Computers aren’t just writing novels and entering them into literary contests. Now they’re putting on their editorial hats and are choosing them for publication too. Inkitt, a “data-driven” electronic publishing platform, announced in a press release last week that it will partner with science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books to “release the first novel selected by an algorithm for publishing.” The chosen novel, Bright Star by Erin Swan, is due to come out in summer 2017.
Inkitt, which was founded in Berlin last year, frames itself as an interactive publisher that promotes “fair publishing and objectivity” by emphasizing everyday readers over literary gatekeepers like agents and editors. Echoing the lament of many writers who submit beloved manuscripts to publishers, only to be rejected months later with a curt form letter, Inkitt asks, “Who are we or any editor in the world to judge whether your book is worth publishing?” Instead, they say, let’s have an algorithm decide.
Virtually all writers can share their work on Inkitt. After writers post, Inkitt tracks reader traffic and attention using “artificially intelligent algorithms” and selects the most popular, engaging works for publication. According to the press release, the company “works with leading publishers to get its top-read books to print” and also selects some novels to publish and promote in-house as eBooks.
Since the half-a-million readers who read work on Inkitt can also give writers suggestions for improvement, the publishing platform gives both readers and writers a space to share their voices. While Inkitt says that it seeks to create “an environment of support and positivity,” something seems nightmarish about an entire online community of readers critiquing my work instantaneously.
Based on its analysis of reading patterns, Inkitt’s algorithm deemed Bright Star — the second installment in Swan’s YA fantasy series, Sky Riders — “highly-addictive.” Judging from the novel’s prologue, it seems to have all the ingredients of a YA powerhouse: dragons, romance, emperors, elves, servants, and a war-torn fantasy land.
Ali Albazaz, CEO and founder of Inkitt, views the Tor deal as “a clear signal to the publishing industry that predictive data analysis is the way of the future.” “We are so excited to be able to help Erin kick off her career as a novelist,” he says, “– and we already can’t wait to get our hands on the next book in the Sky Rider series.”
[Note: names have been changed to protect privacy.]
Esperanza stood proudly beside her vision board, which was collaged with images of sleek professional women wearing starched shirts, pencil skirts, and heels, touting leather briefcases, hailing taxis, and making deals over brunch, their diamond studs glistening. She began to recite her poem:
Imma be like those white women
In their sunny offices
With secretaries
Air conditioners
And water coolers
Sending emails
Eating sushi
And doing very important things!
“Preach!” “Woo-hoo!” “Go get it!” Esperanza’s classmates shouted. In response, Esperanza yelled, “Oh yeah!” and threw her hands in the air, pumping them to the ceiling and shaking her behind in a “raise the roof” dance.
In a class of blowouts, manicures, and tight jeans, fourteen-year-old Esperanza wore baggy clothes and glasses. Her hair framed her face in a shock of frizz. She spoke as if she were addressing the crowd at Yankee Stadium, rather than giving a ninth grade English presentation in an 800-square-foot classroom. Although the boys didn’t fawn over her, they listened intently when she spoke, because she possessed perhaps the rarest trait in a teenage girl: a lack of self-consciousness. For that, she was rewarded with respect.
On the first day of class, when I’d asked my students to introduce themselves in a pithy sentence, Esperanza announced, “I am who I am, and that gives me swag!”
Esperanza declared herself a feminist when she discovered Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in our classroom library. More accurately, it was Armando who discovered the play and howled, “Yeeooow! This book got vaginas in it!” The boys sprung out of their seats and surrounded Armando, pawing the objet d’art and insisting this was one book they’d be happy to read in its entirety. When they realized it lacked actual photos of vaginas their interest waned, and Esperanza staked claim to the book, reading it that night.
Esperanza declared herself a feminist when she discovered Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in our classroom library.
As a second-year teacher, I lived for these moments of enthusiasm; having endured a shaky start the year before, I was finally getting my students excited by literature’s power to define who they are and affect who they’re going to be. Rushing into class the next morning, Esperanza reveled in the play’s multicultural narratives of sex, rape, and childbirth, and its themes of injustice. She felt inspired to become a strong independent woman. It sharply conflicted with what was expected of her in her traditional community, where women were raised to be quiet and let men speak first.
In the Dominican Republic, where Esperanza was born, daily life is a battle between Machismo and Marianismo — cocky men reigning over submissive women, who are expected to endure abuse as part of their culture. Women’s subordinate status is reinforced by their lower economic standing; according to a 2013 World Bank study, the female-to-male workforce participation rate is sixty-five percent, making it difficult for women to escape abusive situations.
One day after class, while helping me wash the blackboard, Esperanza told me that when she was in kindergarten in the Dominican Republic, her mother, Sunilda, had been brutally beaten by a boyfriend after she confronted him about his rampant cheating. The attack paralyzed Sunilda for a year and left her permanently blind in one eye. The alleged perpetrator fled to another city, and Esperanza’s uncle tried but failed to get him imprisoned; while domestic-battery laws exist in the Dominican Republic, they are rarely enforced, which has resulted in what’s been described as an “epidemic” of domestic violence in the country.
The attack paralyzed Sunilda for a year and left her permanently blind in one eye.
Following the attack, Sunilda, a Catholic, became even more religious, convinced that her recovery was nothing short of a miracle. When she and Esperanza, who was ten years old at the time, settled in northern Manhattan’s Washington Heights, Sunilda joined similarly pious women in daily church attendance and in the practice of Santería, opening a tiny shop, or a botanica, where she sold herbal remedies and religious icons, counseled customers on love, and brewed potions and teas.
At my many parent-teacher meetings with Sunilda, who was very involved in Esperanza’s education, she told me that her biggest dream was to throw her only child a quinceañera, the celebration considered a rite of passage for fifteen-year-old girls in Latin American countries. Sunilda never got to have one herself because her family didn’t have enough money.
What differentiates quinceañeras from sweet sixteens, besides the age at which they’re celebrated, is the former’s deeply religious and patriarchal slant. The quinceañera typically begins in a church, with the teenager taking a vow of chastity as she lays flowers at the Virgin’s feet. She changes into a bridal-esque dress at the party, where her father often helps her change from flats into heels and dances the first waltz of the night with her, then passes her to another male relative, until she finally spins into the arms of her date. The message is that the teenager has matured from girl to woman, and that she will go on to get married, have children, and live happily ever after. Traditionally, the quinceañera also denotes the end of a girl’s education, though that has changed in modern times.
After spending an entire Saturday at the public library devouring Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Esperanza informed her mother that there was no way she would have a quinceañera when it was time to have one. She was turned off by its fairytale implications.
Esperanza further defied tradition when she took a pro-choice stance on abortion in a class debate. Unlike kids in progressive high schools like the one I had attended, my students were very socially conservative. Most were staunchly opposed to the termination of pregnancy, and when we debated the issue, Esperanza was the sole supporter of a woman’s right to choose.
She focused her argument on challenging a culture in which women turn to dangerous over-the-counter remedies to end pregnancy. Although safe and free abortions are available in Washington Heights, many women use the drug Misoprostol, which is meant for the treatment of gastric ulcers, or a pungent herbal tea called hierba de ruda, which can be purchased for $3 in botanicas, such as Sunilda’s, to cause a miscarriage. Steeped in guilt, women who seek these remedies often convince themselves that the self-abortion was “God’s work,” according to Carmen, a teacher’s aide at our school. Although Sunilda refused to sell pills or tea to women for the purpose of “bringing down their periods,” other santeras — priestesses of Santería — had no such qualms. When these methods work, potential side effects are life-threatening hemorrhages. When they don’t, they can cause birth defects.
During the class debate, Esperanza called for changing the perception of abortion as taboo and ended her presentation exclaiming, “Don’t be all up in our vaginas!” throwing her hands to the ceiling, ready for her “raise the roof” dance. But, for the first time, her words didn’t result in the expected cheers and accolades. Her classmates, girls and boys alike, stared at her with somber expressions, seemingly convinced that abortion was murder. There Esperanza stood, alone, nary a supporter in sight, enduring a major blow to her confidence.
As a feminist, she was firmly opposed to the celebration, but as a teenager, she desperately wanted to be included.
Although Esperanza’s classmates’ disagreement was ideological, their subsequent treatment of her was personal. A few girls told her she laughed “like a hyena,” and mimicked her raucous howl. One of them revealed to Armando that Esperanza had a crush on him, to which he responded, “I only kick it with hotties.” Finally, a close friend excluded Esperanza from her quinceañera. After all the invitations had been handed out and Esperanza realized she was the only person not to receive one, she buried her face in her notebook to hide her tears. As a feminist, she was firmly opposed to the celebration, but as a teenager, she desperately wanted to be included.
