Injury by Proxy: Why “The Handmaid’s Tale” Is So Painful to Watch

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I was telling a friend how I couldn’t stomach violence on TV lately. I recently had a baby — “had” being the most outrageous euphemism for labor — and since then I’ve found that I involuntarily imagine my child’s body in place of the characters, his body receiving whatever pain is inflicted on them. I have similarly begun to think of how these characters, these actors, and everyone around me in real life, are all someone’s baby, the product of every ounce of someone else’s resources. As one of my care providers put it, when you’re pregnant the baby takes all the best parts of everything you consume and leaves you with the dregs, its body too precious to go without. If you don’t drink enough water, the baby takes what it needs and you just don’t get any. As babies, we each did the same––our bodies were also precious. We don’t have a word for the specific and infinite preciousness of a body; my friend had just lost a family member, and like me he also couldn’t stand violence on TV, said it made him almost literally sick, that now it felt too real.

Alexis Bledel in “The Handmaid’s Tale”

“Too real” is how it feels watching Alexis Bledel — as Ofglen, in Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — forced to see her lover being hanged to death. Imagine your lover, the preciousness of their body. Can you bear the thought of something happening to it? Of death happening to it? Of seeing death happen to it? Too real is how it feels watching a handmaid in labor while the woman who owns her mimes labor beside her; how it feels to watch the handmaid deliver a baby and have that baby taken from her body, handed to the woman who owns both her and her baby, her labor. Too real is watching Ofglen wake after a clitoridectomy to be told it was irrelevant, to watch her realize what has been done to her unconscious, precious body.

These specific examples are all in Hulu’s extensions of Atwood’s 1986 classic, and don’t appear in the original text. But they are logical extensions. In the novel, widespread pollution has lead to a fertility crisis in the United States and beyond. This, combined with distant threats of terrorism, lays the groundwork for Gilead to take over, a totalitarian regime under which it becomes illegal for women to read, make money, or own property, and where a certain category of fertile women — called “handmaids” — are cast into reproductive servitude for rich men and their infertile wives. Atwood herself wrote the tale as a work of speculative fiction, because even if the world was imagined, the particular details were not. In an interview with PBS, Atwood admitted, “I made sure that every horrific detail in the book had happened somewhere at sometime.”

American slavery is one of the times and places to which Atwood refers, when women were institutionally owned, raped, and forced to bear children, only to have those children taken from them. In her piece “For black women, The Handmaid’s Tale’s dystopia is real — and telling,” Melayna Williams writes, “This, of course, was the reality for black women in America for hundreds of years, a period where it was nearly impossible for a woman to be born, live, and die of old age under a social system that deemed neither her body nor the fruit of her womb to be her own.” An American slave mother would have nine to ten babies on average (would “have”). How many slave mothers? How many women’s precious bodies? How many precious bodies were they forced to make from their own?

There is more than one way of forcing women to have babies — they don’t all resemble America’s history of slavery, or Atwood’s speculative Gilead. They may take the form of legislation restricting access to healthcare for women, or changing regulations so that clinics have to close, or changing access to insurance so that the poorest women’s options for contraception, education, and abortion are geographically or financially unattainable. As Mike Pence — who signed a law in 2016 that mandated funerals for fetuses — was made vice president, and as bills pass like Texas Senate Bill 25, which allows doctors to lie to patients about fetal abnormalities that might cause them to seek abortions, it seems as though we are headed farther and farther from the kind of country in which no women are forced to have babies — not black women, not poor women. No women.

Recently, at a talk she gave at BAM, the poet Claudia Rankine spoke about moral injury:

There’s a phrase called ‘moral injury.’ It’s a phrase they use for the military, and it’s when a soldier goes into war, goes into battle — and the things that they’re forced to do, the things that they’re forced to see, don’t line up with who they are as human beings. And so they experience a break in themselves. That’s what’s called the moral injury: their moral idea of how they are in the world has been broken, and they’ve become broken because of it.

Rankine was referring to our current moment, in this country, right now. When we see, since 2015, a “near tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups,” and see the president taking down the Spanish language-version of whitehouse.gov, as well as the pages on civil rights, climate change, and LBGTQ issues, we experience moral injury. When the president withholds federal dollars from sanctuary cities, and publishes lists solely of crimes committed by immigrants, we experience moral injury. When we see Donald Trump acting out old totalitarian ideas, as though The Handmaid’s Tale were a playbook — with Muslim bans and distant wars, the rolling back of environmental protections and the appointing of a global warming denier to head the EPA — we experience moral injury. When we see Vice President Mike Pence’s puritanical view of women being enshrined as law, it causes moral injury.

Moral injury is about bodies, how we treat each other’s bodies. Black bodies, Muslim bodies, LBGTQ bodies, immigrant bodies, Spanish-speaking bodies, women’s bodies, bodies that breathe air and drink water. We are implicated in what our president does; we live in the country he is the president of. We are represented by him to the world. We are participants in his reality, this reality TV star, whether in support or in protest, because it has become our reality now. And it is our moral injury when a body is hurt because of our country.

Samira Wiley as Moira in “The Handmaid’s Tale”

Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale makes its moral injuries feel real, more so even than Atwood’s novel, in part because it is so visceral. To watch Elisabeth Moss in the opening scene as she tries to escape through the woods with her daughter, to hear her black husband get shot, and hear her beg, “Please don’t take her, please don’t take her” as their daughter is ripped from her arms, to see her knocked unconscious by the state agents who’ve rendered them all powerless to do anything, is to feel morally injured. The performances of Moss, Bledel, and Samira Wiley (as Moss’s friend Moira) are key to the series’ visceral impact. In flashbacks to the gradual takeover of the nation by Gilead’s repressive regime, Moss and Wiley have a conversation that many Americans had, following our presidential election and what was promised to come. “They can’t just do this. They can’t,” the characters say. “We’re pulling together a march for Thursday morning,” they say.

And then we see those same characters — characters we relate to, in a world we recognize — as they begin to become powerless; their bodies brutalized, their priorities shifting to mere survival. In the reeducation center, where women are tortured and broken into becoming handmaids, Moss and Wiley’s characters join in with a group’s chant, shaming a woman for the fact that she was raped. During the monthly “ceremony,” Moss submits to being held by the woman who owns her, Mrs. Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski), while she is raped by the woman’s husband, Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes). And when Bledel’s lover is hanged, the only possible protest comes from her eyes, her mouth muffled by some sort of mask. I will never forget her eyes. If the book is a cautionary tale, if reading it is like a warning to look both ways before you cross the street, the performances of Moss, Wiley, and Bledel make watching the show like being hit by a bus. We feel their injury in our bodies.

Zadie Smith, in her essay “Man vs. Corpse,” writes that, “I’m a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful — especially then.” Smith is looking at a picture of a corpse. “Imagine being a corpse,” she writes. Hulu’s series invites us to imagine a lot of things, though perhaps the scariest is imagining the loss of control over one’s body, imagining being forced to have children. Many people now living in America don’t even have to imagine. Nevertheless, I believe The Handmaid’s Tale is here to help, and maybe in more concrete ways than expanding our capacity for empathy. Already the image of the handmaid has become a disturbing and powerful counter-symbol for women’s rights, employed in protests where those rights are imminently in danger. Which is good news, given that we now live in a world where it’s possible to imagine Vice President Mike Pence watching The Handmaid’s Tale and thinking, “What a brilliant idea. I can’t believe a woman had it.”

Why People Don’t Like “I Love Dick” (Hint: Because It’s About Women)

A Hollywood Story of Star-crossed Philanderers

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“Mr. and Mrs. P Are Married” By Elizabeth Crane

Mrs. P is born on a cold day in West Virginia in 1947, eyes open, to a homemaker and a general practitioner. Worrying everyone terribly, she does not speak until her third birthday, when she says, I have to go. No one knows what this means. When directed toward the bathroom, she looks in and shakes her head. The child is immediately signed up for Catholic school.

Mr. P is born in Los Angeles, California, in 1941 with a slap to the bottom that literally knocks the shit out of him, and it’s not so much a sign of what’s to come, it’s the opposite if anything, as it is the first in a long series of unfortunate incidents.

His parents had once been in vaudeville, if that has anything to do with anything. We doubt it, but just putting it out there.

Upon turning thirteen, Mrs. P’s mother cuts her daughter’s long blond hair into a Jackie-style bob, which does not suit her. It’s the latest thing, her mother says, but Mrs. P will have short hair only one more time in her life, which will also be a mistake. Mrs. P loves her mother (if not as much this day as others), but she is now and will always be a daddy’s girl. (I’m hideous!/Baby girl, you couldn’t be hideous if you grew a camel’s hump on your back. Hair grows, sweet thing, you just hold on./She hates me, why else would she do this?/Sweet pea, your mama doesn’t hate you, I reckon she’s just a speck jealous because the bloom is off her rose and yours is just opening up.) Mrs. P wonders for a moment what will happen when the bloom falls off her own rose, but as soon as that thought passes, she tears off for the dime store, where she pockets a mascara and a “Fatal Apple” red lipstick. In addition to bloom-loss prevention, young Mrs. P hopes this will bring some edge to her style, and this look isn’t really her either, but she gives it a good go for the better part of seventh grade. However, this move does not bring her great popularity, and she quickly remodels herself one more time with a ponytail and a smile. This will carry her a long way.

Mr. P, tall, skinny, and Irishly handsome, gets into some trouble the summer before his freshman year of high school, the usual 1956 fare: smoking behind the bleachers, fistfight on Sunset Boulevard having something to do with a girl, drinking/ throwing up whiskey into Echo Park Lake. His punishments escalate accordingly from grounding for a day to a yardstick-whipping, and these whippings will continue throughout his high school career. From this Mr. P will learn two things. Thing one: that yardstick-whippings modify his behavior only for the length of time it takes for the physical pain to go away (a lesson Mr. P the elder will not ever learn). Thing two: just because yardstick-whippings as a method of parenting may not be effective does not mean he won’t keep it in mind. (In fact, when he has his own children of yardstick-whipping age, he will not resort to this, but he will consider it, often.) Mr. P is not the dumbest guy on the planet, but he’s not super quick.

