The Paris Review's Blog, page 167

Vanished into Music

Arthur Russell.

There’s a man on the ferry. He’s wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and standing at the stern, his handsome face pitted with acne scars. Everyone else is looking at Manhattan. It’s 1986: the twin towers dominate the view. But this man isn’t looking at the buildings. He’s staring at the swirling water, the confluence of tides, the East River and the Hudson coming together in the harbor of the city.

Out here, everything is expansive. Out here, everything falls away. He has his Walkman in his pocket, his headphones around his ears. The music he’s listening to is a mix he finished late last night. When he was done—though nothing he does is ever done, exactly—he took the cassette and left the studio. Full moon, of course. He has been recording this album every full moon for three years now. Sometimes he curls up in the studio for a nap, waking in the small hours with a new idea, an unprecedented sound bubbling through his mind.

His name is Arthur Russell. He’s thirty-five. He’s a gay man, a Buddhist, a cellist, a country singer, an avant-garde composer, a disco queen; he is the greatest musician you’ve never heard of. The music he’s been making doesn’t sound like any music that’s ever been made before. It’s like music from the bottom of the ocean, it’s like music they play in nightclubs on the moon. The album he’s working on, his first, is called World of Echo. Just his voice and his cello, in a studio in the deserted Financial District, surrounded by empty, glowing offices. One man pushing music to its limits, finding the breaking points, making the most beautiful songs imaginable and then teasing them apart like taffy, amplifying and distorting until they dissolve into lakes of sound.

In the booth, he listens tensely, moving his shoulders a little, dancing on the spot. Which is best? How does the cello sound when it’s distorted, feeding back like an electric guitar? How subtly can he bow, making gauzy veils of sound? Is it better when you can hear the words he’s singing, or when there’s no intelligible language at all, just a polysyllabic babble, the music pouring through him?

At two or three or four in the morning he stops and slots in the night’s tape, listening to it repeatedly as he prowls the sleeping city. Sometimes he’ll walk for hours, wandering the streets of SoHo or following the river north. Maybe he’ll stop at Gem Spa and buy an egg cream; maybe he’ll call in at Paradise Lounge or the Garage, where the beautiful boys dance, black and white together, in an ecstatic sweaty fusion.

*

Lately, though, Arthur has been losing his taste for the nightlife; lately he’s been feeling dog-tired. So tonight he finds himself on the ferry at dawn, gazing out at the water, loving how the music sounds over the low drone of the ferry’s engine.

He doesn’t come from here. He’s a farm boy, a refugee from the cornfields of Iowa, seeking his fortune in the big city. He never felt like he fitted in in Oskaloosa and at eighteen he ran away from home. He washed up in a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, where he was forbidden to play his cello and so hid in a tiny closet to practice for hours. In 1973, at the age of twenty-two, he made the move to Manhattan, finding an apartment in the Poets Building, a tatty East Village walk-up that was home to the poet and counterculture legend Allen Ginsberg, who encouraged him to come out as a gay man.

The wake of the boat is white. Arthur leans on the rail, dreaming of his future. What he wants is to be a pop star, though he is hampered by his shyness, his lack of money, his perfectionism, and his refusal to compromise on any aspect of his vision. Most musicians stick to a single scene but Arthur has always been a rover. He’s a restless soul, sticking his nose into all the different places in the city where music is made. Boundaries and borders mean nothing to him; he hurdles them with ease.

Within a year of his arrival in New York, he was appointed musical director of the Kitchen, the venue at the heart of the city’s experimental music and performance scene. He collaborated with minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and at the same time he played dirty downtown rock ’n’ roll, running out to CBGB to play cello with the Talking Heads. Any music could be experimental music; any music could be pushed to its limits.

And then he discovered the hedonistic, libidinal world of disco. All across downtown, nightclubs were proliferating: wild spaces where you could sweat with a thousand strangers, relinquishing inhibitions in a nocturnal world of rhythm. Quickly, he began to release dance records, under multiple pseudonyms. Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, named for the constant cry from the dealers in the park by his house. Indian Ocean, Killer Whale: names for alternate selves, each with their own alternate vision. You could dance to these records, sure, but they were also experimental adventures in minimalism in their own right: spacey, dubby, weirdly unstructured grooves, shifting in mood from high-octane, fist-pumping ecstasy to a more childlike, innocent sensuality.

Listening to World of Echo over the sound of the water, he thinks it is the most complete thing he’s ever done. But it’s never easy to put something new into the world. The album is released later that year and though the early reviews are positive the sales are appalling. There is no market for the music of the future, not yet.

*

One of the most magical things about Arthur Russell’s music is the way it conveys feelings, especially feelings that are not easily translated into words. For him, music is a place of refuge, a haven: an infinite realm into which he can voyage, even vanish. He hopes it might bring him fame, heightened visibility, but he also loves the way he can swim out into it, temporarily disappearing from the world.

AIDS accelerates this tendency, turning it malignant. His natural spaciness becomes confusion, while his capacity for wandering gives way to a dangerous tendency to get lost. The virus lays waste to him, eroding his immune system. The end comes fast: April 4, 1992, in a hospital bed high above New York.

How do you define success? Arthur Russell was only forty when he died, flat broke, a few obscure singles and one album to his name. But he left behind thousands of hours of unpublished music, hundreds upon hundreds of songs. In his absence, it has slowly been released into the world, to growing appreciation and acclaim. Listening to it now, it becomes apparent that the quiet man on the ferry, dancing silently to sounds that only he could hear, might have been one of the best and strangest talents of twentieth-century composition, a nomad with an absolute commitment to freedom, whose natural element was music itself.

“That’s us,” Arthur once sang, “before we got there.” He’s telling a story about being a kid, driving to the lake before dawn to swim. Then the beat kicks in, and now it’s love he’s singing about, or maybe just how it feels to be awake in the world on a summer morning. It’s a wild combination all right, and so was he: a firework on the Fourth of July, everything all at once, in a flash, and gone before you could grasp what you’d seen.

 

Winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Olivia Laing is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, including The Lonely City, and one novel, Crudo. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She lives in London, England.

Excerpted from Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency © 2020 by Olivia Laing. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Quarantine Reads: The U.S.A. Trilogy

Our flat in London has five windows and two skylights. Like most renters in this city, we have no yard, no balcony, no fire escape. Four floors up from the street, the windows offer our allotment of open space; the sky forms our personal outdoors. Over the past weeks, since our early self-quarantine bled into the UK’s nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, I have studied the way patches of light move through this flat like I’m a geographer of warmth. I follow it in arches as the hours pass, as though I’m a dot floating across a time-lapse heat map. Cooped up in a few hundred square feet, I have learned that my sanity depends on putting myself in that path of light, again and again and again.

It begins in our bedroom, which faces southeast: early in the morning, a rectangle of light hits the wall at the foot of our bed, bisected by the windowpane’s even cross. At midday the skylight creates a square foot of heat in the hallway; the dog and I sit there, sharing it. By early afternoon the sun has moved to the other side of the flat; a corner of the dining table is flooded with light, illuminating every pock and scratch in the wood. If I sit there until evening, the sun leaves my cheeks pink.

I’m light-chasing in my mind, too: trying to hop from one safe, warm spot of focus (the potted mint thriving in the window; the thin-sliced meat dry-curing in the oven; the dog nuzzled against my side) to the next (an untouched tray of watercolor paints; a fresh set of mismatched sheets on the bed; a bath at midday). The shadows of dread spread beneath my conscious thoughts. I look away as long-laid plans crack and rot. Fear has become ambient, the way you stop hearing the speeding train’s rattle when you live next door to the tracks.

Like all those who have built lives in a country that is not their own, where one’s right to exist is granted only in brief, expensive, and uncertain installments, I found myself caught between risks: the risk of staying in London and the risk of returning to America, the risk of distance and the risk of infection, the risk of being within and the risk of being without. Time made the decision for me.

There go the shadows! Gosh are they dark. I leap back into the silly, easy light: the neighbor’s blossoming jasmine, the dog’s wet nose, the warm breeze at night. There is birdsong in the neighborhood, was that there before? If I fill my mind with only this, I may get through. I know it’s a privilege to even try.