On the last day of the year, as I was putting my belongings away for the summer, Esperanza stood in the doorway of our classroom and spoke to me in spontaneous poetry:
Miss Rodov
I know what Imma be
Imma be a lawyer
A prosecutor
Because life ain’t fair
And someone’s gotta fix it
Let it be me!
Then off she went to spend a summer with cousins in the Dominican Republic.
That fall in my sophomore class, when we were reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, I asked students to ponder the meaning of the memoir’s title. As I walked around class gauging their progress in their writing, I noticed that Esperanza, who was in my class again, was filling in every space of her notebook with the lines: When things were very bad / His soul just crawled behind his heart / And curled up, and went to sleep. Some words were written in giant block letters and others were in characters so small that I could barely see them. They had nothing to do with my instructions.
I noticed that Esperanza had returned from vacation a completely different student.
I noticed that Esperanza had returned from vacation a completely different student. Her spirit was diminished, her grades were slipping, and she rarely spoke up. When I gave her an application for a competitive academic summer program at Dartmouth, she ignored it, which was out of character for someone who had previously seized every opportunity. I didn’t know if her behavior was cause for alarm or par for the course, what Mary Pipher described in her book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls as happening to outspoken girls often in adolescence — they lose their confidence, doubt their abilities, and become depressed.
After class I gave her a pep talk about how kids who are popular in high school aren’t later in life and vice versa. I concluded my speech with an earnest attempt at urban slang: “Where your swag be at?” I asked. She shook her head at my pathetic effort and walked away.
Another day, I found Esperanza draped over the toilet in the bathroom, throwing up uncontrollably. She stopped me from running to the nurse by fervently recounting how her mother had told her to chuck the spoiled milk, which she drank instead, and was now suffering the consequences. If the school nurse — herself a mother and close friend of Esperanza’s family — got involved, the ensuing lecture would cause Esperanza to miss her history quiz, the teen explained. She gave me a hug and hightailed it to her history class.
In my English class later that day, when I asked students to share the passage in Maya Angelou’s memoir that most resonated with them, Esperanza read the following aloud:
Then there was the pain
A breaking and entering
When even the senses are torn
…The child gives
Because the body can
And the mind of the violator cannot
Immediately upon finishing, she slammed her book down and ran out. I followed her into the stairwell, where she explained why she was so upset — why I had found her vomiting earlier that day. Over the summer, when she was staying with cousins in Constanza, a town in the Dominican Republic’s La Vega province, she went to a party where she caught the eye of a handsome twenty-two-year-old named Miguel. Flattered by the attention, she snuck out with him. They drove through the countryside and talked for hours over a blended milk and orange juice drink, morir soñando, which means “to die dreaming.” Then, he raped her.
“I’m two months pregnant,” Esperanza whispered.
When I entered her botanica, Sunilda noticed my slight cold and brewed me some zesty ginger tea. Wrapping my hands around the warm mug, I joined her in the cramped back room. Her unsteady gait served as a souvenir from her boyfriend’s beating ten years ago. I asked Sunilda if she knew what had happened to Esperanza. She nodded, her blind eye wandering. But when I voiced my concern that Esperanza hadn’t yet seen a doctor, Sunilda responded by reaching for a catalogue of quinceañera dresses and asking me which one was my favorite.
Sunilda was hoping that the quinceañera, with its Virgin Mary and taffeta and waltzes, would cleanse Esperanza of the unspeakable ugliness to which she’d been subjected over the summer.
Sunilda was devoted to Esperanza. She would often say, “No soy nadie,” which means, “I’m nobody,” but insisted on her Esperancita becoming somebody. However, she refused to discuss the rape or pregnancy, though I imagined she was distraught about it. She told me she’d often said that in order to achieve the American Dream, Esperanza would have to avoid becoming a statistic: Latinas have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the United States. Now, however, it felt like Sunilda was hoping that the quinceañera, with its Virgin Mary and taffeta and waltzes, would cleanse Esperanza of the unspeakable ugliness to which she’d been subjected over the summer.
The next morning I met Esperanza at Dunkin’ Donuts. We huddled together, sharing a blueberry muffin and trying to figure out where she would seek medical care. Although she was hesitant about going to the school’s health center because the nurse knew too many of the same people as her mother, I insisted that she go. I hoped that the nurse would convince Sunilda to take Esperanza to a psychologist to deal with the emotional impact of the rape and, of course, to a gynecologist. The end of her first trimester was quickly approaching, and an abortion — if she chose to have one — would be riskier later on. Esperanza looked me in the eye and spoke firmly, “Miss Rodov, Imma see the nurse. But I ain’t doing the thing. Imma keep my baby.”
It was naïve of me to believe that the ideology Esperanza expressed in class during our debates would carry over into real life. That I would even think to intervene in a family, especially between a mother and daughter, and about a topic as sensitive as abortion, was presumptuous — maybe even unethical. In the Dominican culture, like in many other Latin cultures, family is everything. And in Marianismo, mothers — devoted, self-sacrificing, and saintly — are worshipped. In her book, Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA, Julia Alvarez writes that even the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who tortured enemies by killing their sons and raping their daughters and wives, never abused anybody’s mother. Turns out El Jefe was a mama’s boy who visited his mom every afternoon, and this predictability ultimately set him up to be ambushed by rebels.
That I would even think to intervene in a family, especially between a mother and daughter, and about a topic as sensitive as abortion, was presumptuous — maybe even unethical.
Sitting across from Esperanza, I marveled at a culture where rights and wrongs were absolute; it was a sharp contrast to my own, which was much more ambiguous. My parents, having grown up under anti-Semitism’s oppression in the Soviet Union, were secular Jews. Many of our people, upon immigrating to the United States, embraced the country’s freedoms by becoming very religious, but others continued being as non-religious as they were back home. My family was firmly in the latter camp. I hadn’t even read Night by Elie Wiesel until I had to teach it in my English class. When I mentioned this to colleagues at a faculty meeting, one teacher spit out his coffee in shock.
Some believe that Russians’ disconnect from faith is one of the factors that caused the wide acceptance in the Soviet Union of abortions, which were, according to my friends and family, performed in “conveyer-belt fashion.” Many Russian women have had multiple abortions — some in the double-digits — and though abortion rates have declined in recent years, they are still relatively high over there.
Over plates of borscht and pierogies at our dining table in Forest Hills, Queens, my mom’s friends chatted about their abortions with the same casualness given their manicures, while my best friend Yulia and I, teenagers at the time, sat nearby doing our homework. It didn’t really bother me and it seemed not to irk Yulia, either. But in our twenties, when Yulia became a stand-up comedian, she joked about having been an “almost abortion” and thanked her parents for changing their minds at the last minute. Yulia became a staunch pro-life conservative.
Over plates of borscht and pierogies at our dining table in Forest Hills, Queens, my mom’s friends chatted about their abortions with the same casualness given their manicures.
In recalling her epiphany and in thinking about the sacredness with which Esperanza and Sunilda regarded pregnancy, I began to question my mom’s friends’ callousness towards life, as well as my own. Was I heartless in thinking Esperanza should terminate her pregnancy? Was there something missing in my own moral fiber that I could so easily advocate for ending a life? Was I a bad teacher and an even worse human being? In our classroom library, I reached for Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. In pouring over its words, I realized that entertaining doubt wasn’t weak; it was courageous — perhaps it was even an act of rebellion.
A few weeks after Esperanza decided to keep her baby, she asked me to be one of her madrinas de quinceañera — godmothers. I agreed. A quinceañera is an elaborate affair, “a wedding without the groom” as many call it, and Esperanza and Sunilda were barely getting by. Like most of my students, Esperanza received free lunch. Those who live in poverty often assuage the financial worries of an expensive celebration by assigning godmothers to handle the various elements — the dress, the limo, the flowers.
Because I had friends in fashion who were happy to create magic for Esperanza, I was tasked with the dress. A designer lent us her showroom, and Esperanza picked the pinkest, puffiest, laciest dress for herself, and chose similar concoctions for her cousins and friends, who would be princesses in her court. Assistants added tiaras to the pirate’s booty, and Esperanza thanked them with effusive hugs.
It was the beginning of Esperanza’s second trimester. She was seeing a doctor; the baby was healthy. And her grades were up. I couldn’t help wondering if feminism was inherent in all choice — not just in the choice to have an abortion, but also in the choice not to. Nevertheless, I again felt a twinge of sadness when I heard her friends planning to attend a poetry slam out of town in the spring. Esperanza exclaimed, “Yo, I can’t wait!” before remembering that she’d be a new mother by then and would not be able to go.
