Roy Miller's Blog, page 237
March 24, 2017
Geoff Dyer on Obsession vs. Addiction, and the Unpredictability of Life
In this wonderful conversation from the podcast vault, Geoff Dyer and Paul Holdengraber travel back to a time before President Trump (summer 2016) to talk art, writing, Kerouac, and more.
Geoff Dyer on obsession…
I’m also a man of obsessions, passions, and hobbies rather than being someone of an addictive bent. I often think that the thing about the obsessive is that you bounce from one obsession to another as opposed to some sort of monorail type of addiction. It always strikes me that it seems rather normal to be interested in lots of different things.
Geoff Dyer on the unpredictability of life…
You’re not sitting there thinking, “Oh, I can have a stroke in the course of this phone call.” But that’s how sudden and unanticipated it is. The shocking thing for me was this idea that a hole could open up in the road as your walking along at any moment. The effect of this was to make me live each day as though it was my last and regard each day as a gift.
Geoff Dyer on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road…
There was this huge hunger on Kerouac’s part to write this great book. I think he managed it, and it’s a great reminder for me that the value of a life can never be assessed chronologically. He might as well go to pieces because with that book he had achieved everything he dreamed of. I’m so surprised by the way that book continues to work its magic on me. Every time I read it I wait for the disillusionment to kick in, and it never does.
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Geoff Dyer on John Berger…
In addition to the books there’s the fact that he’s such a wonderful man… He’s a model of how to have lived as a writer.
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The Tooth Divide: Beauty, Class and the Story of Dentistry
On the high end of the $110 billion-a-year dental industry, there are veneers for $1,000 each, “gum contouring” and more than $1 billion per year spent on tooth whitening products. A dentist tells Otto that members of his profession “once exclusively focused upon fillings and extractions, are nowadays considered providers of beauty.” And thanks to decades of deregulation, allowing medical advertising and then medical credit cards, they are doing well at it — according to a 2010 study, dentists make more per hour than doctors.
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But on the other end of the spectrum, which stretches from a free clinic in Appalachia to the Indian Health Service in remote Alaska to a mobile clinic in Prince George’s County, Md., dental providers struggle to see all of those who cannot access regular care. One-third of white children go without dental care, Otto notes; that number is closer to one-half for black and Latino children. Forty-nine million people live in “dental professional shortage areas,” and even for those who do have benefits under public programs like Medicaid, which ostensibly covered Deamonte Driver and his siblings, it can be difficult to find a provider. The dentist treating Driver’s brother DaShawn, Otto writes, “discontinued treatments because DaShawn squirmed too much in the dental chair.” Medicare doesn’t cover routine dental services. Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps, the charity that operated the temporary clinic in Appalachia, was begun to reach suffering people in developing countries, but wound up seeing Americans. “We have a very serious social problem that we are trying to solve with private means,” a researcher tells Otto.
Yet in a country where the party in power fights tooth and nail against expanding regular health care benefits, what chance do we have of publicly funded dental care? After Deamonte Driver’s death, elected officials battled to add dental benefits to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), only to see the law vetoed by George W. Bush. Barack Obama signed the Schip expansion in February 2009; newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price voted against it.
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Donald Trump, who has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and who nominated Price, makes a cameo in “Teeth,” looming over the Miss U.S.A. pageant as the owner of the Miss Universe Organization, a subtle reminder of which side of the American divide — on teeth as on everything — Trump stands.
The focus on pageant competitors underlines another divide in the dental profession, one between men and women. Though more women are dentists these days, the job of hygienist grew from men’s expectations of women’s appropriate work, and it has always, Otto notes, made dentists nervous when hygienists move to be more independent. Plans to put dental hygienists in public schools, for instance, have been squashed by dentists’ associations. Yet Otto rarely brings up the role of sexism, leaving the reader to ask the unanswered questions — if the dental industry revolves around beauty, who is consuming most of these beautifying treatments? Those in the service professions, it’s reasonable to assume, most of whom are women.
