Note: I have a new book coming out! Storyknife is my first collection of short stories in 15 years, a collection of metafictions, experiments, and good old-fashioned tales about white liberal America teetering on the brink of (and then going over the brink of) disaster. It’ll be released as a paperback original by Ecco in August 2026. Please pre-order it now! There’s a sneak peek of the cover below.

Since last summer I’ve been highlighting stories in the collection in brief posts like this. “The Axe” was originally published in Tin House in 2014, and was never published online, so you’ll have to wait until the book comes out to read the whole thing.

One more quick note: I will be teaching an online class on the art of the short story in May, over three subsequent Wednesday nights. Please consider signing up! It’s appropriate for any skill level and many students have found it helpful. More details below.

If any story in Storyknife deserves to explain itself, it’s “The Axe.” Here’s how it starts:

So today it’s snowing, an early March snow, the flakes loose and wayward, turning to dark spots on the pavement as soon as they touch down, and I want to write you a story that is as mild, as light to the touch, as this snow. Start on Commerce Street. If you don’t know it—and why would you?—it’s a side street, a lane, off Bedford in the West Village of Manhattan. A hushed street of rowhouses and low stone apartment buildings, some with wrought-iron gateways and interior courtyards, where nearly every house number has a historical plaque underneath it. Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here; so did Aaron Copland, Lillian Hellman, and Frank Zappa, who practiced with the Mothers of Invention in the basement of 104. It’s the kind of street where everything exciting, where history itself, has already happened. A risk museum, a bohemia museum. We’re in 1994, which is after the end of history anyway. So let’s just say this: there’s a boy, a sixteen-year-old boy, who lives here in an apartment his mother bought with the proceeds of the sale of her first marriage. The boy’s name is Alexander, not Alex or Sasha, Alexander. And the man’s name, his tutor’s name, is Paul.

I started writing “The Axe” soon after we’d moved to New York in the summer of 2012, when our younger kid was two and entering preschool, and our older one was registered for kindergarten at PS 3 on Hudson Street in the West Village. Our walk to PS 3 took us through some of the most beautiful and famous streets in the Village—and if you know anything about that part of New York, you probably know that it’s long since transformed from a raucous home to artists, musicians, and writers to a sedate, buttoned-up, fabulously expensive refuge for bankers, celebrities, and trust-fund babies from all over the world. (If you’re curious, John Strausbaugh’s The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Villains, Radicals and Rogues is an excellent history, published around the same time we moved in.)

I wanted to write something that captured the otherworldliness of the neighborhood, but I didn’t want to set it in the 21st century—I wanted to capture the Village in the nineties, when I first encountered it, when it was already well-gentrified but not quite the cultural cliche it is today. The story, I thought, was going to be a fleeting but painful memory, a kind of referred pain or whiff of ugliness. In this case, it’s a brief but complicated and troubling sexual encounter between a teenage boy and his SAT tutor, who’s in his mid-twenties—an encounter that happens to take place at the same time the beginning of the Rwandan genocide is reported on TV.

If that sounds random, it’s supposed to be. One of my longtime fascinations as a writer is the way news of global events, global tragedies, enter our daily lives—that is, the relation between the small and seemingly trivial events in our ordinary reality and the tragic, often ghastly events we’re called upon to witness, in a way, through reading, hearing, or watching the news. In “The Axe,” which is metafiction through-and-through, I pose the problem directly to the reader, this way:

This story is about the problem of scale. This story is about the problem of only being a story. It may be that there is a lesson to be learned here about, for example, bourgeois estrangement from political agency through hierarchies of taste. But a story can’t be a lesson. It can only be itself.

The thing about being a writer of fiction is this: you spend a lot of time having feelings which are not really your feelings to have. Or conjuring feelings in others that aren’t your feelings to give. The risk is that you lose touch with any sense of reality and just float around in a fog. You can almost imagine handing the reader an ax and saying, here, solve this problem for me. Prove to me I’m real. Free me from this mildness.

Almost.

That last bit, about a writer losing all touch with reality, isn’t theoretical at all. It’s a pressing concern for anyone who spends their career in the arts, as I remarked in my last post about the structural violence of cultural elites.

The other point that will always stand out to me about “The Axe” (which will be apparent to anyone who encountered the story in Tin House years ago) is that in revising it for Storyknife I changed the gender of the teenager—that is, Alexander was originally a girl. Why? I’m not sure. Something always bothered me about that first version of the story, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I wanted to distance the story from any associations with my own teenage years, maybe. In writing fiction, the revision process (as much as the original composition process) happens by instinct, and here I felt the need to displace it, make it further away from my life, in order to see it more clearly. The relationship is troubling and risky either way (that’s what the story’s about!)—all I can say is that once I made the change, it resonated with me in a way it never had before.

