Radio Treason, by Rebecca West

A strange read for such a sane, solid book. This is a portrait of William Joyce, or “Lord Haw-Haw,” a British fascist who ran his mouth on behalf of Germany in WWII, and from within Germany itself. Just republished this year by McNally Editions.

Most of the action of this book, initially at least, depends on the hinterlands of citizenship through which William Joyce wandered. Born in the USA to a naturalized American father, who was actually Irish and married an ethnically Irish Lancashire woman, Joyce was raised in Ireland and England and yet, legally, remained an American his whole life. His father hid this fact. It’s a fact that could have saved Joyce from being hung as a traitor. Instead, Lord Haw-Haw insisted on his Britishness, re-upping his British passport regularly. He was the penultimate man hanged for something other than murder in England.

Joyce’s whole story is odd and sharp-elbowed. He impressed some, but annoyed and irked most. Even his family history, with his father an English-loving Irishman, is filled with uncomfortable catty-corners of violence. His father’s house was burned down by Sinn Féin, even though he wasn’t an informer. Or perhaps he was some kind of traitor to Ireland more indirectly (wonders West)? Why else hide his American identity and the (legal) Americanness of his children?

West is unflappable in her ability to condemn the very stupid, which is often how she characterizes the very evil. Irish revolutionaries burning other people’s houses for no reason is foolish. Antisemitism is pernicious, but also contemptible in its intellectual shallowness. Joyce himself she seems to snub for his classless manners, almost as if she’s content to employ the bludgeoning bat of classism that England enjoys so much. But she also points out, repeatedly, how the class frustrations of England must’ve driven Joyce’s search for a worthy outlet for his ambition and intelligence. Indeed, she’s clear that he was not only bright, but an enthusiastic and gifted tutor and teacher.

I shouldn’t be surprised by West’s singular balance of the waspish and the train-like. Here come her facts, one after another. Don’t be lulled, though, because the sting is at your ear as you watch. I especially shouldn’t be surprised by a West outing all about the aftermath of WWII, told through a character study that knots together political threads of national identity and patriotism turned into criminal opportunism. But it does feel a lot wiser in retrospect than it did while I was reading.

One thing that stood out while reading, and which stands out now, is West’s confidence as a detective. All writers are a kind of detective in their pursuit of information, even if the pursuit is quite different for the novelist than it is the journalist. West combines both gifts. Her inventions on behalf of Joyce’s inner life are always accompanied by evidence—his disposition at trial, the words of some neighbors who knew him, or snippets from his own broadcasts or publications—but she nonetheless routinely and confidently veers into territory more usually occupied by the fiction writer.

When she peeks into his skull, she uses phrases like “this must have been the first time he realized he was a comic figure in Britain,” instead of, “this might have been the first time,” etc. She outlines his inner life brick by brick, moving carefully from each stone to the next, so that when she does make an authorial leap, it feels justified. Joyce is never a sympathetic character. Her sense of the moment and belief in objective narrative is too strong. In fact, it was bracing to read a story that refused to wallow in the wickedness of an obviously wicked man, yet which also managed to avoid any shallow moralizing by not turning him into a case study of the weak trying to hurt the weaker. West’s moral sense is too refined for such hand-waving.

The man supported the greatest criminal of the 20th century, telling his beloved England that it deserved the blitzkrieg even as the blitzkrieg threatened to murder his own parents. What a damnable act of treason. What a fascinating skein to unwind.

Dark Harvest, by Norman Partridge

The best hard-boiled Stephen King Halloween book that Stephen King never wrote.

Enough pulp the juice splashes on you if you read too close. Grim and serious in that old-fashioned way that’s so damn fun; or at least gripping.

A parable about boys being drafted to Vietnam—or any war, but the story takes place a year shy of that conflict—or possibly a parable about how the blood of WWII buying the peace of the high-rolling 50s and early 60s was always a shaky foundation. The latter is probably the richer symbolic reading.

Also, to be clear, a book about a pumpkin-headed vine monster that comes alive every Halloween in small town in America. It has to get to the church before the bell tolls midnight. Roaming the streets are hoards of teenage boys let loose for the sole purpose of killing the monster—if it is a monster—and often killing and looting and vandalizing whether or not they see the creature called the Halloween Boy, or Sawtooth Jack.

There’s an evil “harvester’s guild” and nasty authoritarian figures wasting young men’s lives in the most literal ways. It’s a corn-king myth plopped in Peoria. Whatever bargain with the cornfields demands the October Boy’s night of killing is never centralized, and it’s unclear how such a dingy town could be benefiting from this pagan cycle gone psycho killing. Which makes the book even better. You’re born into a rough world, and you either get chopped or get out. Oh, and no one has ever gotten out.

This is a tale about boys’ needs and their fathers’ failures. It’s about doing right, as a boy yourself, by the kid you’d most like to beat into a pulp. I haven’t read a book that took male responsibility, and the reality of male anger, so seriously in years. The novel pivots on a post-Angela Carter narrative inversion that is pulled off without pumping the breaks on the screeching, violent, silly, awesome, say-it-with-a-cigarette-on-your-lip throwback language that gives this creature feature so much style and attitude. Happy Halloween.

I have nothing more to say about it. I’m bored even typing out “John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.”

It was the first book that taught me to quit reading if you’ve given a novel a fair shake. Hate-reading to the end has integrity, maybe, but the world is on fire, your loved ones feel lost, and there’s always a moment in the evening when it’s just right for walking. Cut the Californian short. Stretch your legs and be free.

So much for the specific case; for the literal “most boring novel in the world.” Maybe you have your own title in mind. My suggestion is to actually pick a title and to enjoy that it exists. That way there’s always a book out there you don’t have to reconsider and would never recommend. “What should I pick up next,” the people ask, hopeful. “Not Grapes of Wrath,” you bellow. Everyone loves this sort of thing.

Anyway.

There’s a general problem, too, though; a trait or tendency or failing that I’ve come to believe is not only unserious in terms of story-writing, but mind-numbing as well. Identifying this lack lends heft to the basic sense that a book’s goodness or badness often coincides with a feeling that we’ve been expanded or diminished after encountering it. The bad don’t always diminish, to be clear. The world is large and we’ve got to be beaten back from our own self-attention now and then. The poet Christian Wiman puts writers into “destructive” and “creative” categories, for example. Sometimes we need to be scourged.

As such, the most boring kind of novel in the world (haha, you know, sort of) is any story which sets its metaphysical horizon as the reading experience.

Your subpar dragon-hero romp, for instance, asks you to forget any reality outside of a novel exists. The dopamine high of plowing through a plot is the point of the plot such that the reader feeds on the fumes of his own reading. Read so you can read more, the same as you might hit the bar on a slot machine. To be clear, everyone likes mystery or sci-fi or fantasy or the seafaring adventures of Rafael Sabatini1, and should! But Madame Bovary went a little mad from reading novels, and so can the rest of us.

Maybe this idea is alien to you. Maybe you’ve never been in fourth grade, faking an illness so you can go home and read Animorphs all day. And while that was probably a better way to spend some school days, your Animorphs habit became so severe over the course of several weeks that you risked failing fourth grade. Sleeping was less important than what animal Marcus might transform into next. Doing homework, never that important to you, was less vital than reading the next ten books as quickly as possible. Animorphs was fun! Animorphs was killing you.

Even if this has never been your experience, is my point, any librarian will tell you: readers don’t care which James Patterson they get, as long as it’s new. They can’t tell their James Pattersons apart. They flip through hundreds of library books a year, using secret markings in the back pages to track which titles they’ve already scanned. They literally can’t tell the difference otherwise. This happened when I worked in Syracuse, NY, and it’s recurred throughout my time in Colorado libraries.

Of course, bingeing a romance or mystery or fantasy series is at least diverting in the short term. There’s the genuine and often rewarding urge of wanting to know what happens on the next page.2 If you become entranced with the wrong kind of highbrow titles, on the other hand, you’ll have to spend all your time being excited that the latest listless novel in your collection is a reassuring act against not reading other novels. “Whoa,” you’ll keep saying to yourself. “This isn’t something else!”

In these cases, and many more, what matters most is what happens either in a novel or as a comparison between novels, and good news, you are reading a novel!

Take the (somewhat) recent sub-genre of prestige fiction focused on being extremely online. Even the best of these works, with their bloggy bon mots, feel dead on arrival. Being encoded by internet habits, they necessarily revere whatever trendy social media mood they pretend to satire. What if, they implicitly ask their readers, you could be online even when you’re offline? The moral stakes of the novel’s world are DMs and comment rage and the acedia these obsessions induce; the authors’ formal innovation is to write like they write everyday on Twitter and Instagram, only no one is allowed to interrupt them.

Call this an adjacent case to my argument. These books’ metaphysical horizon isn’t reading novels, per se. They do, however, inherently juxtapose novel-reading with screen-glazing as the default models of moral experience. The act of reading the novel is being constantly compared, if only implicitly, with that other kind of reading you are always doing. None of the texts I have in mind are so banal as to be “pro-reading” or “anti-social media.”3 But their spiritual depth isn’t any greater than those positions. It’s the same swimming pool of reality. Reading is not a thing that happens in life, but the boundaries of the novels’ very understanding of life.

To be fair, the reality of being online is hard to put into words. It’s certainly hard to put into a novel. It’s even harder, in my opinion, to put it into a novel in a way that expresses some essence of being online. Here, too, though, we find a helpful illustration for what I’m trying to say. The experience of the internet is a lot more like a mall than a blog, or at least a mall as it might exist in a novel.

Not to explain symbolism, but a mall in a novel is always already removed from reality in a way that comments, or offers space to comment, laterally or mysteriously. Being a (necessarily) symbolic mall, the setting either gives rise to a sense of reality newly understood (or felt or encountered), or it doesn’t.

This is one of the great achievements of George Saunders’s stories. Often writing science-fiction that the imaginary New Yorker reader in my mind would hesitate to call science-fiction, early Saunders laid bare 1990s capitalist exhaustion in funny, gruesome, and sometimes sentimental vignettes all set in theme parks; demented, twisted, bizarre theme parks; recognizably American theme parks with names like “CivilWarLand.” I worked as a lifeguard at Colorado’s largest water park in high school, a place of wonder and surrealism and managerial horror. Saunders captures a specific truth about these unique blends of corporatism and theater.

But his literary theme parks and their terrible conditions also depict a more fundamental dynamic between worker and manager, between our enthusiasm and self-degradation, between efficiency and workplace surveillance, between our canned, corporate speech and our degrading mental condition as a result of the inane words (“workflow”) we force ourselves to take seriously. We inhale Saunders’s vision not as a self-satifsying high at understanding his allusions or allegories, but as a form of spiritual appraisal. He’s right about the world. He’s not (usually) preaching or didactic. Rather, the material of his fiction is scraped from the world in all its lucid strangeness and pushed into book form. It does not mistake the limits and joys of its literariness for the limits and joys of reality.

I’m not sure any of this is news to anyone. But what’s fun (to me) is how the root of literary solipsism can express itself in so many different forms. Everyone knows escapism when they see it. Let’s even admit that sometimes it’s just what the cruel world requires. Likewise, a novel’s intertextuality really can be a fascinating little puzzle that scratches the crossword-adjacent itch in the lay intellectual’s mind. (I guess? I dunno!) Even the lifestyle voyeurism of a literary book club hit like [REDACTED] can elevate a dull evening.

But I suppose my point is that when the literariness of whatever brow—high, mid, or low—becomes its own end, the book dies. Either it goes stale, or the reader does. The dragons wilt. The formalist jabs don’t land. Even the suburban rubber-necking loses its snapback.

An author may be self-satisfied or cosmologically insensitive — all is vanity — but a good story cannot be either.

I love you all.

“Mama!” whispers the three-year-old at 1am. He is carrying his full-sized pillow and blanket through the doorway to our bedroom. This is not a visit. He is a moving van, and he has arrived.

“Thank you, Dada! Thank you!” he says at 5:30am when I give him my pillow as well. He wraps himself around it, a koala discovering its first tree branch.

“I am speaking this way,” I say in the afternoon, trying to moderate my severity, “because I asked the first three times and was completely ignored.”

“Stop!” I say very loudly — not, I must insist, actually yelling — “screaming!”

I do not fully understand Gentle Parenting, which is not to say I fully condemn it.

“I won’t cry,” says the three-year-old when we tell him to stop climbing or running or throwing scissors.

“You might get hurt,” we say.

He unleashes his dimple. “No,” he says. “I won’t cry.”

The kids do not belong to us. We aren’t even borrowing them.

“Okay, I think we’ll call it there.”

All three children have been watching me play “Old School Mario.” This is what they call Super Mario Bros. World. They call Super Mario Bros. 3, “Old, Old School Mario.”

“Dad!” says my daughter. This is a protest against ending Mario. She reads a book a day when she’s not in school. There is never enough book time or screen time or pool time or park time. She cannot be exhausted. More is the beatdrum of our arguments. All my limits feel artificial.

The key to being counter-cultural, I’ve found, usually involves doing nothing, which is much simpler than doing something.

Our children don’t play with iPads on road trips. Or ever. We already didn’t have iPads when they were born. Join the revolution, baby. Do less.

“I think your son is having sleep problems,” a specialist visiting my wife’s pediatric clinic tells one of her patients, “because he has access to a computer in his bedroom. And he’s twelve.”

I am kind of a zealot about tech and children.

I recently bought myself a Steam Deck.

A few years ago, on my older son’s first day of pre-school, I had a mini-breakdown. He and I fight the most. We can see through each other’s skulls. We feel the other one’s feelings too easily. He tried to smile as we left him, but it was terror that hovered beneath the bone. “See you in a little bit,” we told him. Three hours later, he was fine. I, on the other hand, found another inventive way to gain weight.

