New York Groove: On Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers

A narrative strategy of ambivalence is often a sure bet in the realistic novel. Gustave Flaubert complained that Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, didn’t need to “make observations” about chattel slavery in the United States, she only needed to “depict it: that’s enough.” Flaubert’s observations still inspire writers and critics who argue the author should be a deity. On the other hand, we have the Bob Dylan of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” directing the congregant when it’s time to withhold tears, and when it’s time to cry. In his new novel, The Sleepers, Matthew Gasda rolls the dice more on the French side. It’s an ambivalent work that, at first glance, seems more contemporary than it is. We begin with Akari. We will all be as lucky as Akari, or so the novel leads us to believe. She arrives in New York from Los Angeles, a film industry worker, a UCLA grad, “toned and lean from yoga and Pilates classes, so she appeared longer than she was.” This long person walks instead of waiting for the “G” train, an in-joke local readers of this novel will recognize. Around her, people seem to be “running on some alternate energy source that did not burn as cleanly or as efficiently as sleep.”

The Performance of Life: On Katie Kitamura’s Recent Novels

When I was a young man I enjoyed a brief, accidental career as a business executive. In my surprising success, I discovered skills and aspects of my personality — my self —that I hadn’t previously known I possessed. Because all along I felt my true self to be, very differently, what I ultimately chose to become, a writer and professor of English, I sometimes felt like an imposter. Who is this person making decisions, issuing directives, strategically angling advantages in corporate maneuverings — perceived, in his small world, as important and powerful? We categorize and label identities, of others and of ourselves, even when the categories may be incommensurate to our various selves acting in the world, and this produces discordances. Central to a discordant sense of identity is that defining human attribute we call self-consciousness. Consider that as part of my work, I often had to persuade clients, partners, and employees to do what I wished — sometimes needed — them to do, in order to advance my and my company’s objectives, which didn’t always, for various reasons, precisely align. I always believed in what I was doing, and I didn’t seek to disadvantage anyone. But sometimes the course of action I argued, not necessarily always by my own choice, didn’t appear on the surface as advantageous to the other party as I suggested it could be. Sometimes they were right. Initially, it might not be. I had to persuade them, against their self-protective mistrust — using the personal trust I had earned from them, in conjunction with my persuasive skills — that in the longer run, it would be. And I understood how they might perceive the matter differently or at least fear that there was something they weren’t seeing, information they didn’t have, maybe even that I was withholding. Such situations opened up substantial space for speculation about motives, projection of one person’s intuitions onto another’s character, and so on. The more naturally inclined business personality might spend little if any time in this discordant mental space of self-conscious questioning of its own authenticity. A more naturally introspective personality might spend a lot of time there — time better spent becoming a master of the universe.

Metallic Realms: An Excerpt from Lincoln Michel’s New Novel

Dear reader, gird yourself. These pages aren’t mere paper but a portal to (arguably) one of the greatest achievements in science fiction imagination of the twenty-first century in any subgenre, language, or artistic medium. As a fan, I quake with jealousy. I wish I too were freshly encountering the manifold wonders of The Star Rot Chronicles. The ensuing tales are apt to sear into your mind more powerfully than most milestones of so-called “real life.” I close my eyes — here in this cold basement where I compose these notes — and scenes appear as films projected upon the insides of my eyelids. The escape from the solar whale! The great war of the Adamites! The chilling return of — Oh, I must stop myself. No spoilers in my scholarship. I can recall these moments with greater clarity than my first kiss,1 high school graduation, or even the tragic events of 9/11 that so defined the America of my young adulthood. As your intrepid editor and Star Rot whisperer, I’ll confess I occasionally ponder how my life might’ve differed if I’d never discovered The Star Rot Chronicles. Likely, I’d have finished law school. There’d be no possible warrant for my arrest. I might have a steady job. A mortgage. A loving partner. The patter of pajamaed feet running up the stairs of my two-story suburban home; I pivot in my ergonomic office chair to see a young boy and girl in matching striped jammies rush to hug my legs and then look up with wide-eyed cherub faces to say, “Daddy, we love you. Daddy, you are special. Daddy, you are our universe.” Pedestrian pleasures. I have another universe, and it is the Metallic Realms.