Another tiny revision? Originally the title was “The Ax.” “Ax” or “axe” are both valid spellings of the word, and for some reason, when the Tin House copy editor queried my choice, I dug in my heels and defended our American right not to add the silent E. Then I told myself: this is sillye. Let it goe. There’s no such thinge as the “creepinge E.” Time only moveth forward! For ye god’s sake, chillaxe!

Photo credit: An anonymous photo of Commerce Street, location of “The Axe,” with some digital alterations by yours truly.

In 1977 a coalition of French intellectuals signed an open letter on what they described as the “sexual liberation” of children. Protesting the arrest and pre-trial detention of three men for “non-violent” sexual acts with children aged 12-13, the author of the open letter, Gerald Matzneff, wrote, “We consider that there is a manifest disproportion, on the one hand, between the characterization of "crime" which justifies such severity, and the nature of the facts alleged; on the other hand, between the obsolete nature of the law and the daily reality of a society that tends to recognize in children and adolescents the existence of a sexual life.” The signers of this letter, which argued that age-of-consent laws are inherently oppressive, included Francis Ponge, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Philippe Sollers, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean-François Lyotard, an intergenerational hit parade of the postwar French intellectual scene. Another opponent of age-of-consent laws who didn’t sign the letter (for reasons too complicated to go into here) was Michel Foucault, who argued forcefully throughout his later career “that boys, even preadolescent boys, are old enough to exercise their own sexuality freely. That is why he thought the legal age of consent should be dramatically lowered.” (These are the words of his biographer James Miller.)

Although it’s almost certain that Foucault did have sex with pre-adolescent boys at least at one period in his life, he didn’t make it a central part of his writing—unlike Matzneff, the author of the 1977 open letter, who openly admitted to engaging in child sex tourism in the Philippines and elsewhere, and who remains a member of the French literary elite (having won a major prize as late as 2009) even though another of his victims, Vanessa Springora, wrote a bestselling 2020 memoir, Consent, which initiated a criminal investigation (later closed due to the statute of limitations). What Foucault did, like Matzneff and many of his intellectual peers in the mid-to-late 1970s in particular, was provide cover, even in some cases encouragement, for other men who wanted to justify having sex with children and teenagers.

One of the men who benefited from that permissive atmosphere was another Gerald: Gerald Fremlin, second husband of the Canadian writer (and future winner of the Nobel Prize) Alice Munro, who sexually molested Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, beginning when she was nine, in 1976. From the accounts of nearly everyone who knew him (including Munro and Skinner) Fremlin fancied himself an intellectual and iconoclast who talked openly about children’s sexuality and the hypocrisy of age-of-consent laws. In letters he wrote decades after the abuse, he used the same rhetoric in refusing to apologize for his acts. (He, too, was protected by statutes of limitation.) Alice Munro apparently wasn’t aware of the abuse until Andrea Skinner confronted her about it when Skinner was an adult; after that (and perhaps even before), Munro made the themes of this intimate family drama central in her short stories.

In a piece about Munro and the revelations for the Washington Post (RIP) I wrote the following:

Many adults now in their fifties and sixties are still dealing with the emotional fallout of being a child in an era when their liberated parents—liberated for good and necessary reasons!—were treating them as an afterthought. Or as a target. Knowing that Munro was one of those adults, and then looking back at her work, I don’t feel angry, much less interested in opining about whether she should be “canceled.” (Her work has been read, studied and internalized by writers for 50 years; it’s not going anywhere.) Fiction writers take the material they’re given—the raw mass of their lived experience—and make something new out of it, something that may seem lifelike but is outside of life, isolated and contained. You can produce great art that way, especially if you’re Alice Munro, but there is a real psychological risk involved, and sometimes a moral risk—to others. As I put it in one of my own short stories: “The thing about being a writer of fiction is this: you spend a lot of time having feelings which are not really your feelings to have. Or conjuring feelings in others that aren’t your feelings to give. The risk is that you lose touch with any sense of reality and just float around in a fog.”

I can’t know if Alice Munro felt that way, but I strongly suspect she did. She chose denial. She chose over and over to shelter and defend a pedophile, because anything else would have threatened her art.

Why does pedophilia matter so much, why do we spend so much time discussing it? Contrary to what many otherwise intelligent people believed in the 1970s, it does irreparable harm to children and adolescents, who are not, in fact, capable of giving informed consent to adults who want to do things to them they don’t understand. It’s inherently a form of exploitation, domination, and violence. It’s a nexus for other kinds of exploitative power, as we’ve seen with the release of the Epstein Files: blackmail, extortion, corruption of every kind, on every level, from bizarrely small favors to rape, imprisonment, torture, possibly even murder.

Third—a point that isn’t discussed enough—it’s an affectation shared by men (and a very small number of women) who think of themselves as occupying the very pinnacle of cultural life—intellectual, social, even artistic prominence and influence. This is a theme that stretches from Plato’s Symposium to medieval artistic coteries centered around deranged aristocrats to de Sade to the English gothic novel to Lolita to Woody Allen, who collaborated closely with Epstein over the course of many years and clearly identified with him.

