What can I say about Miriam Toews’ Women Talking? Ostensibly it’s a novel, but it reads like a play. Substantially it’s a #MeToo story, but it takes place in a world far removed from our own. Aesthetically it’s spare—not one character is described, in physical detail—but, visually and emotionally, it is one of the most evocative pieces of writing I’ve encountered, in recent memory. Overall, it is a remarkable book.
In Toews’ introductory note, she explains that the book is based on real-life events:
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia named the Manitoba Colony, after the province in Canada, many girls and women would wake in the morning feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies bruised and bleeding, having been attacked in the night. The attacks were attributed to ghosts and demons. Some members of the community felt the women were being made to suffer by God or Satan as punishment for their sins; many accused the women of lying for attention or to cover up adultery; still others believed everything was the result of wild female imagination.
Eventually, it was revealed that eight men from the colony had been using an animal anesthetic to knock their victims unconscious and rape them.
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Women Talking is both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.
The novel opens when eight Mennonite women in the fictional Molotschka colony, whose ages span 3 generations, have come together to discuss their options after the men who attacked them were thrown in jail. The options, as they’ve outlined them: do nothing; stay and fight; or leave. As the men will be bailed out, and return to the colony shortly, the women’s deliberations are hurried. They last exactly two days: from June 6 to June 7.
I talked to Miriam Toews about how historically women’s stories have been mostly told and interpreted by men.
Rachel Lyon: Though the characters are Mennonites, illiterate and foreign—they speak Plautdietsch, or low German; they are believers in a strict, patriarchal faith—they feel utterly contemporary. Though their attackers use Belladonna spray to render them unconscious and not quaaludes, ketamine, or flunitrazepam, crimes against women as heinous as those committed by the men of Molotschka are common everywhere. There were likely at least half a dozen high-profile rape and sexual assault trials going on, presumably while you were writing this book (Steubenville, Vanderbilt, Baylor, Brock Turner, Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby).
The distance of Molotschka, physically and psychically, from our “first world” society; the Petri dish isolation of these women, their lack of outside influences and references; and the simplicity of the premise (do nothing; stay and fight; or leave); all these elements seem to strip down and purify the problem. Was setting the book in this particular cultural context an attempt to filter out some of that noise?
Miriam Toews: No, not on any conscious level. It didn’t even occur to me to set the book in any other cultural context. I think all of my books are, however indirectly, set within some aspect of the Mennonite community. In the same way that all my main characters, in my mind, are Mennonites, which isn’t necessarily always evident in the text. But the hope is, I guess, that the story transcends its specific setting.
RL: The conceit of the narrative is that the women, who are illiterate, have asked an unthreatening man named August, whose job in the colony is to teach young (male) children, to take the minutes of their meeting, although they will not be able to read them. August is a great character: smart, awkward, humble, and hopelessly in love with one of the women, Ona. He is also a big fan of ducks (and has suffered badly for his enthusiasm: “Talking about semi-aquatic birds in jail, even the smallest detail, can trigger a severe beating, I told Ona, and she agreed I should have kept it to myself.”) It strikes me as a playful treatment for such dark material, but I wonder if there is something deeper going on with August. Given a recurring theme in the women’s dialogue about life flourishing under the sea, under intense pressure, in the unlikeliest of conditions, it strikes me as sweet that this character is both able to live on land, in the light, as a man, and visit the watery and mysterious world of the women.
How do you see August’s role in the narrative? Is he more than comic relief? What did it mean to you, as the author, to retain him as the reader’s filter for these women’s discussion?
It’s time for men to sit with women, to listen and to learn.
MT: Ona senses that August is suffering, profoundly, that he is suicidal. Out of compassion and love and concern, she quickly makes up a task for August—to take the minutes of their meetings, because she knows he is literate—to make him feel necessary and needed, but also safe. For as long as he is in the loft with the women, at least, he’ll continue to live. At the end of the book he asks himself, “How will I live without these women?” But in fact the “minutes” of the meetings are irrelevant, at least to the women. They can’t read them anyway and they have far more urgent things to worry about.
There are other reasons for August being the filter, as you say. He inhabits that liminal space between the closed world of the colony and the outside world, as do the women in the loft in their way inhabit such a space as well—the loft is a space between earth and heaven, as it allows the women to discuss their practical, pragmatic options and their faith and fundamental concepts of spirituality and theology. Something has to give. The women need to decide what they will do, how they will keep their faith and remain safe and August also has to decide what he will do: end his own life, or work towards a better world, which means educating or re-educating the boys on the basis of all he’s heard and learned from the women in the loft. In this sense, August takes on a symbolic value as well, as a man: it’s time for men to sit with women, to listen and to learn.
Historically, women’s stories have been mostly told and interpreted by men. The women in my book will go on to write their own stories, to organize their own lives according to their own ideas, hopefully, or their daughters will, after they’ve decided, collectively, what action to take. And, I should add, the world these women will “organize” isn’t one without men, it’s one with men who see the women as equals.
RL: Any book, but perhaps particularly if it’s written in the first person, requires to some degree a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. If the book is in the past tense, the reader might ask, “How is it possible that the narrator remembers these conversations verbatim?” If it’s in the present tense, the reader might ask, “How does the narrator have the time, between all this action, to describe these scenes to me?”
In Women Talking the suspension of disbelief is a little different in quality; here and there, August editorializes, adds a “translator’s note,” or admits that all the women are talking at once and he can’t keep up. The facade is never dropped; the reader is never immersed; the conceit remains an essential part of the work of art throughout. There is a kind of brilliant Brechtian obstinance about this, I think. The reader is never really allowed to fall into “the fictional dream,” and yet I found myself utterly immersed. Is there a connection between this artistic choice you made, and the content of the book?
MT: Yes. I spent a long time trying to figure out how I would tell the story and when the idea of the “minutes” came to me, I knew—or at least I felt—that that was the only way for me to do it, or at least the only way that made sense to me.
It’s hard for me to explain but I’ve always felt self-conscious about writing a novel, any novel, without there being some kind of necessity, even a fictional necessity, to the book itself. For instance, with A Complicated Kindness, the whole book was an assignment, really, that Nomi Nickel had to complete in order to graduate from high school. In Irma Voth, the film director character gives Irma a notebook and suggests she fill it with her thoughts and observations. So then, for me, it made sense to write the book, because there was a type of imperative for it. Otherwise, I find I get bogged down in the idea that what I’m doing, as a writer, with words, is ridiculous somehow, I think there are more important or useful things I could do with my time and energy than write books. There are allusions to that thinking in almost all of my books—the futility of words. And yet, the utter necessity of them, of language, of connection through language and story.
RL: Speaking of Brecht, I read this novel in just a couple of days, and found the experience of reading it very much like the experience of watching a play. (In the margins somewhere I wrote, “12 Angry Men, but 8 of them, and they’re women!”)
Like a play, the novel is primarily dialogue. Like a play, nearly all of it takes place on one, static set: the hayloft where the women are talking. I often felt, when I put the book down to go do something else, as if I was closing a book and more as if I was pressing the pause button on the proceedings. Do you think of this novel as a kind of theater, yourself—or did you ever think of it that way, during the writing process?
Historically, women’s stories have been mostly told and interpreted by men.
MT: Wait, what? You put the book down to do something else? Haha, just kidding. Well, yes, absolutely I did sometimes think of this novel as a type of theatre (that’s how we spell that word up here in Canada). The women’s conversations are urgent, they have practical decisions to make, but it instantly becomes apparent to them that what is “practical” arises wholly out of their principles and their beliefs—everything is at stake for them, and so their talking propels them, at every moment, toward the decisive action they are about to take. There’s no time to waste. I think there is inherent drama and tension in that, and hopefully the reader feels it too. The great thing about a play or a movie is that you can watch the whole thing in one sitting, which I think is so essential to the experience.
RL: I read All My Puny Sorrowswhen it came out and loved it so, so much, I recommended it to everyone I knew. It really made such a deep and lasting impression on me. It is also completely different from Women Talking. I’d like to ask you about how different this piece is, tonally, from your other work. What is the relationship like, for you, between the essence of a story and the way it is told? I’m curious, from a process perspective, how you come to the tone of a novel, and from a product perspective, how tone informs story, and vice versa.
MT: I think that the tone of a novel is created by the characters, by who they are, where they come from, what they’re in conflict with and by what is motivating them. I guess I’m saying that I think story informs tone. Or that being true to the character of your narrator will naturally create the tone. Yoli, the narrator in All My Puny Sorrows, is such a different type of character than August, the narrator in Women Talking, in spite of the fact that both stories have a type of urgency in the telling and a serious subject matter. Yoli is a person very much like myself and the character of August is inspired by my father.
A month after I finished the first draft of my novel, The Risk of Us, I took the full manuscript to one of my most trusted early readers. She and I have divergent tastes, but she has a sharp eye and a sharply honest tongue. We met at her mother’s house to discuss her reactions, sharing a pot of tea while her mother, entering the last months of her life, dozed in the corner. My friend, a novelist and memoirist herself, held the pages hesitantly, gave me that blunt look I cherished, and said, “I found it totally compelling. But you know you can’t do this. The protagonist’s father was murdered when she was a little girl. Your father was murdered when you were a little girl. You can’t make that fiction.”
I respected her reaction, but to me it was immaterial. The book I had written was fiction. I intended it, from the start, to create its own imagined internal reality. That my own father had been murdered was a coincidence that a reader did not need to know to enter the world of the novel. And, many details in the novel did not (do not) align with the facts of my own life. What corresponded to fact or didn’t was not a consideration as I wrote it. Might the fact that I had previously published a memoir about my father’s murder create some curiosity in the reader’s mind about how much I had drawn on my life? Realistically, yes. But I didn’t see that as a problem in fiction, since so many writers I was drawn to also tolerated—or experimented with—that ambiguity.
A few days after our meeting, my friend asked for a reading list, since the idea of such intentionally ambiguous work was new to her. I didn’t mention to her the term “autofiction,” now so popular for describing works with this kind of ambiguity. Though I like a lot of what is being published as autofiction, I don’t use the term myself. I didn’t mention Proust, and I didn’t bring up Karl Ove Knausgaard. Confession: I’m probably a terrible critical commentator on what’s now being called autofiction, because though I may become aware that a writer’s factual life overlaps with what they have used in their fictional work, and may even in fact be drawn in by suspicions of this, I don’t tend to further investigate the real-life background to determine how much the writer has mined personal experience; unless a work has billed itself as memoir, I’m happy to stay inside the book’s wholly self-sufficient world. That said, this is a list of books that fortified my own choices because I was aware, while reading each of these books, that the writer was reimagining material from “real life”—and I found this freeing and thrilling.
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys moved from the Carribean to England as a teenager after her father died—just like the protagonist, Anna, of this exquisitely spare novel. Though all of Rhys’ five novels feature a difficult-to-love, embittered woman who sees the world’s misogyny all too clearly, and can’t decide whether to manipulate men or say to hell with them, Voyage in the Dark does so more successfully than the others, to my mind. The Rhys figure, a traveling chorus girl named Anna, is only twenty, and still wants desperately to love. This is my favorite novel of all time.
The narrator of this novel is, like Szabo, a Hungarian author trying to recover from a political retaliations against her work. She takes in a mysterious and Valkyrian housekeeper, Emerence, then struggles to understand her simultaneous need, disgust, and fear towards the woman—and ultimately betrays her.
