Beloved Australian Author Detained By US Border Control

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Mem Fox doubts she’ll ever return to the US again

Popular Australian children’s author, Mem Fox, was recently detained by the United States border control as a result of Trump’s travel ban (or “not a ban” or “bad people” ban or whatever he is calling it now).

After nearly two-hours of exhausting interrogation, border control agents finally determined that Fox, a 70 year old woman who has traveled to the United States 116 times, was in fact not a bad person. However, it appears that irreparable damage has been done as far as the author is concerned. In a statement obtained by the Guardian, Fox says, “I felt like I had been physically assaulted which is why, when I got to my hotel room, I completely collapsed and sobbed like a baby.” She was taken aback by the “so many insults and…so much gratuitous impoliteness” she received, that at this point she “couldn’t imagine” returning to the United States again.

The writer of over 30 books, including the classic, Possum Magic, filed formal complaints with the Australian and US embassies. While Fox’s ordeal is a downright embarrassment for the United States, let us not forget that this is a frightening reality for millions of our local community members who have far less agency. If border control is treating a darling, 70 year old, visa-carrying author this way, we should be worried.

Yoojin Grace Wuertz Takes On a Turbulent Moment in South Korean History

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In her debut novel Everything Belongs To Us, Yoojin Grace Wuertz transports readers back to 1978, to Seoul National University in South Korea. Four students — Jisun, Namin, Sunam, and Juno — struggle to succeed financially and socially during the final years of a repressive regime that also incited an economic transformation in the country. Jisun, a tycoon’s daughter, shuns her privilege to become an underground labor activist. Namin, her childhood best friend, lifts her family out of poverty by soaring to the top of the class. Juno will stop at nothing to get it all, including top rank in the university’s prestigious social club, “the Circle.” And Sunam, lover and villain, drives a wedge between the women, changing their lives forever.

Born in Seoul, Wuertz immigrated to the US when she was six. I met her at Tin House Writer’s Workshop in 2012, where I first witnessed the compassion she transmits from her heart to the page. She is brilliant, poised and determined, and while her prose is keen and tidy, the intimate relationships she creates in her stories are messy enough to be true. She currently lives with her husband and son in New Jersey, which is where she was when I phoned her to discuss writing historical fiction, listening to our elders, enduring an authoritarian leader, and Everything Belongs To Us.

Andrea Arnold: South Korean history hasn’t been widely covered by American novelists. Why did you choose to set Everything Belongs To Us in 1978?

Yoojin Grace Wuertz: My parents were college students in Seoul in the 1970s and I became fascinated with the stories my dad would tell me about that period. It was a very dynamic, volatile time because the economy was growing at an unprecedented rate under a repressive and authoritarian government. Park Chung Hee was President, and I chose to set the novel in 1978 because many factions in the country — student and labor activists particularly — were rising up in dissent during that time. [The President] was assassinated in 1979, three months before I was born. As an immigrant kid, I noticed cultural differences between Korea and the U.S., of course, but I didn’t understand the political differences. It started as an intellectual interest but ended up being personally meaningful because it helped put my own history and identity into larger context.

AA: Financial success is everything to everyone in the novel except for Jisun. After we leave these students, an economic transformation occurs in South Korea. What was life like for South Koreans before and after the economic transformation?

YGW: My parents were born in 1953, 1954 at the end of the Korean War. For that generation, the post-war generation, they witnessed several generations’ worth of economic progress compressed into thirty years. In 1953, Korea was among the most impoverished countries in the world with something like $50 GDP per capita, which is really hard to imagine now, in 2017, because South Korea is a major world economy and companies like Samsung and Hyundai are household names. But that shift happened during my parents’ lifetime and during the lifetime of the characters in this novel. And it happened because of the Park administration, which blatantly pursued development at the cost of democracy and human rights. For that reason, Park Chung Hee is a very controversial figure: revered by the older, more conservative generation and criticized by progressives. His daughter, Park Geun-hye, who was impeached from the Presidency last December, has had a similarly problematic legacy.

AA: Jisun is an underground labor activist, although she is also a privileged college student whose father is very wealthy. She is full of contradictions. Who is Jisun?

YGW: I wanted her to have a passion that was counter to her birth and to her grooming. I modeled her father after the authoritarian figures in Korean history. Very successful and nation-minded but brutal. He had a plan for his daughter, and she rebelled against it because she had different ideas for herself and what she considered noble and what she wanted for her future. Jisun has that financial success that was so highly desired by many people in the country, but what she wanted was freedom, democracy and personal agency, which is what she didn’t have in her life.

AA: She falls for a Methodist missionary named Peter. I don’t want to give spoiler alerts, but can you tell me about missionaries and why they were allowed to be in Korea spreading gospel during Park’s regime?

YGW: Christian missionaries have a centuries-long history in Korea, but especially after the war they were instrumental because they brought aid in addition to religion. American missionaries set up universities and supported other educational and social efforts. The government did not oppose American missionaries in the ’50s and ’60s. But in the ’70s when the missionaries became supportive of labor protest and antigovernment and pro-democracy movements with the rise of Minjung theology, which is a Korean social justice theology comparable to Latin American liberation theology, then the government started to feel antagonistic toward US missionaries and US groups. There was a tense balance, because the United States is one of South Korea’s most important allies. The administration had to be very careful not to offend America by kicking out or jailing missionaries, which I reference in the early part of the novel. Peter was protected by his US citizenship.

AA: In many ways the character Namin reminds me of you. She’s brilliant and hard working. Success is her only option. Did you model her character after anyone?

YGW: Thank you, I actually modeled her after my mom! My mom grew up the youngest child in a single parent home because her father passed away when she was an infant. My grandmother, who was an amazing woman, had to raise three kids in an incredibly challenging financial climate. Pretty much everybody was poor, but if your family did not have the primary breadwinner, which would have been the father, you struggled even more. My mom has always been an academic person. She’s always loved reading and studying and learning. The scenes of Namin testing into the most elite middle school in the country, when she was the first one from her working class town to get accepted, that happened to my mom. The town threw her a party! She tested into the top high school and women’s college, Ewha Womans University. She was able to overcome financial and social challenges via education. My father’s stories about the political and cultural climate sparked my interest in researching this time period, but my mom’s personal story became the heart of the book.

AA: Motherhood is another recurring theme in the novel. I’m thinking of the references to ajummas, which is so great because then everyone has a mother even if she’s just the woman next to you on the bus! Can you talk about the changing role of women in 1978 Korea and why motherhood became a focal point of the story?

YGW: Ajumma is a Korean concept I find difficult to translate. I’ve seen it translated as auntie, but that isn’t quite right. Basically, ajumma can refer to any middle-aged or married woman. Sometimes it’s a pejorative word and sometimes it’s an affectionate word, depending on the context. But I guess the translation “auntie” refers to Korea’s communal culture, the idea of communal motherhood and family. When I was growing up all adults were my parents because all adults could tell you what to do. In the novel, I think I chose to create an absence of traditional mothers. Jisun’s mother is dead. Namin’s mother is not supportive of her sister during times of crisis. Her sister, who becomes a mother, has a very conflicted idea of motherhood. Portraying female characters was something that I thought a lot about while writing this novel. I wanted to create women who were anti-convention, who didn’t fall into the expected roles, and so maybe that’s why I created an absence of motherhood. Not because I don’t value motherhood — I’m a new mother myself — but because there is no lack of Korean women being portrayed as mothers and daughters and caregivers. I wanted something else.

There is no lack of Korean women being portrayed as mothers and daughters and caregivers. I wanted something else.

AA: What is Juno’s notion of a “little pond” and where did it come from?

YGW: Korea is a small country geographically. South Korea is the size of Indiana. To the west is China, a huge landmass, culturally influential. On the east side is Japan, maybe not huge in land but historically powerful. Koreans have always thought of themselves as wedged in between giants, which creates a bit of an inferiority complex. In the national mindset is this intense desire to succeed despite its underdog status. Juno, being somebody who is desperate to succeed and project himself as large as possible, says Korea is “a little pond,” and in a little pond you want to learn how to be a big fish, a shark. That way you might get a shot in the ocean.

AA: Games play a big role in your characters’ lives. The university boys play baduk. The Circle hazing involves a sex game. Jisun plays sadistic games with Sunam. Are games important in Korean culture or why are all these games played in the novel?

YGW: Yes. I think games are important in Korean culture. I grew up watching my male relatives play baduk, the Chinese game “Go.” It’s a strategic, cerebral game. Historically only aristocrats were allowed to become educated in Korea. They were called the yangban class, and playing these games of strategy was considered very erudite and marked you as a person of intelligence.

