August 6, 2019 In Memoriam Toni Morrison, 1931–2019 By The Paris Review Toni Morrison. Photo: Angela Radulescu. We are deeply sad to report that Toni Morrison died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Over the course of eleven novels and several essay collections, children’s books, and plays, she reshaped the American literary landscape and influenced just about every English-language writer currently working. The Paris Review was lucky enough to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with Morrison on the eve of her 1993 Nobel Prize win. Born to a family of talented musicians, Morrison came late to the realization that she wanted to be a writer, but in her interview, she is clear about her intentions: “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books.” For twenty years, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, where she published Gayl Jones, Nettie P. Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Once she finally did begin writing, she kept relatively quiet about it; when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, her coworkers learned of the book’s existence from a review in the New York Times. “It was by the time I was writing Song of Solomon, the third book, that I began to think that this was the central part of my life,” she says. “Not to say that other women haven’t said it all along, but for a woman to say, I am a writer, is difficult … It isn’t so difficult anymore, but it certainly was for me and for women of my generation or my class or my race.” Read More
August 6, 2019 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Jia Tolentino By Jia Tolentino In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. I just realized, having never before had an occasion to consider my thoughts on the matter, that I feel incredibly fond of the front of my fridge. Life should be more like the front of my fridge: entirely made up of postcards from your friends, pictures of babies, an upside-down magazine photo of a rocket launch from a seventies aviation magazine, old aura readings, photos of when you blacked out at a Pistons game watching Fat Joe (no longer fat) play at halftime, novelty magnets that remind you of everywhere you’ve been that you love. The best thing on this fridge is a magnetic sheet featuring four incredible photos of my friend Jackson—it was a Christmas present from Jackson’s partner, Kate. Mostly when I go to the fridge, though, the only thing that registers for me visually is a glimpse of my dog Luna’s fluffy puppy face. Inside, my fridge’s vibe is almost always “last night’s dinner plus snacks.” If I lived almost anywhere else, I’d probably be working less and cooking constantly, and my fridge would always be bursting with some Martha Stewart shit, pizza dough and herbs and iced green tea with honey, as it was in Texas and Michigan. But here it’s like, we got some eggs, we got that bodega Vermont cheddar, we got Simply Orange so I can choke down my vitamins in the morning, we got limes that have turned into moldy rocks since the party. Read More
August 6, 2019 Arts & Culture The Creative Compulsions of OCD By Adam O’Fallon Price 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. Read More
August 5, 2019 Arts & Culture Sigrid Nunez’s Portraits of Animal Intelligence By Peter Cameron 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
August 5, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Cora Sandel By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Cora Sandel “In everything one writes,” said the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, “there is woven in a thread from one’s own life. It can be so hidden that nobody notices it, but it is there and it must be there, I suppose, if it is to be seen as a piece of living writing.” Sandel, born Sara Fabricius in Kristiania (now Oslo), tried to avoid undue conjecture on her fiction’s autobiographical basis by using a pseudonym. When she published her first novel, Alberta and Jacob, in 1926 at age forty-six, she gave her publisher no author photo, nor did she ever agree to be interviewed on television. The two other books in the acclaimed Alberta trilogy appeared shortly thereafter: Alberta and Freedom in 1931, and Alberta Alone in 1939. After Alberta and Jacob drew a wide and appreciative Scandinavian readership, an uncle wrote to her in Sweden, where she was living, to tell her: “I have just read a book by a woman who calls herself Cora Sandel. Everyone here says that it is you.” He had always known, he added, that she would achieve something significant. The demands placed on today’s authors, the all but mandatory self-disclosure and endless media promotion, would have horrified Sandel. “I have always been of the opinion,” she said, “that no more needs to be expected of an author than she should write books.” Though she lived in Paris for fifteen years she didn’t, on principle, engineer an encounter with Colette, whom she idolized and whose novel The Vagabond she translated into Norwegian. “I considered it too presumptuous to have friends arrange a meeting—Colette was forced to meet so many people anyway.” Sandel valued solitude above all, and spent long hours in silent contemplation of the precise words she needed to capture a mood or sentiment. In the final novel of the trilogy, the eponymous writer-heroine reflects of her manuscript: “Each word had come floating up singly from the unknown depths, where the truth hides itself and then rises again, in different guise, unrecognizable as a dream, but irrefutable.” Read More
August 2, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Free Verse, Farewells, and Fist City By The Paris Review Nell Zink. Photo: Francesca Torricelli. Nell Zink’s Doxology is the first truly great novel to tackle the 2016 election. I’ve been a fan of Zink’s work since The Wallcreeper, but in this new novel, she’s sharper and slyer than ever before. At times, it almost feels like she’s winking at Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, with its indie-rock musician character and D.C. environmentalist subplot. But Zink turns everything on its head: the musician isn’t sexy but an idiot savant; the worldly D.C. operative isn’t greedy but instead trying to defeat Trump; the environmentalists’ idealism rapidly turns self-serving. And no one can write a one-liner like Zink: New York, for instance, is “a city devoted to making the labor theory of value look stupid.” In 2016, I briefly worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign. I’d never worked in politics before, and I’ll never work in them again; I joined the campaign out of a sense of fear, an obligation to do something, anything, in the face of Trump. We all know how that ended. But Zink, from her perch abroad, captures those doomed final days before November 8, 2016, more accurately than any breathlessly reported account from any political reporter or former campaign worker. “Hillary can beat a Republican, but she can’t beat a totemic forest spirit,” a character tries to explain at one point to a few hapless campaign staffers. It doesn’t work, of course. Nothing worked in real life either. But at least we have Nell Zink to show us how we got here. —Rhian Sasseen Read More