Orgasming Without Pornography: On the Novels and Television of These Strange, Alienating Times

When I was in third grade, my school counselor gave me two books. One was about a girl raised by dolphins. This girl is “rescued,” taught to use language and walk normally and generally act like a human. The other book was about a girl growing up in the nineteenth century who learns, suddenly, that it’s actually 1996: she’s been living in a kind of historical museum, as a living diorama, and now must enter the real world of telephones and cars in order to obtain lifesaving modern medicine for her community. Only later did I put two and two together. This was all happening a couple of months after Hurricane Katrina, at my evacuation school in Houston. I cried every morning, unconcerned that my parents had bigger things to worry about. I constantly faked (no, really experienced) stomachaches and headaches. The guidance counselor, I now understand, thought I’d relate to books about children wrenched bewilderingly and suddenly from their contained worlds. At the time, I simply resented the guidance counselor, and I above all resented the fact that I loved these two books: her plot against me had worked.

Longing for Something Sacred: On Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement

In his seminal 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the American historian Christopher Lasch warned of the increasing normalization of pathological narcissism. Though he was hailed as a “biblical prophet” by Time magazine, his was far from a purely moralistic diatribe. Rather, he aimed to demonstrate that this anxious focus on the self was primarily a psychological condition more so than a mere moral failure, arising from certain sociological factors tied to the expansion of neoliberal economic policies. Lasch — formed by the material approach of the “Old Left” — pointed to the impact that over-bureaucratization and the decline of institutions that banked on mutual responsibility, respect, and the forging of thick social bonds had on our collective psyche. His Freudian background drew his attention to the effect that familial dysfunction — especially the distortion of dynamics between men and women — had on social realities, which other theorists of his ilk were less inclined to pick up on. While dedicating much writing to the effects of the decline of the role of the father and the bureaucratic paternalism that took its place, Lasch also considers the effects of the doting mother who, seeing “the child as an extension of herself, lavishes attentions on her child that are ‘awkwardly out of touch’ with his need,” thereby encouraging “an exaggerated sense of his own importance.” The resultant lapse in the child’s superego — his capacity to discern and adhere to limits — makes it difficult for him to maintain “boundaries between the self and the world of objects,” gives rise to “delusions of omnipotence” and magical thinking, and disposes him to oscillate between yearning to win the approval of others and to gratify his own base instincts. This collapse of the child’s sense of objectivity and his skewed sense of the real traps him in a bewilderingly solipsistic state.

The Future of the American Novel: Meditations on What Comes Next

There were surely critics, in the middle of the 1960s, who had no concept of what was to come. The counterculture could feel faddish; so could New Hollywood, sexually explicit novels, baroque pop, and acid rock. If history is a procession from A to B, it must never be forgotten that everyone in every time was living a life in transition, in the eternal present. Retrospective judgment only goes so far. Apprehending the future is inordinately difficult — now, and always. If you’re sure of it, you’re probably wrong. Knowing which way the wind blows is a special sort of art, one few can even start to master. And so, in the middle of the 2020s, American literature — and culture, broadly — appears to be at a crossroads, or at least barreling towards one. This is what The Metropolitan Review is all about; this is our raison d’être. Much of what we do is traditional — publish reviews and essays — though how we do it, and deliver it to you, is not. We have our own website, but we also publish via Substack, where the bulk of our readers lie. I don’t wish to discourse too much on a tech platform that has been the source of so much discourse already, some of it intriguing and some of it tedious, but it’s fine to linger, for a moment at least, on the newsletter service that is methodically becoming the locus of digital written culture.

