Because this line, “American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another,” from the Writers Against Trump statement is not only empirically false, it’s a continuation of the ongoing legacy of sanitized lies America has shoved down its own throat since its creation;
Because we, the people who continue to struggle in the face of that lie, and whose ancestors suffered and died from the reality that lie conceals, are fully fed the fuck up with people who claim to have our backs dishonoring our past and perpetuating that lie;
Because in an age when we still have to shut down highways to declare whose lives matter, the lie of American exceptionalism and “a grand experiment” is really a way of valuing one life, one story, one experience over another;
Because no matter how many times you say words like “freedom” and “justice,” genocide is still genocide and slavery is still slavery. Rape is still rape;
Because American foreign policy is and has always meant perpetual war;
Because Wounded Knee, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Grenada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, Libya, Sudan, Puerto Rico, the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles and on and on and on…;
Because, as James Baldwin wrote: “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”;
Because, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage”;
Because, as Rebecca Solnit wrote in the very same publication in which your letter appeared: “There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those dominant narratives or paradigms or memes or metaphors we live by or frameworks. However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and too often the bars of someone else’s cage”;
Because, as you wrote: “as writers, we are particularly aware of the many ways that language can be abused in the name of power”;
Because, as you wrote: “the search for justice is predicated on a respect for the truth”;
Because your self-indulgent willful delusion weakens your argument, makes you look like a joke to the rest of the world, and serves only yourself and those you claim to be against, and right now, in this heightened crisis amidst an ongoing crisis, when the stakes are so very high, we can’t afford to lie to ourselves anymore about where we came from and we won’t continue to swallow this same lie in the name of solidarity or unity or good intentions or any of the other make-believe justifications you bring to the table in the interest of giving yourselves a pass once again;
Because American literature has erased us, demonized us, falsified our gods and made a mockery of our struggles, and we need the custodians of story to do better or step aside;
Because literature is about telling the truth, and our job as writers requires us to sit with our discomfort, with our complexity, with our painful histories, and face them head on in order to call them by their name and move forward;
For all these reasons, we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States AND the facile, violent lie of American history being a “grand experiment.”
Pillows are made of feathers, go to sleep. It’s a big, black feather.
Come and sleep in my bed.
There’s a feather on your pillow too.
Let’s leave the feathers where they are and
sleep on the floor.
DAD
Four or five days after she died, I sat alone in the
living room wondering what to do. Shuffling around,
waiting for shock to give way, waiting for any kind of
structured feeling to emerge from the organizational
fakery of my days. I felt hung-empty. The children
were asleep. I drank. I smoked roll-ups out of the
window. I felt that perhaps the main result of her
being gone would be that I would permanently
become this organizer, this list-making trader in
clichés of gratitude, machine-like architect of routines
for small children with no Mum. Grief felt fourth-
dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.
The friends and family who had been hanging around
being kind had gone home to their own lives. When
the children went to bed the flat had no meaning,
nothing moved.
The doorbell rang and I braced myself for more
kindness. Another lasagne, some books, a cuddle,
some little potted ready-meals for the boys. Of
course, I was becoming expert in the behavior of
orbiting grievers. Being at the epicenter grants
a curiously anthropological awareness of everybody
else; the overwhelmeds, the affectedly lackadaisicals,
the nothing so fars, the overstayers, the new best
friends of hers, of mine, of the boys. The people I still
have no fucking idea who they were. I felt like Earth
in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded
by a thick belt of space junk. I felt it would be years
before the knotted-string dream of other people’s
performances of woe for my dead wife would thin
enough for me to see any black space again, and
of course–needless to say–thoughts of this kind
made me feel guilty. But, I thought, in support of
myself, everything has changed, and she is gone and
I can think what I like. She would approve, because
we were always over-analytical, cynical, probably
disloyal, puzzled. Dinner party post-mortem bitches
with kind intentions. Hypocrites. Friends.
The bell rang again.
I climbed down the carpeted stairs into the chilly
hallway and opened the front door.
There were no streetlights, bins or paving stones. No
shape or light, no form at all, just a stench.
There was a crack and a whoosh and I was smacked
back, winded, onto the doorstep. The hallway was
pitch black and freezing cold and I thought, ‘What
kind of world is it that I would be robbed in my home
tonight?’ And then I thought, ‘Frankly, what does it
matter?’ I thought, ‘Please don’t wake the boys, they
need their sleep. I will give you every penny I own
just as long as you don’t wake the boys.’
I opened my eyes and it was still dark and everything
was crackling, rustling.
Feathers.
There was a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of
just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and
yeast.
Feathers between my fingers, in my eyes, in my
mouth, beneath me a feathery hammock lifting me up
a foot above the tiled floor.
One shiny jet-black eye as big as my face, blinking
slowly, in a leathery wrinkled socket, bulging out
from a football-sized testicle.
SHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
shhhhhhhh.
And this is what he said:
I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more.
Put me down, I said.
Not until you say hello.
Put. Me. Down, I croaked, and my piss warmed the
cradle of his wing.
You’re frightened. Just say hello.
Hello.
Say it properly.
I lay back, resigned, and wished my wife wasn’t
dead. I wished I wasn’t lying terrified in a giant
bird embrace in my hallway. I wished I hadn’t been
obsessing about this thing just when the greatest
tragedy of my life occurred. These were factual
yearnings. It was bitterly wonderful. I had some
clarity.
Hello Crow, I said. Good to finally meet you.
And he was gone.
For the first time in days I slept. I dreamt of
afternoons in the forest.
CROW
Very romantic, how we first met. Badly behaved. Trip
trap. Two-bed upstairs at, spit-level, slight barbed-
error, snuck in easy through the wall and up the attic
bedroom to see those cotton boys silently sleeping,
intoxicating hum of innocent children, lint, flack,
gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning,
every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat,
welly, covered in a lm of grief. Down the dead Mum
stairs, plinkety plink curled claws whisper, down to
Daddy’s recently Mum-and-Dad’s bedroom. I was
Herne the hunter hornless, funt. Munt. Here he is.
Out. Drunk-for white. I bent down over him and
smelt his breath. Notes of rotten hedge, bluebottles.
I prised open his mouth and counted bones, snacked
a little on his un-brushed teeth, flossed him, crowly
tossed his tongue hither, thither, I lifted the duvet.
I Eskimo kissed him. I butterfly kissed him. I flat-
flutter Jenny Wren kissed him. His lint (toe-jam-rint)
fuck-sacks sad and cosy, sagging, gently rising, then
down, rising, then down, rising, then down, I was
praying the breathing and the epidermis whispered
‘flesh, aah, flesh, aah, flesh, aah,’ and it was beautiful
for me, rising (just like me) then down (just like me)
pan-shaped (just like me) it was any wonder the facts
of my arrival under his sheets didn’t lift him, stench,
rot-yot-kot, wake up human (BIRD FEATHERS
UP YER CRACK, DOWN YER COCK-EYE, IN
YER MOUTH) but he slept and the bedroom was
a mausoleum. He was an accidental remnant and I
knew this was the best gig, a real bit of fun. I put my
claw on his eyeball and weighed up gouging it out for
fun or mercy. I plucked one jet feather from my hood
and left it on his forehead, for, his, head.
For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of
night in the morning.
For a little break in the mourning.
I will give you something to think about, I whispered.
He woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness
of his trauma.
ghoeeeze, he clacked.
ghoeeeze.
DAD
Today I got back to work.
I managed half an hour then doodled.
I drew a picture of the funeral. Everybody had crow
faces, except for the boys.
CROW
Look at that, look, did I or did I not, oi, look, stab it.
Good book, funny bodies, open door, slam door, spit
this, lick that, lift, oi, look, stop it.
Tender opportunity. Never mind, every evening,
crack of dawn, all change, all meat this, all meat that,
separate the reek. Did I or did I not, ooh, tarmac
macadam. Edible, sticky, bad camouflage.
Strap me to the mast or I’ll bang her until my
mathematics poke out her sorry, sorry, sorry, look! A
severed hand, bramble, box of swans, box of stories,
piss-arc, better off, must stop shaking, must stay still,
mast stay still.
Oi, look, trust me. Did I or did I not faithfully
deliver St Vincent to Lisbon. Safe trip, a bit of liver,
sniff, sniff, fabric softener, leather, railings melted
for bombs, bullets. Did I or did I not carry the hag
across the river. Shit not, did not. Sing song blackbird
automatic fuck-you-yellow, nasty, pretty boy, joke,
creak, joke, crech, joke. Patience.
I could’ve bent him backwards over a chair and drip-
fed him sour bulletins of the true one-hour dying of
his wife. OTHER BIRDS WOULD HAVE, there’s
no goody baddy in the kingdom. Better get cracking.
I believe in the therapeutic method.