Leonard Michaels poured much of himself into a clearly fictional vessel, the mathematician Raphael Nachman of the beloved Nachman Stories. But he also wrote this slim novel, expanded from a short memoir, about his early marriage to a woman who committed suicide. It is a stark, unsparingly direct novel of a man reassessing his guilt in his wife’s decline.
In 1934, the often sickly and reclusive Schulz makes his drab Polish town Drohobycz into a mythical land dominated by a family maid who obsesses the boy with erotic longing, and a father who in one story turns into a cockroach, and in another gathers an aviary of exotic birds in the attic. “After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water—and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams,” reads a typical sentence in Celina Wieniewska’s translation.
I like to imagine the main character of this collection’s title story as O’Brien herself: sensual beyond bridling, too intelligent to live her life within the confines society expects for women and mothers, bravely alone, but ultimately deeply vulnerable. The character of the story, who works in broadcasting rather than writing, becomes enthralled by a married lover whose forseeable abandonment of her drives her nearly to suicide. The sudden reappearance of her children, home from boarding school, pulls her out of the spell.
Brian Mastroianni writes in the Paris Review, “When Duras claimed that the novel was entirely autobiographical, it became something of an international sensation. But, as the New York Times noted, ‘truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity’; Duras also went on to say ‘that the story of her life did not exist.’” Debate endures over whether the effect of the novel is too contingent on knowing its autobiographical basis. This was not an issue for me when I read, completely unaware of Duras’s or the book’s history. I was simply transfixed by the way she circles around the central, haunting image of the narrator’s 15-year-old self, crossing a ferry on the Mekong River, about to meet the much older man whose lust she would embrace and whose love she would reject.
Like Heti’s third novel Motherhood, How Should a Person Be? is narrated by a woman named Sheila, whose Toronto artist friends share the real Sheila Heti’s friends’ names. But to think that every event in the novel happened factually would be a mistake, as Heti has revealed that she used chance procedures to combine scenes.
The narrator of this look-between-the-lines novel is unnamed, but like the real-life Jenny Offill who wrote it, she has published one acclaimed book and is struggling with the demands of mothering and the relative poverty of adjunct teaching to stay true to her “art monster” self and follow up with a second. I did not care how much of this was faithful to Offill’s life as I read it. I read it six more times purely to study the technique.
Sitting on the Floor with Your Back Against an Interior Door Frame, Sobbing
The trick is to not stand up, grab the molding on each side with both hands
And drive the top of your head into the door frame as hard as you can
Like the time in the kitchen of that two-bedroom apartment in Iowa
When you staggered and saw cobalt blobs floating when you blinked your eyes.
It also helps if you arrange the eggs in the large carton from Costco Into shifting symmetrical chevrons as you remove them to Crack and fry for breakfasts or hard-boil for the children’s lunches Because by ordering the small things you can the larger pain expunge.
The carrion smell and the laundry room full of fat blowflies crowding the window
Make you wish the buzzing in the wall was like the time you were pregnant with the twins
And you kept saying, “Do you hear it? Can’t you hear it? The wall is alive.”
And no one believed you, but with your ear to the wall you could hear the thrumming hive.
This knife isn’t sharp enough. It skids off the onion
And rasps along your thumbnail, making notches but not drawing blood.
A Little Song of Mini-Golf
Grandpa is taking his time, reading the break
On the dull AstroTurf of Hole 8, The Treasure Chest,
At the rain-soaked Pirate’s Cove Putt-Putt. Barely awake,
I pause at the light and watch as he squats, squints, and does his best
To show he’s having fun with his grandkids
And not show that he really wants to birdie this hole.
We landed last night in this spring break town in winter amid
A storm surge that forced seawater from manholes
And wind that whipped and stung our faces with sand.
Now, in strained morning light, the boardwalk, the sky,
The beach, and the ocean converge and vanish.
Cold rain pelts the shore again. Everyone scatters but I stay
To watch a lone wetsuited surfer way beyond the waves
Paddling out into the gray and pulsing blankness.
Each “Unfinished Business” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers — and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes to find the real story.
On January 10, 1982, the science fiction author Philip K. Dick sat down for an interview with journalist and friend Gwen Lee to discuss The Owl in Daylight, a novel that he’d been composing in his mind since May of the previous year. He wouldn’t finish—or even really begin—the book before his death from a stroke a few weeks later, but the novel he outlined to Lee has had as strange an afterlife as Dick himself.
The title, The Owl in Daylight, derived from an expression Dick had heard used once by a television character from the Ozarks. Away from home and confused, unable to understand the world around him, the man described himself as being like “the owl in daylight,” and the phrase stuck with Dick thereafter.
After explaining the title, Dick told Lee how the idea first came to him as he’d finished his previous novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. At some point he’d realized that that book’s protagonist, a young woman named Angel Archer, was actually smarter than he was. Specifically, Dick felt, she was wittier, better at logical deduction, and more insightful about others.
How could it be possible for someone to create a character that was more intelligent than themselves? This puzzled him. Dick couldn’t shake the sense that he had not actually created her.
“She didn’t come from my mind,” he explained. “She did not come from my mind, because it’s impossible, unless I somehow contain another human being.”
He had earlier explained to Lee that sometimes this happened to him. He’d write a character, thinking they were from his own imagination, only to meet them in real life later on. Was this just odd coincidence? Clairvoyance? Dick preferred to call it a “precognition”—an ability he’d had for a long time, and which he’d explored in his early novel, “The World Jones Made,” and elsewhere.
Real or not, Angel Archer was so close to Dick in his writing that he told Lee he felt real physical anguish upon finishing the novel. “The pain was so great at losing that woman as my friend […] after I sent the manuscript off, I discovered that I was hemorrhaging, gastrointestinal bleeding.” (It would turn out there was another, more direct reason.)
The puzzle over how he could have created Archer, and the real pain he connected with letting her go, inspired him to try and tackle a very difficult challenge in his next novel, which he told Lee would be “the hardest job of all.”
Every writer who’s any good is tempted at some time in his career to do a version of the Faust story.
“Every writer who’s any good is tempted at some time in his career to do a version of the Faust story,” Dick explains, “Because, I mean, it is almost the paradigm of the writer. Faust and the writer are almost the same person. A good writer is Faustian.” He speculates that this was the same impulse that led James Joyce to write Finnegans Wake, “which no one can understand.”
Dick proposed to mix Faust together with Beethoven— “the greatest genius, creative genius—not intellectual, creative—genius the world has ever seen.” Like Faust, or Beethoven, the central character would therefore have to be pursuing the “absolute ultimate” of something.
Only, Dick wondered, how could he figure out what this would even be, without himself being a genius on the level of his character? It seemed analogous to his Angel Archer conundrum.
In the interview, Dick then diverts into a long discussion of Pythagoras, millimicrons and Fraunhofer lines, and an error he’d detected in a centuries-old analysis of Parminedes that undermined the basis for 2,300 years of Western science… all to try and explain how, eventually he did come up with an “absolute ultimate” concept: a way to communicate information simultaneously through color, music, and mathematics.
“And I just couldn’t go on anymore,” he says, “I had now thought, I had literally thought of a concept which I could not think of.”
In an attempt to explain this better, Dick resumes his tangent about Parminedes, moves on to St. Anselm’s ontological arguments for proving the existence of God, the possibility of self-authenticating statements, and their relevance to German codebreakers in World War II…
The tape cuts off just as he is about to launch into Claude Shannon and the development of information theory.
Reading the transcript of the Lee interview has two simultaneous, conflicting effects. It makes one doubt Dick’s claim that he somehow created a smarter character than himself—for he comes off as incredibly well-read, brilliant, and witty.
But it also might make one wonder if he is totally out of his mind. His long discursive tangents seem to track logically from sentence to sentence, but looking back they seem to make no sense at all.
Was Dick out of his depth? Or had he gone far deeper than he could describe with words?
In a 1965 essay called “Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes,” Dick described himself as having a “preschizophrenic personality […] generally called ‘schizoid affective.’” He reflected on the nature of the schizophrenic’s universe as unchained from time, creating causal relationships between things that others don’t experience as being connected.
At one point he noted that this was not dissimilar from the effect of certain hallucinogenic drugs, which he also knew well.
“Anyhow, LSD has made this discovery available to everyone, and hence subject to consensual validation, hence within the realm of knowledge, hence a scientific fact (or just plain fact, if you prefer). Anybody can get into this state now, not just the schizophrenic. Yes, friends, you, too, can suffer forever; simply take 150 mg of LSD–and enjoy! If not satisfied, simply mail in–but enough. Because after two thousand years under LSD, participating in the Day of Judgement, one probably will be rather apathetic to asking for one’s five dollars back.”
Dick wrote often of his own vivid hallucinations, possibly a result of drug use. In addition to LSD, he experimented with mescaline, PCP, and amphetamines. It was while on doctor-prescribed sodium pentothal (after an impacted wisdom tooth) that he described seeing a “pink beam of light” reflecting off the fish-shaped pendant on a girl’s necklace (the girl was delivering him prescription opioids at the time).
“It invaded my mind and assumed control of my motor centers […] It set about healing me physically and my 4-year-old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of. It had memories dating back over 2,000 years… there wasn’t anything that it didn’t seem to know.”
According to Dick, he brought his son to see a doctor after this, and they confirmed the “pink beam’s” diagnosis. He began to refer to the voice as the “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” or VALIS, and wrote a novel inspired by this “alien being” in 1981 as well as thousands of pages of a philosophical treatise he called “2-3-74” (the visions having come to him between February and March of 1974) in which he hoped to “fathom” the “entire universe transformed into information.” This project was eventually edited and annotated by scholar Pamela Jackson and the novelist Jonathan Lethem and published in 2011 as the 900 page “Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.”
“Dick wasn’t a legend and he wasn’t mad,” Lethem wrote. “He lived among us and he was a genius.”
Five days after Gwen Lee’s initial discussion with Philip K. Dick about The Owl in Daylight, she returned to resume the conversation. This time, Dick dove directly into the form and plot of the novel without getting sidetracked by the philosophical underpinnings.
It would begin from the viewpoint of an “entity that was not human but presumably from another star system.” This entity’s planet would have no earthlike atmosphere but only isolated “pockets” of breathable air and so the beings there would never have developed an ability to speak. They would therefore have “no art that is predicated on sound.” In other words— no music.
Instead of language, these beings would communicate visually, through their highly advanced abilities to see color and light. Dick notes then that their planet would seem mystical or heavenly to us, as many religions, from Sufism to Zoroastrianism to Judaism to Christianity, strongly associate light with “the next world.”
“And I got to thinking,” Dick says, “What if their world is our heaven and our world is their heaven?” (Lee liked this line so much she used part of it as the title to these published interviews.)
Dick’s protagonist then would be an entity from this other world—a “mystic” who has visions of this next world—where sound exists, and music was ubiquitous. In other words—Earth.
The novel will open with this protagonist entity on an intergalactic starship of some kind, travelling to Earth, to prove that his mystic visions are real.
Dick claims that his literary agent balked at this point, arguing it would not be possible for such a being to narrate a book. How could it, without access to our language—which is based in sound?
But Dick gladly smooths this wrinkle away with another long aside about how Bach and Beethoven composed music after having lost their hearing, because they could mathematically interpret the notations, and therefore the alien would simply use technology to create some kind of pressure-impression of sound, similar to how some sight can be restored to the blind through pressure on the eyeballs.