Mrs. P joins the pep squad in high school and is nominated for captain before the end of the year. She has become quite a natural beauty, although in the brains department she’s pretty much on the level of her future husband, maybe a half notch up. Mrs. P does spend a lot of time thinking, about life mostly, she just doesn’t get very far with it. She looks at the world around her, and it sort of looks nice, post-football bon res, pie-baking contests, Main Street parades, church potlucks, but even from the center, she feels removed from it somehow. It looks to her like a class photo they took without her. She thinks she’s supposed to want it, but imagines everyone walking around with nothing but clouds in their skulls because it’s easier than coming up with any idea of what they really think. At times she wishes she had clouds in her own skull in place of thoughts like these, but even the effort to assimilate only results in further thoughts about why no one sees what she sees. She tries to enter the picture by dating the quarterback, Ned Crawford, for most of her junior and senior years of high school, leaving him devastated when she decides to break up with him right before prom. Ned had been planning a prom night proposal, but Mrs. P had been secretly fucking her mechanic since he fixed her Ford Falcon. The mechanic had seduced her, quite easily, with talk of life’s small beauties: the Baptist church on South Elm just after it lets out, the Potters’ old blue barn that leans like a parallelogram, a pink Band-Aid on a boy’s skinned knee, the percussion of a car engine. He talks at length about the details that give meaning to the mundane. (It’s not about looking, it’s about seeing, you dig?) Mrs. P has never heard talk like this before, certainly not at home, and Ned speaks mostly of football and taking over the family shoe store, neither of which interest her. The mechanic sparks more in her than her sexual nature (which is no small portion of her overall nature); it’s almost as though he activated a hidden mechanism or replaced a missing part she’d hardly known was gone, and suddenly she feels as though her whole self has finally been assembled. When she tells him she needs to go, he nods and sends her off with a farewell fuck. After reading a tiny ad for an art school in the back of Photoplay, Mrs. P takes off for Los Angeles, just before graduation. Disheartened to discover that the art school is actually just a suburban post office box, she redirects and answers a casting call for all-American types for a game show hostess in the same magazine. She does not get that job, but lands a mayonnaise commercial right after putting in an application at the Chicken A-Go-Go.

Mr. P is at this time on the amateur boxing circuit, mostly getting his ass kicked, but it doesn’t matter, because a talent scout from one of the networks spots him and offers him a screen test for a new soap opera. Mr. P, like Mrs. P, had shown little interest in acting before jumping in (in spite of occasional suggestions from his parents to try bringing back vaudeville) and his talent hasn’t quite been uncovered at this point (although he does have some), but on the basis of his resemblance to the actor hired to play his brother, he’s given the part. The show becomes a hit and Mr. P makes the cover of Photoplay and Mrs. P sees it and thinks he’s kind of cute in a bland sort of way, a guy who manages a grocery store kind of way, but she won’t give him another thought for fifteen years. At this time, nineteen-year-old Mrs. P is involved with a much older television producer who gets her a few lines on some popular situation comedies and not much more. She’s not with him for this reason, that’s not her thing, and she’s not with him just because he tells her she has a quality (because she has no idea what this means), nor is she with him because he talks to her as though she understands what he’s talking about (even when she doesn’t). She’s with him because when they fuck, he does this thing with a scarf around her neck that makes her feel like Jesus himself is fucking her.

Mr. P at this time, has not gotten much further, sexually speaking, than pounding his costar missionary-style. This is good enough for making a baby, which they do, a red-headed girl they call Maggie, but not good enough to hold on to his costar, who briefly becomes his wife after they discover the pregnancy. They divorce quickly, because his drinking has sent him on one too many two-day benders, and his wife has heard one too many lame excuses (I had to shoot a night scene in Malibu/I had an important meeting in Malibu/Something happened in Malibu/I don’t have to tell you everything). Also she doesn’t much like being called a cunt. From his second wife, he will learn about cunnilingus, but he won’t enjoy it, and they too will reproduce, a boy they name Seamus, and ten months later, a girl they name Erin (as in Go Bragh, which he thinks is hilarious one drunken night and briefly tries to convince his wife would make a great middle name, Right, she says, because I’m sure high school was a smashing success for Ima Hogg), but again, the drinking and cunt thing, so this marriage will also be short-lived. In 1972 he will land the role that will be the first line of his obituary, a wildly popular weepy drama (Love Lives on Forever) about a widower whose daughter dies of a rare disease but who finds love with her private nurse and learns to live again. For a while he pounds this costar as well, but she refuses his proposal. Mr. P, raised Catholic, has always believed in marriage, even though he doesn’t know why and doesn’t question why, even though the example set for him by his parents was not particularly inspiring (twin beds in his parents’ bedroom, the door to which was almost always open/not much in the way of dinner conversation beyond Pass the green beans/not much in the way of motherly affection beyond a pat on the blanket after she’d tucked him in/Dad liked to drink and sleep with prostitutes). Still, he feels that there’s something holy about it, marriage, or should be, at least; he believes this is the true and right thing for a man and a woman to do and is determined to find a wife he’ll stick with one day.

After leaving the television producer, Mrs. P does a guest spot on an action series and quickly marries the star of the show, causing a sensation by hyphenating her last name. Her new husband doesn’t much care for this, he’s a bit of a traditionalist, but he’s mad for her and takes it as part of the package. Frankly, he’d just as soon have her stay at home, which he lets her know on numerous occasions, to which she always says sweetly, some variation of, Oh . . . well . . . I don’t think that’s for me. In 1976 Mrs. P gets her big break on a new action series created with her in mind, this one featuring an all-female ensemble cast, for which her thick blond hair is cut to accentuate its natural wave, a hairstyle that will seemingly be copied by every woman in America for a time. It’s around here that Mrs. P becomes acquainted with the tabloids, who declare that she is involved in everything from sex cults to sorcery. None of these things are ever true, and as much as she’d like her privacy back, a part of her wishes they’d go ahead and print the truth as she sees it, which is simply that she has the sex drive of an eighteen-year-old boy and likes to try new things (new things here including activity considered by some to be risky but which she sees as merely exciting and, perhaps most important, no one else’s damn business). Because of the negative attention, Mrs. P cuts her hair into a pixie style (which looked good on Jean Seberg and, she realizes too late, only Jean Seberg, and which of course serves only to bring her more unwanted attention) and leaves the series that made her a star after just one season, and although her hair will be talked about for decades, she is not heard from again publicly until the ’80s. Privately, between 1977 and 1983, several things happen, beginning with two miscarriages and three months in a private mental care facility — exhaustion is the reason made public, but in fact Mrs. P suffers a protracted and debilitating bout of depression brought on by the miscarriages, wonders if god thinks she’d be an unfit mother, wonders if she could love a child she didn’t give birth to (she could, but will not find out), wonders if having a child would make her want to stay in one place (it won’t), wonders if anything matters without children, which for a time leaves her profoundly hopeless about more or less everything else she’d previously cared about, even sex (What does it really mean, anyway, nothing). Intensive psychotherapy and brief affair with a yoga instructor help her to snap out of it, but all of it figures into, if not causes, the breakdown of her marriage.

Mrs. P’s husband makes a serious miscalculation in introducing his wife to his best friend during this period, believing that his friend Mr. P will keep an eye on his unreliable wife while he’s out of the country filming a made-for-TV movie about an Australian bounty hunter. (I know she’ll fuck somebody else if I leave her alone. Never met a woman or a man as horny as her in my life. And I’ve met a lot of women. And I’m horny.) What happens instead is that though Mr. P initially does remarkably well with this task, dissuading the future Mrs. P from a dalliance she’s interested in having with a tile man doing work on her patio, Mr. P is thoroughly unable to resist her advances when they are made, and because they have begun to confide in each other during this time of their relationship troubles (He just doesn’t get me/Women always leave me/Who would leave you, baby?/Ah I guess I can be a jerk sometimes), their bond is not merely sexual (especially given the initial absence of the cunnilingus Mrs. P is quite fond of), but as it turns out, a genuine connection that neither is prepared to give up. Mr. and Mrs. P talk about god and life (I just think, this can’t be all of it, right? Like, stars? at can’t just be explained by astroscience, right?/No, no way, baby/I know, right?) and even art (I’m completely taken with Matisse’s colors/I can’t say I know who that is/Here look at this book, baby, see, doesn’t it just make you want to lay some paint down on the floor and roll around in it?/You are so fucking sexy, baby, I am over the moon for you), which is something Mrs. P has secretly been thinking about trying again someday, painting, and Mr. P says, If you were my wife, I’d build you a studio, and Mrs. P smiles and brushes it off as just a hobby, anyway, tells him he’s sweet and changes the subject. Mr. and Mrs. P think these conversations are deep, even though they aren’t, although who’s to decide that, really, because they are with each other one hundred percent by now, and because they do really connect here, because they both feel something they haven’t felt before, something they both believe no one has felt before, and maybe that’s as deep as it ever needs to be. Mrs. P acquires a quickie divorce before her husband even returns to the country, and immediately moves in with Mr. P at his Beverly Hills mansion. Mrs. P’s husband deals with this betrayal by waiting for a respectable ninety days before telling his side of the story to Barbara Walters.

Unsurprisingly, Mrs. P, in her soft-spoken way, her voice like a pot-smoking kitten, will inform Mr. P that he’ll need to learn a few new tricks if he’s interested in keeping her around. Mr. P makes a few initial stumbles but learns to please. In fact he learns a few extra tricks thanks to Mrs. P’s interest in bondage and knife play. Some tricks he will flat-out refuse, like the time Mrs. P hears there’s a new trend in Japan where people are utilizing electrically charged squid as one might use a dildo. (I’m not sure where the pleasure in that would be for me/It just goes where the dildo goes, honey/I don’t think I want an electric sea creature shocking me up the ass/How will you know unless you try it?) He’s about to say, I just do, but the look on Mrs. P’s face is so inviting that she might be able to convince him that an atomic missile up his ass would be even better. For a time, this behavior will remain in the bedroom and will also involve weird third-person dialogue (Yeah, she loves his big dick in her mouth!/He’s cumming! Mr. P is cumming! Here it comes!/Cum on her face!) and role-playing (teacher/underage student, pimp/drug-addicted whore, mommy/little boy, daddy/little boy [Mrs. P is always the daddy in this scenario; Mr. P is initially taken aback by this not because it’s incestuous but because it seems gay, but it’s another chance for Mrs. P to use a strap-on], priest/altar boy [a variation on the previous, with a few Biblical verses], brother/sister, farmhand/sheep).

For nearly a year, things are good, and outside of the bedroom they do a lot of the typical things couples do, travel, go to the movies, the beach, throw dinner parties (although admittedly, someone at their dinner parties always gets drunk enough to either break a large piece of furniture or punch someone). Once, on a leisurely hunt for beach glass, Mr. P gets down on one knee with the narrow end of a nicely sanded green beer bottle and places the glass ring on her finger, the look on his face as he proposes that of a puppy who just chewed up your grandmother’s needlepoint pillow but still hopes to sleep in your bed. Mrs. P says, You’re sweet, and resists the mysterious urge to pat him on the head, and tells him if she were to marry again, it would only be him, but he knows that tiny little if is the major problem with the entire sentence. Around this time, Mrs. P rescues a skinny calico kitten that shows up behind the air-conditioning unit, realizes, as she treats it for worms, lovingly salves its wounds, feeds it with a bottle, that her maternal instincts haven’t abandoned her, perhaps even grew while she wasn’t looking, and perceives an almost spiritual connection with the animal, would go so far as to say she feels not just appreciated but understood by the kitten, and is so moved by the experience that she begins donating large sums of money to animal-rescue groups. She has been asked to appear on behalf of various causes over the years, always declining but donating anonymously (Well, I just don’t see why anyone needs to know, she’ll say with a coy smile) and making no exception now. Mr. P, to date, has never gotten much more involved in anything terribly munificent outside of buying a few boxes of thin Mints when the Girl Scouts come around, and has vocally disapproved of Mrs. P’s inclinations in this area (You’re going to go broke!/I have more than I need./You can’t give to every pathetic person out there!/Yes, I can!), but has recently softened, partly in the hopes that it will make him seem more marriage-worthy (Will you marry me if I give a million dollars to sad dogs?/Maybe/Get me my checkbook).

