August 4, 2021 At Work Authenticity and Apocalypse: An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman By Cornelia Channing Photo: Nina Subin. I first encountered Alexandra Kleeman’s work in the pages of this magazine. Her story “Fairy Tale”—published in 2010, when Kleeman was still a student in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University—is a nightmarish account of a woman confronted by a barrage of strangers who all claim to be her fiancé. The one she is forced to choose tries to kill her. Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine employs a similarly arch and sinister surrealism to tell the story of two roommates whose identities slowly melt into one. In her latest novel, Something New under the Sun, the otherworldly elements lurk further below the surface. The world of the novel is an only mildly exaggerated version of our own, plagued by privatization, corporate conspiracy, and rampant wildfires. The story follows a middle-aged East Coast novelist, Patrick Hamlin, as he travels to Los Angeles to supervise the making of his book into a film—a glamorous vision that is comically upended when, upon arrival, he discovers his primary task will be chauffeuring a demanding starlet, Cassidy Carter, across the menacing California landscape. Due to extreme drought and water shortage, all but the wealthiest Californians have to drink WAT-R, a synthetic substitute for water that is described as being “exactly like the original, except moreso.” Back in New York, Patrick’s wife and daughter have taken refuge at a cultish eco-commune upstate, where they perform rituals to mourn the imminent death of the planet. In confident, understated prose, Kleeman foregrounds the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties, conjuring a simmering unease that recalls fellow genre defiers such as Don DeLillo and Patricia Highsmith. But in the end what’s most troubling about the world of Kleeman’s novel is not its strangeness but its familiarity—how closely its horrors hew to those of modern life. This interview was conducted by phone between New York and Colorado two days after a notorious American billionaire shot himself into space and a few weeks after a patch of ocean in the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire. My conversation with Kleeman made me think deeply about the uncanny moment we are living in and the potential of fiction to offer new and more expansive modes of reality. INTERVIEWER The epigraph of the book is a passage from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in which a man sees a unicorn. At first, he thinks he must be dreaming or having some kind of mystical experience. But then another person comes along and sees it, too, and then another, and somehow these witnesses reduce the specialness of the experience until it is “as thin as reality,” transforming the unicorn into something ordinary—“a horse with an arrow in its forehead.” Why did that feel like the right way to open the novel? KLEEMAN I have a long relationship with the play Hamlet. It is the thing I have seen performed the most times in my life, and it was an important touchstone for me in several different ways while writing Something New under the Sun. First, it manifests this theme of telling and retelling and substitution and change by parts that I think is an important part of the logic of the novel. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also asks this question about whether or not perceiving inaccurately is helpful to us in terms of our psychological stability and our survival, which I think is one of the main questions of this book. We often perceive correctly in a localized way. We can accurately name what is happening in our daily lives, or perform a very complex analysis of a TV show we are watching. But the larger context in which we operate—the capitalist economy, the ecosystem, which is under extreme pressure and is changing in ways that are stochastic and nonlinear—is often beyond our emotional comprehension. I think a lot about whether our models of reality enable us to function usefully in a world that is changing as quickly as the one we occupy. Read More
August 3, 2021 Redux Redux: The Runner Trying to Disappear By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. The author at his jazz club, Peter Cat, in 1978. This week at The Paris Review, we’re tuning in to the Olympics and thinking about feats of athleticism. Read on for Haruki Murakami’s Art of Fiction interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “The Weirdos,” Gary Gildner’s poem “The Runner,” and Leanne Shapton and Charlotte Strick’s art portfolio “Swimming Lessons.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 (that’s $50 in savings!). Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182 Issue no. 170 (Summer 2004) INTERVIEWER How is your typical workday structured? MURAKAMI When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity. Read More
August 3, 2021 Arts & Culture The Silver Age of Essays By Phillip Lopate A new essay anthology, The Contemporary American Essay, collects works by forty-seven American writers that exemplify the diverse styles and subject matters explored within the form throughout the past twenty-five years. In the excerpted introduction below, the editor and writer Phillip Lopate considers the boom of literary nonfiction amid times of uncertainty. Henriette Browne, A Girl Writing; The Pet Goldfinch, ca. 1874, oil on canvas, 22 x 36 1/4’’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV/AIDS, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction—if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty. When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into best sellers. We could speculate on the reasons for this growing popularity—the hunger for humane, authentic voices trying to get at least a partial grip on the truth in the face of so much political mendacity and information overload; the convenient, bite-size nature of essays that require no excessive time commitment; the rise of identity politics and its promotion of eloquent spokespersons. Rather than trying to figure out why it’s happening, what’s important is to chart the high points of this resurgence, and to account for the range of styles, subgenres, experimental approaches, and moral positions that characterize the contemporary American essay. Of course, roping off a period like the year 2000 to the present and calling it “contemporary” is somewhat arbitrary, but one has to start somewhere. At least this artificial chronological box allows for the inclusion of older authors who made their mark in the twentieth century and had the temerity to keep producing significant work in the twenty-first (such as John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch). Just as set designers of period films make a mistake in choosing only articles of clothing or furnishings that were produced in that era, forgetting that we always live with the layered material objects of previous decades, so it would be wrong to restrict the literary flavor of an era to writers under forty. Indeed, what makes this period so interesting is the mélange of clashing generations and points of view. There are still tightly reasoned sequential essays being written in the classical mode, side by side with ones that resist that tidiness. Read More
