The Paris Review's Blog, page 105

Oranges

In her column Corpus, Jordan Kisner examines the stories our bodies tell.

Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (detail), 1992–97, orange, banana, grapefruit, and lemon skins, thread, buttons, zippers, needles, wax, sinew, string, snaps, and hooks, 295 parts, dimensions variable. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with funds contributed by the Dietrich Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, 1998. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Graydon Wood.

When I undertook this column, I had the notion that I would be writing about, I don’t know, heredity. Like: I went to a healing circle in south Brooklyn. After a few days of being asked to think about the particular ways we might need to be healed, as well as the particular ways we might offer healing to other people, we were taken into a small, dark room in groups of four or five and told to sit on stools and close our eyes. The two women leading the healing circle told us they would be drawing initiatory symbols in the air over our heads and invoking various energies on our behalf. They instructed us to keep our eyes closed and to anticipate that we might receive a vision of a spirit that would guide us in this healing journey. I was there because I was curious about the nature of the healing these women claimed to invoke, but I was resistant to the endeavor. I did not want my vibrational frequencies altered. I did not want a spirit guide.

I was feeling fraudulent and confused and a little guilty for being an unbeliever in this room of aspiring healers, and so I was startled when—sitting there in the dark with my eyes closed, confused and fraudulent, dimly aware of these two women waving their hands in the air around me—I had a sense suddenly that my grandmother (my father’s mother, Mardell) was near my left shoulder and my great-grandmother (my mother’s paternal grandmother and namesake, Carmen) was at my right.

They’ve both been dead for more than fifteen years, and I hadn’t thought about them for a while—nor had I ever really thought about them together. I’d never spent any time with them together, and they weren’t at all alike. Their arrival as a pair in my imagination was a surprise. In the moment, I half wondered whether this meant they needed some kind of healing or attention from me, posthumously—or, conversely, whether I needed some kind of healing that had to do with them.

This would not have occurred to me but for the subject of the convening that had brought me to this little windowless room. The teachers of this particular class talked about practicing their healing on the dead, and after they said it a few times I tentatively raised my hand. “Why would you… need to heal the dead,” I asked. They told me that the dead can remain in need of spiritual healing in the same way the living do. Not everyone is healed by the time they go. One of the teachers suggested that when we heal ourselves, we heal our ancestors, too.

I did not become a healer in the manner in which the leaders of the circle had intended, nor did I seem to begin any overt healing journey that day. But over time, and as I began this column, I thought I might write about these two grandmothers on my shoulders so that I could think more about how a body, my body, is composed of many others: how it holds the traits and quirks and traumas of all the bodies from which it is descended and many of those it touches, how the imprints of two such different and unconnected women could be carried together in a body like mine, and how that is a great freakish mystery of time and space that we all walk around with every day, all the grandmothers waiting for us to notice them on our shoulders.

But today, I am sitting here eating fruit—an orange from my mother’s orange tree—and looking at photos of the artist Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit, which is the peels and skins of nearly three hundred pieces of fruit Leonard ate over the course of a few years in the early nineties. “I didn’t think of this as making art at all,” Leonard wrote of the fruit. The finished piece is a contemporary vanitas, but the act of its creation was more of a grief compulsion. Her friend David Wojnarowicz, who was an artist, photographer, writer, and AIDS activist, had died of AIDS, as he knew he would, at thirty-seven, and Leonard was bereft. More than a hundred thousand Americans had died of AIDS by then, and thousands more would die—are still dying. And Leonard was not going to die. She was going to live—is still living—a full life as an artist, a gift Wojnarowicz was denied.

She started sewing fruit. After she ate a banana or an orange or a grapefruit, she would take the skins and stitch them back together with thread or wire. She had gotten this idea from Wojnarowicz’s work—he used thread in his art, and had once broken a loaf of bread in half and then stitched it back together with red embroidery floss. She would eat an orange and then sew it back together, empty but reassembled. The effect wasn’t to make the fruits seamless or to fool an observer into thinking they were still whole; instead, she highlighted the suture. She installed zippers and buttons. She used neon-colored thread. She braided extra embroidery floss so it dangled from the pedicel of a lemon like a tail. Over months, these little decomposing sculptures accrued along her windowsills and on the floor of her studio. “Like memory, these skins are not the substance itself, but a form reminiscent of the original,” she wrote. Eventually, in 1995, she exhibited them in her Manhattan studio. The Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired the fruit, all 295 pieces, in 1998.

I happened to see Strange Fruit a few years ago when the Whitney Museum of American Art put on a Leonard retrospective. The fruit was laid out in a white box of a gallery ensconced in the middle of the exhibition, stretching into the room as if toward a horizon. The pieces looked like gravestones, or like bodies. It was all mostly mummified—after working with a conservator to see whether the skins could be preserved in their decay, Leonard decided to just let them be.

The fruit on display at the Whitney (carefully stored at the Philadelphia Museum of Art most of the time) is still breaking down. “They are fading and cracking and turning to dust as I write this,” Leonard wrote in the late nineties. “It’s an absurd act of repair.” Leonard’s stitching doesn’t change the ultimate end of these fruits—they’ll go exactly the same way as the orange peel I threw in the trash just now. She just delays and extends that process, and makes us look at it. The conservator, in one of his letters to Leonard, told her, “Decay is always the same, and at one point, it will all be powder.”

It may seem strange after a year of mass death to be revisiting art about death, but in the past season, I have wanted to look at art that constitutes absurd acts of repair. I want gestures of preserving what is seen as disposable, and reassembling what will never be whole again. I am drawn to art that did not begin as art, but as a refusal to let go of what must go. After the last year, I want to remember what art or writing can do in the face of grief or absence, the ways this practice can be a form of retrieval or reincarnation or mending.

When I first saw it, Strange Fruit struck me as a show of lineage—a monument to Wojnarowicz and the way he lives in Leonard, who is entering her sixties now, and in her work. Because of how many peels and skins there are, the multiplicity of the missing fruits, it also functions like a monument to the many other unnamed beloveds lost to that epidemic, people for whom Wojnarowicz fought when he was alive. This is chosen inheritance—or maybe not, if you think of loving and grieving someone as a phenomenon rather than a choice. It is heredity, or that which stays with you and inside you whether you want it to or not.

From my grandmother Mardell I inherited a sweet tooth and a tendency, as yet unmanifested, toward osteoporosis. From my great-grandmother Carmen I inherited—through my mother, I think—an enthusiasm for cooking, gardening, and citrus. From Leonard, maybe, I have acquired a way of looking at fruit and disappearance and the continued presence of what seems gone. When you eat an orange, it stays in your body for a day or two. It transforms from an orange into pulp into a series of fibers, sugars, and minerals, and then it is mostly gone. Except that it is not quite gone. The vitamin C, the potassium, the calcium embed in your bones and strengthen them against decay or destruction. This fruit, still inside you, helps your body heal itself.

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and her work appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, n+1, Pitchfork, and others. She is also the creator of the Lit Hub podcast Thresholds.

The Review’s Review: Secrets, Sebald, and Simmering Heat

Still from Alicia Scherson’s Il Futuro, 2013. Courtesy of Strand Releasing.

A film I often come back to and that I think everyone should see is Il Futuro (2013), by the Chilean director Alicia Scherson. It’s based on A Little Lumpen Novelita, one of my favorite novels by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by New Directions in 2014. The book is about Bianca, orphaned in her teens by a car crash, and the life of crime she and her brother begin to lead soon after. Starring Manuela Martelli and the late Rutger Hauer, Scherson’s film conveys Bianca’s new sense of reality in scenes of dark, destabilizing eroticism, and sometimes warmth and levity. Scherson’s film adaptation of Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich is also in the works, titled 1989. —Amina Cain 

Peter Atkins risks a big overpromise in the short introduction to the “short introduction” to The Laws of Thermodynamics—understand these laws and “you will know what drives the universe.” Ever the seeker, I dived into this slim orange book with high expectations and found an unexpected treatise on language. Atkins writes that “science … takes terms with an everyday meaning and sharpens them—some would say, hijacks them—so that they take on an exact and unambiguous meaning.” System, surroundings, open, close, heat, spontaneous, tendency all became rich and weighty, and in the heady way of reading a Wallace Stevens poem, paragraphs on steam engines and combustion started to feel like metaphors for everything and nothing—or, probably, for whatever drives the universe. —Lauren Kane

FOTOMATIC, a post-punk trio out of Toulouse, France, has been obsessing me for the better part of a month. Released this past June, their 7″ featuring “Bipolarity” is frenetic yet polished. It’s heaven for hotheaded listeners like me. On the B-side, FOTOMATIC covers “Take a Ride,” by the Parisian all-girl punk band Les Lou’s, whose sole extant recording of it is the one used in the 1979 cult film La Brune et Moi. The story goes that the film screened for a week on the Left Bank and then receded into obscurity for a few decades. We have FOTOMATIC to thank for digging it up. —Jay Graham

I just finished Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy. I’d never read any Sybille Bedford before and now feel I have to read everything she’s ever written. A Legacy is the strangest composition, a kind of memoir of the lives of her parents before she was born, but really a novel about families and their secrets and the way a secret keeps on operating in a family over time. Also, her dialogue is some of the best novelistic dialogue I’ve read. —Adam Thirlwell 

 

Still from Fradique’s Air Conditioner, 2020. © Geração 80. Courtesy of MUBI.