With Mr. P’s encouragement, Mrs. P will endeavor to get back in the acting game after a couple years absent, takes acting classes for the first time, finally auditioning for and landing a part in a feature as a woman whose child has been abducted. Around the time that Mrs. P’s career begins to take off again, Mr. P’s begins to take a nose dive, not crashing completely but forever remaining in middling comedies and the occasional cameo in a drama that shows the potential he had but never fully proved. It is during this period that Mr. and Mrs. P begin hurting each other. It could be argued that the origin of this behavior began with some of the sex play, but that remains uncertain. There is an incident when Mrs. P drips hot candle wax on Mr. P’s testicles, which turns them both on for about a minute until Mrs. P accidentally drips a little too much and gives him a second-degree burn, which he believes she has done on purpose because she’d been angry with him about his unwillingness to try the squid. (Cunt! You know you meant to do that!/Why would I do that on purpose?/I don’t know, maybe you see me as a father figure!/I don’t need a father figure, my father’s nice!/I bet he is, fatherfucker!/Maybe you were really fucking your father!/That doesn’t even make any sense!/Don’t you even say one more word about my daddy!/Fatherfucker!/Well, maybe you were fucking your mother! Motherfucker!/ Bitch!/You’re the little bitch!) This fight continues off and on for a good while, and will always be referred to in later fights. (You were supposed to pay the gardener/No you were supposed to pay the gardener/No my assistant was supposed to pay the gardener/Was the assistant supposed to read your fucking idiot mind?/Why are you so worried about the gardener anyway, do you want to fuck him?/Yeah, I’m a faggot now, I want to fuck the gardener/Hey, I don’t know, maybe you do/Well maybe the gardener wouldn’t burn me on the balls!/Let it fucking go, did you cum or not?) In any case, who throws the first punch is up for debate, but what is certain is that they’re both throwing them. Mrs. P, being of a petite stature, does not inflict a lot of damage with her bare hands, but has great aim with pottery and is not afraid to throw it. After these incidents, there is always make-up fucking, and sometimes they’re still bleeding, which makes them laugh. Sometimes they call each other Cunty and Motherfucker, affectionately. Several years later when Mrs. P leaves, it is not for this reason, but it may be the reason she comes back. In the summer of 1986 Mr. and Mrs. P conclude this period of their lives with the birth of their only child, Charlie, which as she’d long ago imagined, provides a meaning to her life that trumps everything else that matters to her, a meaning she tries unsuccessfully to explain to Mr. P, who feels something he doesn’t care to call jealousy but looks a lot like it. (It’s just . . . I feel . . . a knowing/A knowing./A knowing./ . . . /If you don’t understand without me explaining, I don’t think you’re going to.) In spite of Mr. P’s unknowing, the early years are magical, filled with trips to Disneyland and the redwoods and Maui, with playdates, Happy Meals, and bedtime stories. Mr. P sees Mrs. P bathing the infant boy in the kitchen sink, carefully soaping the baby’s bald head, whisper-singing “Mockingbird,” wrapping the baby in what looks to him like a velvet towel, and knows beyond doubt that he will never feel for another woman what he feels for this one. Mr. P, however, in spite of this example, will, on the occasion that he actually picks the baby up, continue to hold the boy as one might deliver the Thanksgiving turkey to the table, with about the same measure of pride, and as though the only purpose for lifting the boy is for the purpose of transporting him from one place to another. Mrs. P, the primary caregiver by a lot, will love the child as much as a child could be loved, but by the time he turns fourteen, he will have stolen and sold most of his mother’s jewelry for drugs, wrecked a car he wasn’t licensed to drive, and gone missing several times. An early excuse involving Malibu is not accepted, for obvious reasons. (I should have beat your ass with a yardstick like my father did/Yeah that worked out real good for you, Pops/ . . .)

Mr. P’s relationships with his children have only rarely resembled anything falling on the positive side of the parenting scale. His relationship with his younger daughter, Erin, has never been good, considering that her mother moved her to the East Coast when she was six and he’s visited her exactly four times in fifteen years, and has been strained even more ever since Erin decided that sex for any purpose other than procreation is a black sin and that her father will go to hell for it unless he accepts god, which Mr. P thinks is horseshit even though he considers himself to be a practicing Catholic, albeit one who sins and doesn’t go to church. Mr. P tells his daughter that if he does go to hell, that’ll be the least of the reasons. His son Seamus, now in his thirties, is a seventh-grade history teacher, the only P child to attend more than a semester at college, and who now has a family of his own, is by all accounts but his father’s the well-adjusted one, perhaps due to the presence of a loving stepfather who entered his life early on, or perhaps just by luck of the draw, since this didn’t seem to help his sister at all. No doubt Mr. P’s hostility toward his son is exacerbated by Seamus’s calm and easygoing demeanor. Seamus loves his father, but has learned from years of Al-Anon meetings to do so from a distance where there’s no chance of being hit. Seamus sends his father and Mrs. P (whom all the P kids have always adored; You’re too good for him/Why are you with him?/I love him/But why?/Why not?) birthday cards and holiday letters, calls a couple of times a month; Mr. P rarely offers any return communication, and rarely even returns Seamus’s calls. When asked why by Mrs. P (or anyone for that matter), he says, I hate that guy, and that’s all he ever says about it. Maggie, Mr. P’s other neglected daughter, whose birthday he forgot every other year since she was five, endeavoring, unsuccessfully, to make up for it with cars and credit cards (She doesn’t need a car, she’s twelve/Well, did she like it?), is currently serving a three-year sentence at a women’s prison for breaking and entering, a charge she pleaded no contest to on account of it being true; she had broken and entered her ex-husband’s house and taken back her engagement ring, which she pawned for an ounce of black tar heroin. This causes Mr. P no small amount of anguish, which he deals with by smoking some black tar heroin. This, however, is not his drug of choice, so Mr. P adds to this some Percocet and Scotch, which leads to his third DUI arrest. Mr. P, who once had to pound milk shakes to keep his 150 pounds, still has his boyish looks, but has put on some weight and is puffy in the face from the drinking. He’s thinking about an eye lift. Later he will get one, which will make his eyes look slightly inhuman, which he will attempt to remedy by adding eyeliner, which is one of those things some older men in Hollywood do that we shouldn’t even try to understand. Mr. P is sentenced to ninety days of community service picking up trash on the 101 freeway, wearing dark sunglasses and the required pinny that in bold letters says LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, and during this time gives several autographs, which makes him happy and sad at the same time, which confuses him (as you might imagine, this inability to understand complexity of feeling has not aided him in his acting career either). Mrs. P leaves during this period, and even though there are plenty of obvious good reasons, it’s not any of these. She just needs to go. She tries to explain this to Mr. P, that it’s just a drive she has, that it doesn’t have anything to do with him, and it doesn’t, but he doesn’t get it, and he’s demolished, like when they fill up old buildings with dynamite and they’re utterly flattened, like that, he tells her, flattened. He begs her not to leave, promises her anything she could possibly want, anything he could possibly do to make things work, couples therapy, liposuction, anything, but she just smiles, sadly, kisses his weird eyes and goes, takes troubled thirteen-year-old Charlie with her, and except for one horrendous incident with a prostitute, Mr. P will not get involved with anyone sexually or otherwise until they reunite. He will flirt a lot, in restaurants, in bars, in the grocery store, on the street, or his version of flirting (You ever see Love Lives on Forever? You want to?), mostly with women younger than his daughters, but none of this will result in sexual activity of any kind. Mr. P stalks Mrs. P a little bit periodically, moping in his car outside her house, showing up places he thinks she might be, leaving horrifically out-of-tune heartbreak songs on her answering machine (She’s gone! Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone! She’s leaving! Leaving! On that midnight train to Georgia!) and sending sad, nonsensical letters (this period of my life, babe, is like smoke signals, and without you my mind goes to lunch), and she actually thinks it’s kind of sweet, and she actually knows exactly what he means.

Mrs. P drops out of acting during this time, this time for good. She takes up painting and even though it’s halfway decent, she doesn’t get much in the way of critical acclaim, which she seems to understand (Yeah, it’s a little they don’t get it, a little “look at the girl with the hair having her fun”), but doesn’t really care, because she sells a boatload of it. Also it fills her spirit, and in early 2002 she up and marries and quickly divorces a gallery owner. Needless to say, when Mr. P learns that she’s married someone besides him, he calls her immediately and asks why she didn’t just stab him in the stomach with a fireplace poker instead. Around here she watches a lot of Oprah, reads The Road Less Traveled, and starts listening to NPR, which she thinks is really interesting. She tells people, I just love learning, you know? even though she may not be fully comprehending the material being consumed. Often she learns things altogether wrong (Did you know that Kim Jong-il is responsible for the deaths of millions of babies in Taiwan?) or memorizes bits at the most basic level (the problems in our educational system can’t be solved by throwing a bunch of money at it), nevertheless she’s invigorated, and will tell anyone who will listen about the latest thing she learned.

In a blackout, Mr. P hears about the gallery guy on Access Hollywood, tracks him down, and kicks the shit out of him. Mr. P has never thought of his relationship with Mrs. P as abusive and neither has she. They always like to say passionate or tumultuous. They always like to say their love is one of a kind, even, or maybe especially, at times when they aren’t technically together. We aren’t really sure what to call it, love isn’t the first word that comes to mind, but we haven’t got another one. If you catch Mrs. P after she’s heard this kind of scuttlebutt about her relationship, she’ll say, Who are they to say what love is or isn’t? You know what I think? I think love is easy. It doesn’t mean you don’t throw things at each other sometimes or take a few years off for yourself. Mrs. P gets word of what Mr. P’s done (via the tabloids, which she of course doesn’t read but is hard-pressed to overlook at the supermarket checkout) and dreamily tells her best friend how romantic she thinks this is. In truth, Mr. and Mrs. P have never really been out of touch since the split, Charlie being their excuse for multiple daily phone calls that go well beyond what time he should be picked up from his AA meeting, but there are things they don’t discuss, or we should say she won’t discuss, for obvious reasons. So but Mr. P gets word from her girlfriend that she was touched to hear he defended her honor so gallantly, and starts writing her love letters again, really sweet, if unsurprisingly odd and misspelled love letters (I love you like a bonfire loves a marshmallow), and Mrs. P finally answers him back and tells him that if he goes to rehab, she’ll consider taking him back someday, even though rehab doesn’t have much to do with it, she just wants a little more time. Mr. P goes to rehab, and it doesn’t take the first time, or the second time, but it does take the third time, which coincides with him being around long enough to become ironically popular again, getting some interesting parts in independent films and finally a sitcom. Mr. P sends flowers and gifts to Mrs. P every week (picked out by her girlfriend because he’s inclined to pick out antelope-sized arrangements and Elizabeth Taylor–type bling for her even though she prefers freesia and hardly wears jewelry at all), but it isn’t until she hears from her friend that he has prostate cancer that she begins seeing him again. Mrs. P visits him every day in his room at Cedars-Sinai, even though they’ve been apart for some time. She won’t have any of what the nursing staff is selling her in terms of visiting hours (but does so in her charming way — Oh, I’ll be on my way in just a few, and then sleeps in his bed next to him for the length of his stay). Mrs. P also avails herself to Mr. P during his entire recovery, baking fresh berry scones every day, bringing flowers and reading Anna Karenina to him, mostly because Mrs. P has always loved the first line. (Usually, she just reads a page or two before he falls asleep.) Mr. P does everything he can to use his illness to get her to come back (I might croak tomorrow/ Nice try, baby, the doctor says you’re all clear/Ah, I don’t know, I’m not feeling that great unless you’re around/I’m always with you, baby, you should know that). Mr. P soon recovers and promises never to hurt Mrs. P again, and he doesn’t.

