Autumn means changing leaves, apple-based baked goods, decorative gourds, pumpkin spice lattes—and an avalanche of literary award longlists. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the must-read National Book Award nominees you’re now realizing you didn’t read, why not base your TBR pile off of your favorite fall food? If nothing else, it’s an excellent excuse to go out and restock your pantry, so that you’ll have reading snacks on hand.
You can’t get more American than apple pie, so they say—which means that a deconstructed version is the perfect pairing for Alam’s provocative novel about a crumbling vision of the American Dream. A white Brooklynite couple plans a summer getaway to Long Island; however, their idyllic plans are shattered when an older Black couple shows up, claiming to be the owners of the house. They have evacuated New York City due to a sudden blackout. Amidst global catastrophe, the tensions between the two different families escalate and the very idea of safety itself is questioned.
Are you one of those that reject the stereotypical pumpkin pie/apple pie binary, opting for dark horse candidate pecan as your fall pie of choice? If so, try Yu’s ambitious novel about Willis Wu, a self-identified “Generic Asian Man” who acts in bit roles for a never-ending cop show—the most Willis can hope for is to achieve the status of “Kung Fu Guy.” Structured as a screenplay itself, Interior Chinatown is a deft satire of Hollywood stereotypes. Like a pecan pie’s darkly spiced, sweet filling, Yu’s dark humor pervades the narrative, as does his lingering, poignant questions about representation and racism. Plus, rumor is that Chinese five spice powder makes for a killer secret ingredient in a good pecan pie.
Pumpkin spice lattes have become synonymous with “basic” whiteness. So why tie them to this bestselling novel by a Black author about family and racial identity? Hear me out: “pumpkin spice” has taken on a set of connotations that are wholly divorced from actual pumpkins or even pumpkin pie; one could argue that pumpkin spice is a construct (check out this image for a better explanation). Bennett’s novel helps illustrate how race, too, is a social construct. The Vanishing Half is centered on two identical twins, whose lives take very different paths—one chooses to pass as white, the other does not. Through the twins’ family saga that spans multiple generations, Bennett explores the American question of “passing,” while also probing at the tension between individual choice and societal responsibility. And all constructs and symbolism aside—there’s no denying that both pumpkin spice lattes and Bennett’s prose are addictively good.
(Bobbing for) raw apples: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Nothing tastes as memorable or as uncomfortable as an apple that you’ve managed to finally catch, after many minutes of dunking your head into dirty, cold water. Stuart’s much-acclaimed debut (it is also a Booker Prize finalist) is just as unforgettable—and equally unsettling. Set in an economically destitute Glasgow in 1981, Shuggie Bain centers on a family struggling with alcoholism and poverty. Shuggie, a lonely but sweet boy, is the only child that will not abandon his alcoholic mother, Agnes. Warning: Like bobbing for apples, Shuggie’s heartbreaking story about the consequences of addiction and the tenuousness of familial love may leave your face wet.
As Kirkus Reviews notes, this short story collection is “mouthwatering and matter-of-factly haunted.” What better book to read as you traipse through (potentially) haunted orchards, munching on an apple cider donut? If I Had Two Wings explores life in Tims Creek, a fictional small town in North Carolina, through ten stories. Kenan, a beloved author who passed away this August, masterfully blends the line between the mundane and the unearthly; his collection includes both river goddesses and small town diners, ghosts and retired plumbers. Kenan’s collection so masterfully explores the idea of appetite—as sexual desire, as hunger, as reveling in a feast—that having a delicious snack on hand is a must.
If you’re into the vibes of chestnuts roasting over an open fire, seeing the charred skins crackle open, try Majumdar’s equally-heated debut novel about power and corruption in modern-day India. A Burning begins with a terrorist attack that burns many to death; Jivan, an innocent observer, is thrown into jail when she posts a careless comment about the attack on Facebook. Jivan’s fate gets wrapped up with two other city residents: PT Sir, a PE teacher, and Lovely, a trans woman and aspiring actress. As all three characters aspire to achieve their version of power, they run into questions about morality and justice. Majumdar crafts a thrilling narrative that moves at a breakneck pace and plays with high stakes—one moment later, someone may end up destroyed, like a chestnut left too long in the flame.
Cranberry sauce conjures up memories of Thanksgiving dinner—and the accompanying family drama—like no other food except turkey. If you’re looking for a book that’s equally vivid, flavorful, and prone to messy drips, try Beha’s family saga. A young journalist, Sam, becomes acquainted with the Doyles, an affluent family in New York City. Frank, the patriarch, is a baseball writer who is in hot water for making racist remarks. Over the course of one baseball season in 2009, Sam witnesses the disintegration of the Doyle family’s established empire. Like a sauce that has been simmering on the stove for hours, Beha’s narrative smushes a variety of themes and characters into a cohesive, sweeping portrait of one family and New York City.
It is a well-known fact that you can put a hot toddy in a mug, and no one will ever be the wiser. Philyaw’s debut collection of short stories explore the lives of churchgoing Black women that are similarly secretive and gently spicy. In one story, a teen girl has a crush on the preacher’s wife; in another, a woman refuses to go to church because she will no longer wear a girdle. Philyaw’s characters explore, in various ways, what it’s like to publicly follow the rules of the church whilebreaking them in private, discovering new truths about themselves. Warm, intimate, and filled with verve, this short story collection will give you a wholesome buzz with or without the booze.
If this is your favorite fall food, I am genuinely confused—but there is a perfect book pairing for you. Millet’s tale starts at a lakeside summer resort (think: sticky-sweet caramel exterior), where a group of families are vacationing. However, things take more of a turn towards Lord of the Flies when a storm hits, leaving the adults apathetic and the kids to fend for themselves (cue: the mealy, bland apple interior). As author Jenny Offill notes, Millet offers a “cozy catastrophe” with a climate change twist; her narrative is both apocalyptic and allegorical, filled with pressing questions about responsibility, environment, and civilization. As a kid, I remember finding caramel apples to be consistently disappointing—but that disappointment does not hold a candle to the crisis-ridden, ecologically-devastated world that is fast becoming the legacy for kids today.
Arguably one of the best snacks for a fall road trip, pumpkin bread is a twist on the usual pumpkin pie. With a mix of spiced humor, reinterpretation of “family,” and dense, interlocking narratives, The Great Offshore Ground may be the book for pumpkin bread fans. Set in the Pacific Northwest, the novel centers on two sisters, Cheyenne and Livy, and their adopted brother Essex. At their father’s remarriage, Cheyenne and Livy reconnect with one of their biological mothers, Kirsten—who raised them, but only gave birth to one of the girls (and refuses to specify which). This triggers a road trip to find their other birth mother, who lives across the country in Boston; meanwhile, Essex enlists in the Marines for lack of anything better to do. Veselka draws a sharp family portrait of contemporary American poverty, one that’s both rich and thought-provoking.
On March 23, 2020, in the midst of a rapidly escalating pandemic, Seattle officials announced the sudden closure of one of the city’s most highly trafficked bridges. In an emergency virtual press conference, the Mayor pronounced the West Seattle High-Rise Bridge cracked, deteriorated, structurally unsound—a road to certain catastrophe. Closure was imminent, and possibly permanent. They gave residents three hours’ notice.
This bridge was the “high road” between West Seattle and Interstate 5, the fastest route between the city’s largest neighborhood and the world beyond. Over 100,000 cars and 25,000 transit passengers crossed it daily. Commuters, cargo, school and metro buses sped high above the shipyards—a land of grain silos and shipping containers, a history of industry at the nation’s northwestern edge, where the shimmering Duwamish Waterway empties into Elliott Bay and flows to the Pacific. Crossing the bridge on a clear day, Mount Rainier rises like a pale god on the southern horizon, foregrounded by a fleet of orange steel cranes.
We took for granted that the bridge would suspend us, that the center would hold.
The moment Seattleites learned of the closure, we made a mental calculation about the last time we’d crossed it, and how soon we’d need to make the trip to West Seattle again. We took for granted that the bridge would suspend us, that the center would hold. And why not? Why not trust the DOT and your own two eyes? On the surface, the bridge looked like a good bridge. But now, we think of all the times we sailed across mindlessly, never questioning the road beneath our tires, not knowing or even seeing the structure that upheld us.
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day…
So begins Thornton Wilder’s 1927 Pulitzer Prize-winning novella, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a slim moral fable that takes as its central question nothing short of the whole meaning of life. The story, echoed above, is set against a backdrop of colonialism and the Spanish Inquisition; its characters are well acquainted with disaster. Yet, “[t]he moment a Peruvian heard of the accident, he signed himself and made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed it.” People “had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf,” and “there was a great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima.”
There’s no formula for moving a person to care. But Wilder, a dramatist at heart, and the only American writer to win Pulitzers for both fiction and playwriting (twice, for “Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth”), offers two reasons why this particular breach held sway over the national conscience.
One is the act of witness. A Franciscan missionary named Brother Juniper “happened to be in Peru converting the Indians” when he saw the bridge snap. Brother Juniper undertakes to learn every detail about the fallen, to document his findings in a book that will prove a divine intention behind the accident, and God’s reason for choosing those five—three adults, two children—whose stories occupy the bulk of the novel.
But Wilder also points to the bridge itself, a man-made construction we imbue with near-invincible properties. It’s a kind of suspension of disbelief, a psychic control we surrender in order to get through our days, a dream of stability we occasionally startle from. “The bridge,” he writes, “seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.”
Before barricading the bridge, Seattle recruited international “structural experts” to monitor the damage. Interior cracks accelerated two feet in two weeks, an aging process that typically takes years. The Department of Transportation acknowledged mistakes; the media detailed them. How the DOT had defied logic to add a seventh lane in 2013. How band-aids to the problem—increased inspections, fastened gauges, epoxy—failed to stick.
The metaphor is obvious, but it was the spring of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and closer to home, Manuel Ellis—he, too, could not breathe. It was the spring of Christopher Cooper attempting to birdwatch in Central Park, an otherwise peaceful pastime. It was the spring and then the summer of warlike death tolls, ugly projections, grim facts of Black lives lost at a rate of three to one, a pandemic statistic that mirrored the disproportionate rate of Black death by lethal force at the hands of law enforcement. Protesters and counter-protesters clashed on the Brooklyn Bridge. Chicago drew its bridges as a medieval castle might, “the city of big shoulders” raising its arms. Portland’s historic Burnside Bridge was paved with bodies, thousands of them, on their backs for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. It was the summer of George Floyd.
Protesters and counter-protesters clashed on the Brooklyn Bridge. Chicago drew its bridges as a medieval castle might.
Those 8 minutes and 46 seconds were like a reverse moon landing. Months, years, decades led to one fateful film clip; Americans at home, paying attention because the cameras were on and we could not look away, could not make the old excuses, no time, gotta run, not today. The world tuned in with us to witness the man in uniform take the fateful step, an act at once inconceivable and inevitable, fundamental and antithetical to our species—and our nation, as the architects of the Constitution designed us. If the decimation of Native peoples is America’s original sin, a knee on the neck of Black man—more weight than any load-bearing back was built for—is our core wound. The wound cracked open.
Perhaps it always goes back to the fathers, the founding.
In recounting the origin story of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder said, “the central idea of the work […] stems from friendly arguments with my father, a strict Calvinist.”
Wilder did not share his father’s faith, or absolutism. (In one of Wilder’s journal entries, he defines an American as “a man who has outgrown his father,” according to Penelope Niven’s biography Thornton Wilder: A Life.) In contrast, The Bridge is riddled with “perhapses.” It boasts no heroes. And much to Brother Juniper’s dismay, the lives lost to the bridge don’t add up to easy answers, not a saint among them: the Marquesa de Montemayor, a wealthy drunk who becomes famous for sentimental letters penned to her estranged daughter; Pepita, an orphan and the Marquesa’s maid; Esteban, a reticent scribe; and Uncle Pio, trainer of Lima’s most famous actress, who crosses the bridge with the actress’s son in his charge.