And fourth: because it has an aura of elite knowledge, exclusivity, and power, because it’s so difficult to prosecute and easy to protect (if only by looking the other way), sexual violence against children warps the world around it, in ways that aren’t always easy to see. Let me explain what I mean, limiting my scope to the literary world. Sexual violence against children and teenagers is present (as fictional subject matter, and sometimes as documentation) in the work of transgressive writers like Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Nabokov, John Irving, Richard Brautigan—and depending on how you feel about their work, it can be seen as inherently unethical and exploitative, or ethically provocative, or a representation of the limits of the imagination. (The fact that Epstein was fascinated by Lolita, even literally writing lines from it on the bodies of girls he victimized, should give the lie, once and for all, to W.H. Auden’s sententious argument that “poetry makes nothing happen.”)

But pedophilia and abusive sex is also present in the work of much more conventional and normative writers like Alice Munro—alluded to, in the margins, carefully elided, but there all the same. Fremlin’s abuse warped Alice Munro’s writing (by her own choice), and because Munro is one of the most influential fiction writers of her time, it has seeped in small and large ways into the work of younger writers who held her up as a model, including me. This is a subtle kind of violence that is very hard to quantify; through layers and layers of denial, euphemism, misrepresentation, it gets worked into the very fabric of our language, our symbolic associations, our value systems. There is a powerful reward system in place for writers and other artists whose work seems “apolitical,” emotionally forgiving, nuanced, or “generous,” who don’t discuss uncomfortable subjects and never name names, who avoid referring to racism, economic exploitation, imperialism, gender-based violence. Those are often the people who get prominent positions or major awards—and in return, make it their business to suppress protest, truth-telling, and factual reporting on situations like the Epstein scandal.

If you spend time around people in that echelon, it’s hard not to notice an uncomfortable fact: their work and their CVs might be impressive and distinctive, but usually their behavior is not. Power, wealth, and discretion, it turns out, often make people quite boring—although the culture around them never wants to admit it. James Miller, Foucault’s biographer, again: “Human beings who are extraordinarily privileged because of great accomplishments often find themselves able to flout the conventional rules…with comparative impunity. Foucault was always testing limits. As he became more famous, it became a bit easier for him to test limits ever more freely.” You might call this an unconscious observation about the banality of elitism: people who perceive themselves to be one-of-a-kind geniuses, whose behavior doesn’t fall within the safe limitations of bourgeois morality, often transgress in precisely the same ways. Foucault’s sexual interest in young boys wasn’t intellectually interesting or politically transformative: it was a fixation he shared with many other men of his age and demographic, or, as he himself might have put it, a given logic of power relations. It diminishes him—one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century!—to the level of Gerald Fremlin, a garden-variety sweaty suburban ghoul.

In the end the real question isn’t about sexuality per se but about power: why do we give so much of it away to elites in the first place, why are we so parasocially drawn to certain certain artists and thinkers to the point of considering them secular saints, why do we enshrine them and assume they can do no wrong? The flip side of cancel culture, we might say, is reward culture—the disproportionate resources (money, prizes, jobs) and adulation that flow to a tiny number of stars at the very top of their fields, what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture.” Until we can unwind that habit of thinking, we’ll be trapped in a cycle of exposure, scandal and fallout until the seas rise and the billionaires have nowhere left to escape to.

Note: I have a new book coming out! Storyknife is my first collection of short stories in 15 years, a collection of metafictions, experiments, and good old-fashioned tales about white liberal America teetering on the brink of (and then going over the brink of) disaster. It’ll be released as a paperback original by Ecco in August 2026. Please pre-order it now! There’s a sneak peek of the cover below. Since last summer I’ve been highlighting stories in the collection in brief posts like this. “The Empties” was originally published in the New Yorker in 2014; you can read it online here.

One more quick note about this Substack: I’ve added a paid subscription feature which is completely optional. All my posts will remain public. If you want to support my writing by signing up for a paid subscription, it’s $5/month, much appreciated but not necessary.

In the summer of 2008, Sonya and I were staying in a rental house in Brookfield, Vermont with our new baby, Mina (whose name is now Micah) while I taught at the summer residency of the Vermont College of Fine Arts writing program. Mina developed a fever, and the nearest pediatrician we could find—this was in the days before urgent care—was twenty minutes away in South Royalton, Vermont. The pediatrician was a kind sixty-ish woman with silver braids, who it turned out was in the first class of women at Yale (Sonya and I went to Yale); we had a great time talking with her, Mina was totally healthy, and South Royalton was a prototypically beautiful central Vermont town with a large town green (complete with gazebo and Civil War monuments)…so of course my thoughts turned to the end of civilization, starvation, famine, and terror.

