The Revolution of Everyday Life

In the eight years since a small group of anti-capitalist activists set up camp in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street has generated its own literary subgenre: Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs, and Ling Ma’s Severance all feature scenes of the 2011 protests. In these novels, the Occupy movement, with its non-programmatic political aims and nonviolent tactics, represents a particularly utopian way of thinking about contemporary revolution—one that is less about direct action than it is about nonaction, about indirection.

Caleb Crain’s new novel,

print Summer 2019

Suspicious Minds

With The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins is credited with writing the first detective novel—a genre that runs on secrets and the uncovering of them. Initially serialized in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round and released to enormous success, The Moonstone has it all: stolen jewelry, purloined letters, dirty linen, death by quicksand. Women have fainting ﬁts as the virtues of opium are lauded. Suspicious details and red herrings abound. The stuff of domestic trifles is blown up and meticulously inspected—often literally under the lens of a magnifying glass. Dorothy L. Sayers called