Books, I’ve tried, too. I page through new books and old books and books I’ve read before, desperate to be swallowed up. But it’s as though my brain’s been rewired: linear plots appear naive and presumptive; realist dialogue rings flat like a bad pilot script; and depictions of normalcy shoot my thoughts down a rabbit hole of when-will-it-be-that-way-again. I try and fail to lose myself, but then the book gets set down, and I somehow wind up on eBay, channeling homesickness into bids for Chicago kitsch.

I was aimlessly watching the ticker go down on an auction for Cubs paraphernalia when I saw the fat spine of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy staring me down from the shelf. I’d read the books years ago, as an undergraduate in California, a time in my life characterized by so much ease and beauty that I find it hard to believe it actually happened. Back then I’d admired the rhythm of his sentences and the ambition of his project, but had found myself listless in the face of his determined experimentation: the novels, The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and Big Money (1936), shuttle between snapshot narratives of various fictional American men and women; brief biographies of famous men; snippets of poetry and popular music from the radio; stream-of-consciousness autofiction; and headlines and sentence-length clippings from the Chicago Tribune and the New York World News. It’s a clattering 1,184-page portrait of a nation in perpetual crisis, reckoning with war, precarity, economic upheaval, cavernous political divisions, capitalism’s parasitic expansion, and the thwarted rise of American social democracy. To say that it’s a trilogy of “renewed relevance” would be to suggest the story of America has ever been otherwise.

Its massive size, which once filled me with a sense of studious obligation, now grants me freedom to roam. I read diligently for a few pages; I page ahead, flip back. I read like I’m improvising the act of reading. I stare at the headlines: “EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL”, “THIS IS THE CENTURY WHERE BRAINS AND BILLIONS ARE TO RULE”, “STRIKING WAITERS ASK AID OF WOMEN”, “CONFESSED ANARCHISTS ON BENDED KNEES KISS U.S. FLAG”. My mind flits across the tales of Janey and Mac and Eleanor and Richard; I glimpse the lives of journalists and mechanics and actresses and activists. Dos Passos’s Modernism mimics the pattern of attention we’ve developed on the internet: headlines declaring personal or national disaster are interspersed with enjoyably vapid snaps of popular culture and the tales of individual lives. It’s impossible to linger on any given moment; it’s gone as it begins. I read Dos Passos before I go to sleep, I read Dos Passos when I wake up, I read Dos Passos while I follow the sun. I absorb maybe a third of what I read; the other two thirds just keep me company, run-on sentences filling my mind, keeping other thoughts out.

In truth, what is portrayed is a glimpse of what’s likely to come: wholesale unemployment, the vicious reassertion of capitalist power, rare moments of mercy spread far across a long line of economic devastation. Yet these snapshots of two cities I love—Chicago, New York—bring me comfort at a moment when I have no idea when I’ll see them next. The characters’ vagabond lives throw my own stasis into clear relief: their lives are uncertain, premised on promises the market never intended to keep, but there is an irrepressible momentum to each story, months and years passing in pages, characters ricocheting across the country in search of some kind of progress, rarely finding it but pushing forward all the same, each motivated by their own private fiction of America.

I’ve never really known an America like that, except through the stories my immigrant grandmother told me: the way, as a child, she would watch planes pass over the Philippines and imagine that every single one of them was headed to the States. Her single-minded certainty that one day she’d put herself on one of those planes; her dogged belief that when she got to America, her life would really begin. I’m now the third generation to learn that to call two countries home is to live in a perpetual state of flight: you have always just left, you have always only just arrived.

That immigrant restlessness is borne out in the expansiveness of Dos Passos’s project, his insistence that meaning would be found not in one person’s life but in a whole wave of voices, a ceaseless coming and going. The U.S.A. trilogy offers the comforting cacophony of the collective at a time of isolation. I know America will be changed when I next return (when will that be?) and I envy those who have the luxury of taking it for granted, who sigh that they wish they were in Europe, that they wish they were anywhere else. I understand where it comes from, but all I can think of is home. So I read Dos Passos and I let the days pass and the news cycles keep cycling through, rendering home for me in statistics and headlines and photographs of empty streets.

Dos Passos ends his trilogy with an unnamed young man on a plane headed west, looking out at the sky over the country as the plane passes through dusk: Cleveland, Chicago, Cheyenne, Salt Lake.

The transcontinental passenger thinks contracts, profits, vacationtrips, mighty continent between Atlantic and Pacific, power, wires humming dollars, cities jammed, hills empty, the indiantrail leading into the wagonroad, the macadamed pike, the concrete skyway; trains, planes: history the billiondollar speedup…

A hundred miles down the road.

In a corner of our apartment where the light never hits, we have a photograph by Berenice Abbott, one of Dos Passos’s Modernist contemporaries. The image depicts Exchange Place in Lower Manhattan, after the Wall Street Crash. Abbott’s vantage point is surreal, as though she’s on a tightrope between two skyscrapers, looking down on the street. Men in professional dress walk the streets, unidentifiable; a few look up, most keep their heads down. New Street and Broad Street form stripes of sunlight between the shadows of the skyscrapers. And at the end of the road, there’s a slight curve, where Exchange becomes Hanover, and a building at the edge of Abbott’s sight fades into the polluted, dusty light, like the part of a dream where your mind hasn’t thought far enough, a corner your subconscious didn’t get a chance to build. Of course, for those on the ground, the disappearing point isn’t there at all: just more road ahead, more shadows, more light to chase.

Head swims, belly tightens, wants crawl over his skin like ants: went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor … paychecks were for hands willing to work … waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly, idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic.

A hundred miles down the road.

 

Jennifer Schaffer is an American writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Baffler, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere in print and online. 

Rethinking the Eighties: An Interview with Quan Barry

Left: Quan Barry, photo courtesy of the author

In 1692, a small group of adolescent girls dominated Salem politics, accusing local women and men of witchcraft. The condemned women were often misfits, unfairly deemed dangerous by their kin. The young accusers themselves—their active imaginations stifled by puritanical life—quickly became the main players in the Salem witch trials. In her second novel, We Ride Upon Sticks (Pantheon, 2020), author Quan Barry reexamines this notorious history with a new question in mind. Who would these women and girls be had they lived three hundred years later? Her answer: the 1989 Danvers High varsity field hockey team.

We Ride Upon Sticks is a feminist bildungsroman set in a township just outside of Salem in the eighties. The field hockey team is on a losing streak, so they employ a dark strategy, using witchcraft to turn the season around. Forming an unlikely coven, each player signs her name in a makeshift devil’s book—a diary with a picture of Emilio Estevez on the cover. The losing streak becomes a winning streak, but victory on the field leads to debauchery off. A Ouija board urges human sacrifice, cars are smashed by field hockey sticks, a tarot reader is consulted, and potions are brewed. The team gathers for bonfires as regular and ritualistic as the games, where Janet Jackson blares on full volume and Bartles & Jaymes flows freely. Partaking in this pagan revelry, the girls dance stark naked in the clear light of the New England moon.

Barry’s novel is a love letter to her hometown of Danvers. In artful prose that recalls Barry’s long career in poetry, she depicts her local landscape in detail, unveiling the communal memories imbued in each turn of Route 1 and each corridor of Danvers High. But her narrative is as universal as it is regional. The field hockey coach, Coach Butler, is recognizable to any woman who partook in high school sports. She was modeled on Barry’s real-life coach, Barb Damon, and so vividly recalls my own, Miss Monahan, who would stand on the sidelines waving her stick like a baton as I tore through crowds of players twice my size.

Barry and I spoke over the phone in mid-March, just after she had concluded a book tour in New York and along Boston’s North Shore. She had appeared at Danvers High not a week before. Though COVID-19 loomed, we lingered on unrelated topics, such as hair, feminism, and D.I.Y. witchcraft. Our conversation took place, quite aptly, on Friday the thirteenth.

INTERVIEWER

In We Ride Upon Sticks, you play with the aesthetics and tropes of movies from the eighties, especially horror movies. Why did you choose the eighties as the backdrop for the novel?