This year, my younger son keeps braying about going to school, the same pre-school my older son has now left. “In Sepmember I get to go to a classroom!” he says. “This is my lunchbox!”

If we don’t kick him out the door, he’ll kick himself through it. Go with our good wishes, unbreakable boy.

At some point, with unrecoverable intensity, he’ll make me cry alone at a Popeye’s, too. The mercy of God doles this out in doses. Even the Lord doesn’t think you should be at Popeye’s more than once a week.

“Knight’s Castle is the second book, Daddy,” says my daughter.

“I think it’s Magic by the Lake, kiddo.”

“No, no,” she is saying. “Because in the back, where they list the books, they don’t list the book’s own name.”

“I know, sweetheart. I’m a librarian. I’m pretty sure it’s Knight’s Castle. I can even look it up to be safe.”

“Let me show you!”

As she finds the book that will prove me wrong, I prove myself wrong with the internet.

“'Ope!” I say as she returns. “I was wrong. You were right.”

The smile that posesses her face is indescribable. I already too often grab the wrong keys, forget we’re going to school and not to my work, misremember her schedule. I’ll never be able to tell her anything again.

“Son,” I say very softly to my older boy. “You can’t throw rocks off the cliff while people are jumping into the water. It can be dangerous.” If it were another child, like my younger son, I might have yelled. Safety brings out the horns, sometimes. Not with my older son. If I want him to hear, he needs it soft but urgent. He needs to be treated as an equal, almost.

“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t jump into the lake from twenty feet. His sister does.

Another summer absorbed and released. We’re in the transition days of September, an eternal return of something finite.

Onward, I suppose. Let the schedule regain its iron.

I love you all.

All those high school losers—you know, writers—are finally having their moment in the quad. We are waving, straining, our arms raised. “Hey! Over here!” None of the boys can stop high-fiving, even the weird boys who know how to pronounce Goethe.

There across the mass of movement is Jane Greer, not in the friend group, but a friend of friends. A senior who lingers. Her bon mots alight on the ear. In deep winter, she says, “Cold enough to freeze the balls / off a pool table. The temp falls, / ‘wind-chill factor’ kicks in, hard, / dog squats before she hits the yard.” Whoa. But the algorithimic swarm continues apace and Jane fades. Another cold day, the same refrain as I pass. “Any ass out in all this weather / deserves three toes and skin like leather.” Ha! But we don’t exchange names or conversation. She has her circles and all mine feel offline.

So it goes for years. Leave the high school stuff behind. There’s no graduating from society. Even the normies text me memes, often the same memes I see from Jane Greer and others like her, wits and would-bes all practicing their microwaved stand-up routines. We’re amusing each other in the queue to the talent show. We’re at the viral lottery store buying in bulk. We’re building audience factories, we hope, for publishers to co-opt. Or we lurk, like me, enjoying the freedom of someone like Jane Greer, not a friend, who risks untrendiness as a form of her trending hits.

Jane Greer “writes like a grownup,” says the only person who is as well read as he claims to be. He’s not even a friend of a friend. And he’s not so much in the hallway (since we can never actually leave the hallway) as he is sharing stories in the parking lot—maybe a student-teacher, of some kind? Overhearing him deepens what you overhear from her. Jane’s more than funny, this funny person you don’t know.

A quick pause amid the rush:

Like feathers, they drift in
from somewhere out-of-frame,
and none of them can name
where they have been.

Too briefly do they stay
in-frame, falling, lifting,
lightly slanting, drifting
down and away,

with perfect gravity,
into the waiting grave.
They love us but behave
so thoughtlessly.

Back to scrolling! The hallway is not meant for perusal, but for skimming; meant not for close reading, but for click being. As it should be. As it must be. Continue to wander, then wonder, on the next coldest day, how Jane Greer might describe it.

“I haven’t been on here much since Monday.” It’s July 2025, yet you can still hear these words from Jane across the crowd. Not a friend. Another voice you don’t mind in the milieu. The tone is off. “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me.” The algorithm and the waving and the lurking continue. Jane is not feeling well. What a bummer.

The next time you pass her corner, someone else is in her place. That hospital tweet has become her last tweet. Jane… is dead? It comes to you as a question even as it isn’t questioned. Jane Greer?

But I don’t even know her! I mean that as a protest. I haven’t even had the chance to get to know her.

I remember being cc’d on plans for my high school’s ten-year reunion. Obviously, none of my close friends were going. Let us out of the hallways! Amid all the planning, a high school acquaintance who’d been active on the Facebook side of discussions died. Not a bit like Jane’s demise, except it was also a surprise. “Michael Flores is dead?” The further surprise of Jane’s unexpected passing is that it felt as close as that high school tinted death. I knew Michael Flores, once upon a time. I didn’t even know that I knew Jane until I could never act on what little knowledge I had. Something more than parasocial, and less than friendship.

I revisit the final stub she sent into the air. She wasn’t just in the hospital. She had diverticulitis. “Prayers appreciated,” she continued. “Personally, I’m praying for and dreaming of large full cups of ice water.” That gleam of glib. That glint of everyday goodness. She just couldn’t help herself.

All writers want to be read—want to share even when they don’t want to be adored—and I missed a chance to tell her that I love her work. There are ways to upend the illusion of the hallway, to step outside its witching rhythms, and say, “Thank you.”

I have her books now, of course. Too late for her, if just in time for me. They deserve the heightened praise that a eulogy invites. A better formalist, she is a fully sanctified Ted Kooser. She has an air, as noted by Patrick Kurp, of Janet Lewis.

One last snatch from the back of the classroom, then, the bell about to toll:

No one will say it, but we know
today’s fresh-flamed hibiscus flower
reveals in one brief, glorious show
our birth, our life, our final hour.

Sacrament and synecdoche
live in a pot near the atrium door,
mirroring holy brevity
which, in a day, is evermore.

I love you all.

The Chronicles of Narnia

Having read so many children’s books in the the last few years, I’ve come more and more to admire Lewis’s Narnian prose. The only book we’ve read so far that feels as accomplished, if wholly different, is Mio, My Son, by Astrid Lindgren.

What might be even more amazing is how lightly sketched Narnia is on the page, and yet it exists fully painted in one’s mind. It becomes less of a fairy land as you work through the seven books, and is never really a fairy land in that it feels too medieval, too derivative of the courtly romance tales of Lewis’s scholarship. At the same time, there is no better place to ride on the back of a lion or to talk to a tree or to hunt a white stag that can grant wishes—in other words, fairy land.

Lewis’s greatest gift—and where he and Tolkien actually overlap, despite being foils in so many other ways—is to use a fictional world to detail all the things he loves best in this one. Good food, beautiful woods, wonderful walks, and more.

As for the books on an individual level, The Silver Chair is the most complete. It’s hard to top the wonder and emotion of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the girls’ ride with Aslan through the fields to the Witch's castle is hard to beat for pure, childlike joy—but the narrative unity of The Silver Chair is almost perfect. By which I mean PUDDLEGLUM EXISTS. Give me all your dirge-dampened hymns for the loyalest marsh-wiggle that ever lived. Gallant Grump. Conscientious Crank. Saintly Sourpuss!

What Lewis does well in every book, though, is to scale the moments of courage largely at the level a child might understand—you must remember the most important rules; you must dare to be laughed at by your siblings; you must give up treats and comfort because the situation demands it.

There’s real physical danger, of course, but the children who go to Narnia are most worried about looking silly and sounding silly and about not getting enough sleep or getting wet in the wrong clothes. They’re cranky and they don't want to make the effort. They know they must obey Aslan's fourth sign, but they just promised they wouldn't untie the Knight! Can’t they sit down for a bit?

Even though his heroes battle and flee and thieve and more, the facet of courage which Lewis brings beneath his narrative microscope is almost always the moment of social nerve. Not just, “Can I swing my sword at this serpent though I might die?” But, “Will I be humble before my brother and sisters? Will I tell my classmate I was wrong? Will I split with my neighbors, who are all jeering what I actually believe?” It’s a simple view of life, maybe. Virtue isn’t always so clear-cut. Many times, it’s hard to distinguish between prudence and anxiety; that is, between what seems right on the balance of wisdom and insight, versus what I might prefer, being a jellyfish of a man.

But it’s like good old Puddleglum says, “That fellow will be the death of us once he's up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the sign.” Our discomfort is not meant to be our master, and is often the cause of much greater wrongdoing than might seem possible at first. Puddleglum says many other and even better words. Our family favorite is, “Respectowiggle.”

The Tears of Autumn, by Charles McCarry

Who killed JFK? Like everyone else living in 1963, that’s the question for Paul Christopher, Charles McCarry’s undercover CIA handler who speaks French and German like a native, and who finds himself supporting agents in Europe, the Congo, and (most importantly) Vietnam. A man who dislikes JFK and his posse of imitative New Men, Christopher weeps when he hears the president has been shot. He also knows, within a day or two, who sponsored the murder.

I mentioned McCarry’s first novel, The Miernik Dossier, recently. The Tears of Autumn is less successful, if only because I’m pretty sure most spy novels are less successful than The Miernik Dossier. McCarry, though, was a CIA undercover man himself, and was rediscovered in the mainstream for a bit in the early 2000s because of his novel The Better Angels, which features terrorists taking over planes as means of mass desctruction in the year 2000. It was published in 1979.

All of his books have that realpolitik feel. They’re romantic adventure stories squeezed through the mind of someone who knows that spying involves a lot of memos and enough information gaps in the name of security that any number of realities can and will co-exist regarding even world historical events.

As for JFK?

South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm was assassinated in a CIA-backed coup 21 days before Kennedy. Within a short time frame, Christopher finds all the intermediaries that suggest JFK’s assassination was a Vietnamese revenge plot—some a little less practical than you might expect from McCarry. I don’t know how accurate McCarry’s interpretation of Vietnamese cultures and family structures is, but he takes pains to give the nation circa 1963 and its people a specificity and alienness, from the American perspective, that doesn’t simply reduce them to the exotic or simplistic. There’s still a lot of damning caricatures, of course, which was bad then and is bad now.1 His point, though, is to emphasize that a small country’s president being assassinated is as dirty a deed as a large country’s.

McCarry is a convincing conspiracist. The novel takes place before Bobby Kennedy’s later assassassination, and our main man, Christopher, points out that the Vietnamese won’t have their revenge until Diệm’s brother, also killed in 1963, is accounted for as well.

The Natural, by Bernard Malamud

This novel was as surprising, in many ways, as its film adaptation when I first saw the latter in high school. Whereas the film looked hokey on the outside—the cover features a golden Robert Redford tossing a ball like he’s about to star in an afternoon special titled “Weekend Dad”—Malamud’s text felt dated from the outside. Not sure why. Perhaps simply because it’s a book about baseball during baseball’s dominance within American culture. I was wrong, and maybe a little right, on both counts, but more surprised than prophetic.

Malamud is the model for the older author in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and that character’s famous, “I turn sentences around,” description of writing feels very accurate to this novel. Malamud is a stylist above everything. He flirts with the same problem C.S. Lewis ascribed to Golding and his novel about Salisbury Cathedral: Malamud almost writes too well. The flare sometimes obscures everything except for itself. What flare, though!

Malamud understands the spiritual nature of sports, the way fans and society and the players themselves invest a holy, damning, unreasonable level of personal stakes into the results of adults playing schoolyard games. The dream sequences, the action sequences that read like dreams: the superstitions of ball players are not incidental to sports, but the very heart of them. All the melodrama of this novel, and all the pyrotechnics of Roy Hobbs's off-field life, are able to ape novelistically the very highs and lows of being a sports fan. The incandescent, prophetic feeling of a team of destiny tearing off win after win. The cruel, unraveling effect of that same invincible unit collapsing, getting injured, selling out.

Malamud has transformed the drama of the field into sentences; he really has. Even the gut punch at the end scans: here's a writer who has loved a team and seen them lose at the very moment he finally believed they might win.

The movie ends on a much different note, predictably. My thoughts haven’t congealed around the last page of the novel yet, but when I finished it I stared at the wall for two or three minutes in a kind of shock. Maybe this is the thickest stew of self-stirring prose an American has ever cooked up? Maybe it’s the lucid dreaming of America’s conscious mythic-making made manifest? Not sure! Either way, it’s worth reading.

I love you all.

Yevgeny is given two legends, a backup in case one is ever burned. The first is Eugene Dodgson, a name only Russian spy-masters and Cold War fictioneers could concoct. The alias contains his personal history by way of assonance. “Eugene” points back to “Yevgeny” even for those of us who don’t speak Russian. Even better, Eugene Debs, the iconic American socialist, hovers as an aural echo. Yevgeny is comfortable as Eugene. The narration even switches to “Eugene” as his primary designation. He is a new man.

Then one day the legend is compromised. The FBI are on to Mr. Dodgson and he must become someone else a second time. A third person must be pulled from inside Eugene just as Eugene was pulled from inside Yevgeny. Appropriately, he becomes Gene Lutwidge. The hint of “Yev” is shed completely. Just Gene.

When I read The Company sometime in college, or shortly thereafter, this scene stuck in my mind. I’m not sure why. There was something miraculous about Yevgeny’s ability to sink into a new self more than once. Before he leaves the motherland, his Russian instructors insist that he must never again react to his given name. Yevgeny? Who could that be?

In the last few years, this specific scene and its blunt depiction of self-creation has recurred to me. For the first time in my life, I have a career. A career, of course, is more than a job. Careers are the effect of needing a job, are a special case of job-having in the same sense that a square is a special kind of rectangle. A job is a task standing between oneself and the unforgiving maw of not paying the bills. “I’m just doing a job,” we say when we want to indicate our indifference, our separation. A career requires that something of yourself become mixed with the tasks, with the job. A portion of your psyche, of your sense of self, is drafted into the work.