Lee brings him back to the story again, asking how the mystic would manage to bring all this technology all the way to Earth.
“Oh, that’s just a plot problem,” Dick replies.
Lee then asks if the entity’s mystic visions would be a kind of “precognition.” “I’ll gussy it all up so nobody will notice I’ve used it before,” Dick replies.
This settled, Dick returns to his Owl in Daylight plot. After arriving on Earth and discovering sound and music, the entity will believe it was on a sacred planet, which Dick compares to “finding God.” Except the entity wouldn’t be able to experience it, without the biological components to hear. The only way is to download his consciousness onto a “biochip” and to then enter into a “symbiotic relationship” with a human being.
After a brief discussion of synesthesia and a memory of once seeing one of Beethoven’s quartets as a spiky cactus while on an LSD trip, Dick explains the lucky human to be biochipped will be named “Ed Firmley”—and here the POV would switch.
At first Dick claims he’ll be a “loser composer” and a real “Woody Allen character,” but then, mid-stream, he changes his mind. No, actually Firmley will be a somewhat successful but blasé composer, “a young nudnik nitwit” who writes film scores for cheap science fiction movies. “You know, these clones of Star Wars.” (He goes on to describe a movie Firmley could score that sounds a lot like Blade Runner, adapted from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which he’d discussed at length with Lee earlier, and which would be released later that year.)
Either way, poor Ed is then kidnapped and bopped on the head in an alley, and the biochip is then implanted in his brain with the alien consciousness inside.
After Ed wakes up, he doesn’t know what’s happened, and resumes his regular life. Meanwhile, the alien in his brain is listening now to music for the first time ever. It’s a revelatory, mystical experience. Utterly blissful. Except for one thing… Ed has terrible taste. All he likes is dull “KJOY” music. Because of this, the heavenly/spiritual thrill of music soon wears thin for the alien-in-biochip, which desires more and more experimental and avant-garde stuff (Dick suggests perhaps Brian Eno).
One day Ed accidentally listens to part of a Mozart opera in the car and it thrills the alien-in-biochip like “the top level of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” Dick says. “He gets a glimpse—not a glimpse, see, it’s the audio equivalent of a glimpse.”
But then the glimpse is gone, as Ed goes back to KJOY again.
Furious, the biochip decides to take matters into its own circuitry. He feeds Ed more and more advanced mathematical ideas, which Ed uses to compose more and more outstanding, serious work for the alien to enjoy. Soon, Ed becomes “one of the most—if not the most—creative and original composers on earth.”
But as with any Faust story, there is a terrible price for this divine inspiration.
The stress the biochip imposes on Ed’s brain in passing him all these incredible mathematical ideas, begins to kill him. He goes in for a brain scan—at which point the doctors locate the biochip in his head.
The alien then addresses Ed and confesses to him what has been going on. (Dick likens this moment to Flowers for Algernon, which he tells Lee he finds very moving). The alien insists that Ed save himself by having the biochip removed and returning to his old life of writing “schmaltzy cornball nothings.”
But of course, Ed now cannot go along with this return to his old self, even if it means he’ll die. “He is now conscious of real art, he is no longer a hack.”
But, wait, another twist. The alien’s crewmates, who have been somewhere else this whole time, realize they can make Ed into a biochip. They can implant Ed into one of their alien brains and take him back to their world to symbiotically experience the human “next world” just as Ed has done for the original alien.
A happy ending, Lee wonders? Yes, Dick agrees, but well, actually, no.
A happy ending, Lee wonders? Yes, Dick agrees, but well, actually, no. Because this “heavenly exchange” will eventually kill the new alien, who Dick explains will be a sort of a Christlike figure, having sacrificed himself for Ed. And Ed will, of course, have to die along with the new Christ-alien.
“This is the paradigm of Faust,” Dick tells her, “Faust reaches into a Godlike realm, grasps this thing and brings it back. But dies at the very moment that his hand closes on it. Death and victory become one event for the Faustian man. It’s incredible. This is the Faustian victory.”
At this point Lee asks if the new alien, carrying Ed (carrying the original alien), could just biochip someone else. Or re-biochip the first alien—did he die, or what?
Swiftly, Dick devolves into a discussion about cloning and whether or not putting yourself on the biochip necessarily kills you, and on and on.
Eventually he just stops.
“I—I’m going to, uh, leave that open ‘cause I don’t want to write the end before I get right to it. It’ll be—this is—I guess it’s OK—this is something I better check, you know, to develop. This is something I’m pretty sure about, you know, we’re [unintelligible]. Yeah.”
There’s then a break in the tape, while Dick takes a phone call from his ex-wife Tessa.
Later, Dick and Lee resume their discussion, weirdly, right back at the beginning again. He re-explains the origin of the title The Owl in Daylight and the idea of it being Faustian, almost as if he had not just explained it all five days earlier. Has he forgotten?
This time, however, Dick moves further into the underlying and personal meaning of the bargain that Ed will be making.
“You know, the ratio, like you know on a graph where the cost rises in proportion to the output, is that the cost line is rising higher and closing the gap all the time, you know. So that you could look on the graph, you can see that those two lines are going to meet and finally the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line—the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line, you know.”
In a later interview with Lee, Dick would note that back in the 60s he’d written eighteen novels in just five years, and stories on top of that. Neither of them draw any connection to his struggle with amphetamine addiction during the same period.
Instead, Dick just reflects that his own physical stamina has been declining. That he can “still write well” but that it takes longer, and the costs are higher each time. Eventually, “it’s inevitable” that the costs will outweigh the output.
Lee asks, “Do you feel it’s imminent?” and Dick says he thinks it isn’t. He admits that while he personally finds writer’s block to be a relief, he hasn’t written anything since finishing the Archer novel, last May, and that this almost killed him: “Yeah, I was bleeding internally. When I got finished, I was living on aspirin, scotch, and potassium tablets.” He recalls drinking with his agent and “all of a sudden I started bleeding and I knew it was from everything […] I never even told the doctor about it because I figured it was, you know, it’s like your headaches, when they start—it’s a coefficient of all the stress, the fear of failure.
Lawrence Sutin, author of the biography Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick explains that Dick was well aware of the state he’d left himself in. He feared dying of a heart attack. In a letter he recounted driving his car intentionally into the metal support beam of a parking garage. Previously he had “crushed an aluminum pop can so that it cut into his wrist.” Sutin speculates that he sensed that Timothy Archer would not be a big hit. And after the countless hours he’d spent on 2-3-74, he had failed to solve the mysteries of the universe after all. “What it is I simply do not know, nor do I expect ever to know,” Dick wrote.
He continued to receive visions and to hear voices. VALIS gave him a vision of a savior named “Tagore,” living in Ceylon, “the second incarnation of Christ” who is “taken to be Lord Krishna by the local population.” VALIS told him that Tagore was dying “voluntarily,” having “taken upon himself mankind’s sins against the ecosphere.”
Dick told friends that he was “receiving communications from God and that they troubled and confused him.”
A few weeks after his interview with Lee, Dick mentioned to his therapist that he was having trouble with his vision. Despite the doctor’s urging him to go to the emergency room, Dick returned home to rest. The next day he was found there, on the floor, having had a stroke. A few days later, now in the hospital, he had a second stroke and became brain dead. Five days later, he was taken off life support and died on March 2, 1982.
If Dick really did have precognitive abilities, they were only accurate about his “increasing costs vs. declining yields” in the short-term.
Yes, his final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer would not sell terribly well. At first the posthumous reprintings of his other novels failed to attract many fresh readers.
But looming also was Blade Runner, the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which Dick told Lee in one interview that he was very excited about. He told her enthusiastically about the music, the special effects, and all about Ridley Scott’s visual style. Dick even gushed about liking Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He told Lee about his publisher’s hopes to sell a half million copies of the novel if the film did well.
Unfortunately, that summer’s theatrical release of Blade Runner was met with mixed critical reviews and underwhelming ticket sales. But it also galvanized a new generation of dedicated Philip K. Dick fans, science fiction aficionados turned on by Star Wars and Star Trek but now ready for something grittier, darker, and deeper. As the ‘80s wore on, Philip K. Dick’s fans eventually lifted Blade Runner and Dick into the pantheon of cult classics.
Eight years later, the 1990 adaptation of Dick’s novel Total Recall, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwartzennager, was a #1 box office hit, given 3.5 stars by Roger Ebert, who declared it “one of the most complex and visually interesting science-fiction movies in a long time.”
And in the years since, Dick’s works have only gone on to more and more adapted success, including “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly”, “The Man in the High Castle” on Hulu, and the Blade Runner 2049 sequel, it is hard to undersell the influence of Dick’s work on the world of film, science fiction—and all of fiction.
In 2003, Frank Rose wrote of “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick” in Wired: “Dick’s anxious surrealism all but defines contemporary Hollywood science fiction and spills over into other kinds of movies as well. His influence is pervasive in The Matrix and its sequels, which present the world we know as nothing more than an information grid; Dick articulated the concept in a 1977 speech in which he posited the existence of multiple realities overlapping the “matrix world” that most of us experience.” Rose goes on to connect Dick’s influence to Vanilla Sky, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ. Memento, The Truman Show, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “Memory, paranoia, alternate realities: Dick’s themes are everywhere.”
Perhaps it was a true Faustian victory after all, but with Dick’s very real costs already paid off, the yield line of his work has only continued its astronomical rise.
In recent years, among Dick’s hardcore fans online (or “Dickheads” as they call themselves) there has been continual fascination with The Owl in Daylight, and what might have been a final masterpiece.
However, there’s something of a split in which version of the novel to endorse.
There’s the “biochip” version that Dick explained to Lee in the interview, but also an almost completely different version that Dick described to his editor, David Hartwell, at Timescape Books just weeks before:
“It will be based somewhat (as I have discussed with you and Russell Galen) on Dante’s COMMEDIA—and also on Goethe’s FAUST Part One, In the future a scientist who is very old supervises the construction of an amusement park (something like the “lands” at Disneyland) of Berkeley, California circa 1949-1952 with all the various groups and subcultures of that time and place represented. In order to impose coherency on the Park he involves one of the planet’s leading computers in the operation of it, turning this high-level computer into the mind behind the Park. The computer resents this, since it prefers to solve abstract, theoretical problems of the highest order. The computer pays the scientist back by trapping him in the Park and making him subject to its mind (that is, the computer’s mind): the scientist is given the physical body of a high school boy, and he is deprived of his memories of his true identity (you can see the influence of Van Vogt on me, here, and also that of a number of my earlier novels) . Now the scientist, trapped in his own amusement Park and subject to the mind of the misused (misused and knowing it and keenly resenting it) must solve the maze that the Park represents and find his way out of it by solving problems propounded by the computer and presented to him in sequence.)”
It’s stunning how completely different this version of the book is from the other. Some biographies, like Sutin’s, have declared the Lee-interview-version the final and correct book, while other’s, like Andrew Butler’s The Pocket Essential Philip K. Dick leaves open the possibility that some other version would have prevailed, perhaps some kind of amalgamation of the two.
In an interview with TheTwilight Zone magazine, Dick spoke to his eventual plans to merge the two books. “I’ve done two different outlines. I’ll probably wind up laminating them together and making one book out of it, which is what I like to do, develop independent outlines and then laminate them into one book,” he said. “That’s where I got my multiple plot ideas. I really enjoy doing that, a paste-up job. A synthesis, in other words.”