I couldn’t help wondering if feminism was inherent in all choice — not just in the choice to have an abortion, but also in the choice not to.
The night before Esperanza’s quinceañera, her godmothers, friends, and relatives — including her uncle, who would be changing her flats into heels at the ceremony — gathered at her apartment for dinner. As we ate chicken with rice and beans, the faces of Mary and Jesus gazing upon us from icons on the wall, I was reminded of the moment in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings when the motley crew of homeless kids accepts Maya unconditionally, causing her to finally find enduring strength. The caged bird sings because, despite adversity, godmothers and godfathers are all around helping us get by.
Following tea and dessert, Sunilda asked me to join her in the kitchen to wash dishes. When I entered, she locked the door and spoke frantically, apparently wracked with guilt. She had sent her Esperancita to the Dominican Republic to enjoy a carefree summer and wasn’t there to protect her. She should never have let her go. Their lives would never be the same.
“Quiero que mi hija sea una persona importante!” Sunilda exclaimed. “I want my daughter to be an important person!” She held my hand and asked me if I understood. Then she collapsed to the floor and begged God for forgiveness.
“Dios mio!” she wailed.
Later, when we were watching TV, Esperanza suddenly doubled over in pain, clutching her stomach. When she rose from the couch, her jeans were drenched in blood.
If the work of writers is to make the familiar unfamiliar, Ruth Ozeki’s newest essay is an exercise in the defamiliarization of our most known and intimate parts — the human face. As one of three writers in a new trilogy released by Restless Books centering on the face, Ozeki takes her examination into the realm of meditation, musing on subjects as varied as cosmetic surgery, Japanese mask carving, Japanese-American identity, Zen Buddhist practice, and head shaving. Throughout Ozeki’s essay her refreshing and cultivated wisdom leads us through the mind of a compassionate, grounded human and a writer of real integrity.
Melody Nixon: Your essay, “The Face: A time code” was published last month. In it, you gaze at your own face for three hours and document your thoughts. The immediate response that comes to my mind is this: in the age of the selfie, will this act be seen as first and foremost narcissistic?
Ruth Ozeki: This concern didn’t come up for me at all when I was conceiving of the experiment.
I think I saw it as an exercise in stoicism, rather than narcissism. Narcissism is primarily about self-love, about deriving pleasure or gratification from self-admiration, and I did not expect to derive pleasure or gratification from the observation. Quite the opposite. I expected it would be a somewhat arduous practice of facing my fears, and while I thought it might yield interesting results, I fully expected it to be difficult and somewhat painful, which it was. Indeed, the most pleasurable moment was when it was over!
MN: You do wonder in the essay: “Is this narcissistic?” So I think you do ask the question, and address it subsequently. Ultimately the essay’s exploration is so broad, encompassing themes of aging, feminism, the mistaking of the external self for the person within, temporality, identity-formation, spirituality, and existence, all going well beyond the bounds of self-obsession. Did the exploration of this territory feel like an extension of your familiar self, or did the essay take a direction, in writing, that you didn’t anticipate?
RO: It felt like a natural outgrowth of things that I have written about in the past, that I’ve thought about. It felt like a very natural expression of the interests I’ve returned to over and over in my writing. You can certainly see them in my novels and my film work. It felt like a natural emerging of themes that I’ve toyed with and worried in the past. This was another way to get at and explore it.
MN: Your past writing is predominantly fiction — included in your works is the incredible novel, A Tale for the Time Being. The term “memoir” feels overused to me, and not quite accurate for your style of writing in “The Face: a time code.” But do you view this essay as memoir? And how did you make the choice to switch to nonfiction?
RO: Like you, I’m a little uncomfortable with the idea of memoir. And yet the premise of the essay series, The Face, was intriguing to me — especially when Restless Books threw out a Borges quote: that was bait I couldn’t resist. The idea of a face being a map of a territory of a life really intrigued me. At that point I had just finished reading Jennifer L. Roberts’ article “The Power of Patience” in Harvard Magazine, and the idea of studying the face converged with my idea of doing this essay as a formal thought experiment. I had just been teaching a series of classes in Buddhism about Dōgen and Dōgen’s view of the self. In Zen there are many kōans about the face. The idea of the “original face” is something that’s very much embedded in the language and philosophy. So these three elements came together quite naturally in my mind.
It was interesting though because during the course of the experiment itself — when I sat down in front of the mirror for three hours — I didn’t know where my mind would go. And I found myself remembering things that I’ve never really remembered before. When I conceived of the essay I knew that probably I would write about Dōgen, and probably I would write about Zen, but I’d completely forgotten about the experiences I’d had doing Noh mask carving. That was not part of my original intention. And suddenly that whole thing came back.
MN: Given this experience, do you think writing can allow us to access the unconscious through memories stored in the body?
…the key to any kind of literary writing is being able to tap the body’s memory…
RO: I find that whether I’m writing fiction or memoirish essay, whatever you want to call it, the key to any kind of literary writing is being able to tap the body’s memory: to enter the writing through the senses, and through the body. If we’re able to do that then the writing itself becomes embodied. We are all human bodies; for the writer to be able to enter a scene or a piece of prose that way I think necessarily invokes a similar response in the reader. I’ve always written with the idea that writing is not just something one does with the mind, that you have to write embodied prose in order to elicit the same kinds of strong, physical, emotional responses, from the reader.
MN: How do other senses come in to play in “embodied” writing?
RO: In Buddhism we talk about the sense organs as being “gates.” There’s the sense gate of the ear, nose, mouth, skin, and eye. All of those sense gates allow sensory input to come in. But there’s a sixth sense in Buddhism, which is the mind. And so the mind is also an organ for sensory experience; the kind of sensory experiences that come in through the mind are thoughts. We spend most of our time as writers operating the sense gates of the mind. There’s something about the way Buddhism flattens the distinction between the mind and, say, the nose, that I find very evocative and appealing. The mind is just another sense gate, and they’re all equally important. They all function interdependently.
MN: The Zen practice of not dwelling on one’s thoughts — of letting them pass, not giving them too much importance — seems like it would have a complex interaction with writing, since writing is a practice of indulging one’s thoughts, of spending excessive time with them. How do Zen and writing interact for you?
RO: It’s actually not a contradiction. We’re so used to thinking about our thoughts about ourselves, our own experience, as being something more than other stories we tell. What we experience and the stories that we tell about our traumas and our tragedies and our struggle — the constant narration that’s going on in our minds all the time — we’re creating narratives about ourselves. That’s how we define our sense of self in the world. And somehow we latch onto that and think, “that’s real.” Whereas, “the stuff I’m putting in novels is not real, it’s fictional.” In a way it’s an elevation of the stories of the self, and a distancing from the stories we “just” write about in stories and books. I would say it’s the other way around. Treating all of them as just exactly what they are; stories. Whether we’re telling them to ourselves about ourselves, or whether we’re telling them on the page to share with others; there’s not that much difference.
Which, to go back to Dōgen: any kind of writing or any kind of expression is just a way of this particular arrangement of molecules that I call myself expressing itself in the world. It’s not Me. This ever-changing entity that I call myself and that I experience as myself is just a conduit or a vector for the writing that I put out in the world.
In other words, we privilege our own self-narratives. We think of them as more real. But I would argue that they’re just more narratives.
MN: You’re very clear and honest in expressing your fears and insecurities in “The Face: a time code.” Could you talk about your experience of vulnerability during the process of writing the essay? How does this relate to a Zen framework?
RO: I find Zen practice to be entirely about facing your insecurities. Every moment on the cushion is an intimate encounter with one’s own insecurities. Zen is also filled with performance. There are ritual and formal elements that are designed to trip you up, to make you screw up. The precision with which everything is done in Zen — it’s a diabolical plot to make anyone who tries it, fail. Then you go back to your cushion, after you’ve made a mess of yourself, in some arcane piece of ritualistic blunder; you go back to your cushion and sit there for another five hours and dwell on it. The whole experience is designed to force you to confront your insecurities, and let them go. You feel a wave of shame and insecurity, and then you let it go. You do this over and over and over again, and eventually, 10, 20, 30 years down the line, your relationship with your own insecurities becomes a little bit less firm. And I think the same thing is true with writing.
As an artist you’re pulling things out of the air. You’re pulling things out of your own body, your own experience, out of the air around you, and you’re giving them to the world. And it’s an incredibly vulnerable-making exercise. There’s nothing more vulnerable making than that; except maybe taking off your clothes in Times Square.
MN: How has your relationship with your insecurities changed as you get older?