BARRY

I’m from the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. I graduated from high school in 1990, which means I played on the field hockey team in 1989, the year in which the novel is set. But unlike in the book, it was never a rags-to-riches story. We were good all along. I knew the eighties. I knew the town. I knew the history of the Salem witch trials. That’s why all of those elements are in the book. I didn’t realize it when I was going into the project, but I like the fact that we can look back on that decade with a wiser eye. Oftentimes when people think of the eighties, they just recall the funny clothes and the hair. But, as is discussed in the book, the eighties definitely had their issues. It’s post-Reagan, you have the Central Park Five, you have the AIDS crisis. There was a lot going on, and I was interested in rethinking that time through a more complicated lens. It’s a time that was dear to my heart, because that was when I came of age.

INTERVIEWER

In the book, witchcraft is a practice through which women can express and act on otherwise forbidden urges, and of course, this book takes place on the grounds of the Salem witch trials. The recent #MeToo movement is often referred to as a “witch hunt.” How were you thinking through the connections between witchcraft and feminism?

BARRY

I’ve always thought of witchcraft in terms of female empowerment, because many of the women who were hung historically did not fit into society in traditional ways. They weren’t mothers, or they were old, or they were seen as too powerful. One of the first women who was hung in Salem was Bridget Bishop. A couple of the things were held against her—she was a tavern owner and she supposedly liked to wear red. I’ve always thought of witchcraft as a tool of female empowerment, even going back to paganism and Wiccan practices. Witchcraft is very Mother Nature–centric, and it just made sense that it would be braided into the book. I also wanted to write a story about teen sports, but one that looked at teen sports played by girls, which we don’t see much of in books and movies, even now. Think, too, about women’s soccer—the fight for equal pay and the difficulty that they’re having with that today.

INTERVIEWER

The spirit of the U.S. women’s soccer team reminds me of the Danvers field hockey team, in a way. I love that moment when they realize they are the first female team at Danvers High to be thrown a pep rally.

BARRY

Yes, they’re the first ones through the hoop. And when it comes to sports mascots, they are usually all male or even ambiguously gendered. Right now, in 2020, the Salem High School football team is called the Witches, which I just love. When was the last time you heard about a sports team that had a distinctly female mascot?

INTERVIEWER

The eighties were also a moment when possibilities for women were changing, as was our understanding of gender. This tension plays out between the two characters named Cory. Girl Cory, the ultrafeminine “it girl” of Danvers, and Boy Cory, the only adolescent male in a women’s league, play opposite positions on the team. And yet, in some ways, they seem like doubles of each other. How were you thinking through gender and queerness in the novel?

BARRY

I was thinking about it in terms of silence—that, unfortunately in the eighties, in Danvers, there wasn’t even a language for LGBTQ people. Not in a lot of places, and particularly not in high schools. How could people who were LGBTQ discover who they were in a world in which there was no language for what you might be? There was no vocabulary. If you don’t see yourself in the culture, how do you make sense of who you are? I was very much thinking about that with respect to Boy Cory and trying very hard to be sensitive to their arc. Now that you mention it, I hadn’t thought of the Corys as being parallel in certain ways. But somebody who I very briefly dated—among his friend pool there was another couple, a boy Cory and a girl Cory. I just thought that was so funny then. We were children of the eighties, before there were as many unisex names.

INTERVIEWER

We Ride Upon Sticks is narrated by an anonymous yet omniscient first-person plural, “we.” Why did you choose this type of narration for a story about young women?

BARRY

I always knew that I wanted to write it in a “we” voice. But I just didn’t know who the voice belonged to. At first, I thought that the voice belonged to the school. And then, for a very short period of time, I thought that the voice belonged to the freshman team. When I was on the freshman team, the varsity girls just seemed so adult to us. I was talking to my friends about it, and we all agreed that we knew everything about the senior girls. We idolized them. But then I realized pretty quickly that that didn’t work either. I realized that it’s the team that tells the story. They develop a hive mind, able to communicate silently as a collective, and that is one witchy element in the book. Even though they cast spells, too, there’s never any evidence that it really works. I kept wondering—is this just them being teens and believing in themselves? Or is it actually witchcraft? Maybe their hive mind is just their strong connection to each other. But the “we” voice did add this element of witchy-ness.

INTERVIEWER

By contrast, other coming-of-age novels are often single-minded and individualistic, focusing on the consciousness of one adolescent. The communal narration plays with that trope and even breaks it apart quite radically.

BARRY

There’s a way in which friendships among teen girls are more emotional than those among teen boys. And I do not mean that women are more emotional. But you don’t often get the sense that teen boys could necessarily finish each other’s sentences. Women can become very close. And our society sanctions that—it’s okay for women to be close in ways which aren’t allowed for men, which is too bad. I think that the “we” voice is reflective of a sisterhood, a sisterhood that allows the team to have that particular closeness and that group-thought mentality.

INTERVIEWER

Your first novel, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, is set in Vietnam. But in We Ride Upon Sticks, you write quite intimately about your hometown. What was it like to revisit Danvers in fiction?

BARRY

When you write your first book, nobody, by and large, is waiting for it. You have all the time in the world to write it. So, I traveled to Vietnam for research. When revisiting Danvers, on the other hand, I already knew it all. As a kid here, we were taken on field trips around various local historical sites. We went, from time to time, to Salem, which is basically the town next door. I just imbibed the history of the place. You’d pass the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in the car on the way to the mall. I played soccer by the Danvers Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial. It’s where the Salem Village Meeting House used to be. There are these markers around town that I have always known about. So, I wrote this book very quickly. It took me only a year to have a solid draft done. Thinking about Danvers—it was just fun. It was just fun to write about my hometown.

INTERVIEWER

As the women of the Danvers field hockey team research dark magic, they encounter religions that white American communities may often think of as witchcraft, such as voodoo and Santeria. Could you speak to the tension in the novel between this largely white community in Massachusetts and its experience of difference, other, and race?

BARRY

There are three characters of color in the book. There’s A.J. Johnson, and there’s Sue Yoon, first-generation Korean, and there’s the adopted Julie Kaling. It’s through these three characters that I talk about what it’s like to be a member of a minority community in predominantly white spaces. They each present different ways of being in a predominantly white space. In many ways, A.J. feels it the most acutely as an African American student. Take, for example, her experience reading Huckleberry Finn at school. For Sue Yoon, who is first generation, it’s about assimilation. Sue Yoon’s story takes place during Halloween. She has a tarot reading and gets a piece of advice. The reader—this woman who’s maybe a Wiccan—tells Sue Yoon, “Fuck ’em. Don’t pay any mind to what people think or say.” That’s the message at the end of the day. Be yourself. Be true to who you are. Empower yourself, and you’ll go a long way. Julie Kaling is different, too, because she’s adopted, and her family is white. I didn’t want the team to be homogeneous. I wanted there to be difference among them. To not address race would not create an accurate picture of this particular place and time. I hope that it complicates the reading of the book in a good way. And it maybe makes readers rethink their own experience of the eighties.

INTERVIEWER

I loved A.J.’s campaign to have Huckleberry Finn removed from the syllabus, which culminates in a book burning. What role did literature play in your own childhood, and when did you first find fiction that spoke to you?

BARRY

I was a weird kid. I’m the youngest of five, and I always wanted to be like my siblings. When I first started to really read—I would say, fourth grade—I would read the high school books that my sisters were reading. I remember reading The Crucible. I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea. How much did I get out of it? I could physically read them, but did I understand them? Probably not. But I have this memory of reading adult literature as a kid. And in elementary school, there used to be book sales. My brother and I are both adopted, and we were basically the only children of color in the school. There were maybe five of us at a school of two or three hundred. I remember Mrs. Atwood, our librarian, saying at the book sale, Oh, here’s a book that I think you’d like. I still remember that book—Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe. It was about an African American girl living in the South. It was about her adventures, and what she was up to. It became my favorite book. I couldn’t tell you what happens in it. But I still remember that book, because I don’t have memories of seeing many African American characters elsewhere.

INTERVIEWER

Hair is a recurrent theme in We Ride Upon Sticks. I’m thinking, of course, of Jen Fiorenza’s “Claw”—her classic eighties ’do that is personified as its own character. Julie also defies her mother’s rules by washing her hair with egg whites, and A.J. comes into her own when she gets braids. Why is hair an important or useful image to you?