AA: Did your own childhood memories make their way into the novel, and in addition to chatting with your parents what kind of research did you do?

YGW: I read everything I could about the time period, particularly focusing on the protest movements for labor rights and democracy. Contemporary studies with first person accounts were particularly helpful to give me a sense of what people were experiencing at the time. For the Peter character, I read first person accounts of American missionaries who had gone to Korea in the ’60s and ’70s. I did a lot of cultural research talking to my family members about what films they were watching, what music was popular at the time, what they would do for fun, where they would go for dates, and what was normal in terms of friendships and dating and clothing. In terms of my own memories, the novel is set in 1978, two years before I was born, so I would do this thought experiment where I would take my memories of living in Seoul as a child in the early- to mid-’80s and try to slightly rewind in time. If the economy is growing at 7 or 8% as it was during that time, every year makes a difference in terms of standard of living, what people could afford, and also how social norms would track with those economic changes. I would take what I remembered and try to reverse-engineer what that memory might have been a few years earlier.

AA: When you were going through your rewrite you told me about a character you cut from the novel. Now that I read the book I’m curious about the role that other character had. Can you discuss your journey from draft to publication?

YGW: In very early drafts, this novel was about Sunam’s family, his kids. It would’ve been set in the ’90s and ’00s in the United States. What I found while I was writing it was that nobody cared about that story [Laughs]. They were more interested in the flashbacks to Sunam’s youth when he was a college student. So I decided to set the novel in that time period, which actually scared me a lot because I had not set out to write a historical fiction novel. Writing historical fiction scared me because it seemed like a lot of research. [Laughs] And it seemed like I’d have to be an authority on a time period I hadn’t lived through. I wanted to do right by the material because of the people who had lived through it, because I so admired them and the work they had done. Once I started getting into the research and once I started talking to my family members I stopped thinking of it as historical fiction and started thinking of it as how can I tell this story? What would it be like if I was going through this? Also, because my parents and I are culturally very different, they having grown up in Korea during this repressive time and me having grown up in America in a much freer time, we had a pretty tense relationship for many years. Writing this novel actually created so much healing in that relationship, because I was researching this material as a writer who wanted to understand the time period and these characters — not as a daughter who was often quite resentful of the culture. Developing empathy for these characters, who are essentially contemporaries of my parents, helped me to understand where they were coming from in a radical way that I hadn’t been willing to consider before.

AA: Did you start writing Sunam’s story while earning your MFA at NYU?

YGW: Yes. During my first semester at NYU I was still straddling that contemporary family arc. After that first semester I started the draft that became the novel. By the time I graduated, I had half the manuscript. It took me a year after that to finish the manuscript, and I connected with my agent shortly after that.

AA: What was your experience like at NYU? Were there teachers that shaped you or that you emulated?

YGW: I was very intimidated to even apply. My idea of myself as a writer was so fragile because I had already written a failed novel and I wasn’t sure I was supposed to keep going. I would go to MFA open houses, come home and say nope, not this year. It took me seven years to work up the courage to finally send in an application. Thank god I was accepted because I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to survive the rejection. When I started the program I jumped in with both feet and I loved it! I felt so fortunate to be able to learn from these amazing writers every week.

The professor who helped my writing the most was Aleksandar Hemon, who I had as a second year. He taught a class on editing. I thought editing was just making prettier sentences, and what I learned is that editing is a process where you find what your story is. You find the most interesting way to tell the story, in the most active way possible. Not just tinkering with adjectives, which is something I’d been doing for a long time, trying to hold onto sentences that weren’t helping my story because I’d worked hard on them. I learned it’s okay to write shitty drafts and throw out most of it if it teaches you where the story is for the next draft. He’d say “it’s all shit until it’s not.” If you’ve read him, you know how un-shitty his writing is, and it is very empowering to hear him say “it’s all shitty” before it becomes that remarkably unshitty thing we get to read.

Another professor I learned a lot from was David Lipsky. I was so lucky because I was in both David’s and Sasha’s classes at similar times and they were teaching opposite craft skills that turned out to be complementary. From Sasha, I was learning about structure and plot and organizing story, and what I learned from David was micro word-level editing. He is an obsessive reader. He will ask you to choose that one word in a sentence that makes it great rather than good. Every week he’d come in with a short story that was the best version of itself and say why does this work? Why does this give you a lift? It was a new way of reading and noticing.

AA: What are you working on next?

YGW: You mentioned that you saw the theme of financial success being major in Everything Belongs To Us. I’m writing another book with a theme of class strife. This time it’s set in contemporary America, and it’s a story of a marriage where the two partners are of very different classes, cultures and race. I like working with social differences in intimate relationships.

Gracie Allen and John Denver in Boot Camp

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From a nearby bunk a girl loudly whispered in the dark, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”

A chorus of other recruits, at least four, answered, “Goodnight, Gracie!” in the high-pitched nasal tone of an old-school Hollywood dumb blonde.

I was fairly certain that the instigator of this almost nightly routine was a blonde girl from the division’s flag team who I more or less regarded as a bully. She seemed to think she was cute. She seemed to fancy herself a leader of some kind. I didn’t care for her during the day, but at night when she initiated the George Burns and Gracie Allen routine, first with a handful of girls, and by the end of the sixth week of training, fifteen or twenty girls, I really hated her.

And you know what? I remembered seeing a documentary about Burns and Allen, the married comedy team whose Burns and Allen Show ran in the 1930s and 40s, that said the whole “goodnight Gracie” thing wasn’t actually part of their routine. And why in the world would these girls want to do this non-routine in Navy basic training anyway? It bothered me to no end. No one stopped them. No recruit drill commander ever overheard what they were doing and told them it was un-Navylike. Part of me wanted to call out to the instigator and ask what her deal was, but she was always busy whispering with other girls and I just didn’t have it in me to get in the mix. Other than having befriended the only other older, college-educated recruit, I wasn’t doing great socially. But, I was in freaking boot camp, so why should I have to worry about my social life?

I was in freaking boot camp, so why should I have to worry about my social life?

Now, what the instigator’s routine certainly did do for me every night was pull John Denver to the forefront of my mind, via his movie with George Burns, Oh, God from 1977. I had the almost nightly habit of scrolling through a John album for entertainment and comfort as I was trying to fall asleep. Sleep was not generally elusive since we were lucky to get five or six hours a night, and we moved almost constantly the other nineteen hours of the day, but comfort was hard to come by.

Bereft of amusement, I closed my eyes tight and imagined scenes from Oh, God. John’s acting always made me uncomfortable, but I applauded his chutzpah in going after movie roles — he didn’t mind putting himself in uncomfortable situations. In that movie, John played a family man who worked at a grocery. His life wasn’t great and he had his doubts about the state the world was in. Suddenly God, played by Burns, began appearing to him with the message that he could and should make a positive difference. Though I wasn’t really looking for one, the parallel between the story’s set-up and my current situation didn’t completely escape me. Or maybe attempting to create a parallel was just another comfort-fix.

In 1975, the year I was born in Hobart, Indiana, my mother took me on long walks and sang Top 40 songs from the radio. That year was an outstanding one for John — probably the peak of his career. He had a string of number one songs and albums, he won an Emmy, was named country music’s performer of the year, and hosted the Tonight Show numerous times. I always wondered why his work resonated with me after it no longer resonated with our culture as a whole. He was most popular at the tail-end of Vietnam — perhaps the country needed someone who seemed honest and goodhearted as part of a healing process — but why did I need him?

Though I wasn’t really looking for one, the parallel between the story’s set-up and my current situation didn’t completely escape me. Or maybe attempting to create a parallel was just another comfort-fix.

So who knows how many times I’d heard his best known songs before the day when I was about six when “Country Roads” grabbed me by the collar. My family was in our white- canvas-topped orange Skylark when it came on the radio. I remember leaning forward to get closer to the speakers and asking, “Who is this?”

My parents and most of the rest of the world had gotten over John by 1981. So, in the car they looked at each other like I’d asked about buying bellbottoms, but eventually one of them answered my question.

Nineteen years after his death, people persist in thinking of John as a peace-nik. And I wondered if he would have disapproved of my having enlisted. He died in Monterey, near the Defense Language Institute, a year and a half before I moved there and began my Arabic course, and it wasn’t like I could have asked his advice even if he’d lived. But I still wondered what he would think. His own father had been a record-breaking Air Force pilot and John grew up moving from one base to the next; he knew more about military life than most people, which gave weight to any opposition to war he voiced.