Not right away. I think I scrawled down the idea for “The Empties” around 2010 and wrote the story in bits and pieces while I was finishing Your Face in Mine; I sent it to my agent in early 2014, and the New Yorker accepted it while I was on book tour in Berkeley that August. This was at a time when a new (or new-ish) kind of dystopian writing seemed to be everywhere; what I call “near-future dystopian fiction,” meaning a prediction of what the writer thinks might happen in the next few decades, as opposed to more classic dystopian fiction (like, say, 1984 or Mad Max or Blade Runner) which takes place in a far-off time. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, both published in 2010, were very much on my mind as I was writing it.

The premise of “The Empties” is classic post-apocalypticism: there’s been a total collapse of the national power grid and, not long after, all forms of communication—email, Internet, radio, TV—leaving the residents of South Royalton to fend for themselves. Our main character (we only know her as “J”) is a young woman who hasn’t lived in town long and isn’t a Vermont native; she moved to South Royalton with her boyfriend and lives in a rented vacation house belonging to out-of-towners who will never return. It’s now several years after the blackout, and quite a few of the town’s former residents—including her boyfriend—have already died, of untreated illnesses, hunger, or suicide.

I wanted to do two things in this story: first, make it a believable post-apocalyptic environment, and second, make it a metafictional commentary on the post-apocalyptic narratives we already know, so that the characters aren’t sure which kind of story they’re living out. Although I wrote and published the story before Stranger Things aired, “The Empties” now reminds me a little of what the Duffer brothers originally envisioned for that show—a crazy quilt of 1980s clichés, but arranged in such a way that there’s a viable drama peeking up underneath.

The problem with that intention now, of course, is that the idea of a authoritarian American government invading towns and cities and murdering civilians isn’t a dystopian fiction but a present reality, and the questions at the end of the story about how Americans can organize and respond is a very real one. I wrote it in a tongue-and-cheek fashion to feel like something out of Rambo or Red Dawn; if I were writing it today, I would do it very differently, taking the question of violent resistance much more seriously. It’s just one tiny example of how what seemed like the material for near-future dystopian fiction a decade ago has in fact come to pass, and the question of what-narrative-are-we-in has lately turned me toward much more serious books, like Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism (which I highly recommend).

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that (in a strange coincidence) my writer friend Rachel Khong posted about “The Empties” a few weeks ago on her own Substack, Short Story Short. Here’s some of what she had to say:

Reading “The Empties” doesn’t make me want to become a doomsday prepper. It makes me want to cultivate a better, more interesting imagination. It’s impossible to make sense of anything right now—it’s totally senseless. But what makes some sense to me is rejecting values that were never mine: homogeneity, depersonalization, categorization. I want to believe in every person as singular, valuable, precious, richly interesting.

Rachel also has a book of stories coming out this year: My Dear You, out in April from Knopf. I’m very excited to see it.

Another post from the archives! This is a passage from White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination about my favorite movie of all time, Harold and Maude. Bud Cort, who was best known for playing Harold (though he has many other excellent acting credits) died yesterday at age 77.

I saw Harold and Maude for the first time at summer camp, in the summer of 1988, when I was thirteen. It was, unapologetically, nerd camp: the Center for Talented Youth, on the campus of Scripps College, a Mission-style villa in the mountains outside Los Angeles, with fountains, lots of wrought iron, improbably green lawns, cool, echoing tiled rooms. All these details matter in some way. My camp friends were the artsy ones, with goth or punk affiliations; Shoshana, Rachel, Sean, Gabby. They were all two or three years older, sneaked cigarettes, quoted Wilde, and dispensed all kinds of worldly knowledge; they said this movie, above all others, would change my life.

In the first scene—filmed in such low light that at first it’s difficult to distinguish one object from another—a young man in a three-piece suit, filmed almost entirely from the shoulders down, moves around a richly appointed Mission-style room, lighting candles and incense, putting a record on the hi-fi (Cat Stevens, “Don’t Be Shy”), writing a note on a side table, pinning it to his lapel, finally climbing onto a chair and kicking it away, leaving his shoes swinging in midair.

This is a faked suicide: a moment later, and then over and over in the first third of the movie, his face appears in the pose of pretend death. Harold Chasen is a fatherless only child of an obscenely wealthy family; he’s dropped out of prep school and lives with his mother in a mansion near Big Sur. All this takes place in 1971. To draw attention to himself, to pass the time, to channel his otherwise unfocused rage and despair, he stages his own death. In one of these scenes, he imitates a Vietnamese monk’s self-immolation, using a dummy and a disappearing trick; when he reappears, unharmed, and fully dressed, in front of his mother’s fury, he looks at the camera and smiles.

He knows the viewers are with him. Who is he? An absurdly large puffy Windsor knot that only makes him look more childlike, a boy in a man’s suit, with a boy’s overgrown bowl haircut and slight dimples. He’s acting. Everything in his life is a performance, between quotation marks, “as if.” Except for one ambiguous feature: his face is extremely white, several tones lighter than his mother’s skin. One word for it would be pallid. Deathly, or proto-Goth.