 

Temperatures are high in Luanda, Angola’s capital, and air conditioners are mysteriously falling from apartment windows. From this straightforward premise, Angolan director Fradique creates Air Conditioner, which follows Matacedo, a security guard, on a quest to repair his awful boss’s air-conditioning unit. With pleasurably meandering shots of everyday life in Luanda and a borderline surreal scene set in an electronics repair shop, Air Conditioner isn’t shy about critiquing the class divide—as a T-shirt shown in one of the film’s opening series of stills declares, ART IS RESISTANCE. —Rhian Sasseen

Pandemic trauma has presented differently in each of us. Standing in line at a grocery store, I noticed the words “September 2021” on the cover of The Atlantic, with its story on a young man killed in the 9/11 attacks, and thought, The magazines here are a whole year out of date? Of course, it was my own mind that had slipped. Jennifer Senior’s piece is both a kind of stunning synecdoche and a timely exploration of how grief has as many variants as it has hosts, mutating until we are each alone in our memory of even the most common tragedy. —Julia Berick

A new album by Torres—stage name of the singer-songwriter and indie rock powerhouse Mackenzie Scott—is just what the world needs right now. Thirstier, her fifth, is unrelenting in its intensity and unafraid to grip live emotional wires, driven, as all Scott’s music is, to get at the truth about love and connection. Everywhere I look, there’s something to be scared of; thank you, Torres, for feeling all the feels I can’t afford to. —Craig Morgan Teicher

Once, in a letter to his friend Marie, W. G. Sebald enclosed a photo of his sister Gertrud and his friend Sepp Willers. The picture had been taken six months before Sebald was born. Sebald told Marie, “It’s outrageous… they clearly don’t miss me.” “Dear Max,” I thought as I read the first biography of Sebald, Carole Angier’s forthcoming Speak, Silence, and pictured that melancholy white mustache, “we all miss you terribly.” —Robin Jones

 

W. G. Sebald. Photo: © Jerry Bauer. Courtesy of New Directions.

 

Read Amina Cain’s interview with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, published earlier this week on the Daily.

The Heart of the Trouble

Gwendoline Riley. Photo: Adrian Lourie / Writer Pictures. Courtesy of Granta Books.

In 2007 Gwendoline Riley, then age twenty-eight and already the author of three acclaimed novels, described her writing life as lacking “any tremendous triumph or romance—I feel like I’m just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion.”

As literary aspirations go, it sounds modest. And by superficial measures, Riley’s novels are unambitious: light on conventional plotting, narrow in scope, and told from the perspectives of women close to herself in age and background. Riley has tried using the third person, she said in 2012, but it “always sounds so false.” As for adopting a male point of view: “Ugh, men’s brains! That vipers’ nest? No.” Her protagonists are writers, too, encouraging the frequent assumption that she draws directly from life. But to regard Riley’s fiction as titivated memoir is to misperceive what beguiles her readers: not barely mediated personal experience but its sedulous transmutation by a strange, rare talent. As Vivian Gornick wrote after reading the letters of Jean Rhys, a novelist with whom Riley shares some kinship: “The letters are the life, and the novels—there’s no mistaking it—are the magic performed on the life.”

Nor does Riley write autofiction, if authors in that contentious category aim to replicate the texture of life by dispensing with, in Rachel Cusk’s now famous words, the “fake and embarrassing” architecture of novels. When Riley makes you squirm with recognition, it’s not because of any explicit overlap between author and protagonist or winking acknowledgment of the writing process. Her uncannily observed female character studies, with their bracing emotional clarity, ruthlessly crafted scenes, and consummate use of the telling detail, belong instead to a certain feminist-existentialist tradition of realism. Literary forerunners to Riley’s work include Rhys’s interwar novels of female alienation, as well as Margaret Drabble’s groundbreaking early novels, in which intellectual young women grapple with the hazards and potentials of their desires, thus dramatizing, as the writer Jennifer Schaffer aptly put it, “a fighting urge to disturb the mold of one’s life, as it sets.” Yet what sets Riley apart from even these noble antecedents is her unshrinking determination to contemplate the unseemly, the discordant, and the unsolvable, without ever straying into despair or the maudlin.

Riley, who was born in London and grew up in Merseyside, published her Betty Trask Award–winning debut, Cold Water, in 2002, when she was twenty-two. Given her age, not to mention the gorgeous nouvelle vague–ish author photo adorning advance copies, some preconceived skepticism about the novel’s merit might have been forgivable. Forgivable, but unwarranted, because Cold Water is an understated classic. Our heroine in holey All Stars and a dress over jeans is twenty-year-old Carmel McKisco, a barmaid of a “downbeat disposition” who works in a low-lit Manchester dive, dreams of moving to Cornwall, and nurses an obsession with a failed musician whose band she loved when she was fourteen. Charting Carmel’s poetic musings and alcohol-fueled gadding about, this wistful little ballad of a novel captures with great verve and originality the bittersweet exhilaration of youth, with its various diverting limerences that, in the big picture, shouldn’t matter. “But, you see,” Carmel explains,

the point is, I’m not in the big picture. I’m in Manchester, and I can’t afford to leave just yet … For now I walk around through the scraping wind, through puddles full of brick dust, often with my feet so cold and sodden; the flesh of my toes like soaked cotton wadding spun round the bones.

In Cold Water, rain-bleared Manchester is seen through an artist’s eye. The lights in Piccadilly Gardens cast “an eerie medical glow against the smudge-grey sky.” Some “ragged carnations the color of evaporated milk and tongue” remind Carmel “of the old recipe cards in the back of a kitchen draw at my mum’s.” This light-handed imbrication of visual and emotional detail to conjure atmosphere, a hallmark of Riley’s early novels, makes for the kind of immersive, effortless read that’s often underrated as easy to write. Here’s the short story writer Esther, in 2004’s Sick Notes, describing her roommate’s bedroom:

There’s a duvet cover, framed postcards on the wall, ornaments even: dried up sea urchins, a crouching child figurine, a tiny pair of painted wooden clogs, a ship in a bottle and a Russian doll flanked by the two rubber ducks I got her for her last birthday. Also a plain brass photo frame holding a picture of a small girl standing by a piano. The kid’s on tiptoe, reaching up to jab at the keys. The curtains behind her and the jumper underneath her dungarees are in sour seventies colors. Her facial expression is kind of sour too.

Esther, back in Manchester after a stint in the U.S., is poised restlessly between an unhappy childhood and an uncertain future. The disorder of her own bedroom, with its cardboard boxes and unfinished books “resting open on my bed like pitched roofs, like dead birds,” semaphores her emphatic itinerancy. She drifts around the city with a biro in her ponytail, thinking of “ways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light,” while dodging the perils of intimate connection. An idyllic romantic encounter with Newton, a touring American musician, affects Esther so deeply that she longs to somehow purge herself of it; the push-pull of her impulse to call him is the current around which the narrative swirls. In another writer’s hands, it would be a thin premise. But Esther’s chafing self-awareness as she wallows, postures, and seeks distraction is too convincing to ever feel trivial. “I have this monstrous self-pity in me,” she declares, “and this monstrous self-love.”

Riley’s sixth novel, My Phantoms, was published in the UK in April and hailed, with every justification, as a masterpiece. (Bafflingly, it has no U.S. publisher.) In this portrait of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, the author has elevated her gift for psychological verisimilitude to astonishing tragicomic effect. Sixty-something Hen (short for Helen), separated from her second husband and retired, pursues an elusive sense of belonging via constant outings: Wine Circle, Victorian Society, festivals, film screenings, gallery evenings. “I’m putting myself out there,” she tells her daughter Bridget, whose suggestions that she has a night in are met with a firm “No.” Over years of dutiful phone calls, lunches, and dinners, Bridget alternates between humoring Hen—managing to “put a penny in the right slot”—and trying to reconcile her with some version of reality. Hen is in determined flight from reality, as the dramatic crux of the novel underscores. Desperate to meet Bridget’s boyfriend, Hen badgers her about it until Bridget loses patience:

“Do you want me to tell you why, Mum?” I said. “Why I have to keep things separate?” She didn’t answer. “How many sentences do you think you could take on the subject? Three? Four? One? Could you consider and acknowledge one sentence?”

Haunting them both is Bridget’s late father, Lee, a mostly taboo subject. “It wasn’t me who was horrible,” Hen protests, “it was your dad. It wasn’t me.” During Bridget’s childhood, when she and her sister were legally mandated to spend every Saturday with Lee, Hen had recourse to a regular refrain: “There’s no point in provoking him, is there?” In Riley’s merciless characterization, Hen’s lexicon of well-worn phrases is a buffer against an intimidating world, the next best thing to silence, to risking no provocation at all.

The novel’s depiction of Lee, as filtered through Bridget’s forensic recollection, is a graphic testament to the terroristic legacy of petty, small-minded bullies, its unflinching realism unparalleled in anything I’ve read. A ceaseless fount of humiliations and mortifications, “needlings and exhortations,” Lee would dismiss his daughters’ interests—playing football, vegetarianism—with the remark: “No one’s impressed with your recent behavior.” Reading a book was “posing” or “bluffing”; a new haircut brought the inevitable query: “Did they catch whoever did that?” In Lee’s self-mythology he was, Bridget reflects, “a sort of beloved outlaw; an admired one-off.” To her, he was less a person than a formidable and relentless phenomenon: “A gripper of shoulders. A pincher of upper arms. If I was wearing a hat, a snatcher of hats. If I was reading a book, a snatcher of books. Energized bother, in short.”

Iterations of this character, equally unpleasant but not quite as sharply focused, appear throughout Riley’s work. Novelist Aislinn, in 2012’s Opposed Positions, is estranged from her father but must contend with a sinister barrage of his unanswered emails. “Showing off again are we?” he writes. Then, alongside four transcribed quotes from her novel: “Oh dear! Oof! Posing! Er, what?” One of the most appalling moments in 2017’s First Love, a novel full of jaw-dropping moments, is when the narrator, Neve, recalls being at her father’s house as a teenager. In front of his male friend, he ordered her to “clean up” the bathroom she’d just used. She was perplexed, but on close examination she found two pinpricks of blood on the toilet bowl. “Women just aren’t naturally clean, are they?” her father said to the friend. These are not operatic accounts of abuse à la Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; Riley’s register is scrupulously uncathartic. Along with Neve, Aislinn, and Bridget you feel, deep in your guts, the banal unassuageable horrors they’ve endured.

First Love, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize, saw Riley begin to pare back her already stripped-down style to examine, at unsparing close range, an intermittently poisonous marriage. Neve’s older husband, Edwyn, who has a debilitating chronic illness and is prone to ferocious outbursts, casts their fighting as a replay of the rancor she had with her father. “You hated him, he was cruel to you, that’s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back.”

We don’t witness any viciousness from Neve, who prides herself on being “warm, attentive, mild,” and yet her relationship with Edwyn is evidently one of complicated codependence. He claims to have married her because she needed to be taken care of; she likens the process of keeping him calm by saying the right thing to “throwing some sausages at a guard dog”: a basic trick for someone who grew up walking on eggshells, when a wrong word “unlatched a sort of chaos.” The wry rhythm of Riley’s prose, which anatomizes this commonplace folie à deux with alarming efficiency, holds the reader in a helpless thrall.