BOYS
We were small boys with remote-control
cars and ink-stamp sets and we knew
something was up. We knew we weren’t
getting straight answers when we asked
‘where is Mum?’ and we knew, even
before we were taken to our room and
told to sit on the bed, either side of Dad,
that something was changed. We guessed
and understood that this was a new life
and Dad was a different type of Dad now
and we were different boys, we were brave
new boys without a Mum. So when he
told us what had happened I don’t know
what my brother was thinking but I was
thinking this:
Where are the fire engines? Where is the
noise and clamor of an event like this?
Where are the strangers going out of their
way to help, screaming, flinging bits of
emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment
at us to try and settle us and save us?
There should be men in helmets speaking
a new and dramatic language of crisis.
There should be horrible levels of noise,
completely foreign and inappropriate for
our cozy London flat.
There were no crowds and no uniformed
strangers and there was no new language
of crisis. We stayed in our PJs and people
visited and gave us stuff.
Holiday and school became the same.
CROW
In other versions I am a doctor or a ghost. Perfect
devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things
other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets
and have theatrical battles with language and God. I
was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom,
figment, specter, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst
and babysitter.
I was, after all, ‘the central bird … at every extreme.’
I’m a template. I know that, he knows that. A myth
to be slipped in. Slip up into.
Inevitably I have to defend my position, because my
position is sentimental. You don’t know your origin
tales, your biological truth (accident), your deaths
(mosquito bites, mostly), your lives (denial, cheerfully).
I am reluctant to discuss absurdity with any of you,
who have persecuted us since time began. What good is
a crow to a pack of grieving humans? A huddle.
A throb.
A sore.
A plug.
A gape.
A load.
A gap.
So, yes. I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow
filth, cheat death, mock the starving homeless,
misdirect, misinform. Oi, stab it! A bloody load of
time wasted.
But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief.
There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity,
splendor or normality that interest me (interest
ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless
children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is
ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.
DAD
I’ve drawn her unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a
xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her
bones.
CROW
I’ve written hundreds of memoirs. It’s necessary for
big names like me. I believe it is called the imperative.
Once upon a time there was a blood wedding, and the
crow son was angry that his mother was marrying
again. So he flew away. He flew to find his father
but all he found was carrion. He made friends with
farmers (he delivered other birds to their guns),
scientists (he performed tricks with tools that not
even chimps could perform), and a poet or two. He
thought, on several occasions, that he had found
his Daddy’s bones, and he wept and screamed at the
hateful Goshawks ‘here are the grey bones of my
hooded Papa,’ but every time when he looked again
it was some other corvid’s corpse. So, tired of the
fable lifestyle, sick of his omen celebrity, he hopped
and flew and dragged himself home. The wedding
party was still in full swing and the ancient grey crow
rutting with his mother in the pile of trash at the foot
of the stairs was none other than his father. The crow
son screamed his hurt and confusion at his writhing
parents. His father laughed. KONK. KONK. KONK.
You’ve lived a long time and been a crow through and
through, but you still can’t take a joke.
DAD
Soft.
Slight.
Like light, like a child’s foot talcum-
dusted and kissed, like stroke-reversing suede, like
dust, like pins and needles, like a promise, like a curse,
like seeds, like everything grained, plaited, linked, or
numbered, like everything nature-made and violent
and quiet.
It is all completely missing. Nothing patient now.
BOYS
My brother and I discovered a guppy fish in a
rock pool somewhere. We set about trying to
kill it. First we flung shingle into the pool but
the fish was fast. Then we tried large rocks and
boulders, but the fish would hide in the corners
beneath small crevices, or dart away. We were
human boys and the fish was just a fish, so
we devised a way to kill it. We filled the pool
with stones, blocking and damming the guppy
into a smaller and smaller area. Soon it circled
slowly and sadly in the tiny prison-pool and
we selected a perfectly sized stone. My brother
slammed it down over-arm and it popped and
splashed, rock on rock in water and delightedly
we lifted it out. Sure enough the fish was dead.
All the fun was sucked across the wide empty
beach. I felt sick and my brother swore. He
suggested flinging the lifeless guppy into the
sea but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it so
we sprinted back across the beach and Dad
didn’t look up from his book but said
‘you’ve done something bad I can tell.’
DAD
We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-
ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.
The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-
longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the
principal difference between our house and a house
where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their
last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles
of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-
CHEEK.’ She was not busy dying, and there is no
detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then
she was gone.
She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush,
thesaurus).
She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel,
peanut butter, lip balm).
And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for
her birthday.
I will stop finding her hairs.
I will stop hearing her breathing.
BOYS
We found a fish in a pool and tried to kill
it but the pool was too big and the fish was
too quick so we dammed it and smashed it.
Later on, for ages, my brother did pictures
of the pool, of the fish, of us. Diagrams
explaining our choices. My brother always
uses diagrams to explain our choices, but
they aren’t scientific, they’re scrappy. My
brother likes to do scrappy badly drawn
diagrams even though he can actually
draw pretty well.
CROW
Head down, tot-along, looking.
Head down, hop-down, totter.
Look up. ‘LOUD, HARD AND INDIGNANT
KRAAH NOTES’ (Collins Guide to Birds, p. 45).
Head down, bottle-top, potter.
Head down, mop-a-lot, hopper.
He could learn a lot from me.
That’s why I’m here.
DAD
There is a fascinating constant exchange between
Crow’s natural self and his civilized self, between
the scavenger and the philosopher, the goddess of
complete being and the black stain, between Crow
and his birdness. It seems to me to be the self-same
exchange between mourning and living, then and
now. I could learn a lot from him.
“This is Emma Straub’s tour of Brooklyn,” she says, stuck in traffic on Livingston Street.
We are on the phone discussing her new novel, Modern Lovers, and it’s fitting that Straub should be my vehicular guide through the borough of her most recent book. The novel follows two Ditmas Park families and their teenage children. It’s both a coming of age story and an uh-oh-entering-middle-age story. The parents, college friends and former members of the band Kitty’s Mustache, are grappling with their maturing marriages and relationships. A producer wants to make a movie about Lydia, their friend and the fourth member of their band. She skyrocketed to fame, and died young, and her renewed presence in the plot of their daily lives rekindles old grudges, old affections, and old questions about the fragility of friendship. Along the way, we encounter yoga cults, SAT prep courses, and delicious descriptions of Brooklyn dining. It’s summer in New York, and it’s sumptuous.
“I don’t know if you can hear that,” Straub says, “but that’s my phone telling me directions.” And then: “I’m turning this off because I know where I’m going.” She does know where she’s going. It’s hard to match the confidence of her narrative voice, the way it deftly manages and cares for the modern lovers of her book, its antic and engrossing cast of characters. Straub’s Brooklyn is lush and populated and humming with possibility. Over the Manhattan Bridge and onto the Flatbush Avenue Extension, one couldn’t hope for a better voice to lead the way. She confesses, unprompted and in no particular order, that she’s blocking the box, that life is good when you’re in front of Sahadi’s gourmet grocery store, and that she’s really quite adept at getting tickets. Most of all, she wants to make sure I know about the new cat cafe on Atlantic Avenue.
“You can go get a deep fried Twinkie [at ChipShop] and then pet a cat.”
I feel that my well-being very much looked out for during this interview. I feel it’s important to Emma Straub that I have plans after I finish talking to her about her novel. The empathy and humanity that is so visible in her writing comes through the phone, too.
“I’ve been sitting here for about seven minutes,” she says, “right at the door of Junior’s. I feel like I could get out of the car, go sit down, eat a piece of cheesecake.”
“If you need a slice of cheesecake,” she offers.
I do need a slice of cheesecake. Don’t we all? Or maybe it’s not that I need the cheesecake, but I need the offer. Every now and then, a book comes along that makes that kind of offer. Modern Lovers says, here, just in case you need this. Here is a book with a large, nuanced heart.
“The things you learn,” Straub says, “when you’re just sitting in traffic.”
Hilary Leichter: Modern Lovers revolves around a group of middle-aged friends that used to be in a band together in college. The fourth friend, Lydia, died of an overdose when she was young. I was reminded of some of my other favorite stories that deal with groups of friends, where one friend has died, or is gone, or has vanished. I was thinking of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and even The Big Chill. But The Waves felt really significant to me given that it’s also the name of the hotel that Andrew, one of the characters in your book, wants to open. Were these things that you were thinking about when you were writing the book? Was it important to you to have this absence, a character who is gone and creates a vortex at the center of your narrative?
Emma Straub: That is so funny. It never ceases to amaze me how many things happen organically within a book, like that, like The Waves, that you never think about in advance, and then someone says it to you and you think “Oh, that makes sense!” But you know, things can feel unintentional when you’re doing them and then they bubble to the surface in meaningful ways. That is hilarious.
One of the things that I was thinking about was the absence of old friendships and old relationships, but also how friendships that you keep change over time, and how sometimes you can feel sort of stuck in a previous moment with someone even when that moment has passed. We all have friends from childhood who we see a certain way, and who we know see us a certain way, even though we’re not really that person anymore. And sometimes that can be really nice and comforting. And sometimes it can be really frustrating. I think people also often feel that way about their families. Sometimes your parents see you one way long after you don’t want to be seen that way anymore.
