June 29, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Trick Mirrors, Summer Beers, and Bedazzled Pianos By The Paris Review Photo: M. Sharkey All of the essays in Alexander Chee’s marvelous collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled “1989,” the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an AIDS protest in San Francisco—his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block traffic; they are immediately surrounded by riot police, who begin to brutally drive them off. Chee climbs atop a newspaper box, with a view to the scene, and describes the rise and fall of batons with dispassionate shock, eventually climbing down from his perch to rescue a beaten friend. “This is the country I live in,” he realizes in closing. And I thought instantly of Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace, atop a knoll, observing the horrors of the Battle of Borodino. In shock and fear, he plunges down the slope and thinks, “Now they will be horrified at what they have done!” They aren’t, of course, and this seems to be the same conclusion Chee comes to: the feeling of incredulousness that violence and death are served up so openly—in a field, in a street—before so many watching eyes. Chee’s essay takes place during an AIDS protest but with other details it could easily be about the Holocaust, the Syrian war, or the United States, ca. 2018. —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 29, 2018 Arts & Culture Tommy Orange and the New Native Renaissance By Julian Brave NoiseCat Photo credit: Elena Seibert On a June afternoon, Tommy Orange, author of There There, one of this summer’s breakout books, stood at the foot of the stage at the Fellowship of Humanity, a lavender-interiored church on 27th Street in Oakland, California. Behind him, a banner congratulated this year’s graduating class of East Bay Native American high school seniors. It read: “The students of today are the warriors of tomorrow.” Orange hates public speaking. With his head buried in his notes, he intoned, “As Native people we have a bad history with schools, with institutions. They’re still teaching history wrong. We still hear them saying: ‘just get over it already,’ even when they’re saying they know the feeling is there. Get over what? The mountain that is history?” Read More
June 29, 2018 Department of Tomfoolery The Hardest Guess-the-Writer Quiz By Matt B. Weir The five anonymous minibiographies below are drawn from the lives of writers in our interview archives. Think you’ve got what it takes to identify them based on only the strangest and most idiosyncratic details of their lives? On our last quiz, only 24 percent of participants got a perfect score—but we are ruthless and haven’t made this one any easier. Be among the first to correctly identify all five and you could win a copy of The Paris Review’s newest book, The Writer’s Chapbook. The winner will be drawn on Friday, July 6, and contacted via email. Loading… Matt B. Weir is a writer living in New York. These anonymous biographies are part of his larger ongoing series.
June 28, 2018 First Person What Comes After Idealism? By Heather Abel “Class of ’36, I guess we did something wrong.” This is what my grandmother wrote to her Barnard College classmates fifty years after they had all graduated. My grandmother was charismatic and uncompromising, equally critical of capitalism and sentimentality. In her life as a Westchester housewife and radical leftist, she’d planned protests, played tennis, and published mystery novels. When her children were grown, she moved to Manhattan, waking every morning at five to walk briskly around Central Park (she was mugged only a few times). She spent the rest of the day writing and tending the ivy she’d planted to beautify the trees along her block. Every Saturday, she organized against U.S. atrocities in Central America. Days before she died in 1992, while attached to an IV, a blood transfusion, and oxygen, she dictated the final paragraph of her eighteenth book to my mother. The book was, she explained, the first in a new series she planned to write. At her memorial a week later, held in a classroom at Barnard College, her five children yelled and laughed and interrupted one another. She’d taught them to rebel against society’s mawkish ceremonies, like memorial services, as well as its unjust institutions. Her children all inherited her radical politics, and they raised us, her twelve grandchildren, in the same mode. You can be anything, they joked, as long as it’s a public defender. Interpreting this broadly, we complied. Read More
June 28, 2018 Arts & Culture How to Live in a Dystopian Fiction By Adam O’Fallon Price Albert Robida, Le vingtième siècle, ca. 1880. A curious feature of most dystopian fiction is that it begins in medias res. It’s a stylistic convention of the genre, and it applies to most dystopian lit that comes to mind, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Brave New World to Never Let Me Go. As pure narrative strategy, it makes sense. After all, novels in general must hook a reader quickly, and there are few things hookier than unfolding disaster. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, for example, begins with twenty utterly gripping pages of the first hours of a superplague wiping out Toronto (and the world). There is something compelling about this type of introduction—it carves narrative down to a brutal logic in which the only two options are survival and death. The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which will wrap up its second season in July, is the most recent popular example of this phenomenon. The viewer is dropped, from the first episode, into the fresh hell of Gilead, alongside Elisabeth’s Moss’s Offred. We are given the broad strokes of how Gilead came to power (ecological disaster, plummeting birth rates, a coup in Congress) but only the occasional flashback to normal life before the coup, when the show’s world much resembled ours. The first season was released in April 2017, and Offred’s disoriented struggle felt topical, consonant with an American body politic waking up to the reality of the Trump era. My wife and I watched it, as I know so many people did, with rapt, grim fascination. It showed our worst fears about the new government dramatized. As time—and the show—has gone on, however, I find myself increasingly drawn to the scanty scenes of America before Gilead, the tender, doomed moments of Offred’s previous life. The glimpses of that hazy, vanishing world are the most painful and perhaps the most resonant with our own unfolding dystopia. This is what all dystopias—fictional and real—specialize in: erasure of what came before. Read More