
Gods and Monsters
LIKE MUCH OF THE READING WORLD, I rejoiced when Marlon James published his third novel in 2014. A Brief History of Seven Killings told, in part, the story of the events surrounding the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976. Of course, if you’ve read the novel you know that a one-line summary of the book is impossible. (And if you haven’t read it yet, well, unfuck that in 2019.) Still, there’s a natural human instinct to narrow the world, to make it intelligible by streamlining the design. Thus my one-line summary. It doesn’t work, though, not for life and not for art. Not for the good stuff,