April 21, 2023 The Review’s Review Divorcée Fiction: On Ursula Parrott By Alissa Bennett Russell Patterson, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I’d never heard of Ursula Parrott when McNally Editions introduced me to Ex-Wife, the author’s 1929 novel about a young woman who suddenly finds herself suspended in the caliginous space between matrimony and divorce. The first thing I wondered was where it had been all my life. Ex-Wife rattles with ghosts and loss and lonely New York apartments, with men who change their minds and change them again, with people and places that assert their permanence by the very fact that they’re gone and they’re never coming back. Originally published anonymously, Ex-Wife stirred immediate controversy for Parrott’s frank depiction of her heroine, Patricia, a woman whose allure does not spare her from desertion after an open marriage proves to be an asymmetrical failure. Embarking on a marathon of alcoholic oblivion and a series of mostly joyless dips into the waters of sexual liberation, Patricia spends the book ricocheting between her fear of an abstract future and her fixation on a past that has been polished, gleaming from memory’s sleight of hand. It’s been nearly a century since Ex-Wife had its flash of fame (the book sold more than one hundred thousand copies in its first year), and as progress has stripped divorce of its moral opprobrium, it has also swelled the ranks of us ex-wives. Folded in with Patricia’s descriptions of one-night stands and prohibition-busting binges are the kind of hollow distractions relatable to any of us who have ever wanted to forget: she buys clothes she can’t afford; she gets facials and has her hair done; she listens to songs on repeat while wearily wondering why heartache always seems to bookend love. My copy is riddled with exclamation marks and anecdotes that chart my own parallel romantic catastrophes, its paragraphs vandalized with highlighted passages and bracketed phrases. There is a sentence on the book’s first page that I outlined in black ink: “He grew tired of me;” it reads, “hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them.” The box that I have drawn around these words is a frame, I suppose; the kind that you find around a mirror. Read More
April 14, 2023 The Review’s Review Daniel Mason, Marta Figlerowicz, and Malachi Black Recommend By The Paris Review From Zdeněk Miler’s “Krtek a maminka.” Guild loyalty says I should probably choose a work of fiction for my favorite recent book, but I’m not sure that anyone, with the exception of Octavia Butler, could serve up as glorious a museum of the unimaginable as Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney do in Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species. Have you ever seen a spongilla fly cocoon (silk lozenge haloed in a lacy mesh of bridal finery)? How about neatly-ranged eggs laid by a katydid along a blade of grass? I had thought myself well-versed in the range of parasitic terrors until I saw the work of a mummy wasp upon a sphinx moth caterpillar. And leaf miners! When my mortal hour is up, I will look back and see my life divided into the half when I hadn’t known labyrinths like the ones they make existed, and the one after I came to understand that they are everywhere. I came to this book when no amount of googling could solve the mystery of who had made the particularly stylized set of tunnels I kept finding on downed poplar in the woods, carved in a pattern I can best describe as a cross between fine hatchet marks, the grooves on a music-box cylinder, morse code, alien messages, and the exuberant scribblings of a child who has discovered the letter i but has only a single sheet of paper. “Dotted insect lines on poplar logs,” “wood beetle straight lines dots poplar,” “straight lines wood downed tree”—try them, they will lead you nowhere. Except they did lead me to Eiseman and Charney’s book. Oh, the pleasure of realizing that something bound can deliver what the internet cannot! Tracks & Sign had a gallery of insect carpentry to choose from. While they didn’t highlight the poplar chiseler I was looking for (I would later learn it was a shipworm—one of those wonderful instances when natural history suggests a deep human history as well), by then it didn’t matter. A great nature e-book both orders the world and leaves one with the sense of a vastness far beyond one’s self. This one does both … —Daniel Mason, author of “A Case Study” Read More
April 7, 2023 The Review’s Review On Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers By Deborah Feldman Still from Hungry Hearts, an adaptation of a novel by Anzia Yezierska. Courtesy of Goldwyn Pictures. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I had recently begun attending Sarah Lawrence College when Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers was first introduced to me. I was twenty years old, but as a married Orthodox Jewish woman with a one-year-old child to show for myself instead of a high school diploma, I had been enrolled in the continuing education program for one year in order to prepare for proper matriculation. The blunt hairline of my voluminous wig paired with my over-the-knee skirts would have been enough to render me the exotic outsider to my worldly classmates even if I hadn’t revealed my heavy accent or my ignorance of basic cultural references. So when an older classmate who hadn’t previously made much effort at conversing with me thrust the worn paperback into my hands, I was caught unawares by her sudden attention. “Maybe you’ve already read it, but I thought, just in case …” Eyeing the title and the unfamiliar name of the author, I shook my head in bemusement. “Is this some famous classic,” I asked, “some essential part of the canon I’ve missed and need to catch up on?” She laughed. “Not really,” she answered. “But back when I was in college the first time around, some acquaintances of mine were instrumental in its republication, so that’s how I know about it. I came across it again recently while I was spring cleaning, but you know how it is with coincidences. They rarely are. I thought of you immediately; I felt strongly that this book was meant for you.” Taking that portentous statement on its merit, I began to read the book the same day, parking my car on the side of the road on the way home from class for as long as I had until my husband returned from work, reading behind the steering wheel instead of on my sofa for the sake of peace and privacy. Even today I cringe when remembering the experience. As I read about the impoverished Orthodox protagonist suffering through the deprivations of the Lower East Side tenements while dreaming of dignity and education, I felt as if my classmate, in handing me the book and saying it was “meant for you,” had in effect publicly shamed and exposed me—had lumped me together with the novel’s Sara Smolinsky into the category of awkward, vulgar greenhorn. The woman who had seemingly seen right through me might have had good intentions, but she had grown up in a posh Massachusetts town, had a hyphenated last name, and lived in a historic mansion in the most expensive town in Westchester with a handsome husband who was a big name in finance. She was, in fact, exactly like everyone else around me in college at the time: well-educated, privileged, and refined. On top of that she was adorned with the garlands of enlightenment, studying feminism and women’s literature after having spent the last two decades raising her sons. So of course her gesture did not feel welcoming at all; it felt pointed and exclusionary, a humiliation akin to what the novel’s protagonist, too, experiences among her college classmates. Read More