RO: I’m almost 60 now, and I’ve been doing this for a really long time, so I think my relationship with my own insecurities has gotten a little bit lighter. I’m not quite as bound by them as I used to be. That attitude itself is something I can share, and something I can experiment with on the page.
MN: You can experiment with your vulnerability?
RO: With the idea of trying to hold myself a standard — of honesty, of truth telling — that feels just a little bit uncomfortable at times. In the same way that staring at your face for three hours in the mirror is uncomfortable. It’s not a pleasant experience at all. So I think I was replicating that on the page in “The Face.” Holding myself to a standard of discomfort and seeing what I could make out of it.
Where that becomes problematic is when there are other people involved in your narrative. Then you have to marshal another set of standards to bring to bear on that particular type of exercise or writing. When I’m writing about my parents, or other people, they’re not there so I can’t ask them to be complicit. It requires a different set of standards.
MN: How much do thoughts of your parents influence your work?
RO: I was just thinking about my mother, and was thinking about how, when I was a little girl, she was never concerned about closing the blinds when she changed her clothes. Not that there was anyone outside who could see. Still, I remember the blinds would be open and I would feel a bit concerned about that — anybody could look in! — and she would always just laugh at me and say, “who would be interested?” She was never concerned or shy about [the body]. That stayed with me; that it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. You could keep your blinds open, and no harm would come to you. I’ve always felt that.
MN: In the essay you explore the social and personal implications for women of the ideal of youth as beauty. You write about women trying to live up to impossible ideals, primarily through cosmetic facial surgery. I found your own reason for not wanting surgery — that you sincerely felt it would make you unhappy — refreshing to hear. Can you speak about that feeling? What lack might physically altering one’s face provoke?
RO: It’s once again a bit of a Buddhist thing; you realize when sitting in meditation that giving things up is actually a form of liberation. So when you give something up you’re suddenly not bound by it anymore. Which is why we have phrases like, “the tyranny of choice.” Choice is tyranny. Accepting things the way they are is a form of liberation from that. That’s been an important realization, throughout my life; that the more I can give up attachments, and not care so deeply, and learn to accept things — including my face — for what they are, then the happier I am.
There was a real sense of meeting myself, and a deep sense of recognition: “oh, there you are.”
It was the feeling I had when I shaved my head when I was ordained [as a Zen priest] — this feeling of suddenly looking at myself in the mirror and recognizing myself for who I am, without all the things attached to me. There was a real sense of meeting myself, and a deep sense of recognition: “oh, there you are.”
MN: I really liked your description of the time period after you shaved your head, when you felt both unable to hide and as though you no longer wanted to hide. You just were.
RO: I had this incredible feeling of: my head is part of my body. These are not two separate things. There’s a continuum of skin that goes from head to toe. It’s not like this head is this thing that has to be washed in certain ways with certain products and has to be treated specially for various reasons. Your head becomes like your elbow or knee.
MN: This ties in with the Noh mask sections of your essay. In addition to the rich detail of those sections, I’m struck by their metaphorical quality. For example, you describe a Noh performer who’s about to put on a mask; he holds it before his face and transfers his emotions into it and the mask in turn imbues him with the role he’s about to play. Did you deliberately include the Noh masks as a metaphor for constructing identity?
RO: That idea was there, lurking in the background, especially in the sections of the essay where I’m talking about the ways that a child’s face is projected upon. A child assumes those projections, and from them constructs a sense of self. There’s an exchange happening between one’s self, one’s face, and the world that perceives one’s face. And through this exchange we create roles for ourselves.
MN: Our identity is constructed for us, and we meet it.
It wasn’t until I went to Japan that I realized I could have a raucous, loud voice, I could have a sense of humor.
RO: Yes, it’s not just a one-way process. And I really felt this when I was growing up, because I grew up thinking of myself as a Japanese girl. Even though I wasn’t, I was American. I had a slightly “Japanesey” face, and that’s what Caucasian Americans in my neighborhood reacted to when they saw me, and so that became the identity I assumed. When I went to Japan for the first time the shock was that people saw me as American. I suddenly realized, “Oh my god, I’m an American. All these years I thought I was Japanese. But I’m not Japanese at all.” I don’t speak Japanese, I didn’t look Japanese in that context, I looked like a Caucasian American, and I sounded like one. This was very liberating for me. Because, in addition [to this identity] when I was growing up I appropriated all the stereotypes that applied to young Asian girls: that they should be intellectual, good at maths, preferably violin-playing, quiet, docile, pretty, maybe sexy. Included in that was never anything like having a sense of humor. That was not part of the stereotype. It wasn’t until I went to Japan that I realized I could have a raucous, loud voice, I could have a sense of humor. I could be obnoxious; I’m an American! This was part of my birth right too. That was very liberating for me.
MN: A dismantling of one of the masks.
RO: Exactly.
MN: Near the end of the essay you confront death, in one of the most original passages about death I’ve read recently. You see it as something your parents have done, and something you too, in turn, will do; it’s almost like a ritual or a family practice. Can you talk about the notion of impermanence, why you chose to include this in the essay?
…in Western culture, we’re so far removed from death.
RO: Structurally it seemed important for the essay to go from the arc of childhood until death. The more philosophical and deeply personal reason was that, as I get older — as we all get older, I think, we start to see our parent’s faces in our own face. And that’s a very disquieting, uncomfortable feeling, because we have various feelings about our parents and it’s a constant reminder — especially if your parents have died — of what’s in store. At the same time, especially in Western culture, we’re so far removed from death. We don’t come face to face with it very often. When we do, we don’t have the means to accept it and to be comfortable with it in any kind of way. For me, the process of watching my parents die, and being with them during their dying, was extremely important. It made death feel a little bit more familiar to me, and a little bit more intimate. So now when I think about it, I have the memories of their faces when they died. I know what those two precious faces look like at that moment of death. And since my face is little by little growing more like theirs, I know where we’re going. And I can think about that, I can experience that now, with a kind of love. Because that is the primary emotion I feel when I think about my parents faces, and when I think about their faces at death.
MN: In your acceptance speech last year for a Russian literary award, the Yasnaya Polyana Award, you said: “We writers often take credit for bringing people together with our books, but people are already deeply and fundamentally connected, and our work is just an expression of this primary connection.” What is the primary connection that is being expressed through your essay?
RO: It’s the idea that we all have faces, and we all have feelings about our faces, and we all have long relationships with our faces. There’s something about knowing that. You walk out on the street and every face you meet you think; wow, here’s this person with a face, and this person has feelings about her or his face; this is something we share. Maybe not the exact feelings, but the sense of identity that a face expresses. That’s a very poignant and beautiful thing.
When you go out onto the street and see a group of young girls who are all dressed up, you think, “look at all the effort they’ve put into being beautiful.” And, “I hope that they’re happy, really happy tonight with the way they look and not too tormented.” It’s sweet because you understand the relationship it’s possible to have with your own face, and so you assume — well, everybody’s got some version of that. It’s a way of feeling a connection. If readers come away with a little bit of that feeling, that would be nice.
MN: I did definitely feel recognition and comfort from reading you — another person — have many of the same thoughts I have had in relation to my own face.
RO: I think that’s why we read: because literature is a kind of mirror. We read it to find out about the world, but we also read to find out about ourselves, and our reactions. The mirroring works there as well.
It had been three full weeks since they’d last seen the moon, a chrome parenthesis dissolving into the predawn blue. Had they known, they might have stopped to look a bit longer.
The buttonmender started the rumor, said it was the new girl. She rides the moon, he whispered, and he could tell, because she wore space-powder like chaps on the insides of her thighs.
So every afternoon the villagers peered from their windows, watched her walk her pet sunflower, leash taut, as its ripe yellow petals strained for the light. Each footfall shed dust like cinnamon and chimed like bells. See? they protested, confirming the chink of spurs, Who knows what else she stole? But count as they might, they couldn’t find a single star missing to wish upon.
It was true; they had lived entire lives beneath the moon, not taking stock of the singular beauty of its scars: the dents and creases, the peaks and rifts, the slopes and valleys of its pale cheeks. They had never meditated the shadows of its face, never calculated the density of its flesh, never mapped the simple curvature of its body. Oh but now that it was gone how they longed for it in all its forms, blooming and withering from season to season, from the polished orb to the slim staple and the occasional eclipse, the rust-orange reflection burnishing the lake at their feet. They were sore from desire.
The women danced with loose hair and the children skipped pebbles on tides that never changed. They prayed to all the gods they could name, and their days grew long, seeping at last into the third month, though they had no way to know for sure.
Finally, arming themselves with fists and fire, they marched on the girl’s house. She left quietly that evening, following the sun over the horizon.