The central paradigm for discussing identity and work, for some years, has been imposter syndrome, the idea that many of us fear being exposed as frauds. We go to meetings, we email, we teach, we give patients advice, we perform some set of required tasks with competence but also with a sense of deceit. Fake it until you make it, and don’t forget to worry that you’re a fake. This has produced an inevitable, and perhaps sometimes accurate, backlash: “You don’t have imposter syndrome. You are simply bad at your job.”

There’s an inverted issue, though, that I’ve found more intractable. You are hired to do a job. By Russians, maybe. You shed Yevgeny, that yokel of the steppes, and you become Eugene Dodgson. When you get a promotion, you let Eugene go for the sake of Gene, the All-American. The slippage comes with the work. The danger isn’t that you’re a fraud, but that you might go local. You might lose yourself in the work, so to be speak. And even if you never become a company man, your career still begins to dictacte which of your multitudes—we contain them, I’m told—are salient.

The persons we pull into existence through circumstantial demands aren’t infinite, of course, but there are a lot more than I ever considered possible. I felt this when I went to graduate school, when like an accident I went to graduate school again, and certainly when I worked for both the University of Colorado and the University of Denver in full-time admin jobs. The peripatetic nature of those years—of bouncing from full-time work to full-time school to part-time work to full-time parenting—meant that slipping into a new type of public self was suggested, but never fully realized.

Take a totally fictitious and extremely impersonal example: you become a librarian. You plan library events, curate the collection, act as an intellectual waiter for anyone who comes to the reference desk. Displays and event prep and creativity abound. But there’s a vacuum in the leadership, and you’d rather become a competent manager than suffer any more hierarchical missteps. You’re promoted. Individual vision must now give way to bureaucratic peace-making, which you were already doing. You lead a larger team, so “process” and “systems” and “documentation” also grow as portions of your daily pie. Oh, and there are local, state, and federal laws which libraries must know and incorporate and respect, and you are now the person who must know them best.

In short, the administrative side of being a librarian is the only aspect of yourself that has been promoted. The rest of what led to your promotion is sloughed from your shoulders. Promotion is thus a narrowing of one’s individuality, at times, even as it’s billed as an expansion—more money, more power, more whatever. More freedom, really, is the great carrot that’s dangled in service work. And in most cases, that’s true. You no longer man the reference desk. You can separate yourself from the front of house constrictions regarding your schedule. Mostly.

The good news, if you’re doing your job well, is that the FBI will still want to find and question you. Yevgeny, Eugene, or Gene: the cause continues.1

Reading:

Oddly, I began this post before stumbling across Charles McCarry’s The Miernik Dossier (1973). Every good spy novelist is compared to le Carré at some point, but McCarry has a pretty good claim to being “the American le Carré,” as he’s often labeled. The book is magnificent, if also sex-soaked in that grim and salacious way novels from the '70s, and especially genre novels, seem to enjoy. McCarry served undercover for the CIA and, as with reading le Carré, it’s hard not to come away feeling that you have a better sense of the actual men and women playing espionage games—at least during the period in question—than you once did.

I could see many people I admire hating it, and with good reason. But it’s one of the best spy novels I’ve read in a long time.

I love you all.

One of those rules: never sell out my children. Don’t undress their worst behavior or their most embarrassing tendencies or their confessions of endearing vulnerability to any passerby who’s paying attention. This one’s hard. To speak about parenting is always a test of one’s boundaries. It’s either the 30,000 foot check-in—“everyone’s good; here are their ages and grades”—or it’s stories which attempt to capture the joys, dramas, and surprises of the average day, and sometimes the average half hour. Put it another way: we’re banal or we’re narrative, and it’s hard to stick to the former, even when writing.

Since I am not going to sell out my children for a blog, though, some of my ranting below will be a little bloodless. My wonderful kids are not going to be used as counter-weights to all these absurd, utopian blather pieces that claim to solve parenting. But I want it to be clear that my frustrations come from a place of actually raising children without the ability to endlessly tailor my own circumstances. You’d think that’d be everyone’s situation, but apparently not!

For example, I recently came across this blog post. The premise is simple: “No couple - much less single parent - can meet all of their child’s needs and their own. And yet very few people raise their kids in community. In the US, 71% of children grow up in single family homes.” So far, so good. Call me a fellow traveler, at minimum. What the piece goes on to discuss, however, are examples of community living that include:

1. An independently wealthy author who moved his family “from Belgium to an eco village in upstate New York”

2. A cohousing community in the Bay Area, called Radish

3. A “baby coworking club” existing entirely, it seems, of work-from-home friends1

4. A creative commons on a literal chateau in France

The obvious criticism isn’t even the one I’m looking to level; that is, “congrats on being rich!”2 I’ll even cop to being piqued when I should probably just be, I dunno, inspired or something. The point of this lifestyle voyeurism isn’t to suggest you or I also move to France or, God forbid, the Bay Area. It’s to suggest that alternatives exist, and that you might find your own magic math in your own way.

But the actual examples are in lock-step with the great and demoralizing lie of modern America. You, such pieces insist, are endlessly customizable, and so is your situation. You, too, can move to D.C. and live next to your best friends, kickstarting a village that no longer exists organically. You aren’t surrounded by people who don’t have real jobs in the real world and can set up shop in your house for an entire workday? Change jobs. Change cities. Change friends! “Here’s what I’ve discovered,” the independently wealthy man who moved from Belgium to New York—which is totally fine and obviously not a big deal for most of us—says about parenting: “much of that strain is self-inflicted.”

Ah. Nice. It’s not that we were born into a century or an economy or a culture that puts roadblocks between us and a completely different material possibility—we’ve shot ourselves in our own foot! I might wish I could live literally next door to my friends or family or job or school, or have all of that conveniently delivered to my neck of the woods like so many packaged goods—or, even better, I could deliver myself somewhere new, being a totally fungible apparatus of attached dependents and credentials—but instead I’ve chosen to live with people I’ve actually known all my life. I don’t make enough money to do whatever I want, but I could at least kill every relationship God gave me in the name of drinking herbal tea with eco-members—I mean, house-friends—on a communal patio!

If I were trying to give such people the benefit of the doubt, and I will try, there’s perhaps a spiritual paradox lurking in these endlessly glib testimonies. Give up your community so you might have community. Renounce so that you may receive. May I be so convicted, and so called, if that’s the case.

Currently, though, I’m someone who rejected the convenience of my own upstate New York3 life in order to be embedded in community. My wife and I have also worked incredibly hard so that our primary childcare is either one of us or a grandparent. That’s involved several different configurations, such that I’ve worked part-time, been at home full time, and now work full time. Our kids will know their grandparents as everyday relations.

I even have one of those impossible friend groups. Seven to eight guys I’ve known for at least fifteen years, and in some cases twenty or twenty-five years, get together in some combination most Thursday nights. We’re all married and almost all have children aged ten and below. Our wives have their own chat. Our families do things like “daddy dinner night” and weekend gatherings when we can.

So far, so utopic.

Except my wife, a pediatric PA, works on one side of the Denver Front Range and I work on the other. Our jobs are more or less locked in, currently, given the balance of childcare and more. We live in what is technically a townhouse; it has two stories but is the size of a decent condo. We love it. No one we know lives in the compound. Almost no one in the compound has children even though there are many couples our age and younger. The few families that do prefer their children stay indoors and use screens.

Unless I can convince my closest friends, even a few of them, to build a commune, or join an artistic cult in France apparently, we’re never going to be neighbors and intimates at the level described in these think-pieces. I might live with other generations of my family at some point—that’s even my hope and goal—but living in the same-ish town is as good as it gets right now. I could maybe acquire a LEGO set community by leaving my home state and church and lifelong comrades, but that seems like a pretty strange decision to make in the name of “doing life together.”

Too many of these scenarios, in fact, are not re-creations of the inter-generational norms of pre-modern parenting, or whatever. They thrive at least partly on who gets thrown off the wagon. Maybe I’m too focused on this one blog post, and on its linked examples, but where are the actual family members? Where are the friends who can’t live right next to you because they are already living near their parents? Where are the dangerous cousins and aging grandparents and morally catawampus siblings? They’re not in the commune, sounds like. They’ve been discarded in the name of a daycare startup.

Again—I admit—there’s a possible religious ring to this conundrum.4 The bespoke kid club isn’t an altogether universal or helpful solution, but maybe that’s the point of these essays. Maybe such parenting solutions—build your own village!—are meant to be ascetic orders cut off from the current world, shining ideals we try to mimic, but to which most of us will never be called. They’re islands. They exist among neighborhoods no longer full of children but which were planned for children, hence all the unused playgrounds. The neighborhoods with families overflowing without this intense intentionality are poor, new to America, or McNeighborhoods where millennials keep moving their 1-2 children so they can live on iPads and drink sparkling water in peace.5

I’m not trying to attack your life, by the way. Unless you love sparkling water. What I’m trying to articulate is that these aforementioned blogs and articles are the upper-middle class’s version of vlogs. They’re decorations against which you bang your forehead. I’m glad a statistically insignificant percentage of parents are figuring out how to replace both the dearth of children in general and their own deracinated familial lives.

I actually am glad! That’s also what I am trying to do!

But these solutions always downplay the actual constrictions of what it means to be a parent, to be a friend, to even (should you dare) be friends with parents you’d never let half-raise your child. As exhortations, they fall for the same trap as too many other types of parenting advice: let kids be the absolute center of your decision-making, and change out anything in your life that doesn’t fit your preferred whim. Make life neat. Even better if your brother-in-law isn’t around.

The hardest parts of parenting, what’s more, aren’t hanging out all day with four-year-olds. Yes, sometimes that’s really rough! But the hardest part is facing down the force that sometimes wakes between yourself and your child, the actual battle of wills and values and temperaments that requires you to decide in this moment, if in no other, how you will parent. The overall burden can be shared, and should be; it’d make these vital interplays behind closed doors easier, in my opinion. But your children will always know who you are and how you react when no one else is around, and no amount of fake uncles and eco-friendly communes that employ a private cook will relieve you of that onus.

We must disaggregate the parenting function. Yes. Please. It’s still gonna be messy.

But none of that is admirable. All of that is the exact same behavior you might expect from the addicted. The drunkards, the smack happy, the short-video starers who—okay, maybe they don’t get up early—but who certainly stay up too late, steal time from their jobs, steal time from their families, and often steal whatever they can in the most literal sense. That writers are often derailed by addictions is perhaps not surprising.

If social media has made anything explicit, it’s that we are all slaves to something—sometimes it’s benign enough, or marginalized enough, we can continue paying our bills, kissing our kids, driving to work.

For the writer, addiction fights for the same territory as the writing. Children, which are not an addiction, are the other great competitors. If more writers had them, maybe they’d write less, but they’d at least be more entertained.

Early on, if you have a calling to write, you learn it isn’t a calling. Or that “calling” isn’t a clear road of the mind down which you walk, the sunlight of purpose at your feet. A calling is a compulsion. Try to shake it, if you can. I tell my wife all the time, “I hope our children love art. Even better if they’re not artists.”

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not a burden. It’s not some great weight, and any writer who tells you it is has mistaken “anxiety” and possibly “existential crisis” for “urge to write.” It’s very easy to satisfy the compulsion of the keyboard, the pen, the pencil. Sit down and put some words together, one after the other. There. The urge releases.

Hobbyists don’t have this compulsion. Hobbies can be dropped. Careerists don’t have this compulsion. The urge to write only ever leads to the urge to make money because it’d be nice if all this time I spent writing gave me some relief from the time I devote to making money. Which isn’t to say I’d have more time to write or would use that time to write more—writers can be fiends in the margins of our lives, but most of us whither under any actual abundance of opportunity. Writers: we want to work less.

All of that is automatic or instinctual, and indeed a compulsion can be muted, dulled, or ignored under the right sort of numbing, therapeutic, or self-destructive conditions. Congratulations that you keep writing in lieu of climbing the walls. That is why a cat chases its tail. That is perhaps why so much of what we write is rubbish. The words must follow the words or the writer, that pathetic creature, will function even less.

A conscious decision toward discipline—a knowing response to the compulsion—must clothe the instinct, the itch, in reasons. The reasons matter. We have to keep choosing how we deal with the urge, which margins we’ll allow to service the need. Plenty of writers become careerists. No one can afford to care nothing for the career. Yadda yadda yadda. I’m not good at the entrepreneurial stuff. It’s hurt my career, but I don’t believe it’s hurt my writing. The inverse is not true for many others.

Whatever the case, the initial response to the call, to the urge, can be corrupted. “Thou has left thy first love,” as the author of Revelation puts it regarding something that has nothing to do with writing. You find yourself reading all these lesser writers, seeing even good writers get better deals, and you can decide that you will find the magic formula which lets you scratch the itch enough it might leave you alone, but the purpose of itching will now be material gain. Give me the goods.

I would love to write a mystery novel, a fantasy novel, a mainstream hit. I’d love that to be an accident of looking at the world and typing up as truly as possible what there was to enjoy, surprise, fear, worship, avoid. That happens best through fiction, which hits on the ever-present doubleness of life’s meaning (if there is meaning), the view from below and above.

What I’m getting to very slowly is a truth I took from my time at Syracuse University. I look like one of those careerists, I know. I got my MFA from Syracuse. I have a newsletter. I tweet things. I want the work to be read. I admit it. The urge is to write, and the hangover is our desire to be read. Maybe it’s part of the compulsion. I’m not sure. I have all the fuel of a good careerist, but that is not the ultimate heat under which one’s writing compulsion is meant to thrive.

Sometimes the obligations of a career provide proximate heat, sure. Deadlines are good. Practical concerns are provocative. Caveats are caveats. But inspiration is incommensurate with both greed and vanity. Maybe those re-appear the moment you’re not writing. But as the fingers tap, as the pen scrawls, a certain amount of dying to oneself is necessary.

