Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age: A Meditation on the Here and Now

In 1924, the French novelist Marcel Arland — founder of the Dadaist newspaper Aventure — wrote an article in La Nouvelle Revue Française which contained the phrase mal du siècle (the illness of the century), which he used to describe an ambivalent feeling, a dissonance, well-known to young men of his generation. Those men, many scarcely boys at the war’s beginning, had returned to a culture entirely removed from the mechanized brutality of the front from which they had emerged in 1918. It was an experience which some would try, and mostly fail, to sublimate in art and literature. As someone temperamentally conditioned to appreciate aesthetic novelty, and given to a grandiose historical view of epochs, I cannot help but feel invigorated by the prospect of a return to a new era of Romanticism, especially one described in eloquent terms by writers such as Sam Jennings: “What’s coming must be new — must be strange and fitful, awkward and passionate. A lover rediscovering the world, confused by its tactless kisses, yet charmed, endlessly by its dents and imperfections, its sadness and its religion, the dimples where its ancient smile shows.” Or indeed, in the noble and hopeful political sentiments of Ross Barkan — who sees more clearly than perhaps anyone else that the success of such a turn may portend a collective liberation of consciousness, as it did in previous times, which was followed by the emergence of unashamedly utopian modes of thinking that completely reconfigured the material conditions of the modern world: “Now we beat on into a murkier future. There is good news still, flickers of light in fog. A serf cannot liberate himself until he knows he is a serf. He must survey the land, his life, and his relation to power to see that he must get free. That is as hard as breaking the chains themselves.”

The Social Pornography Complex: On Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s Got Money Troubles appears on the jacket to be a book about motherhood and pornography, but it’s really about the internet. But wait, according to internet discourse, the internet novel doesn’t exist. Actually it does exist but can never succeed. Actually it should really be called “the social media novel.” There are many opinions about what an “internet novel” is and whether or not it can be good, yet many have converged around the idea that the internet novel should carry its reader through the feeling of the internet, of being “online,” and it’s not surprising that such novels that invoke this feeling tend to conclude, at least implicitly: social media is bad. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts: Social media is fake and, by the way, it turned my boyfriend evil. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, specifically the story “The Feminist”: Social media turned me evil. Honor Levy’s My First Book: Social media has ruined my brain. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This: It’s ruined mine, too, and did you know, social media is fake? These books aren’t necessarily bad — Patricia Lockwood’s writing is a highlight, her language is a delight, and it glorifies the fun of it all — but they all carry a similar message: Log off. By now, we all understand social media can have harmful effects, yet here we are anyway. Social media is not only not going away, it will continue to have an increasing impact on our inner and outer lives. So what do we do about it?

The Thinking Machine: On Dean Kissick, Paul Lynch, Claire Keegan, Leon Trotsky, and Art Today

What do we mean when we call a novel “urgent?” Presumably, we do not mean that the novel urges us to commit a certain act, or even to align with an ideology or support a particular cause. Even the most overtly political fiction that I’ve enjoyed — say, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — never caused me to join an anarcho-syndicalist organization or start my own commune. I take it I’m not alone in this. In my experience reading “urgent” novels, I would estimate that the term indicates less the verb “to urge,” but rather “urgency” as an emotional condition, generally with an implied political valence. I would hazard that this is a modern update on the famous Aristotelian formula that tragedy is pity plus fear. (If I got that wrong, you can blame the notes I took in ninth-grade English.)

Will Conservatives Make Great Art Again?: A Meditation on the New Right

Theodoric abruptly drew his broadsword and struck Odoacer with such ferocity that it cleaved him from shoulder to thigh in a single slice. “The wretch cannot have had a bone in his body,” he joked, standing over the barbarian King of Italy, the man who put to bed the Western Roman Empire. Carved to a gory stump. Odoacer had joined Theodoric that evening for a banquet intended to celebrate a truce between the two Germanic warlords. It was a trap, and after Odoacer was dispatched, Theodoric slaughtered his family and friends in ways that would make Machiavelli blush. Yet what followed this bloodletting might surprise you. Theodoric did not raze Italy. Though violence and perfidy bookended his reign, he oversaw a period of prosperity and stability from his court at Ravenna that was unequaled until the time of Charlemagne. He launched an ambitious infrastructure program, constructing new road networks, refurbishing hospitals, and building public squares and churches, his crown jewel being the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, which still stands today. He did all this while encouraging comity between Romans and Germans. But perhaps the most fascinating part of Theodoric’s rule was that, as he rejuvenated the cities he conquered, he also provided generous support to historians and philosophers and encouraged the revival of classical learning. Theodoric is generally considered to have been illiterate. He didn’t sign his own name without using a stencil. So why would a barbarian who never learned to read or write enjoy hearing poetry read?

