{"id":125872,"date":"2018-05-25T13:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T17:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125872"},"modified":"2018-05-25T14:06:52","modified_gmt":"2018-05-25T18:06:52","slug":"staff-picks-sharp-women-and-humble-turtles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/25\/staff-picks-sharp-women-and-humble-turtles\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Sharp Women and Humble Turtles"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Michelle Dean.<\/p><\/div>\n

What I like most about Michelle Dean\u2019s book\u00a0Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>is its cumulative effect. It\u2019s not a biography of one or two or even three brilliant intellectuals, but ten: ten women\u00a0writers (all are referred to by their last names alone, comme des gar\u00e7ons<\/i>) who are variously funny, acerbic, insightful, opinionated, and complex. Together, they make a sisterhood, even though, Dean explains, most would likely balk at that notion. All were persistent in their rejection of ever-evolving accusations of aggression, vindictiveness, unseriousness, and facileness. In fact, the number and variety of stories in Dean\u2019s book also illustrate how hard it is for women to find the \u201cright\u201d tone among male-dominated ideologies. (Dean\u2019s primary subjects are white; a book about women of color would evoke other, unique difficulties.) Of Pauline Kael, Dean writes, \u201cIt\u2019s plain she was hoping the brilliance of her work would be enough, as it would be for a man in her position.\u201d Such a small desire, and still so fresh. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

All happy gardens are alike, except that they\u2019re not, not at all, a truth rendered in Penelope Lively\u2019s thoroughly charming forthcoming nonfiction\u00a0Life in the Garden<\/a>.<\/i>\u00a0As with all successful nature writing, reading this book is like being taught a new way to see. What previously registered as a vague, general whole now registers as an abundance of individual parts, each worthy of their own attention. Lively\u2019s nimble book is a captivating kind of memoir balanced on pillars of social history and art criticism, examining the role of the garden as a mainstay of modern culture (and as such, subject to the influence of waxing and waning trends and styles) and its significance in selections of literature and art (my personal favorite being the cameo of Mr. Noakes from Tom Stoppard\u2019s\u00a0Arcadia<\/i>). As a card-holding member of the New York Botanical Garden, I recognize that the color of my personal fascination with gardens is as an American, born and raised in a country where the garden is less an integral part of the cultural fiber than it is in Lively\u2019s Britain. But Lively herself asserts that there is a magnetism to the garden that transcends nationality, hooking into themes of time, transience, and memory. \u2014Lauren Kane\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kevin Young<\/p><\/div>\n

This week, I\u2019ve spent much of my spare time poring over Kevin Young\u2019s most recent collection of poems,\u00a0Brown<\/i><\/a>. The book comprises four sections, each as piercing as the one before, and it wears one of the most handsome jackets I\u2019ve seen in a long while: scraps of paper\u2014pink and maroon, white and a fleck of yellowish green\u2014frame other scraps, black, brown, and gold. Throughout the collection, Young returns to the theme of childhood, and of growing up black in America. As the poet watches his son dance to jazz, recalls his first sleepover (\u201cIt\u2019s as if you \/ have died when I head \/ into your room \u2026 though you \/ are just down \/ the street\u201d) and the time \u201canother neighbor \/ & good friend \/ called him nigger,\u201d he is deluged with memories of his own boyhood experiences from\u00a0Topeka, Kansas. He writes of when he first heard the word\u00a0jigaboo<\/i>, of when his wrestling coach asked him to moonwalk, of the brown boys that died after nights shared at house parties. With Brown<\/em>, Young proves once again that he\u2019s a formidable poetic force whose work we\u2019ll be reading for lifetimes to come, and reminds us, too, to listen up now. Here are a few lines from \u201cTriptych for Trayvon Martin\u201d: \u00a0\u201cThere are gods \/ of fertility, \/ corn, childbirth \/ & police \/ brutality\u2014this last \/ is offered praise \/ & sacrifice \/ near weekly \/ & still cannot \/ be sated\u2014many-limbed, \/ thin-skinned, \/ its colors are blue \/ & black, a cross- \/ hatch of bruise \/ & bulletholes.