What I learned at Syracuse is that this is practical advice, a practical reaction to the lived experience of writing, and especially to career success, and not simply a moral undertow. “Before my first book was published,” a professor told us at Syracuse University, “my agent sat me down. ‘The novel is going to come out,’ she said, ‘and nothing in your life will change.’” Our professor shrugged. “It was the best advice I ever got.”

To return to the empty page, to invite inspiration as a recurrent phenomenon, occurs in the light of this truth. For most of us, it’s a material truth. Publishing will not change your actual day-to-day reality. For the rare few, this is still a practical, as well as a spiritual, truth. You can now buy Scotland on the royalties of your Pynchon-esque time travel novella. Good. The kids are home from school in two hours. Your self-regard, which leads to imaginative myopia, is in danger of matching your income.

Writing is a compulsion, and can be a career, but the candle only stays lit in a satisfying, sustained glow under the auspices of the (worthwhile) writer’s first love. You steal time, you invent time, you blunt other edges in your life as a response to the urge. The lasting response, though, is romantic, is artistic in the most useless sense. You have to write, and you choose to write because of a naivete that supersedes your own discretion. “This matters,” you feel. “It’s a mystery. But it matters that I do this well.”

The career will die, if it ever starts. Even the urge qua urge won’t always be scratched. We’re mostly mediocre writers, all of us. Hence the revisions. The writer’s response to the compulsion, therefore, has to survive both its ignition and its gains.

We must remain romantics.

New Writing

Maybe I’m not that great at even benign career moves, but I am trying to share. Joyland Magazine published a new short story of mine today. I hope you’re taken with it.

“The Fountain of Youth,” by Joel Cuthbertson

I love you all.

Every culture war. All culture wars. Whether one ongoing war in which partisans are continuously amalgamated into one of two blobs, or multiple wars in which partisans find enemies becoming allies and allies becoming enemies, depending on the topic.

All these wars are about children.

I mean that simply, in the sense that the hottest fighting takes place around the intersection of these topics and children. I mean that in practical terms, in that the aims of the movements all seemingly revolve around policies related to education and public safety.

I don’t think this is a right-wing talking point; that is, my saying the culture wars are about children. “Protect Trans Kids” is as defining a rallying cry as anything across the aisle.

Surprisingly, though, I am not writing any of this so that I can resolve these often intractable issues in a 500-word newsletter. I also don’t think the issues are all equally pressing or equally insipid, or that all sides are equally at fault. I’ve become more and more curious, though, as to why issues regarding male, female, and nonbinary gender roles in society; pornography; vaccines; abortion; social media; AI (or AGI), etc. are overwhelmingly proxy wars for, or are at least downstream from, what people believe about children.

If we date the current iterative structure of the culture wars from the 1960s, we can see the germ of this phenomenon. Segregation was an issue throughout all of society, harming the young, middle-aged, and old alike. But a bedrock of the Civil Rights movement, and one of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights movement, involves the integration of schools.

Pro-life, or anti-abortion, as it exists today grew out of the 1960s movements, and is perhaps the epitome of the culture war in that it’s a debate about what literally is or is not a child.1

Is your blood pressure up? I think I’ve stepped on almost every landmine possible so far.

But I’ve been thinking about this issue—the way in which so many hot-button topics are tied in definitive, if not absolute, terms to the welfare of children—because years ago, I was almost a culture warrior. A child culture warrior.

Many people are embarrassed by who they were as children. Again, I think this is an interesting commentary on childhood. They’re too hard on themselves, in my view. Children are moral agents and, especially in the teens years, have to deal with the lifelong consequences of their behavior. Being a bully shapes oneself, and might haunt oneself. But for most of us, it’s a little too easy to remember our childhood blunders and resent ourselves for being less than we are now, usually stupid or willful. But we were less developed than we are now. We were younger.

Anyway. I wasn’t a bully. I was much worse. I believed literally that the earth was 6,000 to 10,000 years old. I’m not really embarrassed by the fact anymore. The smartest men and women I knew—who were and are genuinely intelligent2—often believed the same. I’m sometimes embarrassed by how I acted upon this belief, but by the end of high school the fever had pretty much passed. Ironically, I gave my opinion less air when it became more palatable, so I didn’t even derive social benefit from my evolution.3

My history goes deeper, unfortunately. I knew who Roy Moore was before he ran in a special election for the Senate during Trump’s first presidency. The former chief justice for Alabama, Moore’s campaign disintegrated under robust accusations that he sexually assaulted younger women. That was all news to me. But I recognized his name from a Focus on the Family story that I’d read freshmen or sophomore year of high school. The article billed him as a defender of the faith because he wanted the Ten Commandments to be memorialized at the Alabama State Courthouse in the largest, gaudiest way possible.

In essence, what I learned early is that my sense of justice is easily co-opted by passionate, and sometimes legitimate, causes of public debate. Everyone, I hope, has learned this in the last five to eight years. You really believed you might stop police violence one month after hearing about it for the first time by putting a black square on your Instagram. That’s okay. Mistakes happen. I once read an article about Roy Moore on purpose.

Interestingly, one of Christ’s harshest words of warning is about leading children astray. “It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to sin.”

As a former child myself, and as a current parent, all these tidal forces feel appropriately powerful. Our public push and pull on many pressing, moral questions are only able to be ignored for so long. That these are often social questions, and even sometimes social questions that touch on the most Christian of issues—wealth, poverty, charity—means they often come rolling into our lives with or without our invitation.

More to the point, they necessarily splash at the feet and knees and perhaps even threaten to submerge our children, because the upbringing and educating of children is the last place we almost universally recognize a need for some strain, however thin, of moralism.

In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor spends a good portion of the end of the book discussing legalism and moralism. “Why can’t our moral/ethical life ever be adequately captured in a code?” The answer is, for the purposes of this stub of an essay, “lots of reasons.” Let me quote him anyway:

We can’t live without codes, legal ones which are essential to the rules of law, moral ones which we have to inculcate in each new generation. But… it is terribly important to see that that is not all there is, that it is in many ways dehumanizing, alienating; that it often generates dilemmas that it cannot see, and in driving forward, acts with great ruthlessness and cruelty. The various modes of political correctness, from Left and Right, illustrate this every day.

The important carve out in this whole section, and in the above quote, is “We can’t live without … moral [codes] which we have to inculcate in each new generation.” Taylor argues for a kind of virtue ethics as realized by the transcendent life of Christ. Sort of. A Secular Age is an 800-page philosophy book. There’s no adequate summary.

But where he finds moralism necessary, if still in qualified terms, it’s regarding our need to instill in our children a sense of the transcendent logic that virtue ethics and the life of Christ (not only Christ, but especially Christ) demand. I teach my children right from wrong in basic terms so that when they are old enough not only to be forced into adulthood, but hopefully old enough to begin sorting the greater nuances of social living, they will yearn for and seek what is good, beautiful, true, loving, empathetic, etc.4

They have a sense of right that they must transcend in the name of pursuing what is right. The rub for all of us in these various battles of values is that we must decide which codes we’re going to instill either as parents or as support from the sidelines. Sometimes the very argument is about which responsible adults should be trusted with instilling (teachers, parents, priests, doctors, etc.). We have to argue over some of these issues, and in the name of public education, usually, or public spaces, generally, we have to descend into the most vulgar positions of black and white thinking.

The bathrooms in elementary schools must be labeled one way or another, and especially because we’re dealing with children, the moral stakes feel higher. They probably are. But we all recognize that a code is being supported or rejected, that support in a fundamental way is being offered or re-routed.

Legalistic inculcation is far from the full picture. We can return, if nothing else, to the home of the fundamentalist 1990s Christian for this fable. Any of us in these circles know countless peers who’ve left the church, the values of their parents, and any outward signs of their previous faith behind. Poof. They’re secular.

That’s one of the paradoxes of these hot-button issues, perhaps. The fact that we must dabble in moralism for the sake of imparting a sense of a higher ethical framework in our children—to say nothing of public safety, which I’ve largely ignored—is no excuse for us to become moral simpletons.

How you answer questions from your feminine son; how you prepare and react to your pregnant teenage daughter; how you walk with your children through poverty-stricken streets; how you explain war; how you use “infant” or “fetus”; how you handle medical decisions—all of these will require concrete instructions or decisions, including the choice to be apathetic or distant, that will inform a child’s sense of right or wrong. Inform, to repeat: not determine.

Such situations will also be a test of our own moral orientation, our own virtue pressure chamber. Parents must somehow both give their children a solid foundation from which to seek a moral life, and live in a morally mature, a spiritually receptive, way that upends the temptations of moralism. Sometimes the decisions we make in the name of our children are more black and white than the world in which we live because they are being made for children, thus demanding courage as well as discretion. Sometimes not.

I’m not sure how that translates into the world and politics and more. But for years now, I think we’ve seen code enforcement continue to escalate, and given the focus on children, I think its possible the fallout only worsens.

Either way, we cannot escape some of these conversations, some of these decisions, and we shouldn’t. The nine-year-old doesn’t need an iPhone or an iWatch or an iPad and giving her one is imprudent, if not immoral, in the same way smoking might be. Let’s talk about it. Let’s challenge each other. But, to end what is basically a simple blog in the most simplistic terms, it will matter vitally how we use our own phones even if we protect our children from the worst exposures of social media.

Maybe that analogy is inapplicable to all other hot-button issues.5 All I feel confident about—some days, at least—is that we are at risk of inculcating a sense of moral despair in much of the next generation. Our society is addicted to code enforcement, to winning the battle of norms by any means, and one result may be, and perhaps already is, that older forms of casual evil will find themselves resurgent.6

I love you all.

Worse, the problem with being the kind of person who has a blog about writing that’s updated, oh, every three months, is that DFW is the kind of writer it’s almost impossible not to want to write about should you finally read an entire work by him. To be really precise, in a way that might mimic but never actually captures the power of Mr. Wallace, the problem with writing about DFW is that so much has been written about DFW, and more importantly memed about him, that the urge to write about his work is immediately met with an internalized blockade that actually spurs you further into wanting to write because you’d never let some invisible mob of Paste has-beens (meaning both camps) dictate what draws your attention.

Oof! If only there were a chronicler of this sort of modern and crippling (though sometimes elevating) self-consciousness! A writer whose obsessive desire for precision is leavened by a genuinely expansive, if sometimes combative, curiosity.1

The good news is that the internal blockade around DFW can serve as a canny introduction: name the conundrum as a way to slip under the armor of the reader’s own resistance. Even better, such an introduction is itself a spiritual pastiche of David Foster Wallace, who never met an idea that he couldn’t examine from a slightly different angle, and who didn’t write so much in a dialectical mode2 as he chased ideas down every textual alleyway until it was more or less helpless—not captured, but caught clearly in the beam of his differently scaled descriptions.

In short, although I have much more to say about it, I think most people should read David Foster Wallace.3 I think even if you avoid his fiction, and even if you hate him and his worst fans on a personal level for the rest of your life, you should bump his essays higher up your list. I don’t know how your to-read list works—mine is more or less a catalog of titles I never want to forget even as it remains powerless to actually sway4 my reading decisions in any day-to-day way—but Wallace’s essays should be added, maybe upvoted, maybe highlighted, etc.

Why is he worth your time, though? It’s not a rhetorical question. Time and attention are commodities more than ever; are abstractions we seem to possess, having been convinced by the self-help tomes of CEOs and ad writers that everything is a commodity rather than a decision or a judgment or a preference. Time and attention are things we control and which we hand out, something we pay with, something we budget and allot and waste on variously-sized screens.

Let’s leave the terrible system intact, for now. Time and attention are things we keep in reserve, like coins in our soul’s piggy bank, and I’m asking you to crack open the porcelain for the sake of one of the internet’s favorite litmus tests. If you read DFW, much less enjoy him, no one in your actual life will care.5 But a bunch of people who may one day see an anodyne Instagram shelfie6 from your account might absolutely, clinically lose their minds if they note David Foster Wallace among your less problematic tomes.

To be frank: David Foster Wallace is problematic.7 And, honestly, I’m the kind of sensitive, readerly, character-driven surburban dad who doesn’t take his reputed bad behavior all that lightly. If I’ve been light in tone until this paragraph, it’s because Wallace as a writer invites a kind of lightness, a playfulness,8 that I think is often lost amid the critical consideration of his recursive or discursive or pick-your-vursive literary designs. If the footnotes are endless in an exhausting sense—or could be described that way—I think they might also be seen as something less solemn. Comedians have the same kind of self-interrupting tics, for instance. If they’re heading down known territory, they often jump ahead of themselves with a kind of side commentary before seeing the joke through to its natural conclusion. Jim Gaffigan9 does this quite literally in his early specials, deploying the famous high voice of an imagined audience member to heighten, or more often extend, the punchlines.

The point is that Wallace the person can’t be taken so lightly. Mary Karr, the poet and memoirist, published alarming details about Wallace in her memoir Lit (2009).10 When #MeToo swept through American culture in 2018, she pointed out that no one had ever really cared about her anecdotes. I won’t recount all the disturbing details here, mostly because they’ve been summarized better elsewhere. Also, and more controversially, I won’t recount them at this moment because there’s no reason to still be talking about David Foster Wallace except that he wrote (allegedly) great works of prose.

Personally, I borrowed The Broom of the System (1987),11 Wallace’s debut novel, in either college or grad school not because I was hoping to become the next literary misogynist and solipsist,12 but because he was supposed to be one of the great modern writers. Meaning really modern, like young enough if he hadn’t committed suicide,13 he’d possibly be teaching English to this day, much less publishing. His work made him important in his lifetime, made him famous in his death, and has made him infamous in light of his personal demons. The demons themselves are insufficient in and of themselves to have ever elevated him. The work matters, culturally if not to you or me personally, as a precipitating event to the ongoing wars about his moral value.