The book offers no obvious villain, either—except, perhaps, for the Inquisition itself, a headless horseman stampeding in the background, cowing citizens through a campaign of terror fueled by rumor, suspicion, and dehumanization, both targeted and free-wheeling. Even Brother Juniper isn’t immune; the monk spends his days calculating points of good and evil, only to die quite pointlessly, burning at the stake at the hands of that monstrous outgrowth of Catholicism, his own religious parentage.
We prefer the safe ground of this side or that, good or evil, with us or against us, lock her up or set her free.
This liminal space between black-and-white binaries is not a comfortable place for humans, or readers, to be. We prefer the safe ground of this side or that, good or evil, with us or against us, lock her up or set her free. Perhaps it’s surprising, then, that Wilder’s novel sold out immediately, went through seventeen printings in its first year, became an American classic and required reading. Why this book?
In a letter to a former student, Wilder wrote, “People who are full of faith claim that the book is a vindication of this optimism; disillusioned people claim that it is a ‘barely concealed anatomy of despair.’” In other words: literary confirmation bias. In a story of ambiguity, we see what we want to see.
To the many readers who wrote demanding Wilder choose a side, the author invoked Chekov’s line that “the business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.”
The Bridge, Wilder said, was also inspired by a fair question, one that Jesus poses in the Gospel of Luke, which seems as relevant to the events of 2020 as any: “Or those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?”
It must be said: it was not a beautiful bridge. This was no Golden Gate, no Brooklyn, no London Bridge we’ll sing about. It was not vying for design awards, trading in art or poetics, padlocked hearts and marriage proposals. We’re talking seven lanes and 590 feet of pre-stressed concrete, cement grey and steel, buttressed by concrete box girders. Bridges are inherently vulnerable, at-risk, defying gravity with a sleight of engineering hand. But the West Seattle bridge cried bull. It was a stocky-legged freeway, functional until it was dysfunctional.
We weren’t in the room, but let’s imagine the bridge was built by good engineers with good intentions. Let’s give them that 21st-century benefit of the doubt, assume they were “doing the best they could with the information they had at the time.” Maybe someone phoned it in one day. Maybe they had a colicky newborn, or a dying parent, or the flu. Maybe a bit of ego got in the way, or the pressure of a deadline. We are human. We break down, crack up. Fault lines run through us, run from us, baked into the earth beneath our feet and all our creations.
At any rate, the bridge was fundamentally, categorically unsafe, in a way citizens would never see. The trouble ran below the surface.
The bridge was fundamentally, categorically unsafe, in a way citizens would never see. The trouble ran below the surface.
If the West Seattle Bridge were Wilder’s Marquesa de Montemayor—a woman “who had never brought courage to either life or love”—she might resort to rhetorical flourishes and deflections: sing London Bridge is falling down, or cry, “What about the dams? Nobody’s even talking about the dams!” Then she would pen a gushing, desperate letter: “Cover me in Band-Aids. Patch me over with denial. I was trying. It was the Nisqually Earthquake’s fault, in 2001, remember? Please love me.”
The Marquesa’s story highlights the human tendency toward a shame response in the face of rejection or perceived judgment. In a desire to elicit love from her daughter, the Marquesa resorts to self-pity, blame, and avoidance, behavior which achieves the opposite result. Finally, just before her fateful trip across the bridge, a declaration of bravery by her young maid shocks the woman awake to her own dishonesty. She could not rewrite letters past, “but she could write some new ones, free and generous.” She cleared the table, and “wrote what she called her first letter, her first stumbling misspelled letter in courage.” This letter becomes famous throughout Peru and beyond, a modern Second Corinthians. “No one else has regarded it as stumbling.”
Or take Esteban, the silent scribe, who attempts suicide after his twin brother dies, just before he’s meant to leave on a voyage with Captain Alvarez—a man who is no stranger to loss, and overhears Esteban in his room.
The Captain stood on the stairs, trembling: “Perhaps it’s best,” he said to himself. “Perhaps I should leave him alone. Perhaps it’s the only thing possible for him.” Then on hearing another sound he flung himself against the door, fell into the room and caught the boy. “Go away,” cried Esteban. “Let me be. Don’t come in now.”
Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. “I am alone, alone, alone,” he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, “We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes.”
Love, sometimes, sounds like apology. Stumbling, sometimes, looks like courage. Broad shoulders, sometimes, tremble and bow before the banal.
Maybe the uncertain present has me turning to the past, to Wilder, to a story built on “perhaps.” Maybe the hope I feel is contextual: a higher hope amid the public rallying cry for Walls! Walls! Walls! Is it passé, in 2020, to talk bridges instead?
Now, the conversation turns to a way forward. Uphold and repair the current structure, or dismantle and rebuild with the information we have now. Emphasis on the “R” words. Repair, Rebuild. Without the bridge, we cannot get across, cannot reach the places we want to go.
We have a history of this in West Seattle. Four failed former structures—three variations on a swinging gate bridge, in 1900, 1910, and 1918—followed by a low-level bascule bridge that eventually caused one of the city’s worst bottlenecks. By mid-century, the West Seattle Bridge was mired in a 20-year replacement saga so replete with political corruption that it landed the Head of the Washington House Transportation Committee (HTC) and his conspirators in prison. The project was dead until an 81-year-old sea captain smashed his cargo ship into the bridge, earning the city federal replacement funds. (In a final twist, the captain retired in disgrace, and fearing bankruptcy, transferred his assets to his much younger wife, who blew through the cash, blew his head off with a shotgun, chopped up his body with a butcher knife and buried him in the backyard. She joined the head of the HTC in prison.)
It took a century’s drama and a cool $150 million to build this bridge. Initial SDOT estimates put the cost of rebuild between $50 and $150 million. They projected a timeline of one year. In a city notorious for protracted permitting and deliberation—the “Seattle process,” described in a 1983 Seattle Weekly editorial as “seeking consensus through exhaustion”—that date rang like a punchline. The media reported two years, then four, then six.
In the meantime, nearly 80,000 residents are marooned, stuck at home, stuck in traffic, bottlenecked along a snaking two-lane highway known as “the low road.” That’s not including residents of Vashon Island or the Kitsap Peninsula who ferry through West Seattle. Without the bridge, West Seattle is itself a kind of island. One woman I spoke with, whose daily two-hour round-trip commute has more than doubled, was on the verge of tears, unsure how she could keep her job and maintain her family.
Others, perhaps, have greeted the news of the bridge closure with indifference, even glee. Politicians eager to dethrone the mayor. City councilmembers: same. Developers, contractors chomping at the bid. A group of West Seattleites eager to “free West Seattle” from the city. Loners loathe to venture beyond the neighborhood. The grumblers who grumble, “Why should MY tax dollars pay for it? What about the pothole in MY road? If West Seattleites weren’t so busy complaining, they’d be halfway to work by now.”
This is America; we have our share of conspiracy theorists. Those who believe the city was in on it, the mayor was in on it, the conservatives or the liberals were in on it. Some saw the bridge’s near-collapse as an act of God. Some saw it as an act of Russia. What about the fact that the bridge was built in 1984? Coincidence?
Some saw the bridge’s near-collapse as an act of God. Some saw it as an act of Russia.
You could trace a line from these voices to the London Bridge of antiquity, where a prevailing conspiracy theory held that the bridge would fall unless a child sacrifice was captured and cemented in the foundation. It sounds preposterous today, but history lives like song inside us. “Lock her up” is catching because it’s an echo—take the keys and lock her up—so familiar we forget we committed that verse to memory before we left the nursery.
You could trace a line from Manuel Ellis to Chief Seattle, from Seattle’s racist redlining to Ordinance No. 5, which passed easily among white settlers, and called for the removal of all Indians. They were already removed onto reservations, but the law would keep them from coming back for work. The view from the West Seattle Bridge could serve as a retrospect. The Duwamish River was once home to the Duwamish First Nations tribe, led by Chief Seattle, for whom our progressive city is named. Today, the Duwamish Longhouse sits amid shipping containers. Tribal lands run beneath Amazon’s headquarters. In 2001, the glimmering Duwamish River, a repository for 150 years of toxic industrial waste, was declared a Superfund site. Cleanup is like the democratic process: slow, messy, and if you believe in it, worth every effort.
For years, scientists have predicted impending doom for Seattle in the form of the really big one, a tectonic clash that would rattle our homes and infrastructures, turn whole swaths of apparent solid ground to liquid beneath us. I almost never think of this unless I see a headline or pass tsunami warning signs at the beach—human stick figures scrambling for higher ground, the Sound a roaring monster at their heels—or until I am inching in traffic across a bridge. Suddenly, I’m reminded of my precarious place on the planet. Suddenly, I wonder if the Department of Transportation is paying attention, if the center can hold us all. I imagine myself a victim, like one of Thornton Wilder’s random chosen, who according to a Brother Juniper looked like “gesticulating ants” flung into the rift.
Some days, it feels as if the Big One is upon us. Some days, it feels as if we are peering over some dark edge, gesticulating ants flung about by fate and folly as we march the earth together for the briefest while: a colony. In the canyon of my mind, I hear the echo of my public schoolteachers across decades and miles. “Mira, mira—” says my Spanish teacher, a former priest who taught me about the Inquisition. Look, pay attention. “If we’re not careful, history repeats.”
Like a chorus. Like a bridge.
In the midst of a public health crisis, a reckoning on race in America, and partisanship that threatens to snap us in two, the West Seattle bridge fractures. A fateful reminder or a meaningless coincidence that we were founded upon lofty ideals but inherently flawed designs. The Duwamish Waterway. The Dred Scott decision. Selma: a peaceful march met with state-sanctioned violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. These failings are our past and future, no matter how sound they seem on the surface, or in name, no matter how wishful our thinking or willful our forgetting. Like the Marquesa, we cannot revoke those pages from our history. But she could write some new ones, free and generous…
These failings are our past and future, no matter how sound they seem on the surface, no matter how wishful our thinking or willful our forgetting.
At the time of this writing, a petition is underway to change the name of the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the John Lewis, after the U.S. representative and Civil Rights leader who led the march across it. The current structure is named for a U.S. Senator, a general of the Confederate Army and a “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan.
In Seattle, the Mayor has convened a task force, and for the second time in the bridge’s forty-year history, issued a request for federal funds. The West Seattle Chamber of Commerce has started its own committee. At least one new community coalition has formed, its name full of optimism: West Seattle Bridge Now.
Story is, as the writer Brian McDonald calls it, “survival information.” Life or death. If we are to look to literature for insight, then—in this case, a classic novel about a bridge collapse—we might turn to The End, to Wilder’s famous final lines: “[S]oon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough….”
The tense—future perfect—was no accident on the author’s part. But as the story of The Bridge makes excruciatingly clear, love alone will not cure our suffering. We get closer through the operative “be,” love as transitive verb, in direct relationship to others, activated and made known through courage, no act too small. Call it connection. Call it common humanity, or beloved community, this invisible structure we spend our lives working and mending on our way to a more perfect union. We know this: how love degenerates along the low road of shame, greed and fear. We know this: the restorative power of apology, humility, and grace. We forget this: we have always known the way across.
It’s early 2016 and the unnamed narrator of Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Red Pill, feels a dread of something coming that he can’t quite explain or convince others to take seriously. Perhaps his fear is tied to the American election, but it is also much bigger than that.
Without reading the fine print, he accepts a three month residency at the Deuter Center in Wannsee, near Berlin—a town with grim resonances of Nazi history. There, he encounters an eerie emphasis on transparency, public workspaces, and surveillance. He befriends a cleaning woman who offers a detailed account of how she was set up by the Stasi and wonders if his own family might someday face the fate of the Syrian refugees wandering the streets. Retreating to his room, the narrator grows obsessed with streaming an exceptionally brutal American police drama called Blue Lives. When he encounters the showrunner at a party, he becomes convinced this man has enormous power to influence the culture with his alt-right worldview, kicking off a cat-and-mouse game between the two that leads them across Paris and Scotland. Is he losing his mind or can he do something to stop the ideologies of the far right from going mainstream?
In the first of my two-part interview with Kunzru, we talked about whether 2020 fulfills his narrator’s disastrous fears, how white supremacist ideologies are no longer necessarily about race, and dangerous failures of political imagination.