As a result, neither of the novel’s versions has ever quite become canonized, allowing fans to imagine how exactly Dick would have finished it.
One such re-imagining of The Owl in Daylight was written by Dick’s ex-wife Tessa. In 2009 she self-published a novel by the same name, in an effort to complete the project that Dick originally intended. She remarked that “some of Phil’s loyal readers begged me to write it” in an interview, and claimed to have at times felt as if Dick himself was writing the book through her: “Sometimes I do feel that Phil is communicating with me from beyond the grave, but that concept is too spooky for me to accept completely. It’s probably just that I knew him so well that I can think the way he did.”
Tessa explained that she disregarded much of the other two plot versions and instead developed her own original ideas, loosely based on Dick’s own life. “The Owl in Daylight is my concept of what Phil’s novel should be,” she said. Her planned sequel, The Owl in Twilight, would build on her own ideas.
In the end, the Philip K. Dick estate, managed by his two daughters, asked Tessa to take down the publication and she obliged. (Used copies of the book now sell on Amazon for more than $150.)
Around this same time, the actor Paul Giamatti spoke to MTV News about a film adaptation of The Owl in Daylight, that he hoped to produce, which they called “a sort of Charlie Kauffman-esque experiment in blurring fiction and reality.”
But a few years later, in an interview with Collider, Giamatti described the complicated process behind the Dick biopic:
“Isa, one of his daughters, we were talking to about it. I, I don’t know. You know, it’s a tough thing. They never did a script based on that story which was the last unpublished thing of his that still hasn’t ever been public—. Well, he never wrote it. It only exists in the form of him telling somebody on tape, the plot to it. So, we were gonna use that actually ‘cause he got more and more into that thing of using himself as a character. So that seemed, actually, like a good launching pad for some kind of biopic about him ‘cause a straight biopic about him would be sort of pointless. So, it was always a tough thing to get the script right and that didn’t happen for a while. So, it’s gone in and out and I think they’ve gone back and forth about being willing to do it or not and, you know, it’s, he’s a tricky figure and, you know, for them I think it’s… There’s days when I think they’re very enthusiastic about it and then there’s days when they’re like, ‘You know what? Maybe we should just…’”
He went on to discuss how the two versions of the novel could dovetail together even, calling that a “starting point.”
Currently the film adaptation has been taken down from IMDb. Its future is unknown. But as Dick’s work, and life, continues to inspire his fans all these years later, perhaps this starting point, this final novel, will someday find a finished form. Or maybe it will remain in some sense, an idea of a novel, something we can’t quite grasp.
Picture Dick, or Giamatti, or the biochipped Ed Firmley, about to die after having, at last arrived at the alien planet, the next world—our heaven.
“Death and victory” Dick told Lee, “become one event for the Faustian man. It’s incredible. This is the Faustian victory.”
And if, instead of victory, there is failure? Well, Dick thought, that’s just how it goes sometimes.
“If either occurs without the other it wouldn’t be Faustian. It would be something else. I don’t know what it would—you just die—I guess that’s just life, and you know that’s what—that’s the breaks, you know?”
In his introduction to the speculative fiction anthology A People’s Future of the United States, co-edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, LaValle cites as inspiration Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Of particular note is that Zinn begins the book not from the perspective of Columbus, alighting on verdant, virgin land, easy fruit to be plucked and tossed into the colonizer’s basket, but from the perspective of the Arawak tribe of the Bahama Islands, swimming out to greet the new arrivals. It is not Columbus who discovers this territory; it’s the people of the territory who discover Columbus.
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This reversal runs like a red-hot throughline, connecting the diverse and diversely brilliant stories in this collection. This vertebral column connects dragonriders to a miracle birth to an egomaniacal ruler willfully blind to the changing climate to a reluctant time traveler to a woman collecting the last effects of a loved one encaged and destroyed by prejudice. If speculative fiction is in the business of mythmaking, then these stories are doing double duty, both obliterating and remaking, in excellent alchemical fashion, the story of America.
What is the United States? Each story posits an answer. As varied as those answers are, they all take the terrifying, hopeful form of yet another question. What might the United States become?
Victor LaValle and I corresponded over email about the problem with Star Trek’s vision of the future, technology both as a tool of oppression and a tool for liberation, and why horror does best under Republican presidents.
Tochi Onyebuchi: This anthology is a godsend. Not only does it make me feel supremely seen as a fan of speculative fiction, but it stares issues of oppression straight in the face. We don’t stop being racist, sexist, misogynistic, transphobic in the future. Could you talk on the non-utopian impulse running through these stories? Does it run up against the stereotypical aim of science fiction to imagine our way into better selves?
Victor LaValle: I’m so happy to hear you call this book a “godsend” because that’s certainly how I felt when John Joseph Adams invited me to co-edit the stories with him. Even more so when we got down to our list of dream collaborators and then actually got nearly all of them to say yes. Looking at this table of contents felt like an embarrassment of riches, to use an embarrassing cliché.
As for the non-utopian impulse, I do think one of the more profound ideas for people–really any of us–is to grapple with the idea that our personal happiness does not necessarily equate to a universal happiness. It seems silly to have to even state such a thing, but how many folks need this lesson again and again? (Myself included.)
In the case of this anthology we took it for granted that if we invited a genuinely diverse group of wildly talented writers into the anthology, we would see wildly diverse pictures of the future. Somewhere in the world, someone always has a boot on their neck. That’s true of the past, and the present, and will be true of the future, too. It’s one of the reasons I always took issue with Star Trek’s vision of the future. Prejudice has been conquered. But don’t question why this white dude is still the boss. He’s a nice boss!
Somewhere in the world, someone always has a boot on their neck. That’s true of the past, and the present, and will be true of the future, too.
TO: Imagining a future with any measure of verisimilitude seems to necessitate contending with the fact that there will be people of color with white-supremacist capitalistic values as in Gabby Rivera’s story about this miracle birth. Prejudice follows us into the future.
VLV: One of my favorite things about this anthology is that it never turned into a simplistic white people versus POC kind of book. How could any thoughtful take on the future pretend that we all have our shit together all the time? It’s a nice dream, but I’ve never experienced it in reality. And it’s only more insidious when the people who look like us speak the ignorance of those who don’t. Hell of a ventriloquist act, really.
TO: I found Tobias Bucknell’s story fascinating, because it reified the idea of technology both as a tool of oppression and a tool for liberation. Smartphones track our locations and feed our info to the Feds, but they also let us record episodes of police brutality. Twitter facilitated so much communication during the Arab Spring, but it’s like 70% Nazi or Nazi-adjacent now. That’s part of why I found the idea of everyone getting tried in a court of law as a white man hilarious but depressing at the same time.
VLV: Tobias let that one play out like a such a gangster, I felt. Acknowledging the imbalance of the system and then showing how someone might be compelled to use it. It reminded me of a novel that came out recently, We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. There’s a lot of potency in the idea of “passing” and how or why some of us do it. Some to blend in and enjoy the benefits of a corrupt system, but also sometimes to sneak in and smash the machine from the inside.
TO: Early on there are, I think, two stories prominently featuring libraries or bookstores, stories in which havens for books also very literally become havens for people. Could you talk about what stories in general can do for us, not only in this time, but whenever we’ve, historically, been kept under an oppressive yolk?
VLV: Stories are old technology. They bypass so many of our natural defenses. If human beings are naturally pack animals, then it can be difficult to get around that programming. There have been more than enough studies that show people don’t change their minds based on facts. The emotional impulse is just too strong. But stories, the good ones, can get around this problem by making a reader care about people who don’t look or act or live anything like them. It’s wondrous when it works. Few things do it as well.
Good stories can change people’s minds by making a reader care about people who don’t look or act or live anything like them.
TO: In Sam J. Miller’s story, resistance isn’t only marching and sit-ins and civil disobedience. It’s sex too. “I wanted to tell him that desire was not a distraction. Not something separate from the way we want freedom.” It was really poignant to see that in a story too where “Talking Politics with people” is seen as generally ineffective in bringing about change. Is pleasure an act of revolution?
VLV: I loved that aspect of Sam’s story. The story revels in the sex, the pleasure of it, and allows for a broad range of pleasures for our protagonist to enjoy. It felt genuinely revelatory that the character wasn’t punished for his pleasure, even more so as a gay protagonist. This country loves to crack the whip [on] people, and not in a fun way. That’s part of what makes the story such a great read. Pleasure can be an act of revolution, joy and optimism, too.
TO: In Omar El Akkad’s haunting story, “Riverbed,” you have these twin harbingers of change: climate catastrophe and immigration. It always seems as though it’s never just one thing at a time. Change is all these things braided together and it can seem like the fight for justice in the midst of backlash can feel like trying to outlast a siege more than anything else.
VLV: That story is one of the most haunting in the book. The retrospective nature of the piece only makes it more so. To learn of the horrors the narrator’s brother suffers in the past is to be placed into the same condition as the protagonist. Wishing one could do more, wishing it was still possible to save the one you love (and the planet you love) and having to reckon with the fact that you can’t.
How could any thoughtful take on the future pretend that we all have our shit together all the time?
TO: Even in what seemed like the kindest, most ostensibly hopeful story, there’s a thread of sadness. I’m thinking Seanan McGuire’s “Harmony,” where she writes: “[t]olerance could be legislated, could be demanded, but it couldn’t be guaranteed.” You can regulate behavior, make it easier for oppressed peoples to vote, to own homes, but the bigotry’s like sand in a jar full of stones. Always manages to fill the space. Is this part of the dystopia?
VLV: Well that’s the one-two punch of legislation, right? Someone’s got to pass the law, but then someone has to enforce it. The argument for state’s rights regularly falls into this sandpit. I get the desire for people to legislate themselves because they know their own locale best, but it’s amazing to me how often that local legislation decides the best way to govern is to put a boot on the throat of the most vulnerable. And with no federal oversight, who’s going to stop you? (And, of course, in the history of this nation, even when there is federal oversight you usually won’t be stopped.)
TO: Alice Sola Kim’s story, “Now Wait For This Week,” knocked me on my ass. The claustrophobia and the almost ever-present proximity to traumatic triggers. Women trapped in industries and professions with the men who harmed them, and it’s so eloquently married to the science-fictional conceit here. What struck me too was the sheer immediacy of it. The story could’ve taken place this year or last. This sort of hyperrealist depiction of our present or near-past feels just as science-fictional as anything else in this collection.
VLV: Yep, that joint is a killer. It seemed like a great way to end the book because it did bring us back to the present so clearly. In the span of the anthology you might go into the near or far future, you might enter a world filled with dragons, but at the end we wanted the reader to feel the real-world immediacy of the book. Alice’s story is happening, right now. Has been. Will be.
TO: It made me chuckle morbidly when Bonnie’s telling her parents about the horrible things that will happen this week—scandals, school shootings—and her parents are just like “um that’s all normal stuff we expect to happen based on existing data.”
VLV: There’s a great, grim sense of humor in that story. And not just there. I’ve been so happy to see how many of the stories have affected people deeply. I also hope that if they give the pieces second and third reads, they’ll see the ways these stories also make room for humor, wackiness, the mundane. All of that is part of the future, too.
One thing that seems true is that horror does best under Republican presidents.