If you care about his bad behavior, and would like to battle the influence of his hypocrisy, that means eventually you must read the books.14 The further we get from DFW’s death and from his possibly poisonous effect on the lives of women and men still living, the more we enter the debates we always have about deceased artists whose moral nadirs are public record. Maybe what I’m suggesting here is just the standard “admire the work despite the author” position,15 but once you read David Foster Wallace, rather than about him, the questions regarding his behavior are necessarily sidelined. The relationship is now between what exists on the page and has been offered for readerly consideration, and your own inner thoughts.16

Relavent confession: Consider the Lobster, the last book he published before he died, is the first book I’ve finished by David Foster Wallace. I hope this drives home how little my argument is, “Infinite Jest is genius, actually!” Although I remember vividly the first chapter of The Broom of the System from my college (or grad school) perusal,17 part of what I recall so strongly is that I knew I couldn’t keep reading. One of my weaknesses as a reader, or perhaps as a writer, is that I have a hard time finishing any novel or story that feels like it might be related to my own ambitions in fiction. This doesn’t mean that I write like DFW and worry I’ll find what I hope to achieve already accomplished, although that’s sometimes the case.18

With Broom, the quality of the first pages alone made me realize how amorophous and incipient and, perhaps most accurately, inchoate my own novelistic tendencies were at the time. The clarity of his authorial voice, and honestly the sheer authority of such a young writer’s point-of-view, was startling. I knew he was young when he wrote the work, and I was young (early-twenties at latest) at the time, and I also was beginning to sense that I was a late bloomer, of sorts. Or a later bloomer.19

After that, I put Wallace aside. I didn’t want to wrangle with his fiction, especially the more I learned about (though without ever reading) Infinite Jest. It didn’t matter that Zadie Smith, one of my favorite novelist-cum-critics, thought his short stories were some of the most vital pieces of fiction she’d come across. It didn’t matter that I attended Syracuse University’s MFA program, which has all sorts of connections20 with David Foster Wallace.

Instead, my contact was incidental: I heard that one graduation speech he gave about the fish and “This is water” and so on, which I thought was decent, and I found a convincing blurb of his about taking usage (rather than “grammar”) seriously that I assigned to my freshmen writing students. The latter, to be honest, is probably why I ended up buying Consider the Lobster—again, in Syracuse—though all the noise around him and my own multi-layered resistance to his work kept me from reading the book until now.

Relevant tangent: George Steiner, one of the 20th century’s critical luminaries, begins his definitive book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky by declaring that “literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love.” To be more precise, “the poem or drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings,” such that “we are not the same when we put down the work as when we took it up.”

I can’t offer anything so certain regarding Wallace’s work, or about the essays in Consider the Lobster specifically. But the same instinct to testimony invigorates the reader as well as the critic, and certainly inspired this post. The tension over Wallace the writer and Wallace the human, however, is that his work has inspired Steiner’s species of literary love. If my own testimony is a little more lukewarm, I still want to press it as firmly as possible into your hand, a gift of one wandering literary nerd to another. You may not enjoy Consider the Lobster’s best essays the way I have, but I don’t think anyone can read “Up, Simba”—Wallace’s novella-sized profile of then populist-candidate John McCain and his 2000 presidential campaign—without feeling like an essential dynamic of American power versus American sentiment has been unpeeled layer by layer.21

In other words, I don’t feel a “debt of love” to Wallace, but I do feel that subtle shift of perception which occurs after encountering a remarkable, and bracing, influence. Worse, I sort of half-believe many of Wallace’s most intelligent partisans.22 I can’t count myself among them, but when I say, “You should read David Foster Wallace,” it’s in the name of curiosity, and maybe even a challenge to best him at his own game. If everything he oozes as a vibe remains an intractable block on my curiosity, the ironic conclusion of refusing to engage his work is that I end up a less generous reader and thinker than the writer I’m hoping to condemn.23

If that’s too petty, here’s my testimony on a higher plane: reading Consider the Lobster can never undue the damage of Wallace’s life, but it has helped me with some of the mental burden of my own. That’s a rare gift, and I think anyone serious about American literature should test whether their own literary taste will allow them to accept it.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, by Roald Dahl

What if instead of writing a really great sequel to the beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl decided to turn Willy Wonka into Doctor Who fan-fiction? The Glass Elevator acts as a minimally disguised Tardis, while Willy Wonka handles space dangers with the wit and encyclopedic knowledge that demand comparison to Britain’s favorite Time Lord.1 A forgettable, but not painful way to introduce younger readers to both sci-fi and anti-Americanism. The ending chapters owe a lot to The Phantom Tollbooth, and the explicit conflation of “Minusland” with Hell—well! Even mediocre books can have great moments. Not an outing to be revisited.

The Second World War, by Antony Beevor

I’m grateful to this book for being what I can only imagine is the best single-volume introduction to WWII. A sense of the drama, of the narrative as it unfolded at the time—the competing narratives amid so many countries—is somehow both coherent and episodic. Hitler is the greatest criminal the world has ever seen, and some of the folks battling him for the title in the 20th century either also dominate (Stalin) or skirt importantly around the edges (Mao). The brutality of the war years, on all fronts and however varying, is somehow captured without excessive, unworthy sentiment.

Beevor zooms in at the right moments—Jewish mothers hiding their babies amid their clothing as they enter the gas chambers of a Nazi concentration camp; the babies being found, and pushed inside as one might sweep the dirt into a dustpan. The evil, so universally invoked in our society, is eternally perplexing. It is so total in so many ways. The devastating trail of the Red Army’s revenge, the firebombing, the prisoner-of-war murders, the explicit call to kill the young in the name of ending generational reprisal, and more. All genres of human evil, it seems, were given free reign. I even joked with a friend that, “I never remember how much cannibalism is involved in WWII. It’s the kind of horror that usually takes the headlines.”

I need to keep reading, but I wonder if WWII will ever be exhausted for our culture. It can be misused, of course, but it remains the mythological event of the modern world. If we ever erase our histories and our writings, some tale of the war across the world will survive—the Holocaust and the atom bomb and the protean destruction that transformed humanity at material, cultural, and spiritual extremes.

I’m saying nothing, of course. Only Antony Beevor can write substantial generalizations about WWII, and I’m glad he took the time to do so.

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

George Saunders once confessed that he thought this was “a perfect book.” He knew it was very unfashionable to say so. But, in truth, his career could be summarized as a “punk rock Christmas Carol,” the supernatural do-goodery stretched to its eerie, oddest, funniest maximum.

I also love this short book. Like many slim classics, it can feel slight revisiting it because the impression—the cultural as well as personal footprint—is so large and distinct. “We’re already playing games with nephew Fred? But the story just began!” I hope to read it more or less every year.

Cover Her Face and A Mind to Murder, by P.D. James

It’s strange to find comfort in a writer so obviously aloof, but I always do.

The first and second titles in James’s Inspector Dalgliesh series, these were much stronger than I remembered. Cover Her Face in particular caught me off-guard. The balance she wants isn’t quite in place yet—a lack of mastery, to be honest—which is most obvious for the reader who tries to keep track of every character. (Uh, you know, any reader.) I think it took me half the novel to reconcile formal names (“Mrs. Riscoe”) with first names. But the parlor room drama microwaved by murder is more or less fully formed from the outset.

A Mind to Murder felt slightly bathetic this go-around, but maybe I was so surprised on my first read that this reaction was inevitable. Again, I’m not sure the control is quite there yet. Having two viable suspects is fine, and Dalgliesh being drawn to the more interesting personality—as he always is—works. But the timeline coincidence for the two suspects is overcooked.

The cast of psychiatrists, and the conflict and tension between them, is given a remarkable face-lift with the matronly, witty Dr. Maddox. A beginning novelist might think, “You can’t have a character pop in for only one chapter even if she dominates the chapter; what’s the point?” The less formulaic sophomore says, “Why not?” Only the superior writer can get away with it, though, and James does.

I love you all.

Along these lines, and especially with new friends, there comes a time when I have to confess a lifelong weakness. I don’t hide it, per se. But I don’t open with it either. At some point, I’ll be chatting with a pal and they’ll ask an innocent question about upcoming plans. Who can be indicted for wondering, “Are you busy on Saturday?” Or even more generic: “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

“Oh,” I respond. “I’ll be in Oklahoma, actually.” This is not the confession. Many people are required to be in Oklahoma. I don’t want to get into the whole history of people being required to be in Oklahoma, which I hope is an acceptable omission to make as a writer. And it might not be, but that’s also not a question I’m getting into right now. There’s a concern for practicality here. I can’t be held hostage to the ways in which American travel is a vast field of culturally insensitive rakes which might whap one in the face without warning. Just saying “Oklahoma”—the etymology of which is Choctaw (cool?), meaning essentially “red” “people” (whap!)—can lead one into explanations for one’s explanations.

Plans are asked about, is what I’m saying. And my answer, at least once a year, is “I’ll be in Oklahoma.” The issue is that I’m from Colorado and still live in Colorado and many people from Colorado, especially those originally raised in Oklahoma, respond with unfeigned snobbery. Not always, but enough of the time. “What? Really?” Or sometimes the subtext is just text: “Do you have to?”

I hate this response. I’m a simple person. I’m not saying I don’t understand their prejudice, but at minimum it puts some onus on me to prove my sensibilities, to either educate them about Tulsa, for example, and how it has the best riverside park in the country, or to take the easy way out and tell them the trip is an obligation. “Yeah, my whole family is from there.”

To be clear, my whole family is from there. I have visited my entire life out of actual obligation. But routine creates belief. Ruts create desires. I love Oklahoma. I have that luxury, maybe, as someone who only visits Oklahoma, who only sees the best of its people—my family—and who can return to my job at a well-funded public library in a state where most public libraries aren’t that controversial.

All the same: I love Oklahoma. There are few places in the world I enjoy going more. But the visits are becoming complicated. My grandfather is ninety-one and has some form of dementia. He’s in assisted living. My mother and her brothers and their wives take turns helping on the weekends in an attempt to lessen the load on my grandmother, who is ninety herself and living independently. The staff at his home is reduced on the weekend. Buttons might be pushed and ignored for lengths that are unthinkable on a Tuesday.

I recently saw my grandfather in his new arrangement for the first time. The trip was hard. The trip was beautiful. The tensions you might expect, the goodwill of those who love him butting against their own and others’ limitations, predominated. But I was surprised by many things. I am keeping most of them to myself. I love my grandfather.

One surprise, however, was the way we all relied on similar descriptions of what was occurring. We placed my grandfather in the past. “He’d hate what’s happened to himself,” folks kept saying, including me. My grandfather’s living personhood was buried beneath our warmth for the person he used to be. He wasn’t with us so much as removed from the now, watching now happen at a distance, if he was anywhere at all.

The tragedy of my grandfather’s condition was most legible—was total, in fact—only if the real grandfather was his middle self. His essential self was not in a continuum, but was fixed at an earlier moment. There was no exact blip of change for him—no sudden accident—but at some point we spoke as if he’d crossed a threshold from Actual to Former. “He’d hate what’s happened to himself.”

And from a certain angle, sure! He has been reduced. The full range of his personality, of his person’s expression, has diminished. But all the clichés of “you start helpless and you end helpless” and “you live from dependency to dependency” have perhaps failed to convince us at the deepest levels that someone like my grandfather is no less of a person, even if he’s a different person, simply because he’s lost certain capacities.

“Did you watch the football games this weekend?” a patient care worker asked him.

“'Course,” he said.

“Who won? Anyone you like?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember anything.” A wry smile. A joke. The flicker of who he is, not who he was, rising to the surface of our observation. The personality came and went, but it was consistent.

He never complained, for example. I won’t detail what it’s like for a grown man to be quarantined to a bed all day; a strong man who was walking as many as 5 miles every morning only 4 or 5 years ago—miles that dwindled, but persisted to some degree until he was moved into assisted living. But he never complained while I was there. He reacted. Sometimes strongly. Once, when an aide hurt him on accident, he told her to stop apologizing. “Everyone keeps apologizing. It don’t change what happened. You’re just doing your job. I know that.” He thinks you’re a dumbass but he also doesn’t want to be a bother. That is my grandfather.

At one of our lunches, he told me why he doesn’t like to eat chicken, another secret I’ll keep for myself. I showed him a picture of my youngest child, who at two and a half is not someone my grandfather remembers. He re-meets him every lucid moment I’m around. My son’s middle name is my grandfather’s first name, Roy. “You saddled him with that, huh,” he said. Another wry smile.

A few years ago, Matt Bruenig—leftist policy-wonk and social media troll par excellence—came out strong in defense of children, um, I guess, existing. He was responding to the usual online sources that enjoy asking whether or not children should be treated as humans—with access to transportation across states, for instance—or if they should be given shorter shrift than most millennials’ dogs. Bruenig delivered his usual mix of pragmatism and provocation:

Complaining that an adult with severe autism or Down Syndrome was on your plane or in a restaurant and misbehaving would be bizarre and very few people do it, especially publicly. Young kids, who have similar levels of mental and behavioral development, shouldn’t be regarded any differently.

A similar slippages exists in the way we talk about those who age into mental disrepair. No eighteen-year-old wants to be spoon fed, yet that’s the basic trajectory of old age. We go from strength to dependence. The grace we have on the front end, the way we think of our children as always being themselves even though they used to garble their speech, mess themselves, or in some cases seemed to have completely different personalities before puberty—this wholistic generosity is what the aging deserve.

It’s rare to hear it, though. Our sense of injustice roils: My grandfather shouldn’t have to be infantilized in his senescence. I feel this tragedy deeply. At the same, why did he have to be a baby at all, a literal baby? He didn’t choose that situation either.