Our thrall is all the tighter for the glimpses we get of Neve and Edwyn’s sincere affection and closeness, their silly, tender pet names (“lovely Mr. Pusskins,” “little compost heap”) and his habit of kissing her “repeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.” Not for Riley the convenient narrative inexorability of the couple’s breakup, nor the readerly consolation of their reaching a better place (a phrase beneath Neve in its triteness, apart from anything else). As in Riley’s Somerset Maugham Award–winning third novel, Joshua Spassky, also a story of irresolute true love, romantic redemption is not even permitted chimerical status. “When you hold on to another person,” Joshua Spassky’s Natalie says to her titular lover, “I think you’re only ever really holding onto your own fathomless situation.”

Or, as Riley said a few years ago: “Human beings are incorrigible. This is a source of humor and pain.” Her alchemizing of this wellspring has created an extraordinary body of work, especially for an author scarcely over forty. Happily for literature, Riley seems monogamously bound to fiction as a form. She has expressed a disinclination for all other kinds of writing and doesn’t use social media, a choice befitting her austere mystique. We can hope, then, for many more novels whose quietly splendid triumph is, in the words of Neve: “To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble.”

 

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, Longreads, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Awl, Words without Borders, and other publications. She was the first writer of the Daily’s Feminize Your Canon column.

Language’s Wilderness: An Interview with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Photo: Kayla Holdread.

Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly. The novel follows Arezu, a woman in her late thirties, as she travels to Marbella, Spain, where she spent the summer when she was seventeen. She has returned to confront the past, the ghost of who she was, and her memories of Omar, an enigmatic older man who introduced her to unfamiliar freedoms even as he harmed her and dispossessed her of her power. Oloomi has written two previous novels, Fra Keeler, a mystery as hallucinatory and menacing as it is comic, and Call Me Zebra, which follows the pilgrimage of a free-spirited exile and autodidact. Though Savage Tongues takes after both, it explores new territory, as Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character.

The language of the new novel diverges, too, and Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing. Take this passage, in which Arezu has just entered her old apartment building in Marbella—“When I pressed the elevator button, I felt Omar’s hand reaching through mine as if our bodies were superimposed: for a moment, my limbs filled with lead. All of the energy and vitality and strength I’d cultivated over the years drained out of me. I felt the pressure of his finger against the illuminated call button and a cold shiver ran down my spine.”    

This summer, Oloomi and I wrote back and forth to each other over Google Docs. She had just returned from a trip to Turkey, and I’d just arrived in the Catskills, both of us readjusting to movement and travel after having stayed still for so long. We talked, among many other things, about pleasure, self-preservation and survival, and literature that is “raw and ruthless.”

 INTERVIEWER

Savage Tongues is a book of summer. How has this summer been? What have you been doing?

OLOOMI

It’s been all sorts of ways. I’m directing the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame this year, so work didn’t slow down until mid-June, when I left for Turkey. Like most people, I hadn’t traveled in more than fifteen months, and to go from the static life of quarantine and lockdown to moving across a huge country felt amazing. I spent time in Istanbul and Bodrum. I swam every day. And I ate my heart out. I’m back in the Midwest now, swimming in the lake when I can, though mostly I spend my downtime at a natural horsemanship barn where I lease a horse.

INTERVIEWER

I’m curious if you’ve read anything lately you especially liked, and also, I’d like to know what you read when you were writing Savage Tongues.

OLOOMI

I’ve been reading short story collections, mostly. Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq and Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular. I like the way that stories can feel like miniature time capsules. When I was writing Savage Tongues I was reading a lot of radical women writers—Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Etel Adnan, Maggie Nelson, Nawal El Saadawi. I went to Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Butler, Toni Morrison, and Elaine Scarry as I started to think about the politics of discursive violence. Then I read a lot of James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, and Hervé Guibert—writers who write brilliantly about sex, who are always aware of the power and the politics underpinning a physical or sexual encounter. So I had different stacks of books, different guides to see me through each dimension of the novel.

INTERVIEWER

In many ways, Savage Tongues is quite different from your other two novels, though all three share a restless, relentless, investigative quality. How did the novel first arise for you, and what was it like to write it?

OLOOMI

I’d been thinking about Savage Tongues for a long time before I sat down to write it. The search for the language of the novel was definitely protracted, likely because the questions the novel asks kept piling on. The more I sat with it, the more impossible it seemed to separate the private, intimate story of Arezu’s life during her teenage years—and, later on, as an adult woman looking back at her younger self—from the geopolitical context. It is a book that required me to let everything in, to look at Arezu’s individual trauma as inseparable from the wounds of history and migrancy.

To start, I really wanted to explore the complex and troubling ways that children of immigrants have to bridge the gap between their parents and the host culture they are dropped into, the unbearable violence that can manifest when that gap is too wide to close. One thing I don’t think we talk about enough is how parental neglect, cross-generational misunderstanding, family dynamics, and gender-based abuse intersect with geopolitical conflict, colonialism, and patterns of migration. How the particular dynamics of political and identity-based violence one flees influence one’s ability to navigate the structural violence at play both in the adoptive country at large and in one’s own diaspora community. I needed to sit with these questions for a good long while, and to archive intimate conversations I’d been having for years with my queer family, the tribe of friends who finally made America both legible and bearable to me. Savage Tongues is in many ways a love letter to my chosen family.

INTERVIEWER

After finishing the novel I kept thinking about the relationship between Arezu and her best friend, Ellie, who accompanies her to Marbella and the apartment there, which is a site not only of trauma but also of desire. None of what Arezu experienced in that place was cut-and-dried, which Ellie understands very well because of her own experiences. I was moved by the “recovery journeys” the two go on together—Arezu has accompanied Ellie to Israel and occupied Palestine—and the healing that comes through these journeys. That kind of friendship is not often explored in literature. And I’ve never read a novel before that is in itself a kind of recovery journey—the reader is accompanying Arezu, too. It sounds as though the friendship between Arezu and Ellie was a central part of the novel from the outset.

OLOOMI

I definitely think of it as a novel about the enduring power of friendship. There’s an Audre Lorde quote that was very present for me as I wrote the book—“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” The friendship between Arezu and Ellie is fundamental to their self-preservation, and it is most certainly an act of political warfare, a resistance to systems of oppression that perpetuate hate. Arezu comes from a culturally Muslim Iranian family, Ellie from an Orthodox Jewish family that doesn’t recognize Israel’s occupation of Palestine. They’ve both been abandoned and disowned by their families, Ellie for being queer and for dedicating her intellectual and emotional life to the Palestinian cause and recognizing her position as an implicated subject in the violence of the occupation. Arezu is a bit feral and tends to live in a fugue state. But their love for each other allows them to survive, and to recover their right to pleasure. Their recovery journeys are about voicing unspeakable pain and suppression so that language can no longer be weaponized against them.

INTERVIEWER

In a profound way the unspeakable is transcended. On one level, Savage Tongues is a novel of conversation—so much is gotten to and pushed past through Arezu and Ellie’s talks. Yet it is only when Arezu is unaccompanied that she can come into contact with her past self. I was very affected by how this self comes to life. On the bus to Marbella, for instance, Arezu sees her projected on the horizon, bruised, walking across the desert rocks. She sees her in the apartment with Omar, riding him in bed. She sees who she might have been if she’d never left—ravaged, haunted. The past is not dead. It is always rising to meet the present. How did you think about the self in the novel, especially as it relates to time?

OLOOMI

There’s a speculative element to the novel that helped me to convey the electric charge of history, of a traumatic past that refuses to be let down easily. The element of horror, of a subtle surrealism, allowed me to let in the ghosts, to memorialize the past in order to begin to imagine an alternate future. When I think of the selves in the novel—the self that I am and from which I write, and the selves I am interested in inhabiting on the page—well, their very survival depends on remembering the past, their history that would otherwise vanish because history’s victors have no interest in archiving their pain, their material culture, its immense historical power and the ways in which its power has been foreclosed in the service of colonialism. There’s something else, too. This book is intensely about intersectional female interiority. Our power has been foreclosed in the service of the patriarchy, which is an extension of colonialism. But there’s so much resistance and pushback to these various eclipses, there always has been, there always will be. There’s Duras, Lessing, Morrison, Lorde, Adnan, El Saadawi. The list goes on. That’s something to feel immensely grateful about. What would culture look like if writers didn’t refuse to move on, to just get on with it? What if we said, Okay, you win, we’ll bury our heads in the sand, we’ll take the injustice? I wouldn’t want to know.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned that Arezu and Ellie help each other recover their right to pleasure, and I’d like to come back to that because it, too, has such a bearing on the novel, just as much as horror. The two spend long, luxurious hours together eating and drinking, lying on the beach in Marbella, wandering the streets of Granada, soaking in the baths at a hammam. The descriptions of the landscape, the plants and the flowers, are deeply pleasurable to read.

OLOOMI

Landscape is one of the things I most love writing about, because it is so sensory, evocative. All of our memories are nested in spaces—in sights, sounds, smells. So I don’t think of landscape as separate from character and have never conceived of setting as a backdrop to the consciousness of the characters who inhabit my novels. To me they are inseparable elements of a life. Arezu’s time with Omar, the very texture of her experiences with him, is intertwined with the balmy Mediterranean air, the particular shade of the water at various times of day, the gangly palm trees that arch over the roads, the dark, isolated mountain lake they swim in, hemmed in by evergreens and out of view. And there’s all of the food she and Ellie eat, all of the ways they are alive to their bodies in the aftermath of trauma. They take so much pleasure in the landscape, the same landscape that had ravished Arezu as a teenager. This is one way in which Arezu reclaims her power, even as she addresses the horrors of the past.

INTERVIEWER

Arezu is marked by Omar, by her absent father, and by the West. When a white supremacist attacks her brother, for instance, this is an attack on her, too, one that shapes her life. She sees Omar clearly, and the harm he did her, but she also sees her yearning for him, and for freedom and life, as well as the geopolitical conflicts and colonialism that underpin their relationship. When I said earlier that the unspeakable is transcended, this is also part of what I meant. It’s everything I want literature to do, to be able to hold these complexities and seeming contradictions. I think my favorite books punch all the way through one side into another, and that is the side one reads. I don’t know if that makes sense.