HL: There’s a great passage where the character Harry, Elizabeth and Andrew’s teenage son, describes how he could construct a version of himself out of old photographs and his parents would probably not even notice. I think that’s a really interesting way about talking about characters in a book, too, kind of frozen in the eyes of their readers. Can you talk a little bit about the band, Kitty’s Mustache, and their hit song, Mistress of Myself? The main chorus from the song is a quote from Sense and Sensibility and then I started to recognize a lot of the characters’ names from Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth, Lydia, and Jane, and Bennet(t). Is this just another thing that I’m throwing into the air?
Jane Austen…is in my family tree somewhere.
ES: It is, it absolutely is! But the Jane Austen stuff tells you a lot about the make up of my brain. I sometimes think about the DNA of writers and books, and I sometimes think: who are my literary relatives? Jane Austen, I’d certainly like to think, is in my family tree somewhere. There are certainly things that happen in this book that are not Jane Austen-approved. Happy endings for everyone? But in general, I do believe in happy endings, or satisfying endings. Not necessarily that everyone is peachy-keen and perfectly squared away. But I want the reader to leave the book feeling secure that things are sort of taken care of. That’s how I feel about Jane Austen. I feel very well taken care of by her.
HL: It’s a generosity. I felt that reading your short stories, too. I think there’s a real generosity that you give to the characters. Which isn’t to say that they’re all likable all the time, or they’re all lovable all the time, but you feel that they’re taken care of and someone loves them. I think that’s Jane Austen, too. Her characters feel loved.
ES: Think about all of the annoying people in Jane Austen novels. That’s just the job, of making you sympathetic to most of them, even if it’s just for a moment. Even the creeps can be entertaining. And of course the whole idea of likability is preposterous anyway.
HL: Yes, right! I’m thinking about the character from Pride and Prejudice. I’m completely blanking on the name, but he’s Elizabeth Bennet’s original intended, and she rejects him, and he’s the most annoying. But you just really feel for him. There’s compassion there.
ES: Do you mean Mr. Collins?
HL: Yes!
ES: And you’re just like blegh. But by the end you’re thinking oh, he’s just a person. He’s going to make her friend happy. It’s going to be alright.
HL: Exactly. What do you think Jane Austen would think of the marriages in your book?
ES: Oh man. I think she would enjoy Zoe and Jane’s marriage because they’re sort of funnier with each other. They’re sort of more quippy with each other than Elizabeth and Andrew. But I think Harry and Ruby would be her favorite couple in the book for sure. Young love. A young, powerful woman and the sort of gentle boy.
HL: I loved the way you included ephemera — articles, advertisements, clippings. It made the book feel like a neighborhood to me, like I was just sitting on the corner listening to what was happening around me. It had a Greek chorus vibe. I was wondering how and if Brooklyn asserted itself as a character in this novel, and if you had a chance to spend any time in those beautiful old houses in Ditmas Park as part of your research?
ES: Yeah, I did. When I was writing this book I was also looking for a place to move. My husband and I had decided we were going to move within Brooklyn, but we were exploring new neighborhoods. And we spent some time in Ditmas. We used to live quite close to Ditmas Park, so we’d walked those streets before, anyway. And we were going to a lot of open houses, really looking at real estate very seriously. I went to so many houses in Ditmas Park, which was great, because even when I walked in and thought “I don’t want to live here,” I thought, “well, maybe one of my characters wants to live here!” So I did a lot of real estate research, killing two birds with one stone. And what I really liked about Ditmas Park was that it’s this funny little island in Brooklyn that doesn’t look like anywhere else in Brooklyn. It’s got some of the trappings of more hip neighborhoods or more gentrified neighborhoods, but it also has been the way it is for a lot longer than people realize. There’s nothing trendy about it, which is what I really liked. It really is family oriented and feels like the ‘burbs. There are garages, and driveways, and all these things that growing up in New York City I always thought of as completely foreign. So I loved the idea that I could give my characters some of those things, things that I always secretly wanted or fantasized about.
HL: I love that idea of real estate hunting for yourself but also for your characters. There’s this wonderful line where Zoe is alone in the house and she hears a thud, and thinks someone is there, but it’s just the house creaking. She thinks, “The house had its own problems.” We’re seeing all this drama between characters, but maybe the house has its own story happening at the same time, and its own drama. What was the quirkiest house that you saw when you were looking at real estate?
ES: There are so many weird houses in Ditmas Park. I mean, everywhere in the world. The one house that I would say I enjoyed touring the most was — well there were a few that I really liked. Some of them had been sort of chopped up, and had weird carpets and locks on all the bedroom doors. There were some houses where we were like, “Uh, what’s going on here?” There’s some that would require a lot of renovations and money and things I didn’t have. And patience with renovations, that’s really what I didn’t have, because I was also seven months pregnant at the time. But one of the houses, I realized part way through the tour, belonged to Noah Baumbach’s father, and so was the setting for The Squid and the Whale, which is one of my favorite Noah Baumbach movies, and in which I have a very, very, very brief cameo. Sort of randomly, because I was friends with the woman who was his assistant at the time. I was just an extra. But I realized that I was inside that movie in this whole new way. We did not buy that house.
Houses do have their own stories.
Houses do have their own stories. My parents just moved out of the house I grew up in after about thirty years, and it’s so strange to me to think that someone else is living in that house now. That the house is still there, but that I can’t go to it. It boggles my mind. I feel like there must be traces of my childhood there, even though I know there aren’t, because obviously my parents took all of their things, and I haven’t lived there in fifteen years or more.
HL: I feel like the stand-in for that feeling in movies in books is always the series of notches on the wall. That’s the stand-in for every footprint and scuff.
ES: Yeah, my parents painted over that wall a long time ago.
HL: I was thinking a lot about Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures while reading this, and there’s a recurring theme in some of your books about how people deal or don’t deal with fame. If Lydia from Modern Lovers and Laura could meet up and have a drink, would they have advice for each other? Or anything to learn from each other?
ES: I don’t think Lydia can learn anything from anybody. What I was interested in about Laura Lamont is that she was trying to do it all. She really wanted it all. She wanted the career, and the family, and love, and everything. And I don’t think Lydia gives a shit about anything except fame. I think she’s got a one track mind for sure. Lydia only cared about being famous. She is a spurned lover in the book, but that didn’t really matter to her, not in the same way that having success mattered to her.
HL: Were you ever in a band in college, like Kitty’s Mustache?
ES: When I was in college I had a boyfriend who was in a band, and I had lots of friends who were in bands, but I had absolutely no, less than zero, musical talent or ability. I didn’t even really like to do karaoke. It’s no good. Nobody wants to hear it, that much I know for sure. But I did enjoy, at Oberlin, going to see my friends’ bands all the time. And I had a lot of friends who were in the conservatory too, and so they were really, really good musicians. I had a lot of friends who had taught themselves how to play guitar, but I also had a lot of friends who were really astonishingly good musicians. It was a real pleasure to get to see them. And I was always in love with everyone who played music. I mean, how can you not be?
HL: Especially in college. There’s nothing like a guitar. Elizabeth is sort of the master songwriter of the group, and I loved the way you show her writing music, in her garage with the door half closed. I thought that was such a great image. Do you have a similarly specific set up for when you sit down to write a book?
ES: In theory, yes. After looking for a new place to live for a year, we finally moved in November, and then I had horrible bronchitis for the last couple of months of my pregnancy, and then I had a new baby, and then it was January, and then the baby — he’s much nicer now, but for the first few months he was basically screaming twenty-four hours a day and eating every two hours. So I have not had a chance to work yet in my new space. But I have a new office that I’m really, really excited about working in — someday. Someday. Maybe when my book tour is done. I’m hoping when my book tour is done I will get there.
HL: A new office is exciting.
ES: We live over in the Columbia Street Waterfront District now, and so I can see a lot of sky, which is really nice. I used to look out my window and see trees, and I love trees, and I miss the trees that I used to stare at out the window. But now I get sky, and I’m looking forward to seeing what that does to my brain.
HL: I wanted to ask you about vacations. Because your last book was about a vacation, and this book is about a Brooklyn summer. Is there something inspiring to you about that kind of bite-sized structure for a book?
Summer seems so endless and important when you’re a teenager.
ES: With The Vacationers, I was coming off of Laura Lamont, which covered decades and decades and decades of time. After that I wanted to give myself the opposite — not problem — but the opposite set of rules. The Vacationers is bing, bang, boom, and I knew I had to smush everything together to make everything happen really quickly. With this book, I liked the structure of a summer especially because of the teenagers. So much can happen in a summer when you’re a kid. Summer seems so endless and important when you’re a teenager. What are your friends doing? What are you doing? Where are you going, are you going somewhere? Do you have a job? Do you have to take the stupid SATs? Do you have a summer love, do you not have a summer love, does everyone else have a summer love? These are some of the things that I thought about. I also think that Brooklyn can be so disgusting in the summer. It’s so hot and sweaty and gross, and that can really drive people crazy. So I wanted some of that, too. That really sweaty, your-clothing-is-sticking-to-you kind of stuff that might drive you to join a yoga cult.