And, full of hope, the villagers stayed up all day waiting for moonrise.
The Blind Bride
At a café in downtown Masterton, the rest of the girls treat themselves to waffle sandwiches while the bride’s eating baked kumara out of tinfoil, counting down the hours to the wedding night. She peels back the red skin, and when she lifts the naked root to her mouth, her fresh manicure makes crescent tallies on the softened torso.
She swears by all eleven pounds she’s lost on kumara and horse chestnuts this week that he’s never seen her naked really, and, mouths full, the girls raise their brows and bob their heads, and idly count the squares on their waffles, the buttered panes dampening their palms.
The bride admits she’s studied his bare chest before, and his belly button does sit a little to the left. And as she deliberates on the shape and meat of his forearms, she speculates too upon the features of their child — perhaps three, maybe five — blonde hair, black eyes, button nose. Yes, she says, Yes.
They finish their lunch, and the bride, blushing, recounts the days leading up to this very night that they practiced sleeping in the same bed. In her parents’ bedroom, fully clothed and wide-eyed, they lay perfectly still, brushing fingertips, careful not to breathe too loud in the dark.
The Bitiko
1. Old Tapha’s bitiko is like every other corner shop in Darsilami, an eight-by-six coop of shelved walls and chicken wire, goods stacked all around: sweet mints, dried juice, boiled eggs, soap cubes, fresh bread, tea leaves, and the coldest Cokes in the village, guaranteed.
2. For five dalasis, he will pull a glass bottle from the meat freezer. Always, a slight pane of bloody ice left on the curves.
3. No, he did not always live alone in the small room behind his bitiko, which sits under a mango tree that does not belong to him.
4. In the rainy season, when business slows, ripe mangoes drop on the roof, startling him from his musings. Sometimes, a child falls instead. There’s a flame tree outside his window in the shape of a praying nun. Flames do not fall from this tree.
5. Tapha takes inventory every night on plain paper, though in July when supply trucks spin furrows into the unpaved roads, there’s little to do but draw new lines and wait.
6. A good vendor never eats his own wares, but a good man always makes exceptions. During thunderstorms, he sips warm Coke in front of his window, bare ankles crossed on the ledge. Soon, the stormy night lights up the sky, the tree, his face.
7. First kisses clutter the sandcastle, a church drowned in the dunes. On clear nights, teens wade to the top with stolen drinks, watch closely as red taillights — the merchants, the visitors, the locals, the lost — are doused by night. For luck, they shatter empty bottles on the rocks below.
8. It’s a long way to Darsilami by foot, bike, or gelle-gelle, and the travelers are always thirsty.
I turned 40 this spring, marking at least the halfway point of a reasonably long life, and I’ve come to realize that there are many books on my to-be-read pile that I will not read this lifetime. Like your TBR pile, I’m sure, my stack of books is approximately 3.17 miles high. These unread books stare at me from the shelves and wish lists, silently accusing me of shirking my reading duty. I’d like to credit myself with an antilibrary, but the more homely truth is that life is short and children’s soccer practices are long (so, so long).
But be not ashamed, fellow book-shirkers. The Stoic philosopher Seneca hit upon the solution to our restless bookish ways back in AD 64 in his Letters:
“Be careful … about this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment form them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. … If you are unable to read all the books in your possession, you have enough when you have all the books you are able to read.”
Unlike what the good philosopher Seneca proposed, however, I’m not going to be making re-acquaintance strictly with works of “unquestionable genius.” Or rather, let us say that I’m going to redefine genius downward. I’m going to re-read some books that contain a spark of brilliance, howsoever questionable, that have stuck with me throughout the years. No one’s going to be perusing my emails for wisdom 1952 years from now, so, no pressure.
Now, it just so happens that this month’s selection is an all-timer, that I believe people will be reading centuries hence, but at heart I’m not as entirely highbrow as that. Later in the year I’m going to be diving back into a potboiler Gold Medal truck-stop paperback, the lead-off book of a forgotten fantasy series, an 80s anti-drug PSA in the form of a comic book, and a forgotten short story by a now-famous author, who was decidedly obscure at the time. It’s not all blasts from the last millennia, either: one of the entries came out in 2014, and another just last year.
These books, I can’t quote with any degree of accuracy from them, the plotlines are likely to be garbled, character names mixed up or forgotten entirely. Hell, sometimes I can’t even remember the names of their authors. But they’ve stuck with me all the same. By way of contrast, take In Search of Lost Time, whose seven ponderous volumes I once slogged through in a fit of pure masochistic book-nerdery when I was in my early thirties. What I mainly recall now is that it took ol’ Marcel a reaaaaaaaaaallllly long time to dunk and eat that damn madeleine. Despite that tidal wave of words, or perhaps because of them, those seven revered classics of the Western canon failed almost completelyto make much impression on me. Whereas my memory of a childhood comic book where UFOs descend on a World War II tank battle remains so vivid I can plainly see the very curvature of the font. (If only I could recall the title, I’d find the damn thing on Amazon!)
Likewise, each of the books I’ll re-read this year left an indelible mark on my memory and consciousness. And while that may well say a good deal more about me than the books themselves, I’ve no special regard for the “personal” essay. I’m not going to inflict my own madeleine-dunking on you. I’d rather discuss the books themselves.
Four ground rules apply:
1) I have to already own the book.
2) I can only have read it once.
3) Before re-reading, I can hold the book but only crack it open to smell it; I can only write down what I directly remember.
4) Upon re-reading, I can’t make any reference to secondary sources. I’ll only comment on the book itself.
My aim is get down the impression of these books before reading them. No cheating, either. No wikis, cliff notes, Goodreads, or quotable quotes. Nothing that will jog the memory or revive a long-buried feeling. Before re-reading, I want only those impressions harrowed and winnowed down by time, the visceral gut punches that I can still feel even years later. And then compare them to the actual book itself. Neither, when writing about my re-reading, will I consult any sources about the book in question, no scholarly sources, on interviews, no blog posts or Tweets. Just me and the pages.
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that my impressions will be mistaken, that I will misremember names, places, even plot happenings. Memory is tricky that way; I may have whole books wrong.. It may turn out that a book I’ve long thought of as wondrous in its linguistic fireworks turns out to merely pedestrian. Puerile. Pedantic. Not worth a re-read or even the pages it’s printed on.
Even worse yet, I run the risk that, say, that fantasy book I’ve treasured in the corridors of memory all these years turns out to be … dull. (Like watching insipid superhero movies as an adult.) You may be best off not to re-visit the theme park that thrilled you as a kid … but I’m going to anyway.
Flintstones Park is as dead and gone as my childhood.
But I’ve got to think there’s a reason these books have stayed with me. I’m hoping that reason is that they’re awesome. Maybe the thrill of the re-read just will measure up to the thrill of the original read. I’m aiming to find out!
***
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
BEFORE READING:
I own a pretty old copy of this book, judging from the 60₵ price on the spine. Yep, smells old, that particular musty scent old paperbacks acquire upon long acquaintance with an unloved shelf. The pages have that old green tinge to the edges, too, an effect I haven’t seen in a long time. Why don’t they make books like this anymore?
Green.
I read this book sometime in my twenties, though I don’t remember where, or where I bought it. (I’m told there exist an amazing class of people who mark the date and location of each new book they buy on its title page, but I’m not one of that bookkeeping tribe.) I had James Baldwin on a list of must-reads, and it appears I was in a used bookstore somewhere (Ft. Collins? Tokyo? Penang?) and complied.
I do remember Go Tell It on the Mountain struck me speechless when I finished it. I had never read anything quite like it, and I remember swearing on the spot that I would re-read it regularly. Fifteen years or so later, I am here to make good on the promise.
What I mainly recall is the soaring force of the redemption and conversion of the main character (whose name I cannot recall, nor can I recall precisely what sins he longed to be forgiven for). A scene in a church, dust rising from the floorboards as the choir stamped and hollered and sang of God’s glory, mixed in my memory now with my favorite Blind Boys of Alabama song, which generates the same feeling in me.
Set to the melody of “House of the Rising Sun,” no less — if church music was always like this, I’d go to a lot more church
This experience of feeling the true presence of God went on for pages and pages, I think, the language rising to greater and more impossible heights with each paragraph. I was plainly jealous of that boy and his encounter with Divine — how I longed for a genuine religious experience like that. Still haven’t. So I guess I’m still jealous.