In addition to the fear of competition from hygienists, Otto details dentistry’s fear of socialized medicine and how that fear kept the profession largely privatized — it is likely not an accident that the invention of still rare dental insurance came from a man named Max Schoen, who “earned the distinction of being the first dentist to be called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” Working with the legendary labor leader “Red” Harry Bridges, Schoen helped the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union set up not just a dental plan but a racially integrated prepaid dental practice to provide the care. It could have laid the groundwork for a radically different dental care system from the one we have now. Instead, the decline of union jobs in America has led to a corresponding decline in dental benefits. Like hygienists, Schoen wanted to focus on prevention and earned the ire of conservative dentists.
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Those conservative dentists used their social clout as medical providers to consolidate their own power over their industry, to control hygienists and rebels like Schoen, yet ultimately they wanted their practices to be treated more like optional services bought on the free market than social goods.
Otto does not say such things outright. A veteran journalist, she never strays into polemic even when her material screams for it. She has a knack, though, for an illustrative anecdote that underscores her point about inequality, for example that in the 1800s, poor people would sell their teeth to the rich, whose own had rotted away from the consumption of sweets that the poor could not afford. Other times, she raises a fascinating fact — such as the idea that the extraction of wisdom teeth may be unnecessary, but continues to be performed on patients who can pay — only to move on, leaving the reader wanting more.
The problem of oral health in America is, Otto argues, part of the larger debate about health that is likely to grow larger and nastier in the upcoming months. At the moment, our broader health care system at least tenuously operates on the belief that no one should be denied health care because of ability to pay. But dental care is still associated in our minds with cosmetic practices, with beauty and privilege. It is simultaneously frivolous, a luxury for those who can waste money, and a personal responsibility that one is harshly judged for neglecting. In this context, “Teeth” becomes more than an exploration of a two-tiered system — it is a call for sweeping, radical change.
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March 23, 2017
If Fiction Changes the World, It’s Going to Be YA
Young adult fiction is like totally lit right now. (There, I’ve given away my advanced age in the first sentence.) Actually, as you may have noticed, YA has been popular for quite some time, but recently, it’s gotten even bigger, in part as a result of the way it directly engages with up-to-the-minute social issues. Recently in The New York Times, Alexandra Alter highlighted Angie Thomas’s recent bestseller The Hate U Give—inspired by yet another shooting of an unarmed black American by a police officer—as part of “a cluster of young-adult novels that confront police brutality, racial profiling and the Black Lives Matter movement,” including “several… debut novels from young African-American writers who have turned to fiction as a form of activism, hoping that their stories can help frame and illuminate the persistence of racial injustice for young readers.” (A companion piece highlighted a few of these new books.) In trying times like these, the notion of a novel as a form of activism seems only natural: everyone must respond to the current political, social, and emotional moment in their own way, and for writers, that way is on the page.
But it’s notable that literary fiction has not responded to the new cultural climate (or perhaps just the gross unwrapping of the culture we’ve always had) in quite the same way—or at least with the same alacrity. Literary writers have certainly been responding to the rise of Trump, Black Lives Matter, threats to transgender and other human rights, racism, sexism, et al, but at least so far, this response has primarily taken place in nonfiction. New books like Mychal Denzel Smith’s Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education, and The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, tackle contemporary racial issues head-on, but books about race come out every year. A shiny new crop of feminist manifestos were published around International Women’s Day this year, which is “proof at least,” as Melissa Benn points out, “of the presumed commercial buoyancy of the new feminism.” (The feature of Benn’s dek asks “can books by Jessa Crispin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Catherine Mayer and Jess Phillips harness a wave of popular energy?” but Benn doesn’t exactly answer this question—probably because the answer is no.) Lots of literary voices have written essays about social justice and how we’re meant to go on, of course—and many of those have been published on this very site.
Books take a long time to write and publish. Anecdotal evidence would suggest to me that YA novels take, on average, less time to get from idea to hardcover than literary novels, so that may be a factor in all of this. But there’s also the fact that in literary publishing, there’s a definite ick factor that comes along with being too timely. “First Great Instagram Novel” aside, think about how delicate most contemporary novels are about even mentioning the Internet or iPhones—unless it’s in a 5-minutes-in-the-future way, à la Jennifer Egan—despite the fact that these are major functional realities of all of our lives. This may have something to do with the fact that most of the literary idols worshipped by people old enough to be writing literary fiction never engaged with the Internet. That is, if Nabokov didn’t write it, we should pretend it doesn’t exist—or run the risk of appearing cheap and unworthy.