BARRY

For girls and women, appearance is so much a part of our identities, fortunately or unfortunately. In the eighties, hair was everything. It was a mode of expression. You could tell things about people by their hair. It signaled something about them. And it made sense to me that the hair would be an important part of the book. I think of the Claw as Jen Fiorenza’s id. It’s maybe even the team’s id. The Claw literally says the things that they’re all thinking and voices what they all want to do. It was a lot of fun to think about that character. I don’t remember at which point I knew that the Claw would be a character. I think if I had sat down and planned it, it would have sounded nuts to me.

INTERVIEWER

Most of the characters have one physical feature that’s monstrously exaggerated, such as the Splotch on Mel Boucher’s neck, the Claw for Jen Fiorenza, and the Chin for Nicky Higgins. This stylistic move again recalls popular movies of the eighties. Many are set in high schools, where that might already be the predominant way of categorizing and differentiating between people—by their most defining traits. Which eighties actors would you cast to play your characters?

BARRY

Well, unfortunately, there weren’t that many young African American actors in the eighties. For A.J. Johnson, because she is an actress, I’m thinking a young Janet Jackson. Which is funny because the team listens to Janet Jackson. Or Lark Voorhies from Saved by the Bell. Similarly, there aren’t many Asian actresses who I could even name from the eighties. There’s always Margaret Cho—but she’s older than that, much older. If we were filming it now, I would cast Lana Condor, who’s in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. She could be Julie Kaling. Even though he’s supposed to be blond, the real Emilio Estevez could be the football captain. The only character who’s based on an actual person is the field hockey coach. She is modeled after our coach, who passed away last year. People are saying online that Meryl Streep could play her.

INTERVIEWER

Is there one character or player on the Danvers varsity field hockey team with whom you connect the most?

BARRY

They’re all a combination of me. There’s something about Abby Putnam that I like. I see her as being fearless. She’s fearless but she’s also authentic. Even though she’s an optimist and a go-getter, it’s not in a fake way. If you think about the movie Election, Tracy Flick seems a little delusional. Abby’s a go-getter, too, but she’s not one-minded like Tracy Flick. She is genuine, and real, and reliable, and her friends turn to her and she’s a rock for them, and she’s pretty happy. She’s the character that I most aspire to be.

 

 

Elinor Hitt is a writer living in Manhattan. She is an editorial intern at The Paris Review.

Staff Picks: Mums, Moms, and Mothers

Photo: Jane Breakell.

In a paper gesture to the fistfuls of wilting dandelions offered by children, and beloved—surely!—by mothers all over the dandelion-growing world, I offer my mother Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. I can remember Mom saying about certain plants, They grow where they are planted; in her tone, gratitude and admiration for the least fussy members of the garden. Were they wildflowers, which, as Dolly Parton sings, “don’t care where they grow”? Weren’t all flowers wild, at some point? Perhaps some are closer to their primal selves than others. At any rate, Mom—a Manhattanite transplanted to New England, with a few trying stops along the way—admires a plant that can make itself at home, and I’m grateful to her for encouraging, in conversation and by example, a weed-like adaptability in her children. In his guidebook, Lawrence Newcomb lets us get to know actual wildflowers with a neat key based on simple distinctions of flower shape, number of parts, and the shape and arrangement of leaves; detailed illustrations; and, important for my word-loving mother, a fine glossary of excellent botanical words: calyx, spadix, corymb; bulblet, axil, umbel. Today I identified a backyard flower as a celandine poppy: four symmetrical petals, deeply lobed leaves in opposite pairs. Newcomb describes this flower as “juice yellow.” He also notes its growing zone, which lies between western Pennsylvania and southern Wisconsin. Someone must have planted it in my scrubby little New York yard, where it now flourishes. I wish that I could keep a cutting from wilting and bring my mother a juice-yellow nosegay. —Jane Breakell 

I haven’t read anything lately that reminds me specifically of my mother or even moms in general, so for Mother’s Day, I thought I’d ask my mom about the book she’s been reading: On Lighthouses, by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. My mother has a healthy appetite for exploration, and it’s a shame that Mother’s Day this year will go by without some sort of adventure. When I moved to the city, I bought her the guidebook 111 Places in New York You Must Not Miss, which has taken us to locales as varied as the Merchant House Museum and the SeaGlass Carousel in Battery Park. On Lighthouses, based on what she tells me, is the history of six lighthouses in America. Some chapters start with a story; another chapter is the diary of a lighthouse keeper. Lighthouses, the “frontier between civilization and nature,” are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we’ll see and things we’ll do when we can go out again; my mom tends the lighthouse. —Lauren Kane

 

Margaret Brown Kilik.

 

As my first Mother’s Day at home in years approaches, I’ve turned to Margaret Brown Kilik’s posthumous novel The Duchess of Angus, which tells the autobiographical story of Jane Davis, an English major who returns home to San Antonio to live in her mother’s run-down hotel. My own mother, with whom I am sheltering now, taught me to recognize good literature. Her lessons: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and, more recently, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Kilik deserves a place in this canon, but her midcentury novel was only just published in March. Jenny Davidson—Kilik’s step-granddaughter and my professor at Columbia—prepared the manuscript for publication after acquiring it in 2017. Davidson’s introduction is as intelligent as the novel itself. She explores the history of Kilik’s eccentric mother, Agnes, also writing that the author’s voice contains “the flat affect and disturbing candor found in the fiction of J. D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath.” Kilik’s blunt sense of humor could even be compared to that of Dorothy Parker, though her protagonist is able to generate witty comebacks or aphorisms only after the moment has passed. In Jane’s own words: “I was furious. Senselessly furious. At that time I had not yet learned to bone up on the answers in anticipation of the questions. I lacked the presence of mind to retort, and it was useless to depend upon the depth of my emotions to see me through, for like domestic champagne, they never quite bubbled up to their potential but were more often lost in the yellow liquid. I groped about in my silent prison while the moment passed.” Jane vacillates between youthful euphoria and self-hatred. And her inarticulateness in real time draws a sharp contrast to the cruel judgments she makes of herself and others in thought. The Duchess of Agnes, a joint feat by Kilik and Davidson, is the perfect starter for book clubs among mothers and daughters who now find themselves living together again. —Elinor Hitt

Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other was the first of my quarantine reads, but seven weeks and twelve books later, it is still the one I think of most, particularly as Mother’s Day approaches. Here is a multigenerational, multifocal narrative about strong women, motherhood, and networks of female friendship in the contemporary UK (though Evaristo admirably stretches those narratives back most of a century). I don’t need to speak of its merits—the book won the Booker; enough said—but it did inspire me to appreciate all the women in my life anew, their narratives, how our paths approach one another and split apart again, and how, with good luck, those paths sometimes intersect in ways that make each thread stronger. Right now those intersections are virtual—talking Chekhov with my mom as she shelters in Maine, sending my best friend a video message for her first Mother’s Day, reading Yum Yum Dim Sum to a friend’s kids in Queens (which will have to do until we can get together in Flushing again—I can taste the shumai). Nothing is as good as being able to show up on my mom’s doorstep and surprise the snot out of her—but for now, I’m grateful for literature that helps us appreciate mothers, and technology that lets us tell them so. —Emily Nemens