Preety Sidhu: Throughout this book, which is set entirely in 2016, your narrator dreads some coming disaster, a surprise Black Swan event that will have a major effect on the world, that is tied to but much bigger than the results of the American election that year. Did you complete the manuscript before the pandemic hit? Can you speak more to the relationship between what your narrator is dreading and the events we are experiencing in 2020?
Hari Kunzru: Yes, it was complete before the pandemic hit. It’s strange. When the pandemic started and I just started to realize that this book was going to arrive in the middle of this situation, I began to wonder whether it would feel relevant. But the pandemic aside, the larger feelings of anxiety, and the idea that certain kinds of social and political givens are not so certain as they may have felt a few years ago, I think that’s only intensified. As you say, it is bigger than the election. This isn’t a Trump Apocalypse book. It’s about much larger things to do with how we feel about things like human dignity and how we feel about value, more generally. You know, even the narrator’s anxiety is very—his problem is that he can’t really give it a name. That’s the first problem, is that he hasn’t got to, oh well, this is wrong with my life and so I can go about solving it. He has a kind of general fear of disaster.
At certain points I have found myself wondering how far things will slide and how quickly they will slide. I was thinking a lot when I was writing, which was 2015–2016, the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. I was in Berlin and we talked about the refugee situation there. Realizing that there are other people who had their lives and their houses and their children and their hopes for the future, and found themselves absolutely destitute, in rubber boats. There’s a complacency that people in rich safe places have had. But the cold breath of disaster is beginning to play on the backs of the necks of a lot of people in America or in Western Europe, because we’re not sure that things will stay how they used to. You used the phrase Black Swan event, and that’s a good way of thinking about it.
PS: Your narrator is biracial, half Indian and half English. Anton, who is after all a white supremacist, does not come for him because he’s not white, but rather attacks the foundation of his liberal beliefs, his assumption that human beings deserve human rights, that cosmopolitanism is good, and so on. To what extent is Anton’s brand of white supremacy more focused on ideology rather than personal identity?
HK: That’s a very interesting question. There are plenty of straight-out racists in the mix, that’s very true. But it would be a very easy story to tell if our poor Brown narrator—if the nasty white supremacists are nasty to him for the thing he can’t change, the color of his skin. But especially on the intellectual end of this constellation of broadly white supremacist thinking that’s there on the right—which has really had a renaissance in the last few years, they have become much more sophisticated and powerful—for the more sophisticated of them, it isn’t based on race. They’ve got plenty of atavistic feelings about not wanting to be around Black and Brown people, but they do have this ideological hatred of cosmopolitanism and globalism, which some of them see as a tool of an elite, perhaps even a Jewish, cabal to impose an economic and social system which benefits them at the expense of a white indigenous population of wherever we’re talking about.
Also there’s an interest in “intelligence,” which is usually coded racially and is a way of justifying various measures intended to suppress Black people specifically. But the ones who are interested in intelligence are forced to admit things like that Ashkenazi Jews and South and East Asians score very well on the tests that they believe show your intrinsic worth. So there’s an end of this far right culture which is not very racially obsessed. It’s a mistake of mainstream liberals to assume that if you show that race is a fiction—here’s my book demonstrating that biological race is not a real thing—that’s going to get to the heart of it. It is much more complex and insidious than that.
I don’t think Anton is a—he’s clearly Islamophobic. The milieu they’re in, in Germany at that moment, the anxiety is all around new Muslim immigrants and there’s all this stuff about the gates of Vienna and the Ottomans coming to the very door of Europe and being pushed back. Is this going to happen again in this insidious way, through migration? You’re probably familiar with the idea of “the Great Replacement,” that’s French theory that comes from this old racist git called Renaud Camus, the idea that this migration is going to replace indigenous French people with an alien Brown and Black race. But yeah, it’s not primarily race-based. I think that’s quite hard for a lot of people to grasp. It’s often questions around whether they think democracy is a useful thing. In the book I get very interested in what they believe about democracy and what democracy actually represents. Is democracy the mass rule of the stupid people over the few intelligent people? That would be very much the frame that these rightists have.
PS: As I was reading the kebab scene, I couldn’t remember whether I had read the narrator’s racial identity earlier in the book. I do feel that Anton might have treated a white liberal this way.
You should be able to write characters who have particular racial identities without a book having to be about those racial identities.
HK: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting that Anton doesn’t immediately say, well you look like these Turkish people that we’re in the restaurant with, so therefore you must be the same. To me, it’s a point of principle, as a South Asian or as anybody, you should be able to write characters who have particular racial identities without a book having to be about those racial identities. I wanted this character to be a visibly brown-skinned man going through this, but his range of cultural interests are very European. He rarely mentions anybody who’s not from this Western canon that he’s interested in. The only point where it becomes significant, there’s a little tiny scene at a bus stop where he sees the refugee dad and the little girl. He and the dad make eye contact in—I call it something like the Freemasonry of Brown men who meet in white spaces. So there is that kind of moment which I’m sure you know very well, you scan the room and you’re like catching their eye. Whether you actually have anything else in common, you notice.
The director vaguely asks him what he thinks he can bring to the study of German poetry, but I wanted that to be not the axis around which the book turns. Because the worlds I live in, I could have an evening talking about Goethe or whatever and my South Asian identity would not come up. I’m trying to open up a space for everybody to not have to constantly bang on about identity and diversity. When I was starting out as a writer in the 90s in Britain, we had this new wave of visibility of the second generation, children of immigrants, and we were doing all these cultural things. But every time I spoke to anybody, it would be like, can you talk about identity? How does your work deal with identity? And I’d eventually be like, please. Yeah.
My experience of being in Germany in the first half of 2016, when there were all these new immigrants around, was that very frequently I was mistaken for a refugee. Germans would treat me in various ways, ranging from a very exaggerated hospitality to demonstrate that they were friendly and welcoming to a couple of times when people wouldn’t serve me in shops. That’s another flickering of identity which I gave to this character. He’s in the same position I was in, a prestigious fellowship at an institution, and not somebody who’s living in a communal accommodation and trying to make his way in this new country. It’s another dimension of that question.
PS: While we see several ordinary 2016 Democratic voters towards the end of the book, we never encounter ordinary Republican voters. Can you speak to your decision to make the danger internal to the narrator and his opposition embodied in only one other man, rather than millions of voters?
HK: At one point he talks about there being two tracks to his life. There’s the normie track which has to do with electoral politics and his wife fundraising for Clinton. And he has the second track, which he considers this almost unsayable secret life, where he’s looking at the Internet and the way he sees the world going and imagining some terror coming down towards him. At the very end, he has a sense of these two tracks touching and somehow through him the secret apocalyptic worldview has affected the real.
So my concern wasn’t really with the logic by which American voters would vote Republican or Democrat. It’s supposed to be a critique of a certain complacent elite liberal mindset, which has been very largely responsible for getting us to the mess that we find ourselves in, which is imagining that the horizons of the world go no farther than your very bland imagination of it.
If Trump wins this election, I straightforwardly believe it will be the end of America as a democratic state. And I don’t like being proved right, there’s no fun in that at all.
The process which gave us Hillary Clinton as a candidate seemed almost willfully blind to what was actually going on. And again, the ticket we have this time is not a ticket that really addresses any deep issues. Maybe tactically it’s enough to get the current occupant out of the White House. I’m shocked by the lack of political imagination that some people have. I was very scared in 2015. The book is an outgrowing of that, a big bucket for me to put all that anxiety and fear in. And yet, we’ve had mainstream commentators saying well he’ll govern as the Republican. No, don’t be silly. The pandemic came along, it was alarmist to mention 200,000 people will die in it. Now we’ve seen the space of possibility open up and open up and open up.
I hope that many people now understand that there is no magic guarantee that American political and cultural life will carry on as it has done. America’s as vulnerable as anywhere else to a hostile takeover by authoritarianism. We are at a turning point. If Trump wins this election, I straightforwardly believe it will be the end of America as a democratic state. I think that’s still unthinkable for a lot of people, but it’s been where I am mentally for five years now. And I don’t like being proved right, there’s no fun in that at all.
PS: The idea that this narrator gets fixated on, that maybe he can track down and talk sense into this one man who seems to have influence over what’s happening—why crystallize it into this one man that he can play this cat-and-mouse game with?
HK: It’s absurd, he’s chosen a TV showrunner as the source of all ills. Anton has a cultural power that the narrator says he’s not jealous of, but he’s clearly jealous of. Anton is smart and may have some sort of agenda, but he’s not the cause of any of this. It’s that parable of the drunk man looking for his house keys under the streetlight because that’s where the light’s best. We go for a detailed plot-like solution for these very complex … it’s very hard to put your finger on what the thing you would change is, that would make it all better.
Look at QAnon. I think QAnon is the mirror version of the things happening to the protagonist in this book. The QAnon people have invented a fairy story about a small number of very evil people who are in charge and a hero who’s going to overthrow them and restore justice and order to the world. It’s the most ancient narrative structure imaginable and yet it’s playing out in these very modern ways through social media and so on. It’s comforting to imagine that things have plots, and the real horror is that they don’t, that life is formless and life has a complexity that’s ungraspable and that we’re the playthings of fate.
PS: I love this quote, from the narrator’s stint at a New York City mental health facility: “My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?” What were you hoping to convey or explore about the narrator’s mental health, whether a justified response to the world or otherwise?
HK: I think he’s correct to say that the reasonable response to the world is endless horrified screaming because the world is unbearable. The world contains every imaginable horror and it’s amazing that we can carry on in the midst of that. But we do and we have to, so some sort of accommodation with that is necessary.
The QAnon people have invented a fairy story about a small number of evil people who are in charge and a hero who’s going to overthrow them and restore justice to the world.
The slightly different stuff about his … I think the technical terms are depersonalization and derealization, which are very common experiences for people having mental breaks. The idea of the thinness of reality has always interested me, the moment where you look around and you realize that the world is a stage set in some sense. It’s simultaneously literally not true, but in some other ways is true. Many aspects of our world are constructed and could be different.
I think the sense of the thinness of reality is where we are now, because we’re asking ourselves what other political arrangements could come out of this situation? Could we end up in an authoritarian state? Who has to be taken away to the camps for it to start feeling real to ordinary people? The lesson from history is that you can go all the way through without it feeling real. You can be a good German and have the concentration camp outside your town, and you can still not feel that’s something connected to you. So that sense of thinness is a real political experience that we’re having at the moment. Having a narrator who’s experiencing that in a literal mental health way, I feel he’s the sane one and the Hillary people are not.
PS: Anton’s real name is Gary Bridgeman, and Bridgeman is a name you’ve used a few times for characters in previous books. Is there a story behind this?
HK: You’re the first person to ever actually ask me that. Yeah, there’s a Bridgeman in each book. They’re always ambiguous characters, they are “bridge men,” the kind of people that connect things that otherwise wouldn’t be connected. In The Impressionists that’s the guy who’s passing. There is always something shady about a Bridgeman, when you meet one in my head.
PS: How far back does that go for you?
HK: It was the obvious name for the character in The Impressionists, and then it was just a private joke to myself. Waiting for people to say hang on, you use this name frequently. It’s a constellation or a family resemblance rather than it meaning one thing.
I started writing my new novel, Sensation Machines,during a moment of social upheaval—the rise of the Occupy movement—and completed it in the wake of what felt like the ultimate symbol of that movement’s inefficacy, the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps inevitably then, the final product presents something of a jaundiced worldview. The book’s protagonists, Michael and Wendy Mixner, are married Brooklynites who work in finance and marketing, respectively. They see themselves as people with progressive values, but when those values are tested, they learn that they would rather be complicit in an unjust system than risk their class status and disrupt their comfortable lives. In many ways it is a book about the lengths we go to achieve cognitive dissonance. The novel’s satirical takes on technology, marketing, finance, and criminal justice are intended to be comic, but the satire is also meant to reveal the ways that the rooted imperatives of American capitalism act as structural impediments to progress.