I’m not saying that there are no works of contemporary fiction engaging with the current cultural and political moment—Moshin Hamid’s Exit West is one, but it’s being largely discussed as predictive, not reactive. Sure, Slate has its Trump Story Project. Yes, there have been a thousand and one articles about which books predicted Trump, and perhaps even more thinly, which books will save us. But that’s not really the same.
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I’m not faulting literary publishing for its resistance to change or its lack of obvious, pointed response to current events. The fear of seeming timely is, in this case, also a fear of seeming didactic, and resistance to this is just a generic convention, an arbitrary rule like any other. YA can tackle social issues head-on, without any fears of seeming didactic or overwrought because as a genre, it doesn’t have the same kind of baggage. Literary fiction, despite all our claims that it opens our hearts to one another, is just not the best genre for engineering social change. Which is truly okay. That is, we shouldn’t blame George Saunders for his novel being not what we need right now. It was the novel he needed to write when he wrote it, and it may be the novel someone needs to read when they read it, and that’s enough. I agree, gratefully, with Josephine Livingstone’s argument that art is still, and should be, “an aesthetic space whose boundaries are not defined by the president.”
But if that’s true, we don’t get to say that art will save us. I’m not sure how much of YA could or should be classified as Art (probably some but not all, as in all genres), but most of these socially-conscious novels aren’t subversive or satirical, as the literary novels that will no doubt emerge are likely to be—instead, they’re representative. Alter quotes Jay Coles, whose novel Tyler Johnson Was Here was written in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, saying “For me, specifically for black teenagers, it’s a reflection of what we’re all facing right now.” These books may be about activism in some cases, but more importantly, they are actions in themselves. They show how it is, for different kinds of young people, right now, and that’s what is going to make a difference.
Young adults are uniquely situated to marshall in the future—not least because they actually are the future. Here are three things to know about teenagers: 1. Teenagers read more than adults. 2. Teenagers—particularly teenage girls—are living at the cutting edge of the English language. 3. Teenagers care about politics, and they are generally highly progressive and open to change.
So, yes: it’s the teenagers who are going to save us. And by extension, it’s also the adults who are writing for and representing them. I’d argue that while diverse books and authors are necessary in every field, seeing yourself in the media you consume is most crucial when you’re young. Not unrelated, it’s when you’re young that you are most flexible, most willing to internalize truths that may be outside your daily ken. And happily, Black Lives Matter isn’t the only timely social issue being directly explored in YA—there has also been a surge in novels featuring transgender protagonists (some written by trans authors), and novels about activism in general. For instance, Leader of the Resistance Teen Vogue just published an excerpt of Shadowhouse Fall, whose author, Daniel José Older, described it as “explicitly a protest novel in the sense that the characters hit the streets protesting against violence and the different forms that it appears in in their lives.” I wonder if a literary author would admit to as much.
There’s also this: YA writers tend to be younger, so it’s easier for them to represent youth accurately. The YA community is very insular and protective. I once asked a close friend—who happens to be a successful YA novelist—why major literary outlets didn’t invest more resources in covering YA, to scoop up its major readership—teenagers may not have as much expendable income as adult readers (in general), but in a world where clicks are a commodity, they have lots of purchasing power. But it wouldn’t work, she told me. YA readers don’t trust major outlets. They trust each other. “Maybe if the reviews were written by a teenager,” she shrugged. This seems to me to be important: there’s a real conversation happening among YA readers, and it’s about social justice and action, and it’s a conversation that has been built from the ground up. The community around YA novels is much more closely-knit than the one around literary fiction, or even poetry. So whether in explicit protest novels, fiction as resistance, or simply by loudly representing underrepresented voices, it’s YA that has the best chance to jump on that “wave of popular energy” and lead us all to a better world. Or at least, I hope so.
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Paperback Row – The New York Times
Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
RIGHTFUL HERITAGE: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America, by Douglas Brinkley. (Harper Perennial, $19.99.) While Roosevelt is most often associated with saving the economy, restructuring the social contract and waging war, he was also greatly concerned with the welfare of the country’s natural resources. Brinkley outlines how the president intentionally interwove economic and environmental interests, often to a mixed effect.