Underground Cinema: A Short Story About Love and Death

It’s elsewhere, you know, the world, we’re over here, he said, and it’s over there, it’s over the crest of that — is it a hill, yes, it’s most likely a hill, all the tell-tale signs, all the horrific giveaways, of a hill, there’s no element in nature more embarrassing than a hill, I’ve always had this feeling, he said, that 98% of natural phenomena, at least, are essentially failures, a hill is a failed mountain, he said, a lake is a failed sea, a shrub is a failed tree, a mouse is a failed rat, a dog is a failed wolf, a cat is a failed lynx, a stone is a failed cliff, snow is failed water, water is failed sun, I raised my hand in frustration, I couldn’t speak, he had tied me up and seemingly also cut out my tongue, I couldn’t tell for certain whether he’d cut it out, I couldn’t feel anything in my mouth, but that didn’t prove that my tongue wasn’t still in there somewhere, clinging to the back of my throat, and while the last time I’d an opportunity to have a bit of a feel, to see if there was something in my mouth, I was able to affirm that yes, something tongue-like was still to be found, in the inner recesses of my mouth, but this morning I couldn’t feel anything at all —

A World Beyond Words: On Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon. Recently, I experienced a form of this magic for myself with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I wanted to watch it out of obligation. Could I call myself a cinephile if I skipped over this colossus of cinema history? But I was not expecting much. How could a film without words sustain my attention or stimulate my curiosity? Well, it did. Swells and silences in the score, monumental production design, the expressive faces of talented thespians — all of it coalesced into a stirring depiction of greed, industrialization, and class.

The Last Colossus: On Cynthia Ozick’s In a Yellow Wood

Volumes of a writer’s selected or collected work usually have a kind of a grandness to them, an authoritative summing up that pretends to the definitive, and are the outcome of retrospective weighing: the author, if they have made the selections, or a custodian of their work — spouse, editor, literary executor — has looked at years of production and decided that these writings will stand for what the writer and their work was. You can go further into their corpus and search out the oddities, the minor, the incomplete and occasional, the neglected, but this material before you is the main substance — it will offer the most up-front and prepossessing (some might say imploring) portrait, a testament, for better or worse, of what is past and aspires toward the enduring, a record colored and oddly shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of a particular mind either deceased or soon-to-be. And there, I’m not out of the first paragraph and mortality has entered, though I’d intended to hold it off longer. But how not to remark the truly remarkable fact that Cynthia Ozick, who has just published In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays, is ninety-seven years old?

Great American Psycho: On the Film and Novel, 25 Years Later

Search the internet far and wide, and you’ll find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fan-edited videos of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho; Bateman is portrayed by Christian Bale in the film adaptation directed by Mary Harron. Beneath these videos is an interpretation of Bateman as an Übermensch figure with the ideal body. This powerful investment banker lives in luxury, carved from nowhere like a porcelain statue, with a devil-may-care attitude. Many of the movie’s scenes have been parodied numerous times. A scene where Bateman walks into the office while listening to Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” shows him in his glory through bright and distorted filters. His morning routine — an obsessive attempt to have the perfect skin texture through conditioners, as well as an intense exercise regimen — is also highlighted in these edits. Other popular scenes include all the men comparing their business cards and Bateman becoming very envious when one’s more textured; the infamous sequence of Bateman’s execution of Paul Allen, after he monologues about Huey Lewis and the News, is recreated with Huey Lewis. There’s also no shortage of memorable quotes like “cool it with the antisemitic remarks” or “I’m going out to return some videotapes.”

The Rocket Never Landed: On Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17

Mickey 17 longs to make sweeping and grandiose political statements but has to settle for a referendum on Robert Pattinson’s merits as a leading man. While those who are wholly immune to his charms should stay clear, if you’ve been won over by his transformation into a bona fide leading man, then it’s worth the price of admission, if nothing more than to see what Bong Joon Ho can do with a mega budget. Bong has been one of the grittiest, most genre-bending international auteurs in the cinematic game. He’s never been one to pull punches or to withhold layering in seriously heavy social critiques. This time, he decides to use this adaptation of 2022 science fiction novel Mickey7 as a pretext to level criticism at a surfeit of targets. The issue is that with all of the opprobrium being spray-gunned in practically every direction, most of it fails to resonate in any tangible way.