March 31, 2023 The Review’s Review John Wick Marathon By The Paris Review Keanu Reeves as John Wick in John Wick: Chapter 4. Photograph by Murray Close. Courtesy of Lionsgate. In our Spring issue, we published Kyra Wilder’s poem “John Wick Is So Tired.” To celebrate the poem and the recent release of John Wick: Chapter 4, we sent four reviewers to three different John Wick screenings over the course of a week. Tuesday, March 21: Press Preview The first thing we noted when we entered AMC Lincoln Square 13 for the New York press screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 was that film PR girls are way nicer than their fashion industry counterparts. Check-in was a breeze, and we were informed that since we had special blue wristbands, we didn’t have to turn in our phones. We hadn’t considered that we would potentially have to turn in our phones, but were relieved nevertheless. We were handed a very large stack of papers with a large John Wick logo at the top, containing detailed information about the franchise and a long explanation of the movie’s plot, which we chose not to read too closely for fear of spoilers. This heavy stack of papers was also where we first learned that the runtime was a whopping 169 minutes. This troubled us, mostly because we had had a lot of wine with dinner and were concerned that we would have to pee. The theater was packed with agitated-seeming nonjournalists who were somehow able to secure tickets. People wove up and down the aisles in a huff, frustrated by the first-come-first-served seating. A couple of women exchanged curse words over another woman’s volume. Multiple people arrived late with full take-out bags, their lack of discretion leading us to believe that the staff of the theater were not too concerned with enforcing the rules of this AMC John Wick press preview. The French crime film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville once said, “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ ” In the universe of John Wick, it’s pretty much that too, but it’s a thousand guns, two dozen archers, bows, arrows, knives, swords, bulletproof suits, a sundry list of exotic ammunition, an attack dog, a blind assassin, dueling pistols, a fleet of luxury attack vehicles, and a handful of classic American muscle cars. Oh, and if you could bring them all to the Sacré-Cœur, in Paris, by sunrise, that would be great, thanks. Read More
March 24, 2023 The Review’s Review Rivers Solomon, Elisa Gonzalez, and Elaine Feeney Recommend By The Paris Review Kusudama cherry blossom. Courtesy of praaeew, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. As I get older, and the world gets worse, or gets differently bad, or stays the same but my understanding of its badness deepens and broadens, I grow ever more dependent upon books like Akwugo Emejulu’s Fugitive Feminism. This short, sharp text reminds readers that, like the rattling door in a haunted house or the concerned face of a friend who understands well the way a lover is slowly bringing about your annihilation, it is good to leave that which does not serve you. Fleeing, as in the case of the enslaved from the plantation, is no act of cowardice but a tremendous gesture toward liberation. The flight Emejulu encourages is not from a place but from a conceptual space. Referencing the work of Black critical theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Fugitive Feminism troubles the notion of the “human,” arguing that it is not a neutral, objective term for one type of mammal but a philosophical and political category informed by colonialism that, from its invention, excluded Blackness and Black people. For years, many have fought (to no avail) to be, for once, called and acted upon as humans, but for Emejulu, there is nothing to be reclaimed in that cursed white supremacist taxonomy. When we stop seeking inclusion into a category built on genocide and eugenics, there is freedom to explore other ways of being, seeing, and doing. Emejulu’s writing is clear, evocative, and concise, and while readers with no background in the subject material may find places where they need to spend more time, Fugitive Feminism is an extraordinarily accessible text that will touch many of those left behind by society without sacrificing complexity and critical rigor. —Rivers Solomon, author of “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be” Read More
March 17, 2023 The Review’s Review Art Out of Time: Three Reviews By The Paris Review Bernadette Corporation, Untitled, 2023. Courtesy of Greene Naftali. This week, three reviews on damaged art, art out of time, art of our time, and enjoying the void. We’re in a particular phase of “pandemic art” now—I don’t mean work that portrays the spread of disease (I’ll leave The Last of Us to another writer) but the work that artists made while they lived in hibernation: writers at their desks with no social obligations to draw them out into the city, artists in their studios with the endless horizon of hours receding. Now they are showing what they made. Tara Donovan’s stunning “screen drawings,” on view last month at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, are a project begun in that period. The “drawings” are made from typical aluminum insect screens, cut and tweezed into intricate geometric patterns—layered lines, swirls, and cutouts—that shimmer and morph as you walk through the gallery. They are subtle optical illusions cut from the humblest everyday material. Their connection to the period of “high quarantine” strikes me immediately: time spent looking out the window onto silent streets, time spent feeling intensely aware of the need for protection. The discourse around “screen time” is of course fatiguing, but Donovan’s drawings for me reinvigorate the multiple meanings of the phrase. Before we came to understand the screen as the portal that brought the outside infinity into our personal space, screens were more often for keeping something out: a fugitive look, a bothersome fly. (I saw Donovan’s work around the same time as I became aware of an interesting but disquieting TikTok trend of overlaying TV clips with ASMR videos, in case you didn’t have enough stimulation.) What else do they continue to separate from us? A special quality of Donovan’s manipulations is that no photo of them can do them justice—they look good in two dimensions, but in person they are almost hypnotic in their immersive power. They’re hardly capturable as digital artifacts, and so much the better. —David S. Wallace, contributing editor Read More