Of the responses I received when the book went out on submission, one in particular gave me pause. The reader liked my writing, but suggested that, in this bleak moment, fiction should offer at least a glimmer of optimism, and my novel did not. I agonized over this response, worried that this reader was correct, that my novel’s vision of America was too cynically bogged down in despair. But the more I thought about the satirical novels I admired, the more it seemed to me that the satirist’s job isn’t only to hold a mirror up to society, but also to warp its reflection so that readers must uncomfortably confront our own grotesquerie.
Though tonally and stylistically varied, the books below all revel in this brand of discomfort. They are funny novels, some uproariously so, but they are also books that push us out of complacency by prying our eyes open and forcing us to stare at our ugliest selves.
Invisible Man came out in 1952, but I can’t think of a text more relevant to the current moment than Ellison’s trenchant examination of racial injustice in America. From the absurdity of college admissions to the internal politics of protest movements, nothing evades Ellison’s satirical crosshairs. Returning to the novel twenty years after first reading it in high school English, what strikes me most is how boldly it defies classification. Combining comic farce with psychological realism, and moving fluidly between tonal registers, Ellison expertly manufactures readerly discomfort by refusing to signal when or if it’s appropriate to laugh.
Oreo was all but ignored upon its original publication in 1974, and I can see why. Published at the peak of the Black Power Movement, this experimental novel about a biracial woman on a Homeric quest to track down her Jewish father intrepidly pushed against the grain of the zeitgeist. As Mat Johnson explains in a 2011 NPR piece:
“A novel about a biracial woman’s search for her Jewish identity, complete with Yiddish word jokes and a structure based around Greek mythology, was about as far away from what was expected of a black writer as possible.”
On top of that, Oreo is one of the most stylistically unorthodox books I’ve ever read; the closest comparison I can think of is The Crying of Lot 49, but reimagined as a Richard Pryor routine. It also happens to be one of the funniest, a novel whose very subject—cultural admixture—fuels its virtuosic joke-making and feverish wordplay. Ross draws from Yiddish and Black Vernacular English, but also from academic jargon, hippie slang, restaurant menus, and mathematical notation to produce a sui generis carnival of diversity.
A Cold War-era sendup of the Soviet space program, this short novel is difficult to discuss without giving away spoilers, as it hinges on a shocking plot twist that radically alters the reader’s understanding of the story. What I can say is that I’ve never quite read anything like it, a political parable that is not only scathing in its critique of Soviet nationalism, but is also both hilarious and improbably poignant.
In this wildly imaginative novel, Sharpe flips America’s foundational myth on its buckle-hatted head. Set in a “post-annihilation” future, Jamestown is less a reimagining than a straight-up remix, and its Pocahontas is like nothing we’ve seen, a cellphone-savvy, unapologetically foul-mouthed 19-year-old who spends her lonely evenings writing blog posts in a cornfield “under the twilit sky that looks like a day old bruise on the thigh of a woman whose body is five hundred times bigger than the world.” Sharpe’s masterful fusion of the poetic and the vulgar is what carries the novel through its heights of absurdity. The result is irresistible, social commentary wrapped in riotous comedy.
Paul Beatty is best known for his Booker Prize-winning 2015 novel, The Sellout, and his cultishly admired 1996 debut, The Whiteboy Shuffle. Both are great, but so are Beatty’s other novels, Tuff and Slumberland. I’m especially fond of the latter. Set in Berlin just after the fall of the Wall, Slumberland chronicles the adventures of a “jukebox sommelier” in search of a lost avant-garde jazz musician. The novel opens with what is certainly the funniest riff on tanning salons ever put to print, and keeps moving with the speed and precision of a NASCAR racer navigating the Autobahn. Beatty’s prose is pyrotechnic, and the joke-to-page ratio is unprecedented, but Slumberland also offers profound insights on expat culture and the end of The Cold War.
I resisted this novel when it first came out. I thought the title sounded corny and the book seemed overhyped. I’m glad I eventually gave it a chance. Not only is Fountain’s novel a) an absolutely vicious skewering of the mass infomercial that is NFL football, and b) the best Iraq war novel I’ve read, and among the best war novels I’ve read, period, but it’s also c) the only novel I know of in which Beyoncé appears as a character. Quite frankly, more novels should feature Beyoncé as a character. Fountain offers a master class in how to write humanely—tenderly even—without dulling one’s satirical teeth, and his novel gives new life to that dusty bromide about opposing the war but supporting the troops.
At first glance, Sarah Schulman’s near-future New York is not dystopic, but utopic. The city is affordable ($50-60/month for a studio, $200/month for a 4-bed), homelessness has been eradicated, and Staten Island has been annexed to Texas. The tradeoff for this apparent paradise is compulsory allegiance to a media conglomerate that offers citizens the illusion of freedom while it sells them homogeneity at irresistible prices. This is Brave New World for the Internet era: instead of drugs to keep us complacent, we have Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon Prime. As Schulman explains,
“Sometimes, come the revolution, we all eat strawberries and cream. Sometimes, come the revolution we only eat strawberries and cream. What if you don’t like strawberries and cream? Sometimes, come the revolution, we have to eat strawberries and cream.”
The first novel in this fantastic trilogy follows a diverse array of Parisians—film execs, bounty hunters, musicians, and sex workers—as they search the streets for our eponymous antihero, a former record store proprietor reduced to homelessness now that his sole marketable skill—selling vinyl—has been rendered obsolete. Despentes’ tracks Gen X’s descent into cultural irrelevance to both comic and tragic effect. In doing so, she paints a politically nuanced portrait of a Europe in flux. It’s the book Michel Houellebecq might write if he were a woman and had better politics.
It takes serious guts—and serious chops—to open a novel from the perspective of our current president as he floats over America in an “ultraluxury zeppelin”, dropping nukes left and right. Mark Doten has both, and Trump Sky Alpha—which jumps ahead into the post-apocalyptic future where a journalist attempts to uncover the final memes before The Cloud went dark—is quite a feat. A mimic of the highest order, Doten has an impeccable ear, not only for Trump’s tics and tautologies, but for the vernacular of online culture, its strange, associative logic. Doten takes a premise that sounds like an SNL skit, and turns it into so much more, a book as terrifying as it is hilarious in regards to both our current moment and our prospects for the future.
“Pink Mountain on Locust Island” by Jamie Marina Lau
STREET
Santa Coy is Chinatown’s most glamorous little prince. We’re sitting outside this yum cha place and a man in a short chef’s hat is pouring sappy oil in the gutter. He turns around, looks at us for a while. When Santa Coy and me stare back the man winks at Santa Coy. Santa Coy raises his eyebrows and says good gracious. Should I go flirt with him? he asks.
I roll my eyes. Santa Coy thinks he’s an edgy prince.
He offers me a cigarette. It’s in close range to his body so that he seems reluctant about it. I take it and smoke it like the world is closing in on us. When I’m with Santa Coy we never talk about my dad. So I ask him if he likes my dad and Santa Coy says that he’s nice. I tell him that Dad put on an entire exhibition for him, that of course he’s nice. Santa Coy pulls his mouth to his nose.
He says, cool it dinky.
I stamp the cigarette a few times.
Alright, alright, says Santa Coy. It’s out.
He takes a huge, long drag.
It’s a blue and pink light paradise in Chinatown tonight. Laundry from windows and signs with writing about a fish heads sale. I want to get a job here, I tell Santa Coy. I’m grown up now, I need a job here. He asks if I mean here in Chinatown. I tell him exactly, right here, where it smells like dried-up fish and people are eating sea life. There are more ramen joints here than there are hot and sour soup joints, even though this is Chinatown. There’s always the sounds of Chinese opera no matter which laneway you walk. Of course here, in Chinatown. He is not any kind of prince.
Santa Coy tells me he doesn’t believe in jobs. I tell him this is 100 per cent because he’s got people helping him out. When you’ve got no one helping you out, you need a job. He doesn’t say anything and offers me another cigarette instead, reaching right out to pass it to me. The chef from the yum cha comes out into the laneway again with the plastic rubbish of udon packets. He winks at Santa Coy again and Santa Coy yells, piss off!
Santa Coy gets his thick marker out and starts drawing hieroglyphics on the wall of the yum cha. We’re trying to show that rubbish man that we’re better than his wink.
We buy wine from the grocery store and the man asks where Santa Coy got his big long coat from. Santa Coy says from the Philistines. The grocery man nods quickly, out of politeness, he asks: where is that?
We leave.
We drink wine leaning against shutters of a store which sells fabric imports from Hong Kong. We are a sort of Holmes-Watson situation. A considerable biography happening of one of us, I don’t know who—but Santa Coy thinks it’s of him. The sound of the pots and pans drummer a block away is just phantom.
Is not one of us the other’s apostle, one of us the other’s messiah.
PHARAOH
A woman gets into a cab with a man wearing sunglasses. They’ve come up from the mahjong club underground. I look down inside and see a table of four women. They’re queens, but they scowl at each other.
Outlaw Star is playing on the television in my neighbor’s apartment. An intergalactic space shuttle of the 1970s.
In the corridor Santa Coy jumps back and forth between narrowly spaced walls.
Once we’re inside I run hot water from the kitchen sink to rinse mugs left with color stains from Santa Coy’s brushes. This is a tomb. I am washing the dead artist’s loin cloths. Santa Coy claims his work is about death, even though he has never died. And maybe he’s being ironic. He brings me more mugs to wash.
He says, thanks dinky.
LATE NIGHT
They keep playing No Wave while I’m trying to play some damn bebop in my room.
It’s a Dizzy spell.
I smack the door against its frame ten times in a row and nobody hears. Santa Coy bumps into me in the skinny hallway holding a charcoal stick on the edge of his fingers. He’s got yeasty breath. I ask him to turn the music down or off. He jabs his hands into his pockets.
He says, ask your dad to. Then shrugs. Santa Coy is now playing a clarinet and the windows are open and the slight wind outside whips the plastic jungle plant in the corner of the lounge room. When it stops Santa Coy will stop. He is playing along with the wind, or he is controlling it.
SWIMMING POOL
If you stay in a swimming pool too long your fingers will prune. But if you stay out of a swimming pool too long they forget the sweetness of chlorine.
The swimming pool is a late night hub for people with firm abdominals. It opens ’til 11pm and Yuya has been coming here with her dad for the last two weeks. Her dad swims laps in the medium lane and Yuya swims laps in the fast lane. I swim in the slow lane because Yuya has told me that’s where she started. Breaststroke is a meditation but then Yuya tells me that it’s only for old ladies.
We’re sitting on the edge of the pool, drinking out of recyclable mini water bottles that Yuya’s dad bought us from the supermarket.
Yuya tells me: never drink while eating, I saw you can actually get cancer from it.
We swim another three laps and Yuya’s dad is sill going when we finish. She tells me that he is just showing off to me. She’s chewing on the spout of her bottle. She says that her ma doesn’t give any more love to him since she started her new healing business.
Our ankles are being kissed with little pecks by the water.
In Yuya’s car I ask if I can sleep over please? I tell them, my dad keeps playing these idiotic songs too loud.
Yuya’s dad says as long as it’s okay with my parents. I correct him and tell him it’s just my dad and that he’s pretty much okay with anything.
Their house is the smell of steamed rice. Honey is in the kitchen bowing her head a bunch of times, pecking it against the kitchen countertops. We ignore her and sit at the circle table. She bows for another twelve minutes, then gives us little cups of white rice and some sauces in shallow trays. We pray between clasped hands, all four of us.
I tell everyone that my aunty Linda took me to church last weekend. Yuya and her dad and Honey look at me all together. Yuya clears her throat. She says that I have to respect the food in front of me. I tell her that I am, I’m very thankful for it. I know that not everybody gets food. I don’t know why I get food and other people don’t. That the hungry are kind, and the full are guilty. Yuya clears her throat again and tells me I have to respect the food by not talking. I ask if God doesn’t want us to talk. Nobody says anything.
When we are in Yuya’s bedroom she apologizes that we can’t talk around the dinner table. I ask again if God asks them not to talk. Yuya still doesn’t answer. She’s already got her second chocolate bar open and anointed around her chin and almost up one nostril.
In here it’s a greasy intergalactic mission. The walls are white with nothing on them, and Yuya is holding up side-by-side two photographs from runway catalogues. She asks me without looking up which one I prefer. I point to the one with the big red flare pants. I tap her on the shoulder and whisper if God asked her personally not to talk.