NOT ALL BASTARDS ARE FROM VIENNA, by Andrea Molesini. Translated by Antony Shugaar and Patrick Creagh. (Grove, $16.) Set in Italy during World War I, Molesini’s novel follows the residents of German-requisitioned Villa Spada, in a small town north of Venice. Our reviewer, Katherine A. Powers, called the novel “wonderfully alive — often terribly so — as a wartime adventure and story of youth arriving at manhood.”
DOUBLE CUP LOVE: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China, by Eddie Huang. (Spiegel & Grau, $17.) In his earlier memoir, “Fresh Off the Boat,” Huang, a chef, drew parallels between African-American and Chinese culture. “Double Cup Love” takes place largely in mainland China as Huang researches cuisine and grapples with his plans to propose to his white American girlfriend, raising questions about identity and authenticity.
THE ATOMIC WEIGHT OF LOVE, by Elizabeth J. Church. (Algonquin, $15.95.) In the early 1940s, Meridian Wallace is an eager biology student, but when she falls in love with a professor 20 years her senior, she sets aside her aspirations, living in Los Alamos while her husband works on the bomb. Years later, she is trying to keep up her scientific ambition by studying a community of crows. But when she encounters a second passion — a Vietnam War veteran working as a geologist — she finds an opportunity to make a new set of choices.
STRANGE GODS: A Secular History of Conversion, by Susan Jacoby. (Vintage, $17.) Over half of Americans will switch religions as adults, according to Jacoby. Though many prevailing conversion accounts center on a spiritual awakening or reckoning, she investigates the material reasons for change — among them a desire to improve one’s socioeconomic standing or to abandon a ruinous path in a quest for self-preservation.
I’M GLAD ABOUT YOU, by Theresa Rebeck. (Putnam, $16.) Fate brings together and drives apart two former high school sweethearts in the Midwest: Alison is pursuing an acting career in New York, while Kyle, a married pediatrician, settles into suburban life. The novel “strikes a buzzworthy balance between down-home charm and Hollywood glitter,” Elisabeth Egan said in the Book Review.
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Posters to reveal entire text of book about fighting tyranny | Books
In what is believed to be an industry first, the entire text of a book billed as “a practical guide to resisting the rise of totalitarianism” is to be fly-posted along an east London street next week.
US historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, out next week, is to be reproduced chapter by chapter in a series of 20 eye-catching posters pasted along Leonard Street, near Silicon Roundabout. The posters, designed by Vintage creative director Suzanne Dean and her team with students at Kingston University, will appear in sequence on Monday along the road, which is at the heart of the capital’s creative community.
Describing the book as “an attempt to distil what I have learned about the 20th century into a guide for action today”, the Yale professor said: “I can’t think of anything like this that has been done with anyone’s work before.”
He added that it was doubtful such a distillation would have been possible with his previous works, which include Bloodlands and Black Earth, both of which come in at over 400 pages, compared with On Tyranny’s 130.
In the book, the professor, who specialises in European history and the Holocaust, mixes modern history with practical lessons on how to resist tyranny. It was prompted, he said, by the shock and sense of helplessness felt by many over recent political developments in the US and UK. Utilising examples of resistance against Hitler and Stalin, each chapter includes acts of defiance readers can integrate into their daily life.
Snyder intended the book be used as “a manifesto and manual” in the fight against rising populism on both sides of the Atlantic, a situation he described as “urgent”.
Poster four in the Timothy Snyder On Tyranny campaign.
“I will be more than happy if the posters themselves convey its message,” he added. “We have become unused to the stakes being high, but they are: those who control the executive branch of the US government want a regime change in my country, and the basic sense of freedom that many of us have come to take for granted in the west is under threat.”
William Smith, creative manager at Snyder’s publisher Vintage, said: “We believe it’s the first time anyone has done this to launch a book.” He said On Tyranny was a book that would get word-of-mouth recommendation, but “you need to get that word-of-mouth going”.
The east London street was chosen because “every other person around there uses Instagram and Twitter”, Smith said. It is expected that photographs of the eye-catching designs – modelled on 1930s propaganda – will be shared on social media.
Though Snyder praised the campaign, he admitted it took time for him to understand how it would work. “Any publication means the transformation of ideas into an object,” he explained. Describing the posters as “in effect a second kind of publication of the book” and its transformation from 20 lessons about tyranny into 20 original pieces of art, he said: “I didn’t grasp that until I saw the wonderful posters. This is not so much the promotion of the book as another realisation of it, free of charge in the public space.”