TO: Around the time that Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo got their non-indictments for the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner respectively, I heard a lot of talk—very mercenary—about how much good art was going to come out of that time, and it messed me up that these horrible things happen and some folks’ first thought is “wow, we’re gonna get a dope book out of this” or “Kendrick’s next album is gonna be flames.” At the same time, this art can and does provide solace in a world that doesn’t seem organized out of love for us. Could you speak to that tension?
VLV: I grew up as a horror head, books and movies. And one thing that seems true is that horror does best under Republican presidents. It can be fun to go back and track when the most sustained and lasting horror was produced, you’ll see it was under Reagan and Bush and Bush II and now, unfortunately, Trump. The same may be true for fantasy and scifi. Everyone is anxious and scared. The more conservative personality is, almost by definition, fear-based. And the liberal end is fearful because of who is running things. It’s a perfect combination for digging deep into our anxieties. Still, I would’ve much preferred Hillary and less good art.
TO: At your event at the New York Public Library, you asked “How do you wrestle with a thing you just. Can’t. Defeat?” I think about that so much. In fiction, in life. It’s Moses dying before reaching the Promised Land. Dr. King being murdered before seeing the more perfect union he envisioned. You don’t just whoop the Devil’s ass once. You gotta get up tomorrow morning and do it all over again. Sometimes it’s the Devil that whoops you. Is it “giving up” to fight knowing you won’t “win?” Whatever we take “win” to mean?
VLV: Few of the stories in the book are about a fight being won and the war coming to its end. Instead, most of the stories are about the triumph that comes from continuing to exist. That can seem like a small victory, but only if you’re the type of people who take “mere” existence for granted. I certainly don’t. And really, I’m baffled by any person, group, or civilization who takes their permanent dominance for granted. They’re the same people who believe this planet will sustain [us] for as long as we live, but they only think that way because they’re likely to die sooner than the rest of us. All there is in this life is fighting the Devil, and sometimes getting to rest long enough to embrace the ones you love. Here’s to the fight, but also to the love.
The theme of education—spiritual journeys, individual enlightenment—pervades much of the literary canon across cultures. Reading the narrative of a protagonist’s heuristic odyssey can open the eyes of the reader as it relates to their own life. Bildungsroman novels allow us to look at our own morals and dispositions, and consider the places in which we can grow. As the hero grows and learns, we grow and learn with them. This is true of novels about sexual exploration. A history of censorship has turned sex into a subject matter only disclosed behind closed doors (or during a 45 minute class in middle school), making it difficult to be comfortable with our bodies and the pleasures for which it lusts. But this prohibition only makes the conversation more relevant.
Written with sincerity and vulnerability, these seven books share the stories, both fictional and non-fictional, of sexual exploration. The characters give us insight into our own journeys; as they learn about their own sexual appetite and biological urges, we make discoveries of our own.
In Open Me, high school graduate Roxana, consumed with wanderlust and an awakening sexuality, goes on a study abroad trip to Denmark. Her adventure begins when she meets a beguiling Danish PhD student who woos her and whisks her away to stay with him in a remote town, where he tells her that he has only one key and she cannot leave the apartment while he is out working. Finding herself locked away in a stranger’s apartment in a foreign town, Roxana defies the “princess locked in a tower” trope. Rather than wasting away her time, dreaming of her prince or brushing her long golden locks, she takes the opportunity to explore the intricacies of her body, reflecting on her previous and current sexual experiences, to learn about her desires. Locascio writes about sex (and masturbation) with a vivid realism that no male writer could ever achieve.
For this hydro-erotic story, Melissa Broder pulls from her own insecurities and idiosyncrasies relating to sex. According to The New Yorker, Broder “could only orgasm when she imagined people vomiting” during her developing years. With the same vulnerability she uses to tell the public about her own sexual pleasures, she develops a protagonist willing to succumb to a lust for marine carnality. An addict to the feeling of being desired and adored, Lucy recognizes the same need in her partner, whose quasi-merman body has made him believe he will never receive love.
Sexual exploration and education goes far beyond adolescence and even young adulthood, it can exist even within the boundaries of a permanent relationship, even within the time honored tradition of marriage. With the changing of bodies and situations, with lives in constant flux, growth can be incessant. When the married couple in Sarah Dunn’s novel recognize this, they make a sincere effort to progress rather than stay in place. The Arrangement tells the story of an open marriage between Owen and Lucy, in their attempt to reclaim their marriage while simultaneously sanctioning one another’s implicit sexual desires. The Arrangement plays with the periphery of what has been long considered, in many parts of the world, the conventional way to live a life alongside one monogamous partner.
Using lyrical prose that bewitches from the first page and poignant references from philosophers, pediatricians, and writers, Nelson writes about her life with a nonbinary partner. Nelson’s style, which vacillates between poetry, theory, and memoir, offers the reader a sincere look into what it means for her to love, and lust after, someone who does not fall within the confines of the binary social construction of gender.
Educating yourself on sex and lust is one thing, educating your children is entirely another thing. In Emma Straub’s novel, set in modern day Brooklyn, two families simultaneously explore what it means to be in a relationship, whether it’s a lifelong connection or a newly flourishing one. While Jane, Zoe, Elizabeth and Andrew struggle with their own relationships after the death of a mutual college friend and bandmate, their respective children begin a fling. The juxtaposition of experienced and inexperienced, old and new, offers an interesting perspective on the development of sex and love—of growth from the one into the other.
One of the first English novels about someone changing gender begins with, “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex…” Long before the public acknowledgement of gender fluidity, Woolf weaves the tale of a woman born in a man’s body—or a man who becomes a woman. Orlando lives hundreds of years, is exposed to centuries of chauvinism, and encounters the mistreatment of the female’s body from the perspective of a person who has lived on the other side of the coin. Orlando illuminates the brutal history of gender politics while recounting the experience of a person who lusts after both men and women.
Lusting after a person can inspire a passion for creation. Edna, a married woman, learns this when her appetite for sex is aroused by a neighbor at the boarding houses on Grand Isle where she is staying for the summer. When autumn sets in and Robert—her muse—is gone, Edna continues her fervency. Now, the object of her fervor is no longer a man, but art. Her romance with Robert catalyzes a desire to create beauty. Edna rides on the high of that inspiration, forgoing the social norms of women of the time to zealously chase after the feeling of bringing something beautiful into existence. A feeling not unlike creating a bond between another person where before there was only unfamiliarity.
Sexual exploration can be as painful as it can be pleasurable. Simone de Beauvoir, a cited expert on the condition of human suffering and the subjugation of women, wrote this novel loosely based on her relationship with Jean Paul Sartre. She Came to Stay follows the story of Françoise and Pierre as they invite a third person into their lives. Through these three characters, de Beauvoir examines the inherent paradox of love and desire; how can we feel the freedom of individuality that love promises us when we depend on the other to give it to us? As per the deep-rooted existentialism that pervades all of her texts, She Came to Stay is an investigation into meaning through the magnificence and monstrousness of sex and love.
Who needs an introduction to Ann Beattie? The writer is an icon. Since the 1970s she has been publishing stories and novels we’ve marveled at, for their wit, intelligence, and their wry, affectless treatment of contemporary people navigating the messes of their contemporary lives. When I mentioned to a friend I was interviewing her for Electric Lit, my friend swooned. “Have you read Chilly Scenes of Winter? Chilly Scenes of Winter is amazing. I love Chilly Scenes of Winter.”
That classic novella was published in 1976, years before my friend and I were born, but since then Beattie’s place in the American canon has been firmly established. Which has not protected her, by the way, from bad reviews. In 1998 she was accused in the New York Times of “irritating moral passivity” (the sort of a accusation that reveals more, I think, about the critic than it does about the fiction writer). In 2011 Beattie’s novel Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life was widely declaimed for its meandering storyline and its bravado.
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Beattie’s newest novel A Wonderful Stroke of Luck feels somewhat plotless, too, but I found its twists and shadows full of secrets and surprises (so to speak). What makes Beattie’s work so interesting, to me, is its resistance to conventional, formal narrative structure. Its artistry is in its wit and its humanity, its remarkable formal verisimilitude.
In 1983 Beattie was quoted in an unpublished interview for the Paris Review as saying, “I can’t help it if people make the mistake of thinking that I am a prophet and that I am disguising my wisdom as short fiction that’s published in The New Yorker.” Reading this book I kept thinking, What does it say about me, as a reader, that I am searching for hidden meaning in this narrative?
A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is best described, I think, as a novel-length character study. The narrative chiefly follows its protagonist Ben, from his late teenage years in the late 1990s at the fictional boarding school Bailey Academy (“that fancy school where everybody played to everybody else, so you came out thinking the whole world wanted to be your audience”) through his mid-30s in a New York exurb (“life on the lam as a reverse-snobbery style statement”). The voice is talky, funny, omniscient, and inconsistent. It dips in and out of different characters’ points of view in a jazzy, virtuosic free indirect discourse, occasionally informing us of things they cannot know. Every character, however tertiary, has his own thoughts, sense of humor, manner of speech, and opinions, “his own constant personal debate.” The story of Ben’s life is thus interrupted—often, incidentally, and delightfully—by brief, sharply observed forays into the lives of the characters around him, among them many of his boarding school cohort, his stepmother, his sister, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, his eventual neighbors, and—most oppressively—his teacher Pierre LaVerdere, who heads up the Bailey Academy honors society, LaVerdere’s Leading Lights, and who remains a (sometimes unwelcome) touchstone well into Ben’s adult life. A Wonderful Stroke Of Luck left me feeling as if I’d expanded my circle of real life acquaintances.
Especially because, coincidentally, their circumstances are familiar to me. I myself am just one year older than Beattie’s fictional characters. LaVerdere’s protégés are high school seniors when the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. That day, I was in my first week of college, fresh out of a small private school as self-consciously liberal and intellectually dizzying as Bailey. So it was rather an out-of-body experience for me to read this wry, rambling account of the coming-of-age of my own microgeneration. I found myself frequently startled by the accuracy, perceptiveness, specificity, and humor of Beattie’s observations. I looked forward not just professionally, but personally, to asking her all about it.
Rachel Lyon: LaVerdere’s Leading Lights strikes me as a kind of alternate universe Dead Poets Society, Pierre LaVerdere playing the dark twin of Robin Williams’s character in the film. Where Williams’s John Keating is earnest, honest, inspiring, and dedicated to waking up his handsome young students, Pierre LaVerdere is perverse, opportunistic, given to prevarication, solipsistic yet bored by himself, often disappointing—and disappointed in them. When he admits he attempted and failed to write a book—a “humbling experience” (“I really did assume I had a book in me,” he says, “but then I thought: Why think in those terms? …What’s so great about an imaginary, internal book?”)
I found myself dying to know: what does Ann Beattie think of LaVerdere?
Ann Beattie: I love that description of him as the dark twin. I think LaVerdere remains something of an enigma, though as you observe him through time, you get more information. The LaVerdere we first meet is really Ben’s LaVerdere – and Ben has something invested in how he thinks of him. Ben has a limited point of view, as well as his own limited perceptions. He’s young, defended, conflicted, and–no different than his teacher–he projects. I should also say that I cringed when LaVerdere made his spur-of-the-moment visit to Ben, because I really didn’t know what would happen.