Yuya holds up the next two photographs. I point to the one with the white jumpsuit and a big yellow headpiece. The model is from Spain. I ask Yuya again if God asked her not to talk. This time she presses her palm against my mouth. It tastes like salt. She tells me okay, and she tells me to shut up. She holds me against her bed frame, leans in close, says that I can’t tell anyone. I nod quickly. Yuya breathes in deep and says okay, and sighs, and tells me that her ma has powers to talk to the Spirit. She’s whispering. Her words trip over themselves.
You can’t tell anyone.
She takes her palm off my mouth. Her eyes are glossy black coils. She wipes chocolate away from around her mouth using the inside of her wrist.
JOB
Honey rehearses in the living room the next morning, screaming at the television: “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” “It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!” Her face is pressed against the screen.
A country pop star on the early morning show with a guitar, next to him a barista with a fedora slapping a tambourine, making the tambourine palpitate.
An hour later, Yuya and me eating rice for breakfast in front of the television watching CatDog. Honey is wrapping a wholegrain sandwich for the father’s lunch. When she isn’t screeching she has a voice like plump cushions. She asks Yuya’s father if he wants seed mustard or normal mustard. When Yuya’s father leaves for work and Yuya’s in the shower, I am quiet at the circle table. Honey is spitting out cherry pips into a tissue, red pulp between her front two teeth.
I whisper to Honey across the table: Honey, excuse me, could I ask you something?
Yuya’s shower is on full blast.
HERMENEUTICS
All during Yuya’s twenty-minute shower, I devise a recipe to consider. Honey listens as I tell her about Santa Coy throwing paints in the living room and Dad asking me to get the washcloth and telling me hurry up, to stop standing around—that there’s art to be made, that this is a no-standing area. You can never tell what’s on Honey’s brain because when she’s not screaming, her only expression is a stiff smile. You can tell she was beautiful once but her face has lopsided a little in various slumps. She sits and thinks for a long time and then looks at me funny. She tells me she might be able to figure something out, to do something to help my situation. She puts a long red fingernail to her lips and says that it’s not that simple.
I tell her, I know how you have powers; special gifts.
She tells me then about how someone named Reverend Bugsy took her gifts away because of his jealousy. She says that if I help her out, then she might help me out, and to call her on her business number if I decide we should help each other.
A cold sun today. I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes and one of Yuya’s beanies. She fixed it on my head and told me I can come by anytime, but that I must remember not to talk during dinner.
STRING INSTRUMENTS
Our lounge room is Santa Coy, a slimy fish across one brown couch, and Dad, a grumpy strap of leather on the other. There is no more politeness about smoking in here, or television etiquettes. The TV plays only infomercials. I change it to the jazz station and it’s pan flute and orchestration.
I sit on the floor with a box of cornflakes and watch the radio station logo rebounding off the screen’s edges. No one’s listening but still I ask: when was the last time you considered the fact that you are not kings of the world?
ITALIAN FOOD
I’m here on this website about the most popular Italian dishes for dinner parties in autumn. I’ve asked my dad if I can cook when his art colleagues come over. They’re visiting because he’s now becoming successful. It’s good, this is working—something I heard him say to Santa Coy.
He’s asked my sister to cook instead. But I’m a chef and no one can stop me.
My big sister is wearing an apron when I open the front door. She tells me: I think it’s good Dad’s seeing his friends again. Her husband is a red fluster behind her, carrying a slow cooker and the slow cooker recipe book on top.
I’ve spent the last nine hours memorizing an Italian recipe so that I can tell her that I don’t need a recipe book. I tell her that it’s all in here like a real chef. I point to my brain.
My big sister sets up her slow cooker, an aluminum mammoth, where the toaster’s supposed to go. I tell her a real chef doesn’t need a slow cooker.
My sister’s best friend is this slow cooker.
She wipes it down before beginning. I sit on top of the bench until Dad comes out from his shower, his greying beard half shaved off. My sister tells him that he looks great. He ignores her and points at me, swiping his finger in downwards motions.
Sitting on the bench is dangerous, get off, he orders.
At five o’clock my sister is on her phone, waiting for the slow cooker to do all the work.
Charlie Kaufman, the mind behind Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, is best known as the architect behind some of the greatest mind-bending social dramas of the 21st century. Marrying cerebral concerns with formal conceits that defy categorization, Kaufman has become a distinctive voice in American filmmaking. But as his work attests, he’s long agonized over his own creations, each new screenplay an uneasy proposition about the very value of what he’s trying to accomplish. With his first novel, Antkind, released earlier this year, and his latest film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, now available on Netflix, Kaufman has gone one step further. He’s offered a twinned vision of the anxiety around storytelling by and about straight white men.
To look back at Kaufman’s work is to see a slew of films with distinctive metafictional frames that all but hope to break cinema from the inside—but also a continued examination of what writers who look like Kaufman can offer the world. His interest in making narrative impossibilities a central concern of his work, both formally and thematically, continues in Antkind and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. In both cases, though, Kaufman has made explicit something that was bubbling underneath the surface in his previous work: he presents a dizzying picture of a story that becomes ever more unhinged precisely because its anchors—his straight white male protagonists—can no longer center themselves in the stories they’re trying to tell without running the risk of annihilating themselves in the process. In their own ways, novel and film alike are intellectual exercises about what kinds of stories white men can tell these days—to others, and more tellingly, to themselves.
Novel and film alike are intellectual exercises about what kinds of stories white men can tell these days.
Antkind centers on a film critic intent on making a name for himself after witnessing (and accidentally destroying the only print of) what he terms the greatest film ever made: a three-month-long stop-motion animated film by an unknown Black filmmaker, 90 years in the making. At once a satire of self-serious cis white straight male film critics and a meta-comedy about doppelgangers, cinema, and dreamscapes, Antkind is quintessential Kaufman. As in his films Synecdoche, New York and Adaptation, the plot of the noveltwists and turns on itself to the point where it’s unclear whether what you’re reading is the plot of a film being retold, the narrative of a dream, a flashback memory being remembered, or, perhaps, quite implausibly, all three at the same time. In contrast, I’m Thinking of Ending Things (based on Iain Reid’s novel by the same name) has a decidedly simple premise: Jake (Jesse Plemons) is taking his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley) to meet his parents for the first time. Only, as her voiceover confides in us at the start of the film, she’s actually thinking of ending things.
As you read and watch, Kaufman’s 2020 creations slowly unravel in ways that feel familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed the fantastical world of Being John Malkovich and the playful, time-bending sensibility of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As Antkind’s protagonist B. R. Rosenberg tries to recall (via hypnosis, naturally) the months-long film he destroyed, the distinctions between what he dreams, what he watched, and what he’s remembering blur together. By the time we see him in his dreams—in which he’s become a professional novelizer, being recruited by a time-traveling future “Brainio” filmmaker hoping to get him to write a novel about the death of “President Trunk” that she can then claim to have adapted in her present—it’s clear Kaufman’s fanciful novel is a kind of Rubik’s Cube we’re not really meant to solve as much as obsess over, sometimes in utter frustration, others in gleeful awe.
In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, meanwhile, though the setup seems plain as day, there are hints early on that, this being a Kaufman vehicle, not all is as it seems. When Lucy thinks to herself that she’s thinking of ending the relationship with Jake, Plemons reacts as if he’s overheard her. By the time the couple reach Jake’s parents’ house, every shot demands you do a double take to reassure yourself that Lucy (or is it Louisa? Or perhaps Lucia?) isn’t wearing a new dress, that the house isn’t suddenly decorated differently, that Jake’s mother (Toni Collette) isn’t suddenly younger (or much older and in bed dying?), or that the acerbic family comedy you thought you were watching didn’t just become an absurdist Beckettian drama where time has an elasticity that makes watching it an enervating affair. The film’s sense of reality becomes all the more mercurial when it goes full Oklahoma! in its final musical moments, eventually suggesting that Jake and the older high school janitor we keep seeing in intercut scenes are one and the same. Oh, and that Buckley’s voice over, as well as her entire character and maybe their entire family dinner plot, may be just a figment of Jake’s imagination.
He’s long probed the frustrations of white men who wished they could be more.
To enter Kaufman’s fictional worlds has always felt like an opportunity to live in the pliable mindscapes of his many sad sack protagonists. He’s long probed the frustrations of white men who wished they could be more (think Being John Malkovich’s unemployed puppeteer, Adaptation’s “Charlie Kaufman” and Synecdoche, New York’s theater director). Here, though, Jake and B.’s grievances resonate quite differently—perhaps because both Antkind and I’m Thinking of Ending Things arrive at a time when such self-flagellating premises risk sounding tone-deaf. Kaufman, as usual, seems less interested in eliciting empathy for these men than in unpacking the pity—self- and otherwise—that surrounds them.
Given their outlandish tone and their winking self-awareness, it’s difficult to get a grasp on whether Antkind and I’m Thinking of Ending Things are mocking their characters, their fans, their critics, or even their own creator. It’s possible they’re mocking any number of these, depending on what scene you’re in and your own position toward the insidious vision of white male creative authority novel and film are so eager to deconstruct. B., for instance, is constantly griping over how his insights as a cis white straight male critic are currently undervalued despite his superior intellect, an issue Kaufman problematizes when he reveals what B.’s work is all about: his Harvard dissertation, “Temporary Mobility Practices in the Indigenous Australian Population as an Analogue of the Experience of Western Film Viewers,” and his upcoming monograph, “At Last, I Am Becoming Gender and Transformation in American Cinema,” clearly suggest that he is animated by a constant attempt to take up space best served by other critics. Even his use of “B.” (a nod to noted queer film historian B. Ruby Rich) makes him disingenuous, eager to mislead others about his gender.
To enter the mind of an aggrieved white male in 2020 is, as Kaufman makes all too clear, an uncomfortable and exhausting exercise.
Kaufman may relish the ability to constantly cut through whatever argument you think he may be making, but there’s no denying there’s a probing fascination with the self-immolating impulses of these men who face a world that’s left them behind, that’s ignored them, that now perhaps has no use for them. Jake’s attempt to create a new plot for himself, one that finds him taking his beautiful girlfriend to meet his parents, is a failure from the moment of conception. Even in his subconscious, he emerges as a pitiful figure. In the end, he’s left singing Jud’s song “Lonely Room” from Oklahoma!, which frames him not just as a loner but as a disturbing figure whose love of a woman exists alongside a penchant for violence. There’s a toxicity to his entire creation, which, as in Antkind, pushes the plot to constantly get distorted away from readers and viewers alike, as if any examination of the centrality of white men in 2020 would necessarily require a loss of the objectivity that surrounds their stories.
To enter the mind of an aggrieved white male in 2020 is, as Kaufman makes all too clear, an uncomfortable and exhausting exercise. Antkind’s 700-plus pages can feel interminable, the very definition of taking up too much space, even as its narrator keeps making light of the way its protagonist is literally shrinking out of sight. Likewise, the many formal twists of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which ends with an Oklahoma! inspired ballet, a cribbed A Beautiful Mind speech, and an animated pig (yes, really) feel equally obnoxious. They’re both maddening in the way, perhaps, all of Kaufman’s work has always been. But the difference here is how untethered from any semblance of reality these stories leave us: they’re both intricate columbariums to the stories we used to tell (about a boy and a girl, say; or about a man in crisis) that embrace the collapse of storytelling altogether. It’s a bleak outlook that feels defiant and despairing in equal measure; an infuriating—not to mention ambivalent—answer to the question of what stories about white men can look like today.
I feel a little self-conscious about this admission, but here it goes: I’m mostly a self-taught writer. I was a women’s studies major who went on to graduate school in library science, and I cannot tell you the names of essay types to save my soul. My creative writing education is gleaned from reading like a writer, breaking down what I’m consuming into its parts to better understand how others create chemistry and build tension. While writing my debut A World Between––which follows two queer women of color over the course of thirteen years as they grow away from and towards each other––this education focused on reading more queer writers, whether blockbuster books or titles that weren’t on everyone’s lips.