Was he worried when he didn’t understand it? No, he said: “Marx said that the point is not to understand the world but to change it.”
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Ron Rash: How I Write
Credit: Ashley Jones
Ron Rash grew up in southern Appalachia, and his work remains steeped in the region. It’s both where he lives and what he writes about, so much so that the Philadelphia Inquirer called him “the Appalachian Shakespeare.” But his beautiful, rich, lyrical writing resonates with readers way beyond any specific geographical region.
A gifted storyteller, Rash is a prolific writer, publishing seven novels (including 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist Serena), six short story collections, and four books of poetry to date.
His most recent novel, The Risen, unfolds using two alternating time periods: one set in present day and another told in flashbacks from decades earlier. The result is a suspenseful, skillfully woven narrative about two brothers, a young woman, and an unsolved murder.
The alternating timeline
That was the biggest challenge of the book. I hoped that with each revelation of the past, the present became more complex, and that initial views of the reader are gradually changed with each flashback. It’s critical to the structure to make sure you don’t dwell in either place. You have to keep tension and interest.
Deciding genre
I always start with an image in my mind. With The Risen, it was a mound of leaves by a creek – so I knew there would be a body there. The novel was discovering the story behind that image. Sometimes the image leads to a poem, or a short story, or a novel. Sometimes I’ve written a poem that was good, but the story demanded more, so I’d write a short story. Twice, I knew there was even more that I wanted to talk about, and it turned into a novel.
Finding universal settings
I think anybody can do that. One of my favorite writers is Richard Price, who writes about New York City. His work tends to be very local, but he finds the universal in the particular.
When poets attempt prose
They should realize they’ve got an advantage by writing and reading poetry. Because of that, they should be able to write at a high level. Such an important part of a novel is the ability to tell a story, so I think it’s easier for narrative poets than lyrical poets. Hemingway, Joyce, and Faulkner all started out as poets. The best thing I could have done was start as a poet.
When prose writers attempt poetry
They already know how to be lucid. They know they are communicating to another human being, and that’s an advantage when making the transition to start writing poetry. Steeping oneself in poetry is the best way to learn.
Writing dark subjects
When there is violence in my work, the goal is not to titillate but to reveal character. It reveals the mask of that person, and we see who he or she really is when that mask is dropped. I see almost all of my characters as doing the best they can with what they’ve been dealt. I’m not a cynical or nihilistic writer.
Writing routine
I go by hours per day. For about 35 years, I’ve put in four to six hours per day. On weekends, I cut back a little. When I’m working on a first draft, I’ve gone 10 hours a day. Initially, I use legal pads and then type it on the computer. But I never do edits on the computer. I print out the pages and mark them up by hand.
Allison Futterman is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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Who Will Survive the EVIL EIGHT in Arch Villain Madness – Vote Here!
After a grueling round of 16 (knocking out evildoers such as Bills Sikes, Joffrey Baratheon, Amy Dunne and The Queen of Hearts), we’re down to the final eight—The EVIL EIGHT. And now it’s your turn to help us decide who moves on to the Fatal Four.
Welcome (or welcome back) to the Writer’s Digest Arch Villain Madness of Famous Book Bad Guys. We want to know: Who is the Best Book Villain of All-Time? Who will move on? That’s up to you. Voting starts today here on the blog, on Facebook and on Twitter, and lasts until 9 a.m on Monday, March 27. From there, the winner of each match-up will advance to the next round which will be released the following Thursday.
Please share far and wide so we can get as many votes as possible, and make your voice heard by simply clicking on the book cover below of the villains you want to see move on to the next round.
It’s time for Arch Villain Madness! Who’s the #BestBookVillain? We’re about to find out. Vote now!
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Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
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A Thriller Tracks the Aftermath of a Swedish School Shooting
QUICKSAND
By Malin Persson Giolito
Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles
501 pp. Other Press. $25.95.