HL: If anything’s going to do it, it’s August in Brooklyn.
ES: Right now I’m sitting in front of the Brooklyn Civil Court, which I can tell you is the worst place on earth. Because I had to go there about fourteen times when my husband and I decided to hyphenate our last names. Which is a terrible thing to do. If anyone reading this, if you ever think “oh it would be so sweet to hyphenate my last name,” just do it when you get married. If you’re an idiot like me and you decide six years later that it would be nice if everyone had the same last name, it requires several trips to this pit of hell.
HL: Wait — is this the same place you go to get the marriage license?
ES: No, no. Actually recently, a couple of weeks ago, I married some friends of mine. I had to go to City Hall, to the Marriage Bureau to get registered with the city. And that was lovely. That was a lovely experience. There were flowers everywhere, there were people wearing wedding dresses, there were couples of every age. It was just the beautiful fabric of Brooklyn. That was glorious. I just wanted to stay there forever and marry everyone and throw rice. No, this is a very different place. This is low ceilings, and broken elevators, and a lot of bureaucracy.
HL: I’m so sorry.
ES: That’s my PSA of the day.
HL: I changed my name legally when I got married, but I still use my maiden name for writing, and it’s very confusing. I kind of made the decision on the spot when we went to get our license. So I think about that a lot — should we have hyphenated? But, too late!
ES: I think you did the right thing! When I got married I never in a thousand trillion years considered changing my last name. I was like, why on Earth would I do that? But now, what I realize we should’ve done is to pick some other name that we both liked. Like Sprinkles. Or like, I don’t know, Traffic Cone. Anything, anything would be better than the monstrosity that we have.
HL: I’m going to be looking for the next book by Emma Traffic Cone.
ES: Emma Traffic Cone is going to be huge in construction vehicle literature.
Four years ago, when I was still a writer zygote, I attended an MFA program dinner honoring Cheryl Strayed, who’d read on campus. Wild had recently debuted with the kind of acclaim we aspiring newbies dream up at our drunkest. While I sat at the table trying to balance the beast of a graduate student in the presence of free food with the desperate need not to come off as a ravenous, sloppy hummus machine, I listened as Strayed recounted a recent experience with a (male) interviewer. During the course of the conversation he expressed his admiration for the cover design, featuring a single (now iconic) red-laced Danner boot. This un-gendered photo had made this man feel that it was “okay” to read a book about a woman’s experience written by a woman, and he asked if the design was a conscious decision — perhaps part of a clever, all-out marketing effort — to convince men to pick up the text.
“I’m not looking for male readers,” said Strayed. “I’m looking for readers.”
Isn’t that, I thought at the time, what we’re all looking for? Isn’t a reader simply hungry for a story?
***
Maybe The New York Times knew that we needed a laugh.
After all, this was a morning we woke up to Donald Trump as the uncontested Republican presidential nominee. We needed a conduit for rage at a political tempest too grave and complicated to wrap our dissent around.
Perhaps they’d been curled up on the downy puff piece for a while, waiting for this opportune moment to impress advertisers with a wicked click-through rate. Dropping an article mastheaded with a picture of grinning, balding white men in what appears to be a funeral parlor designed by Betty Draper cheekily proclaiming “the one rule of men’s book club is no books about women, by women” was Twitter gasoline.
Maybe The New York Times knew that we needed a laugh.
We can debate the levels of hubris and/or drunkenness in the NYT editorial room all we want, but what we have is an article claiming real estate and resources in The New York Times’ Books section. Space and author payments that could have, you know, gone toward any other article. One that didn’t profile a misogynistic boy’s club with all the cheerful winking of a local newscaster ending the night on a squirrel that can water-ski.
Because, as female writers, as writers of color, as writers of nontraditional body types and nonbinary genders and different sexualities, you know what? We get it. We know there is a large swath of the American population that is not going to read our work, even if the upper echelons of the publication industry stoop to letting us in. Not 24 hours before the Book Club Bomb, Mallory Ortberg at The Toastpublished a sublime response to Entertainment Weekly’s piece quoting an editor claiming that there was no bias in extravagant book advances, and she would have paid a debut author “the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at.” We don’t need to read the statistics from VIDA or The Guardian because this is the reality we’re living in. Each of us have a dozen anecdotes that tell the same story. These are the odds stacked against us.
As Ortberg points out in her essay, the shock and rage over the publisher’s comments do not stem from the fact that the vast number of books that are published, books that are promoted, books that are stocked, books that are reviewed, books that are read come from a narrow and homogenized cross-section of a working writer population that continues to become bolder, more nimble, more outspoken and more diverse. The anger, that sweet sweet 140-character indignation writhing in GIFs and hashtags, is a reaction to the casual, cavalier and shameless propagation of sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic truths.
The anger, that sweet sweet 140-character indignation writhing in GIFs and hashtags, is a reaction to the casual, cavalier and shameless propagation of sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic truths.
No matter how much writers themselves are working to become more inclusionary (evidenced this same week by the wide and deafening denouncement of Antioch Review’sabominable transphobic rant by the literary community, these ideas that books chosen by grandmothers are worthy of scorn and a man can only enjoy a book by and about someone who looks and lives and loves as he does, they keep getting published. They keep getting perpetuated. You cannot deny the right of these small-minded individuals to exist, but the elevation? That’s voluntary. That’s purposeful.
It is easy to dismiss the article and its subjects as a relic. The Man Book Club’s members are, as noted in the article, “lawyers and engineers in their mid-50’s.” We can roll our eyes as they decry “chick-lit” and fondly reminisce over how they’ve served as each other’s divorce lawyers at different points in their lives. The thoughtless way they note that their wives’ clubs “have a lot of turnover” without examining what obligations may prevent a 21st century woman from finishing a novel and planning an accompanying themed dinner party every month. It’s convenient to claim that this misogyny is an endangered strain, one that is a generation removed from our own, one that will die when these men are all inevitably gone and buried.
***
Reading the Man Book Club article a second time through today, hearing Strayed’s voice echo back, the cover of a childhood book resurfaced in my mind. No Girls Allowed, one of 300 Berenstain Bears titles released by Stan and Jan Berenstain. My copy was tucked into an Easter basket when I was five, between a bag of Brach’s jellybeans and a pack of yellow Peeps. The cartoon cover image, an ominous illustration of boy bear cubs sneering at a lone sister bear cub left outside of their clubhouse, seared into my brain from amidst the plastic pink woven basket and neon grass confetti. NO GIRLS ALLOWED was painted in red as a warning. A distinction. A threat.
Sister Bear could run faster, shoot better marbles and hit a baseball better than Brother Bear and his friends. And damn, it got annoying fast. She was such a pest, winning all the time, even though she was younger and smaller than all the neighborhood bros. The brothers get together and build a fortress clubhouse with the distinct purpose of excluding her and her evil “gloating” ways. Sister Bear, confused and devastated, runs home crying. Papa Bear is so incensed that he sets right to work on building a way cooler playhouse for his daughter, so she can also exist in the world. When the boys discover this super sweet new pad, they decide equality might actually be the way to go (for better real estate and snack delivery from Mama Bear), and so they decide to call a truce — as long as Sister Bear can agree to keep all that “boastfulness” to a dull roar.
Sister Bear was such a pest, winning all the time, even though she was younger and smaller than all the neighborhood bros.
I doubt there was any intentional subtext in my mom’s gift-shopping book choice. It was likely one of the only titles stocked at the local Fred Meyer, a half-conscious shelf grab between picking up the Easter dinner ham and remembering Cadbury eggs. She probably didn’t even think much of the subject matter once she opened it up and read it to me at bedtime. Even if the journey was problematic, it was the resolution that counted, right? I can tsk the moralistic Berenstains and their heavy-handed nuclear family lessons from this distance all I want — 25 years later, the same age as my mother was then, child free with a career writing feminist culture critique. The books were forged from, and wildly successful in, a culture littered with passive, micro-lessons for children. The body of Barbie. Ariel and her lost voice. The Berenstains and their bears weren’t aiming to change the world they sold 240 million books in; they were simply happy to perpetuate it.
And we absorbed it, breathed it in. Like each generation of girls before and after. We saw the blueprint for selves we did not understand. We drank the water because this culture was our only well.
I can’t say that this was the first time I learned the importance of tempering passion and achievement for the sake of a man’s feelings. Just as I’m sure that the wives of the Men’s Book Club members have heard whining over more than how unfair it is that they have nifty book clubs, and that a writer as lauded, awarded and beloved as Strayed has been wholeheartedly congratulated for eking out a great story despite her gender.