RL: Your scenes of LaVerdere’s heady classroom discussions, in the months and years just before 9/11 reflect a degree of creative and philosophical freedom that I feel I remember, and that in retrospect seems luxurious, even indulgent. As the novel goes on, however, we watch Ben and his peers come of age in a country that took a hard right in the ensuing years. They struggle to outgrow their education, attempting to unlearn what they were taught at Bailey. (“All those years in the debate club, along with all the years afterward trying to forget what he’d learned so he could talk like a human being again.”) We watch Ben grow up, intellectually, before our eyes:
Metaphor. It was insidious. You had to ignore that way of thinking, the same way you had to understand that your dreams contained straw men rather than real omens, the way you were obliged to admit your neurotic fears lacked legitimacy. Strangely, to admit you lacked intuition, that you realized symbolic stories were inert, that you had no special abilities, no second senses to go on, meant that you had achieved a sense of power.
The book engages, as Ben does, in a sort of relentless breaking down of abstraction. When Ben finds himself still in possession of his friend’s father’s beret, which has held some significance for him over the years, he finds that naming it—referring to it first as a souvenir and then, “more bluntly,” as just a hat—renders it powerless. LaVerdere is demoted in the course of a paragraph from the devil himself to “a sad approximation, a devil in a diorama,” Ben’s high school crush from “an enigma” to “only hard, hard and self-protective.” You write, “Men’s actions had little to do with language and metaphor, and everything to do with testosterone and cortisol.”
Tell me about the power to be found in resisting metaphor and symbolism.
All literary devices that writers invoke effectively can be hugely revealing, at the same time they also add another layer of veneer.
AB:That’s a complex question that seems to ask more than just what I feel about a couple of literary devices! I appreciate your reading the book so closely and for seeing that one of the questions of the book is about power. Flannery O’Connor says (I agree), that symbolism isn’t something you superimpose, though I think what it’s an outgrowth of–-whether, say, we’re talking about a plant shallowly rooted (descriptive; not a value judgment), or one with a long taproot–-is important to consider.
Let me try another answer: The narrative voice adheres closely, here, to Ben’s thoughts – that’s how the reader learns what Ben has concluded. I think that word “concluded” is important because these statements are obviously not where the book concludes. In every case, with or without such revelations, Ben goes right on. I hope there’s something visceral and also painful about such sweeping assertions as the ones you point out — that they’re emphatic enough to get the reader’s attention, but that they also make the reader ask, “Really?” I can’t help noticing that with these declarations, Ben’s like LaVerdere in his cynicism and his way of seeming to have everything figured out. Last response: all literary devices that writers invoke effectively can be hugely revealing, at the same time they also add another layer of veneer.
RL: The painting The Peaceable Kingdomappears and reappears in the book—on its cover, of course, and in its pages too. In one oblique reference, the painting is unconsciously channelled by a character whose mother, an eccentric zookeeper, used to dress in animal costumes: “She sat at the kitchen table and verbalized the animals’ thoughts into a Dictaphone, using a variety of voices. She believed she could read their minds.” What attracted you to this painting, and how do you understand its role in the book?
AB: I didn’t know what the cover would be. I wanted to conjure up a painting familiar enough that many readers would immediately have a sense of it (perhaps I should have caved and used Jeff Koons?) – and also, something LaVerdere would really be pained to have to talk about. That short chapter speaks to a serious concern in the novel, but it’s also played for laughs. My husband’s a painter, so we enjoyed poking fun of such ridiculous talk about art. Also, in general, I tried to get a vibration going in the novel between the natural world (I have to agree with LaVerdere: this painting’s idealized–-though that’s hardly the point), and the lives we’ve constructed as we live apart from nature, which is a concern of Ben’s when he leaves the city. That dichotomy’s everywhere in the book.
RL:Ben makes a useful protagonist because he’s a natural observer; in fact, he seems to experience himself almost exclusively through his observations of the people around him. When he’s feeling uncomfortably vulnerable in a strange rendezvous-a-trois with his confrontational girlfriend and humorless sister, his attention turns to a child nearby, “a little boy in his overalls, bib and forearms streaked with ketchup.” Avoiding his feelings after an upsetting encounter with an ex, he wanders a CVS and witnesses a young woman shoplifting a bag of candy. Indeed he only recognizes his own anxiety when he reads about it in a magazine:
How strange that it took him some time to figure out that he was experiencing claustrophobia. …He read with interest pieces in New York magazine about people his age, or just a bit older, who’d decided to set up camp outside New York City. He admitted… that he felt restless, as if he’d been captured. Saying that word had surprised him, because it was the first time he’d put a name on his anxiety.
How would you characterize Ben, and the way he changes over the course of the book? Does his transformation reflect, in your mind, a broader, post-9/11, intellectual and emotional shift, among the privileged population he belongs to?
AB: He’s a natural observer, but there’s only so much you can learn by observation. Maybe he overly relies on this navigational tool. What exists apart from his vision-–apart from his knowing–-turns out to be crucial information.
RL: The title of the book is contextualized by its epigraph, from the Dalai Lama: “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” I puzzled over this for a while, because Ben seems neither to want anything very badly, on a conscious level, nor to be particularly “lucky,” whatever that means.
But in maybe my favorite passage, adult Ben thinks of LaVerdere after reading an essay by Flannery O’Connor:
It was one LaVerdere had particularly admired (for a long time, Ben had thought Flannery O’Connor was a man)—something to the effect that when writers succeed, it’s because their conscious mind, alone, hasn’t been the most significant factor. To the extent that LaVerdere could be called mystical (he wouldn’t have liked that word), he did seem to believe, as O’Connor did, that there were enormous realms—pre-existing realms, like as-yet-unseen galaxies—that contextualized for you. That was why writers were so often quoted as being paradoxically relieved to be surprised.
I am guessing this refers to O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” is that right? (Which, incidentally, opens with her remark—thematically relevant here!—that hearing different writers’ opine on the craft of writing is something like “having the zoo come to you, one animal at a time; and I suspect that what you hear one week from the giraffe is contradicted the next week by the baboon.”) I wonder if you see a connection between the epigraph and the passage above, something about the unknowability of the self. What is the value—comedic, creative, or otherwise—in not understanding ourselves—for fictional characters and for the writers who create them?
AB:I’ve read Mystery andManners many times, though I didn’t remember that. It’s just wonderful. As in: a wonderful stroke of luck that animals figure explicitly in my novel – though I can’t pretend I was alluding to that.
Yes, I had in mind “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” including, “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it, and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene.” LaVerdere also speaks loosely, though. Among many other things, he’s a bullshitter – so what he says often has different layers of meaning.
In partial answer to the last part of your question, let me recommend Missing Out, by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: “we can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us.” My friend Susan Wood asked me to go with her to hear Adam Phillips talk with Paul Holdengraber years ago at the Miami Book Fair, and he was brilliant, I was riveted, but only now have I finished this fascinating book.
In Nigeria, romance has always been a popular medium for storytelling across all artforms. The first of the three parts of my novel, Prince of Monkeys, involves a budding love between the narrator, Ihechi, and the free spirited Zeenat, a relationship that is steered by Zeenat’s brazen personality and which eventually thrives despite Ihechi’s boyish shyness. But Ihechi’s innocence is quickly sacrificed at the altar of ambition when he develops a transactional relationship with Madame Messalina, a prostitution and political queenpin.
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Toxic relationships often go beyond romance. Toxicity could stem from individual differences—whether cultural, economic, political or religious—that yield bitterness, envy, distrust or spite between friends and family. This is the primary theme of my novel, partly drawn from personal experiences, where the biases of backgrounds and loyalties to later associations threaten friendships as individuals within a tight-knit group come of age.
The portrayal of toxic conflict in relationships fascinates me because it asks questions beyond what people can achieve for love, hate, fear, grief or any other emotion. It queries further, asking what people can achieve in spite of these emotions.
To shed a bit more light on the theme, I composed a reading list of my favorite Nigerian books which contain stories of toxic relationships. Some of the protagonists stand against toxic relationships, some use it as a stepping stone to further personal aspirations, others are crushed by its oppressive weight, and some choose to simply navigate through it like water around rocks.
Before encountering Adichie’s work in 2005 when my mother stocked the very first editions of Purple Hibiscus in her Enugu bookstore, there were not too many writers I could read and relate to. Soyinka, Achebe, Emecheta and other pillars of the Nigerian literary canon were not writing about my era, and so, in my mind, being a writer was something for the wisdom and sacredness of old age. Purple Hibiscus destroyed that narrative.
The violently abusive nature of Eugene Achike, Kambili’s father, has become one of the novel’s most critical talking points and hardly needs more belaboring. Less discussed is the overly tender relationship between a fifteen-year-old Kambili and Father Amadi, a Catholic priest at her aunt’s church. They have seemingly pure-hearted interactions, though they harbor feelings for one another. I have spent a fair amount of my life arguing that the problematic nature of such a relationship, considering the age and maturity dynamics at play, is shrouded beneath, and eventually tolerated by most due to, the childishly innocent perspective of the teenage narrator.
The strength of this novel is not necessarily its plot but the journey and gradual evolution of Enitan Taiwo, the central figure to the story, over 25 years. During this time, her relationships reshape her. She grapples with her mother’s unfolding as a cynical religious zealot following the premature death of her brother. Then she struggles to maintain a marriage that forces her to choose sides between her relationship and her politics, and she is also burdened by general distrust for men rooted in the trauma of witnessing the sexual abuse of her childhood best friend, Sheri. Despite the story being told in Enitan’s voice, Sheri is undoubtedly its heroine. Enitan often feels the need to compromise while Sheri is unrelenting in her resolve to defy the status quo and to demand more from fate than she has been dealt. Their enduring friendship is the redeeming narrative in a tale where all other relationships seem to bring more harm than good.
Published in 1966 as part of the African Writers Series created by Heinemann to provide a platform for postcolonial era African writers to tell their own narratives, Elechi Amadi’s debut novel is an undisputed classic. Long after reading The Concubine, I realised that the fact that its protagonist, Ihuoma, is one of the most cherished characters in Nigerian literature is a major indictment on how we as a people have an endearment towards suffering which goes beyond, and should not be confused with, empathy. While Ihuoma is beautiful and beloved by her entire community, especially for her graciousness in widowhood, she endures suffering—at the hands of people in her village, their traditions and, ultimately, the sea god—for love. It is easier to simply root for her than to confront the precarious reality of a cultural system where women are often powerless victims in their own fate, for the sake of male ego, tradition and the whims of the gods.
Another product of the African Writers Series, Efuru is the first published novel by a Nigerian woman and a staple of the African feminist canon. Set in the same period and Igbo society as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, it is not as famous and critically reviewed as Achebe’s work but it is arguably just as good and definitely as relevant. Its title character is beautiful and charming yet a perpetual victim of the machinations of the society she lives. Efuru survives two emotionally abusive marriages where she struggles with philandering spouses, self serving in-laws, child loss, and persecution for her inability to bear more children. But through it all, Efuru remains steadfastly loyal to herself, captured best when she says, “Perhaps self-imposed suffering appeals to her. It does not appeal to me. I know I am capable of suffering for greater things. But to suffer for a truant husband, an irresponsible husband like Adizua is to debase suffering. My own suffering will be noble.”
