April 21, 2023 The Review’s Review Divorcée Fiction: On Ursula Parrott By Alissa Bennett Russell Patterson, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’d never heard of Ursula Parrott when McNally Editions introduced me to Ex-Wife, the author’s 1929 novel about a young woman who suddenly finds herself suspended in the caliginous space between matrimony and divorce. The first thing I wondered was where it had been all my life. Ex-Wife rattles with ghosts and loss and lonely New York apartments, with men who change their minds and change them again, with people and places that assert their permanence by the very fact that they’re gone and they’re never coming back. Originally published anonymously, Ex-Wife stirred immediate controversy for Parrott’s frank depiction of her heroine, Patricia, a woman whose allure does not spare her from desertion after an open marriage proves to be an asymmetrical failure. Embarking on a marathon of alcoholic oblivion and a series of mostly joyless dips into the waters of sexual liberation, Patricia spends the book ricocheting between her fear of an abstract future and her fixation on a past that has been polished, gleaming from memory’s sleight of hand. It’s been nearly a century since Ex-Wife had its flash of fame (the book sold more than one hundred thousand copies in its first year), and as progress has stripped divorce of its moral opprobrium, it has also swelled the ranks of us ex-wives. Folded in with Patricia’s descriptions of one-night stands and prohibition-busting binges are the kind of hollow distractions relatable to any of us who have ever wanted to forget: she buys clothes she can’t afford; she gets facials and has her hair done; she listens to songs on repeat while wearily wondering why heartache always seems to bookend love. My copy is riddled with exclamation marks and anecdotes that chart my own parallel romantic catastrophes, its paragraphs vandalized with highlighted passages and bracketed phrases. There is a sentence on the book’s first page that I outlined in black ink: “He grew tired of me;” it reads, “hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them.” The box that I have drawn around these words is a frame, I suppose; the kind that you find around a mirror. Read More
April 20, 2023 First Person The Birder By Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon Bird lore, 1906. National Committee of Audobon Societies of America. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I knew a birder once. I liked him—it’s pointless to deny it and in any case I don’t think I can write about him without it being abundantly clear—though we redirected early enough that friendship seemed possible. For him it always was a friendship, anyway. Still, the birding excursion was definitely a date. Perhaps he was curious about whether he’d discover feelings for me among the pines—whether what psychologists call the misattribution of desire might be prompted by seeing a rare bird in my presence. We only saw regular birds, though: grackles, goldfinches, a great blue heron. He was a birder but he was mostly a musician. I would have found it satisfying to discover that these were two sides of the same coin for him: it’s nice, after all, when people cohere, when you can discern a uniform purpose or a set of underlying values across their various pursuits. But the truth, really, is that people are more than one thing, and for most of his life, birds were an inconsequential if benign presence. It wasn’t until the 2020 lockdown that he discovered how far he was willing to go for their sake: a tundra swan in Pittsfield, a Pacific golden plover in Newburyport. Read More
April 19, 2023 Dispatch Going Roth Mode By Sean Thor Conroe Newark Public Library, Main Branch. Photo by Jim Henderson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m not even necessarily the biggest Roth guy. When I got asked to cover “Philip Roth Unbound,” a festival to celebrate and “agitate” his legacy, I hadn’t read but a handful of his books. But, looking over the press release, I was drawn to how intense the schedule was set up to be: three full days of panels, live readings, and comedy shows, all in his hometown of Newark. Roth compared novel-writing to the tedium of baseball, and there was something athletic about how these events were stacked up, one after another, jam-packed with renowned writers and themes encompassing the breadth of Roth’s vision. I’d view this like a marathon, one that I’d need to read the rest of his books to prepare for. I’d read maybe six. He wrote thirty-one. We were a month out. Plenty of time, I decided. Read More