The Man’s Book Club could have asked for an invite to their wives’ clubs and discovered what it was about these literary works that made them so beloved to their spouses.
When threatened, the boy cubs could have leaned closer in on Sister Bear, stacked her into their teams against other, less capable boys. The Man’s Book Club could have asked for an invite to their wives’ clubs and discovered what it was about these literary works that made them so beloved to their spouses. Strayed’s interviewer could have asked himself why he was so tentative about reading women’s literary work. The New York Times could have uncovered one of a million new voices; told a story about those who are transcending rather than conforming.
Reading the article yet again, my pity for this dude squad begins to blossom. To think that they will head into the ground without the words of Terry Tempest Williams or Lidia Yuknavitch or Sandra Cisneros in their hearts. They will never listen to Lemonade. They will never roam a bookstore free to any possibility that may hook their gaze, any staff member’s favorite new selection. They will be halted because the pantones on a cover are too flamboyant or pastel. Or the name hints at something feminine. Or the author’s jacket photo couldn’t pass as their own mugshot. Too comfortable to learn, too lazy to evolve, their inertia cheered by one of our nation’s most iconic publications. As artists clamor and push, the pillars of the establishment burrow into their clubhouse in a contented hibernation.
The walls, however, are drafty. We can hear them snore.
On assignment for a newspaper that she seldom read anymore, Nikki watched a musician perform and afterwards interviewed him for a 2000-word feature article. Nikki’s boyfriend was out of town that weekend. During the show she stood in the middle of the club, behind a group of men who appeared, she thought, as if groomed for a band photo in a music magazine. At the bar she made small talk with a young woman who eventually asked Nikki her age, and when Nikki said 35 the younger woman nodded in this way that meant yes, you look about that old. After the show, still inside the club, the musician told Nikki the room might be too noisy, and she agreed it wouldn’t do, she could hardly hear, and she suggested they finish the interview at her apartment. “It’s not far — a 10-minute walk,” Nikki said. She and the musician turned right at the next block, and crossed a footbridge, after which the way home was so many pastel terrace houses and red-brick apartment blocks. The decay of Nikki’s building was assured by an indifferent landlord who, the property manager explained, spent much of the year overseas and out of reach. Inside, the musician sat on the sofa and lit a cigarette. The flat looked untidy because Nikki and her boyfriend were both happy letting the mess go on for weeks, until their jackets swallowed the chairs and their shoes came to conspire in corners. “Nice place,” the musician said. Nikki asked a standard question about the musician’s old jobs, and he told a story about the years he worked as a gardener at Centennial Park, where he harvested psychotropic mushrooms every April, before Nikki noticed that a stereo speaker had been turned 180 degrees, its red wires showing. A second speaker had fallen on its side. There were two books on the carpet. Nikki never left books on the floor. She asked him two more questions. Then she looked away. “Hold on a second,” she said, peering inside the kitchen drawer where she kept passports, a folder of lease-related paperwork, and painkillers. “Some things are missing,” she told the musician. And the musician said, “Maybe your boyfriend’s left you?” Now Nikki asked her next question. “What is music for? Politically or in other ways, what’s music’s function, and I mean contemporary rock music of the four-minute-song kind.” She said this while checking the cupboards. “But shouldn’t you be writing this down; shouldn’t you be recording this?” said the musician. And the naked sound of drawers reeling and cupboards banging shut continued to gather in strength until Nikki understood what had happened. She said, “We’ve been burgled.” Her shoebox containing sentimental objects was no longer under the bed. Her laptop wasn’t in the spare room. All the Apple products had disappeared. The musician kept asking, “We’ll keep going with the interview, won’t we? See, I really need to promote my stuff.” Nikki shook her head: she hesitated between contempt and pity for the thieves — and for the musician too.
Years later, Nikki would tell this story in job interviews to illustrate why she disliked practising forms of journalism that were essentially promotional — publicising films and albums and tours and music festivals — and why she now wanted to work in public relations proper. It might feel more honest to be a publicist, she said. Nikki didn’t mention that her pay hadn’t changed in six years — she was ashamed of this fact — and she never gave the musician’s name, because it didn’t matter much in her telling, and he wasn’t well-known. Eventually she found a PR job. There were other consequences of the robbery. After the break-in, she and her boyfriend moved to a more secure building in a quieter part of the city, where they became friends with their neighbour upstairs, a man with what she considered an old-fashioned name: George. He guessed — correctly, as it turned out — that her name was short for Nikomachi: the winner of battles. She fell in love with George and married him, and he and Nikki had one child — a girl. The robbery, according to Nikki, was the very night that her life went off in this direction. When her daughter was 13 years old, suddenly curious about love, and came home from school asking Nikki to “give examples” of how two people might meet and marry each other, the story began with the break-in.
In another city, somewhere colder, the musician also remembered the night that Nikki abandoned their interview. It shouldn’t be complicated: for a few years he made music, he was concerned with little else, but for good reasons it became impossible to continue with a full heart. Then he did something else with the rest of his life. Nikki was the last person who asked him those questions about music, and it made him cringe to think of how he’d answered. As far as he knew, his children had never listened to his old CDs. He didn’t play anymore, not at all, telling himself the house was too small for ten-year-olds and teenagers and his old instruments, too small for the person he used to be. It needn’t be painful: he’d left music behind. After he found work as a paramedic, his youngest daughter began referring to him as “Ambulanceman,” as if he were another superhero who eliminated every problem. At night, driving home, the former musician pictured the lounge room of Nikki’s old flat: a stereo speaker turned awkwardly, a paperback flopped open on the floor; something was about to be discovered, and he’d soon be leaving.
Night after night, Dmitri Shostakovich sits in the hall beside the elevator in his apartment building, fully dressed and chain smoking. He is waiting to be taken away by Stalin’s secret police and possibly tortured, possibly killed. He’s hoping to save his wife and daughter the trauma of watching him be dragged out of their home, and to save himself the indignity of being taken in his night shirt. If Stalin’s people get inside the apartment, he knows they will sack all his belongings ostensibly to find proof of his disloyalty, which they will find or plant as necessary. To isolate his bad luck and keep his family away from the state’s gaze as long as possible, he sits night after night waiting and smoking by the elevator. This is the scene that sets The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s new novel about the composer Shostakovich.
Barnes’s fiction typically has a swirling structure, with many small anecdotes and bits of thought or drama happening in and out of sequence, separated by white space on the page. He often uses phrases or ideas in a particular way then changes their significance several pages later. This style has never been better suited to his topic than here in The Noise of Time where the jittery fearful tone of the thoughts and the pointillist style work together seamlessly — a formal triumph for Barnes, while Shostakovich may be executed for artistic formalism. It’s not only that the prose style matches the anxiety of the character’s thoughts, Barnes has crafted something almost shockingly profound in this short book, pulling in a wide net of history, political theory, philosophy, feeling, art and plain human muddle into something both coherent and mysterious.
Shostakovich’s youthful thoughts about music are coherent and mysterious too — he knows exactly what he wants to write, and for whom, but there’s an invisible center to the difference between good art and bad art that he can’t ever define too concretely. The people who can define good art and its function too specifically are mocked musicologists or feared — Stalin — the face of what he calls “Power.”
Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbas miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.
Barnes can’t let this stand, though, and soon Shostakovich finds his certainties complicated —
It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them — that is a musicologist.
But it did not seem so funny now they were shooting even musicologists.
He has failed to argue out of his certainties; he changes his mind slightly because musicologist shouldn’t be shot, and he doesn’t want to be shot himself. He doesn’t even fully change his mind, rather lets his opinions recede a little, and consider what he will do with his music if he doesn’t want to be killed. There’s something chilling and messy about the way circumstances change his mind, slightly wearing down what he thinks of as his integrity over and over.
How recently he had sensed within him youth’s indestructibility. More than that — its incorruptibility. And beyond that, beneath it all, a conviction of the rightness of whatever talent he had, and whatever music he had written. All this was not in any way undermined. It was just, now, completely irrelevant.
The relevant thing, as he’s trying not to be killed, is his love for his family and precious, fragile loyalty to his friends, which he knows will be easily destroyed by pain if they choose to torture him. He is in this situation because Stalin attended one of his operas, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and sent Shostakovich to be interrogated for counterrevolutionary beliefs. The man who’s assigned the task of interrogating him is called Zakrevsky — on the day he is to go in for his interrogation, Zakrevsky is not available so Shostakovich goes home again, to wait for Power to come and take him some other way. He discovers that Zakrevsky is permanently not available — he has been killed by the same Power that had assigned him to kill Shostakovich. There could be another Zakrevsky in his place, though, someone else would do the job of torturing for information or just shooting him in the stairwell — unless Power had decided for some unplumbable reason to let Shostakovich live and go free. He is saved not by a counter-attack against his attackers, but by a muddle that may or may not be purposeful. He doesn’t know how long to wait for a substitute Zakrevsky to come for him, or if one ever will.