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s\u00a0My Year of Rest and Relaxation<\/a><\/i>, and yet I could not put the book down. Moshfegh\u2019s novel, out this July, tells the story of a young woman who decides to duck out of the world for a year. With the help of an array of pills, one by one or in combination, the protagonist goes into hibernation. Moshfegh\u2019s protagonist is brutally dreary, and the brutality of her dreariness is often very funny, but the book is really quite serious. Her year of rest and relaxation begins in the fall of 2000, and as the months pass and the reader senses the approach of September 2001, her dreary outlook on the world outside of her apartment starts to seem less brutal than trivial. The events of 9\/11 are hardly mentioned, but they are nonetheless present from the first page to the last. The book seems to anchor itself to \u201creal\u201d experiences of pain and to validate itself by their relevance (the death of the protagonist\u2019s parents, for instance, or the looming attack). But it is mostly, almost by juxtaposition, about the realness of a more subtle and very private\u00a0expression<\/i>\u00a0of pain, no matter the cause, no matter how seemingly trivial. That\u2019s what kept me reading even as my cringing muscles grew sore: feeling in my screwed-up face, barked laughs, and watery eyes the translation of that private kind of pain into something I could share. \u2014Claire Benoit<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Helen DeWitt\u2019s forthcoming collection,\u00a0Some Trick<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>is some trick indeed. Dry and wry and propulsively funny, each thought has been whittled into a lean, sharp blade. In many of these stories (a baker\u2019s dozen), she lacerates the publishing and art worlds, reveling in the horrifying absurdity that results when art is commodified\u2014when awkward artists and their heartfelt creations are judged, packaged, and parceled out by middlemen with one eye on the \u201cmarket\u201d and another on their own careers. \u201cClimbers\u201d is my favorite of the lot. Gil, passionate and respected, wears \u201ca dark green polo shirt with a small red turtle in the place where a more fashionable polo shirt might sport a crocodile. It has the trusting incomprehension of a Presidential dog.\u201d Later we are told, in an aside, \u201cThe unpretentiousness of the humble turtle\u2014it\u2019s hard to explain how this contributed to making people feel shamefaced and crass, but it did.\u201d The European writer everyone in New York is desperate to publish, and therefore \u201cdiscover,\u201d was \u201cunassumingly dressed in the way that older Europeans are unassuming.\u201d Rachel drinks Campari at KGB bar in \u201cskinny white jeans and a sloppy lilac-blue V-necked sweater, sleeves rucked up to her elbows, cashmere.\u201d Ralph, the high-powered agent who \u201cwas not an intellectual but maybe the secret of success was not caring,\u201d wears \u201ca tan polo shirt with a crocodile on the breast, chinos, and sockless Topsiders, because he had never wanted to be a suit.\u201d \u201cThe thing you have to understand is that I really don\u2019t understand people,\u201d Gil says, at the start of the story. It\u2019s clear that the DeWitt does, almost uncomfortably well. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Each page of Hybrid Child<\/a><\/i>, the first\u00a0English translation, by Jodie Beck, of a Japanese work of speculative fiction by\u00a0Mariko \u014chara, feels a little bit like waking up during an overnight flight, opening your window to see the stars, and instead seeing two lions in the middle of a vicious fight stop to blink peacefully up at you from the wing. You also see the glittering expanse of stars you came for, and the deafening silence of outer space, and maybe a robot? The story of the novel is that of Sample B #3, a shapeshifting cyborg of military creation, who becomes self-aware and escapes by becoming human and walking out of his cell. It\u2019s also the story of the legend of Sample B #3, and the legend of the girl, Jonah, whose body the cyborg assumes: because Sample B #3 essentially cannot die,\u00a0\u014chara is accustomed to moving through centuries of time like they\u2019re nothing. It\u2019s an eerie, beautiful universe populated by humans and things that\u00a0\u014chara gives the empathy of humans, intentional at every turn about what boundaries she wants her future to have. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong><\/p>\n

