May 5, 2025 On Photography How to Find Your Mother in Her Portrait By Iman Mersal Hidden mother with child. Linda Fregni Nagler, #0173, tintype from The Hidden Mother, 997 collected daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, snapshots. When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the little girl that was me, this portrait happened to be a document of the moment in which, for the first and last time, I had stood beside my mother in a studio, unaware that less than two months time she would be dead. That photograph must be a means of instruction, an exercise in recovering the moment that had passed, in recovering the features and presence of my mother or, as Barthes writes, “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see [in this instance, my mother] has indeed existed.” I never had the sense that the woman in the photograph was my mother. Perhaps it is the anxious expression she turns toward the lens, as though, having stepped out of her domestic fortress, she now stood powerless. Perhaps it is the dress she is wearing, one I only ever saw her in once or twice on expeditions into town. Or maybe it is the hair that hangs down to her waist and which was usually plaited into two long braids that circled her head in opposite directions. The woman in the picture is not just different from what I remember of her, or want to remember: she is a ghost, like the ghosts I would see on strips of negatives as a girl. I would hold them up to my eye, trying to guess who they were, and when I grew bored of this, would fashion these haunted ribbons into bracelets around my wrist. Read More
May 2, 2025 The Review’s Review Keith McNally’s Rearview Mirror By Rosa Shipley From Reflected by Vijay Balakrishnan, a portfolio in issue no. 185 of the Review. “Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it. In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally’s tells us that his heart has been broken many times over—but it seems that restaurants are, in fact, what have saved him. As a diner, his restaurants have certainly given me much life force and heart-mend; they are perhaps the most accessibly glamorous in New York City, where I grew up. Over the course of his career, McNally, who is now seventy-three, has opened Augustine, Balthazar, Café Luxembourg, Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Minetta Tavern, Morandi, Pastis, Pravda, and Schiller’s, as well as Balthazar in London and the new Minetta Tavern, in Washington, D.C. This memoir spans the course of McNally’s life. It loops and shifts between timelines, but in a way that is forgivable and even charming: it reads like McNally remembers as he writes and then—urgently—wants not to forget. A funny tension for someone who claims to regret almost everything. He weaves together memories from the working-class London of his childhood to his young man’s adventures abroad and the sets (strip clubs and playhouses alike) where he realized that film and theater were what moved him most. But more often than not, we’re in New York City in the eighties, witnessing, up close, the building of his empire, the explosions of his love affairs, and time’s passage and pains to the present. McNally turns on the overheads: We get intimate, poignant, sometimes brutal moments from his marriages (two, both now finished) and earnest, messy fatherhood. Lights intensify on a stroke, a suicide attempt, a stint at McLean, and an arrival at new kind of life. Read More
May 1, 2025 Bookmarks Souvenirs By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling in the back, a book of Corinne Day’s photos on the set of Sofia Coppola’s the virgin suicides, out from MACK this month. Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor From Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Corbin/Kiarostami/Lacan (MIT Press): As Ishaghpour puts it in his essay “The True and False in Art,” “It would be fair to say that, according to Kiarostami, the whole world has just one wish: being photographed, appearing in a film, being on the screen. So much so, that it would be necessary to change Descartes’s formula into ‘I have an image, [therefore] I [am].’ ” Why should women be exempt from this elemental desire to have an image—a desire so elemental that even the God of Islam is acknowledged to have pined for one. For want of an image he was hidden even from Himself. Those who protest against the assimilation of women to an image are right to do so, though it needs to be acknowledged that there is a critical difference between an image that assimilates what it depicts (or: reduces it to an object) and an epiphanic image. The latter—or “incorruptible”—form of the image performs an epiphanic function. It directs us to attend not merely to what it shows on its surface but also to what nestles in its shadow. One of the most famous illustrations of such an image is the painting of a veil by Parrhasios, which prompted those who looked at it to wonder what lay beneath it. The function of the image in this case is not merely to draw our attention to what is visible but also to what is not. Read More