Mr. and Mrs. P’s son, Charlie, takes his turn in prison, also on drug-related charges. It’s a terrible time for the Ps, much worse than the cancer, for Mrs. P the hands-down worst time in her life. Charlie doesn’t blame her (prison dialogue, all family members present: Charlie, I should have done better by you, my sweet baby boy/Please don’t blame yourself, Mom, I just got some shitty genes from Dad/So it’s my fault/Yeah, well, you could have at least tried to make up the difference somehow/Did I not give you everything you needed? You live in our goddamn guest house with freaking maid service/Not now I don’t/You’re just an ungrateful little bitch/Stop it! Stop it right now!), but she can’t help herself. At home, Mrs. P cries and cries, mostly alone in a secluded corner of her garden, until Mr. P finally pulls his head out of his ass and admits to her that he’s fucked everything up with their kid, and that he wants to try to do right by her (Don’t do it for me, baby, do it for him/I will, baby). Mr. P goes back to the prison without Mrs. P (for the first time) to see Charlie and weeping, confesses his sins.

(I’ve fucked all you kids up, I know it/Nah, Dad, the odds were against me in the womb/I still could have tried harder/You did the best you could, I know you got fucked the same way I did./I’m so, so sorry, Son/Hey, I thought love meant never having to say you’re sorry/Yeah, that’s a big load of horseshit/ (actual laughter here)/I want to do better now, if you’ll let me try/Okay, Dad.) This particular Okay, Dad has any number of layers to it, including but not limited to total skepticism, lingering resentment he’s too tired to express, and hope, a little tiny bit of hope that he might someday have a dad that acts like a dad, even now. Mrs. P, whose bright light is dimming just a bit now, leans on Mr. P, lets him stay over most nights now, and they no longer fight or throw anything, they make healthy dinners, watch movies, and have some sex that’s a somewhat less energetic version of times past, but that has a tenderness that had never been there; Mr. P often lies quietly next to her after, while she falls asleep. He likes to say that he loves to watch her dreaming, he imagines, of kittens in palaces, dining on lobster rolls and ice cream sundaes, romping under rainbows and sleeping in canopy beds.

Mrs. P comes down with cancer herself, of the colon, unfortunately it is discovered rather late for anything but a miracle, which is what they both hope for, and now Mr. P tends to her. Mr. P shifts into a brand-new gear for this exercise, goes to great lengths to find a cure for his wife, learns to use the internet (for a while he hadn’t even believed it existed; he would say, Who uses that really?, this around 2004), reads articles and calls around the world, everyone from doctors to shamans to the pope (the latter of whom is not easily reached for miracle-making, he discovers). He prepares most of her meals as smoothies because she can’t tolerate solid foods and hardly has the energy to chew anyway. Mrs. P doesn’t love all of these smoothies (I’m not crazy about the split pea, honey/Come on, it’s just like soup, you love soup!/This is not like soup/Okay, sweetness, I’ll fix you something different, what do you want, you name it/Chocolate banana/Okay baby, chocolate banana coming up/With whipped cream/You got it baby) but when he delivers them to her bed with a loopy straw and an edible violet blossom on top, she gives him a grateful, loving smile, albeit a cancer-stricken, half-lit version of her famous smile, a smile that makes him know his time on the planet hasn’t been altogether useless. Mr. P gets down on his knees every morning and evening now, something he hasn’t done since third grade, praying to god to cure Mrs. P, trying to make any deal he can think of, even some unsavory ones (Take me, take Seamus), weeping and even admitting some of his flaws (I know I’m a shitty father, I know I’m a dick in sixteen different ways, Mother Mary, but she’s an angel, you probably already know that, and she doesn’t deserve this, please don’t take this out on her, she is good and kind and I don’t think I can live without her). It is during this time that Mr. P makes the first of a number of marriage proposals that Mrs. P turns down. (Oh, silly, when are you going to stop asking me that?/When you say yes./I want to grow old with you./Sometimes I think people like me aren’t supposed to grow old./What does that mean? What kind of people are you? Don’t say that.) Mr. P thinks they’re the same kind of people, the kind of people who like a good cheese and an old movie and who think too hard about the wrong things (which he thinks to say just in the moment, but which may be as insightful a thing that ever comes to him), who got lucky in the most important way when they found each other, the kind of people who are meant to grow old together, forever, until they’re old and feeble and take an overdose of pills so they can die at the same time, in an embrace. This has been Mr. P’s plan ever since he met Mrs. P. He knows there’s not much time left but he still wants to be able to call her his wife, once and for all. (Please, baby, make me the happiest man in the world, we can do it however you like, a big church wedding, at the courthouse, I could rent a yacht, we can go to Vegas, whatever you desire/Oh I don’t know.) But Mrs. P does know, she thinks maybe she’s just meant to sparkle brilliantly for a short while and when the shine starts to dull, she’ll just fizzle out quickly, like a bottle rocket.

Several days before her death, in a bit of a morphine haze but not at all unclear about her decision, Mr. and Mrs. P are married. She has mere days left, so it’s hardly as he always imagined, an all-white barefoot ceremony on the beach, close friends (and even some family), vows they wrote themselves, Mrs. P with a single gardenia behind her ear. The only thing that’s white in reality is the harsh fluorescent lights above them, and the only people present besides them are the hospital chaplain, an uninvited nurse who randomly walks in with a handyman, insisting that one of the monitors needs to be checked at this exact moment, and Mrs. P’s best girlfriend as a witness. Mrs. P has, with the doctor’s permission, cut her morning dose of morphine in half, but is still drowsy and in pain and distracted by a fly buzzing around her head. At Mrs. P’s request her friend has dabbed a tiny bit of rose lipstick on her lips and cheeks, and Mr. P has brought a gardenia for her hair, which she uses for a bouquet instead, because she loves the fragrance, says the fragrance is so heavenly that when she closes her eyes for a second it positively takes her away. The chaplain weds them with the traditional vows, although Mrs. P’s not listening at the moment, Mr. P smiles and snuffs and makes a slashing motion across his neck when the chaplain says “obey,” her friend gives a small inaudible chuckle, and although Mrs. P has been unable to prepare anything, Mr. P has with him the dog-eared, folded-up vow he’s been hanging on to since he wrote it thirty years ago. Tears run down his puffy face as he reads it, the others in the room are welling up too, all but Mrs. P who’s in and out, and returns only long enough to see Mr. P wiping away tears and telling her that he knows he’s still not a very good man, but she’s made him a better one, and that fourteen lifetimes from now when he’s an armadillo and she’s a gazelle, he will still love her as much as he does this day, as much as always.

At the funeral, Mrs. P’s bereaved, ninety-two-year-old father is led down the aisle, held tightly by Mr. P on one side and Charlie on the other, because he can barely stand from the grief. He asks Mr. P, weeping, not expecting an answer, Why her, I’m an old man, why not me? Why my sweet angel girl? Mr. P says he’s not sure his wife was really made for this world. Mr. P’s father considers this for a moment before he speaks. What world do you suppose she was made for, then? I don’t know, Mr. P says. A better one.

A Standing Ovation for The Public Theater’s Controversial Julius Caesar

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Plus Voldemort gets his own movie, Russia continues to work against the Ukrainian Literature Library, and more literary news

Never a boring day on the literary front. In today’s roundup, the resemblance between Trump and Caesar is uncanny, Harry Potter fans will have a new storyline to obsess about, and the war between Russia and the Ukrainian Literature Library rages on.

Photo by Joan Marcus

The Public Theater’s Trump-like Caesar gets strong reactions

Dramatic, tyrannical, narcissistic. Sound familiar? Well, the Public Theater certainly thought so when it decided to cast Julius Caesar as a figure resembling our very own POTUS, Donald Trump, in the new Shakespeare in the Park production. Since its debut on May 23rd, the show has stirred up a great deal of controversy from the right wing, pitting a beloved New York arts institution against the President’s fervent supporters. The play features violent scenes of a Trump-like Caesar, complete with dangling red tie, assassinated by a group of women and minorities. The depiction has elicited outrage from right-wing media outlets including Breitbart and Fox News. Despite the criticism (and the withdrawal of sponsors Bank of America and Delta Airlines), the Public Theater’s artistic director Oskar Eustis stands behind his provocative choices, sending out an email to theater supporters saying, “Such discussion is exactly the goal of our civically engaged theater; this discourse is the basis of a healthy democracy.” It appears that many are in agreement with Eustis; yesterday’s show received a standing ovation from an approving crowd. If the Public Theater has taught us anything, it’s that to this day, Shakespeare’s iconic play Julius Caesar stands as a testimony to politics, democracy, leadership — and the violence of it all. The play’s last show will be on June 18th, so see it while it’s still hot and hated by conservatives.

[Variety/Gordon Cox]

Voldemort finally gets the limelight in fan-made movie

If there’s anything the literary world knows by now, it’s that Harry Potter fans are dedicated (read: relentless). Unsatisfied with the undeveloped Voldemort/Tom Riddle storyline in Rowling’s hefty seven books, a group of Italian filmmakers have set out to leave no detail or ambiguity unnoticed. Production company Tryangle Films has released a number of teasers on YouTube for the fan-made film “Voldemort: Origins of the Heir,” which have garnered millions of views thanks to passionate Potterheads. While the project looked first to Kickstarter to receive some funding, the campaign was quickly shut down by Warner Bros. Now, it has been revealed that Warner Bros. and Tryangle have an agreement to release the project online, creating it via nonprofit means. The film will be released on YouTube for free, in what may be the ultimate homage to one of literature’s most despicable villains.

