as well as criminal trespass to the list of offenses for which, if convicted, the perpetrator must give a sample of their blood or saliva to be retained in a statewide DNA database until the end of time. In common parlance, this bill is known for Hannah Graham, the white University of Virginia sophomore whose body was recovered in a creek bed outside Charlottesville. The preceding nonstop thirty-six-day search was the most expensive Virginia search effort to date. Hannah Graham’s parents were the chief advocates for SB 565. Her mother pleaded to the Justice Committee, “Please don’t let what happened to my beautiful daughter, Hannah, happen to another young woman in Virginia.” While SB 565 may indeed have prevented Graham’s death (her killer turned out to have a long history of violence against women and a prior conviction for criminal trespass), critics worry about its potential to sow more injustice. In a statement, the Virginia ACLU wrote, “It actually is a creeping assault on Virginians’ privacy and due-process rights that could lead to more bias in the state’s criminal-justice system—and even false convictions.” Read More
June 20, 2018 Arts & Culture What Is Andre Dubus Doing, Anyway? By Ann Beattie Photo by Marion Ettlinger. Andre Dubus and I were once on book tour together. Because he was wheelchair-bound by this time, we were transported by hired car. Outside Boston, actually not so close to Boston, the car broke down. Do I remember correctly that this happened on a holiday weekend, or am I still trying to make sense of it? We sat in the back seat. Andre’s friend Jack was in the seat next to the driver. There were numerous phone calls, many moments when we had, or lost, hope. We reached our publisher’s voicemail. Nobody responded—well, there was talk, but no one did anything, as time passed and time passed. Finally, we tried to get a car by calling 1-800-RENTACAR, but that didn’t work either. A cop car pulled into the breakdown lane, assessed the situation, and raced off, lights blinking. That was the end of that. Hours into this, my husband and his best friend fetched me. They insisted: I must go because they were all going to get down the hill somehow and pee. I’d be seeing him soon, he said. One of the group had finally managed to summon help: a tow truck, another rental car, I don’t remember. I left amid cries of “Good sport!” and “See you next week!” feeling that I should stay. (Yes, I should have.) Read More