As he sits and smokes by the elevator, he thinks of the courtship between him and his wife — both believe in Free Love but settle into an unsteady monogamy after their daughter Galya is born. Again, the thing that half-defeats his principles of freedom isn’t directly relevant, it’s only a competing need, not a disproof. It only makes a mess of something that has seemed clear to him.
Did he still believe in Free Love? Perhaps so; theoretically; for the young, the adventurous, the carefree. But when children came along, you could not have both parents pursuing their own pleasure — not without causing unconscionable damage. He had known couples who were so set on their own sexual freedom that their children had ended up in orphanages.
That cost was far too high. So there had to be some accommodation. This was what lie consisted of, once you got past the part where everything smelt of carnation oil. For instance, one partner might practice Free Love while the other looked after the children. More often it was the man who took such freedom; but in some cases it was the woman. That was how his own case might look to someone from a distance, not knowing all the details. Such a spectator would see Nina Vasilievna away a lot, for work or pleasure, or both at the same time. She was not fitted for domesticity, Nita, neither by temperament nor habit.
One person could truly believe in the rights of another person — in their right to Free Love. But yes, between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish. And so he had buried himself in his music, which took his entire attention and therefore consoled him. Though when he was present in his music he was inevitably absent from his children. And sometimes, it was true, he had had his own flirtations. More than flirtations. He had tried to do his best, which was all a man could do.
Eventually he gives up waiting to be killed in front of the elevator, and goes back to his ordinary life. The clarity of his fear diffuses through the book but he is never psychologically free. He never stops seeing the Power operating in his own life and the lives of others, even outside the Soviet Union when he travels to the U.S. and after Stalin’s death and he is coerced with awards rather than death threats. He is still, in some way, and always will be, in the stairwell waiting to be dragged off and shot in the back of his head.
Each morning, instead of prayer, he would recite to himself two poems by Evtushenko. One was “career” which described how lives are led beneath the shadow of Power:
In Galileo’s day, a fellow scientist
Was no more stupid than Galileo.
He was well aware that the Earth revolved,
But he also had a large family to feed.
None of Shostakovich’s goals or principles can stand uncorrupted — he’s not an exemplary husband or father even though he has sacrificed significantly for his family, and he is unsatisfied with his music and yet there is something in good music and in good love and even in Power that is clear and real despite it all. As the book spirals outward through Shostakovich’s life, his philosophical and artistic concerns are no longer simply about life and art in totalitarianism, but about life and art in the world. The great complexity of the book can sometimes feel like the mess of existence Shostakovich is continually experiencing, but the ending gives the book a startlingly crisp capstone, profound both in scope and in precision. Because it arises so organically from the rest of the book, I couldn’t give it away if I tried.
The art critic Walter Pater’s famous claim that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” has long resonated with me (who wouldn’t take being a rock star over being a fiction writer?). His words were on my mind as I put together this playlist for you. In writing each of the stories in Some Possible Solutions, I labored to make the words conjure a particular mood; a song can achieve mood with a single chord.
Because each story in Some Possible Solutions takes place in a different reality, from a faraway planet to a nursing home to a post-apocalyptic farmhouse, I wanted a wide variety of songs that could evoke a series of distinct worlds and keep pace with the leaps in time and space.
There are eighteen stories in the collection, featuring: (1) an ATM machine that dispenses death dates, (2) a life-sized male sex doll, (3) a town filled with identical new mothers, (4) a frozen dinner party, (5) a woolly mammoth, (6) alien hermaphrodites, (7) a city of skin-less people, (8) a tsunami at Coney Island, (9) a disappearing wife, (10) a throne room, (11) a leprechaun scaling a wall of ivy, (12) futuristic strippers, (13) children with gooey green blood, (14) a cathedral, (15) soccer-playing zombies, (16) vanishing bees, (17) the Laundromat of life, and (18) a magic pebble.
So: eighteen songs to fill the white spaces on the page.
Silence punctuated by the distant sound of the ice cream truck. Sublime devastating solitude of early motherhood. An exhausted witch mesmerizes herself into a trance. I slept as though dead. What is the difference between one mother and another? Dare we go outside? Danger! Danger!
[ed. note — Read “The Döppelgangers” on EL’s Recommended Reading, with an intro by Lauren Groff.]
4. Björk, “It’s Oh So Quiet,” a track for “The Messy Joy of the Final Throes of the Dinner Party”
Hush vs. explosion, loneliness vs. company, alienation vs. harmony, reservation vs. romp, glumness vs. glee.
5.The Mountain Goats, “Mole,” a track for “Life Care Center”
I came to see you up there in intensive care … And they said, “Lights out,” and it was lights out … Out in the desert we’ll have no worries, out in the desert just you and me.
6. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “The Origin of Love,” a track for “The Joined,”
The best (only?) song about the story of Zeus splitting the hermaphrodites. So we wrapped our arms around each other, trying to sew ourselves back together.
7. Purity Ring, “Fineshrine,” a track for “Flesh and Blood”
Sternum, ribs, blood, lungs, the rungs of me: a song for the woman who can see through your skin.
8. A Flying Dodo Society, “We Ate the Sun,” a track for “When the Tsunami Came”
How I hate the sun, roasting my roller coaster. It burns the birds … There’s an animal balloon for everyone. A Flying Dodo Society (may they become wildly famous) was playing on the boardwalk at Coney Island and then everything was dazzling. Ferocious love & indifference to anyone else & defiance of death … even if the Coney Island roller coaster just got dismantled by a tsunami wave and is heading straight toward you.
9. Pavement, “Gold Soundz,” a track for “Game”
My in-laws have a red Corolla from 1994, and Pavement’s Crooked Rain is one of the four or so CDs that lingers around the car season to season. If you could take only one album to a Corolla island … anyway, so drunk in the August sun, and you’re the kind of girl I like, because you’re empty, and I’m empty, and you can never quarantine the past — do you remember, in December?
10. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major Op. 35, First Movement, a track for “One of us will be happy; it’s just a matter of which one”
The tension between the transcendent, triumphant refrain & the almost cruel withholding of it = the back-and-forth dynamic of this marriage.
A song for drinking too many $3 gin & tonics in the afternoon in the backyard of your local bar (wall of ivy, wind, sun, etc.) with the person you’re trying to love.
12. Cat Power, “He War,” a track for “R”
The rage of losing your twin sister to a man with features as sharp as pencils.
13. Dan Friel, “Ghost Town (Pt. 1),” a track for “Children”
Music to accompany an alien insemination. When you turn out to be really glad that the aliens chose you.
14. Grimes, “Circumambient,” a track for “The Worst”
“Loud, confusing music … music designed to alter the electricity that dictates your desires.”
15. The Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1,” a track for “How I Began to Bleed Again After Six Alarming Months Without”
In this case, not pink robots but instead blue zombies, a wolf in a uniform, and a witch in a tracksuit.
16. Hadja Soumano, “N’teri Diaba,” a track for “The Beekeeper”
Music to accompany being quarantined with your (unrequited) love at the edge of a disintegrating civilization for a few perfect moments before the bees vanish.
17. The Clearwings, “Nothing to Say,” a track for “The Wedding Stairs”
(Courtesy my own brother’s alt-folk duo.) The end of the wedding, when the candles are blown out and the fluorescents come on. Now it is a part of you.
18.tUnE-yArDs, “Water Fountain,” a track for “Contamination Generation”
No water, no wood, just steel and a blood-soaked dollar. Only a five-year-old girl with glitter and glue is trying to do something about it.
About the Author
Helen Phillipsis the author of four books, including the recently released short story collection Some Possible Solutions, the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (a New York Times Notable Book of 2015 and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Award) and the collection And Yet They Were Happy (named a notable book by The Story Prize). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts.
“Pleasure” is noun, adjective and verb. It is provocative and sexy, dangerous and luxurious. But what is it? Everyone thinks of sex, and Molly Tanzer’s The Pleasure Merchant is full of it, but the realm of pleasure exceeds carnality or love. Maybe your pleasure is food, or inclusion in a certain social sect. Revenge. Reunion. Freedom. A pleasure merchant is simply one who procures the desired for a price. But more questions follow, for if this is a story about pleasure, it is as much about the lack of it. How long does pleasure last? Is pleasure happiness?
Tom Dawne is an apprentice wigmaker in mid-to-late eighteenth century London caught in a feud between two rich gentlemen. Accused of planting cards in one man’s wig, he is dragged by Bow Street Runners to the house of the other gentleman, where Tom is found innocent but dismissed from his position nonetheless. An orphan with incomplete training, he is despondent. The other gentleman, out of a sense of guilt, hires him immediately.
