In the Course of Developing Pet Names: A Short Story About New Love and Old Dogs

They discovered who they would be to each other. Sweet and maternal — her last boyfriend had called her “bean,” or “baby” — or cool and adult. This one would not be her baby. He didn’t seem to want to be, first of all. Second of all she didn’t want him to be. The soft part of her had guided her before and she wanted the hard parts leading now. She was older now, this seemed the lesson of her younger years. Her last relationship had failed for many reasons, among them that she’d found it impossible to be someone’s baby and also to tear fuckably at their clothes. For his part, he’d tried calling the ex-wife “goose” in their early days but she wouldn't have it, found it alternately unromantic and offensive — which were how she found him, in the end, usually both at once. She walked out on him. Rejected even the couples therapy that seemed to him the least they had been promising when they spoke those vows. (Unless this belief was again mere evidence of his unromanticism.) So he tried the moniker anew with this one. Felt a bit like cheating and a bit like cleaning. Windex the toothpaste-spattered mirror. Both he and the ex-wife had been messy when they lived together. Now his place was spotless. Hers too, he’d heard from a mutual friend. Each blamed the other for their slobbiness. He knew, though, that the act of being clean was itself an act of cleansing the old. The new girl seemed to like it, goose.

Life After Ahab: On Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill

In his 1997 essay “The Wonderful White Whale of Kansas,” Paul Metcalf posed a nagging question about the respective afterlives of a pair of American classics. “If there have been so many sequels to [The Wonderful Wizard of] Oz,” he wondered, “why not Moby-Dick?” Luckily, Metcalf is here to correct the record. He proceeds to dream up a few sequels of his own, concocting different futures for the Pequod’s crew and their offspring, some of whom, in his fantasy, actually survived the wreck. In Metcalf’s imaginings, these lucky escapees decamped to the setting of Melville’s first novel, the Marquesas Islands, where they interbred with the natives “and eventually scattered into the world.” Among their heirs: Ahab’s great-grandson, a dentist in Peoria, Stubb’s great-grandson, a corporate lawyer, and a descendent of Queequeg who is the “first female mixed-race mayor of a major American city.”

A Flight From Slow, Sad Reality: On Scott Spires’ Social Distancing

I can remember the first time I really understood the millennial obsession with authenticity. It was the summer of 2016, a few months after I moved to Seattle, as the bright lights of a newly urban existence began to dim in the rhythms of the day to day, and the lingering jokes about gentrifying hipsters with their artisanal beard wax and fair trade coffee had long worn out their punchline. My job at the time was ingratiating myself to hospitality workers, concierges of major hotels especially, so they might hand out my company’s travel magazine to any tourist looking for the hottest restaurant in the hippest neighborhood, one willing to advertise to the type of tourist who still reads print mags in the first place. Most of my exchanges with these higher-end concierges consisted of dull pleasantries and languorous chattering about special events going on around the city. One of these exchanges went sour, which I had sensed on the concierge’s face even before I was later called into my boss’s office. She simply asked how my day was going.

The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature

If you are a diligent reader of the novels flowing out of the Anglosphere for the last five or ten years, there are a number of reasons why French literary culture might strike you as rather strange. First, French writers seem to be unusually responsive to current events: while we were all writing our neat little autofictions about that time someone was mean to us in our MFA program, Michel Houellebecq was concocting terrorist attacks and farmers’ rebellions with such sociological acuity that one or two of them actually came true. Second, French writers seem to revel in nastiness in a way that few international contemporaries can: while we were all looking deep within ourselves and trying to work out whether we were good, or authentic, or racist, Emmanuel Carrère was charting the developments of his latest herpes outbreak and Annie Ernaux remembering her abortions in excruciating detail. Third, French writers have remained unapologetically erudite: while the rest of us were channeling the crisp, boring cadences of Strunk and White, Mathias Énard was writing page-long sentences likening the metaphysics of existence to “the ostinato of the zarb.”

Daddy’s Favorite: A Short Story About Siblings and Deception

Sean was ten when it happened. It was a memory that he swallowed. Instead of passing through him, it became another heart. It was there, alert and active, with him always. He thought this obsession, his acceptance of his father’s worst moment along with his commitment to remembering it, was proof he loved Daddy most. Julia was appalled when Sean told her that theory one drunken Memorial Day. It had been a long and lazy weekend, so unlike how they usually spent their time. Sean had gotten too comfortable. Immediately after he spoke, he regretted it. Julia, it was apparent, had not kept the memory close. Instead, she had ejected it from her body like vomit, expelling all traces. The thought alone a poison. “Daddy most certainly did not try to kill us,” she said. “And it was Fourth of July, not Memorial Day so I don’t even know why you would bring this up now.” She was older, almost thirteen at the time. It was their dad’s weekend, and it was the first time Julia and Sean had been truly alone with him without Nana or Aunt Gemma popping in and out, dropping off casserole or leftover barbeque but really, keeping a watchful eye over them. Or maybe it had been an eye on him. Their mother had cheated, Daddy reminded them and anyone who would listen, and still, even though he would forgive her because he was a goddamn Christian and his vow to God had meant something, she still wanted out, so after fifteen years of marriage, he was living alone for the first time in his life. Within a matter of weeks, everything was decided. Nana’s summer house was meticulously maintained and she said he was free to move in and stay year-round. Not just until he got on his feet. Forever. It was his.

Great American Allusions: On John Pistelli’s Major Arcana

Major Arcana is possibly the greatest title of the twenty-first century, depending on how you pronounce it. Major Ar-kay-nuh with an Arkansas accent won’t do, nor will trying to rhyme it with Arkansas, either. And as for the German My-orr, let us bid it a preventative Auf Weidersehen. The only way to pronounce it is Major Ar-caw-nuh, with its deserved fluidity. The novel, however, is in part a pronoun novel, meaning it deals with one of the least fluid grammatical phenomena of our times, but from a playful omniscience beyond popular morality that may very well retire the gender genre. Let us then, already at play in the high celestial geography of the third person, look down first with vertigo at the openwork Gothic cathedral author John Pistelli has fashioned in tribute to the maximal, modernist novel, and let the myopia of post-modern grammar set in later, in the senescence of this review. Major Arcana is a baroque structure, much in the way that literary talent is baroque today, and literary grandeur an outmoded concept in our late-stage era of the publishing industrial complex. But Pistelli, a fellow nth-generation goomba, scanned the landscape of disposable low-brow-upmarket “literary fiction” and answered instead to the architectural demands of 2020s geography, and to the true motives of literature: marketless, talented inspiration. Major Arcana is thus a novel of rococo intricacies and Old Testament contingencies, wedding neoclassical scale and style with all the seductive originality of the self-taught architect. The novel contains the internet without being enclosed by it. (After all, the internet needs buildings to house its routers, and Major Arcana’s characters are like this church’s stations of the cross.) Pistelli’s Gaddis-like troupe and their tapestries of interlining private details are shepherded through these various chambers, catching the tints and hues of cathedral glass and then darkening into shadow down long hallways, their crescents of profile caught here and there in the novel’s stained glass candlelight. Even its ARC pages are thick and glossy with grandiloquence.

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.”