Is Harold’s extreme whiteness part of his performance, or is it the condition of his life? The goths I knew as a teenager—those who used that term and those who embraced the symbolism without it—used makeup but also stayed out of the sun, using their bodies as little as possible. I think they knew that belonging to a subculture was a way of making wishful thinking look permanent, as if their hearts really were on their sleeves. To be goth, to wear death drag, is a way of making ordinary life look unbearably dull and cloying and lamely theatrical by comparison. Reverend Moody, in Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” was in some ways the first goth; on his deathbed he accused everyone in the town of secretly wearing the same black veil.

In her review of Harold and Maude, Pauline Kael found the Cat Stevens lyrics that fill nearly every interstice in the movie unforgivable; she called them “mush-minded.” Out of context, they might be; as part of the movie, they create the tension between performance and feeling that feels unbearable and is meant to be unbearable:

Don’t be shy—just let your feelings roll on by

Don’t wear fear—or nobody will know you’re there

Only when Harold, the performance artist with an audience of one—the way all adolescent artists-to-be grasp the nightmare that their parents may be their only audience—meets an actual artist, Maude, who calls him on his pretensions, does his façade break down, and he begins to grasp the dimensions of his actual sadness. Then, with Maude’s help, he begins to make art again.

This is a radical simplification of the movie—leaving out for the moment the part about Harold and Maude’s love affair, her age, her background—but it’s true to what I saw, at age thirteen, in surroundings very much like the film I was watching: I saw a movie that was trying to teach me, personally, how to live. That was what was so electrifying about it.

I lacked a language for explaining Harold’s transformation until I read Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, which dwells at great length on the difference between cynicism and what he calls “kynicism.” Cynicism, in the sense the term is used today, is what Sloterdijk calls a form of coping, of “enlightened false consciousness”:

Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work—in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen . . . . For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they see the nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so. . . . Cynicism is that modernized, unhappy consciousness on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.

Kynicism is an older, stranger, and far more radical way of life: it begins with Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in a dry cistern near the marketplace in Athens and identified himself with dogs; “kynic” is derived from kynikos, “dog-like.” “Other dogs,” Diogenes said, “bite their enemies. I bite my friends to wake them up.” He called himself cosmopolites, “a citizen of the world,” and carried a lantern through the marketplace at midday, saying he was searching for an honest man. Once, Alexander the Great came to visit Diogenes while he was lying in the sun, perhaps getting a tan. “Get out of here,” Diogenes said, “you’re blocking my light.” When invited to a wealthy man’s house and cautioned not to spit anywhere—the kynics were famous for relieving themselves wherever and whenever—he spat in the owner’s face, saying, “I can find no more appropriate receptacle.”[1]

Maude, a Holocaust survivor who lives in an abandoned railroad car, steals cars and defaces statues for fun, and practices every art form she can manage, is a quintessential kynic; Harold, a cynic to the core, is appalled and frightened by her. “I don’t know if that’s right,” he says peevishly, when she explains her philosophy of car theft. But slowly, indefatigably, Maude breaks down his defenses; the movie is entirely on her side. Diogenes, Sloterdijk writes, “could be taken as the original father of self help . . . . he was a self helper by distancing himself from and being ironic about needs for whose satisfaction most people pay with their freedom.” Harold and Maude’s version of self-help partly involves turning his talent for pranks-as-performance-art on authority figures other than his mother, including his uncle, a high-ranking army officer, and a police officer who tries to arrest them, in what is possibly the funniest chase scene in film history.

But Harold and Maude’s most radical self help lies elsewhere. Cynics, by definition, are unable to cry; Harold desperately needs to. Once he’s had sex with Maude, and smoked a hookah, he can: his face screws up, becomes ugly, disfigured, ordinary, as he weeps, telling Maude the story he inevitably has to tell, of feeling isolated after his father’s death, estranged from his mother, her pretensions and insecurities.

The ordinariness of this moment—how embarrassing it is, how hard to watch—deserves close attention. The entire film has led up to this experience of catharsis, which could have happened in any therapist’s office, or in the arms of any lover, or friend; but Harold is so traumatized, so isolated, such an “advanced case,” that it takes extreme measures to lead him out. And the extreme measures are just beginning: shortly after this scene, Maude announces she’s taken an overdose on the night of her eightieth birthday. After she dies, Harold drives his car off Big Sur, but jumps out at the last moment, and strolls away across the bluff, playing a banjo Maude has given him.

Where does he go? This is an unfair but necessary question. The end of Harold and Maude holds cynicism and kynicism in a perfect balance. It’s Harold’s greatest and (presumably) final performance, the last trick he will ever play on us, but also, of course, much more than a trick: this time the grief and the anguish, is real. In Freudian terms, he may have broken through the cycle of melancholy and finally become able to mourn—depending on what he does next. What kind of artist will he be, and where will he go? What song will he sing?