Quickly, Tom realizes the advantages of being in service in a great house versus working as an apprentice of the merchant class. Satiated with pastries, cream and meats and clothed in soft garments, his perceptions change along with his dreams. But the closer he gets to the family and learning the part his new master played in the deception that changed his life’s course, the more his own sense of entitlement grows.
Page by page, as Tom seeks sex, finery, respect and eventually revenge, it becomes apparent that he does not know how to acquire happiness. He is shallow, his desires and morality unwittingly base. He is the so-called common man: a plebeian slave to class, marginally educated yet ignorantly married to mainstream materialisms.
As a wigmaker’s apprentice, Tom fiddles with his master’s daughter, rationalizing their actions with future plans of marriage. As a servant, he is quick to find a maid to lift her skirts. As an imaginary gentleman, dressed up as a surrogate son to his master, he tarries further. Whatever woman present is only the object of his pleasure. Anytime a female expresses sexual need apart from his own lust, or, worse, complex thought, he is repulsed.
Enter Hallux Dryden, Tom’s employer’s cousin, a “nerve doctor” who practices hypnotism while preaching free will. His “science” is his obsession, a sinister undertone of the novel. While his “nightly duties” upon his wife are a joke below stairs, Dryden considers his work his pleasure, though he too derives little happiness from it. His liberalism is of the sort that everyone should be free to agree with his own opinion, as it is the most correct. He is a despot in the house, decrying finery as he dresses in silk, writing a manuscript no one may read, and admonishing his wife for any activity besides vacantly bolstering his ego.
When Tom stumbles upon Miss Tabula Rasa, the pleasure merchant’s apprentice, enlightenment floods the page and she steps onto the pedestal of protagonist. Because she is learning a career outside of social constructs, Tabula Rasa is able to break the rules, and despite the revolutionary times, there are many. Tom, seeing through the mirror of his own expectations, assumes “pleasure merchant’s apprentice” is synonymous to “prostitute,” compromised and without options. Smitten as much with Miss Rasa as the idea of “saving” her, he is blind to the unique liberties she enjoys. Her position is a favorable paradox in the Industrial Age — an orphan adopted into means, a woman and lover, financially independent and intellectually self-reliant. Tom’s efforts to protect her illuminate the contradictions of the era, and many of today. It is easy for Miss Rasa to take the lead, her ideologies are modern and her demeanor accepting. But as unknown ties to Dryden and the family of Tom’s employ collide with her comfortable present, Miss Rasa too must learn whether ignorance truly is bliss.
This noir recounting of a shop boy turned servant turned gentleman, more than one Pygmalion and several Galateas, is at once historical and crime fiction, a mystery with elements of horror and moments of romance, complete with scandals, villains, fringe science and social troglodytes. Masterfully employing every tense and seamlessly switching point of view from third omniscient to first, with a dash of second person for good measure, this is a playful story as well as a cautionary tale. It is a subtle portrait of human interaction, of the blurred lines that can separate, weave and even unravel fates.
While elegant, at times poetic, this is not a novel for those averse to adverbs or unable to stomach excessive ellipsis. It is a wet dream of well-used vocabulary with only a handful of departures from the parlance of the times. Decadent and smart, artistic without being pretentious, and completely captivating from start to finish, Tanzer’s The Pleasure Merchant is the very best sort of literature: a rare pleasure indeed.
Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s by Brad Gooch was released in paperback in spring 2016, and is nominated in the category of Gay Memoir/Biography in the Lambda Literary Awards, which will take place during LGBT Pride Month this June. Smash Cut tells the story of Gooch’s relationship with Howard Brookner, the film director who was best known for Burroughs: The Movie about William S. Burroughs and who died of AIDS in 1989. More than that, Smash Cut is a remembrance of a particular time and place — the seventies and eighties in New York City. Gooch recalls 1970s New York with all its grit and danger but also its unprecedented sexual freedom and flourishing arts scene. From there, he takes us to the 1980s, when a modern plague struck some of society’s most vulnerable members and met with official inaction.
Gooch is the author of eleven books, ranging from novels and poetry, to self-help and literary biography. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times best seller. A professor of English at William Paterson University, he earned his PhD at Columbia University. Gooch lives in New York City, and is currently at work on a biography of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi.
We met at his office in Chelsea, Manhattan, to talk about Smash Cut, Howard, seventies and eighties New York, and books and writing.
SW: What prompted you to write this book now? It’s obviously set in the seventies, and you’ve been living with these memories for a while, so I was wondering what compelled you to finally put them down.
BG: I think it was moving back to the Chelsea neighborhood, with my partner Paul, and actually not, when we got this apartment, really registering that across the street was the Chelsea Hotel where I lived with Howard for three years. And down the street was the London Terrace where he died, and up a couple blocks was this apartment I lived in during the eighties. Somehow, gradually, especially walking every morning to go to the gym and looking up at the Chelsea Hotel and seeing the windows of our first apartment there, it started triggering these memories.
SW: I’m wondering, on a practical level, how you write about a time that’s a couple decades in the past. I know I’m reluctant even to write about my childhood, because I find myself having to guess so many details and conversations and things that are just lost to me now. I’m wondering how you navigate that.
BG: There were a couple things. One is that, unlike childhood, I lived through it at an age when I was a writer and writing stories and sometimes writing journals and writing letters and things like that, so the camera in my head was already clicked on. The other is that it was this very vivid period. People were kind of aware of it as it was happening. People would talk about it at the time, how great, how much fun this is. There was a real sense that something was happening that was new and exciting. That helped. And then the other is the practicality of having some photographs, having Howard’s papers, having my papers, and even though I never really organized anything in the archival way, things did start popping up as I was writing. All that went together.
SW: I was very impressed that you held onto the piece of paper where he wrote his number.
BG: Amazing, right? And even that wasn’t, like, in a Howard Brookner file. We didn’t have cell phones and things. You would give people your number, and then you would have a folder with all these numbers in it — Jack and Fred, and eventually you’d have to clean it out, because there were so many and some people would stay and some people would go. And Howard — that sort of stayed. And it somehow made it to here.
SW: One of the audiences you mentioned having in mind was younger gay men, and I know a lot of gay men around my age, in their twenties and thirties, are very curious about the seventies as an era. What do you think the source of that curiosity is?
Everyone was making it up as they went along, and making up gay identity, which was pretty open, up for grabs.
BG: Part of it is that — well, I talked about it being a romantic time. And part of it was sexuality. There was no AIDS. We were coming out of a period of sexual liberation, not just for gay men, but for everyone, because of the pill. Sexuality for gay men at that point, it was open and liberating and it also was political, so it had some kind of meaning to it. All that was fun and exciting. It also made for a very democratic kind of experience. The social life of gay men, certainly at that time, cut across generations and cut across economic strata — for different reasons, partly because it was a small group, so you were excited to meet other gay people and you learned about gay history and who was really gay and what was going on, only by hearing about it from older guys who’d been around, since most of this wasn’t written down. Sexually, in these bars and clubs and things, it didn’t matter and you didn’t know what economic class someone was in or what their job was. There was this attraction that mixed everything up. Now we have these — I mean, I’m married, we have a baby, we have a whole different kind of life — some would call it heteronormative. There’s something interesting and challenging about a time when there were no rules, and there was a downside to that too, but there weren’t really labels and rules and things. Everyone was making it up as they went along, and making up gay identity, which was pretty open, up for grabs.
SW: The section of the book that’s set in the seventies reads to me, if not always like a happy time, as a vibrant, exciting time. I’m wondering how you felt, emotionally, revisiting it.
BG: It was great. That’s how I got seduced almost into writing the book. First of all, we were all young, I was young, but mainly there was a taste and a visual thing to that period that came back to me really strongly, this kind of amber light and inky shadows and smell of dog poo everywhere — there was just something very specific. Also, writing about Howard, being back in that relationship with him that had been tamped down in memory over the years, though never forgotten certainly. To have him alive again — I mean, that was great. That was my feeling, that it was fun.
SW: You also make a point — I think it’s one of the most memorable lines in the book — of saying you’re “not nostalgic, just shocked.” Yet there is a lot of nostalgia about the seventies in New York. What do you make of that? I think we’ve talked about where the nostalgia comes from, but do you think it’s misplaced at all?
BG: I actually don’t think it’s misplaced. As I was saying, there’s something accurate about it. The thing is, the nostalgia stops. I’ve noticed that: People, for obvious reasons, are not nostalgic about AIDS in that period and, for obvious reasons, don’t want to go there. But you can’t have one without the other. One reason that we’re so nostalgic about it [the 1970s] is that it got flattened into history by AIDS and that all those people are dead. It could be great and there’d be a different culture if Mapplethorpe and Haring were alive, but we wouldn’t have the same pang about it.
SW: You also make clear that New York was a much less safe place back then. There’s a particular scene that sticks in my mind, where a man flashes a knife at you as he leaves your apartment.