On a lark, I decided to climb the highest hill in South Dakota: Black Elk Peak in the Black Hills. Four hours later, doused in sweat and crumpled forward like a folding chair, wheezing and admiring a plaque proclaiming \u201cthe highest point east of the Rockies and west of the Pyrenees,\u201d I had reached the vista point of a sacred American landscape. The Black Hills have been held as holy for centuries by the Sioux, an ellipse of green-shadow pine and bald gray rocks like an iceberg floating on the Plains. Shadows, scarce on the Plains, accumulate in the folds of the Black Hills, dense and irregular as a mosaic. From atop Black Elk Peak one can watch the cloud tufts pitch and roll, watch the hills, gone black and heavy in the transient shadows, light up like bulbs ticking on. It is a landscape that has been transformed by centuries of humans who have perceived it as sacred, and by the weight of those expectations. By Sylvan Lake, at a trailhead to Black Elk Peak, Crazy Horse had his great vision, in which he received instructions about the necessary preparations to render him invincible in battle. And it was to the peak that now bears his name that Black Elk, the Lakota Sioux medicine man, was taken in his prophetic experience, and from where, as he says in Black Elk Speaks<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>his brilliant end of life memoir and sermon, he saw \u201cthe whole hoop of the world.\u201d The existence of Black Elk Speaks<\/em> is a product of extraordinary luck\u2014the result of the meeting of a poet, John Neihardt, and the\u00a0aging Black Elk, who was unknown beyond the remote part of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he lived. The two understood each other enough for Black Elk to entrust his story to the poet. And it is an extraordinary life\u2014from fighting in the Battle of the Little Bighorn to touring Europe with Buffalo Bill to growing old on the reservation (recounted also in Joe Jackson\u2019s excellent biography Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary<\/a>)<\/em>. The Black Hills, an ancient American sacred space, are like a cave mouth opening towards the sky, and Black Elk is one of its great voices. \u2014Matt Levin<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What I like most about Michelle Dean\u2019s book\u00a0Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion\u00a0is its cumulative effect. It\u2019s not a biography of one or two or even three brilliant intellectuals, but ten: ten women\u00a0writers (all are referred to by their last names alone, comme des gar\u00e7ons) who are variously funny, acerbic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[2399,34229,34222,34223,34225,34219,12995,34228,1289,7470,19084,34231,34230,1862,25195,34226,34218,34232,33837,34220,23720,10199,4721,2847,34217,34224,34221,32117,16962,34227,2285],"class_list":["post-125872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-arcadia","tag-battle-of-the-little-bighorn","tag-black-elk-speaks","tag-black-elk-the-life-of-an-american-visionary","tag-black-hills","tag-brown","tag-buffalo-bill","tag-crazy-horse","tag-cyborgs","tag-gardening","tag-helen-dewitt","tag-jodie-beck","tag-joe-jackson","tag-kevin-young","tag-kgb-bar","tag-lakota-sioux","tag-life-in-the-garden","tag-mariko-ohara","tag-michelle-dean","tag-my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation","tag-new-york-botanical-garden","tag-ottessa-moshfegh","tag-pauline-kael","tag-penelope-lively","tag-sharp-the-women-who-made-an-art-of-having-an-opinion","tag-sioux","tag-some-trick","tag-south-dakota","tag-speculative-fiction","tag-sylvan-lake","tag-tom-stoppard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Sharp Women and Humble Turtles<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week, \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 recommends Michelle Dean, Kevin Young, Penelope Lively, and Helen DeWitt.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/25\/staff-picks-sharp-women-and-humble-turtles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Sharp Women and Humble Turtles by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 25, 2018 \u2013 What I like most about Michelle Dean\u2019s book\u00a0Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion\u00a0is its cumulative effect. 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