There Is No Real Lolita: On Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger

In 1977, dozens of prominent French writers and intellectuals — including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, and Gabriel Matzneff — signed an open letter protesting the prolonged pre-trial detention of three men accused of sexually assaulting a group of underage girls. The letter noted that the girls in question “were not victims of the slightest violence, but, on the contrary, clarified to the investigating judges that they consented (despite the fact that French law denies them the right to consent).” It went on to question why the justice system “recognized the capacity of discernment in a minor of 13 or 14 years when being judged and condemned, only to be denied this capacity when it comes to sex and their intimate life.” The letter ended, rather mordantly: “Three years for caresses and kisses, that’s enough.” In Neige Sinno’s prizewinning novel Sad Tiger, which recounts in thorough and relentless detail the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, the French author argues that what everyone wants to know is what goes through the head of a pedophile.“ With the victims,” Sinno writes, “it’s easy, we can all put ourselves in their shoes. Even if you've not experienced it, the bewilderment, the silence of the victim is something we can all imagine, or think we can. The perpetrator, on the other hand, that's something else.”

The Terror of Mediocrity: On Andrew Ewell’s Set for Life

Andrew Ewell’s Set for Life has already met its deserved fate. The novel is doing as poorly as it should on Goodreads and has failed to impress professional reviewers. It’s heartening whenever mediocrity fails; to find the public and experts not only in agreement, but actually right, makes me hopeful about the future of American democracy. Set for Life would be more interesting if it were awful. Free of truly embarrassing passages, even in tone, never purple, caricatural, or unhinged, the novel is instead the sort of boring, easy-to-read fiction that only the steadily dimming aura of ‘literature’ differentiates from what’s served up in the streaming services’ slop troughs. We’re dropped into the plot on page one. A thus-far novel-less would-be novelist, our narrator-protagonist — overshadowed by his relatively prolific novelist wife — is returning from a fellowship during which he wrote nothing. Within a few pages he begins an affair with another unaccomplished, bitter writer, which inspires him to begin a new novel. Scenes move back and forth between Brooklyn and a college upstate, where the protagonist is the spousal hire and technical subordinate of his resented wife. The story combines several of the most familiar setups of modern literature: the campus of unhappy academic couples, the novelist not writing a novel, and the dissatisfied provincial who tries to blast life open with a doomed love affair.

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.

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 —

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.

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.

Amputation: An Exclusive Excerpt from Bruce Wagner’s Forthcoming Novel

The night before, Trooper the Surfer was way up in the Highlands fooling around with the trans bros—most of them were topless but still had pussies—he wasn’t a chaser but met one at the beach (Rory) who said he ‘cracked the egg about a year ago and had top surgery.’ Trooper gave his stock lifestyle-response, his Pete Davidson/Chad ‘Cool,’ and Rory, smiling with a degree of seriousness, said, ‘I’m making my own decisions. I’m my own legal guardian and people don’t understand that.’ He invited the surfer over and whoa the manse was a fuckin motherlode. Trooper’s uncle couldn’t believe all the shit he stole—the trans bros were so rich they didn’t notice or care. His uncle said, ‘Hell, we need to go back,’ but they never got it together. But now the fires were coming and the unbreasted coven was comatose from G—all of them AirPodded except Rory, who loved his cheap Dóttir Freedoms headphones, and Jank, who loved his (Dad’s) $8,000 HIFIMAN Susvara Planar Magnetics—so no one heard the cold, cyclonic 80 mph Santa Anas—Didion and Ray Chandler wouldn’t know a cold Santa Ana if it super-scooped them from the grave, but that’s what it was—cold, cold, cold—all were oblivious to the embers ghost gust-riding the winds to dance with the detonated nitrous tanks in the guest house stocked for the Armin van Buuren DJ’d dumbly titled ‘Fyre Too!’ house party fest set for tomorrow. Nor did they watch the roof/walls blow out and marry the firestorm—nor see the cathedral-size canyon overlook living room window explode, instantly severing the Neo Rauch Die Herrin canvas (and Jank’s left subclavian). Nor could they witness the on-fire cougar studded with fatal shrapnel quills that cannonballed into the tableau like some animatronic loser fleeing di Cosimo’s great painting of a forest inferno; nor hear its sick-making stereophonic scream or smell the febrile anal bloodstink of its extirpation at the foot of the melted Basquiat black crowned king (a gift from Mom to Dad) and the melty Kara Walker and smelting steel-titted Louise Bourgeois’s The Good Mother (gift from Dad to Mom). Eerily, their cadavers were preserved (mostly) by a timely windblown plash of pink retardant, enough for an astute fireman to note in the aftermath that each had the same horizontal sub-aureole scar, i.e. what was believed to be a rich boys’ sleepover was amended by the coroner to a gaggle of FTM twinks.