I hated nature, Mum, which looked better in photographs; Britain was sodden, as advertised, the countryside tasteless and passé in its browns and greens and grays, and everywhere the warbles and shrieks of birds pealed, telling nothing. I wanted it all gilded and wrought and Romantic. Still, not to be alone, I trudged along, preferring the sounds I gleaned from your patient taxonomy: whimbrel, kittiwake, chiffchaff, dunnock, nightjar. Eventually, among other things, I learned from you to tell a brambling from a chaffinch, and that no, the glint in the distance was not a goldfinch. I read R. F. Langley’s (1938–2011) poems with you because I could make no sense of them. I was astounded by their strange, off-kilter rhythms, their dense rhymes and unspooled syllables, and how lines shaped the mouth in recitation. Langley writes: “Talk to mother. Speak in a natural / easy voice, cruising the words. Cirrus and / thisles. Thiskin. Largesse. Debonair. Then / oaks and hornbeams and forever.” But as he speaks, the words break and meld: “Say that mother is out there, / and she is thiswise, thissen, thiskin, which / is thistles, cirrus cruising de bonne aire.” The meaning remained remote until you explained the terms—Callophrys, Grimmia—that granted access and denoted clearly what was there. The more we read, the more they unfurled; too often, what seemed to be a private obscurity just demanded attention. As he writes of a beetle: “Detail is so sharp / and so minute that the total form suggests / infinity.” Like you, Langley showed me how to see. His Complete Poems, comprising just forty-eight written over nearly four decades, is my most treasured book, even as it still eludes me. The last poem, his most transparent, “To a Nightingale,” begins from “Nothing”—there is a poet paused in the countryside, then birdsong. “I am / empty, stopped at nothing, as / I wait for this song to shoot.” Yet the poem slowly fills in the small particulars that shape the whole: “Red mites bowling / about on the baked lichen”; “Darkwing. The / flutter. Doubles and blurs the / margin”; a voice like “a soft cuckle of / wet pebbles.” You tell me about the visitors in isolation: the barn owl watching Poldark with you through the undrawn window, the jostling of squirrels who lost their nuts, and a local cat’s Jacobean slaughter of sparrows. With a leaf between the fingers, Langley writes: “There seems // to be no limit to / the amount of life it / would be good to have.” I long for the loam, for the puddle-furrowed paths to Grantchester, to see an arrow of geese above the fens, or to wait for a kingfisher, hushed in a hide with you. Sitting by my window, as I think of you, Mum, I sound the names of the birds that pass: pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon. —Chris Littlewood

 

R. F. Langley.

My Mother

The author’s mother in the seventies. Photo: © Brit Bennett.

When my mother first arrived in Washington, D.C., she stepped out of Union Station, entranced by the cherry blossoms. Those pink-and-white flowers blooming from the trees must have looked like a technicolor Oz, far from the green moss and brown bayous of small-town Louisiana she’d just left behind. She was nineteen then and had never been farther than Texas; well-wishers advised her to not reveal that she was from out of town so she wouldn’t get scammed. So she and her sister Liz jostled together in the back seat of a cab and acted unimpressed by all the sights—Oh, just the White House? The Capitol? We’ve seen it all before. But it must have been hardest for my mother to pretend to ignore the cherry blossoms. She told me this story once, years ago, and I like to think about my mother then, long before she was a mother, a woman I will never know. I like imagining her in the back seat of that cab, in awe of the world.

 

Brit Bennett is the author of The Mothers.

Excerpt from the new book Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them (Abrams Image), collected and edited by Edan Lepucki. © Brit Bennett and Edan Lepucki.

Still Life

Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life (detail), 1603, oil on wood, 32 1/2 x 21 1/4″.

With vanishing on my mind, I crossed Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a late autumn morning on a sober errand. Ginkgo leaves, freshly fallen, coated my path. My root-word research on vanishing—which, like vanity, comes from the Latin evanescere (“die away”) and vanus (“empty void”)—had led me to a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century.

The vanitas school of painting takes its name from the Latin version of an Ecclesiastes refrain (“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity”) and it involves carefully juxtaposing objects deemed symbolic of life’s brevity and the evanescence of earthly achievements. Objects such as mirrors, broken or tipped glassware, books, decaying flowers, and skulls are meant to encourage viewers to contemplate their own mortality. Jacques de Gheyn’s Vanitas Still Life, the earliest known vanitas painting, hangs in one of the Met’s seemingly less popular galleries. Most visitors pass through this corridor of dark still-life paintings on their way to lighter, more moving pieces. That autumn morning, I had Vanitas Still Life to myself.

A modest-size piece, 32 1/2 by 24 1/4″, it contains a panoply of vanitas symbols. A thin stream of vapor rises from an urn, an orange flower with browning leaves languishes in another. Dutch medals and Spanish coins glitter in the foreground. Two philosophers—Democritus, the “laughing” philosopher, and Heraclitus, the “crying” philosopher—recline in the painting’s top corners, pointing to the objects below. A large transparent bubble hovers above a human skull. From every angle, the viewer confronts images of life’s transience, but it is the skull that serves as the central reminder of human vanishing. The empty eye sockets locked my gaze, making me think—vainly—of my own future. A hollowed head, more than any other bodily remnant, symbolizes death’s totality, an unyielding force that consumes the entire person, even the ability to think. I guess there’s a reason why the sight of Yorick’s skull, not his rib cage or pelvic bone, occasions Hamlet’s famous lament.

*

As a condition associated with the head, dementia—like the vanitas skull—ignites an especially acute awareness of mortality, placing our very selves under death’s scrutiny. In the last decade, I have glimpsed dementia from several different angles. I have seen dementia-related deaths in my own family. I have worked with dementia sufferers day to day in my capacity as a nursing home chaplain. I recently discovered that both of my parents carry one copy of ApoE4, a gene variant strongly linked to late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. I have a 50 percent chance of having a single copy of the gene, which doubles or triples my risk of developing the disease. I have a 25 percent chance of having two copies, which elevates my risk by eight to twelve times, giving me a 51 to 68 percent chance of having Alzheimer’s by the time I am eighty-five. My particular bloodlines aside, the chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is one in nine after age sixty-five and one in three after eighty-five. Nearly six million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s—making it the nation’s sixth leading cause of death. And yet nuanced thinking about dementia is largely absent—perhaps even nonexistent—in public discourse.

Heart disease impairs circulation. Kidney disease impairs filtration. But brain disease impairs communication. By distinctly and directly impacting our abilities to relate with ourselves and others, it confronts us with the fact of our humanness: to be human is to be limited, even in our most cherished capacities. Perhaps more than other conditions, dementia brings our fundamental lack of ultimate control over our lives, and their endings, to a head.

Rather than confirming the humanness of sufferers, dementia, curiously, is often viewed as throwing it into question. A gerontologist once told me over lunch that he begins his dementia caregiver workshops by telling participants that their loved ones remain persons throughout their illness. He reminds caregivers that, even as their relatives become more inaccessible, their “core” never leaves. I am glad for his admonition; I am also troubled that it is needed. I doubt caregivers of persons with terminal heart disease need such instruction, or caregivers of infants need reminders that, even though their babies cannot talk or use the bathroom, they remain people.

That we need reminders that persons living with dementia are “still people” elevates my curiosity and my suspicion about the peculiar burdens dementia-causing diseases bear. We seem to have placed dementia beyond the scope of ordinary human imagining, as if this condition alone reveals some nasty, shameful secret: the ease with which we all may disappear.

*

The skull in Vanitas Still Life, while undoubtedly grim, bears a wry, gapped grin—a grin missing four front teeth. Stripped of its flesh, our bone structure apparently discloses a faint, effortless smile. The skull’s stark, denuded presence signals gravity, but its blithe affect signals buoyancy. Perhaps this face of death reflects both the weeping Heraclitus and the laughing Democritus, pointing viewers back to Ecclesiastes: there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh.” Wisdom here comes lodged in apposition—pairs of apparent opposites, united by the word and: “a time to be born, and a time to die … a time to break down, and a time to build up … a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.” These lines in Ecclesiastes encourage readers to imagine a world in which the poles of existence create vibrant tension, in which life and death, gathering and releasing, embracing and refraining, weeping and laughing, do not negate each other but instead balance and enrich. There is aggregation and integration—even with loss, even in death.

Dementia, too, invites this kind of conjunction. There is dilution and distillation, constriction and expansion, disorder and constancy. Certain aspects of persons and their relationships fade—and other dimensions crystallize, possessing a new kind of clarity. Dementia places new constraints on communication—and relationships expand to include new ways of being and loving. Cognitive changes upset the usual patterns of one’s life—and some rhythms remain unchanged.

I heard a woman describe her spouse with dementia as “my gone but not gone husband,” and her phrase seemed to strike at the heart of dementia’s paradoxes: an acute awareness of absence, and an equal insistence on presence. Lately, I am struck by its general relevance, as I consider my own gone and not-gone self. The cells that comprise my body—all of our bodies—routinely break down or slough off, and new ones take their place. Some cells, like neurons, die and are never replaced. Paradox lives at the heart of my faith, too: the gone and not-gone ego, the gone and not-gone Jesus. The play of presence and absence infuses all of life, I think, both before and after dementia.