It’s informal, but it does feel like there is a queer canon once you peruse those “Top 10 LGBTQ Must-Read Books!” lists. The Price of Salt, check. Audre Lorde’s Zami. A Single Man. All of Sarah Waters’ work. Giovanni’s Room. Check, check, check. These are works deserving of inclusion on these lists, on many lists, but inevitably others get sidelined and don’t receive appropriate attention. What follows are some of those titles that I missed, and maybe you did too, books that traverse genres––novels, nonfiction journalism, humor, graphic novels, and memoir. What unites them is queerness in all of its forms, and being incredibly worthy of your time.
Published in a time when out lesbian writers were simply not handed publishing contracts, After Delores is a fabulous, funny, and dark book about longing after a break-up—but it’s also sort of a murder mystery with an entirely unreliable narrator; perhaps its genre-status is the reason why it shamefully isn’t on all of the lists of top LGBTQ books. It should be for many reasons, if not only for this: “Charlotte taught me the trick. She says that if you’re talking to a woman and she looks you in the eye and really sees you and listens to what you say, then you know she’s gay.” An important tip.
Did you, like me, skip this massive and painstakingly detailed chronicle of the early history of HIV and AIDS for fear it would take you years to read, or bore you, or reduce you to a puddle of tears? This book gives life to those profiled as if a novel, and the people––many of whom are no longer with us––put grief in my heart as we lost them page by page. Reading it was a transformative experience, inspiring a mention in my book, a career for one character, and allowed me to flesh out another. Thinking of And the Band Played On today, in the midst of this horrifying pandemic, is a reminder of the relationship between disease, politics, public health, and communities grappling for survival.
I was late to this book and find it truly agonizing that other queer women don’t know about it either. Perhaps its 1992 publication year precludes me and my old millennial friends from being of age for this wonderful novel that introduces us to Jesse, then spins her off into three discrete directions, a fully realized Choose Your Own Adventure that shows us different endpoints her life could have reached. It’s creative and sticks with you way after you’ve read it, and should be on every queer book list.
David Sedaris seems to escape encapsulation in queer book lists, but the humorist’s take on everything from racist Dutch holiday traditions to his brother’s nuptials are queer as in gay and queer as in defying expectations. Sedaris often references his partner Hugh, but in my favorite essay, “The End of the Affair,” he dives in deeper to their long-term relationship and how real love can’t compare to the film which shares a title with this piece. Though the essay is all about how unromantic he is, it contains a gem worthy of literary wedding vows: “Call me unimaginative, but I still can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be with.”
While Fun Home probably squeaks into the queer canon, Bechdel’s comic strip-turned-collection about a diverse group of queer female friends may lack inclusion for its less serious origins. But to ignore these stories is to turn away from unrepentant queer narratives covering love and its loss, drag kings, divorcing in a pre-marriage equality era, and femininst bookstores. The comic spanned two decades, allowing us into the ongoing lives of characters who felt more like someone you knew.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published the same year as Passing, and a hell of a lot more people know about that dude than Larsen, which causes a potent sadness and anger in me. Larsen’s slim novel packs a skillful punch, exploring main characters Clare and Irene’s movement across the Black and white color line in 1920s Harlem whether for pleasure or survival. What earns it its spot on this list is the sexual grey area between the two women, with references to “a tempting mouth,” and lines like: “For Clare had come softly into the room without knocking, and before Irene could greet her, had dropped a kiss on her dark curls.”
Janet Mock’s memoir is a revelation, a mainstream book that is completely conscious of the intersections of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class. The story of Mock’s childhood and teenage years paints scenes of her struggles to express her true self and is extraordinarily painful at times, while at others is lit with revelatory glee. The queer canon seems to exclude trans narratives, especially those of Black trans women, and Mock’s prominence is a needed antidote.
Brit Bennett’s sophomore novel, The Vanishing Half, opens in the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana. Mallard is founded as a haven for, and populated exclusively by, light-skinned Black people; in this town, we’re told, “nobody married dark.” The novel starts with the return of Desiree Vignes, who fled with her twin sister Stella at age sixteen. Years later, she’s left her husband and returned with her daughter, Jude, whose dark skin alienates her from Mallard’s inhabitants. Her twin, whom she hasn’t spoken to in years, took a different route: While applying for a secretarial job as a young woman, she’s mistaken for white and discovers the possibility of “passing over.” Stella decides to abandon Desiree, marry a rich white man, and break with her history to lead the life of privilege that whiteness affords. The novel follows the twins’ divergent paths, tracking the echoes through the next generation––Stella’s daughter Kennedy and Desiree’s Jude––as their daughters build their own lives and explore the buried past.
Opening in the late 60s, The Vanishing Halfunfolds with the lightness and symmetry of a fairy tale, while still reflecting much of our present reality. Its events are set against the backdrop of protest and political upheaval. There’s a keen sense, in its pages, of how larger social currents shape the movement of individual lives.
As well as coming out during the pandemic, the novel’s publication date––June 2nd––coincided with “blackout Tuesday,” when people across social platforms posted black squares as a show of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, but ended up obscuring on-the-ground information for organizers. The buzz for Bennett’s novel was already considerable––HBO recently won an auction for the rights to turn The Vanishing Half into a limited series––but the social movements of the past few months have only served to buoy it up further. This strange convergence, and the broader response to Black storytelling we’re seeing unfold, is one of the things Bennett and I discussed in our phone conversation, along with the implications of performing whiteness and the uneasy comforts of community.
Tajja Isen: Given our current context, I want to start by asking you about the presence of protests in the novel. Even as it focuses on individual lives, it’s attuned to various collective struggles––the protests after Dr. King’s assassination, women’s liberation, the AIDS crisis. What role did you want protest to occupy in the narrative?
Brit Bennett: I knew I wanted to set the book during this time period that was quite tumultuous, and was also a moment of pretty radical social and political change. Beginning the book in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination and the uprisings that happened in that moment felt really interesting and right. My mom actually moved to D.C. the week that Dr. King was killed––that was her first time ever leaving her small town in Louisiana and really being out in the larger world, and she arrived in this moment of actual history being made. I’ve always been really struck by that bit of family lore, the idea of my mom at 19 years old being out in the world for the first time in the midst of this tumult.
If Stella can easily perform whiteness, then what does it mean to be white?
It was also particularly interesting to think of Desiree in that moment, because this was a moment of collective grief and rage, but also a moment where people are required to identify themselves in some way. So, the idea of Desiree, as this woman who is a bit more racially ambiguous, being caught in that situation [interested me]. Up until this point, has experienced her lightness as, or at least has been told it is, this sort of advantage.
I was interested in these moments of collective struggle as a backdrop for characters’ individual lives mostly because I think that’s the experience of being alive. We have our specific and intimate problems that we’re dealing with, and then at the same time we’re living through a pandemic. I thought my mom’s story was always such a great example of that—she’s trying to find furniture for her apartment while in the middle of this huge historical moment. I wanted the characters to be balancing between those poles.
TI: A lot of characters in the novel have the impulse to justify themselves in opposition to groups––to be like “I’m not like other [blank]”––whether that’s “I’m not like my twin”; “I’m not like the town I come from”; “I’m not racist like those other white people”––what’s interesting to you about this impulse to hold oneself apart?
BB: I think that’s another thing that’s interesting about communities: they’re ways to measure ourselves. There’s a pleasure that can come from being part of a group, but then there’s also that horror that you’re being conflated with a group of people that you don’t want to be conflated with. In the case of Mallard, you’re introduced to this community immediately on the first page, when you see how they react to this child who’s arrived who’s dark-skinned. The idea of Desiree being somebody who’s very much, from the beginning, interested in separating herself from this town, even though she’s kind of the embodiment of what they value—and then, not only that, but returning with this child who is very resoundingly rejected by that same town—there was always something very interesting to me in that complication.
I’m not “anti-group,” but I do feel like a lot of novelists consider ourselves introverted, and maybe that’s also part of my suspicion of groups as I’m writing about them. But I think that idea of, “What part of me belongs to this group and what part do I want to be apart from this group,” I think that’s something we are all constantly negotiating as we move through the world.
TI: There’s also a terror around singularity, too. At one point, Jude thinks, “People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely.” Kennedy, too, thinks, “Belonging to a pattern was safe, at least, to be singular was a risk.” What is it about uniqueness or singularity that can be so terrifying?
BB: I think that’s the other side of it. There’s some level of vulnerability [in] being by yourself, of standing apart from the group. Groups often do offer a measure of protection, whether physical or just psychological and emotional. Being part of a group can make you feel claustrophobic and trapped, but can also make you feel protected. And it’s scary sometimes to leave that group.
TI: Zooming out a bit, what was it about the passing narrative that compelled you to write about it?
BB: The story really began with the idea of this town. I started to think about a sister who passes for white and disappears, and a sister who marries a dark-skinned man and returns to that town with a dark-skinned child. There was something really fascinating about the idea of those diverging paths. I think twins often lend themselves to these very metaphorical readings of identity and choice, and that was something that felt like it emerged organically out of the source of the novel, which is really the idea of this place.
Beyond that, to me, what’s most interesting [about passing narratives] is, one, there’s a sense of unknowability about passing—if you’ve done it successfully nobody will know that you’ve done it. There’s something about that that’s inherently very mysterious, and as a writer, you love mystery. But beyond that, there’s also something inherently very contradictory about passing stories.
On one hand, by Stella passing for white, she is this transgressive figure, and she’s sort of destabilizing these categories of race by showing that you can move between them and also perform them. If Stella can easily perform whiteness, then what does it mean to be white? Does it hold the cultural meaning we’re told that it holds? But the flip side of that idea is that all of the things she gains as a white woman, she’s only able to gain because she is white. By marrying this rich white man and gaining this power and wealth and status, she’s not improving life for other Black people––she’s only improving life for herself, and only as a white person. So, on one hand [passing stories] destabilize race, and on the other hand, they reaffirm race as the meaningful category. There’s something at the heart of that that made me want to write toward this long and very storied tradition, but also from my perspective as a 21st-century writer.
TI: I want to talk about Stella a bit more, and her decision to live as white, which is often described as a matter of choice. I’m curious about the way you found a balance between the freedom of that choice and also the violence of that subject position––she participates in various hypocrisies that underlie white womanhood. How did you walk that line and think through that?
BB: A lot of that was at the heart of what became really fascinating about Stella. It takes her a while to really claim agency over the fact that she has chosen anything. She kind of stumbled into passing, in a way; she’s mistaken for a white woman and she just goes with it. I think there’s something about the haphazardness of the initial choice that allows her to safely act like she was just kind of swept up in this life, and then later has to come to face the fact that this was actually a huge act of agency, and she has to claim that. I feel like she is the character who exercises the most agency in the book, but I don’t think she sees herself in that way. That was very important to think about as I was writing her.
I also wanted to think about the ways that, on one hand, she’s choosing something that, at least to me, feels like it would be really liberating. Race aside, the idea of living somewhere where nobody knows you and starting completely over––I love my friends and family, but there’s always this part of me that finds that idea to be really freeing. And there’s a way in which [Stella is] able to do that as a white woman. The idea of choosing to be white and never talking to my family again––that’s something that I cannot really imagine, ever. But the idea of her creating herself again, that’s something I could access. But as you said, also, that’s not a decision that comes with no cost: There’s the cost of what she’s asked to personally sacrifice as far as her family and her community and her culture, and there’s also the ways in which she chooses to enact this racist violence as a white woman. These are things that she is choosing that she does not have to choose. But the ways in which she commits to being a white woman and leveraging the power that she has as a white woman––that is what begins to make her feel she has finally, successfully completed this act [of passing] and, again, is also a choice.
TI: The novel deals with a lot of violence and loss, but also has moments of incredible joy and is paced with such a light touch. How did you think about or approach the pacing, and create that sense of propulsion?
There’s something strange about writing a novel that you think of as art and having it translated as a sort of how-to guide for white people.
