May 6, 2022 The Review’s Review On Liberated Women Looking for Love By The Paris Review The first paperback edition of Advancing Paul Newman, signed and dedicated by the author to Pauline Kael. Courtesy of Ken Lopez Books and Fine Manuscripts. I became aware of Advancing Paul Newman, Eleanor Bergstein’s 1973 debut novel, through Anatole Broyard’s dismissive review, which I came across in some undirected archival wandering. His grating condescension spurred me to read the novel—one of the best minor rebellions I’ve ever undertaken. (Bergstein is best known for writing the movie Dirty Dancing.) “This is the story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection with life,” she writes of the protagonists, best friends Kitsy and Ila. The romance of their friendship holds together everything else: trips to Europe to collect experiences (which, of course, often disappoint), becoming or failing to become writers, love affairs and marriages and divorces, their idealistic campaigning for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But Advancing Paul Newman is not simply a story of friendship, albeit one between two complicated women. The book is also gorgeously deranged and witty, told in fragments and leaps. “Don’t find me poignant, you ass,” Kitsy snaps at her ex when he happens upon her eating alone in a restaurant. After bad sex in Italy, she says matter-of-factly, “This was a good experience because now I know what it feels like to have my flesh crawl.” Ila is “glorious when in love, undistinguished when not in love,” and sleeps with two men on the day of Kitsy’s wedding. “There were reasons.” When she has a story accepted by The New Yorker, the proofs are returned with only one sentence intact: “Madam, the gentleman across the aisle is staring at my upper thighs.” The novel’s title comes from one of Kitsy and Ila’s duties in the McCarthy campaign: to arrive in advance at Paul Newman’s public appearances on behalf of McCarthy. They act as political fluffers, exciting the crowd and leaving for the next event just as Newman’s car pulls up. (Spoiler: they never meet him.) “Why in the world are you doing that, Miss Bergstein?” Broyard asked, frustrated, in his review. I think I know: the search for a passionate connection with life is chaotic; the lives of young women encompass more than a man thinks they should. —Elisa Gonzalez Read Elisa Gonzalez’s entry in our annotated diary series on the Daily here. Read More
May 6, 2022 On Music Watch the Staples Jr. Singers Perform Live at The Paris Review Offices By The Paris Review A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown. Photograph by Eliza Grace Martin. On the evening of Friday, April 22, the staff of the Review tidied our desks, tucked away our notebooks and computers, ordered pizza, and welcomed the nine members of the band known as the Staples Jr. Singers to our Chelsea office for a very special performance. The band’s music was introduced to us by our friends at Luaka Bop, who are today rereleasing the Staples Jr. Singers’ 1975 record, When Do We Get Paid. The Staples Jr. Singers (who named themselves after Mavis Staples) formed in 1969, when the original band members—A.R.C. Brown, Annie Brown Caldwell, and Edward Brown—were still teenagers; they sold that first, glorious record on the front lawn of their home in Aberdeen, Mississippi. Almost fifty years later, to celebrate the rerelease, the original members drove the seventeen hours from Aberdeen to New York City, children and grandchildren in tow, for a weekend of gigs in New York City. We at the Review were thrilled to host the band’s first-ever concert in the city, and we are delighted to share a clip from that performance with you.
May 5, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2010 By Adam Levin In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts. Dear Levin, No one wants to hear about your parrot. Even your dreams are more interesting. Even the word you stammer in search of to get across the precise nature of the pain in your stomach. No one wants to hear about your novel-in-progress, either, not unless you can tell them you finished it, you sold it, or how much you sold it for. And yet they ask. About your novel-in-progreess. About your parrot. Why do they ask? You know not to speak of the novel-in-progress. You know not to speak of the bird. You know both equally. So why, Levin, capable as you are, successful as you are at not talking about your novel-in-progress—why can’t you just shut the fuck up about your parrot? Levin Read More
May 5, 2022 On Nature Chestnut Trees By Hermann Hesse Artwork by Hermann Hesse. Photograph by Martin Hesse Erben. Courtesy of Volker Michels. Everywhere we’ve lived takes on a certain shape in our memory only some time after we leave it. Then it becomes a picture that will remain unchanged. As long as we’re there, with the whole place before our eyes, we see the accidental and the essential emphasized almost equally; only later are secondary matters snuffed out, our memory preserving only what’s worth preserving. If that weren’t true, how could we look back over even a year of our life without vertigo and terror! Many things make up the picture a place leaves behind for us—waters, rocks, roofs, squares—but for me, it is most of all trees. They are not only beautiful and lovable in their own right, representing the innocence of nature and a contrast to people, who express themselves in buildings and other structures—they are also revealing: we can learn much from them about the age and type of arable land there, the climate, the weather, and the minds of the people. I don’t know how the village where I now live will present itself to my mind’s eye later, but I cannot imagine that it will be without poplars, any more than I can picture Lake Garda without olive trees or Tuscany without cypresses. Other places are unthinkable to me without their lindens, or their nut trees, and two or three are recognizable and remarkable by virtue of having no trees there at all. Read More
May 4, 2022 First Person Notes on Nevada: Trans Literature and the Early Internet By Imogen Binnie Imogen Binnie at Camp Trans in 2008. Photo courtesy of the author. Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called Nevada with a small press called Topside that doesn’t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It’s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print. People have called Nevada “ground zero for modern trans literature,” and while I get that—before it was published, I don’t think I’d read a novel with a trans character who I didn’t at least sort of hate—I don’t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made Nevada possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel. Read More
May 3, 2022 Diaries Other People’s Diaries By Sophie Haigney While reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, I often caught myself mistaking it for a diary. The memoir details an illicit affair in prose that feels startlingly immediate, full of particulars that seem to surface in real time: a skirt in a Benetton shop; a list of fortune-tellers in the telephone book; the faded lettering of a plaque that reads PASSAGE CARDINET, near where the author sought a clandestine abortion years before. Yet I was continually made aware that time had passed, and this was last year’s love seen through this year’s eyes: “From September last year,” Ernaux writes, near the beginning, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come around to my place.” The details of this “most violent and unaccountable reality” have been refracted and altered, distilled into a remarkable book. Read More