OLOOMI

It makes a great deal of sense. I often see the shape of a book before I see the characters, or anything else for that matter. The shape dictates the mood, the whole atmosphere of the novel. Savage Tongues kept appearing to me as a Möbius strip. There’s a great deal of meditation and interiority in the novel. That introspection is not self-indulgent—it is the kind of self-theorizing that is required to decolonize one’s mind and body. That level of stillness is also what allows Arezu to transform the cruelty and murderous brutality of her past into a kind of transgressive awareness. She comes to see that the beauty and power of life lie in its volatility and its impermanence. I am very interested in the power we can claim when we embrace the full spectrum of our identities and emotions, without reaching to erase the contradictions that inform them. And I’m interested in how literature can hold all of this without losing its sting or descending into simple epiphanic sentimentalism.

INTERVIEWER

Are there works of literature you can think of that do this, hold it all without losing the sting?

OLOOMI

I can think of a few writers who do this. Elena Ferrante is on the top of my list. So are Claudia Rankine, Marguerite Duras, Fleur Jaeggy, Doris Lessing, Arundhati Roy, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, Lina Meruane, Garth Greenwell, Alexandra Kleeman, Annie Ernaux. And Laura Van den Berg’s stories, they can turn you inside out. What I love about these writers, who are so different from one another, is that they are equal parts raw and ruthless—they are not afraid of language’s wilderness.

INTERVIEWER

Thank god. We need more writers not afraid of jaggedness, of cutting the reader if it means writing truthfully and entering new territory in literature.

OLOOMI

We do. We need writers who challenge us intellectually and emotionally, and who have an expansive sensibility when it comes to managing temporality and spatiality on the page. Think of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf—so much of their power comes from the scale of time they are able to distill in a single paragraph or chapter. I am definitely hungry for that kind of literature.

 

Amina Cain is the author of two collections of short stories, Creature and I Go to Some Hollow, and a novel, Indelicacy. She lives in Los Angeles.

Redux: It’s All a Question of Language

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Robert Lowell. Drawing by Hans Beck, 1961.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating another year of the best deal in town: our summer subscription offer with The New York Review of Books. For only $99, you’ll receive yearlong subscriptions and complete archive access to both magazines—a 34% savings!

To give you a taste, we’re unlocking pieces from the archives of both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. Read on for Robert Lowell’s Art of Poetry interview, paired with his letters to Elizabeth Bishop concerning the founding of The New York Review of Books; Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story “Everything,” paired with Merve Emre’s essay on Bachmann’s novel Malina and other fiction; and a portfolio of art by Kara Walker, paired with an essay by Zadie Smith on Walker’s work through the years.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and works of criticism, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books and read both magazines’ entire archives?

 

Robert Lowell, The Art of Poetry No. 3
The Paris Review, issue no. 25 (Winter–Spring 1961)

The ideal modern form seems to be the novel and certain short stories. Maybe Tolstoy would be the perfect example—his work is imagistic, it deals with all experience, and there seems to be no conflict of the form and content. So one thing is to get into poetry that kind of human richness in rather simple descriptive language. Then there’s another side of poetry: compression, something highly rhythmical and perhaps wrenched into a small space. I’ve always been fascinated by both these things.

Founding the New York Review: Two Letters from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop
By Robert Lowell
The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2003, issue

Here we are in the hectic whirl of putting out the new book review. I’m very much a bystander and admirer. But Lizzie is furiously engaged and in a way making inspired use of her abilities—for God knows we need a review that at least believes in standards and can intuit excellence.

 

Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann.

 

Everything
By Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser
The Paris Review, issue no. 28 (Summer–Fall 1962)

And suddenly I realized: it’s all a question of language, and not merely of this particular language of ours, which was created with all the other languages at the Tower of Babel in order to bring confusion into the world. For under them all there’s another language smouldering away, a language that extends into gestures and glances, into the evolving of thoughts and the ebb and flow of emotions, and it’s here that all our griefs begin. It was all a question whether I could save the child from our language until he had founded a new one and could so begin a new era.

The Meticulous One
By Merve Emre
The New York Review of Books, October 22, 2020, issue

Today her novels remain unnerving for how desperately they struggle to give visible form to the invisible and private injustices perpetrated by men, to name them with the same certain horror that attends to accusations of fascism. Though no one pulls a trigger or slashes a knife or even lays hands on the women in her novels, Bachmann calls them “victims” and describes the betrayals that preceded their deaths as “crimes.” “It was murder,” proclaims the last sentence of Malina—a murder for which no one will be held accountable because no one appears to have done anything wrong.

 

Kara Walker’s interview at the Camden Arts Centre, London (8m44s). Interview by Anna McNay and filmed by Martin Kennedy. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Silhouettes
By Kara Walker
The Paris Review, issue no. 153 (Winter 1999)

 

Kara Walker, Burn, cut paper on canvas, 92 x 48″.

 

What Do We Want History to Do to Us?
By Zadie Smith
The New York Review of Books, February 27, 2020, issue

Walker’s particular mode of engaging with our attention spans—her visual and conceptual provocations—have often caused furor, first from the generation above her, now not infrequently from the generation below. For when it comes to the ruins of history, Walker neither simply represents nor reclaims. Instead she eroticizes, aestheticizes, fetishizes, and dramatizes.

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 ($50 off the regular price!).

The Best Kind of Vanishing

Today marks the release of Melissa Broder’s Superdoom , a collection of poetry drawn from her first four books. In the introduction, excerpted below, Broder looks back over years of writing and publishing to consider the mysterious genesis of her poetry.  

ShaiHuludKitty, NYC Subway Car at Sunset, 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As of today, March 26, 2021, I no longer know how to write a poem. I have no idea how I wrote the poems in this book.

In some ways, this state of unknowing is exciting. A poetry teacher of mine once said, quoting the poet Muriel Rukeyser, “You need only be a scarecrow for poems to land on.” Perhaps, then, my amnesia as to how I made these poems indicates that I’ve been, at times, a scarecrow: a landing place, a vessel, a channel for poems. I like that. To me, it seems preferable to be a channel than what I usually am: a self-will-er, a scrambler, a filler of holes, a looker in “glittery shitdoors” for love (as I note in the poem “Man’s Search for Meaning”).

To be a channel is great, actually. To be a channel is to be reminded that I do not need to struggle to fill the holes inside with anything glittery. It is to be reminded that I actually like going inside the holes. I just keep forgetting I like it in there.

As a daily reminder that I actually do like the holes, I’ve been reciting the Prayer of Saint Francis for sixteen years. The first line of the prayer asks that I be made a channel, so my attention is directed right away to that emptiness as something ideal.

The prayer asks for a lot of other things, too: that “where there is hatred, I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness,” and other challenging aspirations for a human like me. As I note in the title of my poem “The Saint Francis Prayer Is a Tall Order,” the Saint Francis Prayer really is a tall order. But I’d like to think that when it comes to the channel part, some of these poems are a reflection of my prayers. I mean, I don’t want to be a spiritual materialist. But all of these poems were written between 2006 and 2016—at the height of my Saint Francis Prayer-ing. So, maybe.

I also like framing my amnesia as to the creation of these poems in terms of mystery. Mystery is an element I’ve always loved about poetry: the space a poem makes for the unknown. In a time where certitude is very trendy (maybe it was always trendy, but it feels especially hot now), I love that a poem can be a vessel for living in the questions themselves, a sphere of ambiguity, a celebration of negative capability, a field for the beginner’s mind, a braid of darkness and light, a little fortress of sacred pause. Reader, do not doubt that you can fully experience these poems without “understanding” them intellectually or drawing any conclusions about them. I invite you to do whatever you want with them, of course. But know that I am re-experiencing them now without understanding how they happened.

And yet, it has always been my fear as an artist that one day I will just lose it. This itness is hard to define, but it involves the muse, the gift, the way, the talent, the ability, the inspiration, the craft; any multitude of its, really, intrinsic to creation.

Creative friends tell me this is not possible. You cannot just lose it. Sure, sometimes when you turn on the proverbial creative sink, a little rust comes out. But it’s just a question of leaving the faucet on long enough to let the rust run out. Then, the pure water comes.

Still, I lack faith in the inevitability of pure water. And when I look at these poems and do not know how I wrote them, or if I would have the capacity to write a strong poem again, I feel concerned. What will disappear next?

In all fairness to the faucet, the Muses, and I guess, to myself, I haven’t been actively writing poems since the last of these were written in 2016. I have since turned to the dark side, which is to say, I have been writing prose.

When I lived in New York City, I used to write my poems on the train. I am a perfectionist, hard on myself, and so I’ve always preferred to write my first drafts while in motion or in a place where I’m not supposed to be writing (like a funeral), rather than at an “official writing place” like a desk. This is because I need to trick the critic within me into letting a first draft just be whatever it is. If I don’t encourage messiness and imperfection, there will be no first draft at all.

In the fall of 2013, I left New York and moved to Los Angeles—not for the sake of my writing, but because of my partner’s health. In LA, I could no longer write poems while in transit. It’s just not safe to be typing up poems while driving on the 405. Instead, I found myself dictating words into my phone using Siri and a free notes app while I drove. The geographic change, and resulting dictation, altered my writing. My line breaks disappeared. The language became more conversational. What was once poetic output became essays. The essays became a book called So Sad Today.

During this time, I completed the poems that appear in Last Sext. But after Last Sext, my remaining poetic energies were redirected as I dictated the first draft of my novel The Pisces. While The Pisces celebrates Sappho, and hopefully, at its best, resonates with the rhythm and music of lyric poetry, it is decidedly prose.

The writing of prose finally allowed me—in my midthirties—to become a full-time writer, able to support myself on writing alone. Let’s be honest, poetry doesn’t make it rain. And I love that these poems were absent of profit motive. Did I write them to survive? Yes. But the survival was psychological and spiritual, rather than a question of putting food on my table. I was always a poet with a day job.