[HuffPost/Claire Fallon]

Former director of Ukrainian library sentenced to prison term

For quite some time now, we’ve been hearing about Russia’s apparent vendetta against the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow. After closing the institution in March, citing the supposed presence of anti-Russian propaganda materials amongst the 52,000 tomes, a Russian court has now convicted former director Natalia G. Sharina to a four-year suspended prison term. She has been charged with purchasing anti-Russian materials aimed to help Ukrainian nationalists undermine Russian authority in Moscow. While the Russian government has promised to preserve the books (but is still moving them to another library), Sharina will serve her time for accusations of ethnic hatred. She has actively denied any guilt, saying “Nobody gave a library director the right, moreover the responsibility, to censor legally published books.” All of this is getting a little too dystopian, if you ask me.

[NY Times/Serge Schmemann]

Down and Out in Post-Communist Slovakia

Down and Out in Post-Communist Slovakia

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Petržalka, a major neighborhood in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, is the most densely populated residential district in Central Europe. It’s made up of paneláks, massive concrete apartment buildings from the communist era when leaders sought to provide large quantities of housing and to slash costs by employing cheap and uniform design. Elza, the protagonist of the novel Seeing People Off, describes the buildings like advent calendars, “Window after window with a common backstage.”

The setting of Jana Beňová’s first book in English, translated by Janet Livingstone and published by Two Dollar Radio, is mirrored in how the novel itself is built. The bursts of narration — as short as a few words and rarely longer than a page — are recurring contained units, and they provide a stabilizing uniformity to an otherwise eccentric set of characters and scenes. These vignettes are self-contained, but just like in those paneláks, the noise travels between them.

Elza says, “In Petržalka apartments all the walls play music and talk.” Far beyond the common struggle of early-morning garbage trucks or the footsteps of the people upstairs, Elza wakes up before dawn to the rhythmic singing of the Petržalka muezzins, their voices thudding against the walls, coming down from the ceiling, and throbbing from below.

Elza tries to pee in the comfort of her own bathroom, but the neighbor is laughing so aggressively that the sound encircles her “like a strap that’s too tight,” leaving her frozen on the toilet. “I leave the living room and look for a refuge,” Elza says in another scene as she escapes the noise coming through one wall. “But here the shouts of the woman in love reach me. I have the feeling that they woke up at night, took me out of my cell and sat me down in front of a porno film. But not just any porno film. The kind of porno film where they shit and piss.”

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is Deeply Moving and Honest

Elza still somehow finds a lot to love in Petržalka, and the forced community in this book is one of its central joys. Many of the characters in Beňová’s book are rugged underachievers and one character claims that “the genius loci of Petržalka is in the fact that, in time, everyone here starts to feel like an asshole who never amounted to anything in life.” In the case of Elza, Ian, Lukas, and Rebeka, they’re a quartet of artists.

While some artist get their stipends from prestigious fellowships, Elza, Ian, Rebeka, and Lukas manage it in a much scrappier fashion: One of them works and makes money while the rest sit around drinking coffee and booze and creating. They rotate this responsibility. Beňová writes, “They were always shivering with cold, not dressed heavily enough, warming their hands on the hot mugs, mixing all kinds of alcohol, and continually writing something or making notes in books or magazines. Sometimes they would close a book loudly, put their hand on the spine and look off into the distance with a sigh.”

But while this posture of artistic indolence in the midst of post-Soviet disrepair can feel fun, the inactivity also claws at the characters, particularly Rebeka who’s made anxious by the productive bustle of others. In one vignette, Rebeka excitedly realizes she can levitate a shot glass using her mind. “She thought that her telekinesis abilities would save her life,” Beňová writes. “She wouldn’t have to earn money. They would leave the city and live in a little house by the sea. On one of the Greek Islands. Preferably Patmos.” But scientists later test her and find her telekinesis to be too humble and inconspicuous. “Three out of five people can do this. They just don’t know about it,” the experts tell her.

Petržalka is a major part of Bratislava, but Elza grew up in the old part of the city. She was raised believing that the Old Bridge was the beginning of an unpredictable road, where “a Sunday stroll changes to a fights for one’s life.” The experience of living in the nondescript towering apartment buildings of Petržalka is embodied in an early scene in which a young Elza goes to an outdated amusement park with her grandma. After getting rocked around while riding the old bumper cars, and staring at the bent-over men wandering the muddy complex, Elza enters the mirror-maze with her grandma. “We can’t get out — no way, no doors, the mirrors aren’t windows, nothing, just me and Grandma, Grandma and I, and our faces in the mirrors getting paler and paler.”

While there are two sides to this city, they are worlds apart. As Elza points out, even the rats don’t cross the bridge (the perk of which is that city officials can poison one side of the city at a time to exterminate the vermin). But when Elza’s mom and grandmother get on the wrong bus that ferries them deep into the high-rise apartment buildings, they grow frantic, just like Elza and her grandmother did in the mirror maze. “Miss! Miss! Excuse me, how can we get to Bratislava?” Elza’s mom blurts out to a stranger. “But you already are,” the woman says, “You are in Bratislava.”

They would be horrified to know that this is the Bratislava their own Elza would grow to happily call home.

The Hollywood of the Self

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Catherine Lacey’s second novel is called The Answers, but it is a book composed of questions — questions about who we are as a society, how people operate in relationships both romantic and platonic, and how little this world makes sense to someone who isn’t inundated with its idiosyncrasies.

I read Lacey’s first novel, Nobody is Ever Missing, when I was looking for answers of my own — on the cusp of leaving California for New York, wondering if the things I hoped the city would bring me were possible realities or figments of my imagination. Reading the novel and preparing to interview Lacey felt like a surreal arrival, as the book satirizes many aspects of New York culture that I’ve come to accept as the fabric of life here. This sense of communion with the novel quickly turned contemplative and melancholy; the narrator, Mary, expresses a quiet disbelief in love and a perpetual confusion at culture and society that destabilizes our commonly held conventions of what constitutes appropriate social behavior.

Mary hopes to undergo an expensive series of appointments for her undiagnosed crippling pain, but must find the capital to pay for the strange treatments. She responds to a brief ad posted on the bulletin board of a health food store, and begins a series of interviews for an undisclosed position. The job ends up being a sort of role playing: a famous actor is conducting an experiment in which multiple women perform the separate roles of a partner for him: intimacy girlfriend, anger girlfriend, intellectual girlfriend, maternal girlfriend. Mary is hired as the ‘emotional girlfriend,’ tasked with enacting a timeline of relationship landmarks: trading keys, saying I love you. The book delves into the perspectives of the actor, his devoted assistant, and the anger girlfriend, creating a constellation of ideas about gender relations, celebrity, and the performance of love.

The Answers calls out the fundamental absurdity of modern society and makes us question our continued participation in its psychodrama, as we watch the book’s narrator learn how to survive in a world she can’t quite grasp or understand. Lacey and I spoke on the phone about bartering for healthcare, the Hollywood of the self, and the similarities between modern dating and buying a house.

Rebecca Schuh: Mary’s story begins with her undiagnosed pain, she describes the body as “a sack of skin full of problems.” The body becomes an essential theme of the novel, the lengths we’ll go to protect our bodies, and how that governs our decisions. Can you talk about the role that the body played in constructing the narrative?

Catherine Lacey: There was a point when I was writing my first book where I realized that when I was most effective at inhabiting the voice of the narrator, I had a different posture, an uncomfortable posture, and it was only from this uncomfortable place that I could write that first narrator, Elyria. When I was working on The Answers, at one point I started going to a boxing gym. The character Ashley really came out of boxing. When I was writing her scenes, I felt more aware of her voice and her history while I was being that kind of active.

RS: “Having a body doesn’t give you the right to have one that works properly, having a body doesn’t give you any rights at all” — that quote, alas, reminded me of the current healthcare fiasco, were you thinking at all about the governance of bodies and health while you worked on the novel?

CL: I didn’t set out to write a book about medical debt or healthcare, and it didn’t end up becoming that entirely. While I was working on it I was having to pay for my own health insurance, and it felt like betting against yourself. It didn’t cover anything that I was actually doing that was proactive for my health. I didn’t have the intention to write some sort of critique of that, but whatever is tangibly happening in my life tends to affect what I’m working on, just by default.

I have back pain, because I have scoliosis. I was trying to be proactive in doing something about it, so I started doing acupuncture, and somebody told me about rolfing. I couldn’t afford it, it’s very expensive per session. I was really into bartering, I mean I’m still into bartering, but I was basically living in New York City by bartering for things, because I just made no money and I was always finding some scrappy way to continue to live in New York. I emailed every rolfer saying like I can tutor your children or clean your house, or paint a wall, anything, as a barter for a session, a series of treatments. Once I did it, I found the process to be really intimate and strange and it did have a positive effect, I don’t have almost any back pain anymore and I’m a half inch taller.

Then I realized, I’m paying 350 dollars a month to a health insurance company from which I’m receiving no benefit whatsoever, my primary care person just like walks into a room and looks at me for ten seconds and leaves and that happens once a year. So it was perplexing, thinking about how people take care of each other, and not just in the medical profession. It made me think about what effect does each person in my life have on me and what effects am I having on them, and why is it that a primary relationship or romantic relationship is the one that we think of as the relationship that you’re in and all the other ones are just like pointless, and we only celebrate the anniversary of our primary relationship. I had never seen those parallels before.

RS: Throughout the novel, we see other characters teaching Mary about modern culture and social cues, she starts out as this kind of identity-less character who has to learn so much about operating late in life. What fascinated about having a narrator who had to learn these basic social and cultural references?

CL: I had this sense that she had come from somewhere else and didn’t really have a family, partially because her relationship with Chandra when I started writing it just felt like a very intense relationship that she had a lot wrapped up in. When you have a character that has so few resources, then you can kind of re-envision the world a little bit. You can use her confused perspective as a way to look at the world in a different way. She didn’t see New York City in the same terms that your average person in New York City would see it. She saw it as all this code and this completely overwhelming puzzle to undo.

The world becomes increasingly bizarre to me. If you’re not plugged in, on Facebook, looking at the internet every day, which I’m not, suddenly there’s all these cultural and social cues that sort of spring out of that world that pretty much everyone is adopting. It’s this series of images and ways that people talk to each other now, that if you take a step back and you aren’t involved in it, the world does start to look very strange. I find most people pretty perplexing.

“The world becomes increasingly bizarre to me. If you’re not plugged in, on Facebook, looking at the internet every day…suddenly there’s all these cultural and social cues that sort of spring out of that world that pretty much everyone is adopting.”

RS: There was a lot of really interesting analysis of celebrity in relation to Kurt, how anyone he meets feels as though they already know him and his over awareness of the self. What was that analysis inspired by?

CL: I think that people treat themselves like celebrities right now. I don’t know very much about actual celebrities but I do know that I think because people are constantly turning their personality into product with social media, we now are just a nation of people who view themselves as celebrities and have some kind of brand to maintain. Even if you’re a person that — you have Facebook or you have a Twitter or whatever but you don’t put anything on it — then that’s your brand. And I used to think that that wasn’t necessarily true, but it is, it’s pretty inescapable because the internet has become this media document that we’re all a part of in some way, whether you want to be or not. So the concern with celebrity is not a direct concern with Hollywood so much as it is the Hollywood of the self right now.