April 30, 2025 First Person Meaning By Richard Russo Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. I’m walking, as I do pretty much every day, along the Eastern Promenade near my home in Portland, Maine, when I feel my wedding ring slip off. Luckily, my hands are in my jeans, so no harm done. I slip the ring back on without breaking stride and return to contemplating Casco Bay. I make it another ten yards or so before it happens again. When the ring slips off my finger a third time, I give up and leave it there at the bottom of my pocket. Though the jeans I’m wearing are relatively new, I double-check anyway to make sure there’s no hole in the pocket. Having read Tolkien, I know some rings want to be lost, others to be found, and I’ve already lost one wedding ring, though that was decades ago. The ring in my pocket doesn’t actually want anything, of course. It’s just a piece of metal and has no meaning other than what I attach to it. It’s sliding off my finger because it’s January and bitter cold and my skin is dry and—who knows?—maybe I’ve lost a couple pounds. As I said, it’s perfectly secure right where it is, yet here I am fretting about its safety and unable to reconcile its being in my pocket when it belongs on my finger. My parka has a tiny pocket with a zipper, and I consider putting the ring there, but that would further distance it from the finger it’s supposed to be on. Also, the zipped pocket of my parka carries its own risks. I’m seventy-three and my memory is becoming porous. Sometimes I have to page back through whatever novel I’m working on because I can’t remember the name of a character who’s been absent from the last couple chapters. And like many men my age I too often find myself in front of the open refrigerator, peering at its contents in the hopes of spotting the reason I’m standing there. Am I even in the right place? Is what I’m looking for in the washing machine? The silverware drawer? The pantry? If I put the ring in the pocket of my parka where it can’t possibly fall out, will I forget doing so? If so, then two or three years down the road the ring will go with the parka to Goodwill, and in the meantime I’ll be left to contemplate what it means that I’ve managed to lose not one but two wedding rings. To some people—maybe even to me—that might appear subconsciously intentional. My therapist, if I had one, would surely agree, which is why I don’t have one. Part of the reason I’m fretting is that this would be a terrible time to lose the ring. For the last several months my wife has been suffering from headaches that we’ve been unable to diagnose. MRIs and biopsies seem to have ruled out the most terrifying scenarios, but there’s something scary about not knowing, especially in the wake of the pandemic, which reacquainted all of us with mortality and the uncertainty of the future, realities that in the beforetimes we managed to sequester in the back of our brains. To lose my wedding ring at a time when my wife’s health is in question would mean something, wouldn’t it? Yes? No? Read More
April 28, 2025 On Books Man of the West: Akutagawa’s Tragic Hero By Geoffrey Mak A drawing of the Noppera-bō by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. On the night of July 24, 1927, Ryunosuke Akutagawa swallowed a lethal amount of Veronal, slipped onto a futon beside his wife, and fell asleep reading the Bible. The writer was thirty-five years old. Proclaiming himself an atheist yet preoccupied by Christianity, he had written, shortly before his suicide, “Man of the West,” a series of fifty aphoristic vignettes in which Jesus Christ is an autobiographical writer who has profound insight into all human beings but himself. Akutagawa was a prolific and celebrated writer and one of the first modern Japanese writers to gain popularity in the West. He was drawn to the son of God at a time when he suffered from visual and aural hallucinations, often accompanied by migraines. His wife sometimes found him crouched in his study in Tokyo, clinging to the walls, convinced they were falling in. Days before he died, Akutagawa wrote a series of letters to his family and friends. At a crowded news conference the day after Akutagawa’s suicide, his friend Masao Kume read aloud a letter addressed to him, “Note to an Old Friend,” commonly referred to as Akutagawa’s suicide note. The letter describes, in dark comedy, the practical banalities that undignify the grandiosity of arranging one’s own death: problems involving the rights to his work and his property value and whether he’d be able to keep his hand from shaking when aiming the pistol to his temple. It is also a portrait of the author’s interiority in his final moments. “No one has yet written candidly about the mental state of one who is to commit suicide,” the note opens. “In one of his short stories, [Henri de] Régnier depicts a man who commits suicide but does not himself understand for what reason,” he writes. “Those who commit suicide are for the most part as Régnier depicted, unaware of their real motivation.” Like the Christ-poet of his fiction, Akutagawa thought he could see into the souls of all men—except his own. Perhaps he couldn’t look; perhaps he did not want to, for where there is motivation, there is culpability: precisely what he wanted to abdicate in death. “In my case, I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease,” he writes instead. “I reside in a world of diseased nerves, as translucent as ice.” He mostly wanted rest, he wrote. In “Man of the West,” he writes, “We are but sojourners in this vast and confusing thing called life. Nothing gives us peace except sleep.” Read More
April 25, 2025 The Review’s Review On Fish Tales: A Forgotten Erotic Novel of Raw Longing and Fierce Freedom By Danielle A. Jackson Nettie Pearl Jones, 1984. Photograph by Fern Logan. Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride. The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene: “Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room. “Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.” “Help me?” I screamed out. “By fucking me? Huh?” Read More