When I look back over these selected poems, I see the same psychospiritual and mythopoetic themes that inspire my prose writing. We write our obsessions, and mine seem to be—in these poems and now in prose—sex, death, consumption, God, spiritual longing, earthly longing, and holes. It’s nice to know that being able to eat off my creations hasn’t changed my preoccupations. But, when art and commerce mix, there is inevitably another internal critical voice that joins the chorus of internal voices appraising our text. The voice says, “Can I eat off this?” In these poems, that voice was beautifully silent.

This brings me to the one element that I do remember about the creation of these poems. It isn’t a process, or a craft note, but a feeling. Many nights, I wrote on the subway between 137th Street in Manhattan and Hoyt Street in Brooklyn. I remember feeling, at times, during that commute, like I was disappearing in the best of ways. On these rides, flying through the darkness of the tunnels, I would become obsessed with a piece of a particular poem I was working on: a syllabic beat, or finding the perfect word.

On the subway, I would disappear into rhythmic counting or the hunt for the word. I would forget that I was riding in a subway car. In a way, I was no longer riding in a subway car but riding in a poem. This is the best kind of vanishing. This is my favorite transcendence.

It would be my joy, reader, if you find in some of these poems a bit of transcendence for yourself. I wish for you only the very best kind of vanishing. If you need respite from the body, I hope you get it. If you need freedom from the space-time continuum, that, too. I won’t even mention the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

At the very least, I hope you enjoy a few of these poems, once written by someone, who I’m told is me.

 

Melissa Broder is the author of Superdoom. She has also written the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Broder has written for the New York Times, Vice, Elle.com, Vogue Italia, and The Cut. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles. 

Excerpted from  Superdoom: Poems , by Melissa Broder. Printed with permission from Tin House. Copyright © 2021 by Melissa Broder.

No Balls, No Nets

Liene Vitamante, Venice Skateboarder on Ramp, 2016, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What percentage of skateboarding, I wonder, is talking about skateboarding? Half, probably. There is such rich joy to be found in these debates without stakes, these endless recollections that go nowhere, slowly. And if the impulse to write grows from the impulse to converse, one could reasonably suggest that writing about skateboarding is a natural extension of the activity, too. But skaters tend to have a cautious relationship with the written word. Our culture has produced an array of photographers and filmmakers and sculptors, so it’s not a lack of work ethic or creative energy that’s kept us from producing poets.

At some point in my early twenties, I decided I wanted to become a novelist. So, I worked very hard to become one. By necessity at first, and then by habit, I viewed most any non-novel writing as a threat to my primary purpose. For my second novel, it seemed obvious that I should write about skateboarding. It proved difficult. I hit a snag, as happens, and then another. By the third snag, which was substantial, I decided to send out an email to friends in the name of research. It was four questions, a brief survey about a basic paradox or conundrum central to our practice: Is skateboarding inherently competitive, I asked, like diving or gymnastics? Is it possible for any of us to treat going skateboarding like going for a stroll in the countryside? Or does something within the activity, some internal characteristic, urge its practitioners toward improvement?

How sweet this all seems now, how endearingly naive to believe I could unspool this mystery so directly. I’ve mentioned that I was an athlete as a young person, an okay baseball player until I quit preseason workouts during my first year of college. I was also a competitive tennis player into my teens, when it became clear that I lacked the psycho-emotional fortitude to handle the game’s total isolation and the funneled pressures thereof. Tennis, in fact, eviscerated me. But before it did, I found it thrilling, as I did boyhood soccer leagues, JV basketball, and Ping-Pong. And video games: Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Mario Kart. Caps. Pool. Darts. I have found great pleasure over the years winning whatever I could win. Losing I have sometimes handled rather unwell. In tennis, this meant broken rackets and high-pitched outbursts I am happy to have forgotten. At some point, for example, my wife stopped playing gin rummy with me.

I am saying that it made a certain sense that I would treat writing as competition, viewing publishing as a scarce and precious resource. But skateboarding, especially after I turned thirty, had mostly remained immune. There may be threads of competition running through any session, either alone or with friends, but they come like shifts in the wind and are minor, fleeting. I think of what the surfer and skater from Malibu who called himself the Illusion had to say in 2011 on Crail Couch, an interview series that mixed Errol Morris with an endless loop of Belle and Sebastian’s “I’m a Cuckoo.” When asked if he ever plays team sports, the Illusion said the following:

So, my whole theory, for like fifteen years, was no balls no nets, man. Like, any time anyone asked me to play tennis, like, nah, I don’t do that. I don’t do anything with a ball or a net. If it’s got a ball or a net, man, that’s just my cosmic sign not to mess with it, man.

People like to point to the early Zephyr Team as proof that competition is endemic to skateboarding (this, after all, is the rhetorical use value of establishing gods). In that half decade between crashing the 1975 Del Mar Nationals and the last of Stecyk’s Dogtown articles, their crew did indeed compete as much with one another as with their gentler colleagues hailing from less mythical neighborhoods. Skateboarding’s time line is pocked with such periods of concentrated progression—on vert ramps in the mid to late eighties, in streets and plazas in the early nineties, and through the handrail and stair-set escalations of the aughts. But the Illusion captures something truer about the way the broader world of skateboarding actually spins.

For a fairly simple activity, skateboarding’s internal code of competition is more nuanced and complex and fluid than any single contest could possibly model. Because the Illusion is a burner from Malibu, he speaks of this nuance in terms of the cosmos. This cosmic side has led to some ironies over the years, like a photo I keep pinned to my bulletin board of a Nike 6.0 hoodie that says “Jocks Suck” across the chest. It is usually pretty clear who to call the best skater at any given session, or among a group of friends. But what looks like victory among pack dogs and, I suppose, salespeople and law students and most other worlds premised on rankings, is among skaters almost wholly irrelevant.

Oh, children will think differently about this. Each of us who’s done the thing long enough has at some point believed in and even worked toward the dream of having our talents recognized as exceptional enough to merit sponsorship by a board company, or fantasized about a lifestyle supported by a shoe deal. Eventually, though, if we keep going, if we commit our lives to the practice, we will come to see how frictionlessly the scale slides, how even the slide is itself sliding. That the collective plural for a given brand’s sponsored skaters remains team is as archaic and absurd as those stand-alone video “parts” lacking a whole. The best term for the nonhierarchical system around which skate performance is judged is one that I am a hundred percent certain the Illusion, whatever he’s doing now, has spoken of at least twice in the last hour. The term is stoke, and we might, for now, leave it at that.

Back to those snags. It was stoke, or some approximation thereof, that I couldn’t translate into my writing. That v of novelist had needled into my old and ugly vein, that tennis player’s lament. I’d begun to worry that I’d made perhaps the most foolish choice possible, committing to a life of isolated performance, or what felt at the time like performance, one novel down and the second expected. Suddenly, there was nothing I was doing that I was not doing wrong. It was not failure I felt but defeat. In merging my two pursuits I’d leaned so desirously far toward the one that I’d lost track of the other. I must have known what was happening when I sent that email off to my friends. I wasn’t conducting a survey, I was asking for a rope, or even just directions back from wherever I’d ended up. I was asking for a map.

 

Kyle Beachy’s first novel, The Slide, won The Chicago Reader’s Best Book reader’s choice award. His short fiction has appeared in Fanzine, Pank, Hobart, Juked, The Collagist, and elsewhere. His writing on skateboarding has appeared in The Point, The American Reader, The Chicagoan, Free Skateboard Magazine, The Skateboard Mag, Jenkem, Deadspin, and The Classical. He teaches at Roosevelt University in Chicago and cohosts the skateboarding podcast Vent City with pro skater Ryan Lay and others. Find him on Twitter @kylebeachy.

Excerpted from the book The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life , by Kyle Beachy. Copyright © 2021 by Kyle Beachy. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Staff Picks: Comics, Keys, and Chaos

Nicole Claveloux. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books.

The topic of night terrors has come up in a slew of my conversations lately. In part, this is due to the fact that I’ve been hanging out with a precocious two-year-old with rare but potent insomniac nights. But I also have Nicole Claveloux to thank for my current fixation on hypnagogic hallucinations, those surreal visions that crop up at the threshold of consciousness. Claveloux’s graphic short stories from the late seventies, originally written in French and published for the first time in English in 2017 as The Green Hand and Other Stories, are not literal renderings of night terrors. But the comics are nightmarish in the best sense—absurd, sharply funny, visceral, revealing. I read the collection in one big gulp, prickling with affection for the band of outsiders that populates its pages: a root vegetable with aspirations of becoming a panther, a misanthropic bird, a talking houseplant, a devilishly clever kid on the cusp of puberty. —Jay Graham 

Matt Mitchell is one of the most exciting pianists and composers in contemporary jazz—to my ear, at least. He herds chaos into the corral of his compositions with great precision. The new box set Snark Horse is the six-disc culmination of a project he and his partner, the drummer Kate Gentile—who has developed her playing such that it can accommodate lots of musical corners, dead ends, and abrupt pauses—have been working at for years. It’s a book of one-measure compositions, each of which has just enough room for a hint of melody, that repeat and morph and fly out of control at the hands of their large ensemble. Imagine John Zorn’s Masada compositions but intentionally broken. It’s fine to drop the proverbial needle anywhere in this sea of mostly discordant music; it’s challenging listening, sometimes grating, though often very exciting. After many listens, I’m still sorting out what the point of it is. I suspect it will keep me occupied for years. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Jason Sudeikis in Ted Lasso, now streaming on Apple TV+.​

 

The appeals of the television show Ted Lasso, whose second season premiered a couple of weeks ago on Apple TV+, are simple: the characters are charming, the jokes stack to satisfying payoffs, and the sports action snaps with an appropriate tension and speed. The title character, played by Jason Sudeikis, is a chipper, mustachioed fish out of water, an American football coach conscripted to lead a failing British soccer team. I watched much of the first season while I was very ill—perhaps the perfect conditions for consuming a show that goes down with the sweet smoothness of amoxicillin. —Brian Ransom

The indie rock band Life without Buildings made only one album, 2001’s Any Other City. It’s ten songs, forty-four minutes and change. That’s less than many of us spend getting to work every morning. Each song is a little upbeat, a little moody. The band’s vocalist, Sue Tomkins, adds a forcefully girlish tone, with lines repeated to keep tempo with the drums. By being totally undemanding, this brief moment in the long history of Scottish music is an absolutely perfect capsule of feeling. —Lauren Kane