What my grandfather does choose at this moment is to live within his current conditions. He nearly licks his plate clean if it’s a dish he can manage. Declaring himself full one evening, he reversed course as soon as we said there was dessert. “You want some cheesecake, grandpa?” His eyes grew as large as the white plates we kept ushering in and out. He didn’t know my name, but of course he wanted cheesecake. Cheesecake is a joy.

The fullness of his person—his soul—is no less worthwhile simply because the interface, the weaving of body and soul and mind, is breaking apart. It was a hard weekend with no illusions about the wear and tear he’s experiencing, or the burden that his continued existence imposes on all who care for him. I’m not happy about his lot. Maybe there was even some crying. Not in Oklahoma. My lord, can you imagine? I saved all my tears for where no one would notice a bearded man bawling into an 11.4% beer. I waited until Denver.

There’s no denying the frank truth that his death will bring relief. Many lives are currently spinning around his own, and some of them deserve a rest as well. But that’s also not how we should measure a life’s worth, and (again) almost never how we measure our first dependency. “Enough diapers! Kill the babies!”

No, the equally frank truth is that he persists, and he must be accepted and honored for himself and not only who he used to be. I hope I get to see him again, and soon.

I love you all.

Christian Wiman killed snakes when he was young, when he worked a construction job in an oil-field. “Rattlesnakes, garter snakes, milk snakes, water snakes, lots of king snakes, thick and garish but completely harmless.” The reptiles weren’t his only victims. An even younger Wiman also killed rabbits. “As drunk teens in Texas we used to shoot them randomly from the back of pickup trucks.”

I was never drunk in high school, but birds used to eat our cherries. A yearly decimation. One spring, my brother shot several and strung them up by their feet amid the fruit. In the breeze, the dead birds kept time. The living birds kept their distance. We’ve never grown better cherries.

Life which covers death. Death which hangs at the heart of life. These preoccupations dominate Christian Wiman’s work. The former editor of Poetry magazine and a professor at Yale University, Wiman’s thriving career and often radiant art are counterpoised with the fact that he should be dead. He received a phone call on his 39th birthday, not a year into his marriage, which informed him he had cancer. And not any old cancer. A blood cancer “as rare as it is mysterious.” This diagnosis happened almost twenty years ago. If we’re being poetic, if we’re reading his history with a critical, almost inhuman distance, you might say life’s existential tensions are made visible, even urgent, in Wiman’s biography. We all keep not dying. For now. His cancer is simply a pattern, a conspicuous killing, that makes the pressure of death salient.  

But we’re not inhuman. And Wiman’s not-dying is insufficient to describe, much less explain, his life and work. He’s published seven collections of his own verse and three books of prose. His most recent, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, is a capstone project of sorts, a gathering of all the genres and paradoxes that his career comprises. It’s almost a flipbook of Wiman’s mental terrain. His orientation toward poetry, God, Texas, even romance emerges, but the fragmentation is persistent. 

Born to the wind-scrubbed Christianity of west Texas, Wiman found his way from a fundamentalist, roughneck youth to a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Before people lowered themselves with a term like “exvangelical,” he was living out a common trajectory of lost religion mediated through art and education.

Some of the details, the timeline, matter here. Love found him before his cancer, and he married the poet Danielle Chapman. Together, they slowly turned to praying, to God. Then God gave him cancer. Despite this—because of this—he published a testimony of renewed faith in The American Scholar in 2007. He expanded on the conceit with My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer in 2013: “What I crave at this point in my life is to speak more clearly what it is I believe.”

He loses his faith. He regains his faith. He gets cancer. He places himself inside that “contingent of thoughtful people” who are “frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion.” He insists that the “casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive.”

Yet what he believes is that Christ is somehow central to existence. He says so again and again. The repetition is a knowing intimation that the beliefs aren’t stable. He has been struck by grace, remains loyal to that memory and reality of grace, but doubts the translation from poetry to relationship, from isolated inspiration to daily demands. “To experience grace is one thing,” he writes in My Bright Abyss, “to integrate it into your life is quite another.” 

In fact, the drive to speak his beliefs “more clearly” results in the whiplash of wishing everyone felt less pressure to proclaim all the time. Every step forward entails a counter with Wiman. His clearest manifesto is against manifestos: “This I believe: that we—priests and penitents, geneticists and journalists, physicists and philosophers—all need to outgrow our need to say, ‘This I believe.’” A positive formation of a negative position—this is the essential Wiman experience. His attachment to language, its shivering into and out of meaning, infects the dogma. 

Or it might be more accurate to say that the poetry, for Wiman, becomes the dogma. “What is the final revelation that life gives you?” he asks. The answer: “There will be no revelation.” At least, not in the sense everyone hopes, not so that the order of art, the plot of the novel as opposed to the contingency of the language, becomes one’s primary experience. Instead, we have many revelations, the “intuitions and epiphanies…so total and unselfconscious” in the moment “that they warrant the name of—if they need a name at all—faith.”

We have, in other words, encounters with whatever force underlies reality, and Wiman, like all Christians, experiences this encounter, and the network between such encounters, as the person of Christ. A great mystery from which, from whom, we receive a revelation that “is not ultimate, but intimate.” It doesn’t matter that “you believe in such connections,” he argues, “what matters is that you apprehend them. And live up to them.” Apprehend, he says, not comprehend. Seize them. Safeguard them. We owe such moments of grace our allegiance, and that allegiance becomes the woof and warp of our faith.

Wiman, in short, is testifying to the call that must be answered. Not simply the call of purpose you thought you might have received in youth, the call to Christ you might have heard about in church, or even the call of denial you never thought was anything more than the accident of your neurons firing in the wrong sequence on the wrong day. Wiman smashes those defenses, the coziness of some Christians’ language as well as the fundamentalism of scientific materialism. “You have been struck,” he writes. He even highlights Jesus’ unavoidable demand, “Who do you say that I am?” He remains a poet in his response, in his advice: “There is no one answer to Jesus’ question, and yet you must wager everything upon it.” 

A confession.

Reading so much Wiman caused a slight depressive episode for me last year. Not just that Wiman is unrelenting in his depiction of the abyss—if you read the longer piece (which is fun and not depressing!!), you’ll see what I mean—but the intensity of his writing in and of itself became a stumbling block. His focus and intelligence and seriousness all stem from an unrelenting curiosity, an almost angry investigation of both our words and the world. I felt upbraided, at times, by my own contentment.

Every aspect of his biography, in fact, seemed a richer, more horrifying, more vivid iteration of my own. I have glancing, formative history with southwestern toughism. He was sniping rabbits out of the back of his pickup. I have a sometimes strained relationship with my father, a distance neither of us can understand or overcome. He’s a big character—all fathers are, maybe—and he looms as a figure of both immense competence and immense vulnerability.

Yet in comparison to Wiman’s doctor dad, my father—our relationship, rather—dims. My dad wasn’t beaten into an inch of his life by a patient at his mental hospital. He wasn’t addicted to opiates amid multiple marriages (just the one remarriage will do, thank you!). He hasn’t (and I hope never will) die in squalor in a hotel room in the flat, open land of his youth. A land which is like Wiman’s west Texas, but less (again, always less) hostile.

Plowing (and re-plowing) through one book after the other last fall and winter, Wiman was ahead of me, and more alert than me, and creating more poetry than me. Worse, he revivified the dance with nihilism I also entertain. You have children, you have a worthwhile job, you have a loving life—or not, depending on the decade—and when the arithmetic of “good things in life equals meaningful life!” still fails, there’s that old friend again. The black dog. The abyss. The truth in partial form, perhaps, but not a lie.

The good news is that Wiman becomes a companion in the very darkness he often conjures. Does he even conjure it? He outlines and reports the darkness, in both poetry and memoir, and his ability to do so is its own resilience. I don’t want to step on the Image piece1 by saying any more, but if you haven’t read Wiman, Zero at the Bone is both an impressive anthology of his best essays, and a bracing introduction to the torments and hopes and beauty he revisits in all his work.

Everyone should read him.

I love you all.

The lockdowns, in fact, bathed Piranesi in a certain light from the moment it debuted. Even when reviewers found insights beyond the all-consuming news, the stay-at-home orders still framed their reading. The labyrinth of Piranesi is an endless, grand manor full of classical architecture and statues, with its own mysterious (literal) seas and tides. A decaying house. A house whose meaning is all secondhand, all representation and echo of the world.2 The only times Piranesi sees someone else is when he meets with a person called the Other for a quick work meeting. They’re both studying the House (as he refers to it)—otherwise, he’s alone. The symbolism is so apt, in terms of September 2020, it feels almost reverse-engineered.

The other typical entry into the meaning of the work is to focus on Clarke’s depiction of “disenchantment.” Mainstreamed by Max Weber around 1918, “disenchantment” is an umbrella term for Western society’s turn to rationalism and materialism as defaults both preceding and bracketing supernatural belief. We don’t expect spirits to pour in or out of us except maybe as metaphors for algorithms and social conditions, or as a plot in film. The House, the labyrinth, is a literalizing of this lost magic. All the old tales of unlikely, Ovidian nature magic are true in Piranesi. They happened. We didn’t simply turn from magic as a belief; the magic went away.

But the absent power left traces. Whatever energy once allowed warlocks to see from the eyes of eagles leaked from the world as a rivulet drains into the earth. And just as a well-worn drainage track can create a cavern underground, so the magic carved out a space between worlds. This is an analogy straight from the book. Magic built a kind of in-between reality as it dissipated, a dimension of ruins. Piranesi is jailed within these ruins. He can see the magic depicted in the statues and halls as in a museum, but it has gone elsewhere.

When I finished Piranesi recently, all of these beautiful links of curiosity remained intact, but they were also less central. The core of it, like all great reads, had shifted with my own life. The House and its isolation felt larger than COVID, more permanent. If COVID lockdowns were a break with the norm, a disruption of life as we expect it, Piranesi’s entrapment felt more internal, more “Midway in the journey of life I came to myself in a dark wood.” The House goes beyond disruption, is more than a spell of isolation.

Susanna Clarke, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, wrote the book during a time she was often restricted to her home. She could anticipate the pain of COVID, both illness and isolation, because she’d lived in its twin ruins before those ruins became dominant across the world.

But even illness writ large is insufficient to my most recent reading. I’m healthy. I’m mobile. I’m not restricted to my home for any reason beyond a nightly bedtime routine with children. What Piranesi is above and beyond all the clever connections to sickness or disenchantment is a defense of the life of the mind as sufficient for a life of meaning, so long as it’s based on love.

Yes. Ahem. Love.

Before being trapped in the labyrinth, Piranesi was Matthew Rose Sorenson, a brilliant young scholar, urbane and ambitious. The reader learns his backstory slowly. As Sorenson, he was investigating a mad English academic and his disciples, transgressive figures of the mid-20th century who believed in magic and sought to recover its uses in the modern world. Sorenson takes one chance too many, though. He meets with one of the disciples alone, the man the reader knows as the Other, and the Other tricks him into the labyrinth, into becoming a lab rat who can report on what he discovers. A place erected by magic, mystery, power, ruin—the labyrinth takes Sorenson’s memories. It remakes him. He becomes Piranesi and forgets the world, forgets Sorenson.

When Piranesi is saved, when his life in the labyrinth is reunited with his life as Matthew Rose Sorenson, he doesn’t recover the past. The before and the after touch in his mind, but they give way to a new, unlikely self. Neither Piranesi of the labyrinth nor Matthew Rose Sorenson of the academy. In this way, the novel is partly a story about aging. The labyrinth is a result of his studies, not merely a break with his normal life but a consequence of it. He’s not where he thought he’d be. No scholarly book, no successful tenure job. Those are washed away within the house. He is worn by the mysterious seas into a new creation. He is reduced to unexpected limitations.

And rather than disenchantment, “alienation” kept occurring to me as a better summary of Piranesi’s condition within the labyrinth. Piranesi isn’t disenchanted, in any sense. He also isn’t depressed or destroyed by his ruins, his labyrinth. And he should be! The product of a dying magic, it’s a world less dynamic than our own. He doesn’t have trees, flowers, the unfiltered warmth of sunlight in June. He doesn’t have blizzards, thunderstorms, the noise of neighbors disrupting his life. There are the House’s statues, the stars, the seaweed, the tide, and his never-ending efforts to survive in a way utterly un-modern. Fish-leather and fish nets and collecting dry seaweed for making fires in the cold months. Compared to reality outside the House, it’s a monochromatic world.

Worse, any object or idea from our own world that does drift in, usually via conversations with the Other, Piranesi doesn’t recognize unless it exists in some form within the House. Staying in the labyrinth steals the world from Piranesi. From the Other’s perspective, a man who lives in the world and only visits the labyrinth, Piranesi has gone mad. He’s a clownish amnesiac, at best. The world from which the ruins have been carved is alien to Piranesi, unless the ruins retain their imprint. It’s a pitiable state.

Clarke doesn’t skip over the pain of Piranesi’s condition. What’s been stolen from him is overwhelming, and even in his beatified myopia, his response to rediscovering his condition as a prisoner is to contemplate murder. The wrong he’s endured is not skin-deep, not reparable within a novel’s neat arc. But neither does he become ironic or cynical or flippantly jaded.3 I hate to reach for the lowest common denominator, but it really is a kind of anti-Game of Thrones sentiment. Clarke meets the grimness of reality every bit as staunchly as George R.R. Martin, but instead of punishing the reader again and again for sipping at narrative dregs of hope, she insists that the world in its tragedy is still grounded on a sort of permanent wonder. The House is Matthew Rose Sorenson’s demise. The House is Piranesi’s delight. They are the same House.