The Healing Center

RS: The timeline that Mary is given for the development of her relationship with Kurt seemed like a parody of one of those articles that you read about how this is where you should be in your new relationship, and those always strike me as kind of absurd, but people swear by that specific track. Why do you think people so wedded to that timeline in the face of a new bond?

CL: I guess we just really want order and control. I think maybe that’s something everyone should work on a little bit more because it’s really a lie and it’s a way for people to be controlled, it’s really just you getting on the conveyer belt to procreate, it’s this deep programming, and it doesn’t suit everybody.

On the flip side though, it’s scary to get into a relationship with somebody, it can be intimidating to try and wrap your life up with somebody else, and the possibility they will disappoint you more than anybody else. Certainly if you stay with somebody long enough the little disappointments that can take place in a day between two people, sometimes they’re humungous, the dumbest little things can feel so painful because in your head you have this idea that it’s supposed to be everything for you, and it’s a lie, everybody just kind of gets bamboozled by it all the time.

“The dumbest little things can feel so painful because in your head you have this idea that it’s supposed to be everything for you, and it’s a lie, everybody just kind of gets bamboozled by it all the time.”

I think that there’s a lot about modern dating that’s pretty cowardly and really cruel, where you spend months basically deciding if you can get a better deal. You’re kind of sniffing them out, and they’re sniffing you out, and you’re trying to decide — my partner and I are selling our house right now, and it’s kind of similar to that in that you want to take a bid but that’s not enough and you were holding out for something else.

RS: It’s a very weird and intricate but there’s not a good way to contextualize it because it’s just so strange.

CL: Whether you are in love with somebody I think is pretty clear. If you’re open and receptive and paying attention and you meet somebody who can kind of recognize that in you then it’s great, but it’s just a matter of, that might only be a thing that can exist for a few months because of some circumstance in your life, or “oh I didn’t realize that you actually want to have six children and I want no children.” It’s really two different things, love itself and then the practical stuff of, do your lives fit together? It’s kind of unfortunate really that we live so long because you have time to fuck it up so many times, but the heart and then your life, who you want to be with and who you actually can be with is two different things.

“It’s kind of unfortunate really that we live so long because you have time to fuck it up so many times.”

RS: I thought it was interesting that the name of the novel is The Answers when Mary and the book itself ask so many questions. There were a couple of the questions that I was interested in hearing you respond to. Two resonated with me for whatever reason, the first one being: what is the point of marriage?

Author Catherine Lacey. Photo by Willy Somma

CL: Oh god, there’s so many different points, it really depends on the culture you’re in and the situation you find yourself in. Sometimes I think the point of it is to display something about yourself to other people that you want them to believe. Only the problem is that it’s never true about anybody. I’m reading Isadora, this novel by Amelia Gray that just came out, and one character says, I’m gonna fuck up the quote because the book is not in front of me, but it’s about how disappointing she finds weddings to be because they don’t really deliver on eternity, because you’re seeing these people commit this eternal love, and then you know what’s more possible is that it’s not going to be death that takes them apart but it’ll be something else. So there’s that aspect of it, but that’s a pretty cynical aspect, I think it can be something much finer and more subtle than that, between some people. And all this is only relevant to contemporary American culture. Personally, I don’t really need marriage to have a point.

I feel as good as married to my partner because we’re just completely committed to each other, we live together, we met and basically just immediately moved in, and we were always just gung ho. And I’ve been very hesitant to involve the state in my personal life. I have a lot of reasons to be suspicious of it, I do think about if he ever got sick, but that’s really the only thing to me.

RS: The other question that Mary asks that stuck out to me is, what is happening in the brains of a happy couple and how can we know if they are actually happy?

CL: I guess you can’t know. Limerence is the word for it, but in some ways that early state of falling in love is more about sort of projecting things into the future and observing yourself observing somebody and it’s less about actual duty to someone and real love. It’s more about the excitement of discovery and seeing the world in a slightly different way because now you’re now opened up to seeing the world differently than you used to, and it’s this effusive kind of wild state, but that’s very different than taking care of someone and being able to see all their less great qualities and showing them all your less great qualities.

RS: There’s a scene where Mary and Kurt have their first date at the bar where they make the cocktail based on what they think you need from your mood, and it struck me as a great parody. I found a lot of instances of that cultural parody in the novel, was that intentional?

CL: I guess there’s some aspects of it that are kind of satirical, but, it’s funny because I haven’t really done much of that before, it was only after I’d written some stuff that I kind of realized that’s what I was doing. That bar, I feel like that’s just years of New York sort of worming their way into the situation there.

I was traveling in Japan with my partner and we were in a small town and he saw this unmarked door and it was a bar and so we went in there to have a drink. We didn’t speak any Japanese and the bartender didn’t speak any English, it was this completely ageless handsome impeccably dressed man, and the bar was completely empty, and he served us little bits of sake, through miming and pointing at things, we established a way to communicate with him where basically he was going to pour us some sake and when we finished he would give us more or wouldn’t and I felt like I had stepped into something I had already imagined.

For a little while I wrote for Blackbook online for weird food experiences, like somehow I got on this beat of like fancy food pop up restaurants and shit, I don’t know how it happened. That was while I was super poor, I was on food stamps, and then I’d get to go have this extremely fancy meal for which I was being paid seventy five dollars to write about, and everyone there was paying hundreds of dollars to be there and I was just trying to pass. Like put on my one good dress and just try and act like you belong there. So I think maybe that had some effect on that scene or that aspect of the book, Mary sort of inhabiting this New York world and not really knowing how to do it.

Why People Don’t Like “I Love Dick” (Hint: Because It’s About Women)

An Underground Library on the NYC Subway

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The MTA and NYC libraries partner to offer free eBooks to commuters, with selections from Recommended Reading

New York City’s commuters are already regailed by showtime, mariachi bands, and the occasional harmonizing quartet, but this summer, riding the subway is about to get even more entertaining. As a way to celebrate free cellular service and WiFi in underground stations, the MTA has partnered with the New York Public Library, Queens Public Library, and Brooklyn Public Library in creating a hybrid of the two systems: the Subway Library.

As part of this six week promotion that began last week, the MTA has remade the interior of a 10-car subway train to resemble the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room. Adorned with “SUBWAY LIBRARY” in a multitude of bright colors on its exterior, the train is running along the E and F lines. However, the promotion is not only available for those who will be lucky enough to get on this train in the coming weeks; by logging into the WiFi of any of the underground subway stations, patrons can get free access to hundreds of e-books and other online reading, all of which has been donated to the New York Public Library by publishers. After the six weeks, readers will need a library membership to access the content and the app.

The selection of e-books includes new fiction and nonfiction releases, classics, thrillers, and young adult books, available to browse on the promotion’s website. Electric Literature’s own Recommended Reading has contributed selections from our archives for the project, making members-only stories by authors such as Jesmyn Ward, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lydia Millet available to all New Yorkers. In addition to the selection of short fiction, novel excerpts are available from Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.

Recommended Reading Archives

In a news release on the MTA’s website, New York Public Library President Tony Marx says, “The New York Public Library’s mission is to make information and knowledge accessible to all, and this exciting partnership with the MTA is certainly right on track…By making thousands of free stories easily available to subway straphangers, we are encouraging reading, learning, and curiosity. We hope people take their love of reading with them once they leave the subway by checking out one of our 92 branches or downloading our e-reader app SimplyE.”

Accommodating for various travel times and readers, the Subway Library shows a dedication to one of NYC commuters’ most popular pastimes.

From His Corner, A Bodega Owner Watches Brooklyn Change

Double Take: What Superheroes Talk About on Their Time Off

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Note: Double Take is a literary criticism series wherein a book goes toe-to-toe with two authors as they pick apart and discuss its innermost themes, its successes and failings, trappings and surprises. In this edition, Rosie Clarke and JW McCormack go in-depth with Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs.

Rosie Clarke: Let’s chat on Hangouts!

John McCormack: Yes, sorry, hi! I’m so simpleminded I can’t drive my module. Or remember how to use messenger.

RC: It’s all good! There’s something very Microsoft about Google Hangouts that sets my teeth on edge.

JMC: Do you want to do chat another way?

RC: Is the old Gchat still running? I know they’re phasing it out. I mean this is fine.

JMC: I sort of thought this was Gchat.

RC: It is, as in, Gchat is dead: Long live Google Hangouts.

JMC: That’s right. Now, on top of our confusion about Gchat vs. Talk vs. Hangouts is the fact that I had thought that we would be having a live conversation; instead, we were supposed to write one another a series of emails. I think this series of misunderstandings has brought us here; as well, the wonky platform we’re using underscores a key theme of Dear Cyborgs.

RC: Yes, for me the book feels like a series of monologues, one-sided conversations, with no clear recipient or audience. I found it very hard to connect with what was going on at times. Even the actual conversations that occur are quite alienating. I think the intimacy characters feel with one another aren’t shared by the reader, mainly due to a lack of character development, but we can come back to that. Did you have the same response?

JMC: Right! I suspect this is a situation where we think the same thing but feel differently about it. To your first point, I certainly “a series of floating monologues” is a good way to define the novel’s structure. The characters aren’t actually speaking (at least not entirely) nor is what they’re talking about the basis of the story. It’s a little like Godard’s whispered intrusions in his late 60s movies and a little like the radio writer Joe Frank. But let’s go back to the ‘story,’ the initial premise. How would you describe it?

RC: In part, it’s a memoir, a series of nostalgic recollections about growing up and sharing the kind of closeness with a friend that only comes from a shared sense of alienation. And when that closeness is severed, it echoes that sense of being haunted by its absence. On the other hand, it’s a series of meditations on protest, resistance, the purpose of art as a creative force, commerce. So the “novel,” the connecting thread, is an attempt by the narrator to capture or recapture this significant friendship. The meditations are more like short stories, sometimes even manifestos, conveying messages I feel are not entirely realized.

I was certainly mislead by the superhero element!

JMC: Oh, let’s about that superhero element. Frank Exit is a superhero fighting the machinations of his nemesis, Miss Mistleto, throughout the city. In the meantime, he hangs out in karaoke bars with his artist friends, Muriel and Dave. The superhero chapters alternate with chapters that detail the story of a Vietnamese immigrant named Vu, who moved away when the narrator was a child but who resurfaces near the end of the novel and proposes that he and the narrator collaborate on a series of comic books, which would seem to explain the superhero content, right?

Except all of that — and I’ve left out the postcards addressed to, Dear Cyborgs, popping up throughout — is just a frame to explore the themes you mentioned: ideas of art and resistance.

RC: I feel like using superheroes as mouthpieces for socio-political commentary is a clever move by Lim, I just wasn’t expecting it, but probably because I’m conditioned by the kind of superhero-centric content I consume predominantly being provided by the MCU and D.C., where any discussion of politics is, shall we say, not subtle.