In 1643, several years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony expelled him for his intractable views about freedom of conscience and fairness of land grabs, the Reverend Roger Williams published A Key into the Language of America. Part phrase book, part ethnography, the book is a rare document of the Narragansett people before King Philip’s War. It seems unique in its attention to and relative respect for the Narragansett, who saved Williams’s life when Boston kicked him out, but “relative” is an important qualifier. In 2019, the Tomaquag Museum offered a new edition of Williams’s Key, edited by a group of scholars, elders, and culture bearers who, via footnotes, coolly take the old Reverend to task on major issues—for example, his use of the word barbarians and his belief that drums are an English invention—and offer thoughtful context for his observations and misunderstandings. Importantly, they also standardize spellings and punctuation, without which few would dare attempt ys olde Englifh book. The Tomaquag edition of A Key, a dialogue between Williams and the descendants of the people he wrote about nearly five centuries ago, is a thrill to read—an exciting introduction to America’s language and a gift to anyone seeking a more complete American history. —Jane Breakell

 

William Trost Richards, Rhode Island Coast: Conanicut Island, ca. 1880, transparent watercolor with touches of opaque watercolor on cream, moderately thick, slightly textured wove paper, 10 x 14 3/8. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Genealogy of Disaster

© Vyacheslav Argenberg, Beirut, Lebanon, 2008, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We walked over to the olive trees, he and I. There were three of them, and some little holm oaks. On the horizon, to the east and the south, you could see mountain ridges, and in the two other directions it was so wide that you couldn’t make out the boundary of the plot. The fellow had offered me another one, with a sea view, and I had replied that I didn’t care. I can look at the sea often enough, every day at home, and if I’m going to be in the mountains I might as well gaze up at the peaks and the canopy of sky above them, with its ballet of stars at night. I don’t think he understood a word I was saying. He was strapped into a kind of vest, with a buttoned-up shirt underneath it, although it was already starting to get hot. When we got past the olive trees, walking through the dry grass that sometimes covered the remains of hardened furrows, toward a little tumbledown shack that I’d like to have rebuilt, he asked me if I could possibly pay him in cash. I burst out laughing and asked him how he thought I could get hold of dollars in cash. He didn’t comment. We had agreed on payment by check. He was just trying his luck. A few days ago, I asked Jad why landowners would ever sell their assets for cashier’s checks, and he replied that it’s usually because they have debts they need to repay as soon as possible, before the complete collapse of the pound. As for me, I want my every last penny out of the bank.

When I got home, Mariam announced that the washing machine was making a weird noise. And indeed, the noise was disturbing—a kind of regular clacking, almost rhythmical, to the beat of the rotating drum. I had actually just gotten it repaired a few days ago, the day before yesterday in fact. So I called the repairman, who didn’t answer, of course. These details of daily life which are out of our control are frustrating and make me angry. It’s easy to get angry these days.

On social media it’s always the same thing, inexhaustible, ad nauseam: economic collapse, the bankruptcy of the country, capital control, exchange rates, the pound in free fall, inflation, and penury lying in wait for us all.

*

We couldn’t find a table at any of the pubs on Badaro Street. Only two of them are shut. The others are packed. In the end Marylin, the manager of Super Vega, found us a table for four, and the six of us squeezed in together. Social distancing is sometimes a purely theoretical notion. The music was pleasant and there was a group of young women at the next table over who were screeching with laughter. One of them was trying to get her handbag off the back of her chair, which was almost stuck to Pierre’s, and she elbowed my margarita glass, spilling it all over me. She stood up, wanted to apologize, was about to dab my shirt with a napkin, but then stopped short when she realized this might be taken the wrong way. We laughed about it, and she often turned around with open curiosity over the course of the evening, sharing our conversation and laughing at our jokes or Joy’s puns. We spoke to her a few times, inviting her to turn around completely, which she eventually did. Our table and the one she was sharing with her friends gradually became a single table. One of her friends told us that she had been living in France but then decided to come home for good. She had sold the only asset she owned in order to do so—an apartment in Paris. She had been planning to start a small business here with the money. But it was now inaccessible, and she had the feeling that she didn’t own anything anymore, just like most of us here. It almost made her laugh. When she found out that Nayla, my wife, is a psychotherapist, she wanted to know whether it was normal that she didn’t feel much anxiety at the thought of having lost everything, and that all she’d been doing was cooking—for example, in the last few days she had been experimenting with all sorts of new and different ways to use sumac, as a seasoning for fried eggs, of course, but also braised sturgeon and ray wings.

“Where do you manage to find ray wings these days?” Pierre asked, as dumbfounded as the rest of us.

“I don’t,” she replied. “I make virtual recipes.”

*

July 1

I spend my day running from one bank to the other, converting dollars into pounds at the official exchange rate, then comparing that to the banks’ rates, then to the changers’, then to the black market rate, doing calculations, planning my expenses half in checks and half in cash, going by the changers’ rates or the black market, before getting completely muddled and giving up on the whole thing. My wife said the other day that if the entire population could put to better use just a fraction of the energy that it now spends struggling out of the trap set by our broke government and failing banks, then the country could be back on its feet within forty-eight hours.

*

The economic machine is breaking down, retail businesses are almost bankrupt, and yet the city has been seized by a frenzy of activity since this morning, just like in the glory days of its suddenly vanished opulence. The gridlock is no worse than it was back then, even though the traffic lights are out because of the electricity shortages. And where the lights are actually working, police officers are controlling traffic and encouraging drivers to ignore them, directing everyone to move at the same time with grand, raging gestures, as if they were vengefully making a point of reminding us that order no longer reigns, so why should anyone even bother respecting these last damned surviving traffic lights. The drivers are astonished. Some, like me, resist, under the officers’ resentful eyes. They seem aware and ashamed that they have become representatives of the general chaos and the failure of the state, and are going above and beyond what’s actually necessary, as if they were furiously smashing a prized object to pieces to punish themselves for having carelessly chipped it. I talked to my wife about this when I got home, she didn’t seem to care about the feelings I was ascribing to the traffic officers. She doesn’t like them and even before the economic crisis she thought that they actually tend to be the cause of the gridlock rather than anything else, that they always complicate any situation they are in, that city traffic is like a natural process, it always ends up regulating itself, and that human intervention only disturbs it and makes it more complicated.

*

July 2

There is something fanciful about chance, something tragic even. It was exactly a hundred years ago, in 1920, that the nation of Lebanon was founded. One can only wonder at the irony of fate that brought a country to its ruin on the same date as its birth, at the very moment when its centennial is about to be celebrated. How far back should I go, in those hundred years, to trace the genealogy of this disaster?

*

Lebanon, the arrogant little Switzerland that claimed to be the heir of an ancient or even biblical nation, collapsed for the first time in 1975, after thirty years that tend to be idealized today. In fact they were thirty years of struggle, conflict, and undeclared wars to establish the country’s identity. The Christians considered it as rightfully theirs and as having been founded for them. They refused to share any real power with the Muslims, who demanded what they thought was their due, while aspiring to align the country with the grand Arabist and Nazirite plans. The Muslims allied themselves with the armed Palestinian organizations; the Christians saw this as an existential threat, armed themselves as well, and then the whole thing blew up.

Nowhere else do those “thirty glorious years” deserve their name more than in Lebanon at that time, despite all the discord. As much for their dates—1945–1975, that is, the thirty years of the first Lebanese Republic, which followed the twenty-five indolent years of the French Mandate—as for the heights of opulence that the country reached during that period. Beirut’s cabarets and nightclubs were the most famous in all the Middle East. In those days, Dalida, Jacques Brel, and Louis Armstrong performed in the theaters and the Casino du Liban, while the monumental temples of Baalbek were the backdrop for performances of the Beethoven symphonies conducted by Otto Klemperer and of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea. Jean-Paul Belmondo frolicked with Jean Seberg in the corridors of the Hôtel Phénicia, Louis Aragon stayed at the Hôtel Palmyra, spies from all over the globe held assignations at the famous bar in the Hôtel Saint-Georges designed by Jean Royère, while Oscar Niemeyer was busy building the Tripoli exhibition center inspired by the one in Brasília. But Brigitte Bardot was not well pleased with any of this, and decreed after a film shoot in Beirut that she was disappointed, that it was too Westernized for her taste. She probably expected to find camels, donkeys, and belly dancers around Moresque fountains. But no, people danced the twist and rock ’n’ roll, waterskiing, and miniskirts were all the rage, and this all reached its paroxysm at the beginning of the seventies, just before the collapse. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the city, pitched battles were being fought between the Palestinian militias and those of the Christian parties, and the government had no control over the south of the country. At the time we were like people living at the foot of a volcano, cultivating our fertile land, working hard to get rich, enjoying the good times, while hearing the regular roars from the belly of the earth, feeling the tremors under our feet, and paying no heed, just shrugging and pretending that it had always been this way and will be for a long time yet. Until the day it was all gone.

*

The outbreak of the civil war in 1975 came like the reckoning of all the accounts and miscounts of that first Lebanese Republic. In the early years of the conflict, the militias were fighting with something almost like popular consent: their members were considered as heroes sacrificing their futures and their lives for the common good or a worthy ideal, whether this was the defense of Lebanese identity or the exaltation of its Arab greatness. But this didn’t last. The Syrian interventions from 1979 onward, then the Israeli ones in 1982 and the overturning of the chessboard that they led to, and especially the extended duration of the conflict, inevitably transformed the first armed groups into regular militias, then into quasi-professional armies. The behavior of the combatants changed, too, and many of the first volunteers on the battlefields decided not to continue fighting because of the erosion of their original ideals. The enthusiastic young men from the beginning of the conflict were gradually replaced by career soldiers of sorts. The osmosis with the general population slackened, then a real hostility toward the militias started to appear on both sides, and in the same way in both camps, without this hostility coming into plain sight. Just as naturally, the historical politicians, the leaders of the first republic who were also the main proponents of the war—Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun, Kamal Jumblatt, or Saeb Salam—were gradually overwhelmed or eliminated, then supplanted by a new generation, not of politicians but of warlords: Samir Geagea, Elie Hobeika, Walid Jumblatt, or Nabih Berri. Their various militias and the countless clients that prospered in their orbit bled the country dry for a decade, through racketeering, trafficking scams, and the control of the half-bankrupted public infrastructure, notably the ports and airports. Which explains why the rise of General Michel Aoun, the commander in chief of what was left of the legalist army, made such a big impact, and why he generated so much enthusiasm. This reckless and clumsy braggart promised, in grand waffling speeches, to cleanse Lebanon of its militias, then to rid it of the Syrian presence. But after bloody and pointless battles, instead of succeeding he managed only to complete the ruin of the country, to unite all the militias against him alongside the Syrians, and to allow the Syrians to get rid of him and gain control over the whole country by ending the war by decree.