Maybe if we can learn to inhabit this tension, this space between opposites, then dementia and the lives it touches can rejoin the spectrum of human experience, rather than being reduced to tired tropes and burdened by outsized fears, its sufferers and caregivers made to disappear. Imagine if we received all lives—those with and without dementia—as conglomerations of the ordinary and the peculiar, the fragmented and the whole, the present and the vanishing.

 

Lynn Casteel Harper is a minister, chaplain, and essayist. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online and Catapult magazine. She is a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant recipient and the winner of the 2017 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction. She lives in New York City and is currently the minister of older adults at the Riverside Church.

Excerpted from On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear , copyright © 2020 by Lynn Casteel Harper. Reprinted by permission of Catapult.

Poets on Couches: Jake Skeets

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

 

 

“Horses, Which Do Not Exist”

by Alberto Ríos

Issue no. 101 (Winter 1986)

The strong horseshoe shape of a horse’s mouth

Of his teeth, set that way of a suitcase handle

And the way a bit, in just that way, pulls him:

Come here to where it is I say. Like that

A horse’s mouth, and so his manner, broken

Those horses no longer running along the far

Distance visible from a Tucson highway thirsty

Stopping for water, making one of those paintings

Living rooms wear as pendants. Those paintings

Too unreal, laughed at and finger-poked

And so these horses too must be unreal,

A bad painting of nine,

A pond of browning water. Birds, two kinds.

Grass too green—spring has come this year,

And water—mountains too blue, too many shades,

In the distance. And so they are, this all is‚

As children say, like a dream,

Laughing hard at how good it seemed at the moment.

 

Winner of a 2020 Whiting Award for Poetry, Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019), a National Poetry Series–winning collection of poems. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.

Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.

Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

Hänsel and Gretel, by Darstellung von Alexander Zick

In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered.

I am brought to campus for a three-day interview. I am shown the library I’ll never have access to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black-and-white dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even belong in universities. I meet with another dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The Babies, actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I think I say. I am hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours.”

On the third day of the interview, the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said as I made my body gently vanish. “They shouldn’t exist at all.” Instead I say yes, and pull a beautiful, made-up reason from the air and offer it to him as a gift. Gold for your dust, sir. Pearls for your pigs. “Who is watching your sons right now?” he asks. “Their father,” I answer.

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?

It’s May now. More than thirty million Americans have filed for first-time unemployment benefits. What mattered in February hardly seems to matter now. My sons, my husband, and I are lucky. We have stayed healthy, and we have enough money and enough food to eat. In between teaching my sons the difference between a scalene triangle and an isosceles, and moving my writing workshops from my garage to pixelated classrooms, and cleaning my house, and going nowhere, and being scared, and looking for bread flour and yeast, I can barely remember what it felt like to plead my case for three straight days. It feels good to barely remember.

“You write a lot about motherhood,” says the sixteenth or seventeenth dean.

In the Brothers Grimms’ “Cherry,” an old king with three sons cannot decide who of the three should inherit the kingdom, and so he gives his sons three trials: the first, that they should seek “cloth so fine” the king can draw it through his golden ring. The second, that they find a dog small enough to fit inside a walnut shell. And the third, to bring home the “fairest lady” in all the land. In Grimms’ “The Six Servants” a prince will win his princess if he brings back a ring the old queen has dropped into the red sea, devour three hundred oxen (“skin and bones, hair and horns”), drink three hundred barrels of wine, and keep his arms around the princess all night without falling asleep. And in “Rumpelstiltskin,” if the poor miller’s daughter spins larger and larger rooms full of straw into gold she will become queen. If not, she will die. Fairy tales are riddled with tasks like these. Some contenders cheat, and some were never worthy, and some take the dreary, barren road, and some take the smooth, shady one, and some are helped by birds, and some are helped by giants, and some by witches, and some by luck.

I call my mother. “I can’t find bread flour or yeast anywhere.” “Fuck the bread,” says my mother. “The bread is over.”

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.

In fairy tales, the king is the king. If he dethrones, his bones clatter into a heap and vanish. Loosen the seams of the stepmother, and reach in. Nothing but stepmother inside. Even when the princess is cinders and ash, she is still entirely princess.

I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly. Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.

Tomorrow, on day fifty-nine, I will ask my sons to “find me an acre of land / Between the salt water and the sea-strand, / Plough it with a lamb’s horn, / Sow it all over with one peppercorn, / Reap it with a sickle of leather, / And gather it up with a rope made of heather.” I will tell them if they perform each one of these tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more tasks. And if they perform each of those tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more. Until, at last, they will not be able to tell the difference between their hands and another boy’s hands.

Over the years I have applied for hundreds of professorships, and even received some interviews. I’ve wanted a job like this for so long, I barely even know why I want it anymore. I look at my hands. I can’t tell if they’re mine.

“Of course you can tell if your hands are yours,” says my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I have no real job,” I say. “Of course you have a real job,” she says. “I have no flour,” I say. “Fuck the bread,” says my mother again. “The bread is over.”

And maybe the bread, as I’ve always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, is mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend, “I can’t find bread flour.” She lives in Iowa. “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind.

If I had a machete I would use it to cut the mice, and the princess, and the king, and the stepmother, and the castle, and the wolf, and the mother, and the sons, free from their function so they could disappear into their own form.

But also I wanted an office with a number. I wanted a university ID. I wanted access to a fancy library and benefits and students and colleagues and travel money. I wanted the whole stupid kingdom. “And then what?” says my mother. “And then nothing,” I say as I jump off the very top of a fairy tale that has no place for me. “You’re better off,” says my mother. I look around. I’ve landed where I am.

I like it here. I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of homeschooling. Eli asks me to remind him how to make an aleph. I take a pencil, and draw it for him very carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.”  “You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet.

 

Read earlier installments of Happily here.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia. 

The ‘Lord of the Flies’ Family Book Club

In the column Inside Story, parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times.

It’s unnerving how books mutate. You look up from your life—from these weeks of homey terror—and find a cherished old novel transformed into a bulletin from the front.

*

I have twin sons. They’re twelve years old and identical. When the crisis started, their school hadn’t done enough; my wife and I needed to fill the day, an Ozarks of empty time. We’d start a family book club.

My own seventy-five-ish mother—a lady you might see lugging Judith Krantz paperbacks from an exurban library—agreed to join. That made five of us. Different ages, tastes, places to shelter in.

I pushed for Orwell. Or David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green; the boys came back with Lord of the Flies. This may be hard to believe, but the pick didn’t seem so fraught then.

A bookshelf is a photoshopped self-portrait. The novels people exhibit are there to portray us as we hope to be seen. Hip, smart, wide ranging. All I’ve got are books I’ve loved or books I think I will. And books I incorrectly remember having loved. But such memories can be the prosthetic noses and spirit gum of the reading racket.

As soon as I pulled down Lord of the Flies I realized I’d forgotten it. “Oh yeah,” I’d said when we made the choice, “good novel.” Now my earlier opinions flowed back; in junior high I’d kind of hated the thing.

My sons’ complaints were echoes, I realized, of my own: The book never says what happened to the adults. It’s very coincidental that it is only kids who survived. The crash is too expedient. All this seemed like a flaw, at first.

*

I assume you’re familiar with the basic material. At the start of the twenty-first century, Lev Grossman described the book in Time—when it made the magazine’s best-of-the-century list, and the BBC’s, also the Modern Library’s—“A planeload of young boys is marooned on a nameless tropical island and are forced to fend for themselves.”

After this longline, Grossman continues:

If the novel had been written in the 19th century it would have been about the cheery, whimsical never-neverland the boys created. But in Golding’s version, the veneer of childish purity wears away quickly in the absence of adults, and the boys become two warring tribes.

In fact, Golding was parodying a particular nineteenth-century kids’ novel: R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. But then Golding’s bull’s-eye grew wider; Lord of the Flies ended up parodying all of us. There’s a Lord of the Flies island in all our heads. That was the news Golding brought. And we’d all go lawless in under a month, were we to find ourselves in the wrong circumstances.

*

But, again, Lord of the Flies has its problems: it’s too schematic; it reads, at times, like an outline for a longer, more spontaneous work. In the exactness of its implementation it can make you feel the writer is trapped on an island, too.

