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.

Up Close With the Beauty of Gatsby: On Teaching (And Reading) an American Classic

The Great Gatsby: If you went to high school in the United States, your parents read it, you’ve read it, your friends have some vague memory of the green light and Daisy and Nick, and your kids probably will too. I read it in high school and college, and now am a member of the great tribe of high school teachers who put it on our American Literature syllabi year after year, 100 years after its publication. Almost no text is so ubiquitously found in classrooms, which is also why it often draws righteous indignation and constant interrogation: Do more people need to read this, again? Is there really nothing else that would serve the same purpose? Are we being lazy educators, perpetuating a system that mindlessly privileges a few texts, identities, etc.? These are questions I ask every year, and every year, I choose again to teach it. The reasons are multifarious: I believe there is value in a canon (how many texts are we able to discuss with our peers, parents, and children?); I also think, contrary to the identitarian objection, the text raises interesting and relevant questions of class, gender, etc. But most importantly, Gatsby cares about language. Few texts so carefully ensure the fluidity or the languor of a sentence mirrors its function; few make you feel the slap of an em-dash or the runaway car of a string of commas. Gatsby doesn’t just tell you a story, it teaches you how to love language. In a world of identity politics, the ascendancy of tech, finance, and optimization, language itself is an increasingly rare concern. The art of paying careful attention to language is one we purport to teach in class. We call it close reading. I think Gatsby is a text that both represents and defends close reading. And it does need defending.

America the Beautiful: The Great Gatsby as Romantic Poetry

We could ask this question in two different ways. First, it might be remarkable that he was able to write any masterpieces at all, even if only one. A chronicler of his age’s excesses in gossipy romans à clef, a middling-to-poor student of elite institutions, a status-conscious social climber from a downwardly mobile Midwestern family, an Irish Catholic in a still-WASP-dominated America, and, eventually, a debilitated alcoholic in a failing marriage marked by intense mental instability — even allowing for the well-attested turbulence of the modern artist, the person described by this list of characteristics is not an obvious candidate for the author of the Great American Novel. Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway were also unstable, alcoholic, or both, but they wrote from experiences more intense, from settings more extraordinary, and from erudition more solid than anything offered by Fitzgerald’s gentlemanly-mediocre Princeton or gin-soaked Jazz Age New York. Fitzgerald himself feared that in having been drafted too late to see combat in the Great War, he had missed his opportunity not only for heroism but for crucial literary material. How did a person so apparently unserious write The Great Gatsby, which is, on the centenary of its publication, the only 20th-century American novel every literate American has read? The question could be asked the other way, too, though: why did an author with such a rich literary gift only write one great book, even allowing for his alcoholism, his bad marriage, his decadent social scene, and all the rest of it?

April Fools: A Short Story About Adolescence and Suicide

The boy died on the first of April, so the police were slow to respond. The first of April was a big day for false alarms. My mother worked dispatch for Alachua and fielded all the calls. Every year, she listened to teenagers report cases of mammoth erections and spontaneous combustion. Maybe twice a decade, a kid would do something inventive with bath salts and launch himself into juvie. But most of the calls were total jokes. Still, my mother’s job was to send the police like a good little Samaritan. Her officers quickly stretched thin. That year, a representative from the department stopped by our school to speak over the intercom about making smart choices on April Fools’ Day. “It’s a crime to fake a crime,” he said, but he didn’t tell us what the punishment would be if we got caught. Or maybe he did. I was too busy looking out the window to listen. A pair of enormous crows was picking apart the unlucky carcass of an armadillo, which felt like big news at the time — I didn’t yet know about the boy. I was in Discrete Math, a low-level half-course for borderline morons who didn’t need to take Pre-Calculus. No one in Discrete Math was graduating on time. Sixteen of us had to repeat the year. The school had concocted a whole schedule of specialized courses to convince us it was still worth our while to wake up at six AM five days a week. My desk mate, Nick, threw a penny at the intercom, but it fell very short and struck Ms. Galanis in the chest. She was flat enough that the coin dropped immediately to the floor. It might as well have hit the wall.

Childhood is Over: On Adam Ross’ Playworld

It happens suddenly, sometimes before we even recognize it, and we don’t get any say. We might be slow to acknowledge it; we might even resist it. But we can’t avoid it, or wish it away. Eventually we learn to process it, accept it, move forward. What other choice do we have? Adulthood comes for all of us, sooner or later. We might mourn what we’ve lost. Or we might be relieved that childhood — with its attendant confusion, anxiety, and lack of freedom — is over. Either way, there’s no turning back. Griffin Hurt, the young protagonist of Playworld, an outstanding new novel by Adam Ross, is a student of adulthood. Precocious and observant, he absorbs its manners and mores, familiarizes himself with its customs and concealments. The world of adults is disorienting and opaque, but he learns how to ingratiate himself with them, approximate their behavior. Like a kid trying on his father’s clothing, he might be able to convince you that the suit jacket is his — but look closer, and you’ll see the tailoring is off.

The Devil and Mary Gaitskill: On Sex (and Hopelessness) in Fiction

Among the dozens of stories Mary Gaitskill has published since her 1988 debut Bad Behavior, only one — “Secretary,” a detached BDSM narrative from that collection — has been loosely adapted for the screen. On its face, this fact is not entirely surprising. Gaitskill is, above all else, a prose stylist, renowned more for short fiction than her whipsawing novels, her characters prone to white-collar monotony and lurid sexual encounters. But if these themes have scared off Hollywood producers, they haven’t posed such obstacles for her closest peers, excavators of middle-American intercourse like John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates. In Gaitskill’s case, the sex isn’t the problem so much as its temperature, the hopelessness that precedes and follows.

Searching for Bigger: Where is the Black Working Class in Contemporary Literary Fiction?

A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels and was a seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance. W.E.B. Du Bois hated it. Du Bois wrote after reading the novel that “after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” The reality is that Du Bois saw novels that depicted the lives of Harlem in the streets, brothels, the shipyards and the cabarets as fantastical and catering to a white audience. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, McKay was an immigrant writer from Jamaica who worked as a waiter in various establishments to earn his living, having dropped out of the Tuskegee Institute. Jazz, sex and blues are common in the novel because jazz, sex and blues were common in Harlem despite how it may have ruffled some conservative Black folks’ feathers. His novel focuses on two Black male characters in the interwar period encountering a racist society and the violence of working-class life in Harlem.