Ekwensi’s third novel is yet another postcolonial era narrative from the African Writers Series. Like my novel, Ekwensi’s noir fiction delves into Lagos as if it were a person of its own; worthy of character development, strengths, flaws, and interaction with other humans, of which the most relevant is Jagua Nana, a sex worker whose liberty and aspirations fuel her battle with political and class systems rigged against those who need it most. While good natured, her relationships are almost always transactional and, while justifiable and critical to her survival, they are eventually unsustainable. Also similar to my novel is Ekwensi’s representation of sex workers as worthy of respect, responsible for their own fate and wholly capable of masterminding grand aspirations. The major difference being he wrote this over fifty years ago, when such ideals were more scandalous to suggest.
Unlike Jagua Nana, John’s debut novel tells of a part of Nigeria more entrenched in poverty and religious fundamentalism. His protagonist, Dantala, is more impressionable and probing than self assured and scheming. Dantala is also not as successful in battling the odds against him, but he is as adept at survival. Born on a Tuesday is an exploration of how people are made malleable in the heated forge of religion and propaganda, how self discovery is often less about the self but more about the friendships we keep and the leaders that guide us and, in a society steeped in stereotypes, how our choice of association is very easily the difference between life and death.
If the world was coming to an end and I had to preserve a single book to give whoever came after a glimpse into Nigerian life, I would recommend The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives at every chance. With its Nollywood-type plot twists and layered characters that use humor to bulldoze through each of their ordeals in a quintessentially Nigerian way, the novel captures our methods and mannerisms better than most. It also explores themes that are still fiercely debated everywhere from our beer parlors to our Twitter feeds: class systems and the divisive perceptions they perpetuate, family relationships across generations and the reduction of womanhood to gender roles. The book spotlights how we have grown accustomed to simply navigating, instead of combating, this toxicity in our personal lives. In a polygamous household of four wives and seven children, everyone is bound to be a victim. However, the family unit is held together by a common purpose—upholding lies and a grand secret—which is ultimately undone by jealous scheming and a twist of fate.
“Barney Rosset was a freak. He was a big, crazy freak who took everyone down with him. He was a nut. He was a radical. He was abusive. He was passionate.” So says Ira Silverberg, then-editor of Grove Press, in the opening moments of the documentary Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press before giving the filmits working thesis: “He really was the last maverick in American publishing.” Daniel O’Connor and Neil Ortenberg’s rather amateur-looking documentary, made in 2007 but screened last month at the Brooklyn Public Library’s LitFilm series, purports to tell the story of that “last maverick”—a bastion of a lost, freer literary world. But by the time the film ended, I realized that the shock value Obscene and Rosset traffic in was a juvenile provocation.
Here was a glowing portrait of one of those “bad boys” of publishing who’d changed the world, and what was he being lauded for? Union-busting his own company, firing self-described feminists who challenged his editorial eye, and making a career out of blurring the line (both legal and cultural) between pornography and literature. The documentary and its subject emerge as symptoms of a broader industry that remains wilfully blind to its own toxicity, beholden to a vision of success that imagines, as Ruoxi Chen put it recently, “iconoclastic (difficult) male authors creating art alongside dashing male editors with generous expense accounts and a certain panache.” This unvarnished look at Rosset merely does away with any pretense. He’s the kind of guy publishing has always lionized, in spite of his faults—or more accurately, because of them.
He’s the kind of guy publishing has always lionized, in spite of his faults—or more accurately, because of them.
Soon after Silverberg ends his fawning words on Rosset the film, without a hint of irony, cuts to footage of a 1989 interview with Rosset in a TV show called Midnight Blue. We first see its host, Al Goldstein (bushy beard, slightly overweight), wearing sunglasses, a printed black tee, and a hunting vest, with a shotgun in one hand and a fishing rod on the other, dancing. There’s two of him, the result of one of those cheap mirrored visual effects that were all the rage in the ‘80s. Cut to: a pair of breasts. Then a graphic (“Al Goldstein’s Fuck You Department”) overlaid over Goldstein giving us the finger, followed by images of Goldstein again flipping us the bird (with an American flag behind him, of course) as he yells, “Fuck you!” Then another stripper showing off her boobs. That’s when we’re told Goldstein will be sitting and interviewing Rosset. Did I mention the logo for this show that ran from 1974 to 2003 features a naked woman whose Uncle Sam costume has been ripped off riding a dick-shaped rocket Dr. Strangelove-style? Presented within the first 10 minutes of Obscene, Midnight Blue is as cringe-worthy as you’d imagine. (You’re welcome to check it for yourself as the O’Connor and Ortenberg doc is freely available on Kanopy.) The clip made me, and several other people in the audience at the screening, laugh out loud, but just in an awkward, what-the-fuck kind of way.
Rosset’s appearance on Midnight Blue makes sense given the persona he’d long nurtured. He was “crazy,” yes. But that craziness (not to mention his privilege) was always leveraged to advance irreverent propositions. He and Grove Press, after all, were the ones who took on the fight against censorship by daring to publish D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and succeeded in getting court rulings that slowly dismantled a system that had denied Americans the chance to read these titillating titles. Those legal fights are at the center of Obscene, but it’s also quite clear that O’Connor and Ortenberg are more interested in the man behind the cases. Interviews with the then-85-year-old Rosset are full of wistful reminisces that all but airbrush his more controversial decisions. Even those who knew him go out of their way to sidestep behavior that’s long been glorified but which should give anyone else pause. Richard Seaver, another then-Grove Press editor casually mentions that Rosset had a habit of spending his nights drinking and waltzing into the office straight from a bar. “That’s the Irish part. The Irish love to drink, they love bars,” he adds as both explanation and excuse. It’s one of the early signs that Obscene really thinks Rosset’s bad boy antics were integral to his persona, his success, and his legacy.
Rosset was, and perhaps remains, a god to many young men precisely because he could go on a show like Midnight Blue, where he was hailed as a legend—despite having driven Grove Press almost into the ground and eventually been forced to sell—while being asked whether he thought S&M got a bad rap for being inherently “anti-feminine.” What was intended as slyly shocking in 1989 — two men discussing whether specific strands of mainstream pornography were indeed anti-women — is all the more rankling in 2019. Especially as you then learn Rosset’s office at Grove could only be accessed by his private elevator, and that a young female employee once arrived at his door at 10 in the morning for a meeting she’d arranged, only to find him sipping wine and reading the weekly porn tabloid Screw.
Around that point in the documentary, I realized that Obscene fails as hagiography (clearly its intent) because it can’t smooth over its subject’s shortcomings; the filmmakers don’t recognize Rosset’s more unseemly characteristics as shortcomings at all. His flaws are never hidden or minimized, because they’re seen as necessary aspects of what him such a force within publishing. For starters, the doc doesn’t even attempt to hide its bias when it comes to covering the 1970 protest that had been prompted by the dismissal of eight Grove Press employees (six of them women, as the New York Times reported at the time) who’d been pushing for the formation of a union. “Grove Press won’t let women be anything but secretaries, scrub women, and sex symbols,” Emily Goodman, a lawyer for the women’s liberation group, told the New York Times. Footage from interviews with the protesters are framed by Rosset, who eventually claims those union-organizing women led to the downfall of Grove under his leadership. To hear Rosset tell the story in the film, he was the target of a bunch of angry feminists who couldn’t see, as he did, that there was liberation in the erotic. “In my opinion, they were also FBI agents,” he says with a straight face to Goldstein.
Obscene presents all these various tidbits as badges of honor. Look at this guy! the documentary suggests, Wasn’t he a total badass? He drank at work! His publishing instinct was to go after stuff that turned him on! He even shut down an attempt to form a union at Grove Press! Who wouldn’t be impressed and inspired by such a “maverick”? And that’s the most depressing part of Obscene: a lot of people still would. After all, Rosset is a walking archetype of those “bad boys” popular culture in general, and the publishing industry in particular, insists are to be fawned over and idolized. The ones whose misogyny is often seen as a byproduct of their own narcissistic drive. The ones who excuse their reckless behavior as necessary collateral to their ambition. The Lorin Steins who continue to play gatekeeper. The Dan Mallorys who ride their “charm” all the way to the top. The Don Drapers of the world whom we’re constantly encouraged to see as the heroes of their own stories—whose troubled lives, we’re told, are what make them such geniuses. (Fun fact: Don Draper actually brags in Mad Men about seeing the Rosset-distributed film I Am Curious (Yellow), which famously featured a scene where a young woman kisses a limp penis.)
Rosset is a walking archetype of those ‘bad boys’ the publishing industry insists are to be fawned over and idolized.
As the credits rolled, featuring a list of the esteemed writers Grove Press had published under Rosset, I started keeping a mental list of how many were women. I needed only one hand: out of 27 names listed, 24 were men. And I was being encouraged to see that as progress, as proof of how forward-thinking Grove Press and Rosset had been. Which is, perhaps, as insidious an indictment of the publishing industry writ large as one could find.
To watch Obscene in 2019 is to reckon with hitherto unexamined biases that come to light whenever an icon of years gone by is being rehabilitated. Should his successes overshadow his shortcomings? Should his attitude be exalted when it had a hand in both? What would it mean to critically acknowledge that seismic changes in the publishing industry went hand in hand with toxic work environments and “crazy freaks” who took everyone down with them? These are questions the documentary doesn’t quite set out to answer, but they should linger in contemporary audiences who are only now beginning to see what kind of structures Rosset and his ilk kept in place while tearing down others in the name of iconoclasm. While I’ll always treasure the fact that Neruda and Paz and Rechy and Beckett and others found a fearless publishing house to print their works in the U.S. I will happily dispense with the notion that only someone like Rosset, “a big crazy freak,” could’ve made that happen. We should demand more of our idols. But also of ourselves.
They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.
—Leonard Michaels, “In the Fifties”
They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose—and liked it. And would rather do that than go to a movie or have dinner with a friend. They knew me as one who came two nights a week, who came at four and stayed till after ten, and knew it was not enough, because there was no such thing as enough at the animal shelter in Spanish Harlem that was run by the city, which kept cutting the funds.
They knew us as the ones who checked the day’s euth list for the names of the dogs scheduled to be killed the next morning, who came to take the death-row dogs, who were mostly pit bulls, for a last long walk, brought them good dinners, cleaned out their kennels, and made their beds with beach towels and bath mats and Scooby-Doo fleece blankets still warm from industrial dryers. They knew me as one who made their beds less neatly over the course of a difficult evening, who thought of the artist whose young daughter came to visit his studio, pointed to the painting she liked, and asked, “Why didn’t you make them all good?”
They knew us as the ones who put pigs’ ears on their pillows, like chocolates in a good hotel. They knew us as vocal vegetarians who brought them cooked meat—roast turkey, rare roast beef, and honey-glazed ham—to top off the canned food we supplied, which was still better than what they were fed there. They knew us as the ones who fed them when they were awake, instead of waking them at 2:00 a.m. for feeding, the way the overnight staff had been ordered by a director who felt they did not have enough to do.
They knew me as one who spoke no Spanish, who could say only “Sí, sí” when someone said about a dog I was walking, “Que lindo!” And when a thuggish guy approached too fast, then said, “That’s a handsome dude,” look how we exploded another stereotype in a neighborhood recovering from itself.
They knew us as the ones who had no time for the argument that caring about animals means you don’t also care about people; one of us did! Evelyne, a pediatrician who treated abused children.
They knew us as the ones who got tetanus shots and rabies shots—the latter still a series but no longer in the stomach— and who closed the bites and gashes on our arms with Krazy Glue—not the medical grade, but the kind you find at hardware stores, instead of going for stitches to the ER, where we would have had to report the dog, who would then be put to death.
