Walter Benjamin, 1928. Courtesy of the Walter Benjamin Archive at Akademie der Künste, via Wikimedia Commons.

All books should not be read in the same way. Novels, for instance, are there to be devoured. Reading them is a voluptuous act of absorption, not an act of empathy. The reader does not imagine himself in the hero’s place, but assimilates what befalls him. The vivid report of these experiences is the appetizing trimmings in which a nourishing dish comes to the table.

There is, to be sure, a raw diet of experience—just as there is a raw diet for the stomach—to wit: one’s own experiences. But the art of the novel, like the culinary arts, begins beyond the raw ingredients. Read More

Photo © Giovanni Giovannetti/Effigie

On the morning of January 12, 2010, Susan Barnett and Greg Delisle said goodbye to their three dogs, closed the door of their Cape Cod–style farmhouse in rural upstate New York, and got in their car to go to jobs twenty-five miles away in Ithaca. Susan was a copy editor at Cornell University Press, Greg was a website manager for an academic department. A big snowstorm was scheduled to arrive that afternoon and they anticipated their return might be difficult. What they didn’t know was that in the ceiling of their kitchen, faulty wiring was sparking against the rafters.

At two o’clock, a neighbor called them to say their house was on fire. Susan rushed home through the snowstorm. She was stopped by the police down the road from her house, and from that spot she could see blazing curtains fluttering out of the second-floor window. Fire crews from three towns battled the blaze late into the night.

The result, in insurance parlance, was a burnout. The next day, Greg buried the dogs, who had been trapped in the living room. He and Susan had made a mental list of items that he should try to find. A computer hard drive. Passports. Jewelry. And Dave’s letters—Susan wanted Greg to look for those, too.

Did it seem like an odd priority, I asked Greg, to want to save these letters?

“It’s not an odd priority, if you know Susan,” Greg replied.

I did know Susan. We were undergraduates together at Williams College in the late eighties. Susan was pale, blond, with chipmunk cheeks, and she’d dress in fur muffs one day, straight from Doctor Zhivago, and the next day in pigtails and a gingham dress, à la Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the next in a Boy George black wide-brimmed hat and thick eyeshadow. At the time, she seemed to be trying too hard, but now she seems like one of those low-key counterculture heroines who knew everyone, had been everywhere, influenced everything. She treated us as if we were Andy Warhol’s Factory, documenting the silly mayhem of our class with a camera, even though we made a sad version of a counterculture.

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Still from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

In Los Angeles, 1968, Dennis Wilson was the beachiest of the Beach Boys, the only Boy who actually surfed. He was the cool guy with the cool car, cool shades, cool hair. When he admired his disheveled reflection in his California-shaped swimming pool, his steely blue eyes must’ve told him: Dennis, you deserve it all. True, his band’s best years were behind him. And true, his divorce tarnished his reputation; his ex had told the court how he used to beat her. But as sure as his Ferrari purred—as sure as that gold-record sun went swanning into the Pacific every evening—Wilson was going to enjoy himself. With his pals Terry Melcher (Doris Day’s son, a cool guy) and Gregg Jakobson (a total nobody, but still a cool guy), he formed a trio called the Golden Penetrators, who fancied themselves “roving cocksmen,” as his ex put it. They vowed to seduce as many women as possible.

Likely this oath was at the front of Wilson’s mind when he picked up some hitchhiking hippie girls, escorting them to his mansion for “milk and cookies.” Soon those teens, along with more teens and their leader, Charles Manson, were Wilson’s full-time guests. Having reached peak cool guy, he bragged to the press: “I LIVE WITH 17 GIRLS.” (Now this is just called living in Bushwick.) Ushering Manson, whom he called the “Wizard,” into Hollywood, Wilson and his fellow Penetrators set the stage for some of the most infamous murders in American history.

Though the Golden Penetrators, in their caricatured machismo, seem ready-made for a Quentin Tarantino film, they’re strikingly absent from his latest, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. In their place is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), the cool guy with the cool et cetera, a washed-up stunt double who functions as a Wilson stand-in. Booth, too, is a generation behind the times. He is a relic of Westerns, where Wilson was a relic of surf rock. And Booth, too, is clinging to his glory days with rakish ease, trailed by rumors of the violence that ended his marriage. But when, like Wilson, he picks up a Manson girl, Booth does something astoundingly un-Wilson: he declines her advances. Eventually, his sobering encounter with the Manson Family allows him to prevent, with vintage cool-guy, ass-whooping skills, some of the most infamous murders in American history.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is nominally a fairy tale (nominally in two senses of the word), which is why it entertains these counterfactual revisions. In a fairy tale, Cliff Booth can say no to the sex that Dennis Wilson could not wait to say yes to. Cliff Booth can dispatch, with a bit of LSD-induced chutzpah, the same killers who stabbed and shot five people, including Sharon Tate, on Cielo Drive. Critics have found these deviations appealing or appalling; to me they felt inchoate, as if Tarantino had tinkered with the past only long enough to tire of it. Even if he wanted a storybook finale with a flamethrower, he didn’t need to divest himself so completely of the era’s history. Much of the reality would have served his revisionist ends.