The Art of the Critic: On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism

“The floods of tepid soap and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England, seem to me,” Henry James wrote, “to do little honour to our race.” In February 1884, 40-year-old James dismissed contemporary British novels in a letter to American novelist and editor William Dean Howells. James then went on to laud Howells as “the great American naturalist” before tempering his praise: “I don't think you go far enough, and you are haunted with romantic phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses; but you are in the right path, and I wish you repeated triumphs there.” James had opinions. He also had the language — and the critical sensibility — with which to effectively, and lyrically, express those opinions. Criticism without flair is dull, and criticism without sensibility is useless. James had plied his critical trade for years; a notable early work was a terrible gift for Charles Dickens a few days before Christmas in 1865. Writing of Our Mutual Friend for The Nation, James dismissed the novel as “poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” Bleak House was “forced,” Little Dorrit “labored,” and Our Mutual Friend “dug out as with a spade and a pickaxe.” “Seldom,” James affirms, “had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt.”

Kill the Editor: On the End of Literary Prestige

Twelve years ago, editors at The Paris Review held an open Q&A session on Reddit. One user asked how many unsolicited submissions the magazine receives on average in a period. The editors said around 15,000 a year. In response to a related question, they also disclosed that they rarely accept any manuscripts in the unsolicited category, affectionately referred to as the slush pile. For the most part, the slush pile is read by interns who pass along their favorites to be ignored by the editors. Unless you have a supremely well-connected agent or you commandeer George Plimpton’s corpse for a Weekend at Bernie’s style gesticulatory endorsement, if you submit a story or poem or essay to The Paris Review, you won’t be published, you won’t enjoy a working relationship with a world-class editor, your prose will mold without that premium-grade varnish, that vaunted seal of craftsmanship that only a rigorous editor can give, you won’t be invited to parties in New York City, you may be forced to submit your slush to small presses, or, worst of all, you’ll sink all the way down to the level of Substack, living out the rest of your days writing rude essays like a bucktoothed yahoo. So why worry about prestige publications?

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

The Town Where Journeys End: On The Inland Sea

The train exits Matsuyama through the curving walls of pine and bamboo which give way to the city’s rural outskirts. Here, rice fields are shaved low for the winter, mowed down to a tan stubble of hardened stalks that bend and break over each other in the last phase of their growth, or the first phase of what comes after growth. They are truly the dead of winter. All that is left for them is their immolation at the hands of their farmer, most likely a grandmother in a floral handkerchief and sunglasses. Beside and above these wrecked fields rise the maroon branches and black-green leaves of mikan trees, only just harvested, the round gaps where their fruit hung still traced by supple foliage. They are about a meter tall and stand perfectly distanced the way Japanese preschoolers do when they go out on the town for an excursion. Unlike rice, which is harvested, crushed, burned, then replanted every year, the mikan trees last around three decades. They are the favorite children of Ehime, doted on by aging farmers across the prefecture and yielding mikan juice, butter, jam, lotion, jelly, and sake.

The Colossus of Brooklyn: On Thomas Wolfe and Infinite Loneliness

The retreat center was attached to a grand, turn-of-the-century hotel, straight out of The Shining, manned by a skeleton crew for the winter. Wandering the grounds, I poked my head into the old lobby. Past the worn armchairs and covered grand piano, I found a musty little library with the door unlocked. There is nothing quite like the almost holy feeling of presence in an informal, well-cared-for library. When you enter, the books seem to whisper — Shhhhhh, hey, there's someone coming. I tiptoed around, inspecting the familiar Northeastern canon — the Cheevers, Roths, Eugene O’Neills, and the Updike, so much Updike. One musty black spine called out to me from the shelves, its title eroded by time — a copy of the long-out-of-print Thomas Wolfe Reader. That’s Thomas Wolfe, Southerner, born 1900, not Tom Wolfe, later-century dandy of The Hamptons. Thomas Wolfe grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. As a precocious young playwright at UNC-Chapel Hill, he left the spiritually suffused but stultifying red clay of his native land to make his way in New York. By many accounts, he was an enfant terrible there, pissing people off mightily.

The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission. Then his daughter died. Then he got dropped by his publisher. Then he got hit by a car. Then he got a pulmonary embolism. But things are looking up. William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”