I vividly recall one other part that stemmed from its bygone era. Another of the main characters, a maid for rich folks in another part of New York City, leaves her baby child unattended in a crib all day. This did not serve as an important part of the narrative; I thought there might have been some suspense attached, but nope. It was just the routine way in which poor folks in that day dealt with the need for childcare, and as a parent myself now, in a vastly different and more privileged era, I’m scandalized by the very thought. We never used a crib for my daughter, but we did with my son, and it’s to imagine having left him there for more than a few minutes beyond sleep.
But what if you had no choice? What if leaving him there was the only way to keep the baby fed? Those are the sorts of choices and the sort of world the characters in Go Tell It on the Mountain lived in, as I recollect before reading.
AFTER READING:
What I want to know is this: how in God’s holy name did I allow iron-dark, unimaginable ages to pass before re-reading this book?
Yep, stole that phrase right from page 80. Also featured: sincerity. So much sincerity.
What strikes me most about this magisterial book (“magisterial” seems to have been invented specifically to describe the gothic grandeur of this book) is its almost unbearable sincerity. Perhaps sincerity was more in vogue in 1952, when the book was published, or perhaps the daily realities of a systematically white supremacist racist America drove any impulse for irony from James Baldwin’s brain.
Not many (any?) writers working today would write without at least some semblance of ironic detachment about a conversion experience like this: “The mist on this rise had fled away, and he felt that he stood, as he faced the lone tree, beneath the naked eye of Heaven. Then, in a moment, there was silence, only silence, everywhere — the very birds had ceased to sing, and no dogs barked, and no rooster crowed for day. And he felt that this silence was God’s judgment; that all creation had been still before the just and awful wrath of God.” But Baldwin isn’t pulling any punches. His characters mean it, and if he didn’t, he did a masterful job of keeping any air of corrosive skepticism from the text. If Baldwin didn’t believe in every word of the Bible, you’d never know it from this book.
How about a man describing his ambition thusly: “He desired in his soul, with fear and trembling (bonus Kierkegaard reference!), all the glories that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted power — he want to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, His well-beloved, and worth, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down from Heaven to testify that Jesus was the Son of God.” These are not sentences intended to win prizes for sophistication. God love Baldwin for it.
Again and again Baldwin hammers home the sincere belief of the characters that they are not of this world, that one day, one day soon, they will be called forth as God had once called the Hebrews out of Egypt. That the world is unjust they take for granted: black women will hauled off to be gang-raped in the fields by white men; black men will be hauled to jail and beaten by New York cops. In some respects Go Tell It on the Mountain (an unmovable, unanswering mountain, howsoever long and hard one cries out to it) is a long cry against the injustice; in others a long sigh of patient endurance against that injustice, a long hymn of the long wait for the next, better world. As the characters themselves seesaw between longing for the promises of Heaven and anguish at the sordid realities of Earth, so does the narrative whip between hope and soul-stomping despair.
Whatever Go Tell It on the Mountain takes as its concerns, these concerns are not petty. Its epiphanies are not the dull, workshopped sort beloved of MFAers. Baldwin’s characters experience wrenching, agonizing direct experiences of the Almighty Himself. Theysuffer the worst betrayals of all, those wrought upon each other by blood, father upon son, man upon pregnant woman, daughter upon mother, sister upon brother, aunts upon nieces.
And yet the cumulative effect is somehow uplifting, a conversion experience in itself. I don’t think Baldwin meant to inflict some small-minded moral upon us to the effect that one only achieves salvation through suffering, though that is the essence of the Christian message, here conceived. Nor does the book contain a clarion call to right the horrific injustice of this world. The characters do not walk out of all-night church session looking to change the world. They only want to save souls.
So, that religious experience I recalled before re-reading? Turns out my memory had amalgamated the mystical interludes of several characters: Gabriel, the father; John the (bastard) son; Elizabeth the mother, Florence the sister and aunt. All four encounter God in one form or another, throw themselves to dusty floors to fall upon the Mercy of the Blood of Christ. John’s experience lasts all night long, and is the most intense. He does not just see a vision of hell, he dances upon the flames, and only by the great grace of God Himself is he saved from those awful licking flames.
When he returns to the quotidian world, he is forever changed, true enough, but his adoptive father still despises him, his mother remains weak and silent, and he is still badly tempted by sin — most notably by a budding crush upon his older brother in the faith, Elisha (the homoerotic undertone that runs throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain deserves an essay all its own). He is also all of fourteen years old.
I’m not sure I had all that much to be jealous of, really; I think the poverty of John’s experience — both in real terms and by the fact that his tyrant of a father keeps the entire family behind closed doors, away from the evil city, as much as possible — led directly to the wealth of his journeys in the spiritual world. But conversion is a tenuous, uncertain thing, as Baldwin repeatedly makes clear. Better that he were free in a city that didn’t hate him for his skin color, where he could walk down the avenues with a dime in his hand for the picture show without fear, and where his future was his to decide.
In point of fact, John, if he were 14 in 1952, would be 78 today. True enough, he’d have seen great change arrive on the streets of New York, but as we remember Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo, not as much as he’d like. In truth I picture him as Bill Cobbs who played the preacher on that one episode of The Sopranos.
“Only shit in the Bible came out of Pharoah’s ass when Moses parted the Red Sea.”
Wise but not wizened, bowed but not embittered. Given the timbre of Go Tell It on the Mountain, that would count as a happy ending for a boy like John.
It turns out, also, that I misremembered the part about the baby in the crib all day (the baby who turns out to be John in the book). His mother, Elizabeth works the night shift cleaning an office building on Wall Street, leaving John sleeping in the crib, and the landlady, who drinks too much, checks in on him from time to time. Still not something a parent would likely do today, but hardly as egregious as I recall.
I like to dog-ear books; I find writing in the margins too cramped and underlining with pen too messy. Besides, it’s fun to seek out what line or paragraph in a given page truly caught your attention the first time through, what words convey that particular rattle of genius, or humor, or pathos. Sometimes a dog-eared page will leave me baffled, sometimes I find what I’m looking for, but more often I read the page with new eyes, and find something else that catches my eye. Before, I had a few pages dog-eared in Go Tell It on the Mountain — now nearly a quarter of the book is dog-eared. Too much, I suppose, but then again, I could’ve dog-eared every single page. That’s the kind of book Go Tell It on the Mountain is. As an admiring reader, I can really pay it no higher compliment.
Look at all those dog-ears.
So that’s book one of twelve in My Year of Re-Reading. I wonder if any of the others will live up to the tremendous gauntlet laid down by Go Tell It on the Mountain. I doubt it, but then again, next month’s book isn’t really meant to compete on such a plane. That said, Go Tell It On the Mountain didn’t have me dancing through the cornfields of my Nebraska boyhood, waving a branch like a mighty sword, slaying enemies and saving the princess, longing with every febrile beat of a young boy’s heart for a quest that would take me away from the farm and into the wildlands.
Every war has its literature, its classic novels. There’s WWI and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the Spanish Civil War and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, WWII and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and for better or worse many, many, many more. Such seminal works have provided us with stark windows into the violence on which human civilization invariably rests, but according to David Means and his debut novel, Hystopia, they aren’t simply about confronting the horrors of war, but also about concealing them, hiding them under a layer of rationalizations and wishful thinking that often simplifies their lawless anarchy and finds sense, meaning and purpose where there’s little. In Hystopia, he focuses on people affected in various ways by the Vietnam War, but in a bold move for a débutant novelist, he presents both an alternative history and a novel-within-a-novel, transforming his tale into a comment on how art and literature are very often used to twist reality into a comforting yet ultimately false shape.
It all begins with context, with a series of fictive editor and author notes that underline how the main body of the book — the novel-within-the-novel — is in fact the work of a Eugene Allen, a returning Vietnam veteran who by various lights was at once a “wacko,” “a good boy,” and “freaked out about being drafted.” As these notes would have it, President Kennedy has (apparently) survived numerous assassination attempts, yet such a beacon of hope wasn’t enough to stop Allen from killing himself shortly after the completion of Hystopia, leaving many of the interviewees to suppose that it’s the work of a damaged mind.
And in many ways they’re right, because Hystopia is primarily about damaged minds and the historical uncertainty that results from such damage. It follows Rake, a deeply wounded vet whose rage has sent him on a killing spree around Michigan, as well as Singleton, a government agent who’s tasked with bringing Rake to justice. Singleton works for the Psych Corps, a secret agency whose job it is to administer disturbed individuals with an experimental treatment known as “enfolding.” Explained by Singleton himself, enfolding involves using a drug called “tripizoid” and dramatic reenactments to rewrite a traumatized patient’s sense of biography, such that “all of the memories related to [his or her] trauma repress themselves.” It’s primarily around such a metaphorical figure that the novel subsequently revolves, becoming a warped, psychedelic allegory for how literature and history are themselves a form of enfolding, a mechanism that “turns (enfolds) the drama/trauma inward.”