In any case, John knew more about war and the military than I did. Growing up in Kansas City hadn’t given me any feel for military communities. Leavenworth was only half an hour away, but to see straight-backed men with short hair sporting the occasional uniform, one had to actually go to Leavenworth; they didn’t leak out into the city or suburbs. I never got the sense that anyone in my community cared about wars or the plight of the soldier or anything. I was raised during the Cold War when not much was happening in an obvious way. In fact, the feeling that I had was that I grew up entirely in peacetime. That’s how little I’d paid attention.

I was raised during the Cold War when not much was happening in an obvious way. In fact, the feeling that I had was that I grew up entirely in peacetime. That’s how little I’d paid attention.

And looking back, my reaction to the first Gulf War was pretty stupid.

My best friend Janet and I were at the mall when Congress declared war. I was still fifteen but she had been sixteen since November and her parents allowed us to take their minivan. A TV hung from the ceiling in the corridor and we stopped to watch the announcement.

What I knew of war came from L.M. Montgomery books — you know, the Anne of Green Gables series. By the time Anne was a teenager, Canada was involved in WWI. Her brothers and boyfriend had to go to war and wear a lot of khaki; the women back home fortified themselves with chicory-thinned coffee and cut down on sugar consumption… for The Cause.

So, I’m embarrassed to admit that I had sort of always hoped for a war. At the time of the outbreak of the first Gulf War, I’d been reading the books for at least five years and couldn’t get enough of heroes having to leave their girls behind, and the lonely dog who refused to eat and always sensed when his special boy was unexpectedly approaching by rail or when said boy was blown to pieces in a distant land. I never once thought I would like to be the figure who packed up and flew off to combat, but I certainly wanted to be the girl who got to skimp on meals, collect scrap metal, sew, and write letters to someone. Lots and lots of letters.

At the time of the outbreak of the first Gulf War, I’d been reading the books for at least five years and couldn’t get enough of heroes having to leave their girls behind, and the lonely dog who refused to eat.

Therefore, when we saw the declaration of war on the mall TV, I told Janet we needed to abort our shopping trip stat; I couldn’t believe my good luck and I wanted to begin pacing the floor and beating my breast, my family at my side. Maybe I’d learn to ululate if the situation grew desperate enough.

After Janet dropped me off, I burst through the front door and ran up the steps of our split-level ranch shouting, “Have you heard? We’re at war! Can you believe it?”

My parents and sister were sitting on my parents’ bed watching the smoky, green, loud, live coverage. I didn’t want to look away from — I think it was Gary Shepherd — ducking from tracer fire, trying to hold his earpiece in place. He seemed really scared.

I asked my father if there’d be a draft. He said if it went on long enough maybe there’d have to be. I crossed my fingers.

When the war ended only five weeks later, I was super disappointed. Nothing had even happened. It hadn’t changed our lives at all. I wondered when we’d have another chance at one of these things — to do it up right.

Thanks to my focus on Montgomery, I mainly knew about Canadian and British involvement in the First World War, and nothing else about any other war at all. I had some vague understanding of Vietnam because I’d seen movies and a replica of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall. Janet’s dad was a photographer in Vietnam but never spoke about it. I didn’t exactly ask him questions, but as I understood it he didn’t want to discuss his experience anyway. And, of course, I knew WWII was when the unpleasantness with Hitler had occurred. That about wrapped up my knowledge of war.

I knew WWII was when the unpleasantness with Hitler had occurred. That about wrapped up my knowledge of war.

Talk about a Lost Generation. I’m fairly comfortable saying that I wasn’t the only Gen Xer who was so ignorant.

We weren’t beatniks. We weren’t hippies. But we would have enjoyed being either. Particularly in college. We hadn’t earned one designation or the other, but were gladly standing on the shoulders of disheveled giants with our soft, clean feet.

We sat in our dark dorm rooms, candlelit, drinking Guinness, reading aloud to each other from our Great Books. We contemplated, we mused, we debated and cogitated. We learned to swing dance. But the beats we were imitating… didn’t they do the same out of their sense of world-weariness? Out of their severe feeling of having been beaten down by the wars and the economy and a sense of needing to make change happen? Shit, read two pages of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and you feel the real deal. Even the first few lines of the poem are so charged that any kid in a dim dorm room drinking foreign beer should be ashamed of himself:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-

ery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat

up smoking in the supernatural darkness of

cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities

contemplating jazz…”

Then there was the hippie part, which was equally appealing. At St. John’s College we lay in the sun on the grassy knoll. We made daisy chains, braided them into each other’s hair. We didn’t wear shoes. We spoke of peace, we derided the idea that any type of fighting would bring about any type of peace. But what were we talking about? Vietnam? That ended before most of us were born. And the average unthinking person laments what happened in Vietnam. What did we have in our minds when we stitched peace symbols onto our jeans? Free love? Maybe that’s the part we liked.

And I don’t want to think that wars are the only things that can define a generation, but they do offer scaffolding. We were pretty unscaffolded.

When I was a college senior I had one friend, Steve, a divorcé in his 30s, who was an Air Force veteran. He stood out because he was an actual adult. He was balding. He tucked in his shirts and continued to seek regular haircuts all of first semester. By second semester he let his hair grow and adopted a slouchier dress code. We still sensed he was different from us, but he assimilated because he wanted to be part of the community. We liked him. Of course, he hadn’t seen “action” any more than we had, but he had worn a uniform. He had endured military relocations. He had taken orders, which many of us thought was the worst thing anyone could have to endure. Orders. You can’t tell me what to do. No one puts Baby in a corner.

I don’t want to think that wars are the only things that can define a generation, but they do offer scaffolding.

As time in training wore on, more and more I felt that I was in chains, à la Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality — “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they” — and less and less was I able to override the bullshit idea that I’d chosen to be at basic, and that I was being paid, and it was temporary, and that I’d be off to another life soon. Was any of that really true? I wasn’t so sure what was up to me and what wasn’t any more.

I remembered from John’s autobiography that he said of singing “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free” (Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas), that “it surprised people” when he’d sing it — “this young white kid, with granny glasses, who didn’t seem like anyone who would worry about that.” He wrote that he found songs within himself about freedom, and though I’d listened to his songs all my life, it was only as I aged that I also was able to find those sentiments within myself. I, too, was young, white, middle class, no apparent disadvantages… But the reason John was a megastar was that he’d exploited those universals: everyone everywhere, at one time or another, thinks “I wish I knew how/it would feel/to be free/I wish I could break all these chains holding me.”

In a way I’d been worrying about freedom, or lack thereof, ever since I finished my bachelor’s. Mortimer Adler, one of the founding fathers of the St. John’s program, had said in a lecture I attended, that when we graduated our job was to look up from the books. We had the contents of the Great Books — the canon of Western culture — in our heads. The “great” books were defined, as I thought John’s songs were, by their authors’ ability to speak to human universals — and once we left school we absolutely had to look up from what we’d been studying and out at the world to attempt to make sense of life. In so many ways my enlisting felt like an unlikely move after completion of such a liberal degree. But in other ways I wondered if it made perfect sense. Living well takes a huge amount of discipline. Wasn’t there something about education in the classical sense, that required physical discipline, which we had none of at St. John’s — not even in sports — and required service to one’s country or community? By enlisting, I was completing the puzzle of my schooling, wasn’t I?

The “great” books were defined, as I thought John’s songs were, by their authors’ ability to speak to human universals.

And shouldn’t I feel thankful that I was in a situation that was really giving me reason to think about Rousseau’s ideas? “Let us agree then,” he wrote, “that might does not make right, and that we are bound to obey none but lawful authorities.” Were my drill commanders lawful authorities? Did I have just cause to oppose the authority they wielded over me? Did I even want to oppose them? Was I not an authority of some kind also? I wondered if I would ever have needed to think about these particular questions if I hadn’t subjected myself to the structure/strictures of basic training, though I now knew said training involved girls who imitated Hollywood blondes in the night, and longed for good humor and communion and leniency from those who were stricter-minded than they.

Movie Theaters to Simulcast ‘1984’

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The dystopian classic will be shown in theaters across the nation

For some, watching (or reading) about life in a fictional dystopia is the best way to come to grips with our own budding calamity. In that vein, the United States of Cinema has announced plans to screen Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 for audiences at 89 theaters nationwide (plus one in Toronto — thanks for the solidarity, Canada!). According to the Guardian, the event will be held on April 4th, an homage to the date Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, wrote the first entry in his illegal diary.

In a press release, the organizers said: “Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience and demonizes foreign enemies has never been timelier.” A portion of the proceeds from ticket sales will be directed to local charities surrounding participating theaters.

