Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

Like her good friend the writer Lucia Berlin, Bobbie Louise Hawkins was an excellent observer of others. Like Lucia, too, she was wise and damn funny. Her stories are vitamin-packed, full of her own specific and inimitable possibilities of voice. Or maybe we should say voices, or voicings, because the singular doesn’t quite do it justice. Her voice could take on multiple angles and colors, depending on the setting and time of day, the interlocutor, or, more accurately, the listener, and the number. It wasn’t unusual to hear her with a Texas drawl in the morning in her garden (this voice said “honey” a fair amount, and unfurled like a smoked tumbleweed just rolling out of the fire), a soft New Mexican clipping of word endings in the afternoon, and a British tilt at a party in the evening. Her voice could even take on several aspects at once, especially when she was giving a reading. Voicing was important enough to Bobbie that she offered classes on how to talk (and not talk) into a mic. Don’t pop those p’s! Make sure you cut the mic! No heavy breathing between words!

And while the novella One Small Saga is not as voicey as some of her other work, her marvelous capacity to listen and deftly mimic is acutely on display. She speedily gets her world and her characters “in,” as E. M. Forster, a writer whose prose she admired, put it. Consider one quick sentence early on, the short passage that takes place in Mr. Collins’s sitting room. Bobbie builds this Englishman’s whole character out of just a handful of syllables. The narrator has just noticed the wall hangings, “patterned blue and white cotton to match the drawn drapes … ‘Nigerian,’ Mr. Collins told me, seeing me looking, ‘handwoven native.’ ” In three tight-lipped words we get the tone of the whole of the British empire circa 1950, from the mouth of one of its servants.

Still, in this autobiographical work (Bobbie claimed not to have done any other kind), what’s mainly going on is an attempt at taking the measure of the life the narrator wants to live. She starts that process by recounting a mistake that isn’t a mistake at all. She does something stupid (marries Axel) to get to the next thing (the story of her life). How else would a ferociously observant, intelligent, original young woman born into poverty in the thirties get out of the fix she is in? She has plans, inchoate as they are, and takes the ship that will get her started, pointed firmly in the direction of elsewhere. That the ship she travels on has a “green marble swimming pool” hidden in its depths, which she soon finds herself plunging into daily, seems emblematic. Like Bobbie, the narrator of One Small Saga has an unerring ability to sniff out the unlooked-for and the exceptional. Read More

One quiet spring morning, as a plague engulfs America, I awake, brew coffee, and shuffle to my computer. Outside my windows, a cordillera of snow-thatched roofs. I feel rooted, glooming in grief and rage. The need to stay in place. In the place of our wreckage. In other homes, I imagine children in nightshirts, and daddy flipping pancakes, and some things still good. Meanwhile, the world continues to break in the ways that it has always been broken.

On my computer, a host of small heartbreaks. Records, evidence, stories of child death in foster care. November 2017, I sat in on the murder trial of the stepfather of a young boy, Gabriel Fernandez. Gabriel Fernandez was tortured and beaten to death. We, the journalists, and the family members and the witnesses tuned in daily. Sitting in that small courtroom, I felt strongly that this was about more than one murder.

It was about the many failures of the Department of Children and Family Services, and there were many, but also about the slow, cold violence that permeates these kinds of cases. I had become obsessively curious—not about just how one family could do this, but how a nation with wealth, how any system, could leave so many children tortured and dead. Over the last five years, I’ve reviewed all the case files of murdered children with a pending Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigation. I’d found shelter here, in these redacted files. The dark boxes.

What I know about these children has been culled from police reports, and hospital records, and social worker investigations. The documents all come to me redacted. I spend half my days searching for names, matching names to black boxes. The names of our dead children: they give me pause, they give me agency, an agency I’m not ever certain I deserve. I create a website. I build an archive. Read More

© VIAVAL / Adobe Stock.

If you’ve ever been to Orlando, friend, you’ve been to International Drive. It is the 14.5-mile strip of hotels, restaurants, hotels, time-shares, souvenir shops, lesser theme parks, laser tag emporiums, curio museums, outlet stores, and hotels that’s “as well-known in Boston, England, as it is in Boston, Mass.,” as the line goes. And this is an important point to make. For so very many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself. “No matter where you travel in the world, you run into a startling number of people for whom Orlando is America,” John Jeremiah Sullivan has written. “If you could draw one of those New Yorker cartoon maps in your head, of the way the world sees North America, the turrets of the Magic Kingdom would be a full order of scale bigger than anything else.”

International Drive is not Orlando’s main thoroughfare—that’d be Interstate 4, which runs parallel to I-Drive—but as International Drive comprises five hundred plus businesses selling everything from digital cameras to golf clubs, weeklong stays to Argentinian steaks, it is far and away the most vital artery when it comes to Orlando’s economic health. This despite the fact that until very recently, I-Drive was nothing but sand, pines, and palmettos. What happened was an attorney turned developer named Finley Hamilton, who went looking for ways to profit from Walt Disney’s 1965 announcement that he would build a huge new theme park southwest of downtown. On April Fools’ Day 1968, Hamilton paid $90,000 for ten acres of scrubland. This patch of nothing was accessible only by dirt road—but Hamilton figured that Disney-bound tourists would spot his new Hilton Inn from the interstate, take the nearest exit, and drive north on the paved road he would build.