*

July 3

A few days ago, my daughter Saria got her driver’s license in the most absurd circumstances: she couldn’t sit the written test because of the lack of electricity in the examination center. She practices every day, driving me around on my various errands. She manages very well with the confusion caused by the missing traffic lights and the bizarre attitude of the police officers, but dreads the tunnel going down to the waterfront, which is plunged in perilously opaque darkness because of the failed electricity supply. Sometimes as we pass by, I point out a few ridiculous details of what is now our daily life, and yesterday, in fact, as we drove past a large bank, there was an incredible barricade surrounding it like a stronghold. She asks me questions about the situation, about her future, and whether there is any chance we would let her go abroad next year so she can continue her studies, as a number of her friends are doing. The dreams that young people like her have of leaving, even though they were attached to the country until only recently, are the topic of some of our most distressing and awkward conversations.

But yesterday, we were talking about something else. At her request, I had just explained a few complex issues from our recent history to her, notably the civil war, and she surprised me by declaring that in fact, to summarize it all, this long and complex war between the Lebanese people had actually been won by … the Syrians. I had a good laugh about this at the time, and even conceded that this singular paradox did contain the whole truth. At the end of the armed conflict, those who came out the winners were, in each camp, those who were the closest to the Syrians or had backed them or sought their support at one stage or another. Hobeika, Berri, Jumblatt, or the Hezbollah chiefs, those “new” men who had already bankrupted the country during the conflict, would be able to share out the fabulous cake of its reconstruction, on the condition that they delivered a portion of it to the Syrian military leaders. After granting themselves an amnesty during a memorable vote in the first postwar Parliament, they began the installation of a vast network of control of the new state, in collusion with their old wartime chiefs of staff and the many clients gathered around them.

*

The second collapse was the inescapable result of the very principles of the second republic, and the mutation of warlords into “politicians.” Right from the start, in the euphoria of the return to peace and the expectation of fabulous opulence, the tentacles of a gigantic system of siphoning funds allocated to the country’s reconstruction were efficiently put in place. The mechanisms of dubious contracts, institutional racketeering, insider trading, fake invoicing, corruption, and complicity were brought up to operational speed very quickly at all levels of the state sector, which was overhauled for the sole purpose of enriching the people colonizing the country or those who had become its foreign masters. Useless construction sites sprang up, giving the impression of a beehive at work, slush funds became routine, along with favors and kickbacks, percentage deals, shared projects, fictitious jobs, and the clientelization of local communities.

The only real newcomer among the converted warlords at that time was the businessman Rafic Hariri, who was made prime minister after an agreement sealed between the Saudis (the financial backers of the reconstruction) and the Syrians (the keepers of the peace and unofficial occupiers of Lebanon). He arrived on the scene with genuine ambitions to rebuild the country, despite his questionable taste in urban planning that nearly transformed Beirut into a kind of megalopolis like those in the Gulf emirates. I don’t know how much he allowed to happen, how much he was forced to do. He apparently used rather undemocratic means to strip the owners of the city center of their properties, granted himself a few privileges and off-book accounts, and plunged Lebanon into debt. More importantly, he was forced to work alongside the old Syrian-backed warlords who were now his peers, and to reluctantly offer them high-ranking sinecures in public office and astronomical payments for tender contracts. But even that was not enough, he was still not considered sufficiently docile. His assassination in 2005 provoked what was—although it is rarely described as such—the first real Arab revolution. Millions of Lebanese people in the streets expelled the Syrian occupiers from the country. Our naive belief at the time was that we were getting rid of those responsible for the widespread corruption undermining the government, that everything was going to be fine from then on, and that this second republic would serve its citizens at last. The enemies of Syria came out of the shadows, Aoun the braggart returned, and his followers saw this as the second coming of the Messiah, or of de Gaulle after the Occupation. Alas, politicians of all persuasions—newcomers as well as former allies of Syria who had kept their positions—renewed their old alliances or created new ones that had no other object but to preserve the oligarchy’s control of the government, which continued to be profitable, extremely profitable.

*

All this lasted for thirty years. Maybe there is a riddle to be solved in the dates that define this country’s history. Because thirty years, from 1945 to 1975, is also the time it took for the first republic to collapse. Another thirty glori­ous years, from 1990 to 2020, duplicated the preceding ones. Beirut became the party town and center of nightlife for the entire Middle East again, and maybe even of the entire Mediterranean. You would see more Porsches and Masera­tis here than in Beverly Hills. It was a good place to be rich, but you could also become rich in art and design just as well as in business or real estate, and the banks offered such mind-boggling interest rates that it was an El Dorado for annuitants. Nothing was produced anymore, agriculture was abandoned, industry was nonexistent, people lived on im­ports, and the government decided to borrow U.S. dollars from the local banks at absurd rates, in order to finance large-scale projects. The debt reached thirty billion, then forty, then fifty, and the interest alone was higher than the GDP. But Ro­berto Alagna was singing at Beiteddine, Plácido Domingo at Baalbek, and the Miss Europe contest was held in Lebanon. Once again, we were dancing at the foot of a volcano whose threatening roars everyone refused to hear, or on the edge of a precipice into which we finally fell.

—Translated from the French by Ruth Diver

 

Charif Majdalani was born in Lebanon in 1960 and is one of the most important figures in Lebanese literature today. After living in France for thirteen years, he returned to Lebanon in 1993 and now teaches French literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. His novel Moving the Palace won the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix Tropiques.

Ruth Diver holds a Ph.D. in French and comparative literature from the University of Paris 8 and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She won two 2018 French Voices Awards for her translations of Marx and the Doll, by Maryam Madjidi, and Titus Did Not Love Berenice, by Nathalie Azoulai. She also won Asymptote’s 2016 Close Approximations fiction prize for her translation of extracts of Maraudes, by Sophie Pujas.

Excerpted from Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse, by Charif Majdalani, translated by Ruth Diver. Published by Other Press.

Authenticity and Apocalypse: An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

Photo: Nina Subin.

I first encountered Alexandra Kleeman’s work in the pages of this magazine. Her story “Fairy Tale”—published in 2010, when Kleeman was still a student in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University—is a nightmarish account of a woman confronted by a barrage of strangers who all claim to be her fiancé. The one she is forced to choose tries to kill her. Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine employs a similarly arch and sinister surrealism to tell the story of two roommates whose identities slowly melt into one.

In her latest novel, Something New under the Sun, the otherworldly elements lurk further below the surface. The world of the novel is an only mildly exaggerated version of our own, plagued by privatization, corporate conspiracy, and rampant wildfires. The story follows a middle-aged East Coast novelist, Patrick Hamlin, as he travels to Los Angeles to supervise the making of his book into a film—a glamorous vision that is comically upended when, upon arrival, he discovers his primary task will be chauffeuring a demanding starlet, Cassidy Carter, across the menacing California landscape.

Due to extreme drought and water shortage, all but the wealthiest Californians have to drink WAT-R, a synthetic substitute for water that is described as being “exactly like the original, except moreso.” Back in New York, Patrick’s wife and daughter have taken refuge at a cultish eco-commune upstate, where they perform rituals to mourn the imminent death of the planet. In confident, understated prose, Kleeman foregrounds the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties, conjuring a simmering unease that recalls fellow genre defiers such as Don DeLillo and Patricia Highsmith. But in the end what’s most troubling about the world of Kleeman’s novel is not its strangeness but its familiarity—how closely its horrors hew to those of modern life.

This interview was conducted by phone between New York and Colorado two days after a notorious American billionaire shot himself into space and a few weeks after a patch of ocean in the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire. My conversation with Kleeman made me think deeply about the uncanny moment we are living in and the potential of fiction to offer new and more expansive modes of reality.

INTERVIEWER

The epigraph of the book is a passage from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in which a man sees a unicorn. At first, he thinks he must be dreaming or having some kind of mystical experience. But then another person comes along and sees it, too, and then another, and somehow these witnesses reduce the specialness of the experience until it is “as thin as reality,” transforming the unicorn into something ordinary—“a horse with an arrow in its forehead.” Why did that feel like the right way to open the novel?

KLEEMAN

I have a long relationship with the play Hamlet. It is the thing I have seen performed the most times in my life, and it was an important touchstone for me in several different ways while writing Something New under the Sun. First, it manifests this theme of telling and retelling and substitution and change by parts that I think is an important part of the logic of the novel. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also asks this question about whether or not perceiving inaccurately is helpful to us in terms of our psychological stability and our survival, which I think is one of the main questions of this book. We often perceive correctly in a localized way. We can accurately name what is happening in our daily lives, or perform a very complex analysis of a TV show we are watching. But the larger context in which we operate—the capitalist economy, the ecosystem, which is under extreme pressure and is changing in ways that are stochastic and nonlinear—is often beyond our emotional comprehension. I think a lot about whether our models of reality enable us to function usefully in a world that is changing as quickly as the one we occupy.

INTERVIEWER

You have taught classes on speculative fiction. Were you thinking at all about genre while you were writing? And what do we gain when we view our world through an altered lens?