1984 has lately become a rallying point for those who oppose the new administration. Earlier this month, we reported on the spike in sales for dystopian novels like 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, and Brave New World.

If you’re interested in attending a screening, check out the event’s website.

United States of Cinema also expressed its strong support for the National Endowment for the Arts, a program currently under threat, and says it hopes the screenings will “encourage[] theaters to take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings, and the simple truth that there are no such things as ‘alternative facts.’”

Double Take: John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester

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Welcome to Double Take, a new literary criticism series wherein every month a highly anticipated title goes toe-to-toe with two book critics as they pick apart and discuss its innermost themes, its successes and failings, trappings and surprises. The first to go through the ringer is Universal Harvester, the second novel from John Darnielle. The novel takes the reader deep into 1990s small town life right as everything normal is upturned, every detail rendered suspicious.

Jeremy Heldt works at Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a job that gives him everything he needs — the monotony, the solitude — to dispel the grief of his mom’s death six years ago via a car accident. Days run together and life continues that slow comforting crawl until a customer returns a tape with the complaint of it containing “another movie.” Turns out the customer wasn’t lying: Mysterious footage begins showing up on more than one tape, footage that has been deliberately altered.

You better believe there’s more to the “mystery” than what’s on the surface, and that’s not even factoring the striking resemblance to The Ring. As both Ilana Masad and Tobias Carroll will attest in the following conversation, the experience of reading Universal Harvester can be best described with the phrase, “results may vary.”

Ilana Masad: Reading Universal Harvester, I noticed two things: one, the book felt incredibly masculine to me, very self-aware and nodding at its own self-awareness. Second, the book was built on a false sense of mystery, which really frustrated me. We were dropped so often into scenes after some sort of action or conversation had happened, so we almost never heard the actual contents of these conversations. All reveals came in sideways and vague. The writing was good, sure, but the premise and plot felt so vague to me. I’m not sure I’ve unpacked everything quite yet, though.

Tobias Carroll: I liked both of Darnielle’s previous forays into fiction, the novel Wolf in White Van and the novella Master of Reality, but my reaction to this has been different. Less immediate. I don’t know if that comes down to the structure of the novel; the two earlier books had very formal, rigid structures that let Darnielle work with perceptions of time and recurring imagery. In both cases, for me, it paid off. I can understand why he might have wanted to move to a less formal structure here, where the narrative moves backwards and forwards in time. Yet there were a few places where I found myself admiring that decision more than I actually liked the end result, which isn’t to say that I disliked it: There were a couple of elements that I found incredibly powerful —

The acknowledgements began with Darnielle stating, “This is a book largely about mothers,” which threw me a bit. I also found that the novel’s more masculine elements tended to dominate. I mean, the first part centers itself around a young man adrift in the world and struggling to find his motivation, which seems pretty indicative of a certain kind of story that we’ve probably each read a fair number of times. Admittedly, the fact that Jeremy eventually recedes from the center of the narrative could be seen as a critique of this; I’m curious about what you thought of that aspect of the structure.

I was also curious to see what you thought of the time period in which it opens, where VHS tapes are still in abundance, but are slowly giving way to DVDs. I have a weakness for books that nod to film history–Steve Erickson’s Zeroville is a recent favorite–and I found that there was something interesting going on with that aspect of the novel, for sure.

“I have a weakness for books that nod to film history.”

IM: I haven’t read Darnielle’s previous work, so I can’t speak to it at all. I’m going solely off of my understanding of Universal Harvester. I do think it’s interesting to note that Darnielle was trying to escape the structure he’d put himself into before — it makes sense in terms of his trajectory as a writer.

I was also befuddled by that note in the acknowledgments; as the book to me felt like it wasn’t about mothers at all. It was about the loss of mothers. Which is very, very different. Motherhood is many things — but its absence is something entirely different and has nothing to do with it.

I wonder what you thought about this.

Jeremy receding from the center of the narrative never felt like a critique of the masculinity at the center of the novel to me, though I can see why you might read it that way. His presence was the only thing that truly grounded me to the story. At the beginning of Part Two, when Jeremy recedes and a new character history emerges, I felt unmoored. It seemed like every time we got near to receiving an understanding of someone or something, Darnielle would unmoor the reader. Some writers are able to do this incredibly skillfully — David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas for example — but in this case, it seemed like a gimmick or an attempt to say something very obvious in a very deep way: that we are all unknowable, strangers to one another, our ideas about other people largely imagined and reflective more of us than anyone else. Does that make sense?

“It seemed like every time we got near to receiving an understanding of someone or something, Darnielle would unmoor the reader.”

I enjoyed the nostalgic quality of the VHS tapes, but unfortunately, as I’m not a film buff, I recognized very few of the movies and wondered whether there was a significance or connection between the films described and the spliced scenes put into them. In other words, would a reader who recognized and knew all the films be able to pick up another meaning from the book that a pop-culture-idiot like me couldn’t?

Another thing that was interesting was the use of fragmentary descriptions to evoke the reader’s imagination. Personally, for quite a while, I thought the tapes themselves were either showing some sort of cult ritual or else were moments in some kind of torture porn/crime. I still don’t really understand what was on the tapes or why they were created, nor whether they’re meant to convey a coping mechanism as opposed to artistic expression. What are your thoughts on this?

TC: I’m with you in terms of finding the book to be more about the absence of motherhood, definitely. More broadly, absence seems like a recurring motif, from Jeremy’s boss being increasingly absent to–in a much broader sense–the fact that the video store itself, in the late 1990s, occupies a space that’s soon to become an absence in and of itself. About a block from my apartment in Brooklyn, there’s a vacant storefront that once housed a really good video store, so this metaphor might be projection on my part — but I assume that much of the novel is set in the recent past was done for a reason.

“[M]ysterious videos act as revenants, harbingers of one character’s inescapable feelings of guilt.”

The choice of films affected seemed strange to me, and more noticeable by the absence of one particular film. The videos referenced struck me as a blend of highbrow and lowbrow: Targets and She’s All That and Bloodsport don’t exactly have a lot in common, but it seemed to me that Darnielle was definitely not just going for the most obviously 90s choices here. (For my money, that would be the Freddy Prinze, Jr. vehicle She’s All That and the James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues.) So, for me, it seemed strange to not see a nod to David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, in which mysterious videos that should not exist and which seem to channel unspoken impulses and horrors play a significant role.

Slight digression: the film that this reminded me even more of was Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché, in which a middle-aged Frenchman is haunted by videos that tap into long-suppressed feelings of guilt that he had stemming from his youth. It’s never clearly stated whether the videos are being created by one of the other characters in the film or if they’re a supernatural manifestation of the protagonist’s repression. But it’s unsettling either way.

I found myself thinking back to both of these films (as well as the Doctor Who episode “Blink,” but that’s a whole other digression) as I read the novel. In both of those films, the mysterious videos act as revenants, harbingers of one character’s inescapable feelings of guilt. Here, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

In terms of the fragmentary nature of the story, I wonder if that dovetails with one of the stylistic moves that Darnielle featured a few times: the references to how certain events are only one of many versions of a particular story. I’m not entirely sure that this entirely worked for me; at the same time, I appreciated the idea of these relatively ordinary lives being given a quasi-mythical treatment. (I read John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat for the first time a month or so ago, so that juxtaposition is one that interests me from a narrative point of view.)

At the same time, there’s also a blend of ambiguity — which you brought up in terms of the videos, among other places — and stark realism here, and the sense of the ground rules constantly changing left me a little at a loss. I agree with you that David Mitchell can (most of the time) pull this off; I’m also a big fan of Ali Smith’s work, and I’d also cite her as someone who does that really well. But there are a lot of elements here: it’s both a realistic novel of small-town life and a borderline-metafictional work about narrative, and those elements didn’t always coexist neatly for you.

What did you think of the novel’s sense of place? That was, for me, one of the novel’s stronger elements. And I’m also interested by the religious subplot, especially in light of Darnielle talking recently about how his views on faith have changed.

IM: I love that you have a personal connection to the video store being gone. I have such odd, fond memories of VHS tapes (my mom has kept many of the ones from my childhood for me, even though they’re largely useless). With regard to the absence of David Lynch, I wonder if that was precisely because of how obvious the connection would be. There is something quite Lynchian in the novel — or perhaps an attempt to be Lynchian, to not provide answers but to expect a reader to nevertheless get it.