If the problem of closed endings is one of false necessity—bringing the narrative back to the limitations of the so-called real world—the problem of open endings, in late capitalist culture, is that they are always subject to cynical recirculation: they can always become objectless gestures, “meaning” nothing but themselves. In 1998 Wes Anderson made an objectless, sanitized version of Harold and Maude called Rushmore, where Harold is Max Fisher (played by Jason Schwartzmann), a scholarship student given to bizarre, theatrical antics—as well as actual theater—at his prep school, and Maude is Rosemary (played by Olivia Williams), a beautiful thirtysomething elementary school teacher. In this setting, the love affair never actually happens, and neither does the attempted suicide; Max Fisher’s face never addresses the screen, and never breaks down into abysmal, ugly, ordinary grief. The surface and the pretense are perfectly consistent.

This is not to say that Anderson’s characters—now duplicated, with slight variations, in the many movies he’s made since, including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Express—have no emotions at all. They do. Their emotions are perfectly proportional to the closed, hermetic, purposely artificial worlds they inhabit; their strongest feelings come at moments when those worlds are threatened. They tend to be immensely wealthy, extremely fragile, highly naïve, and very, very pale.

In an American context I don’t think the question of cynicism can ever be unbound from the fact of white supremacy. Anderson’s career demonstrates this, maybe better than any other artist of his generation in any field. Using Bill Murray’s decaying face, he’s created an index of white melancholy, both bland and inert, detached, literally self-effacing. Not surprisingly, he’s stuck there: in a cycle of productivity that is itself a performance, the way Harold, in his mother’s house, was always looking for another variation, a new entertainment, as an alternative to actually dying.

[1] I’ve taken the title of this essay from an episode in the ongoing struggle (as Sloterdijk describes it) between kynicism and cynicism. The Roman writer and cynic Lucian once described the death of Peregrinus, a kynic and convert to Christianity, who self-immolated at the Olympic Games in 185 CE. “If . . . he is so firmly determined to die,” Lucian wrote, “why does it have to be by fire and with a pomp fit for a tragedy? What is the point of this way of dying when he could have chosen a thousand other ways?”

January 2026 marks the thirtieth anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This reflection on Wallace and whiteness is an excerpt from one of the essays in my 2019 book White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (the essay itself is called “What Is the Point of This Way of Dying”). As you will see below, I’ve always had complicated feelings about DFW. I think of him as one of the great artistic heroes of his generation (which is just about a decade removed from my generation, both now erroneously lumped together as “Gen X”) and as a limited, bigoted, complacent thinker whose vision wasn’t nearly as broad or capacious as he thought it was.

David Foster Wallace wanted us to know we are loved. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s the last sentence of his novella “Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way”: “You are loved.” Instead of conspiring with the reader—which he believed was always actually condescending to the reader—he wanted to break metafiction’s frame of permanent irony (what Schlegel once called “permanent parabasis”) and restore to it an aesthetic of emotional directness and intimacy apart from realism. This was the project he laid out, in no uncertain terms, in “Westward” (which rewrites and savagely satirizes John Barth’s metafiction masterpiece “Lost in the Funhouse”) and in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” a manifesto he began writing in the late 1980s and finally published in complete form in 1993.

The pervasive cynicism Wallace detected in himself and other writers his age (he was born in 1962, which makes him either a Shadow Boomer or Gen X, depending whom you ask) came from two sources: the doctrines of postmodern fiction, as defined by Barth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Barthelme, and DeLillo; and TV, which made postmodern narrative technique popular, fun, and inescapable. “Pop-conscious postmodern fiction,” Wallace writes in “E Unibus Pluram,” “has made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal and television; on the other hand, televisual culture has somehow evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault.” The tools of pop postmodernism, “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule,” are effective but also “agents of a great despair and stasis in US culture.” He ends the essay with what in retrospect may be the saddest passage he ever wrote, both an apologia and a call to arms:

It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of US fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started . . . Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval . . . The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.

In the decade since Wallace’s suicide, this story—the literary history of postirony—has been told and retold, with a small core of protagonists (and a few antagonists): how in the mid-1990s Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Ben Marcus, and Rick Moody, plus Dave Eggers on the West Coast, invented post-postmodern fiction, a new literature of feeling. “The thing on the table was emotional fiction,” Saunders said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2013, describing conversations with this group twenty years before. “How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.”

Did it work? Did it happen? According to most sources it did. Saunders is one of the most beloved American writers today, and Wallace is celebrated as a kind of secular saint, not just an artist but a paragon of fearsome difficulty in the service of kindness and humility, as exemplified in his famous 2004 speech to the graduates of Kenyon College, “This is Water”: “If you really learn how to pay attention . . . . it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars.”