JMC: Oh, you mean inasmuch as the mutants of the X-Men are standing in for minorities or how Iron Man fights Captain America in a kind of explosive Bush administration dumb-show?

But I think that Lim’s goals here are to illustrate every variety of adjacency. Adjacency being a force more powerful than love.

Art is certainly adjacent to consumption, just as it is the passing of strangers and the miracle of chance encounter — probably central to every work of literature, but usually not taken as a central feature as it is here — is what turns us into people. As though personhood is a thing that seeps like a ghost through crowds.

That’s what I take from the part where a character is talking about how he likes to “ghost.”

“Now human exchange has been reduced to transaction… I’d test it out quite literally. I’d go to the busiest plaza, the most packed rooms, the jammed streets. And I’d stand just to the side, next to the thoroughfare or just against the jostle of bar bodies in Brownian motion. And the world would revolve around me, even, it felt, flow through me.”

“We’d pass by each other untouched.”

That’s what it is to be a cyborg, right? It’s a super-modern condition where we’re an audience plugged into every conceivable entertainment, including our own lives, but at a considerable distance.

RC: Yes, absolutely, and the postcards that punctuate the chapters are directed at us. They’re very tongue-in-cheek, but vaguely threatening, and sometimes nonsensical in a way that makes me think that some sort of A.I. or algorithm wrote them, which would make sense in the context. And I think the distance that’s inherently connected to our state as “cyborgs” is apparent in the book itself; rather than pulling you into an intimate, absorbing narrative, the reader is constantly being kept at arm’s length, confounded, turned around. And the notion of ghosts and ghosting that you mention are recurring themes. The narrator feels haunted by Vu; the “villain” Ms Mistleto appears and disappears; we ourselves feel like ghosts observing conversations from behind a kind of veil of disconnection.

JMC: I think we are invited to view narrative art with suspicion. Maybe I’m imagining things, but I think I caught a bitter joke at the expense of Italo Calvino and the kind of, you know, primacy of art and the nobility of reading that we all pay lip service to while knowing that, at most, we are “parasites signaling to other parasites.”

I mean it in the way Frank Exit mentions that he lost his book and we expect he’s going to go on losing his book while only getting part of the way in like in If on a winter night’s a traveler. Instead, his friend just turns up and says, “By the way, here’s your book.”

There’s a long quote near the beginning that’s worth trying to parse because it seems like the thing we’re being dared to challenge throughout —

“However, there may be a sliver of protest still possible, which you may rightfully accuse of being worse, a reactionary or collaborative tactic which I nonetheless think is the only possible defiance left outside of the terminal possibilities of suicide, the morally corrupting option of guerrilla warfare, or the subtly but fundamentally distinct choice of utter acquiescence. This alone-possible and admittedly vaporous defiance is merely to live and accept one’s culpability but try without going into heroics to participate minimally as a parasite does, getting one’s needs and not much more, not often much more.One tries then to touch only lightly the general degradation but also to become no longer concerned with it. One becomes accepting of powerlessness, is rendered complacent and mute, but tries nonetheless to signal other like-minded parasites, not in order to gather and foment rebellion, which would be too grandiose a goal, but simply so as to provide reflection, the mirage or actuality of company, that is, simply to make known one’s kind’s existence as a remaining possibility. In the end this contemptible character I’ve sketched, the artist, is all that remains of the initial quest for purity.”

That is, the artist recognizes the base-level un-livability and outrage of the culture as it is. But rather than do the usual thing and claim that art is transformative on a mass scale, Lim’s artist serves to broadcast one’s existence as a remaining, but not redemptive, option.

That’s the dilemma that all the various dialogues seem to be picking up from different angles.

RC: Very Camus-esque — laying oneself open to the indifference (or in this case, hostility) of the world, and in that acceptance lies the impetus to go on despite it all.

JMC: It’s so immediate. Galvanizing, palpable. Maybe that’s why I was more forgiving of the fact that the characters are often little more than mouthpieces, the super-heroics little more than self-aware, coy line drawings penciled in around the monologues that make up the bulk of the book. Because Lim anticipates, and indeed problematizes, our impatience with the escapist literary norm.

RC: Yes, returning to your earlier comment about art’s adjacency to consumption, I think that in Dear Cyborgs, art is more than adjacent — Lim represents art as intrinsically connected to commerce, even when the artist sets out to create something impossible to value. I’m thinking of the character Sonny Rhee, who “allowed only twelve of her paintings to exist at any one time… What this meant was that when she finished a new painting, she would burn her oldest one”, and buyers have to buy all twelve paintings in the understanding that eventually, all of them will have been burned and replaced by different works. Of course, the irony is she’s hugely successful, albeit temporarily, because that kind of gimmick is highly sellable.

The reason is Lim’s focus on capitalism and its machinations, and whether protest and demonstration are viable methods of resistance, or just shouting inside an echo chamber or, worse, into the void, or if by creating a painting with the purpose of destroying it one is feeding the function of art as capital rather than rejecting it, because through that destruction you’re acknowledging its value.

JMC: I am so glad you brought the Sonny Rhee part up. I felt like I was going to have a difficult time re-capping it, but it’s one of my favorite episodes.

RC: Likewise, it’s one of my favorite parts.

Double Take: Joan of Arc in a World of Endless War

JMC: In a way, it’s the most lucid book I’ve read lately. All the books I’ve related to lately have basically brought up the question(s) — what are we doing here? What are we party to? What is desirable? What is apt, given that the correct socio-political view is the horrified, baffled, fearful, woke one?

Another good joke: When the book entitled Dear Cyborgs appears, the narrator asks what it is and the answer is —

“A program, a drug uploaded through your eyeballs, an idea virus. Techincally, a bio-based cybernetic machine to collapse space-time, or psychosomatically one that activates clairvoyance, or, more poetically: a time machine. If you read it, you can know the future or the past.”

“What?

“Just kidding. It’s my autobiography, kind of. My life story, but fictionalized.”

We have at our command, a vast vocabulary of information, knowledge, points of reference and affinities. We can cross-reference science fictional concepts, apply classical storytelling modes to comic books and dissect the Barthesian content of midnight movies, with uncanny skill and speed. We’ve successfully banished all notion of high and low art. It’s hard to believe what a slight comfort it all is. And when we look hard for something pure, “the initial quest,” what do we find but the market, which we know reinforces all the very destructive tendencies we set out to oppose.

Thus, I think, the book’s plot/character elements are tinfoil recreations. To pretend otherwise would to be giving the lie to Lim’s whole project. It would be too comforting to develop these phantoms according to our expectations.

Because what good have our expectations done anybody lately?

Frank’s sister appears drunk at a gallery, railing at her brother’s hypocrisy because she believed in his artistry but now seems to have recognized him as a parasite. She states the case thusly: “Now we’re all Icarus. Cyborgs with our wings. An augmented reality. The Cassandra warnings forgotten. And it’s always on, always simultaneous: the soaring and the panic, spasm and grace, flight and fall. Burn it to the ground. Burn it to the motherfucking ground.”

RC: Fiction that responds to the sense of a societal malaise and directionlessness that isn’t sci-fi, or dystopian fiction, is much more interesting to me, and Dear Cyborgs does feel distinct in that way.

I think it speaks to the questions you posited — what are we doing here? What are we party to? What is desirable, what is apt — which are very specific, unanswerable questions, or perhaps the answers are unwanted in a way.

The chapter where Ms. Mistleto recounts her experiment in “alternative living” arising from a protest which turns into the occupation of a skyscraper, in an attempt to “refashion the occupation… and make it into a utopian colony founded on principles of equality, collective decision making, cooperative labor, and shared property.” Of course, like Sonny’s attempt to disengage art from capital, this project fails, and the occupiers give up and leave. The violent desperation of the protest, a cry out for something better, is inevitably cooled to a gradual acceptance of the status quo. I think that’s a fear a lot of us have at the moment, that the strength of our current convictions are insufficient to overthrow whatever powers we oppose. And when I think too much on that I do see Frank’s sister’s point — is there a way to fix this?

JMC: That’s another great sequence — that occupied skyscraper.

Well, the novel is kind enough to include its own source code at the end. The narrator reunites with Vu and devise their project —

“Superheroes going out to lunch complaining to their therapists, unsure about their parenting styles. A chase scene where the driver and his passenger, while making split-second decisions, talk about different forms of resistance to power. A murder mystery where the detective receives a call at the crime scene from her father and she tells him her theories about the history of suicide protests around the world, analyses of madness and megalomania versus desperate agency, and the dangers of aestheticizing violence.”

That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about in this book, right?

Think about the example of Richard Aoki, which gets a good amount of ink. A radical Asian-American comrade of the Black Panthers outed after his death as an FBI informant!

RC: Yes —

“[T]his utterly and helplessly American character: the secret and self-elected perpetual foreigner modulating between a double and triple identity.”

JMC: I think Lim’s answer would be adjacency. Accident and adjacency. We accomplish a surprising amount merely by existing as living records of our parents’ mistakes and the betrayal of our national ideals.

RC: Huzzah!

JMC: I kn0w. I’m thinking of the fact that, if I remember correctly, when Vu vanishes, he leaves our narrator with a text, right? Is it the text inherited from his father?

RC: That’s correct — it’s a book — and the narrator initially hides it without reading it.

JMC: Well, that’s the hope then: the unread, unwritten book.

It’s the book Frank Exit loses, bookmarked with arcane postcards inscribed with these kind of Buddhist koans… or in the sort of overheard conversations that percolate throughout the novel without adding up to a traditional narrative or scene.

That’s adjacency — the absorbed, the witnessed, the incidental insight that fails to add up to a coherent world view…and yet, one of these days…like when Bowie sings —

“one day I’m going to write a poem or a letter/ one day, I’m going to get the faculty together”

RC: And so maybe our biggest act of resistance is to resist the compulsive urge to make sense of the senseless, the ambiguous, the ghosts, which I can see now was perhaps my mistake when approaching the book initially. Rather than possessing and consuming, we should witness, be grazed by, be passed through by phantoms.

JMC: I think it is rare to encounter self-aware, genre-spliced postmodernism that is this worldly and purposeful, or pop that is this utilitarian, serious and searching, or timely state-of-the-nation reckonings that are this optimistic, open, and kindhearted. The union of seeming opposites, co-existing across 163 pages is, for me, a reason to be cheerful.

RC: You’ve converted me. I came into this feeling somewhat negative about the book, but I think I allowed myself to be swayed by a misconception going in, or wanting it to be something different. I think to write a book about immigrant experience that isn’t about immigrant experience, about superheroes that skews their whole purpose, and about capitalism and resistance that doesn’t succumb to bright-eyed idealism or weary cynicism is quite an achievement.