I agree the videos aren’t being used here as harbingers of guilt, but… aren’t they? In a way, they pull on the moral heartstrings of whoever watches them, creating a sense of obligation to do something about them, to figure them out. They cause a curiosity that should be — and is for some characters — intense. More intense, I’d say, than my own response to the mystery. Partly, this is because a description of a film likely will never be as effective as the film itself, but partly I wonder if it’s because each of the characters has a relatively simple life. They all seem like they’re ripe for some intrigue, something to excite them and take them out of their small town numbness.

“I agree the videos aren’t being used here as harbingers of guilt, but… aren’t they?”

Nodding my head vigorously at the juxtaposition of the realistic and mythical nature of the narrative not always working very well. I found the narrator’s insertion of themselves into the story somewhat of a cheap trick: a way to make the reader feel that there’s something ominous. In that sense, I felt like I was constantly being let down, my brain willing to go farther into what could have been a truly horrifying or difficult story — maybe that speaks more to my affinity with drama than Darnielle’s skills, though.

I do wonder about the place. Oddly, I wish I hadn’t read the book in New York City, where we both live. I’m currently in a small town in Texas for a residency, a town that had an oil boom at the end of the 19th century but deteriorated in the latter half of the last century. Being here, in the quiet of the town’s streets and stores, seeing the nature of the darkness and big sky, I wonder if I’d have enjoyed the novel more if I read it within the kind of place it occupies rather than in the bustle of urban life. I’ve found myself thinking back to the book’s place since arriving here this morning, and so I have to agree with you: sense of place was one of the strongest for me, and perhaps why I wished the novel would have settled into a more dedicated sense of realism.

“I felt like I was constantly being let down, my brain willing to go farther into what could have been a truly horrifying or difficult story.”

The religious subplot was one of the stronger ones for me; yet, once again, it felt like too little, a kind of sidebar, and that made it less effective. Perhaps having just read The Girls by Emma Cline was part of that — cultish attitudes were so central, and I didn’t really see how and why the mother was drawn into Michael’s circle in Darnielle’s book, so it felt a little unbelievable, a bit too convenient. How did you feel about it?

TC: I can definitely see the appeal of reading this novel in a small town. I grew up in New Jersey and have lived in New York since 1999, so my default image of a town tends to be a fairly densely populated one. I was in Iowa for the first time last spring, and it took me a little while to get used to having the ability to look in every direction and see a lot more land, a lot more space.

As for the religious subplot, I found it pretty compelling, but also would have liked even. The tension and progression felt very tactile in a way that — to some extent — Jeremy’s own inner struggles did not… which might be the point: contrasting this everyday decision with something ostensibly on the level of the soul. But with some time, this book seems to be all about strange and unlikely contrasts. After the ambiguity and surrealism of the first part, the novel’s second part opens with as declarative a sentence as you’ll see:

“Lisa Sample was born in Tama in 1969.”

I’d say that I have more mixed emotions about this than either of Darnielle’s previous forays into fiction, but I’m also really curious to see what he does next, and how some of the more experimental devices in this are used in later works.

There’s one phrase close to the end of the novel that has stuck with me:

“Iowa seemed less bloodthirsty about its past than California…”

That sense of state as somehow ravenous, predatory about their own histories. I’m curious: were there any sentences that have stayed with you since you finished reading the novel?

IM: Right, precisely. There’s something that makes me hearken back to the novel now, in this small town, that is more powerful than the unease I felt reading it New York.

I completely see why you’re curious to see what he does next, but I will say this — that in the end, this novel felt incomplete to me in a way that has made me angrier the more I think about it. Because while I do try to appreciate art for art’s sake and separate the artist from the work, I can’t help but wonder how many women have ever been allowed to experiment like this, in a way that feels almost lazy to me, on their way to doing better or bigger work. Darnielle has cachet because, at least in part, he is the singer for The Mountain Goats and he is that most desirable and least controversial of author faces still: a straight white cis man (as far as I know). The women in his novel are symbols more than characters — Stephanie is the crush, Lisa is the damaged girl, the mothers are dead or absent, etc. The men grieve and feel, but ultimately stay strong and move on. Maybe I’m letting politics color my view, but there’s something that makes me deeply impatient with this kind of story when it focuses the way this one does. I’m curious whether you feel this way at all, or whether you think my reaction may be political in an ultimately unhelpful way.

“The women in his novel are symbols more than characters.”

I confess, sentences from this book didn’t stick out to me, either. The book was well-written, yes, but at no point did it emotionally stun me or linguistically floor me. I don’t think the book is bad, not at all — I don’t mean to convey that. It’s lovely in many ways. But in ways I can’t entirely put my finger on, I found myself impatient with it more than once.

TC: I don’t know if impatience is how I’d describe my feelings about it, but there were definitely moments where I wanted more focus, more closure on some of the plotlines. In terms of expansive, intricately-structured novels that encompass vast stretches of time, I think Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas all had that a similar sort of narrative flash while also providing clearer arcs for the characters. Though I don’t necessarily think that what Darnielle’s doing here exactly lines up with any of these, there is that same sense of ambition.

I don’t think that the novel’s handling of gender frustrated me as much as other aspects of it did. You’d talked about the way the story focused, and I think that focus (or a lack thereof) is more where my criticism with it can be found. There are aspects of it, in retrospect, that remind of of some of the storytelling techniques that Ali Smith uses, but I think she uses narrative ambiguity a lot more deftly. I don’t think I’d say that this novel feels that much like one of Smith’s novels, but it does seem to be venturing into the same territory as Hotel World or The Accidental.

(And, of course, I keep talking about this novel in terms of what it’s not, in the ways that it doesn’t resemble certain other things. So maybe that’s of a piece of its ambiguity as well.)

IM: My sense is that while you liked the novel, it’s the kind of book that upon closer inspection doesn’t hold up for you. Is that right? In my case, I think it’s the kind of book that I love talking about, but don’t necessarily enjoy reading as much as I’d like, and so that’s probably not a sterling review for it… Though maybe my discomfort while reading (my impatience in my case) was part of the point, part of the drawn out nature of this small town intrigue, in which case, well done!

TC: Closing thoughts? I have a few–some of which relate to my bewilderment at seeing Universal Harvester referred to as a “horror novel” in at least one headline. In the end, I still feel frustrated by aspects of the novel and impressed with others, and curious about what Darnielle’s next book will be like. But I’m going to close on an optimistic note, and point out that one thing that Darnielle does very well here is to convey the experience of experiencing another form of media. In terms of the evocation of VHS culture of a decade and change ago, he seems pretty spot-on, and I appreciated that. Maybe fifteen years from now, we’ll get the creepy novel about streaming video services that we didn’t know we were waiting for, too.

“Because We Can’t Be Trusted to Hurt Ourselves,” by Roblin Meeks

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I start my twenty-second session of physical therapy, as I’ve started the twenty-one others, by paying upfront. I have myself and pickup basketball to blame for my broken wrist and the surgery to correct it, but many people recovering here are in the middle of legally faulting someone else, and who knows when those lawsuits will result in costs being covered. I use my hurt hand to hold the check down while I sign it with the one that works.

The office specializes in hands, arms, and shoulders, and today, like always, it’s nearly full of managed hurt. Most people spend many weeks in physical therapy, and I recognize almost everyone: the Belgian high-school girl who hurt her pointer finger playing varsity volleyball pokes neon-colored putty to work her grip. The two female police officers sit together as usual, cracking each other up with cop-speak jokes and comparing workman’s comp attorneys. The young guy in the Oxford-cloth button down with two phones, talking to a series of people about money stuff while a therapist uses a machine to send a current through his forearm. I haven’t seen the woman with the plastic-surgeon dad in a while, probably since she can get cortisone shots at home. My first day, a patient with a heavily wrapped shoulder waiting next to me asked, “What are you in for?” Recovery is a sentence; best settle in.

I find an open seat in the room where each chair is paired with a wooden TV-dinner tray, rickety as the limbs that lean on it, under a lithograph of Escher’s hands drawing each other to life. I prefer it to the other room with old elementary-school desks for tables and a framed close-up from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the really famous part where God reaches out to Adam’s limp (injured?) hand. The entire place has an oppressive level of metaphor density, and this print definitely isn’t helping. The woman who works me over twice a week asks how my wrist feels, and I say “fine,” probably to offset all the meaning. She’s good at juggling patients, has to be, and she lays a big blue bag of hot sand on my hand to loosen it up and returns to nursing someone in the other room.