April 18, 2023 Poetry Faring By Saskia Hamilton Illustration by Na Kim. We at the Review are mourning the loss of our friend and advisory editor, the poet and scholar Saskia Hamilton. We recently published her poem “Faring,” part of her collection All Souls, which will be published by Graywolf Press in October; we want to share it again now, along with an introduction by Claudia Rankine. Hamilton will be dearly missed. (June 7, 2023) To read Saskia Hamilton’s “Faring,” the opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen. The morning ticks along as light enters to illuminate both the surrounding structure, window ledge, doves—and the sounds that seep in, wind, construction. To track the light, as the season moves into longer days, is to follow the shadows of others moving here and there behind curtains across the way. The cyclical nature of dawn’s return creates illusions of certainty for future days, though the speaker in “Faring” lives within an illness that names death its cure. This does not prevent love’s negotiation with time, as a child withholds declarations of love in fear of time’s retaliatory embrace. For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it’s the grace we hold. “Faring” builds its rooms against the too-muchness of life, life’s actual, red-hot intensities, for fear that even the caring inquiry “How are you faring?” will no longer be a relevant question, or that the tracking of the gray morning sunrise will be the only relevant answer. Like the eighteenth-century abolitionist poet William Cowper, who is called forward in “Faring” by his poem—the book open, perhaps, on the speaker’s bedside table, like table talk—Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life’s weightiness, wariness, worthiness. Three centuries after Cowper, it’s not the countryside but the cityscape that allows Hamilton access to her own inner landscape. The brilliance of “Faring,” as well as its task, resides in its narrative charting of daily moments lived as “a soothing down.” —Claudia Rankine Read More
April 17, 2023 Home Improvements My Curtains, My Radiator By Mitchell Johnson Photograph by Mitchell Johnson. I moved to Chicago late last summer and spent my first evening alone scrubbing and rescrubbing an old dresser I had found in the basement of my new apartment. It was plastered in dust and cobwebs, and dotted with some small dried-out things that were probably once eggs. Underneath, it was beautiful—maybe a hundred years old, a deep cherry color with intricate metal handles. I cleaned it and stapled fabric to the bottoms of the drawers, which still catch sometimes and deposit small slivers of wood on my T-shirts. Still, it works well enough. I loved the apartment when I moved in. It has big windows and a back sunroom nestled in tree branches. Lake Michigan is just down the block. In the first couple weeks I lived here I would call my friends in other cities and tell them about my lake house, as I called it. It was a warm September, and I spent my days drifting back and forth down the street in my swimsuit. A neighbor told me that some people call Chicago in the summer Chiami. Read More
April 14, 2023 The Review’s Review Daniel Mason, Marta Figlerowicz, and Malachi Black Recommend By The Paris Review From Zdeněk Miler’s “Krtek a maminka.” Guild loyalty says I should probably choose a work of fiction for my favorite recent book, but I’m not sure that anyone, with the exception of Octavia Butler, could serve up as glorious a museum of the unimaginable as Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney do in Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. Have you ever seen a spongilla fly cocoon (silk lozenge haloed in a lacy mesh of bridal finery)? How about neatly-ranged eggs laid by a katydid along a blade of grass? I had thought myself well-versed in the range of parasitic terrors until I saw the work of a mummy wasp upon a sphinx moth caterpillar. And leaf miners! When my mortal hour is up, I will look back and see my life divided into the half when I hadn’t known labyrinths like the ones they make existed, and the one after I came to understand that they are everywhere. I came to this book when no amount of googling could solve the mystery of who had made the particularly stylized set of tunnels I kept finding on downed poplar in the woods, carved in a pattern I can best describe as a cross between fine hatchet marks, the grooves on a music-box cylinder, morse code, alien messages, and the exuberant scribblings of a child who has discovered the letter i but has only a single sheet of paper. “Dotted insect lines on poplar logs,” “wood beetle straight lines dots poplar,” “straight lines wood downed tree”—try them, they will lead you nowhere. Except they did lead me to Eiseman and Charney’s book. Oh, the pleasure of realizing that something bound can deliver what the internet cannot! Tracks & Sign had a gallery of insect carpentry to choose from. While they didn’t highlight the poplar chiseler I was looking for (I would later learn it was a shipworm—one of those wonderful instances when natural history suggests a deep human history as well), by then it didn’t matter. A great nature e-book both orders the world and leaves one with the sense of a vastness far beyond one’s self. This one does both … —Daniel Mason, author of “A Case Study” Read More