I always find myself thinking and writing about him from a point of unfeeling admiration. Which is also to say that I take him at his word, as he put it in “E Unibus Pluram,” that his work is not actually fully successful because he is not only resident inside the aura but, being inside it, was incapable of fully naming it or understanding it. This is how I understand his way of describing the possibilities of American fiction, particularly the tension between postmodern skepticism and “single entendre principles,” without mentioning the American writers most actively engaged with those questions in the late 1980s and early 1990s: John Edgar Wideman, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner. Or even Trey Ellis: a black writer exactly Wallace’s age, whose first novel, Platitudes, published by Vintage Contemporaries in 1988 to some acclaim, shares so many of his obsessions that reading it now is like seeing a convex mirror-image of The Broom of the System:

Donald says he’s got dibs on the Wang, but Andy says, Homo you don’t, and just sits at the terminal, turns it on just to bug Donald, because Andy really likes the DEC VeeDeeTee better. Earle sits next to Andy on the right, like he always does, and Janey walks in, her books over her chest, and sits right in front of Andy, like she always does…Janey’s already confused—she’s more the artsy type—and raises her hand like a Nazi and says, Commander Considine, Commander Considine, but he just keeps on saying junk about making sure that the FOR isn’t too big or else the NEXT loop might become infinite, which is obvious, and now Janey’s arm is tired and hooked over her head like her hairband and she’s waving at the Commander from over her other ear and breathing real loud on purpose, and every time she waves, her chest stretches her sundress, and Earle wouldn’t be surprised if her boobs one day just pop right through the fabric like sinus medicine capsules pop through that foil backing.

Wallace was unquestionably—he would have admitted it, I’m guessing, if anyone asked—writing within a sphere of literary white masculinity that assumed to itself a kind of autonomous, generalized, even infinite irony about everything, including itself, and also assumed itself to be terminal and fatal. From this vantage point, which often crosses over into a kind of spiritual vocation, it’s easy to see how works by writers of color, or women, fall into a category called concerns-which-are-reflexively-dealt-with-by-other-means. In other words: race, and racism, as social phenomena, line the periphery of his consciousness but aren’t integral to his art. From this perspective, to describe his work in racialized terms would be credulous and beside the point, a category mistake. Imaginative autonomy, the default perspective of white writing as I’ve described it earlier in this book, was to DFW an absolute value, related to the nature of the universe itself: “Who on earth’s entitled to declaim about light sources too far out to get to?” he wrote in 1989 in Signifying Rappers, one of the very few times he addressed the subject directly. “The night sky’s spray of light is there, at a distance, for anyone to see and invoke. The heavens, that best chiaroscuro, are color-blind. Not so culture, race in the US present.”

There’s an important, if obvious, observation to be made here, not about race necessarily, but about DFW’s own project as he articulated it, as a turning away from postmodern cynicism toward a posture of belief for its own sake: Wallace was not interested in political paranoia, or the project of political satire, but in a kind of cosmic innocence, wonder, naivete, that subsumed politics; his own liberal politics were self-consciously bland and held at a distance, out of his disinclination to participate in the symbolic logic of the spectacle, as he illustrated with his brief, almost whimsical essay about September 11^th, “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s.” If I had to describe his work in the terms and categories he himself used, I would say something like this (not an original observation): DFW took the “systems novel,” a term the critic Tom LeClair used to describe novels like Giles Goat-Boy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Ratner’s Star, and made a system, an object, out of his own selfhood, the particularities of his own experience. This scene of experiencing self-as-universe occurs in so many places in his fiction it’s hard to choose just one, but try this passage from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men:

I all too quickly, as an adolescent, trying merely to masturbate in private, found out that my single fantasy of unknown seduction outside time required the very world’s population itself must be frozen by the single hand’s gesture, all of the world’s timepieces and activities, from the activities of yam farming in Nigeria to those of affluent Westerners purchasing blue jeans and Rock and Roll, on, on…

The gesture at the heart of Wallace’s work—particularly, and maybe necessarily, so, in light of his lifelong struggles with self-destructive emotions and impulses—was to make his ironizing self feel like a relaxed, expansive, endlessly interesting vantage point. His most characteristic pieces orient the self-system outward, in a blaze of generosity, humor, or good feeling. He seemed to believe, like Forster, that much human misery resulted from simple failures of connection, communication, understanding, as in the pivotal moment of Infinite Jest, where James Incandenza reveals he’s recorded his lethal film, The Entertainment, not out of a maniacal desire to kill the audience but because he’s never been able to find a way to communicate with his son Hal.