Therapy sessions have the same conversational context as haircuts, only your hair is broken and it hurts. My therapist and I have been through so much small talk in two months that I have a fuller picture of her than my coworkers and neighbors. I know that she plays Mahjong with her friends twice a month and that she picked up the game pretty quickly from her grandmother. I know that her husband is finishing up his MBA and has an enviable ease with foreign languages. I know that his grandmother is a surly Holocaust survivor. Right now they’re childless but thinking sometime maybe eventually. She’s left-handed and forever after whoever borrowed her special tape scissors. We’ve told each other our stories, including what we’ve done more or less every weekend for the last two-and-a-half months.

After she returns and removes the heat, she has me do some wrist curls with a five-pound weight, then squeeze a Charles-Atlas-style gripper thirty times. Once I’ve limbered up a bit, my therapist gives me what she calls a “strong stretch,” which involves me looking away and down from the pain while she applies her full body weight to my hand, aiming for ninety degrees of wrist flexion. I try the Zen thing of detaching myself from the material experience. I imagine my arm as cold dough that grows more pliable as it’s kneaded and rolled. A car door iced shut overnight finally forced free. An iron bar glowing orange on an anvil, muttering sparks at each hit but slowly taking a useful shape. I am the Tin Man rusted still, already possessing a heart but needing oil and adventure to discover it.

The purpose of physical or occupational therapy arises out of the fact that adults can’t be trusted to hurt themselves after injury. Each of the three times the cast came off my son’s arm, he was unleashed back onto the baseball field and into the schoolyard and the swimming pool without need for therapy. His body knits bone constantly anyway, and he, like most kids, can easily forget hurt. Adults, though, have vivid memories of pain and tend to convert pain, and the anticipation of it, into suffering. We quickly restrict or retire hurt limbs, which in turn leads our bodies to slowly give up on them. After I fell on my wrist back in May, I wrapped and iced and defended it for several weeks to give it the time I thought it needed to heal itself, but time instead eroded my range of motion. And then the surgery and the pins and the screw permanently through the bone and the nine-week cast all conspired to fix my hand straight. Now it has to be bent further than I want it to if I want it to come back to something like normal.

The Zen thing fails. My wrist pops and smarts like hell but won’t be pushed past my best angle reached a few weeks ago. My therapist reminds me, again, of how I first arrived with flexion and extension of basically zero, to make me feel better about today’s fifty and sixty degrees. It occurs to me that the old saying really should go, “Time fixes all wounds,” with ‘fix’ smuggling in all its senses.

All the effort going on in these rooms makes them stuffy, and my therapist cracks the window near my seat. The days have gotten glorious, and I’m glad to welcome in the loud, warm air of 57th Street, to look away from the scar. I think of my kids and their classmates running in the schoolyard this morning before the bell called them inside, how they left their coats in piles and let out their bodies.

“We’re all done for today,” she says. “See you next week.”

The Stranger’s Tongue

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Last year people, books, and Instagram pages clamored to suggest I’d enjoy the Danish art of hygge. Hygge the books said is a celebration of the simple, homely, and cozy. It is warm socks, gingerbread, a family meal, coffee-foam, or a well-loved cardigan. In these cold months, the idea is appealing. A word plucked from a foreign language can be seductive. It implies that with this one word we can swallow the wisdom of a people different from ourselves, and be given a new way to talk about our lives. During my childhood every bookshop was crammed with Zen. The Zen of Gardening. The Zen of Marriage. The Zen of Eating.

It’s an odd exercise, this selection of a single word. Words in dictionaries are like animals in dioramas. Interesting, educational, but dead. Words find their natural habitats in paragraphs, sentences, and stanzas. I haven’t seen a corresponding spike of interest in Danish writing and writers. Perhaps this is because Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death is a less attractive coffee table book. But surely, it is fascinating that a language and culture has room for both hygge and Frygt og Bæven (Fear and Trembling)?

The work of translators has shaped my life and writing. As a teenager, I lurked in Daunt Books in Marylebone, London. Daunt looks like a bookshop in a picture book, wooden floors, green glass lights, a huge stained glass window. I didn’t fit in. At that age, I had pink hair, giant black biker boots, and an iPod in my ears at all times. The iPod was rather scratched, and I played the same few songs on loop. But I adored Daunt because they organized books by country. Before a reader jets off they can pick up a travel guide and local classic from the same shelf. This system made it easy for me to find Japanese and Chinese novels without knowing the names of specific novelists.

Asia is in the basement. Japan and China stand side by side. I didn’t recognize most of the names and would choose books by their covers, their size, or just an opening sentence. Although my English vocabulary was extensive, my foreign language skills were weak. I knew I’d never read any of these works in the original. Having my grandfather’s eyebrows or my grandmother’s chin didn’t give me their words, grammar, or even the right accent. My chest ached with this failure. I could say I was part Japanese and part Chinese and it would be true. Some rituals, habits, and aesthetic preferences had made it across oceans into our London house. But I didn’t even know what they were. What was Japanese? What was just my Mom being weird?

At home, my mother had a collection of novels from both countries. These books smelled faintly of glue, and the pages had tanned a deep gold with time. Newer editions of these same novels could be found at Daunt. But I was most interested in the now. I was looking for an alternate universe version of myself, one whose accent was perfect, who lived in Tokyo or Shanghai. There were few contemporary translations. Once in a while, not as often as I would like, a new book appeared. No one recommended me these books. I didn’t hear about them from friends or the radio. The only way I knew they existed was that they arrived on the shelf. I still remember the satisfying square of Hitomi Kanehara’s Autofiction. It is a physically small book and barely added to the weight of my satchel. I read it in a hungry gasp on the Tube and then back in my bedroom. It begins with a woman having a panic attack on an airplane. The story that unfolds is strange, sad, and quite surreal. The book doesn’t claim to teach the reader anything about Japan or Japanese Culture. But it helped me feel connected to a part of myself that I didn’t know. In the back of Autofiction, I learned she’d written a book called Snakes and Earrings. And so I searched it out.

I was looking for an alternate universe version of myself, one whose accent was perfect, who lived in Tokyo or Shanghai.

Years later, I’d live briefly in Tokyo. I’d study Japanese language and literature in university classes. I’d borrow my mother’s copy of Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, whose impact on Japanese literature can be imagined if you picture Virginia Woolf and Dickens melding into the same person. Some might say I should’ve started with classics and language classes — that these things would have given me the grounding to understand Autofiction. I disagree. Autofiction gave me a connection that leant me the courage to learn. When I wrote my own novel, Harmless Like You, I was asked who were my influences. I gave the names of English language novelists, but also Kanehara and Soseki. If they hadn’t been translated I’d be a different writer.

Much is lost in translation, and this is especially true for languages as different as Japanese and English. I wasn’t understanding the totality of Kanehara’s work. But I doubt I will ever wring out all that is in Mrs. Dalloway or Pale Fire. For me, fiction is about attempting the empathetic leap, not about perfect success. The original title of Autofiction was オートフィクション (O — tofuikushion). In other words, the Japanese phonetical spelling of the English — Autofiction. Kanehara is also leaping and translating.

Sociologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School found that reading literary fiction enhances our capacity for empathy. I’ve made no study, but suspect that reading literature from other cultures expands our empathy for those from different shores.

The Translator’s House in Amsterdam invited me to visit to promote the understanding between translators and writers. Jeske van der Velden has been translating a short story of mine into Dutch. Jeske read my story more carefully than I thought possible. When a character of mine strained under the weight of her husband, Jeske wanted to know which was more important — the emotional or the physical strain? Did I imagine the blood on the girl’s hands as sticky or wet? What was more important to me, the sound of a word or its meaning?

To allow us both a breath, we decided to get dinner in what she termed Amsterdam’s hipster district. Designer lightbulbs cast their multicolored glow over the pale pine table and the fistful of flowers resting in a jam jar. Hesitantly, I outlined my empathy idea to her. I wanted to know what she thought. She considered and then began —

Milan Kundera called the novel the paradise of individuals, because it gives you a lot of space and possibility to express someone’s point of view from the inside. So I think, in that sense, all fiction gives people the possibility to look at the world from the perspective of another person’s life. Kundera calls this an ‘experimental self.’ Literature from other countries would possibly open up that space even further, and you’re not looking at the culture from the outside but from someone’s point of view who lives there or has grown up there.

As a translator she said she’d become very aware of the relation between culture and language —

Some expressions or experiences become embedded in language that is almost unique to that culture. Therefore the two are very closely related. So what you’re trying to do as a translator is to make the author you’re translating understood in your own language, while at the same time stretch your culture and language a bit to accommodate what makes their voice and experience different. Which in the end might change your own culture a little bit.