They knew us as the ones who argued the names assigned at intake, saying, “Who will adopt a dog named Nixon?” And when Nixon’s name was changed—changed to Dahmer—we ragged on them again, then just let it go when the final name assigned was O.G., Original Gangster. There was always a “Baby” on one of the wards so that staff could write on the kennel card, “No one puts Baby in the corner,” and they finally stopped using “Precious” after a senior kennel worker said of a noble, aged rottie, “I fucking hate this name, but this is a good dog.” (Though often they got it right; they named the cowboy-colored pocket pit who thought he was a big stud Man Man.)
They knew me as one who did not bother wearing latex gloves or gauzy scrubs to handle the dogs in the sick ward, who wore gloves only when a dog had swallowed his rabies tag, and I had to feel for it in feces. They knew me as one who gave a pit bull a rawhide chew stick swirled in peanut butter, then, after he spit it up and wanted it back, cleaned it off and gave it to him so he could have . . . closure.
They knew us as the ones who put our fingers in mouths to retrieve a watch, a cell phone, a red bicycle reflector that a dog
sucked on like a lozenge. They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose, who scoured metal walls and perforated metal floors with Trifectant, the syrupy, yellow chemical wash that foamed into the mess, and then towel-dried the kennel and liked the tangible improvement—like mowing a lawn or ironing a shirt—that reduced their anxiety by even that much.
They knew me as one who, early on, went to tell a vet tech the good news that three dogs had been rescued from that morning’s list of twelve, to which the tech said, “That blows—I already filled twelve syringes.”
They knew us as the ones who repeatedly thanked the other vet tech, the one who was reprimanded for refusing to kill Charlie, the pit bull adopted less than twenty-four hours later by a family who sent us photos of their five-year-old daughter asleep atop Charlie, the whole story like a children’s book, or maybe a German children’s book. And we kept thanking the vet tech, until he was fired for killing two of the wrong dogs, their six-digit ID numbers one digit off. He didn’t catch the mistake, but neither had the kennel worker who brought him the wrong dogs, and who still had his job.
They knew us as those who found them magnificent with their wide-spaced eyes and powerfully muscled bodies, their sense of humor and spirit, the way they were “first to the dance and last to leave,” even in a House of Horrors, the way stillness would take them over as they pushed their heads into our stomachs while sitting in our laps. They knew us as those whose enthusiasm for them was palpable, Rebecca falling in love with them “at first sight, second sight, third sight,” and Yolanda tending to them with broken fingers still in a cast, and Joy and the rest with their surpassing competence and compassion. They knew us as those who would some- times need to take out a Chihuahua—“like walking an ant,” Laurie said—for a break. They knew us as those who didn’t mind when they backwashed our coffee, when they licked the paper cup the moment we looked away. They knew us as the ones who worked for free, who felt that an hour stroking a blanket-wrapped dog whose head never left your lap and who was killed the next morning was time well spent.
They knew me as the least knowledgeable one there, whose mistakes were witnessed by those who knew better.
They knew me as one who liked to apply the phrase “the ideal version of”—as in “Cure Chanel’s mange and you’ll see the ideal version of herself”—but did not like the term “comfort zone,” and thought one should try to move beyond it. They knew me as one who was unsure of small dogs, having grown up with large breeds and knowing how to read them, but still afraid of the Presa Canarios, the molossers bred in the Canary Islands, with their dark bulk and blood-shot bedroom eyes, since I had lived in San Francisco when a pair of them loose in a tony apartment house had killed a friend of mine who had stopped to check her mail and could not get her door unlocked before the attack began.
They knew me as one who called one of their number a dick when he knocked me over and I slammed into a steel bolt that left me bleeding from just above an eye. They knew me as one who guided them to step over the thick coiled hose in the packed garage that was being used weekly by a member of the board of directors to wash his car the city paid for. He never went inside the building
They knew us as the ones who attached a life-size plastic horse’s head to a tree in the fenced-in junkyard backyard, where the dogs could be taken to run off leash one at a time, and to sniff the horse’s head before lifting a leg against it. They knew us as those who circulated photos of two pit littermates dive-bombing each other under the blankets of a bed to get closer to the largehearted woman who had adopted them both.
They knew us as the ones who took them out, those rated “no concern” and “mild,” also “moderate,” and even “severe,” though never the red-stamped “caution” dogs. Although some of the sweetest dogs were the ones rated “moderate,” which was puzzling until we realized that behavior testing was done when a stray was brought in by police or a dog surrendered by his owner, when they were most scared. “Fearful” is the new “moderate.” And how do you think a starving dog will score on “resources guarding” when you try to take away a bowl of food! They knew me as one who never handled the “questionable” dogs, because that meant they could turn on you in an instant, you wouldn’t know what was coming, and some of us got enough of that outside the shelter.
They knew me as one whom Enrique had it in for, the kennel worker who had asked me to take out a 150-pound Cane Corso, and when I said, “Isn’t he ‘severe’?” said, “Naw, he’s a good boy,” and when I looked up his card he was not only “severe,” he was also DOH-HB hold—Department of Health hold for Human Bite. He had bitten his owner.
They knew me as one who forgave Enrique when he slipped on the newly installed floor while subduing a frightened mastiff, fell, and punctured a lung. After voting to spend nearly fifty thousand dollars to replace the facility’s floor, the board then had to allocate funds to bring in a crew with sanders to rough up the pricey new floor. The allocated funds were diverted from Supplies, so kennel staff had to ask us, the volunteers, for food when they ran out because feeding the dogs had not factored into the board’s decision.
They knew me as one who held the scarred muzzle of a long-nosed mutt in sick ward and sang “There is a nose in Spanish Harlem” until he slept.
They knew me as one who refused to lock the padlocks on their kennels, the locks a new requirement after someone stole a puppy from Small Dog Adoptions, and which guarantee the dogs will die in the event the place catches fire.
They knew me as one who asked them stupid questions— “How did you get so cute?”—and answered the questions stupidly, saying on behalf of the giddy dog, “I was born cute and kept getting cuter.” They knew me as one who talked baby talk to the babies, and spoke in a normal voice about current events to those who enjoyed this sort of discourse during their one-on-ones. I told an elderly pittie about the World War II hero who died in his nineties this year in a Florida hospital after having been subdued while in emotional distress by the use of a metal cage that was fixed in place over his bed. The Posey cage had been outlawed in Eastern Europe, yet was still somehow available in Florida. Caged in the space of his bed, “he died like a dog,” people said.
They knew us as the ones who wrote Congress in support of laws made necessary by human cruelty and named for canine victims: Oreo’s Law, Nitro’s Law, the law for the hero dog from Afghanistan, and that’s just this year.
They knew me as one who loved in them what I recoiled from in people: the patent need, the clinging, the appetite. They knew me as one who saw their souls in their faces, who had never seen eyes more expressive than theirs in colors of clover honey, root beer, riverbed, and the tricolor “cracked- glass” eyes of a Catahoula, rare to find up north. They knew us as the ones who wrote their biographies to post to rescue groups, campaigning for the rescue of dogs that we likened to Cleopatra, the Lone Ranger, or Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp, to John Wayne, Johnny Depp, and, of course, Brad Pitt, asking each other if we’d gone overboard or gone soft, like Lennie in Of Mice and Men. They knew us as the ones who tried to gauge what they had been through, as when Laurie said of a dog with shunts draining wounds on his head, “He looks exhausted even when he’s asleep.”
They knew us as the ones who wrote letters to the mayor pointing out that the Department of Health had vastly under-estimated the number of dogs in the city to clear itself of misconduct for failing to license more. The political term for this is “inflating their compliance record.” They knew Joy as the stellar investigator who told the rest of us that the governor helped boost the state budget by helping himself to funds that had been set aside to subsidize spay-neuter services throughout the state.
They knew that? They seemed to know that, just as they seemed to appreciate Joy’s attempt to make a new worker understand that staff had not “forgotten” to write down the times they had walked certain dogs, that the blank space under dates on the log sheets three days in a row meant that those dogs had not been walked in three days. “When the budget was cut by a million and a half,” Joy began. But the new worker did not believe her.
They knew us as the ones who decoded reasons for surrender and knew that “don’t have time” for an elderly, ill dog meant the owner had been hit hard by the ruined economy and could not afford veterinary bills. They knew us as the ones who doted on “throwaway moms,” lactating dogs left tied to posts in the Bronx after the owners sold their puppies, and the terrified young bait dogs—we would do anything for them—their heads and bodies crossed with scars like unlucky life lines in a human hand, yet whose tails still wagged when we reached to pet them. They knew me as one who changed her mind about Presa Canarios when I found one wearing an e-collar that kept him from reaching his food. I had to hold his bowl up to his mouth inside the plastic cone for him to eat; I lost my fear of Presas.
They knew me as one who had Bully Project on speed dial, who knew that owning more than five dogs in Connecticut was, legally, hoarding, who regularly “fake-pulled” a much-loved dog when I found that dog on the list, pretending to be a rescue group, so that in the twenty-four hours it took for the shelter manager to learn it was fake, the dog would have time to be pulled for real.
They knew me as one who got jacked up on rage and didn’t know what to do with it, until a dog dug a ball from a corner of his kennel and brought it to my side, as though to ask, “Have you thought of this?”
They knew me as one who learned a phrase of Spanish—“Lo siento mucho,” I am so sorry—and used it often in the lobby when handed a dog by owners who faced eviction by the New York City Housing Authority if they didn’t surrender their pit.
They knew me as one who wrote a plea for a dog named Storm, due to be killed the next morning, and posted the plea and then went home, to learn the next day that there had been two dogs named Storm in the shelter that night, and the one who needed the plea had been killed that morning—I had failed to check the ID number of the dog. So this is not about heroics; it’s about an impossible job. I joined them in filth and fear, and then I left them there.
They knew me as one who walked them past the homeless man on East 110th who said, “You want to rescue somebody, rescue me.”
They knew me as one who saw through the windowed panel in a closed ward door a dog lift first one front paw and then the other, offering a paw to shake though there was no one there, doing a trick he had once been taught and praised for, a dog not yet damaged but desperate.
They knew me as one who decoded the civic boast of a “full-service” shelter, that it means the place kills animals, that the “full service” offered is death.
They knew me as one who learned that the funds allocated for the dangerous new floor had also been taken from Medical, that the board had determined as “nonessential” the first injection, the sedative before the injection of pento-barbital that kills them, and since it will take up to fifteen seconds for the pentobarb to work, the dogs are then made to walk across the room to join the stack of bodies, only some of which are bagged. This will be the dogs’ last image of life on earth. My fantasy has them waking to find themselves paddling with full stomachs in the warm Caribbean, treading the clearest water over rippled white sand until they find themselves refreshed farther out in cooler water, in the deep blue reef-scarred sea.
They knew me as one who asked another volunteer if she would mind holding Creamsicle, a young vanilla and orange pup, while I cleaned his soiled kennel and made his bed at the end of a night. I knew that Katerina would leave the shelter in minutes for the hospital nearby where her father was about to die. She rocked the sleepy pup in her arms. She said, “You are working too fast.” She kissed the pup. She handed him to me. She said to me, “You should take your time.” We were both tired, and took turns holding the pup against our hearts. They saw this; they knew this. The ward went quiet. We took our time.
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