August 2, 2021 First Person A Great Storyteller Loses His Memory By Rodrigo García Rodrigo García’s new memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, recounts the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez, in close detail. Amid family discussions and trips to the doctor, García explores the challenge of writing about grief while living within it. In the below excerpt, García documents the aftermath of his father’s dementia diagnosis and considers the emotional weight of the memory loss upon the renowned writer. Gabriel García Márquez at the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, 2009, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Writing about the death of loved ones must be about as old as writing itself, and yet the inclination to do it instantly ties me up in knots. I am appalled that I am thinking of taking notes, ashamed as I take notes, disappointed in myself as I revise notes. What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile. A few months earlier a friend asked how my dad was doing with his loss of memory. I told her he lives strictly in the present, unburdened by the past, free of expectations for the future. Forecasting based on previous experience, which is believed to be of evolutionary significance as well as one of the origins of storytelling, no longer plays a part in his life. “So he doesn’t know he’s mortal,” she concluded. “Lucky him.” Of course, the picture I painted for her is simplified. It is dramatized. The past still plays a part in his conscious life. He relies on the distant echo of his considerable interpersonal skills to ask anyone he meets a series of safe questions: “How is everything?” “Where are you living these days?” “How are your people?” Occasionally he’ll venture an attempt at a more ambitious exchange and become disoriented in the middle of it, losing the thread of the idea or running out of words. The puzzled expression on his face, as well as the embarrassment that crosses it momentarily, like a puff of smoke in a breeze, betrays a past when conversation was as natural to him as breathing. Creative, funny, evocative, provocative conversation. Being a great conversador was almost as highly regarded among his oldest group of friends as being a good writer. The future is also not completely behind him. Often at dusk he asks, “Where are we going tonight? Let’s go out to a fun place. Let’s go dancing. Why? Why not?” If you change the subject enough times, he moves on. Read More
July 30, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Melancholia, Music, and Meaning By The Paris Review Cynthia Cruz. Photo: Steven Page. Courtesy of Cruz. America: land of the free, home of the brave. A country, as our cultural mythos would have it, sans the social restrictions of the Old World. A country, thanks to the competitive fervor of meritocratic capitalism, without class. But we know this isn’t true: the idea of the United States as a land of the Protestant work ethic and the righteously rich is a fantasy, one especially relevant in the world of the arts. As the poet Cynthia Cruz painstakingly illustrates in her new book The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an expansion of her 2019 essay of the same name, the working class is more often than not shut out of the arts in the contemporary U.S., reliant as this world is on low wages, credentialism, and social networking. In chapters that combine her own personal experiences as a working-class writer and the work of many American and international writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—including Clarice Lispector, Barbara Loden, James Baldwin, the Jam, Cat Power, and more—Cruz explores the “melancholia” that results when a working-class artist abandons their origins and is subsumed into the middle and upper classes. In a world that denies their very existence, she argues, the working-class artist is a ghost: “neither dead nor alive, the working class exists between worlds.” Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Mark Fisher and Freud, as well as some good old-fashioned proletarian internationalism, Cruz makes a convincing argument as to how the working class can best resist assimilation and instead continue to make provocative, formally experimental work that transcends the borders of both class and country. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
July 30, 2021 Brush Strokes On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait By John Vincler John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. Michaël Borremans, Study for Bird, 2020, oil on linen, 14 1/4 x 11 3/4″. © Michaël Borremans. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. I didn’t understand how much I needed to look at the faces of others until I drove into Manhattan this past December to stare into a stranger’s unmasked face on my birthday. The sole reason for this trip was the stranger’s face—a portrait by Michaël Borremans, an artist I had taken to describing for nearly a decade as my favorite painter whose work I had never seen in person. I knew Borremans’s work mostly from the giant monographs and exhibition catalogs on his work I’d check out from the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library several years ago while I was working as a rare-book librarian a few blocks south at the Morgan Library & Museum. I’d lug these giant books from one library to another and then home in my backpack on the train from Midtown back to Brooklyn, renewing them over and over until they could be renewed no longer, sometimes requesting them again immediately, repeating the cycle. These paintings, or at least their reproductions, had a special resonance for me then. In the Morgan’s reading room, I routinely looked at the miniatures painted in the medieval manuscripts requested mostly by visiting academics. And when I would reshelve the printed books housed in J. P. Morgan’s former study in the old library, I’d always take a moment to look upon Hans Memling’s panel painting Portrait of a Man with a Pink. Read More