When I asked her for an example she reminded me of a column I wrote about wishbones. Jeske had explained to me that the Dutch do not have the idea of a wishbone. For them it is a simple bone and devoid of magic —

But if the idea is translated often enough, if enough people read it and learn about it, it becomes part of their mental system or language.

It was a lovely idea and in the warmth of the Noorderlicht Restaurant, I felt a corresponding heart-warming. The waitress came over to interrupt our little interview with laminated menus. One in English. One in Dutch. Jeske and I compared menus. The English was missing an entry. What is it I asked? Jeske wrinkled her eyebrows. A type of fish? In the tiniest of gestures, this is what I ordered.

It was quite delicious. As I tasted the sweet sharp fish, I said how happy it made me, the idea of cultures shuffling over and making room for these new ideas. Jeske tilted her head slightly, took a breath and said, But it is not so simple.

Is it ever?

Academic and translator, Gideon Toury argued that the way something is translated not only depends on the tastes and beliefs of the translator but on the relative powers of the cultures involved. The more economic and cultural power is associated with a language, the less weirdness readers would accept. Jeske explained that Dutch, with its relatively small number of first language speakers, accepts a lot of strangeness. Whereas work translated into English is more often smoothed out. Translators call this domestication. This saddened me. How can a culture stretch to accommodate a new idea if that idea is bleached away?

How can a culture stretch to accommodate a new idea if that idea is bleached away?

Hygge it seems has entered English culture. The idea of hygge and homeliness is beautiful. But what does it mean that our favoured foreign word is about not leaving the comfort of home? In this time of increasing xenophobia, I hope we can stretch to accommodate not just words, but books, ideas, philosophies. We need all the new ideas we can grasp.

Adjusting Your Pace: How to Get a Story to Move

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As I read through a student story recently, I had the sensation that I was walking. It was a trudging sort of walk, one foot after the other; I was moving through scene after scene, each one skillfully written. But there was something that was a little flat in the story — all of the action and dialogue were weighted the same way. There was the sense that the narration was flat, always on one level, without pauses or breath or stillness. I stood up, suddenly, and I understood my response to the story — the scene didn’t have a nuanced sense of movement. When we read stories, we move along with them, our breath attending to the cadences of the sentences, the scenes, the shape of the action. My experience reading the many similar scenes felt like walking and walking in a straight line.

If scenes were breath, this is what the scenes in a story like this would feel like as you read them:

But a story with a varied pace, in which scenes have been shaped to highlight certain elements, does not feel like this as you read it. A story that is paced to emphasize a certain moment could look like this:

Or let’s look at a scene in terms of a phrase of movement. Here is a scene that is written so that all of the actions and dialogue are equally weighted:

Jane and Lisa are eating lunch at a café. Jane has ordered a cheese sandwich. Lisa has ordered a salad.

“This is a terrible sandwich,” said Jane, putting it down.

“Really? Why?” asked Lisa.

“The bread is kind of soggy,” said Jane.

A car drives into the front window of the restaurant. Glass shatters.

Jane and Lisa look up at the car.

“What just happened?” asks Jane.

“My salad is pretty bad, too,” said Lisa.

A man falls out of the door of the car. He is bloody. Jane gets up and helps him. He dies.

So if this story were translated into movement, it would be a straight line, like this:

The pacing of this scene lends equal weight to all of the actions. We don’t know what the author wants to highlight as important; we don’t know where to pause, what to invest in as a reader. The experience of reading is, in some ways, an experience of movement — you are swept along by the writer’s sentences, cadences, pauses, crescendos. So how do you slow down a scene, highlighting certain aspects and not others?

The experience of reading is, in some ways, an experience of movement — you are swept along by the writer’s sentences, cadences, pauses, crescendos.

Think of a scene as a phrase of movement. By slowing down and leaning into some moments, you help the reader pay attention to them — you lend them more importance. Watch this dancer’s phrase.

See what happens to the scene when you slow down, like this:

Jane and Lisa are eating lunch at a café. Jane has ordered a cheese sandwich. Lisa has ordered a salad.

“This is a terrible sandwich,” said Jane, putting it down.

“Really? Why?” asked Lisa.

“The bread is kind of soggy,” said Jane.

There is a thunderous crash at the front of the restaurant. Diners scream as a car drives into the front window of the restaurant; glass shatters, tables are upended, plates and forks and knives skid across the floor. Jane and Lisa jump up; a man falls out of the door of the car. His shirt is soaked with blood and he looks dazed. Jane dashes toward him and holds him as he closes his eyes.

In this scene, the pacing slows when the car crashes into the restaurant; this allows the reader to identify this as a moment of importance and it highlights and shapes the reading experience. Or another way to do it is this:

Jane and Lisa are eating lunch at a café. Jane has ordered a cheese sandwich. Lisa eats a salad.

“This is a terrible sandwich,” said Jane, putting it down.

“Really? Why?” asked Lisa.

“The bread is kind of soggy,” said Jane.

A car drives into the front window of the restaurant. Glass shatters.

Jane and Lisa look up at the car and continue eating.

“What just happened?” asks Jane.

“My salad is pretty bad, too,” said Lisa. She digs her fork into it. Jane leans over and contemplates Lisa’s salad. It actually looks delicious to her. The lettuce is green and lacy and a few tomatoes are scattered throughout the leaves, and the vinaigrette clings to the leaves like drops of rain.

“Let me try it,” said Jane.

Jane’s fork stabs the salad and she brings out a luscious dark red raspberry.

“Look at this,” she says.

They look eagerly into the salad while, around them, customers swarm around the car and a bloody man falls out of the door of the car.

Here the emphasis is a bit different; the narrative slows down and the salad, and the two women’s relation to it, and perhaps what it could represent, becomes the important element. In this case, what the author highlights reveals something about the characters and what they value, too.

Or what would happen if we really slowed down the action at the beginning and then sped it up.

Like this dancer:

When Jane and Lisa walked into the restaurant; they were meeting for the first time in years. It was the first time they had met since Jane moved across the country, and it was the first time Lisa had seen Jane since her divorce. When they entered the large, busy diner, they did not recognize each other for a moment, and walked through the roar of the crowd, wondering who each one had become. When they spotted each other, they stopped, walked quickly toward each other, and hugged, carefully.

They sat and each ordered. As they waited for their food, they regarded each other with interest.

“It’s been a long time,” said Jane.

Their food arrived and they began to eat it.

Here, when a writer uses exposition to set the scene, the pace is slower at the beginning, giving the reader the chance to look out, to draw a breath, to see what the landscape is in front of her. A beginning that is slower can give the reader context, can give us information on the characters, can set us firmly in a world.

Words reside on a page, but it can be helpful to remember: A scene is an arc of movement.

Words reside on a page, but it can be helpful to remember: A scene is an arc of movement. The reader moves with you through each sentence as the writer decides where each sentence reaches, stops, takes a breath. Sometimes the pace of the sentences is such that the sentences just need to walk, and sometimes they need to run and pause and reach. By exploring all of the possibilities for pacing within a story, for exploring all of the movement, pauses, and acceleration inherent in it, a story can be much more than walking in a straight line. You can explore the ways in which narrative can move and also the opportunities inherent in various levels of space. The narration unfolds the way a body moves. As you read a beautifully paced story, you sense in your own body, your own mind, the way the words can run, leap, and, sometimes, fly.

[Dancer is: Gina Kohler, Assistant Professor of Dance and Assistant Director of the MFA in Dance program at Hollins University. Video shot at Hollins University dance studio.]

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: My Snowman

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★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing my snowman.

If you come from a part of the world where snow does not exist, let me explain what a snowman is. A snowman is a bunch of snow, formed into a shape that vaguely resembles that of a man. Unlike a golem, however, a snowman does not actually come to life. Or does it? I decided to find out.

Magic isn’t something I ever believed in, so when David Copperfield sawed himself in half, I knew it wasn’t really attempted suicide. And when David Blaine coughed up live frogs, I knew it wasn’t Revelation 16:13 coming true — it was just a guy who swallowed some frogs for attention.

But while magic could never make my snowman come to life, I knew there was a chance science might. Science can do some crazy things. So to give my snowman every possible advantage, I filled his torso with a variety of organs I purchased from the butcher. Just in case.

And if he did come alive, I wanted him to be able to procreate (or at least have a good time), so I carved for him a beautiful snow penis. It was exquisite. Much better than any existing penis on any animal I’ve ever seen. If my snowman was going to come to life, he wasn’t going to be one of those hideous, legless creatures with disproportionately weak arms and a smoking habit. He was going to be awesome.

Unfortunately, the raccoons could smell the organs through his snowy flesh and got to him overnight. Thank goodness I didn’t also sleep outside that night. I have way more organs and I’m a heavy sleeper.