A book about tragedy, about life knocking the plans of youth askew; a book, in short, about the problem of evil,4 Piranesi might be the most hopeful novel I’ve ever encountered that isn’t either naïve or ironic. Even when he is rescued, Piranesi revisits the House. He connects with another one-time prisoner of the labyrinth, a man who fared far worse during his internment, and this man also loves the House. Nature, art, and the study of the world are worth more than fleeting, photographic drive-bys. Beauty and philosophy and the complexity of wondrous design can only be enjoyed fully—can only be understood—if loved.5

The Other, in fact, is the great foil to Piranesi’s love. He pursues the knowledge of the House as doggedly, in his own way, as Piranesi. He wants to understand its power, to reclaim its magic for himself. He is a scholar imitating greater scholars, and yet only Piranesi is able to unwind the labyrinth, not simply its metaphysical benevolence, but the practical ins and outs of its seasons, its tides, its blueprints. The depth of his concrete understanding is facilitated by, is consubstantial with, the depth of his simple love of the House. The other dies in the House, ignorant. Piranesi, too, is made ignorant, even pitiable and pathetic and scarred. But he thrives.

What is remarkable about the novel as a work of art is that the reader believes in Piraneis’s love.6 Or I do, at least. Clarke’s methodical care at detailing Piranesi’s invented names of the months, his encounter with statues that awe him, his care for birds, his care for the Other, whittles at one’s mind. It’d be easy to dismiss the whole project as, “What if Stockholm Syndrome were good, actually?” Except Piranesi doesn’t love his captor as his captor. He loves the House. His pain isn’t minimized, it’s subordinated to an improbable, persistent good that the very means of his destruction reveals.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

Reading:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

Um. Ah. Piranesi is “the most hopeful novel I’ve ever encountered that isn’t either naïve or ironic”?? Maybe I spoke too soon! I’m close to finishing Mary Ann Evans’s masterpiece and will report back!

Links:

and I did a podcast with the luminous on Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz! A good book! A good podcast! A good time had by all! Mr. Spufford, please let me read your Narnia book! That might seem a little out of nowhere, but the world is full of connections: Piranesi is itself a kind of Magician’s Nephew fan fiction.7

I love you all.

Before I continue ruining everyone’s fun, let me clarify that I actually like dumb internet book games! I’m not even as anti-list as other literary snobs. Most such snobs aren’t trying to help other readers find a new book specific to their taste. Most snobs—again, which includes me—think we like only the good books and don’t see any reason to read books which aren’t good and believe everyone else should do the same. There are many excellent novels! Why read bad ones!

As a librarian, though, I’m something like a literary waiter. The average restaurant worker doesn’t want you to eat the bacon-thigh-maker double-cheeseburger special as you dip it in delicious soda to soften the texture. No one wants that.1 But if you tell a waiter that you’d like the biggest, baddest cow-meat on the menu, he’ll point you where you need to go. If you come to my information desk and ask for a dragon romance, an Amish thriller, the latest autofiction about a novelist who’s given up on novel-ing, or anything else, I’ll likewise try to offer you the appropriate read-alike. If you’re a mystery fan, I might steer you toward the higher experience of P.D. James or (for noir) Ross Macdonald, but I will shape my recommendations to your taste.

For this reason, lists can be quite useful. I make lists all the time as part of my job, and who they mostly help aren’t readers, but the librarians and associates advising those readers on what they might enjoy in our collection. Yay (sort of; begrudgingly; only for my day job) lists!

And, in a vacuum, the Great American Novels list from The Atlantic could be worse. It might’ve looked like Esquire’s execrable sci-fi book list. The aforementioned Ross Macdonald, for example, appears with his 1962 outing, The Zebra-Striped Hearse. The Lew Archer series is one of America’s greatest literary artifacts. Hurrah for Macdonald’s literary estate, and congrats to any reader who revisits the noir master because The Atlantic thought to include a stellar example of a truly American genre.

All the same, what this list mostly does is flatter everyone’s vanity to the detriment of useful literary insight. I’ve read Macdonald. I’ve read Lolita. Yay me! Other than that, and even as a hypothetical general guideline, it serves no purpose at all. There is no through-line from Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947) to N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015). There are maybe six people in America who even own both books, and that’s probably because one of them was a gift.2

The editors make it clear in their lighthearted introduction that, “We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, ‘You have to read this; you’ll love it.’” Instead of offering a useful and pointed read-alike map, however, they’ve scattershot titles against the wall, and the result is schizophrenic. “Don’t like House of Leaves? Hm, keep scrolling! Saul Bellow is just around the corner!”

The list, again, is for no one. That doesn’t usually get me going, but if you’re going to play the listicle game, especially with any kind of high-minded sincerity, crafting your guidelines such that House of Leaves receives recognition while Moby-Dick goes unnamed—in a category you chose to call “Great American Novels”—is a waste of time. Go read Toni Morrison. Go read Ross Macdonald. You might even enjoy (3/4ths) of Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.3 But the project is broken as a premise.

Reading:

The Complete Polly and the Wolf, by Catherine Storr

I recently finished this collection of short stories with my daughter. Following a little girl named Polly who lives in England in the middle of the last century, each tale is about a Wolf’s various attempts to eat her. He barges into the house, he tries to talk her into visiting his kitchen, he builds a bomb. Yes, a bomb! Polly is wonderful, but the star of the show is the Wolf.

How do I describe this creature? A fairy-tale villain plopped in post-WWII London, he’s a failure compared to the legends of old. No woodcutter has to cut him open to save Red Riding Hood because he never defeats Red Riding Hood. The first book of stories is called Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, which would be hard enough on him, except the second collection of stories opens with him reading Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf. No one likes to be called an idiot!

But there’s more. The Wolf is Don Quixote for six-year-olds.4 He’s Wile E. Coyote by way of Humbert Humbert. His desire for Polly is funny, usually, but it’s also genuine. He wants to eat her. He wants to eat all the children he sees. The darker, allegorical overtones of this situation aren’t ignored by Storr, but they’re never indulged by her either. The danger of the Wolf might court our fears about the pedophile, but in the end he is a Wolf, and he is hungry.

Interestingly, Storr's career outside of these stories is a kind of distillation of the two sensibilities which make The Complete Polly and the Wolf so rich. First, she wrote several Bible-based picture books for children. The art has that whole Jesus as a beautiful, white hippie problem, but it’s otherwise high-quality. And the stories themselves look well-written. I have no idea what her religious beliefs were in private, but morality matters to Storr. The stakes of doing right and doing wrong are never minimized. The Wolf is almost a cartoon, but never wholly one.

In addition, Storr also wrote Marianne Dreams5, a tale about using nightmares to hurt boys:

In the last Polly and the Wolf story, the Wolf tries to convince Polly that they've had a great time. She’s in a position to rescue him, but first she wants him to promise that he’ll never try to eat her again. He can’t understand why. After all, he does get hungry. Besides, getting chased by him has been fun, hasn't it? Yes, she admits. But it’s also been frightening.

I think short story collections that hit this age range, roughly 5-9 year-olds, are maybe the best medium for the young reader. There are others out there, of course—the original Paddington books, Winnie-the-Pooh, etc.—but most “collections” are usually anthologies. The Wolf and Polly are characters who deserve to be followed from one encounter to the next, and I’m glad we got the chance to do so.

I love you all.

Recently, I had a conversation with a library patron that surprised me. We were discussing whether or not we’d eat human meat. How often does this conversation occur at your local book haven? Look, times have changed. People just want to ask a few questions about foodie cannibalism now and then, and the library is here to serve all comers. What surprised me most about this interaction wasn’t the topic, but the certainty of the patron’s position.

“I’d try human meat,” she said.

“Like, in a survival situation?”

“No, no. If it was just an option at some point in my life. I’d try it.”

I’ve consumed kangaroo, alligator, and rattlesnake. I’ve tried Bambi, Thumper, and I suppose I’d eat Flower if I was desperate. Maybe I’m just weak, sentimental, or stupid, but I wouldn’t eat another person. Having grown up in the Alfred Packer state, I’ve thought about this question more often than I’d like to admit. The imaginary context, though, has always been one of extreme conditions, and my line of thought moralistic. Even if you were frozen or shipwreck-dead, dear reader, I’d like to think I’d die with you rather than dine on you.

II.

Sayaka Murata is a Japanese novelist and short-story writer. Three of her books have been translated into English, including her short story collection, Life Ceremony. I’m not sure a book has ever surprised me more. I knew almost nothing about Murata before I began. She is a literary writer enjoyed by other literary writers and I’d gotten some good vibes hearing her name, so I dove into the only title my library had on hand. Even the cover of her book, if not examined closely, has a semi-cozy and relaxing aura.

Murata is not a horror writer. Probably. The title story of her collection, however, is about eating the remains of other people as a funeral rite. A person dies. A person is prepared as a feast. Funeral-goers honor the person by consuming their edible remains, usually as miso hotpot. Look at the cover again, if you didn’t catch it. That’s a human heart on the left side.

The main character, however, is “one of those people who doesn’t really eat human flesh.” Maho, the protagonist, stands in for us. Her struggle with the story’s sanitized, ritualized cannibalism allows Murata to tackle the moral conundrum explicitly. We, too, don’t think eating human flesh is normal or ethical. (Probably.)

Despite the gonzo premise, there’s a simplicity and plainness to Murata’s style.1 The characters live in the modern world. They discuss social media, their jobs, their lunch breaks, their small city apartments. They go out for drinks. Her settings aren’t dystopian. They’re barely speculative. But even when the stories don’t descend into a kind of softcore Black Mirror experiment, preteens describe the taste of blood from their first French kiss. “I wanted to taste more of Yota’s insides… There was a mouth ulcer, a little hole in Yota. I softly licked it with my tongue, taking care not to hurt him.” Such a decorous description of such a feral instinct.

III.

“Life Ceremony” is not pure allegory, but it’s close. In addition to eating the processed meat of the person being buried, life ceremonies (funerals) also include explicit and public lovemaking. Sex on the streets. Sex outside the funeral home. Sex as a casual effort to make more babies. The world is in post birth-rate decline, and the taboo against sex in public has been obliterated. At least for life ceremonies.

The sex tangent, which becomes more important as the story progresses, solidifies Murata’s allegory. Maho, our protagonist, is a social reactionary. She is confused and disgusted by how the world could have changed so much—eating people, sex stains all over the tarmac any time someone keels over. “When I was little,” Maho remembers, “it was forbidden to eat human flesh. I’m certain it was.”

Murata, of course, has chosen taboos we still hold dear. (Probably.) I don’t think it’s just right-wing commentators who believe we shouldn’t routinely eat human meat. They—let’s assume they’re preppers—might even be less against it than most. But the taboo is firm and current. We agree with Maho’s disgust, or at least find it reasonable. The same with sex on the street.

In this sense, Maho is an incredibly gracious portrait of conservative resistance. Her bewilderment as a moral minority, even though she knows being in the minority is a recent phenomenon, is a mirror image of what your proverbial grandad, or maybe your sister or uncle or mother, might say about any number of moral issues. Drinking, piercings, foul language on the radio, and more.

Sex, though, is front and center for the text, and of course front and center in most modern, post-industrial societies. Murata is many things as a writer, but she isn’t coy. Congratulations on being cool with gay marriage, she implies, but we’re past that. How about some cannibalism? How about human sexuality reduced to bestial, public satisfaction? The new mainstream, progressive values are far enough ahead of our moment that we are made into reactionaries alongside Maho.

The story, inevitably, ends with Maho embracing the new funeral rites. She not only consumes one of her closest friends, but helps prepare his meat. He was a gastro snob. He left all kinds of details about how he should be eaten, and she joins his mother and sister as they prepare his various cuts into various meals. There’s no procreative coupling for her right after his funeral, but she does meet a gay man on the beach who, well, offers his semen in a bottle. Which she uses. While walking naked into the ocean. It’s a wild story!

The story’s thesis, again, isn’t surprising or even that interesting, in my opinion: “Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming.” But the depiction is generous, maybe defiant. Murata basically accepts every argument of every social conservative regarding progressive moral decline and says, “Yes. Fair. But the new horror will be beautiful, too.”

IV.

As a collection, Life Ceremony reduces humanity’s spiritual horizon to the body. A character stops seeing her city as separate buildings or the citizens as separate people. Instead, the buildings start to feel like hosts, like living animals, and the people inside like their organs, no different from how our body encases a coordinating heart and liver and spleen, active on their own but subjugated to a greater mass. People die when they die, for good, but we give them an afterlife by consuming them or (in a different outing) recreating them as furniture and clothing.2

What could be simple satire of eating meat or wearing leather is instead turned in on itself, the grotesque mesmerizing by dint of its extremity. The body is our essence, and yet a submission to its animal individuality precipitates a spiritual transformation. She wants to stuff the sublime into literal bento boxes, the order of modern (sub)urban lives a container for the vast and bizarre and wondrous.3 It’s like a whole new genre being made before your eyes. Call it joyful body horror. Somehow, she succeeds.

Unfortunately, one lesson of adulthood is that your values are not embedded in your temperament. Compassion above all, in my opinion. But I am often the (fair, respectful) iron hand of the library. “Knock, knock,” I tap on the men’s bathroom door. “A metallic burning smell was reported and I’m required to check in on you.” I am lied to. I am yelled at. I am helping yet another patron figure out how to overcome the never-ending digital hurdles between themselves and a job at Wal-Mart, their tax return, the aid which the state promises but withholds from anyone who can’t survive the labyrinth of clicks erected as a punishment for needing aid.

Anyway. This post is somehow, impossibly, about Lord of the Rings.

I recently wrote a “15 Books in 15 Minutes” blurb that I’ve seen other literary bloggers do in the past. Not, to be clear, that I’m a blogger. I’m just bored. I tried the experiment while at my library, sticking to the time limit even as I was interrupted with questions ranging from the simple to the complex. I knew immediately I should put Lord of the Rings on the list. But I didn’t, for some reason. Over the course of my life, there’s probably no book I’ve thought about more, except maybe the Bible. Not intellectually or rigorously, perhaps, but Middle-earth is a consistent reference point.