“Quicksand” is a novel that begins like a parlor game gone awry: On its first page, a little cross-section of contemporary Swedish society — a right-on homeroom teacher, a Ugandan foster child, a cashmere-clad blonde, a son of Middle Eastern immigrants — lies on the floor, spattered with blood, as if darkly satirizing the country’s self-image of civilized multiculturalism. A few pages later, 18-year-old Maria Norberg is on trial for her involvement in the school shooting instigated by her boyfriend, Sebastian. The extent of her complicity remains unclear, but Sebastian, the son of a billionaire described as Sweden’s richest man, died at the scene, leaving Maria as the sole focus of the media’s frothing fever dream about the case. (Bear in mind that this is Scandinavia, where such massacres are not the increasingly common occurrence they’ve become in the United States.) She is now a totemic hate figure, with the press gleefully encouraging the spoiled-brat view of her shared by her guards in jail, “a chick who’s never even been camping without a down pillow and the latest-generation phone.”
The first of Malin Persson Giolito’s four novels to be translated into English, “Quicksand” is also the first to be told from the perspective of a defendant rather than a lawyer. Her earlier books are not all courtroom dramas, though they do draw on her years of experience working for a major law firm. What we’re reading here is not so much Maria’s unfiltered thoughts as her speech to an imaginary audience: Mostly we listen in as she tries to make sense of what happened, but she occasionally addresses us directly, speculating as to what assumptions we might make about her and what comfy delusions we may be harboring about ourselves. The voice is uneven, unpredictable in a way that feels characteristic of a teenager — Maria is scathing in her dissection of other people’s clothes, habits and pretensions, yet she also sometimes slips into sentimental reveries about her 5-year-old sister: “I dream that she places her little hand, light as a birch leaf, on my arm, looks at me, and asks why.”
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Malin Persson GiolitoCredit
Viktor Fremling
Though often numb after so many months of isolation and interrogation, Maria remains sensitive to the nuances of performance required of her and everyone else, both in daily life and in court. We don’t usually hear her addressed as Maria, except by the prosecutor: She goes by the younger-sounding “Maja,” and when asked on the stand where she lives, instead of naming her upscale neighborhood, Djursholm, she must simply say, “With my mom and dad and little sister.” She notes that her mother, in a new blouse for the hearing, is “dressed up as a mom who had done everything right, a mom who couldn’t be blamed for anything,” while her expensive lawyers evidently think they’re “part of an American TV show where you eat Chinese food from takeout cartons in an I’m-so-busy-and-important sort of way.” It’s a P.R. disaster (in the vein of Amanda Knox’s infamous cartwheel or yoga stretch) when, asked by a journalist shortly after the killings how she’s doing, she reflexively says, “Fine, thanks.”
The novel is structured as a courtroom procedural, yet it clearly has ambitions beyond that, addressing Sweden’s underlying economic and racial tensions. Characters often conform to social as well as narrative type, and we can’t ignore the connections between the two: There’s Sebastian the rich, troubled boy with daddy issues and a drug problem; Samir Said, the gifted student living in a bad neighborhood who irons his jeans and nurses his resentments; Maja’s parents, with their knife rack and wine cooler, and their diplomas displayed in the guest bathroom of their McMansion, who can’t conceal their delight when Maja begins dating the billionaire’s son.
The facts of the case are revealed gradually, and along the way Maja continually dwells on the kinds of questions that are, as her celebrity lawyer puts it, “not judicially relevant” — such as why she and Sebastian did what they did. One answer the novel offers is that we shouldn’t be so interested either way. People who commit horrific crimes usually have the same more or less banal feelings and motivations as anyone else: They couldn’t meet their needs or control their anger; they were loved too little or indulged too much. (You could say that this very ordinariness helps explain why mass shootings occur more frequently in countries with laxer gun laws.) This seems both true and intriguing, but it does raise the question of why Persson Giolito spends so long on the weakest sections of her story, in which Maja recalls a series of lurid parties, tearful breakups and tense family dinners, and explores the ins and outs of Sebastian’s dime-store psychology.