Which is to say, as with certain short running tracks, the end is always in sight. Not that we know, for sure, the precise details—but the ironic reversal, the Hobbesian epiphany, the (for us enlightenment fans) dramatic comeuppance. All of that arrives, as expected.

The problem with schematic stories isn’t that they aren’t well carried off; it’s that they feel preordained. The strong authorial hand inhibits energy. Irving Howe called this “the clarity of limitation.” (Though I think a better term would have been “the limitation of clarity.”) George Saunders likes a quote from the poet Gerald Stern. Stern: “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and hit the target, then you’ve succeeded only in writing a poem about two dogs fucking.”

In a way, Lord of the Flies is a two-dogs-fucking kind of book.

And yet, it has lasted. A classic: it must have something else to it, and does.

“This book, I don’t know,” my son Beau said. He didn’t say anything else. But his face and his voice also spoke—and they said the novel had made him anxious.

“What do you mean?” my wife asked. One way Susannah shows love is getting the boys to express themselves.

We were sitting in the living room with the blinds up; April sunlight, the couch, a typical setting. Our books and Kindles were open; my mom’s Judith Kranz–loving face smiled to us from a MacBook screen. Meeting no. 3 of the Strauss Family Lord of the Flies Book Club. We were deep into the novel now.

“I don’t like reading it,” Beau said. At twelve he has light eyes and what Saul Bellow, in More Die of Heartbreak, calls “the magics,” compassion, naïveté, an appealing soul. Softness, most of all. He wouldn’t have lasted three days on the island.

We had reached the part where ‘The Beast’ (an aviator’s corpse still wearing a parachute) appears: a representative image. The true “beast” in this story is actually—dun dun dun—the boys themselves. The evil latent in our nature. You know, a symbol.

“It’s kind of—boring,” my other son, Shepherd, said. “Yes!” his brother yelped.

“Boring?” Susannah and I said.

The book, like this sudden era, shows that the laminate of society is disconcertingly thin. After a couple of days, the kids on Golding’s island worship and make sacrifices to a beast; they start killing one another. Boring was a big misread.

And yet I’d found Lord of the Flies kind of boring, too, at the beginning—until it got terrifying. Maybe my kids were stuck thinking about the sunny parts? It seemed they didn’t get the punch line. They’d grabbed only the setup.

Still, there was a nagging fact. While finding the novel a drag, my son Beau was also really disturbed by it. And I think I’ve figured out why.

*

The opening is what I keep coming back to. Those plane-crash kids, the tropical light spanking off the waves, kids in the briny ocean—that is evocative. There’s a joy in all this. The mango-and-unsupervised days. This joy, if we remember how much these characters have uncaringly lost, discomfits.

Boring? There are times when a misread can turn out to reveal a profound truth. Beau’s take matched his experience—the experience of so many in this crisis. He’d stumbled onto what’s ominous in how those with luck or privilege are living through this.

For so many now—and the numbers say that, so far, most of us have been lucky—the lockdown has been, embarrassing as it is to disclose, actually kind of uneventful. People I’ve spoken to have talked about feeling a bit heartless. Blockaded, in this unusual adjournment of the everyday, some of us actually feel untouched. Or, touched only hypothetically. (This will change, of course. Maybe even by the time you read this.)

“It’s too normal,” my son said about the opening of the book. “They’re just having a good time. It doesn’t feel like anything bad just happened.” The people trapped on that island should be taking the state of affairs seriously, and aren’t.

*

I live in New York; I just saw pictures of a mass grave on Hart Island. And then I went on YouTube and watched a Key and Peele skit. And then I wrote this essay. I’ve lost no one yet.

Lord of the Flies has a very odd power. The scenes from the book that I dream about are those pacific ones: laughing, swimming, palm trees, jokes. And I slam awake, with my heart going very fast in my throat.

 

Darin Strauss will publish The Queen of Tuesday— his sixth book and the follow-up to his best-selling, NBCC-winning Half a Life—in August with Random House. He is a clinical professor for the NYU creative writing program.

The Origins of Scandinavian Noir

Martin Lewis, The Great Shadow, 1925, drypoint on paper, 10″ x 7″. Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of Frank McClure.

Sometime in the early eighties, I began reading a series of mysteries that featured a Swedish homicide detective named Martin Beck. I was living in Berkeley at the time, studying for a Ph.D. in English literature as I worked a variety of part-time jobs, and I knew a lot of people both inside and outside the academy. Being a talkative sort, I started telling everyone around me about this incredible Scandinavian cop series. Soon we were all reading it.

What I knew at the time was that it was written by a couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who had from the very beginning envisioned it as a sequence of ten books that would portray Swedish society from a distinctly Marxist perspective. Published between 1965 and 1975, the Martin Beck series grew noticeably darker as it moved toward its end—though whether this was because Sweden itself (not to speak of the world beyond it) had worsened during that decade, or because Per Wahlöö had learned in the early seventies that he was dying of cancer, was something no one could answer. Wahlöö died, I later learned, on the exact day in June of 1975 when the tenth volume was published in Sweden, having worked like a maniac to finish it on time. (Sjöwall, who was his equal partner in many ways—they would write their alternating chapters at night, so as not to be interrupted by their small children, and would then exchange chapters for editing—has said that at the very end Wahlöö was pretty much writing everything himself.) At any rate, he left behind exactly what he had intended to produce: ten books containing thirty chapters each, which, taken together, constitute a single continuous social narrative comparable in some ways to a Balzac, Zola, or Dickens project, though clothed in the garments of a police procedural.

It would be a melodramatic exaggeration to say that the Martin Beck series changed my life, but like all such exaggerations, this one would be built on a nugget of truth. Both my idea of Scandinavia and my sense of what a mystery could do were shaped by those books. If I later became a veritable addict of the form, gobbling up hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in Kindle purchases of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian mysteries, that habit could no doubt be attributed to many things besides the Martin Becks: the invention of digital books, for instance, which allowed for impulse buying and virtually infinite storage; the massive and surprising success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, which encouraged American publishers to bring out any and every available Scandinavian thriller; the introduction of the long-cycle police procedural on American television, including such gems as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and ultimately The Wire, all of which cemented my fascination with the form; not to mention dozens if not hundreds of similar behavior-shaping factors that remain, for me, at an unconscious level. We never know for sure why we read what we read. I cannot, at the moment, even call to mind who first recommended the Martin Becks to me (though I know it was a person and not, say, a bookstore display or a newspaper review). Whoever it was, in any case, deserves my eternal gratitude.

What is so special about these ten books? Or—a slightly different question—what was it that so appealed to me back in 1981 or 1982, when I was about to turn thirty and America was on the verge of becoming what it is today?

Ronald Reagan, remember, had just been elected president. Many of us who voted against him (particularly among the Californians who had suffered through his governorship) had sworn that we would leave the country if he won. We didn’t actually carry out these threats—one never does, as I have learned repeatedly in the years since—but in my imagination I must have pictured Sweden, that haven for dissident Americans since the time of the Vietnam War, as one of the ideal refuges to which one could flee in such circumstances. That the society in which the Martin Beck novels took place represented a form of humane, non-Soviet socialism was certainly a great part of their appeal for me. What I failed to notice at the time was how severely Sjöwall and Wahlöö were in fact criticizing the inadequate socialism practiced in their country. Instead, what I saw was the difference between gun-crazy, corporate-run, murder-riddled America and this small, sensible nation where even police officers hated guns, where crime was seen as a social problem rather than an individual pathology, and where the rare appearance of a serial or mass killer instantly provoked comparisons to the well-chronicled history of such crimes in the United States.

And then there was the specific affection I felt for Martin Beck’s team of homicide detectives. The idea of a team was itself appealing, especially in contrast to the usual American detective, a hardboiled rogue who typically despised collective procedures and chose to work alone and unregulated. But beyond that, I loved the individual characters in the team, who over the course of ten volumes began to seem as familiar to me as most of my real-life acquaintances.