I’m not especially interested in why I didn’t include it. Time panic, mostly, and a desire to surprise myself, probably. The books I listed were fine, even true to this moment in my life. Maybe I gave Annie Dillard too much credit. But the result is that I’ve been thinking about Lord of the Rings even more than usual.

These days, I often feel that enchantment is somehow born of ignorance. Parenthood can be very disenchanting, for example. The mythic landscape, good or bad, of your own childhood is revealed as more or less happenstance. We lived at such a place and for such reasons and attended such schools because our parents found themselves painted into a corner of opportunity, values, and temperament they rarely had much choice in devising. There’s a difference between understanding this intellectually and experiencing it from the other side of the magic curtain.

And yet Lord of the Rings, despite all its imitators and adaptations and misinterpretations, is enchantment for adults. I discovered them young enough I can’t guarantee I’d find either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings as captivating as an adult-only read. But in re-reading Tolkien, I’m not drawn to the fantasy in the same way I was at age twelve. For one thing, did you ever notice how everyone correctly predicts/prophesies what might happen, good or bad, and yet that foresight helps the Fellowship… not one bit?1 Elrond has a foreboding feeling about Pippin and Merry, but still they go with the Ring and—Elrond was right!—the Shire is burned.

Adulthood, and parenting, is often this sort of Pyrrhic correctness on repeat. I maintain our democratic policies on library bathroom usage, I block the tile gaps where drugs might be hidden, I train employees on procedure and process—the drugs are still here, the non-using patrons are still lost in our increasing digital abyss. Merry and Pippin should stay home? Yes. But reality is mostly indifferent to foresight.2

Tolkien is never as cheap and simple as all the summaries of Tolkien. His enchantment doesn’t depend on ignorance or escapism. I don’t finish Lord of the Rings and wish I could just start all over and, you know, live in Middle-earth. Tolkien may have inspired, but he didn’t create, a literary theme park. The power of Lord of the Rings is that the more you know—about languages, about Nordic myths, about regional British accents, about different kinds of trees—the more wonderful the world.

I’m not suggesting that Tolkien is a cure-all for my listlessness, my sense (at times) that my efforts are being wasted in most areas of my life. Almost the opposite. Tolkien has withstood my general, and my acute, disenchantment. I have become a literary snob, a father, a librarian obsessed with the local problems of our damnable (often corporate) bureaucracies. I don’t even read Tolkien to forget the atrocities in Israel and Gaza, or the ones we funded in Saudi Arabia and Yemen before we funded those in Palestine. Tolkien survives living in the world. Tolkien, impossibly, is almost anti-escapism. If you read him well, he draws you further into the complexity, the paradox, of such goodness among such horror and waste. The dead are legion. The world is burning.3 The hobbits are correct to love their gardens.

Maybe Tolkien was too big a symbol for my list, a cultural presence who provokes too many reactions. Whatever the case, I think about him all the time.

I love you all.

I came across a simple game among lit bloggers recently: “Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.”

This is a horrible, terrible exercise akin to torture. But it does produce results different from your “favorite reads.” Mostly. I made myself attempt the above without reference to lists, of which I keep many. My brain is desiccated playdough these days. Any outside force and it crumbles. “Name…FIFTEEN… books? Ah. A book. I definitely know what the word ‘book’ means. I am… booking it.”

Anyway. I added a few rules as I wrote the answers. I tried to pick books that mattered to my whole life and not just to my life as a writer. I tried to be honest when a book suggested itself as to its ongoing influence. Moby-Dick probably should have been on this list,1 but I’m not sure what it would displace. I also told myself, in no uncertain terms, that I wouldn’t sift through the results like some Kabbalist scrying arcane insights from my inner life. More on that after the break. For now, here are the results.

1. The Gospel of John

2. The Major Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins

3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

4. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West

5. A Secular Age, Charles Taylor

6. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

7. The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

8. Godric, Frederick Buechner

9. Ulysses, James Joyce

10. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

11. The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis

12. The Book of Common Prayer

13. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe

14. For the Time Being, Annie Dillard

15. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson

Not a lot of surprises, to be honest. One sub-rule was that I had to choose a single selection from the Bible and not simply the entire collection of scripture. The Gospel of John, especially the first and fifteenth chapters, was my immediate instinct. One day I’m sure I’ll even read it again. Hopkins is the definitive “I became a different reader/thinker after encountering his work” entry. Not only the poems, but the way he wrestles with technique, faithfulness, despair, and even his take on haecceity, which he calls “inscape.”

More than one entry appears because of a single idea or section, such as Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. The end of chapter four, “The Ethics of Elfland,” is a landmark passage for me. Similarly, The Consolation of Philosophy gives one of the only convincing responses to the problem of evil I’ve ever read—not that it explains away the issue. The problem of evil is intractable, in my opinion. But Boethius discerns a hint of justice in our world when one considers the issue of moral (person on person) evil, a hint which possibly augurs a greater and spiritual justice as yet unexperienced.

As we head down the list, things get shakier. Godric by Frederick Buechner is a little like Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, novels which are still among my favorite to read and which also changed me as a writer. I could have included, possibly, The Sound and the Fury and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, as well. Instead, I went with Ulysses, which creates conflict and narrative at the level of the sentence, as in how he writes his sentences scene to scene, in a way that enters your blood if you’re not careful. And I wasn’t.

I won’t belabor the rest, except to say that C.S. Lewis had to be fit in somewhere. He shaped too much of my inner life as both a child and an emerging adult. There were a few of his books I could have included,2 but not only is The Silver Chair the purest adventure novel in The Chronicles of Narnia, it also features Puddleglum. I’d do anything for Puddleglum.

Maybe the list will change ten years from now. I hope so, honestly. The more interesting question, not to be answered, is how it might change if the challenge was, “Five Books in Five Minutes.” Possibly I’d sweat blood. Almost certainly, Denis Johnson would rocket up the list.

I love you all.

One book, or rather one volume of sixty-six books, I didn’t get a chance to consider for this project was the Protestant Bible. And that’s not all. I didn’t review the works of Plato, Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Ovid, or Epictetus. I hardly tackled nonfiction of any kind, and I side-stepped plays and movies and other narrative forms outright. My aim was narrow: to grab some of the best known “boring, book-nerd” novels and shake the dust of their undisturbed covers into the eyes of my enemies. I’m talking about the YA lit community, to be clear. (I’m coming for you [quick Google search], Sarah Dessen!)

But the Bible nagged me. Part of the problem was that I was reading it regularly for the first time in years. This is always a dangerous pursuit. People chatter about the goriness and gruesomeness and general “wow, okay” factor of the Bible, for example, but the Bible’s violence is far more disorienting and profound than our pat debates.

The below scene in 1 Samuel, for example:

Then Samuel said, “Bring here to me Agag the king of the Amalekites.” And Agag came to him cheerfully. Agag said, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” And Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.1

Thankfully, the novelist Christopher Beha has been making the rounds lately with a talk on why the novel is necessarily a secular art form. I haven’t seen the talk. I’ve barely read the Q&A linked in the previous sentence. But that won’t stop me from summarizing his opinion! As B.D. McClay () puts it in a recent newsletter, he discusses “the novel as a ‘secular’ form in the sense that novels are a way we pass the time.” They aren’t inherently antithetical to the religious or moral life, but neither are they meant to redeem or purify us. It’s an illuminating and helpful distinction. Novels aren’t sacred, and to make them sacred is to undermine, as Beha says, their “power and possibility.”

All the same, I don’t want my thesis, “All [Classic Works of Fiction] Are Funny,” to be saved by genre hair-splitting. I know the Bible isn’t the same as Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit,2 and while most “Bible as Literature” curricula strike me as an overreach of theory and an underestimating of transcendence, the Bible is The Classic—poetry, prophecy, myth, reportage, narrative—the actual canon from which all canon wars of English literature derive. It has to be funny!

Now, obviously, there are parts of scripture which we find funny that I don’t think the text intends as a punchline. I’m out of my depth here, but when the prophet Elisha curses some youths who call him “baldy” and a couple of she-bears maul forty-two young men (possibly children), I don’t think we’re supposed to laugh. We might re-enact the scene as a humorous skit for a summer bible camp during middle school that absolutely kills and is sort of a core experience of Being Funny On Stage—for some people—but the violence is grim and the situation mystifying. The number of youths alone suggests Elisha was either being mobbed or decimated a local playground. Not funny.

Likewise, I still have friends who pass around Ezekiel 23:20 as a kind of evangelical Rickroll: “[She] lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions.” Some of us are children forever. Still, the sophomoric humor isn’t exactly of the text. The laughter stems from the fact that Ezekiel invented “hung like a horse.”

Funny? On purpose?

A quick internet search for “Is the Bible funny?” will result in lots of affirmatives, but few convincing examples. The best of the supporting evidence includes a bit from 2 Chronicles 21:20 where an aside about a king dying reassures the reader that he passed “to no one’s regret.” There’s also a precedent-setting monograph, apparently, about the humor of Jesus. I haven’t read it, but I do think the words of Christ have the best case (besides Proverbs) for landing setups on purpose. I can’t imagine a preacher saying, “If your child asks for an egg, will you give him a scorpion,” without a glint in the eye.

My favorite funny verse, though, is about Abraham: “Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’”3 As good as dead! That’s a joke. It’s a joke. It’s an innuendo about Abraham’s virility and even if it weren’t, there’s no way to read it that isn’t amusing. God’s penchant for transforming the unlikely into the glorious is compressed into “Abraham, a guy as good as dead.” I could use this with my children in a year and get a chuckle. “And then at the age of forty, your father’s grandfather, a man as good as dead, begat your grandfather.”

The broader conclusion is that only familiarity, and often study, will demystify the great books, to say nothing of the Holy Book. The jokes are there, in other words, but they’re often in-jokes.4

A Short List of Other Great Works of Art that Are Humorous

• Religio Medici by Thomas Browne (1642)5

• The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald (1990)

• The Seventh Seal dir. by Ingmar Bergman (1957)

• Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci (1503-17)

• The Iliad by Homer (8th C. BC)

• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-72)

• Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

• The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (1915)

• The Fugitive by Ford, Harrison (1993)

Some Exceptions at which I May Have Smiled But Did Not Laugh

• Confessions by Saint Augustine (400)

• A Hidden Life dir. by Terrence Malick (2019)

• Nursery Frieze I by John Piper (1936)

• F•R•I•E•N•D•S

I love you all.

“Luther,” played by Ving Rhames, is the other most consistent presence, a name with religious power that’s only heightened by enemies like “Solomon Lane” and “Owen Davian” (as in David). If Ethan Hunt has a match in terms of steely resolve and spy skillset, its the I’m-not-making-this-up “Ilsa Faust.” Faust! You won’t believe this, but in her first Mission: Impossible outing she pretty much makes a deal with the devil. The conventions harken to Buster Keaton films, where people are called “Steamboat Bill” (guess his job!) and “Johnny Gray” (a Confederate soldier). Even Hunt’s temporary, girl-next-door wife is the sweet “Julia Meade.” No one is here for subtlety and nuance.

What every Mission: Impossible film centers, however, is the daring physicality of Tom Cruise. He hangs parallel to the ground using only core strength and The Bridge to Total Freedom. He rides motorcycles at speeds and around hairpin corners that are usually reserved for cartoon roadrunners. He clings to the outside of an actual airplane, performs a HALO jump, and in this next film he separates his soul into six essential objects of his past that enable him to live forever! Rumor has it not even the horcruxes use stunt doubles.

But the badassery of it all, the way we gawk at Tom Cruise continually not killing Tom Cruise, is a betrayal of Ethan Hunt. Hunt, for all his zeal and courage, is an idiot. The films even think he’s an idiot. The premise of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, one of the strongest in the series, is basically, “You know how Ethan Hunt always gives terrorists world-destroying weapons ‘as a ploy’ because they might kill someone he’s known for half a movie? That finally causes some problems!”

Any warmth we feel for Hunt—as opposed to awe for Cruise in the role of Hunt—comes from his continually getting his ass whupped. That’s a technical phrase. He loses fights to pretty much everyone, he falls off of buildings, he crashes cars, he breaks his ribs, his only method for taking down a helicopter is to fly another helicopter into it, and he drowns at least once. People are saving Hunt almost as often as he’s saving them. If we believe in his friendships—it’s unclear if Hunt or Cruise experience genuine emotions aside from Willpower—it’s because he’s vulnerable in the most brutal sense. All elements of the story, even the relationships, are developed fist against fist.

The way Cruise is battered about is also why he’s the greatest living American action star. I don’t mean he’s anything like the prissy sideshows of Fast and Furious fame, men who have it written into their contracts that they can’t lose a fight. Cruise’s models of behavior are purer and more talented. I’m talking, of course, about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The way Cruise will hang from an airplane or jump across actual buildings is a direct continuation of the silent era’s wonder stunts. He combines grace and comedy in a startling balance, like a Formula 1 Race hosted by Jackass.

The modern precedent for this high-wire juggling is Jackie Chan. No one will ever top Chan’s agility-cum-comedy; he maxed out both categories. Climbing ladders to nowhere and fighting enemies with any mop or towel he could get his hands on, Chan was hanging from moving vehicles when Cruise was still mixing drinks with Elisabeth Shue.

But Cruise has captured the essence of Chan’s gift, a paradox of talent that Buster Keaton more or less immortalized. They are the world’s most capable clowns. Only a genius of mettle would climb a rope dangling from a helicopter in midflight. Only a comedian would fall down so they could do it again. Long live the Mission: Impossible circus, a show I’ll continue to visit for as long as Cruise’s body can take the beating.

I love you all.