I’ll never know if he could come to life, but I do know that if he did, I would have named him Juan and we would have been good friends.

BEST FEATURE: Juan’s mouth stones were repurposed as miniature paperweights.
WORST FEATURE: I had to watch his remains melt away over the course of two weeks.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Satchel Paige.

Nocturnal Animals: Female Readers, and the Dangers of Page-Turning Thrillers

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Amy Adams spends most of her time in Nocturnal Animals reading. Her character, Susan, has been sent a galley of a book by her ex-husband, Edward. They haven’t spoken in nineteen years. Not only is the title of his novel a reference to the pet name he had for her when she couldn’t sleep (from which this film gets its name), but it comes with a surprising dedication: “For Susan.”

Even more surprising is that it depicts a thinly veiled version of the two of them as a blissful couple on a road trip with their teenaged daughter. Except in Edward’s book, which Susan reads feverishly in her beautiful if cold Los Angeles home, the character of the wife is raped and killed early on, the plot hinging on her husband’s subsequent search for justice. As director Tom Ford writes it in his adapted screenplay, the moment Susan realizes what kind of work her ex-husband has authored, “She is stunned. The deafening silence and the stillness of her bedroom is in sharp contrast to the scene she just read. It takes her a moment to calm down.” A thriller wrapped in a marital revenge drama, Ford’s Nocturnal Animals — like Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, the novel on which it’s based — is also a film about the imagined female reader.

Edward’s novel, with its titillating violence against women, thrills and terrifies Susan in equal measure — both for what it tells her about her ex-husband (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), as what it reveals to her about herself. To be sure, this is the promise of all great literature: a book, Kafka instructs us, “must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” Or, in Proust’s words, “In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.” But Susan stands as a peculiar avatar for a reader because the book she’s engaged with is particularly designed as a weapon against her. In the book, as in the film, she is cautious about approaching it, preferring to read while she’s alone.

Jake Gyllenhaal as novel protagonist Tony Hastings and its author, Edward Sheffield, in ‘Nocturnal Animals’

Following the book’s violent opener — which sees Tony (Edward’s alter-ego in his novel, also played by Gyllenhaal in the film) standing helpless as his wife and daughter are abducted by three men on an otherwise empty West Texas highway — Susan begins to worry about what’s yet to come. She recognizes the genre Edward has opted for, and she knows where the story is headed. But since her identification has already been co-opted (she can’t, after all, root against the book’s protagonist, especially when it so clearly feels modeled on her ex-husband, whom she both pities and cares for), she begins to fear that Edward may be laying a trap for her, guiding her thoughts towards places she has gone great lengths to avoid. As in Wright’s novel, the process of reading Edward’s novel leads her to retrace their failed relationship, which among other reasons fractured because she was unable to champion his writing as much as he would have liked.

But there’s a deeper fear here too, one that speaks to the kind of danger a book can conjure for its reader. It is a fear which Wright’s Susan voices in the source novel, stating that “she hopes she’s not being manipulated into some ideology she doesn’t approve.” As a moment of character introspection, this admission is revelatory. Here is a reader all too aware of the way reading can lure you into places you wouldn’t otherwise visit. In Wright’s novel Susan resides in the suburbs, a wife and mother whose picture perfect existence might crumble if she allows Edward’s novel to rattle her. She lives cocooned from outside disturbances, something that Edward’s novel pointedly reminds her. The most fascinating aspect of Wright’s Tony and Susan is the constant frisson between Susan-as-reader and ourselves as readers. The chapter sections that deal with her reactions to the novel come across like a running commentary on the attachment of contemporary audiences to lurid works of fiction. “Tony’s [fictional] world resembled Susan’s except for the violence in its middle,” we are told,

which makes it totally different. What, Susan wonders, do I get from being made to witness such bad luck? Does this novel magnify the difference between Tony’s life and mine, or does it bring us together? Does it threaten or soothe me?

As if to drive the point home, the narrator tells us that these questions “pass through her mind without answers in a pause in her reading.” Wright’s novel is constantly making us aware of these kinds of readerly responses to the text, making us question our own involvement in Tony’s and Susan’s plights, and leading us to wonder whether (and why) reading such violent novels can be both soothing and threatening at the same time.

Edward’s “Nocturnal Animals” is not a far cry from the type of airport paperback thrillers that make it onto book club and bestseller lists, all the while bracketing their own violence as belonging to a fictional elsewhere, one unrelated to the comfortable home where you sit down to read them. Devoid of the inner monologue which Wright offers his character on the page, Ford merely presents us with shots of Adams sighing or looking aside as she sets down the book. There’s anguish in her eyes, giving us the sense that the icy cold woman she is today might be thawing — proof of the humanistic power of the printed word, an art form more earthly and able to connect with real people than the conceptual art she deals in. (It’s no coincidence as well that we frequently see Adams reading at home alone, without the harsh if elegant makeup she dons for work). This change in Susan’s demeanor, Wright and Ford suggest, has to do with being confronted with violence. There’s something in the experience of reading about the indiscriminate violence depicted in Edward’s novel that destabilizes her worldview, and even risks upending it altogether.

In many ways Tony and Susan is a probing commentary on a reader’s imagined safety when dealing with portrayals of violence. “The book weaves around [Susan’s] chair like a web,” we’re told. “She has to make a hole in it to get out. The web damaged, the hole will grow, and when she returns, the web will be gone.” It’s a clear metaphor for entrapment, one which imagines her process of reading as a helpless struggle and pinpoints the feeling of losing oneself in a page-turner, though it recasts it in a wholly sinister light.

If, as recent cognitive scientists suggest, reading fiction makes us more empathetic (and remind us that women are more likely to pick up a book of fiction than men), this figure, of a female reader as a damsel in distress caught in a web of her own making, is particularly illuminating. It not only reimagines the most reviled of readers — those driven by emotions and seemingly easy to manipulate — but specifically maps that other looked-down upon group of readers: women. That the two groups have, historically, been lumped together is not so much a coincidence as a matter of fact. And so, while ideas of empathy and identification, of sentimentality and imagination, are embodied by Susan whenever she picks up Edward’s novel, the male author is shown to wield those concepts as a means of punishing his female protagonist, making a mockery of her own self-indulgent, empathetic reading experience.

In the big screen translation, Ford further complicates this tension. The suburban reader who lives vicariously through pulpy novels, providing her a sense of danger from the comfort of her picket-fenced home, has been transposed onto a vacuous coastal elite who lives an empty life and has no contact with what’s “real” — here, quite literally, and in a Trumpian sort of way, geographically in the South. In this new iteration, Susan is an art dealer whose gallery show opens the film: naked obese women dance in slow motion on giant screens to the delight of a gawking, Angeleno crowd. Everyone tells her it’s a success. She thinks it’s just junk. Overall, the dirty and gory reality that Edward offers her in his book, about laconic detectives and chauvinist criminals, becomes all the more striking. The contrast is made salient thanks to the film’s visual style, as Ford takes the sterile world of Susan’s Los Angeles — with its minimalist design and monochromatic palette — and juxtaposes it with the grimy, dust-covered world of West Texas, which feels oversaturated in comparison.

In the film’s final scene, Adams’ Susan sits and scans around the restaurant where she’s supposed to meet Edward. A few drinks later she realizes he’s not coming. Ford cuts to black before we’re allowed to see what she will do with the understanding that this has been, among other things, a cruel joke at her expense. The empathy she has expended on the novel — and which Ford visualizes with the golden cross that Susan often fondles as she reads, and which we see Tony wearing in the film’s in-book sections — is diminished as meaningless, as hollow as anything adorning her expensive house, as aimless as the cars littering the many establishing shots of the Los Angeles cityscape that punctuate the film. She’s been manipulated, playing right into Tony’s game, caring too much for his characters and his new career only to have that sentiment mocked and dismissed.

That the film ends on such a nihilistic (and torturous) note makes apparent the gendered dynamic that Wright had already embedded in his metafictional page-turner. “If Edward couldn’t live without writing,” Susan “couldn’t live without reading.” In other words, man writes, woman reads. In Nocturnal Animals, which is eager to ogle and revere its male characters and quite happy to make Susan a prop on which to hang the misogyny and elitism she begrudgingly exults, this simple proposition leaves an unsavory aftertaste. Whatever irony there was in Wright’s prose has gone. What’s left is a disdain for the type of reader Susan represents, the type of audience we ourselves have been nudged to become. And like Edward, Ford ultimately gets the last laugh, leading us on in expectation without ever showing up.