BB: Writing something that’s just relentlessly brutal is both hard for the writer to sustain and not as effective for the reader, because after a while you get numbed to the drudgery of the characters who are experiencing relentless misery. Obviously, it also depends on the kind of book you’re writing, but for me, I can’t sustain that. It’s the same thing as when you’re watching a horror movie and there’s a jump scare. The jump scare works because it allows you to release the tension. You jump, and then you’re laughing a little bit—it gives you that break. I think that joy operates in a similar way. It gives you a break; it gives you a moment to breathe. I’ll also say that I find joy a lot harder to write than tragedy. I think that writing things that are sad is a lot easier. So, I try to pay close attention to those moments of joy and try to make them feel real and not cheesy and not overly sentimental. That’s very important when I’m thinking about how to structure a novel: What is the moment when the reader needs to let a breath out and just sort of relax a little bit?
TI: I’ve been thinking a lot about the way the work of Black writers is being positioned right now. There’s so much exciting stuff being published. But how do you feel about the way those stories are being received?
BB: I had a few months to realize, “Okay, this book is going to come out during this pandemic,” and I had wrapped my mind around that and what that might mean. I was not expecting my book to come out the day everybody was posting black squares on Instagram, or the week in which people started circulating anti-racist reading lists, and that the conversation would somehow turn to, “We need to read books to learn how to not be racist.” Obviously, I’m happy to find readers or for readers to find me however they do. But I do think there’s something strange about my book being collected on an anti-racist reading list, in part because I felt like a lot of those books that people were referencing were books written by educators attempting to educate. And that’s not what this book is at all. I’m not equipped, nor am I interested, in teaching anyone how to be anti-racist. There’s something strange about writing a novel that you think of as art and having it translated as a sort of how-to guide for white people. There’s something about that that I find disheartening.
I’m not getting tagged in anti-racist things anymore, so I don’t know if the zeitgeist has moved onto something else; I don’t know if white people are still interested in engaging with those books on race that they were so eager to buy a couple of months ago. But I hope that with all of the really exciting fiction by Black artists that is coming out now, that people will engage with them asart; as something that’s meant to be beautiful and not just meant to instruct you. For a lot of us, we’re writing novels because we think novels are beautiful, and we want to write something that’s moving; we want to write something that’s fun, or entertaining, or any of the things that we turn to fiction to do. I hope that people read those books for those reasons also.
In Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, her first book of nonfiction, novelist Laila Lalami meditates on what it means to be American if you’re not a white man. In presenting her idea of “conditional citizens,” Lalami begins with her own trajectory becoming a citizen after her marriage to her husband. She writes:
Being a citizen of the United States, I had thought, meant being an equal member of the American family—a spirited group of people of different races, origins, and creeds, bound together by common ideals. As time went by, however, the contradictions between doctrine and reality became harder to ignore. While my life in this country is in most ways happy and fulfilling, it has never been entirely secure or comfortable. Certain facts regularly stand in the way, facts that make of me a conditional citizen. By this I mean that my relationship to the state, observed through exposure to its policies or encounters with its representatives, is affected in all sorts of ways by my being an immigrant, a woman, an Arab, and a Muslim.
In the book’s eight essays, Lalami weaves her own personal history with reporting on legal and historical realities of how religion, race, class, and gender affect a person’s Americanness. I spoke to Lalami about the country’s determined forgetting of history, the questions she gets (about ISIS) at her readings that white writers usually don’t, and when she feels most American.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: In Conditional Citizens, you write that there is nothing more American than forgetting the past, as well as of the privilege of ignorance. Who did you write this book for?
Laila Lalami: I wrote it for conditional citizens—the people have had experiences of exclusion, who have had experiences of feeling like they weren’t quite American enough or not American in the right way, or American only if they do this or that. The book is an attempt to connect the experiences of a person who’s excluded, say, for example, because of national origin, with experience of somebody who’s excluded because of gender with the experience of somebody who’s excluded because of race, with the experience of somebody who’s excluded because of class.
It really is trying to tease out commonalities between all of these groups. And this absolutely, I think, connects with the sort of idea of the obliteration of the memory which is what you started your question with. The idea of America depends completely on forgetting and on making it seem as if everybody is equal. When you look at the founding myths of America and then look at how little is taught about how the country was truly founded and what ended up happening. If you look at how the Civil War is taught in the South, or if you look at how slavery in many parts of this country, there is a great deal of forgetfulness, and it’s not unintentional. It absolutely is intentional. And the idea is to convince people that they are uniformly and equally American. And the reality is that they’re not.
The reality is that citizenship from its inception up until today has been a benefit not shared equally. It was something that was meant initially for “free white persons.” And today, the highest benefits of citizenship really are still available to rich white people, right? Nobody could really successfully argue that someone like Bill Gates has the same access to rights and liberties as a person who’s been recently naturalized and is from Iran, for example. Or that he has the same rights and privileges as somebody recently released from prison, and now has a felony record that prevents them from voting. I wanted to create connections between these different modes of experiencing this country.
JRR: What struck you the most about the nature of citizenship in America in your research for this book? I was quite unaware of the precarity of being born near the southern U.S. border and how this could call into question your American citizenship.
The reality is that citizenship has always been a benefit not shared equally. It was something that was meant initially for ‘free white persons.’
LL: When you think about citizenship, you often think of something very basic, like the right to vote. Obviously, I’m well aware of what’s been going on with efforts like voter ID laws to limit rights for a lot of people, disproportionately black, Hispanic, and indigenous people. So when I began writing, I was prepared for this part. But then, once I started looking at the border, and how citizenship is lived in areas close to the border, it just became a lot more sobering. It made me realize how much of what we take for granted is not to be taken for granted. These rights are constantly under threat or up for debate. We have to be asserting them and fighting for them that it doesn’t go away. So, in terms of the border itself, there’s so much. For example, there have been cases where border agents at the wall have shot at Mexican nationals across the border and been sued for that. [In April,] the Supreme Court basically said that people who have been shot at have no right to sue the border officers in U.S courts. This basically means that they can kill and there will be impunity, right?
So, there are so many examples, but one that really was shocking to me is discovering how in the 70s, the Supreme Court decided that in the matter of checkpoints that border agents can use ancestry as a way to determine whether or not to pull you for secondary inspection. That’s basically a way to say that racial profiling is okay along the border. This is what I mean when I say that a lot of the rights that we take for granted suddenly become up for debate when you approach the border, for example, the right to be safe from unreasonable searches, or the right to sue for redress in case you’re the victim of violence from a border agent.
JRR: To your point about erasure, your novel The Moor’s Account fills in what seems like a major gap of American history. You talk about being on tour for that book’s promotion about having to explain ISIS to a white audience member. The way you draw parallels between ISIS and the KKK is brilliant. You note that white writers are not asked to explain the KKK or white supremacy.
LL: I think that there is something about the status of being a conditional citizen that is something that keeps you constantly having to justify or explain yourself. So, you know, whereas somebody who is truly an equal citizen doesn’t have the responsibility to just explain. So, if you’re somebody who is Arab and Muslim, then you are going to get those questions. And I imagine that African American, Hispanic, and Asian authors would have different questions. Anybody who’s not a white male.
You can see this too in broader literary conversations. For example, in literary programming, who is put on panels to talk about craft and who is put on panels to talk about writing from the Other? The work of black writers, indigenous writers, writers of color is taken mostly to be ethnology. The work of white writers, meanwhile, is treated as art, creative and reflective of their imagination. In writing about this encounter, my hope is to get people to really see how even in supposedly liberal spaces and sometimes very progressive spaces, you can still come up against these expectations that people have of you. And that really brings up this idea that you’re different. You’re not quite the same as everyone else.
JRR: Well, that story certainly gave me some ideas for Q&A time when I am next at a reading by a white Southern writer! You move from race to discuss class and how it’s seen as an outcome of personal choice. This seems to be the flip side of the American Dream and the bootstraps mythology.
LL: One of the foundational myths of America is that your life is completely under your control. Circumstance really doesn’t play a part in it. Circumstance can be your present circumstance, or it could be your historical circumstance. None of that should stand in your way, the argument goes, and anybody can work hard and make it. And the reality is, the data, in fact, shows us that that’s not true. One of the biggest predictors of a person’s success in America right now is the zip code in which they’re born. So if you’re born in a very wealthy zip code, chances are your future income level is going to be much higher than if you were born in a poorer zip code. If it’s really true that someone could pull themselves up or down depending on their hard work, you wouldn’t have this correlation. There’s plenty of data to show it. For example, people who score highest on the LSAT are the ones who have spent a lot of money on prep courses. The higher your LSAT, the higher chances are, you’re getting into certain schools. If you get into certain schools, the higher your chances are of landing that interview that job and achieving success later in life. It goes on and on and on.
If I want America to be healthy, it means I have to work to make sure that everyone is equal.
One of the biggest and most dangerous myths that America not only lives by and propagates to the rest of the world is this idea that here anybody can make it. And so, because of that, when people, no matter how hard they work are not millionaires by the age of 25, or whatever, then they tend to feel like they have failed. Conversely people who are millionaires by the age of 25 tend to think that they’ve made it all on their own, completely based on their hard work. That gender, race, gender, class played no role in how they got to where they got. This lie that we’re all living by: if you’re poor, it’s because you didn’t put in enough effort and if you’re rich, you put in a lot of effort. It’s a very poisonous idea. As I mentioned, there’s just so many factors that go into determining class but it would be foolish to think that if you’re successful that you got there solely on your own and if you’re unsuccessful, but you got there on your own. Circumstances do play a role. The sooner we address those circumstances, the better our chances are at addressing poverty.
JRR: You write about a moment where you were on a plane for an event for The Moor’s Account and a white man next to you started talking about how Koreans were overwhelming his neighborhood. When you told him you were an author, he got excited and said he’d buy your novel. Do you think it’s possible to change people’s minds through literature?
LL: Yeah, I have to tell you that when he started off talking about Koreans, I was so upset. I let him talk and then I went back to reading my book for the rest of the flight. But he wasn’t done talking to me—I think he was very curious. I was shocked when he asked, “What’s the title of your book?” He said he’d buy it. This happened maybe a week or two after the 2016 election. It gave me hope. It made me feel that if we talk to people without necessarily immediately trying to convince them, if you give them a little bit of time, you might have a little bit more chance of bringing them around to your point of view. Now, having said that, I do think that there are limits to argument and there are limits to how much you can bring people around. For example, somebody who doesn’t believe that I’m human, there is very little that I can do to change that person’s mind. And frankly, I don’t view it as my job to change that kind of a person’s mind. My humanity is not up for debate. Once you are at that extreme, I don’t think dialogue is going to do much but for others who are maybe not as far gone than I think it is sometimes possible.
JRR: You are one of the originals in terms of presence in the online literary world. I imagine you must get some intense trolling and comments. You write in the book about the post 9/11 surveillance of Muslim communities. Are you concerned about speaking to the truth and being watched in the current state of democracy in the U.S.?
If somebody doesn’t believe I’m human, I don’t view it as my job to change their mind. My humanity is not up for debate.
LL: I am and I am not paranoid to be concerned, especially if you look at what the NYPD did under Michael Bloomberg, which is that for several years, it spied Muslims in New York. They placed informants in mosques, informants in students’ associations, and even lied in order to get access to private homes and go inside and see what’s going on in the private home, what kind of books they had on the shelves. what kind of watching shows they were watching. We obviously found out about it after it had been going on for several years. Just last week, The New York Times reported that Eric Prince, he of Blackwater fame, recruited former US and British spies to help infiltrate liberal groups. And so, it’s not in our heads.
Why shouldn’t a reasonable person assume that they are being watched? Writers and intellectuals should assume that what they are writing, what they are posting, and what they are saying in public spaces and their private messages, that all of that is being watched and can be used against them. On the other hand, I say what I think. I’m posting things because I think about them and believe them so you kinda have to stand by your words really. There’s nothing you can do about the surveillance but it is true that it is absolutely happening.
JRR: I interviewed Suketu Mehta, whose book This Land is Our Land seems to be in conversation with yours. In his book, and I think what I understood from yours, there is a commitment to the ideal of America despite its flaws. Even just now you saying that you write without fear, it seems that America is still the place to be doing that.