To begin with, there is Martin Beck himself, who exhibits rectitude, fairness, a decent sense of empathy even for murderers, a useful skepticism about the criminal justice system, a healthy dislike of stupidity, careerism, and greed, and a willingness to let those around him do their best work. His home life, perhaps, leaves something to be desired—alienated from his nagging wife and distant from his two small children, he spends as many hours as possible on the job—but this changes over the course of the ten volumes, as he and his wife divorce and as he bonds with his growing daughter. And though Martin Beck is something of a loner, with few strong emotional ties, he does have a best friend, in the form of Lennart Kollberg, his second-in-command on the national homicide squad.

Kollberg is one of the great characters of detective fiction. (He is almost always called simply “Kollberg” by the omniscient narrator of these books, just as Martin Beck is always called by his full name; it is only the other characters who address them as “Martin” or “Lennart.”) His fame, in the years since he came into being, has so transcended his original circumstances that a recent Norwegian mystery writer, Karin Fossum, can name her chief detective’s dog Kollberg and expect everyone to pick up the allusion.

It’s not easy to convey what is so lovable about Kollberg. His charm and wit, though notable, don’t lend themselves to brief quotation; they are cumulative, like everything else in the series. Nor is he particularly magnetic, at least in terms of looks. For one thing, he’s distinctly overweight, though that doesn’t prevent him from being very attractive to certain women (in particular his much appreciated and significantly younger wife, Gunnar). He doesn’t have any of the special talents some of his teammates possess—the phenomenal memory of Fredrik Melander, say, or the immense physical bravery of Gunvald Larsson, or even the sheer dogged persistence of the unimaginative Einar Rönn—but his all-round intelligence and sharp, ironic sense of humor make him an invaluable collaborator and sounding board for Martin Beck. As is often remarked in this series, the two of them can understand each other without explaining themselves, which is perhaps the essential definition of a close friendship. It is also, as Sjöwall and Wahlöö must have known, the defining element of any intimate collaboration on an important and prolonged piece of work.

*

In the early sixties, when Sjöwall and Wahlöö were formulating their idea for a ten-volume police procedural that would mirror the whole society, nothing of the kind had ever appeared in Scandinavian literature. America may have produced Dashiell Hammett and Ed McBain by then, not to mention numerous noir detective films and even some early urban TV shows, like Dragnet, that edged toward this territory. But the Scandinavian tradition was different. There were mysteries, true, but they utterly lacked the broad social perspective, the insistence on some kind of realism, that Sjöwall and Wahlöö were about to introduce.

One of the existing strands, for example, descended from the book Jo Nesbø has described as the original Nordic thriller: a 1909 mystery called The Iron Chariot, written by Norway’s Sven Elvestad under the pen name Stein Riverton. It’s a readable enough work, though a bit slow and (especially compared to latter-day practitioners like Nesbø himself) grotesquely unsuspenseful. The Iron Chariot is basically a country-house murder mystery, set in an idyllic landscape somewhere on the southern Norwegian coast at the height of summer—a location and a season that together allow for a great deal of crepuscular light shimmering on the ocean at midnight and other effects of that sort. The mysteriously clanking and reputedly ghostly “chariot” of the title turns out to be a newfangled flying machine invented by a local professor, one of the murder victims. In the end, the murderer is revealed to be the story’s narrator, a weirdly impalpable creature whose crimes and methods are exposed by the Holmes-like detective called in from the nearest city—though not before we have pretty much figured them out by ourselves. The whole novel is like a combination of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, a narrative that is at once logical and insane, but in any case very particular and very enclosed, with an extremely limited pool of suspects and no perspective whatsoever on the society at large.

Another precedent—perhaps even further from the Martin Becks in style and intent, though closer temporally and geographically—consisted of the various Swedish mysteries written for children in the mid-twentieth century. These included Åke Holmberg’s novels about the private eye Ture Sventon, issued between 1948 and 1973, and Nils-Olof Franzén’s illustrated books about the detective Agaton Sax, which came out around the same time. Those detective characters, too, were clearly modeled on Holmes, though with certain features—such as a jolly round figure and an animal associate, in the case of Sax—that would make them especially appealing to children. The most famous series in this genre, perhaps because it actually employed a child as the detective, was Astrid Lindgren’s trio of mysteries featuring a schoolboy named Kalle Blomqvist (a central character who, when the books proved popular enough to export, was later renamed Bill Bergson). These three tales, which appeared in Sweden between 1946 and 1953, are somewhat reminiscent of America’s Nancy Drew series, with a youthful amateur detective who, together with the necessary age-appropriate sidekicks, always succeeds in outwitting the bad guys. Even now, the books remain sufficiently well known in Sweden so that present-day readers of the Stieg Larsson books are expected to get the joke when Lisbeth’s ally, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is nicknamed “Kalle” by his friends. (This would seem to be a joke that never stales among Swedish mystery writers, for Leif G. W. Persson brings it up again in his recent novel The Dying Detective.)

But the Larsson and Persson books did not exist until decades after the Martin Becks were first published. It took a particular pair of authors working together at a specific moment in history to create that now-dominant form, the modern-day Scandinavian mystery. And despite the fact that they were naive beginners, or perhaps in some ways because of that, their achievement in the form has never been topped.

*

Let’s agree to dispense with any discussion about brow levels. If I happen to invoke Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoyevsky when talking about these books, it is not to insist that Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall are their equals as the writers of sentences and paragraphs—though nor would I want to grant outright that they are not at the same level in some other way. After all, Wilkie Collins was a thriller writer of the late nineteenth century whose best novels we are still reading with enormous satisfaction today; with each passing decade, he comes to seem more and more of a Victorian classic. One could also argue that Eric Ambler is as much a twentieth-century stylist as Ernest Hemingway, along the same spare lines, and it is not yet clear, if you ask me, which we’ll be reading longer. My point is not just that we can’t, from our limited perspective, answer questions about longevity and importance. It’s also that I don’t particularly want to.

What matters to me is how persuasively these mystery writers manage to create a world that one can imaginatively inhabit—for the duration of a first reading, initially, but also long after. The various features of Martin Beck’s world, including his Stockholm streets, his police department colleagues, his lovers, his friends, the crimes he solves, the murderers he pities, the politicians and bureaucrats he deplores, even the apartments he inhabits, all seemed terribly real to me when I first encountered them, and all continue to seem so today, even after one or more rereadings. This is the mystery novel not as a puzzle that can be forgotten as soon as it is solved but as an experience one is living through along with the characters. If they are sometimes “flat” characters in the manner of Dickens’s grotesques or Shakespeare’s clowns, that is not an absence of realism, but rather a realistic acknowledgment that in our own lives most other people remain opaque to us, often memorable mainly through their caricature-able qualities. We do not have the capacity, as George Eliot famously noted, to be fully empathetic at all times. Much of our observant life, and even much of our own experience, is conducted in a kind of shorthand.

Yet part of what makes the Sjöwall/Wahlöö books great, in comparison to most other mystery series, is precisely the opposite of this shorthand. They are oddly inclusive, with an eye for extraneous detail and a concern with the kinds of trivialities (subways ridden, meals eaten, suspicions vaguely aroused, meandering conversations, useless trains of thought, sudden bursts of intuition, random acts or events that cause everything to change suddenly) that make up not only every life, but every prolonged police investigation. This means that the timing of the books is, for some readers, excessively slow: we often have to wait for the necessary facts to surface, so we tend to find ourselves floating along rather than racing toward an increasingly visible conclusion. I always tell people that they have to wade through at least the first two volumes, Roseanna and The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, before things really get going in the Martin Beck series. Only when they reach The Man on the Balcony or, even better, The Laughing Policeman will they be able to judge how much they like the series. Patience is required of the reader, just as it is of the detective.

Nor are these the sort of “fair” mystery that lays out all the potential suspects and relevant clues (if perhaps in cleverly disguised form) early enough for you to arrive at the solution yourself. Leave that to Agatha Christie and the other puzzle-mongers. In the Martin Beck novels, the murderer might be someone we meet on the first page, but he equally well might not appear until nearly the end of the volume. The solution is only part of the point; it is getting there that matters.

 

Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review. She has written one novel and eleven previous works of nonfiction; recent books include Music for Silenced Voices, Why I Read, and You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn, which won the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and the PEN America Award for Research Nonfiction. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Swedish Academy, and numerous other organizations, she currently divides her time between Berkeley, California, and New York City.

Excerpted from Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery , by Wendy Lesser. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Lesser. All rights reserved.