He bought and flipped more acreage along his road in the months preceding Disney World’s opening. “I came up with International Drive,” he later recalled, “because it sounded big and important.” Within a few years, I-Drive included a dozen hotels, two dozen restaurants, and four gas stations, most of which were clustered at the road’s two major intersections. Then the nation’s first water park, Wet ’n Wild, opened in 1977. Just like that, I-Drive went from a place to sleep and eat to a destination in its own right. Arriving not long after were your Ripley’s Believe It or Not!s, your Skull Kingdoms, and the like.

In short, International Drive has developed into a tacky gauntlet whereby families are stripped of armloads of cash on their way to and from Disney parks. It, like Greater Orlando, is premised upon one thing: Uncle Walt’s sloppy seconds. Read More

Branwell Brontë, The Brontë Sisters (Anne Brontë; Emily Brontë; Charlotte Brontë), ca. 1834, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 29 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner.

—Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

Twenty years ago, the writer Douglas A. Martin was a student in my fiction workshop at the New School. He was in his early twenties then, an extravagantly gifted young man who sometimes wore a white feather boa to class, his face regularly shining with tiny bits of pink glitter. His stories about young gay men struggling for a place in this world, erotically and artistically, were shot through with a raw and supple longing.

Martin often came to my office hours, where we’d talk about books and films. I learned about his childhood in Georgia and his alcoholic father, a man he was estranged from and hadn’t seen since he was little. In one of these discussions we talked about the Brontës. I was doing research for a talk on Wuthering Heights. I’d been surprised, as Martin was, to hear the Brontës had a brother. Branwell was a ginger, with “a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead … to help his height.” He fancied flowing white shirts and was both freckled and bespeckled. “Small but well formed,” he was unable to control his emotions and had spells of what was called then hysteria. His friend, the sculptor Joseph Leyland, said Branwell’s conversation, his “beautiful and flowery language,” he “never saw equaled.”

Like his sisters, Branwell wrote poetry and he sent poems along with long, pleading, naive letters to the literary men of the day—Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Coleridge—asking for feedback, for affirmation, even for love. In one letter to Wordsworth, which the great man kept but did not answer, Branwell wrote: “I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgment upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this the nineteenth year of my life I have lived among wild and secluded hills where I could neither know what I was or what I could do—I read for the same reason I ate or drank—because it was a real craving of Nature.”

Martin was drawn to Branwell’s feminine qualities. “The idea that being a poet,” Martin tells me, “one could be fem.” He did some research of his own and decided to write Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother. The Brontë siblings’ intense circle fascinated him—the way they bled into one another. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine is Heathcliff, and Branwell, it seems, was his sisters, leaning into their gender and leading their literary aspirations. He was the first to publish poems in the local newspapers, first to cut the path toward a life of letters. The Brontë boy was grandiose, emotionally unstable, and eventually a drug addict, but his model of creative engagement opened up a dream space that Emily, Charlotte, and Anne walked into without him, an imaginary room his sisters eventually made their own. Read More

Philip Roth. Photo courtesy of Philip Roth.

April 24, 2018: “Brace yourself, Ben,” Philip calls to say. “Our beloved Meatball has been downgraded by the Health Department from A to B. This will ruin them! People see that sickly green B in the window and stay away.” I report having seen something still more shocking at the Pan-Asian hellhole two blocks up. “I know, I know!” says Philip. “They’re sporting a ptomainish, orange-colored C. A rat in a tuxedo greets you at the door.”

He’s on to the next thing and hangs up without goodbye. It is gratifying to hear him so exuberant. But five days later he phones to say he is “poorly”—one of his old-fashioned turns of phrase. I say I’ll stay with him that night at his apartment. Around two in the morning I hear him cry out from his room. He’s in trouble. I dial 911. Paramedics arrive with exemplary speed but have trouble defibrillating Philip. I can tell by the way they are talking that he could die. After an infinitely long minute or two his heartbeat reverts. We transport him first to Lenox Hill Hospital, then later that day to NewYork–Presbyterian, which he will never leave. Read More

Katsushika Hokusai, Big Eels, ca. 1840, woodblock print, 5 1/4″ x 7 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In one of the twentieth century’s most memorable scenes from literature, a man is standing on a beach, pulling on a long rope that stretches out to sea. The rope is covered in thick seaweed. He yanks and tugs, and out of the foaming waves comes a horse’s head. It’s black and shiny and lies there at the water’s edge, its dead eyes staring while greenish eels slither from every orifice. The eels crawl out, shiny and entrails-like, more than two dozen of them; when the man has shoved them all into a potato sack, he pries open the horse’s grinning mouth, sticks his hands into its throat, and pulls out two more eels, as thick as his own arms.

This macabre fishing method is described in Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, The Tin Drum. Rarely has the eel been more detestable.

The eel does not appear frequently in literature or art, but when it does, it’s often an unsettling, slightly revolting creature. It’s slimy and slithering, oily and slippery, a scavenger of the dark that salaciously crawls out of cadavers with gaping mouth and beady black eyes.

Sometimes, however, it’s more than that. In The Tin Drum, the eel actually plays a rather important role. It both foreshadows and triggers tragedy. Read More