Yet even if such characters as Singleton and his colleague Wendy have been deceived by enfolding as to the precise nature of their lives and the US they inhabit, Means’ assured prose furnishes a gnarled counterpoint that emphasizes just how deluded they really are. Already a veteran himself of numerous short-story collections, the novelist employs a richly contoured yet unsentimental palette to depict an America that’s being “left to sit and smolder as a monument to the riots” currently upbraiding its former peace. Torn apart by an interminable war effort in Vietnam and worsening social unrest, he paints the country as a wasteland of marauding biker gangs and equally marauding officials, seemingly held together only by the improbable survival of Kennedy and an all-but nationwide course of enfolding.
As the third-person narrator ominously notes at one point, “a shit-storm was coming,” a shit-storm Hystopia’s principal characters spend the best part of the novel’s duration trying to avoid. In the hunt for Rake, Singleton and Wendy come to suspect that the best way to do this is by uncovering the connection they believe the serial murderer has to their respective pasts, both of which have been submerged by the enfolding they underwent prior to becoming agents with the Psych Corps.
Consequently, both characters start trying to “unfold,” which can be done only by “Immersion in cold water” or “Fantastic, beautiful, orgasmic sex.” Via activities of mainly the latter variety, Singleton learns that he was indeed in Vietnam, and that perhaps the healthiest thing for him and the country as a whole to do is to confront even more of this history, rather than leave it obscured and allow the violence of the war to persist in contaminating the country. He also encourages Wendy to follow suit with regards to her former life with an infantryman known affectionately as “The Zomboid,” telling her, “You love the Zomboid and can’t say it and it’s my duty to get you to say it.”
It’s precisely this ‘saying it,’ this openness and honesty that provides the crux of Hystopia, the desired endpoint towards which most of its personae move. This is particularly true for the character based on Eugene Allen’s sister, Meg, who has been abducted by Rake as he makes his way across Michigan indulging in “statutory rape to begin with; murder, narcotics, dealing and using, robbery, burglary.” Meeting the noticeably less violent Hank in one of Rake’s hideaways, she also begins to take steps to unfold, dredging up her buried past in the hope that broaching it will improve her unstable, unhappy condition. With Hank she goes to a nearby lake, where “Down under the water she [hears] a voice speak and the voice” belongs to none other than her boyfriend who was killed in Vietnam, reminding her that what they shared before he marched to his death was “just pure dreaminess.”
Such momentary slides into lovelorn romance aside, the monologue in which Meg envisions her dead ex-boyfriend speaking is key to understanding Hystopia and its enfolding-related metaphors. Beyond simply exhibiting Means’ swift virtuosity as a writer and storyteller, this monologue includes the declaration, “That was how you got around the truth of your situation. You started to imagine the life you (if you survived) might have.” Revealingly, this description of how people coped with existence on the frontline applies to most of the soldiers in the novel, except for Rake, who “drew a blank in the dream department. He could only conjure nightmares.”
That the serial murdering Rake “had very little to go back to” after the war and therefore couldn’t dream of the future explains why he counts as one of the novel’s many “failed enfolds.” Such enfolds are individuals who, because of the poverty of their existences previous to landing in Vietnam, aren’t at all responsive to the enfolding treatment, and in fact become even more volatile when dosed up and subjected to violent reconstructions. That they exist at all is testament to Hystopia’s belief that merely attempting to alter people’s conceptions of history and reality isn’t enough when all they can possibly conceive is hardship, and that consequently the only viable solution to the socio-economic problems surrounding Vietnam or any other war is to address them directly, at the source.
What’s interesting about this view is that it seems to negate the very book that propagates it. Hystopia is itself an ostensible attempt to alter our conceptions of a historical era, but at the same time it affirms that we really have to change the course of history to experience any genuine benefits. This comes out most noticeably in the suicide of its supposed author, who despite his rewriting of events involving people he personally knew, wasn’t placated or palliated enough to actually prevent himself from taking his own life. Clearly, he’d tried to ‘enfold’ himself by writing his own personalized version of the past, but this wasn’t enough to stay his demons.
Ultimately, in writing a fictitious author into his debut novel like this, its real author has produced one of those rare, self-conscious books that operates on multiple levels, alluding to its own insufficiency while paradoxically becoming sufficient as a result. It works as a stylized reimagining of the Vietnam era, it works as an indirect revelation of the emotional truth of this same era, and it works as a subtle critique of the inability of stories and narratives to truly compensate when more than stories and narratives are needed. While the very fact that most of its characters have had their biographies erased means that they might seem a little too superficial at times, the novel as a multi-layered whole is far from it. In presenting itself as the work of a fictitious author rewriting history to better suit his personal needs, it alerts us to how historians in general rewrite the past to better suit the needs of the present in which they operate. As this fictitious author declares in the notes which conclude the novel, “History is avoidance of thought,” but what’s ironic is that, in explicitly avoiding the thought of some of the ugliest, nastiest features of the Vietnam era, his book — and David Means’ — will make its readers do more than their fair share of thinking.
The phrase “the immigrant experience” has never sat right with me — reductive, focusing on foreignness rather than on humanity — even though it’s regularly used to describe my work. For all its elasticity, the English language is limited in its ability to convey the migratory journey of geography and of the interior, and the spectrum of related traumas that transcend generations, imprinting itself on both the individual and on the collective. For now, let’s simply call this disassembly of the heart and excavation of a new identity in an unknown place irrespective of the events that lead up to it,exile, which comes to us not only in the social and political sense but in the emotional, the spiritual, the familial; the virtual undoing of the self in order to exist in a new life. And let’s add to it dislocation, the most specific descriptor of what occurs when one abandons one life, by choice, by force, or by circumstance, and is thrust into an unknown landscape.
My new novel, The Veins of the Ocean, approaches transnationalism and immigration in different ways through its two protagonists, who’ve arrived in the United States from opposite ends of the Caribbean: one, who came from Colombia with her family as a baby, and the other, a newly arrived solitary Cuban defector. What I am often interested in exploring in my fiction is how exile and dislocation engender bonds specific to the condition of being uprooted and othered.
I’ve assembled here a list of some of my favorite novels of exile and dislocation; rather than focus on the individual, these are novels that depict the forming of new communities and relationships as a reaction to displacement.
I’ve given this book as a gift more times than I can remember. Momo, the child narrator whose own origin is a mystery to him recounts the plight of Madame Rosa, the woman charged with caring for the abandoned children of prostitutes in a Paris banlieue and the various Arab, African, and Jewish immigrant communities within it that come together when crisis strikes.
The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales
This book was originally published under the title Boarding Home and tells of a young Cuban exile abandoned by his family in a ramshackle residence for the mentally ill in Miami. The prose is piercing and almost hallucinatory, and it’s a devastating portrait of people exploited for profit while descending further inward and away from all that was once familiar to them.
Often with immigration, the individual will divorce themselves from their old life with the force of a guillotine. The Dew Breaker shows how in exile, we can escape our former lives yet also find ourselves later confronted by them in unexpected ways. Here, Ka learns her gentle and loving father was a military torturer in Haiti, and other characters lend their voices in heartbreaking testimony.
Two young lovers from Medellín arrive in Queens but Marlon gets lost and separated from his girlfriend on his first day and the rest of the novel is his story of homelessness and survival in the city. With the help of other immigrants, he struggles to cobble together a new life and eventually find his way back to his lost love, though their reunion is not what he expects.
This is a harrowing account of several characters who’ve sacrificed nearly everything including their safety by taking a boat from Morocco to Spain in hopes of a better life. The brilliant structure allows us to go deep into the hearts of each character within the perilous journey across the sea that binds them together.
Narrated by an Arab teenager raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Marseille, he tells of his infatuation with a white French girl left in the care of a relative, their sexual and romantic exchanges amid the racial and religious tensions that prevail in a community where identity seems as fixed as a badge on the sleeve, and nearly everyone is rootless.
Sacha, a young Russian girl living in a housing project in Germany, deals with the trauma of immigration by overachieving in school, but finds its consequences extend well beyond the expected alienation and loneliness. This is a powerful novel about how families carry each other yet must also sometimes leave pieces of themselves behind in order to survive.
The mythic yet crushingly realistic tale of a boy raised among birds in Iran, rejected by his mother and then eroticized and objectified to no end in his new life in New York. The pain and joys of Zal are both shocking and tender, something most anyone displaced by immigration understands all too well.
