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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Magic Eye: On the Art (and Life) of Joan Mitchell

A couple years ago, I got the idea that I should spend a week in Paris by myself. Considering I have a boyfriend who could have gone with me and that, perhaps more pertinently, I don’t speak French, the decision was confusing to a handful of people I know. I was satisfied by my own reasoning for the trip — I wanted to travel alone, to be in a situation in which I’m entirely out of my element, at least once while I’m young. Also, JetBlue had a sale. Still, I could read the awkwardness in their eyes, the real questions not being asked, when they’d look at me and carefully go, “So… what are you going to do there?” Really, what I wanted to do there was see the Joan Mitchell paintings at the Centre Pompidou.

It Wasn’t Real, But It Was Beautiful: On the WWE Holiday Tour Live and Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida

Last year, on the day after Christmas, I went alone to the WWE Holiday Tour Live at Madison Square Garden, where I sat in nosebleed seats. I wore a plaid button-down shirt and black jeans. I listened to “Danza Kuduro” on repeat on the half-hour walk from my apartment. My life was stable for the first time in two years. I was twenty-nine, living in New York after a nearly ten year hiatus, and dating a wonderful medical student at the University of Michigan who loved me very much. Everything was good. But I hadn’t finished writing my book and editors often edged me on whether my short stories would make it into their magazines (Not this story, but maybe the next one? Keep submitting to us!). I loved the medical student, but sometimes worried about our relationship.

Would You Rather Have Married Young?: On Lena Dunham, Sally Rooney, and The End of Experience

In an iconic episode of Girls, “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah spontaneously spends a weekend with a hot, respectful doctor in his expensive brownstone. After a couple of sublime days in his house she suffers a moment of shameful envy. “Please don’t tell anyone this,” she says, in tears, “but I want to be happy.” Doctor: Of course you do. Everyone does. Hannah: But I didn’t think that I did. I made a promise such a long time ago that I was going to take in experiences, all of them, so that I could tell other people about them and maybe save them, but it gets so tiring, trying to take in all the experiences for everybody, letting anyone say anything to me. Then I came here and I see you.

Paperback Vibrators and the Pragmatic Evasions of Literary Men: On Gender in Contemporary Fiction

I want to begin with what this is not. A definition by negation. Two exes have accused me of doing this trick all the time. It feels relevant to mention only because, as with most things in a guy’s life, this is all about women. Writing anything about the woes of young men in contemporary fiction can feel like yammering about a lost cause. It can also prompt some pretty fatuous counters. Not even Joyce Carol Oates could be spared — when she shot out a tweet in 2022 about how a literary agent had told her he couldn’t even get editors to look at debuts by ambitious boys, the Twitterati collectively told her to get stuffed.

Welcome to The Metropolitan Review

We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that we took for granted in the twentieth century. So much mainstream art can feel like a pale imitation of yesterday, marketers at the top chasing specters of what was successful a generation ago. “Artificial intelligence” is no longer an insult — wasn’t artifice to be avoided at all costs, plastic a much-deserved insult? — and tech behemoths long to jam us so full of cultural slop that we won’t be able to think coherently again.