BG: I remember someone doing that earlier when I was in college, and then in the Chelsea Hotel. So, yeah, knives were normal. Bashing was normal enough, although I didn’t quite encounter that — but you know, the threat of it. Also, on West Street, there was a bar a block from Christopher, and there was this phase, it was like a fad, where people would go by and shoot in the window, so there’d be bullet holes in the window. You’d be hanging out at this bar but being aware that you were sort of off to the side.
SW: I thought the section set in the eighties was very emotionally intense — in a good way. It was very well written. But really intense. I had to set it aside sometimes, because there was quite a bit of death, among other things. I remember a section of the book where you talk about anger and how you were just crackling with anger at some points. How hard was it to go back, emotionally, to that time?
BG: Very difficult. I got so seduced by writing about the seventies, writing about it in all its great colorful detail, that when I turned to the second half of the book all of a sudden I realized that I’d written myself into a corner, which I had to write also and then in detail, and graphically about the AIDS period. I didn’t particularly want to do that, but also discovered for better or worse that I had all those memories in this vault, intact, of St. Vincent’s Hospital and things, and I could really vividly see it all. It was really surprising to me. So, I did it. It was interesting to go through because it wasn’t all grim, in the sense it was the same people. You had a remarkable generation of these guys. They were funny. And still young, so there was a kind of weird erotic charge even to these AIDS wards. Also, they turned out to be, as a group, remarkably strong and noble facing death. I mean, everyone was so young —
SW: He was only thirty-four, right?
BG: Yeah.
SW: Which is incredible.
BG: Right. I never thought of myself as being someone who could even go to the hospital like that every night. I’d never had any experience like that. My parents were alive, everyone was alive. To see a whole generation and city face that was startling and a little, for all of us, what I think World War I [was like] when all those poets and Oxford types went off to fight and suddenly everyone was dying and you’re in this shocking situation.
SW: It seems to me that, when people talk about the eighties today, there are kind of two different versions of it. There are a lot of people who admire Ronald Reagan: For them, that decade has a golden glow to it. And then there’s everyone who remembers AIDS. What do you make of that very strange disjunction that exists with how we remember the eighties?
BG: It was an incredibly polarized time — definitely in terms of gay and straight and all that stuff. Also economic class. People were infatuated with the Reagans and money and power. There were all these black cars out and limousines and these restaurants — all that stuff. At the same time, there were more homeless people, and then you had people dying of AIDS. All this also you could see on the streets. You could see what was going on. You’d see sick people on the streets, who you’d known. It was split that way.
SW: Are you still in touch with Howard’s family?
BG: Yeah. Aaron, Howard’s nephew, made this documentary, Uncle Howard, that was at Sundance, so I’m definitely in touch with him. I’m in touch with his [Howard’s] mother. So, I am in touch.
SW: When you’re writing about real people and real events, and some of those people are still alive, you must feel some obligation to protect the rights and the privacy of those people. I’m wondering how you navigated that issue, of respecting the rights of the people involved, especially those who are still alive.
BG: Not many people are alive. It’s an unusual experience that way. You’re writing about people who would be alive but they’re not alive, so there weren’t that many actually. But yeah, I do think you need to be aware of people’s feelings. There’s a way of writing that unfortunately I have which is like putting on blinkers or something, and then I just don’t think about any of it and maybe I should. I guess I have the morality of a four-year-old when I write.
SW: Do you ever wonder how Howard would have reacted to the book? Did you think about it as you were writing, whether he would like it?
There was a way I felt: that I was carrying out this kind of obligation, almost, and that it would keep him alive.
BG: Yeah, always. After it was published, Sarah Lindemann, who’d been at high school with Howard at Exeter and then worked on some of his films, wrote me an e-mail that said, “You and I both know that Howard expected you to do this,” and that’s true. There was a sense of — I don’t know how else to say it, but he was a pretty aware creator and I was a writer. There was a way I felt: that I was carrying out this kind of obligation, almost, and that it would keep him alive.
SW: I think the book is actually a wonderful memorial to Howard. I’m guessing to some extent it’s revived interest in him. Would you say that some of that’s taking place?
BG: Yeah. Simultaneously and serendipitously, Aaron got the Burroughs movie back into Criterion print, so that documentary that Howard made is out and about. And then the Uncle Howard and then my thing. I think when I was writing the book I was really in my blinkered state, and it was really for me, and I didn’t show it to my agent or my publisher, and I didn’t really know if anyone would want to publish this book anyway. When it did then get published, I got e-mails from these guys saying, “I was afraid these memories were going to be lost.”
SW: You said you wrote the book in its entirety before showing it to anyone else, is that right?
BG: Yeah.
SW: So you didn’t do it on proposal — in other words, get a contract and write?
BG: No, it was like [playing] hookie or something, because I was working on this biography [about Rumi] that has taken eight years — it was in the middle of that that I did it, and I did it at night. It was like relaxation from working on the biography and all the research involved. It was a form of fun to be able to write without having to check every fact.
SW: You anticipated publishing it, though?
But I also wondered, Does anyone really want to read about gay guys dying of AIDS in the eighties? I did have that question.
BG: It was in my mind as a possibility, because how could it not be? But I also wondered, Does anyone really want to read about gay guys dying of AIDS in the eighties? I did have that question. It was also pretty personal. So I guess I tricked myself into not thinking too much about it [publication]. Also, the minute you get money for a book for which you’ve written a proposal, it’s kind of like you’ve committed yourself to a certain style, or to a publisher then saying, Well, maybe take the AIDS out? I just wanted to do it without compromising.
SW: What was it like going between a biography of Rumi and Smash Cut? Obviously very different projects.
BG: That’s why it worked for me to write them together, because they were so different. One’s completely personal, and the other is constructing a life from the thirteenth century.
SW: You’ve done other memoirs and other biographies. Do you prefer one or feel more comfortable with one or the other?
I have genre ADD.
BG: Not really. I have genre ADD. I’ve written different kinds of things. I sort of like that. I feel much more comfortable, I discovered immediately, doing interviews and going on tour talking about this memoir. It was easier, because there’s a way, when you’re talking about responsibility to the subject with Howard, there is responsibility to Flannery O’Connor or Rumi. It takes a while to frame them, to figure out how to talk about them. Whereas if you’re writing memoir, it’s really just like having a conversation about your life. There’s a casual authority that comes with writing about your life that you have to work for in biography.
SW: What are you reading now?
BG: I am reading many things, but I just finished reading, rereading, The Picture of Dorian Gray. I read it when I was like fifteen, and what I didn’t realize then and I do now is it’s like Stephen King. I hadn’t realized how gruesome it was, scary it was — all that kind of stuff, which is almost over the top and at the same time compelling intellectually. Then I’m reading — I have this big love of Knausgaard, which is corny but I have it. My boyfriend/partner/husband, Paul, is always complaining that I read too fast. He doesn’t believe I’m really reading. I’m now on the fifth volume of Knausgaard — suddenly it’s taking me ten minutes to get through two pages. The whole point is reading every word, and Knausgaard has a kind of detail fetish that I share.
SW: I know you’re very much in the thick of writing the Rumi biography: Have you thought at all about your next project?
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing cocaine.
Cocaine is an illegal drug made from chocolate plants, although it doesn’t taste like chocolate, I’m guessing. To be honest, I’ve never tried cocaine so I don’t know what it tastes or feels like. All I know is people who try it really seem to like it, so it must be pretty good.
Despite how good people say it is, not many people seem interested to try cocaine. I filled a Ziplock bag with flour, wrote “free cocaine” on it, and then placed it on a bench at the mall while I watched from inside Sketchers.
You’d be surprised how many people did not want cocaine. In fact, not only did no one seem to want it, people seemed repelled by it! One man pulled his daughter away from it after she managed to open up the bag and get “cocaine” everywhere. At least now he knows his daughter has a propensity for drug abuse. In that way, I did some good.
I had to use flour in my experiment because cocaine is surprisingly hard to find. I couldn’t find any for sale online, and when I stopped by the marijuana dispensary to ask if they had any, they told me to get out. My doctor said she couldn’t prescribe any for me but when she said it she winked, which I interpreted to mean I should meet her in the parking lot after work. I was very wrong about that wink and now I need to find a new doctor for reasons I won’t go into.
When I drove around town, pulling over and asking people for cocaine, they would just run away. One person called the cops on me. It turns out it’s illegal to ask people for cocaine even if you only want it for review purposes.
A woman at the truck stop offered to trade me kisses for cocaine but it was unclear who was to provide which, so I optimistically gave her a kiss on the cheek, closed my eyes, and put out my hands. When I opened my eyes she was running away with my cell phone. She left a sugar packet in my hands.
I followed her, hoping she might lead me to cocaine. She ended up leading me to a Cracker Barrel where she put on a uniform and started her shift. There was no cocaine anywhere in sight. I let her keep my phone because the battery had died and I had lost my charger.
BEST FEATURE: Cocaine can be used to make crack. WORST FEATURE: There must be cocaine all around me but it’s impossible to find.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Garfield.
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