This is the perfect novel of dislocation and the unsettled spirit of exile. A young Mexican woman is alone in Berlin, a city that conjures visions and prompts her to forge unexpected connections with other people, equally adrift. I read this novel years ago and it still haunts me.
In this exceptionally original work, the individuals, a group of Cuban exile writers, find their community on the page, and the voices compete and rise and go to battle in beautiful ways. The language is exquisite and Menéndez blows apart the map of wounds of immigration and sculpts something entirely new.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a baby hummingbird.
Most people when they see a hummingbird will point and say, “Look, a hummingbird.” But no one ever points and says, “Look, a baby hummingbird.” That’s because no one ever sees them. Have you ever seen one? No, you haven’t. Or have you? Maybe, actually. You probably have and didn’t even know it. Like most babies, baby hummingbirds are very small. Picture a regular hummingbird, but farther away than that. That’s basically what a baby hummingbird looks like.
The only reason I was even able to spot one was because he landed on me. I suspect it was my nectar-like sweat. I eat a lot of sweet things, so my sweat tends to be quite tasty. I know this from tasting it myself, but I also know this from the time I was jogging and accidentally bumped my sweaty arm into a guy’s face and I said sorry and he said “no problem, you’re quite yummy.”
When this baby hummingbird landed on my arm I froze with excitement. I also froze with fear because I was worried I would get so excited that I would move. A passerby threw money at my feet because she thought I was a person pretending to be a statue. Or she may have just dropped the money. Either way, I got five bucks.
I couldn’t make out all the details of the hummingbird since my glasses had fallen into the sewer while I was bent over looking for my glasses which I had forgotten were already on my face, but of the details I could see, the baby hummingbird was beautiful. It was a bright yellow color with black lines.
I reached for it cautiously to pick it up between my fingers as gently as possible, and that’s when it pecked me with its tail. It left quite a stinging sensation. Then it curled up and pretended to sleep. I suppose that’s a defense mechanism.
There was no baby hummingbird nest I could find to return the baby bird to no matter how many trees I climbed, so instead I threw it high into the air, knowing it would have no choice but to fly away, and I’m assuming it did. I couldn’t really tell without my glasses on and also because hummingbirds fly so fast it’s impossible to see.
BEST FEATURE: I don’t know because I couldn’t see the thing clearly. It probably had big, cute eyes like all babies do. WORST FEATURE: It could have been bigger.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a square.
Devoted fans of Patricia Highsmith who rushed to see Carol, Todd Haynes’ ravishing film adaptation of The Price of Salt, might have noticed a missing element: ugliness. As film critic Anthony Lane put it, Haynes does beauty. Moreover, while the brutality of human desire is hinted at obliquely, the movie’s protagonists are neither vulgar nor repellent. Highsmith’s characters, on the other hand, are monsters, every one.
Those whose fondness for Highsmith is due in part to the satisfaction she took in depicting human beings as spiritually and psychologically deformed creatures will relish David Winner’s weird, compelling novel Tyler’s Last, an homage that positively bathes in the monstrous qualities she reveled in — and of late-life Highsmith herself, by most accounts a frankly awful person.
The novel works kaleidoscopically, a story-with-a-story in which the two halves of the tale start out distinct and divided, then begin to splinter, sending shards from one into the other. Yet it always holds its shape, remaining structurally tight, and a page-turner to boot.
In it, Tyler, an aging roué right out of the Talented Mr. Ripley — effete, cunning, lecherous — receives mysterious threats from a handsome goon he lusted after and tried to murder, in that order. Like Ripley, he’s essentially a pragmatist, and his practical solutions to this problem include impersonating the dead and abducting a child. Meanwhile, Tyler’s creator, an elderly lesbian writer, alcoholic and mean as a snake to her hapless caregivers, obsessively stalks her much younger ex-lover. In the background, the real world undergoes convulsive change, perceived by the narcissistic old drunk as nothing more than an inconvenience, ants milling on an anthill.
Both characters are driven by perversity, perversions and muddled romantic longings, and self-soothe with a comically inept attempt at meditation. Both have insides that are rotten both figuratively and literally. On every page, base corporality carries the day. As Winner’s Highsmith stand-in (never referred to by name) burrows ever more deeply into her guzzled whiskey, urine-stained clothes, and hateful views of the world, her literary creation descends ever further into dissolution, cruelty and gastro-intestinal distress. Stains, blood, semen, mud, pickled herring, piss: when it comes to the physical, Winner is as unsparing as William S. Burroughs; the pages practically stick together.
He’s no less so when it comes to character, driving his protagonists full-tilt into their own nastiness with an antic glee. The obsessive old author, in the presence — at last! — of her lost love, inflicts torment only a scorned writer could devise, tying her to a bedpost and reading aloud from a fictionalized version of their relationship, asking in conclusion, “Did the cunt factory that produced you fail to include a heart?”
Horrible, and funny. Is it dialogue that Highsmith could conceivably have written herself? Maybe not. Whether it is something she could conceivably have said is something else entirely, and for Highsmith fans, there’s a kinky pleasure to be had in this.
David Hopson’s All the Lasting Thingsopens with a nod to William Faulkner’s classic and ever-present “man-child” character: anti-hero Benji is in his early 30s, lives in a garage, falls back on family to pay rent, drinks excessively, and is incapable of maintaining romantic relationships. Benjy, Faulkner’s original man-child, who appears in The Sound and the Fury, is arguably autistic, while Benji is functional yet comically regressed. The concept of the man-child has since evolved and is now used as a derogatory label for men who are responsible for their prolonged adolescence. Hopson not only alludes to the celebrated author who invented the character, he also plays with and ultimately subverts the trope.
Like the original Faulknerian man-child, Benji needs assistance getting dressed and moving through space. In the fist chapter the childhood sitcom star turned reluctant Shakespearian actor must wear a “great metal suit” for his role as King Hamlet. Benji, however, decides to abandon a show right before curtain call. After having one too many on his lunch break, he begins to resent the relative obscurity of performing “outside a small dinner theater in the Catskills.” The clunky costume, coupled with Benji’s inebriation, impairs him so much that he tumbles down a ravine. This lands him in the hospital, unable to speak due to a severely bitten tongue. While in the hospital his sister Claudia repeatedly accuses him of being a baby, a word used to describe Benjy, who is nearly wordless and must be escorted outside, multiple times in the first chapter of Faulkner’s seminal work.
We’ve recently seen a resurgence and evolution of Faulkner’s man-child in Blockbuster films such as The 40 Year Old Virgin, Failure to Launch, and Step Brothers, to name a few. At first Benji exists as a comedic amplification of this character. The narrative of the man-child in popular culture is fairly predictable. It begins with selfishness, followed by rebuke, a desire for reformation, a saga of growing pains, and finally, the resolution: the reformed man. The reformed man often maintains his quirks but is financially stable, flourishes in romantic relationships, and is affirmed by his family and peers.
Benji follows the beginning of this narrative to a T. During his recovery from his nearly life-threatening escapade, he falls for and commits to Cat, an actress he met on the set of Hamlet. Unlike Benji, Cat has no taste for fame. Despite offers to act in well-known companies, she takes a pro bono job coaching high schoolers in Benji’s hometown of Aluvia, New York. Motivated by love, Benji quits drinking, gets in shape, and helps direct the high school Shakespeare production with Cat. By the end of the book, Benji is on his way to get a masters degree in teaching.
At this point, however, Hopson turns the narrative on its head. Benji relapses, but not into alcoholism or emotional instability; he relapses into his desire for fame. When a seedy man approaches him in a parking lot with an offer to star in a reality show called “The Comeback,” chronicling a fabricated tale in which Benji reclaims his celebrity status, Benji is torn. Despite the claim that “professionally speaking, he had turned a corner. Moved on. He no longer lived to be a joke for hire. He lived, quite literally now, in a different zip code,” he ultimately heeds the advice of the recruiter and abandons Cat with no warning. His only trace is a cryptic note that reads: “C — I don’t belong here. I never did. I love you. — B.”
Benji’s failure is compelling, because it’s not strictly a failure. If the definition of a man-child is a man who is motivated by the fulfillment of short term, selfish desires despite negative long-term repercussions on his relationships, then Benji has failed the test of maturity. Despite the promise of achieving monetary and success and recognition, his actions only confirm his status as a man-child.
Many of Hopson’s characters are similarly driven to destruction by their desire for their work, ideas, and selves to last. The stories of Benji’s sister, mother, father, lover and nephew are interwoven, and zero in on each characters precarious mental state as they fight for recognition and immortality. Ultimately, Hopson subverts the formula with which society measures success, and forces us to question the true value of lasting things.
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