Substack and the American Novel: On Jarett Kobek’s Oeuvre, and the New World Before Us

Most 21st century novels don’t matter much. They matter, of course, to the people who write them, and to whatever dwindling subset of the wider public still reads them, but, here in America, at least, the majority of folks couldn’t care less. Of course, this sorry state of affairs has been kvetched about and argued over for a good hundred years — one could wallpaper the rooms of every still-aspirant writer in America with the lame-ass Death of the Novel squibs that have cropped up in the last quarter-century alone and still have enough left over to stock their bathroom cabinets with tissue — but the flimsiness of recent arguments can’t really cover the fact that the American novel really is now running on fumes. By this I mean not that there are no good, great, or inventive ones being written — God knows there are — but simply that the American public doesn’t care. No big whoop, I guess. (Did “they” ever care? To how many people does a work of art have to matter to be worthwhile?) But as the novelists I know go hopscotching from one social media platform to another, hoping to build up their audience, hoping to drum up some attention, hoping to do . . . whatever it is we’re doing, say, here on Substack, which platform some (including the editors of this very periodical) seem to believe represents something salvific for writers but towards which I remain, for reasons I will come to, deeply skeptical, I can’t help but think this represents a kind of endgame.

The Pain of Passing: On Mayukh Sen’s Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star

Mayukh Sen’s scrupulous and moving biography, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, considers the Golden Age actress’ ambivalence toward her white and Sinhalese ancestry through a decolonial lens. In 1936, Merle Oberon, then 24, became the first performer of color and Asian descent to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. But Oberon never got to revel in her achievement’s historic importance. To succeed within a far more racist and xenophobic environment, Oberon took pains to pass for white. “This was less a choice than a necessity,” Sen writes, “and it came at great psychic cost to her.” Love, Queenie invites readers to give Oberon’s nomination, gumption, and filmography commensurate recognition. To those who fault Oberon for denying her maternal South Asian lineage, Sen offers context. As black-and-white cinematography gave way to technicolor and television and as Hollywood’s studio system disintegrated, Oberon’s few Asian contemporaries struggled to sustain acting careers. In keeping with anti-miscegenation laws in most of the United States, American film studios of Oberon’s era eschewed depictions of romance between white actors and performers of color. For Oberon, disclosing her identity would have forfeited her leading lady roles. She would have also lost advertising campaigns with Lux Toilet Soap and Max Factor selling her fair complexion. Given the Immigration Act of 1917 that barred South Asians from legal entry into the United States, Oberon would have also risked deportation. As the United States and Britain pushed colonial projects, Oberon overcame poverty, spousal abuse, and fickle industry standards to fulfill her childhood ambition to act. In attending to how Oberon exercised her agency within the constraints she faced, Sen celebrates Oberon’s craft, charting her artistic evolution and limitations and how all of that withholding must have created stores of emotion that informed Oberon’s expression before the camera.

Tiny: A Short Story About Brothers and Betrayal

It was a bad break, a slip and then a tumble. Denny had been jogging (jogging!) for the first time in what felt like ever, trying to be healthy now that he’d turned thirty. Middle age was coming. So was the pothole right off Fillmore on the nice block of Marine Parkway, with all those houses he’d dreamed of selling, hoping to jumpstart his middling realty career. Maybe his eyes were on the good roofing and that’s why he planted awkward, landing strange on his ankle, turned it, heard the snap, and if he’d been in any state of mind to pick his (never specified) emergency contact he would have gone for his stalwart older brother Jim. But instead, due to proximity, it was Tiny. Denny had never gotten along particularly well with Tiny, his younger brother. Was it something from childhood that they never put past them? Denny could hardly remember. A prank with a Lego block that brought punishment to Tiny but not to Denny, then their mother’s favorite, at least that’s what Tiny said years ago, deep in Christmas Eve drinks. He was a science teacher at a Manhattan middle school, always sullen even in the summer. Denny and Tiny lived not thirty blocks apart yet rarely crossed paths, not since their mother had retired to North Carolina and suggested they sell the old house (Denny obliged) to help them all get a leg up in life. Denny saw more of Jim, even though Jim was on his third kid and second marriage and busy a borough away in Queens. Yet here was Tiny riding with him in the ambulance, shaking his head and making gruesome faces at the break, looking at his watch in a way that Denny felt was far more than necessary.