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Karolina Pavlova. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the nineteenth century, when its literature equaled that written in any place at any time in history, Russia had no “great” woman writer—no Sappho, no Ono, no Komachi or Murasaki Shikibu, no Madame de Staël or George Sand, no Jane Austen or George Eliot—or so we might say when surveying the best-known works of the age. But we now know this truth to be less than true.

Karolina Pavlova, born Karolina Karlovna Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807, died in Dresden in 1893 after having lived outside Russia for four decades. She had abandoned her native country not because of czarist oppression but because of hostile criticism of her poetry and her personal life. She died without friends, without family, without money, without renown (not a single Russian newspaper gave her an obituary) but with an unyielding dedication to what she called her “holy craft,” which had produced a body of fine literary, largely poetic, works.

In 1848, when she had completed her only novel, A Double Life, Pavlova was not only devoted to art but also enjoyed other, more transient pleasures like love, friendship, and respect, which she was to lose later on. To judge from the irony that pervades her otherwise romantic description in this book about a young girl who has everything, Karolina Pavlova had come to expect little from the world beyond what her own talents and personality could bring to it. The theme of conflict between poet and society had informed the works of the great lyric poets who were her predecessors, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Read More

Here is my morning routine: when I get out of bed, my feet must touch the edge of the rug, one at a time, while I softly vocalize two magic words that are best described as puffing and plosive sounds. If my feet don’t touch correctly, or if I don’t say the words right, I get back in bed and try again. Once I have properly performed this initial procedure, I again tap my left foot on the carpet while vocalizing the first magic word, and then—while holding my breath and without moving my mouth or tongue one millimeter during the duration—I silently incant a phrase that is far too nonsensical and embarrassing to share publicly, then tap my right foot while vocalizing the second magic word.

This can take anywhere from ten seconds, if I’m lucky, to two or three minutes. Once executed to my satisfaction, I am able to go downstairs, unplug my phone and perform roughly the same procedure on it, with my thumbs instead of my feet, and then I am allowed to use my phone. Likewise, the refrigerator door when I’m making coffee. Likewise, the edges of my laptop when I power it on. With these routines completed, I can start my day, open a Word document, and begin writing.

I realize this sounds bad, but it’s a compromise I’ve reached after decades of managing my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve gone cold turkey before, renouncing all habits and tics, but they eventually creep back in. A therapist once described OCD behaviors as a “blob,” which felt apt; whatever part of it you press down on, another part bulges back up. These little routines are, in a sense, a deal I make with myself, so I don’t have to perform random routines all day long. Not doing them is not an option. If I don’t do them, the world will end.

I can’t remember exactly when it began. As is true of so many disorders, medical literature generally links OCD with the onset of adolescence, and this tracks with my earliest OCD memories: missing the bus to middle school because I had to touch mailboxes and the curb in a certain sequence; playing songs on my cassette deck over and over in order to pause on an exact word or chord; staying up in my teenage basement lair, flicking the lights on and off in patterns that, if my parents had noticed, would have looked like some Morse code call for help, which in a way, it was.

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Photo: Marion Ettlinger.

Sigrid Nunez, like Virginia Woolf, is a writer known for her intellectual rigor and her ability to capture, insightfully and unsentimentally, the myriad complexities of human life in beautifully written prose. In the ambition and variety of their work, they have much in common. Something else that they share: neither Sigrid Nunez nor Virginia Woolf is thought of as a warm-and-fuzzy writer, and yet both, quite literarily, are.

And I mean warm and fuzzy in every sense of the phrase. For while both Nunez’s marmoset Mitz (from her 1998 novel Mitz) and Woolf’s spaniel Flush (the hero of Flush: A Biography, published by Woolf in 1933) are warm-blooded and furry creatures (although they suffer the indignities of lice and fleas), they are also engaging characters based upon actual animals. Many famous nonhuman literary characters are inventions: Chekhov’s lapdog, E. B. White’s mouse and pig and spider and swan, Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, John Steinbeck’s Red Pony, and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Elsa, the lion who was born free, did exist, as did Tulip, J. R. Ackerley’s beloved Alsatian bitch. Nevertheless, real or imagined, few animals have literary pedigrees as noble as Flush and Mitz. Read More