JMC: Agreed. An expansive about-ness that is nonetheless the story of a mind, an experience, a moment. The miracle is that we have the power to transmit these things — it’s not a solipsistic vision at all! Cyborgs are capable of that crucial crossing-over on waves of air. I guess we should end with a quote, almost randomly chosen —

“Someone said we can weaponize our invisibility, our outcast status, by converting it into anonymity. We may do that. The point is we’re out of here. It’s the only escape. The rest is lying to yourself. That’s what we’ve decided. And we’re tough. We can do it. But we have to keep it lean and mean. Just us and on the run and slash and burn.

“IS there another way> Maybe there’s not even this way. The culpability and embeddedness so tight and inextricable.

“We’re going to make a perfect sand painting, a masterpiece ice sculpture — and then suicide pact our way into history I mean oblivion.”

RC:

“Muriel is actually a foundling extraterrestrial sent from a far superior civilization (…) I’m a mere Earthling, and therefore far less inherently powerful, but I’ve mastered various physical disciplines and martial arts as well as having proven myself in battle with a certain tactical wiliness, which seems to impress. Despite these accomplishments, as you no doubt will notice, I tend to be depressed and anxious much of the time.”

A Literary Guide to Southern California’s Beach Towns

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The 230-mile stretch of coastline between Santa Barbara and San Diego is one of the ripest subjects of the American pop culture imagination. But for all the sun-bleached shows and surf-beat bands, Southern California beach towns are a little underserved by real-deal literature.

Fly Me

When I set out to write my novel, Fly Me, I wanted to write a book about stewardesses and the ’70s, but more than anything I hoped to contribute something to the limited shelf about these places along the coast. To peel away the familiar imagery and plug in to the psychology of a setting that makes people feel a way nowhere else makes them feel, and consequently compels them to behave in stark and strange ways. These books are my very favorites that set stories at the beach and get to the heart of what it means to live at the edge, where, as Joan Didion writes, things better work, because that’s “where we run out of continent.”

Traveling roughly north to south…

Santa Barbara: Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

The best kind of thriller, in that the murder mystery driving the plot is secondary to the 3D portrait of post-Vietnam nihilism that cripples the drifters at the book’s core. They made this into a movie starring a young Jeff Bridges (Mr. Santa Barbara himself), but it’d be a mistake to miss the extraordinary writing in what many call Thornburg’s masterpiece. The book does an especially powerful job conveying that quintessential contrast of relentless beauty (of the SB setting) with the blackness of the events and the characters caught up in them.

The White Album

 Malibu: The White Album by Joan Didion

You can’t talk about the psychology of California without talking about Joan Didion. But while many associate her more closely with other California settings — Sacramento (Where I Was From), San Francisco (“Slouching Towards Bethlehem”), Hollywood (Play It As It Lays), even the L.A. County suburbs (“Trouble in Lakewood”) — Didion also trained her penetrating gaze on Malibu when she was living there with her husband and daughter during the early-70s.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Santa Monica: A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

This short novel—set in a single day in the life of Isherwood’s mourning professor, George—is a capsule of both the expat collective in Santa Monica in the years after the war (when Isherwood, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, and Bertolt Brecht collectively complicated the cliché that brains didn’t belong at the beach), and, more essentially, the gay scene in Santa Monica in the early ’60s. It’s a beautiful and refreshing glimpse of a Santa Monica of a different era — and as with even the most unrelated novels set in Southern California beach towns, the book’s perfect climax requires an ocean.

 The Westside: The White Boy Shuffle & The Sellout by Paul Beatty 

These two books by Beatty are genius. And while most of each take place in other neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the scathing characterizations of the beach towns — where Beatty’s narrator grows up (in The White Boy Shuffle) or visits often to surf (in The Sellout) — are so crisply-observed that they’re certainly true. One of the essential subjects of L.A., of course, is the division that exists between the city’s wealthier and poorer neighborhoods, despite their often close proximity to one another. The narrator of The Sellout explores that paradox again and again by taking the short bus ride from his home in Dickens (“the murder capital of America”) to the beach towns ten miles to the west. His breakdown of how a black surfer gets treated in each of those towns along the bay is face-coveringly damning and hilarious.

6. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (2009) — Gordita Beach (Manhattan Beach)

Pynchon lived in Manhattan Beach during the late ’60s while he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow — as unlikely a place to knock out a Europe-in-wartime doorstop as Santa Monica was for Isherwood and Mann. But forty years after leaving, Pynchon published a tangly whodunit starring a stoner P.I. named Doc who lives in a fictionalized M.B. called Gordita Beach. Though the plot is often as paranoid and confused as Doc, the remarkable clarity and specificity with which Pynchon recalls and relates not just the details of the period but the psychology of the folks living near the beach as the lights go out on the ’60s, proves Pynchon was soaking up more (and smoking less) than might’ve been assumed by people who knew him around town back then.

Palos Verdes / Rolling Hills: Model Home by Eric Puchner

This is the best book I’ve read about life “on the hill” — the peninsula at the southern edge of the Santa Monica Bay. The wealthier communities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula are a mix of cliff-perched mansions, horse-y estates, and cookie-cutter track homes, and they remain to this day a little unknown even to folks living in L.A. and Orange Counties. Eric Puchner’s debut novel gave full exposure to the version of the place that existed in the ’80s — and to the complex privilege and attendant edginess that comes if you’re living out there with a sense of un-belonging.

Huntington Beach: Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn

Nunn has been described as the poet laureate of “surf noir,” and he laid claim to the title with this debut. A teenage outsider from the desert comes to Huntington looking for his missing sister and gets caught up with the seedy surfers, bikers, dealers, and pornographers (some are all four) who hang around the pier. As with Thornburg (above), it’s the writing — which is better than it needs to be to carry a book with such pace and movement and mystery — that makes the novel special: both the depth of what’s going on in the hero’s head, and the precision of sensations, like, say, catching a wave. Though it’s not a direct adaptation, this book is said to have inspired Point Break.

Newport Beach: The OC

Some memorable stories by Michael Chabon (A Model World), David Foster Wallace (Girl With Curious Hair), and Victoria Patterson (Drift) notwithstanding, no book does Newport Beach — or the specific psychological strangeness of life in any of these towns — like the first two seasons of The OC. (No joke!)

The Barbarian Nurseries (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

Laguna Rancho Estates (Orange County): The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar

If Southern California coastal life is a little underserved by fiction generally, the stories of the immigrants who work in the wealthier communities are especially few and far between. Which is why Héctor Tobar’s book — centered on a Mexican-American maid in a fictional gated community — is such a revelation. Tobar, who’s worked for decades as a journalist boring beneath the Southern California of easy surfaces, gives us a social novel of the strange and singular interplay between the classes in communities like this one.

 Laguna Beach: Savages by Don Winslow

We started with a crime novel set in a placid beach town and might as well bookend it with another one. Dealers Ben and Chon get a little overextended with their marijuana outfit — squeezed by a Mexican cartel who kidnaps their (shared) girl, “O”—and it’s not long before the plot, like many of Winslow’s, bleeds into the business over the border. Which is the right place to leave things; Mexico’s a whole other story.

In ‘Roughneck,’ Not All Wounds Heal

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The past has the power to haunt us. It can consume us and take over our lives. When it does, we find ourselves in a world of darkness, which is the very territory that Jeff Lemire’s latest graphic novel, Roughneck, occupies.

Readers familiar with the Eisner-nominated author’s masterpiece Essex County, about secrets and family bonds in a rural community, will find some familiar ground here in Roughneck. Derek Ouellette serves as Lemire’s protagonist, and Derek is broken — completely broken. As a young hockey star, he committed a “vicious attack” on an opposing team’s player. Consequently, Derek lost his spot on the team. This incident causes his life to spiral out of control. He turns to drinking, and bar fighting becomes a mere hobby to him. He speaks crudely, and his interactions are harsh and uncontrolled. Unfortunately, Derek falls into a situation where he can’t escape his reputation in his small town of Pimitamon, and that eats away at him. He lives a life void of attachment. That is until his sister, Beth, suddenly arrives back in town.

Beth’s appearance catches Derek off guard. Like him, she, too, is broken. She’s unexpectedly pregnant. She’s trying to escape her abusive boyfriend. She’s addicted to drugs. To make her situation worse, Beth overdoses on Oxycontin shortly after she arrives back in Pimitamon, and she winds up in the hospital. Derek agrees to take care of her, though. He takes her to an isolated hunting camp in the woods, where they both plan to recover — both physically and emotionally. Together, they begin on a tumultuous journey to find some sense of healing.

Will This Marriage End in Fire?

Lemire’s graphic novel sounds explosive, and it certainly is. However, it’s also quiet and introspective. Derek and Beth’s initial conversations are direct, but they carry a fragile undertone that rings of authenticity. After Beth comes home from the hospital, Derek tries to ease the tension in an early exchange of dialogue that he begins:

“Well, the fire’s low. How you feeling otherwise?”

“Like I’m a total mess.”

“Yeah? Well, so am I. Where does that leave us?

“Freezing our asses off in the bush together.”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

They speak with humor to soften the world that has, at least for now, consumed them both.

In what is the novel’s most moving frame, Lemire takes us back to what has to be the worst day from Derek and Beth’s childhood: the day they were in a tragic traffic accident that killed their beloved mother. It’s here that we see Derek’s past loving nature. He wraps his arms around his sister and comforts her. “It’s okay, Bethy. Don’t look. Don’t look at Mom,” he says. By Lemire including this tender flashback, we see how far Derek has fallen. Now, he struggles to even communicate with his sister. He’s a long way from being able to truly comfort her. It’s these intimate moments that make the overall narrative soar.

Roughneck is a simply-plotted story, but it’s so expertly executed that it seems complex — and even sophisticated. Lemire uses a circular style in storytelling. Abuse appears first as we learn of Derek and Beth’s mother living in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship. Then, when Lemire presents Beth’s situation with her abuser, we see how tough the cycle is to break. Lemire uses this same circular motion when looking at Derek’s progression. He was once a hockey star. Now, he finds himself back in the rink — if only to recall those glory days.

Lemire explores classic American themes. There is isolation, loneliness, loss, and perseverance. Although Roughneck is a graphic novel, it should come with the term “literary” somewhere in its classification. This is a finely crafted work of fiction.

Lemire’s illustrations enrich Roughneck, and they capture the book’s moodiness with great success. The lines are harsh, drawn with jagged and tense strokes. The angles have a gritty feeling, too. The close-up shots of Derek’s face display his rugged nature, and they also show his internal pain. Lemire is just as successful in his renderings of Beth, which work to showcase her vulnerability as well as her strength.

Near the end of Roughneck, Beth goes to visit her abusive father, whom she hasn’t spoken to in many years. She tells him, “I wanted you to see that I’m still here. You — you almost killed me, but I’m still here.” Amidst all of her pain, she’s finding her footing. There’s hope for Lemire’s two troubled souls, and there’s hope for us, too. Jeff Lemire’s Roughneck shows us that overcoming a troubled past and finding peace might be a rocky road, but it’s one that’s worth the journey.