The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the nineteenth- century English novels that Martin Amis’s college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading; then, in the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously, like one of Jean Tinguely’s self-wrecking sculptures—or like civilization itself in the twenty-first century.
Bringing together Marx and Freud in a united theoretical front was an urgent task for radicals throughout much of the twentieth century, with benefits that would flow to historical materialism and psychoanalysis alike. The stakes were already clear in Wilhelm Reich’s ill-fated efforts of the 1920s and ’30s: The central but under-developed notion of class consciousness (about which Marx himself had written just a few suggestive pages) might be put on better footing by annexing a theory of the mind that was, after all, materialist in its basic assumptions. And revolutionary expropriation would be good for psychoanalysis itself—it would rescue
Few things in this world have the power to make me clean my desk. One of them, it turns out, is Anne Carson’s new book-in-a-box, Nox. Before I even opened it, I felt an irresistible urge to spend twenty minutes purging my worktable of notes, napkins, magazines, forks, check stubs, unpaid bills, and fingernail clippings. The urge struck me, I think, for a couple of reasons. For one, Nox is unwieldy.
In his new book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind. He begins with a feeling shared by many who have spent the last decade online. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” Carr tells us. “I feel it most strongly when I’m reading.” He relates how he gets fidgety with a long text. Like others, he suspects that the Internet has destroyed his ability to read deeply. “My brain,” he writes, “wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it.”
From the boozy, crusading priest in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, to Malcolm “Mike” Johnson, the New York Sun’s journalist-hero, to death by Murder Inc.’s ice pick, the New York City waterfront’s native criminality has been both root and branch of many enduring urban tropes. These ideas have by now been civilized, obscuring the fact that not long ago a reporter could write that the waterfront “produces more murders per square foot than does any other section of the country.”
For Americans of my generation—the wrong side of thirty, but too young to remember the golden age of student protest—the tales of youth offered by Christopher Hitchens in his new memoir may provoke somewhat more envy than we care to admit. A Trotskyite protester in Hitchens’s salad days could enjoy the thrilling illusion that letter-writing campaigns and streetside invective might one day succeed in buckling the world order and building an epoch of peace on its ruins.
The striking cover image of Shane Jones’s first novel, Light Boxes, is both playful and foreboding, an apt rendering of the novel’s offbeat charm. It reads like a twisted fairy tale. The story follows Thaddeus Lowe, who lives with his wife, Selah, and daughter, Bianca, in an unknown era, in an unnamed town where it is always February, presided over by a godlike character—also named February—who is responsible for the soul-crushing cold and darkness. He’s powerful and mysterious and orders “the end of all things that could fly,” a particularly harsh measure for townspeople who escape the gloom by flying
Frederick Reiken’s complicated and absorbing third novel, Day for Night, opens as though it were a far more conventional book: On a trip to Florida in 1984, Beverly Rabinowitz, her boyfriend and his son go on a manatee-watching expedition; Tim Birdsey, their young guide, makes an unexpectedly deep connection with Beverly, and he brings her back to the river at night.
FICTION Lee Rourke’s first novel, THE CANAL (Melville House, June), features an unnamed, bored first-person protagonist, but the book doesn’t have the quirky and solipsistic observations that solitude spawns and that many debut novelists cram onto the page. For lack of anything better to do, the narrator quits his job and sits each day by a London canal. A woman stranger soon joins him and relates a story that pierces his apathy: “I was uncomfortable with what she was saying . . . yet she excited me that moment more than I ever thought possible.” Michelle Hoover’s THE QUICKENING (Other
There are more Christians in the United States than in any other country in world history, but much of Christianity makes us queasy. Many of our megachurch preachers choke on the word sin, and when politicians talk of “evildoers” they seem to be speaking a dead language. It’s easy to forget, in this sunny state of theological affairs, that for most Anglo-American believers the concept of evil was once as close at hand as a taxicab on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly Circus. We hailed it not only to navigate the twists and turns of war and crime but also to
Two broadsides against American intellectuals after 9/11 hit harder than most. The first came from Paul Berman, who, in Terror and Liberalism (2003), chastised his fellow liberals for turning a blind eye to the fascist roots of “Muslim totalitarianism.” The second came from Tony Judt, who denounced intellectuals like Berman for being George Bush’s “useful idiots” and rationalizing the “War on Terror.” Judt and Berman shared the same social-democratic background but were haunted by different demons of the twentieth century. Where Judt saw the shadows of McCarthyism in the Bush years, Berman was relieved the president did not make the
I’ve been thinking about constricted spaces lately, those crammed, no-exit corners that make us feel diminished in some way, wishing to expand, to break free. In New York, you fit yourself into these spaces daily. They have a way of dictating the very procedure of your mind: the segments, the modules, the shortcuts you think in. Adjustments are made. Your thoughts become the size of the bus seat you occupy—concentrated, balled up. In the subway we press together like guests at a doomed cocktail party, alienated from one another and acutely attuned. We grow increasingly introverted as more riders pour
Christopher Lasch was arguably the last, and almost certainly the best, practitioner of a vanished tradition in American letters—an influential social critic who’d been recruited as an informal adviser to presidents; a university pedagogue whose work was addressed to a general, politically engaged readership; and, most of all, a restless intellect, in the best senses of both words, unafraid to call out stultifying orthodoxies or to scandalize their adherents. It speaks volumes about his vocation and the desiccated American intellectual scene that he spent the last years of his life “afflicted with a sense of ideological homelessness,” as Eric Miller
In the 1960s, John Waters was an admirer of a lesbian stripper in Baltimore named Lady Zorro. “She just came out nude and snarled at her fans, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ To this day,” Waters writes in his splendid new book, “Zorro is my inspiration.”
Rilke has had plenty of remarkable translators, most famously, Stephen Mitchell. All have produced fine versions of Rilke’s unrelentingly intense and sculptural poems, but only Edward Snow has tuned his ear to most or all of Rilke’s body of work.
We should give thanks for Melanie Phillips, who writes for the right in a column for the Daily Mail here in the UK, and now has a book out in the US with Encounter Books (other new titles: How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security, How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting the US Economy, The Bad Science and Bad Policy of Obama’s Global Warming Agenda – which would make Phillips’s The World Turned Upside Down a really snappy title if it hadn’t already been taken by the Diggers, Christopher Hill and Chumbawamba).
Kenzaburo Oe’s novel The Changeling (translated by Deborah Bolivar Boehm) begins in a tried-and-true fashion: with a dead body and a suitcase of posthumous correspondence that may contain the secrets behind the tragedy. Internationally esteemed film director Goro Hanawa has leapt to his death from his Tokyo apartment window.
“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” And yet most times one does not. I was myself not moving—though the desire was there—when I met this sentence, the first in D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. In my case, moving meant reviewing The Thief of Time, not moving meant reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a book about the “serious business of putting off writing my study of [D.H. Lawrence].” And so it began, putting off writing by reading about putting off writing, all with a familiar irritation and indignation.
With the title of his new survey, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, David B. Ruderman plunges into one of the central debates in the writing of Jewish history. For the most of the last 2,000 years, Jews lived as a small minority among much larger and more powerful civilizations.
In an age when the US Senate was plunged into near paralysis over an anemic simulacrum of health-care reform, it seems unthinkable that Congress could have ever rushed headlong into the folly of amending the Constitution to outlaw drinking. But as Daniel Okrent reminds us in Last Call, his richly detailed reconstruction of Prohibition’s thirteen-year reign, what seems in retrospect like a foolishly giddy union of Protestant moralism and the federal state was actually the culmination of generations’ worth of reformist zeal.