American Faust: On Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice

It is abundantly clear, nearly ten years since he descended that gold-trimmed escalator, that Donald Trump is the most significant political figure of our time. Even his most bitter enemies would have to admit, however distasteful it may be, that no president has held greater sway over American government other than perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt during his 12-year presidency, and no single biography has displayed more variety, or taken as many improbable turns, since the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. As the author of this remarkable destiny, Trump himself is chiefly responsible for shaping a story that has altered our politics (many would say for the worse), changed the course of history (in a still undetermined manner), and now places the fate of much of the free world in the hands of a man who, as recently as May 2015, was mostly famous for firing celebrities on a reality show, coiffing his perm-blond hair in an absurd fashion, and going bankrupt in a series of asset devaluations by the end of the 1980s.

The Gray Man Theory: On Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good

A terrible thing has recently happened to me. I have become obsessed with the golden era of American magazines. This grave affliction manifests itself in several symptoms. First, it causes one’s reading list to grow to enormous length. Just when you think you’ve discovered the last memoir about answering phones at the midcentury New Yorker, or cowering under the thumb of Anna Wintour at Vogue, or of late nights at Partisan Review in the hard-drinking glory days, or at the in the high-flying Sixties, several more rear their heads, like martini-soaked Whack-a-Moles. And because the whole thing involves the settling of long-simmering scores and the clashing of titanic egos, you’re almost obligated to read everything in order to form a full picture of the personalities involved. Was the New Yorker’s William Shawn a gnomic sage, or a doddering fool? Did Tina Brown destroy high-middlebrow literary culture in America, or save it? The same person might be painted as a saint in one memoir and a tyrant in the next, and the same incidents might recur across different books with totally different causes and effects, so hell, you might as well read them all.

Indie, Please: On Daniel Falatko’s The Wayback Machine

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to many rock shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick. The neighborhoods, like me, were a bit scruffier then. The glass monoliths had not yet swallowed up the waterfront. PBRs were a buck, never more. The men kept their shirts earnestly plaid and their jeans earnestly tight. I was warier of the jeans, fine with the plaid, and let my hair unspool in a billowing halo of curls. My close friend, who actually played in a rock band, favored leather jackets, and so did I. I had no musical talent of my own — an attempt to learn the guitar at seventeen flopped terribly — but I could lose myself in those shows, which were usually illegal. The bands, often named for animals, thrashed for hours in “DIY” loft spaces and warehouses with names like Death by Audio, Monster Island, and Shea Stadium. I had a dim sense, as a teenager, I belonged to a kind of scene, but I never thought of it that way. This was simply my youth, and where my friends, in the bands that were booked to play, went to rock out. Rock was key: it was the present and the inevitable future, and all of the music I listened to, with few exceptions, was very new. Nostalgia hadn’t swallowed me, or the rest of the culture, whole. My rock, this indie music especially, was going to be the vanguard. “When rock was the dominant force in music, rap came and said, ‘Y’all got to sit down for a second, this is our time.’ And we’ve had a stranglehold on music since then,” Jay-Z told MTV in 2009. “So I hope indie rock pushes rap back a bit because it will force people to make great music for the sake of making great music.”

The Man Without a Past: On the Sublimity of Jay Gatsby

Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsby, which has left the English thanking Americans and the Americans thanking English for a century now, I took my copy to the spot where that nightingale fledged. There is a small pub garden by London’s Hampstead Heath where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero, the Romantic princeling John Keats, composed his "Ode to a Nightingale." Here, as in America, you first meet the book in school, and you take your personal clutch of gorgeous, fleet-footed lyrics; for me, that the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” and that Gatsby’s smile “understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.” Those treasures are precious, but in some way you feel they are so for what they will reveal. Everyone says you must reach a certain age to “really get” Gatsby.