In the end, the novel’s emotional logic keeps it on a fairly conventional path, but it nonetheless points to issues beyond its own frame. The best-known mass killing in the Nordic region is still that perpetrated by Anders Breivik, who left behind copious documentation of his white-supremacist ideology. Sebastian’s motives seem far smaller, more personal, but then there’s the scene in which he humiliates Samir in front of friends, suggesting Samir must be lying about his parents’ original professions: “How is it that all the immigrants who come here and start working as metro drivers and maids,” he asks, “are really doctors and civil engineers and nuclear physicists back in their home countries? . . . Did anyone work as a grocery store cashier in Syria or walk around parks in Iran picking up empty bottles?” While Sebastian’s cruel dad undermines him, Maja’s account makes clear that everyone and everything else around him confirms his importance and superiority. It’s a commonplace by now that if someone of Middle Eastern extraction commits a violent crime, the press is quick to attribute it to fanaticism, to a violent ideology. When a white person is responsible for a shooting, there tends to be more interest in his emotions, his personal history. Here, Persson Giolito implies that rich white people’s feelings may have their ideological underpinnings too.
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‘The greatest literary editor there has ever been’ – John Banville remembers Robert Silvers | Books
Robert Silvers was one of the most significant cultural figures of our time. This will seem a large claim to make about the editor of a twice-monthly literary magazine, but then the New York Review of Books – or “the paper”, as Silvers always called it – was more than your usual lit mag. There had been great journals before it, of course, notably the Times Literary Supplement and the Paris Review – which Silvers edited for a time. But the NYRB was a unique phenomenon: unapologetically intellectual, politically radical, distinctive in its high-toned New York fashion and wholly committed to civilised values. And from the outset Silvers was its heart and, more importantly, its brain.
He was surely the greatest literary editor there has ever been – brilliant, autocratic, endlessly curious and possessed of an extraordinary fund of knowledge about a vast range of subjects. True, he was not always easy to deal with, but when has the best ever been easy? His gift for matching books to reviewers was uncanny; the FedEx package would arrive, containing a volume I could not imagine wanting to read, much less review. Yet a few weeks later I would find myself writing three or four thousand enthusiastic words on it, and wondering why I had not taken notice of this author, or that subject, before.
How did he do it? He just knew, by a kind of sympathetic magic, that the unlikeliest-seeming book would be to a reviewer’s taste. He or she would not know it until one of Bob’s typed notes – his handwriting was terrible – issued a courtly invitation to “see if something might be done” on yet another weighty biography of Kafka, or a satisfyingly nasty late novel by Kingsley Amis.
He was born and brought up in New York and its environs, and was entirely a product of the exciting and intellectually stimulating east coast milieu. The NYRB began life in 1963, during a newspaper printers’ strike in the city. In at the birth with Silvers were editors Barbara Epstein and her husband Jason Epstein, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and the poet Robert Lowell, and the publisher A Whitney Ellsworth. The first issue, on 1 February 1963, was astonishing, with pieces by WH Auden, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and many others, all of whom wrote essay-length reviews for no fee. Autres temps, autre moeurs …
Silvers seemed to work all hours of the day, and all days of the week, including holidays – yes, I had a Christmas morning call from him, asking if I would care to reply to a letter from an academic in Nebraska commenting adversely on one of my pieces. His enthusiasm for literature and ideas – the NYRB was more concerned with the life of the mind than it was with the world of books – stamped itself on every page he published. At this perilous time, political and cultural, for America and the west in general, his death is our great loss. The king is dead; long live “the paper”.
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How Many Books Will You Read Before You Die?
There are millions of books in the world (and almost definitely hundreds of millions—last they checked, Google had the count at 129,864,880, and that was seven years ago). The rabid and/or competitive readers among you will now be asking yourselves: yes, yes, now how will I read them all?
Well, you won’t.
Okay, so we all accept that mortality is bearing down on us—though it should be said that one of the mental tricks that makes it possible for us to exist as mortal beings without going completely insane is that we actually experience time as infinite, even though we know it isn’t. That is, barring an execution date or a known terminal illness, we wake up every morning assuming we’ll also wake up the next morning, until one morning we don’t—and on that morning, we don’t know it. Because we’re dead. So if we accept that the world we live in is a subjective construct made up of our perceptions, we’re actually all immortal—we live forever within the context of reality we’ve created for ourselves, because when we die, so does that reality. Doesn’t that make all this a little better?