LL: Well, as of now, as of now, we are still protected by the First Amendment. So we’re going to continue doing that. I think that there is something deeply seductive but also deeply true about the universal ideas in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, right? Obviously, we have to update “men” to “everyone.” Everybody is going to claim that ideal. The question is who’s actually going to live with that ideal? I think we all come into the world with some kind of, I’m afraid to say, innate, but I don’t know how else to say it, but some desire for justice, some belief in justice, a belief that we’re all the same. The question is in terms of practice, is America living up to that promise? And obviously, the short answer is no, not in its history and not in its present moment.
But I think that the reason that people do have faith is that you want to maintain both of those ideas in your head, the fact that history has shown us that America has a voice to those ideals, but it also has made progress towards those ideals. I think all we can do during our life on earth is to try and move forward and try as much as we can to make those ideals true.
JRR: You’ve been an American citizen for 20 years now. When do you feel most American these days?
LL: When I am speaking for immigrant rights, or for immigrant kids, or if I’m advocating for people who are incarcerated, that’s when I feel the most American—when I’m able to exercise these rights that I gained access to when I became a citizen. I think that the idea that love is uncritical is, especially love for one’s country, is dangerous. If you care about something, you want it to be healthy and safe. If I want America to be healthy, it means I have to work to make sure that everyone is equal.
Science journalist and debut author Angela Chen remembers the first time she saw the word “asexuality”—online, on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). I don’t remember the first time I saw the word, though I know I first used it in the negative—as in, I may have “weird” views on sex, but I’m not asexual. (This came up after a friend and I spent a night guzzling old-fashioneds and talking about sex. “I’d rather analyze a good book,” I said, and she nearly fell off her barstool.)
But in fact, I am asexual—I just wasn’t really sure about that until I found Chen’s book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. In July, deep into this global pandemic and a personal, exhausting reexamination of my identities, I stumbled on an excerpt from the book in BuzzFeed called “How I Discovered My Own Asexuality Without Knowing It.” I clicked on it because I was starved for narratives that modeled how people navigated the grey waters of self-discovery beyond just afterschool specials about honoring who you are. And yet, as I read about Chen’s discovery, there it was—that “shock of recognition,” as Chen describes the experience in her book.
How sexuality and romance and desire and intimacy intersect and intertwine is complex, perhaps more so for aces (a common nickname for asexuals) like Chen—and like myself—who don’t fall into a part of the spectrum that’s commonly understood. (The popular image of the asexual, a person with no sexual interest whatsoever and who may even be repelled by the idea, simply doesn’t describe all of us.) We have so few stories, so few books, so few characters to look to for guidance or support. I spoke to Chen on the phone about her book, the painful lack of asexual representation in all mediums but specifically in literature, and why we need narratives to help us discover ourselves.
Kirin McCrory: I told you this when I first reached out to you, but I clicked on the BuzzFeed link to your excerpt sort of offhandedly, not expecting to have a world-shattering revelation—but upon reading it, I really felt punched in the face, or that “shock of recognition” that you talk about in your book. It is a shock, a punch, the feeling of finally being seen by someone and seeing yourself in someone else, and we’re going to be talking about that throughout this interview. What made you want to write your book?
Angela Chen: After I wrote the book, I read Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, and there was a quote that made me wish that I had read that book before I wrote mine: “…the logical next step, we both knew was for us to fling ourselves at one another and end up on the sofa. We were among the thousands who didn’t know how to do anything but that, especially when a little bit drunk or just lonely. Sex to pass the time, or for lack of imagination, or out of fatalism. Sex, for want of anything better to do.” I felt like that was such a good distillation of some of the ideas that I had and that I kept thinking about, the way that sex can be valorized as such an important and intimate act, but often is merely “the logical next step,” something you do because you can, and it’s out of a lack of imagination. Something rote.
I really only saw asexuality mentioned either in academic books that were dense and cost $300, or on Tumblr, where subcultures are very vibrant but it’s very niche. I have read a lot of articles about asexuality, but all of them felt like they were only skimming the surface. When every article needs to spend the first third explaining what this sexuality is and isn’t, and establishing that it’s not some joke or some kind of disorder, how deep can you really go? Asexuality helped me not only to understand myself and personally why I was the way that I was, but it helped me look at the world in a different way. I decided that I wanted other people to be able to see things that way, too.
I really only saw asexuality mentioned either in academic books that were dense and cost $300, or on Tumblr.
KM: It is one of those books that I would recommend everybody read regardless of their sexual or romantic identification. Because as you mentioned several times in the book, specifically in the U.S., sex really is the only thing that means intimacy. Everything intimate, everything romantic is acquainted with sex. It’s very hard to parse out the different aspects of connection. And the byproduct of that is that it does diminish what you are capable of—as you write in your book, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
AC: I didn’t come up with that line—it’s from Marian Wright Edelman—but yes. Some people are visionaries and they make it happen, but most of us are constrained by imagination. I am fully aware that I, in many ways, am not as imaginative as I wish I were, and I need a little bit of guidance. And in some ways it feels like popular culture is not guiding me in interesting and varied and complex ways, it’s actually just showing me the same three doors over and over. In really good literature it’s the specific, the details that really create that shock of recognition.
Literary fiction is often very specific, but it often seems very specific about a narrow range of things: what it’s like to be a middle-aged white man who has a drinking problem and his history and his life, or a professor who is lusting after one of his college students. There’s a lot of specificity there, but I think literary fiction misses specificity in so many other areas. I’d love to see more ace characters in literary fiction—but even more important than that, I want to see those specific details that makes it seem realistic rather than a caricature.
KM: I loved this quote from your book: “I’m not surprised by their existence, yet being exposed to their attitudes feels like it changes me in real time.” This has always been my experience with reading, where if I read something that feels super specific to me, it doesn’t feel like learning something new—it feels like identifying something that I previously had no framework to identify. And this idea that literary fiction is supposed to sort of be pulling from humanity and also giving back to it—you do still need that exposure, right? To be able to change what you’re doing?
AC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that having these conversations is breaking the script. I think there are people who don’t actually even want to write plots [with sex or] romance, but because they know they want to write literary fiction, they think, “Oh, it has to have a [sexual or] romantic plot.” [Asexuality is different from aromanticism, which is not experiencing romantic attraction, but in non-erotic literature sex and romance are often conflated. In this case I’m referring to “romance” as it exists in literary plots.] It’s not about forcing people who want to write about these topics to not write romance—it’s about showing people who maybe don’t even want to write about romance that they don’t have to.
I think there are people who don’t want to write romance, but think literary fiction has to have a romantic plot.
When it’s done well, you don’t even notice it. Some of my favorites don’t even have romance, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or the play People, Places, and Thingsby Duncan Macmillan. I didn’t read those wondering where the romance was. I didn’t put them down and think, “Oh, I’ve now read a book without romance, give myself a gold star!” I didn’t even notice it because it was so rich in other ways.
KM: You talked about this in your book, but it does seem like any novel we can cite that doesn’t have romance gets identified as a different genre, like YA or science fiction or fantasy. I think there’s something interesting about asexual characters being relegated to these genres, or to cartoons, as in the case of BoJack Horseman and the asexual character Todd Chavez. What does it do for—or to—a person who identifies this way, to only see themselves in fantasy or sci-fi or made-up worlds for children?
AC: I think, broadly, that it does marginalize people. Genres like YA and sci-fi often have very respectful treatments of asexual characters—but when you see asexuality in a mainstream context, like the “House” episode that I write about in the book, it’s often far less respectful. Electric Literature had a piece on this a couple years ago about non-binary characters and how we need more non-binary characters who aren’t aliens or robots.
It does something to you, if you only see yourself represented as an alien, right? And of course this is not to knock cartoons or genre or anything—some people love finding themselves represented there because they love those genres or they like those cultures and genre is often ahead of the mainstream when dealing with social issues. But for other people, maybe genre is less accessible in some ways, and it’s certainly less of a shared cultural touchpoint. There’s a sense that your story is not important enough to come into the mainstream.
The cultural spaces in which asexuality exists affect the culture of asexuality itself. And the culture of asexuality affects who has access to it and who might be able to find a place in it and find helpful resources. And that is true when it comes to age and gender and ability and race. So I think that if sexuality were more broadly portrayed in “mainstream” culture, dominant culture, then the culture of asexuality would change, and a lot of the lens and the ways of thinking would reach so many more people.
KM: Even within the literary fiction category, books without sex or romance get relegated to subgenres like “war novels,” right? Like if there’s no romance in a war novel, nobody really thinks about it because it’s about war. Literary fiction is supposedly that realm for important “human stories” that aren’t about an event or in a genre or anything else, books about the human experience, but they can be so limited in terms of representing other experiences–and this is maybe the biggest black mark on literary fiction as a highly respected, intellectual, adult genre with zero representation of this sexuality.
AC: When you turn inward and you think “what is an exciting, rich multilayered experience I can write about?” the first thing most people land on is romance. That’s often how it happens.
I had done some research for the book that didn’t actually didn’t make it in, but at one point I was interested in the narrative of sexual awakening, because of course the narrative of sexual awakening is very, very present, and the idea that it is universal and always happens is in contradiction with the existence of asexuality. I spoke to a scholar, Alison Moore, one of the authors of a book called Frigidity: An Intellectual History.
The cultural spaces in which asexuality exists affect the culture of asexuality itself.
She told me about how sexual awakening is an old narrative trope. You have these novels from the early 1900s in which there’s these beautiful, sexually unfeeling women who are just “naturally cold” until they meet the right person. And that was interesting to me. I hadn’t read any of these 1900 novels, but of course that trope and that idea has carried on, right? “You just need to find the right person. You’re only cold until someone else is there.”
Moore told me about this 1922 French novel called The Bachelor Girl that describes this career woman who has these “aberrant desires” to work and be active in the world and drink and socialize as a man would. And she can’t feel desire, and she can’t be “penetrated.” The book links her frigidity with her ambition.
So it’s interesting to me that even though I hadn’t read any of these specific books, these tropes and these ideas of frigidity or asexuality as a violation of female gender norms—and the idea of asexuality being this kind of aberrant part of you that is fixed or cured when the right person comes along—has really been successfully passed down .
KM: Narratives really point out just how simple our cognitive abilities are. It’s easy to look at asexuality being relegated to sci-fi or to fantasy and say you should be able to read that and apply it to yourself because you’re a human and you’ve got this big ol’ brain that should be able to make that connection. But if you only ever see depictions of something you identify with as non-human, or as set in the future, or as animated, there literally is no direct connection to who you are as a person, as an introspective being. We’d all like to believe that we’re capable of understanding things about ourselves without direct examples of it—but we aren’t.
AC: For the book I interviewed someone who is Black and ace and they said, basically, “It sounds very stupid, but I only saw white gay people [in popular culture]—for much of my life, I didn’t think that that’s something that was possible for people who are Black.” And of course, now that they’ve learned more about queer culture, it seems so obvious that this is not true. And yet it’s also so simple and so easy to understand why they would have thought that way. I’d like to think that we’re all smarter than that, but I’m not convinced we are.
I want to see more, I want to see deeper, I want there to be a plethora of options.
KM: Are you working on anything else now?
The project that I’m working on now is not explicitly about sexuality at all, and I don’t really talk about asexuality in it, but there is a romance component to it. And I feel very conflicted, to be honest—there is a little bit of “why don’t you walk the walk? If you think that you could see more ways of being, why don’t you write a novel or a short story that has no romance in it?”
And I, frankly, have not been able to reconcile that. Part of me thinks I alone should not have to have that burden, if I have this idea that I wanted to write about for a long time. But then another part of me thinks, well, who’s going to do it? I think, ultimately, this is a structural issue. It’s making sure that the people who want to write those stories without romance will get agents, and the agents will have publishers who believe that those stories can sell.
I am hopeful that representations of asexuality will move beyond 101. I feel like asexuality is slowly gaining in the culture, and better representation of both ace writers and ace characters will help take us beyond the “this orientation exists” storyline and think creatively about stories that involve people of all kinds—mature or not—and relationships with all kinds. I want to see more, I want to see deeper, I want there to be a plethora of options, instead of the same three doors.
Editor’s note: We’ve updated the piece to clarify Chen’s use of the word “romance.”
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