KLEEMAN

Yes, the question of genre was one that came up a lot while I was writing. I think this novel sort of sprawls across several different genres—or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it slumps messily across them. That was an intentional provocation, because I find I’m quite skeptical of whether the boundaries it’s blurring are really even meaningful anymore. In the past, realism or domestic realism has enjoyed a privileged relationship to reality because it claims to offer “accurate” representations of people and things that happen in the world. But what counts as reality is always a question of perspective, parameters, and interests. Let’s say you have a novel set in the present day in Brooklyn and there is no representation of gentrification or the gig economy or climate change. Can that be considered realism? Are you writing about an alternate reality, or are you simply telling an artificially narrow story that imagines a world in which these issues are not as visible and not exerting as much pressure on our psyche? In the past week, two different billionaires have shot themselves into space, a lightning storm over British Columbia sent down something like three hundred thousand lightning strikes, and last time I checked, there was still a giant area of the Gulf of Mexico where the ocean was on fire. When you try to write a far-off dystopian or postapocalyptic narrative, I think you inevitably end up creating something that resonates with a lot of what is happening in the world today. So what does that mean? Does it mean we need new genres to accurately project our fantasies into? Perhaps. But I think a better question would be, In what ways do we need to reconceive how we build our standard-issue reality in literature?

INTERVIEWER

The landscape of California has something of a starring role in your novel. The trees and mountain lions and wildfires are not just vividly conjured but foregrounded and, at times, given consciousness. You mentioned that you spent part of your childhood in California. What about that part of the world captures your imagination?

KLEEMAN

I moved a lot as a kid. I lived in LA, Virginia, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Japan, and even Europe for a little while. One of the big moves was from the Piedmont area of New York to the San Gabriel Valley. Coming out West was this amazing experience of being in the middle of a vast amount of space. To the untrained eye, it looks empty—grassless, treeless, very dry. It’s only once you get to know it that you can really see how much is going on. It is almost an alien landscape after coming from a place where water is so abundant, and I felt that difference really acutely when I was young. So I wanted to pay tribute to the landscape and conjure it with all its drama and beauty, which meant sometimes to just travel across it—to peel away from human characters and let the camera of the narrative move through spaces and see how much life is going on out there.

I feel there is a danger to rendering landscapes in prose. It is easy to write about places in a way that turns them into backgrounds and makes them inert, and that perpetuates the idea that there’s not much going on there, when actually there is so much happening. There is so much drama and action taking place constantly in the natural world—so many stories and narratives unfolding. There are so many worlds of vital life. If we lived in a less anthropocentric world, we might look at our novels and think, Why is there never an animal in this story except for one that dies for some dramatic reason? To show that there is a world that is bigger than the world of these characters was really important to me—to always remind the reader that this story is operating at one level of human scale, plot, character, et cetera, but there are other levels out there.

INTERVIEWER

This novel feels in some ways like a departure from your earlier work, in that the surrealist or otherworldly elements are less apparent at the outset.

KLEEMAN

Absolutely. I wanted to begin by writing my version of a realist novel and then to slowly let it move into more speculative territory. It begins as something that people can recognize and then distorts into something uncanny and unexpected. And Patrick’s character is in some ways a surrogate for the reader in that process. At the beginning of the novel, he is this naive outsider coming into an industry and a world that he still has a lot of unfettered optimism for. Hollywood, for him, is a place where it feels like fortunes can change and big things can happen and your life can transform in a categorical way. And in a sense, his life does transform—just not in the ways he expected.

Many genre writers I really admire, like Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick, use the trope of the “generic man,” and I wanted to play with that and make it my own. The generic man has, for better or worse, defined a lot of the world that we live in, and I’m interested in this cultural moment in which the generic man feels so deeply at risk. I think he is exposed to the world in a way he never was before. His behaviors and instincts have been denaturalized, and he has begun to stick out, forcing him to take on some of the precarity and visibility that people of other identities have felt for a long time. I think this felt to a lot of men like it was the end of the world—but it was just the end of their world, you know? And I thought that was sort of an interesting way to approach the pre-apocalyptic and postapocalyptic, too. The end of an era is never the end for everybody. Sometimes it means space is opening up for others. Sometimes it means the world is more livable for people who haven’t previously been foregrounded. So I wanted the book to begin by being really centered on this man, Patrick, and then to start passing the narrative baton to more and more people who are not white men and sometimes are not even humans.

INTERVIEWER

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that makes a lot of sense. It’s difficult to think on scales beyond the human, but I feel like the novel is constantly pushing the reader to do just that. I was really interested in the way the narrative telescopes, zooming in and out between these big, disquieting events, like the melting of the ice caps, and then the small pettinesses of everyday life. This flattening logic reminded me in some ways of the internet and social media, where the big and the small sit side by side, sometimes to disorienting effect.

KLEEMAN

Yeah, I mean, the amazing thing about the internet is that it contains such a vast amount of information, including hugely significant planetary-level information that it feeds to us in the same way it does an advertisement for a customizable shampoo. It reduces everything to a bite-size component. This is, on the one hand, an interesting and satisfying way to consume information, but it also means we are asked to synthesize things that have large implications and are truly urgent but are happening concurrently to YouTube videos of pets and the lining up of freelance gigs. The book tends toward this overstuffed logic, too, where something big and consequential is shoved out of focus by something small and ordinary.

INTERVIEWER

The novel contains a lot of artifice—synthetic water, phony Hollywood producers—but the characters also talk a lot about authenticity or “realness,” especially in reference to Cassidy. In her case, the question of artifice feels particularly tethered to her gender and fame. Everyone—Patrick included—is obsessed with whether or not she is “real.” Can you speak to this theme of authenticity as it relates to her character?

KLEEMAN

I’m part of the same generation as Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. In a way, I grew up alongside them. And my whole life I have had this strange awareness of being the same age, numerically, as Lindsay Lohan. I have thought to myself, What is she doing and what am I doing? How am I doing relative to Lindsay Lohan? She has always been a kind of yardstick. With this novel, I was thinking a lot about the dynamic of forced plasticity and endless extractionism, and I thought there was no one better to register this than a celebrity who has been so lauded and, frankly, squeezed for the natural resource that is her supposed naturalness or authenticity. To be asked to provide that all that time, to be pinned in place by one perspective of yourself and constantly mined for it, seems really tragic to me. It’s a contradiction—to be asked to perform realness. But I think that’s the position Cassidy finds herself in.

I also wanted to highlight how fraught the question of authenticity is—for everyone, but especially for young women. We receive so much messaging about what we should be and should desire. Our ideas about who we are and what we want and what we’re worth are deeply circulated between our internal selves and the identities or qualities that others impose on us. It becomes really difficult to tell who you’re performing for and even which part is the performance. So I think that when Patrick and others claim to see something “authentic” in Cassidy, it might say more about them and what they are projecting onto her than it does about who she is.

INTERVIEWER

Yeah, absolutely.

KLEEMAN

I always sort of viewed these infamous celebrity breakdowns—Britney Spears shaving her head or Lindsay Lohan yelling at paparazzi or the like—as personal attempts to escape from the constant performance of identity, to shake off this lens and make some more room for other possibilities of who a person might be. People are messy. We have so many conflicting motives. So when you can identify an impulse or a desire that comes truly from within yourself, those are precious moments to seize on and follow.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of moments of rupture, I’d like to talk for a minute about Patrick’s wife, Alison. She feels in a way like an important foil or balancing character. She is depicted as this emotionally fragile woman who has run off to an upstate retreat to mourn the effects of climate change. But there is an argument to be made that by refusing to adjust to an insane world, she is the sanest person in the book—or at least the one standing on the firmest ethical ground. Her character seems to beg the question, Is it right to be happy and okay in a world that is so corrupt and destructive?

KLEEMAN

Having a chapter devoted to Alison was really important to me. She gets to stand where I stand most of the time, which is in a position of compromise but also of trying to do better. She is reckoning with the question of whether it is even possible to live a normal life if you perceive the world around you to be deeply imperiled. At the moment in the narrative when the stuff about WAT-R and this capitalist conspiracy is coming to a head on the West Coast, the book turns to focus on Alison, who is in a place where the drama has a very different quality. That chapter gives a sense of the breadth of the world.

There is no crisis that takes over everyone’s life in the same way. I think the pandemic has been a really clear example of this. Even something so widespread that has reshaped our lives over the past year and a half, seems almost not to have touched some people. The world is amazing and strange in that way. I think Alison’s struggle is not only how to live an ethical life but how to take it seriously and respond to a crisis that is happening far away, that there’s really nothing she can do to help with in that moment. She is where a lot of us are in relation to this sort of vastly distributed crisis of climate change, which impacts some people really directly but impacts many more of us only indirectly, in a much more diffuse way that is difficult to manage a response to. The result, for better or worse, seems to be a kind of generalized anxiety and feeling of precarity that rarely translates to meaningful action—and in some cases inhibits it.

INTERVIEWER

The idea of grieving for the destruction of the environment was really compelling to me. We so rarely speak about climate change in personal and emotional terms, but of course it’s very emotional. There is so much loss happening. I’m curious if writing this book and thinking deeply about these questions changed your own feelings about consumerism and climate change and our ever-burning world. Or did your feelings become more legible to you in any way?

KLEEMAN

There are so many possible ways of responding to that, and all of them come with their own critique attached. It’s part of what makes this such a tricky subject. The same thing that Alison and her daughter, Nora, wrestle with about being in this ecocentric mourning camp is, Are we being truer to the situation by acknowledging it emotionally, or is there something in the world that we should still be doing? Is this a form of escapism or a form of reconciliation and recognition and honesty? I think everyone’s answers to those questions are going to be different. Again, I think about the moments of rupture in the book, these little gestures of will where the spell of normalcy is broken—for instance, Alison’s breakdown where she destroys her yard and her neighbor’s yard and tears up the lawn, or Cassidy’s unwillingness to behave politely in the face of paparazzi who are stealing her private moments. Those sorts of actions share a symmetry with the more mundane, like deciding that you are going to stop driving or cut single-use plastics out of your daily life. These choices don’t have world-changing effects, necessarily, but they do the work of showing that the expected patterns of life can be cracked, can be broken, can be suspended, and that gives you room to think around them.

For me, it has become really important to think about having a relationship to land, and trying to help that landscape be more resilient in whatever way you can, doing what you can to form a community in a specific place. In general, making yourself ready to keep trying rather than resigned to inevitability or completely hopeless and burned out and despairing. It’s a really difficult balance to strike, but it’s what I’m reaching for.

 

Cornelia Channing is a writer from Bridgehampton, New York. She is a copy editor at New York Magazine.