No, it does not. My to-read list is tantalizingly endless, and I often find myself thinking about the fact that my reading time/life is finite when I’m trying to get through a book that I know I should like but is boring (or annoying) me. As Hari Kunzru put it recently in the New York Times Book Review: “I used to force myself to finish everything I started, which I think is quite good discipline when you’re young, but once you’ve established your taste, and the penny drops that there are only a certain number of books you’ll get to read before you die, reading bad ones becomes almost nauseating.”
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Consider this a dropping of the penny, for any of you who were still clutching it.
But how many more books will you get to read? It depends, of course, on how you’re counting, but for our purposes here, it’s down to two primary factors.
The first factor is obvious: how long will you live? To estimate the date of all of our deaths, I used the Social Security Life Expectancy Calculator, despite the fact that this is essentially an online quiz where at the end the government tells you when you’re going to die. Fun! NB: I have rounded the data up or down where appropriate. Don’t worry—you probably wouldn’t even have noticed those extra months of life anyway.
The second factor is: how quickly do you read? Or perhaps more accurately, how many books do you get through per year? According to the Pew Research Center, the average American reads 12 books per year—but knowing, as I do, the approximate makeup of the people who are likely to be looking at this space right now, I’ve made “Average” the low end of the range below. “Voracious” here indicates 50 books read per year, or a little less than one per week (“voracious” readers have been known to undertake projects like Infinite Jest or similar), and “super” indicates 80. Super-super readers like Sarah Weinman will just have to make their own calculations.
So with these two factors in mind, you can now amplify your nausea—and honestly, the more you read, the more nauseated your number is likely to make you—by checking the table below and finding out exactly how many books you’ll (probably) read before you (probably) die. Now… isn’t this a fun game?
*
25 and female: 86 (61 years left)
Average reader: 732
Voracious reader: 3,050
Super reader: 4,880
25 and male: 82 (57 years left)
Average reader: 684
Voracious reader: 2,850
Super reader: 4,560
30 and female: 86 (56 years left)
Average reader: 672
Voracious reader: 2,800
Super reader: 4,480
30 and male: 82 (52 years left)
Average reader: 624
Voracious reader: 2,600
Super reader: 4,160
35 and female: 86 (51 years left)
Average reader: 612
Voracious reader: 2,550
Super reader: 4,080
35 and male: 82 (47 years left)
Average reader: 564
Voracious reader: 2,350
Super reader: 3,670
40 and female: 85.5 (45.5 years left)
Average reader: 546
Voracious reader: 2,275
Super reader: 3,640
40 and male: 82 (42 years left)
Average reader: 504
Voracious reader: 2,100
Super reader: 3,260
45 and female: 85.5 (40.5 years left)
Average reader: 486
Voracious reader: 2,025
Super reader: 3,240
45 and male: 82 (37 years left)
Average reader: 444
Voracious reader: 1,850
Super reader: 2,960
50 and female: 85.5 (35.5 years left)
Average reader: 426
Voracious reader: 1,775
Super reader: 2,840
50 and male: 82 (32 years left)
Average reader: 384
Voracious reader: 1,600
Super reader: 2,560
55 and female: 86 (31 years left)
Average reader: 372
Voracious reader: 1,550
Super reader: 2,480
55 and male: 83 (28 years left)
Average reader: 336
Voracious reader: 1,400
Super reader: 2,240
60 and female: 86 (26 years left)
Average reader: 312
Voracious reader: 1,300
Super reader: 2,080
60 and male: 83 (23 years left)
Average reader: 276
Voracious reader: 1,150
Super reader: 1,840
65 and female: 87 (22 years left)
Average reader: 264
Voracious reader: 1,100
Super reader: 1,760
65 and male: 84 (19 years left)
Average reader: 228
Voracious reader: 950
Super reader: 1,520
70 and female: 87.5 (17.5 years left)
Average reader: 210
Voracious reader: 875
Super reader: 1,400
70 and male: 85 (15 years left)
Average reader: 180
Voracious reader: 750
Super reader: 1,200
75 and female: 89 (14 years left)
Average reader: 168
Voracious reader: 700
Super reader: 1,120
75 and male: 87 (12 years left)
Average reader: 144
Voracious reader: 600
Super reader: 960
80 and female: 90 (10 years left)
Average reader: 120
Voracious reader: 500
Super reader: 800
80 and male: 89 (9 years left)
Average reader: 108
Voracious reader: 450
Super reader: 720
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