But peripheries are uneasy places, even if they firmly stay peripheries. The oddest passage of Infinite Jest—a book which is willfully odd at every turn—occurs early on, in the voice of a black woman, Clenette, about the abuse suffered by her friend Wardine. The entire segment is only about a thousand words, and doesn’t connect to any other aspect of the novel; it reads like a parody of a first-person narrative of inner city life:

But I know Reginald tell. Reginald say he die before Wardine momma beat Wardine again. He say he take his self up to Roy Tony and say him to not mess with Wardine or breathe by her mattress at night. He say he take his self on down to the playground at the Brighton Projects where Roy Tony do business and he go to Roy Tony man to man and he make Roy Tony make it all right.

According to his editors and Wallace himself, the original manuscript of Infinite Jest was nearly twice as long as the published book. Enormous, book-length sections were cut; why did this passage, not in any way part of the extant narrative, stay in? The idiom is stereotyped, exaggerated Ebonics; and Wallace had strong, distinctly racialized feelings about “correct” or Standard Written English, which he explained in detail in a Harper’s essay, “Authority and American Usage,” in 2000. This essay is notably different—harsher, more strident, and, in some ways, more cynical—than DFW’s earlier nonfiction. In it, he labels himself unreservedly a SNOOT (“Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Own Ongoing Tendence”), a term left over from his childhood, a prescriptivist who believes in upholding SWE not because of its innate superiority, but because of the pragmatic necessity of maintaining a single communicative language for a democratic culture. In one of the essay’s many tangents, he rehearses a speech he’s given to African American students who, in his view, haven’t learned, or don’t want to learn, SWE sufficient to his standards:

I’m respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody…who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something—if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself.

Earlier in the essay he makes an analogy between this argument, as a relation to power, and the impossibility, in his view, of allowing boys to wear skirts to school, even if the parent and the boy both believe skirts are objectively better than pants: “In modern America, any little boy who comes to school in a skirt is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a total geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him.” It could be a compelling statement of what used to be a normative belief system—call it liberal anti-pluralism—that positions itself at the rational center of a political sphere available to others only through certain conditions, or standards, of membership. In certain circles (those associated with Obama and his admiration of Reinhold Neibuhr, for example) it’s known as “realism,” though more radical thinkers like Roberto Unger would describe it as the essence of false necessity: staring at what exists and representing that stare as insight. Wallace’s language, in expected and unexpected places, is saturated with this cynical use of realism, a variety of code-switching meant to display, and also arbitrate, total linguistic fluency; and I can’t think of the Wardine section of Infinite Jest outside of this aesthetic posture, an elitist exuberance some people would call slumming. What lingers about this displaced fragment, over the novel as a whole, other than the voice and the sound, as if Wallace is spinning the dial on the radio?

Signifying Rappers came about while Wallace was living in Cambridge in the summer of 1989 with his former college roommate, the lawyer and future novelist Mark Costello; they wrote it in tandem, at the suggestion of the editor Lee Smith, as an argument for why hip hop should be taken “seriously.” (In a 2013 preface to the reprinted edition, Costello says the original title might have been “How Rap, Which You Hate, Is Not What You Think, and is Interesting As Hell, and If Offensive, A Useful Sort of Offensive Given What Is Happening Today.”) For Costello the book is an occasion for earnest reportage (a visit to a recording session in progress; a Slick Rick concert at a Roxbury high school) and pontificating on the political contradictions of Public Enemy. But Wallace dwells on the listening itself, and the absurdity of his listening, as a “white Boston male,” a proto-yuppie, a gentrifier:

Because serious rap has, right from the start, presented itself as a Closed Show…There’s an aura of cohesion-in-competence, of an exclusive and shared universe in the present rap relationship between black artists and black audience not enjoyed by a music especially of and for people of color in something like the past 80 years. To mainstream whites it’s a tight cohesion that can’t but look, from outside the cultural window, like occlusion, clannishness [sic], and inbreeding, a kind of reverse snobbery…Serious rap’s a musical movement that seems to revile whites as a group or Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals…The music’s paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside.

For a writer so obsessed with reflexivity in all its forms, Wallace never seems to recognize how profoundly he’s being played: how he’s participating in what Ralph Ellison, in “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” called “a grim comedy of racial manners,” the mimetic dance of desire, resentment, projection and fantasy that has always characterized the American white relationship to black cool. The posture of Signifying Rappers is that of an ironized field report on an alien semiotics, not unlike Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality, with its pretend-serious hermeneutic exegesis of Disneyland; but for Wallace the pose can’t be as detached as he wants it to be. Hip hop makes him feel excluded, angry, and baffled, never more so than when he sees rappers playing his own game of postmodern evasion-and-replacement:

Serious rap’s so painfully real because it’s utterly mastered the special ‘80s move, the ‘postmodern’ inversion that’s so much sadder and deeper than just self-reference: rap resolves its own contradictions by genuflecting to them . . . A music less ‘against’ than simply scornful of the cold blank caucasian System of special hypocrisies can’t but be of compelling interest to those white of us who stand all scrubbed and eager at that magnifying impediment of glass that rappers—like all US young—have built themselves into. It may be, as avant-avant-gardists were arguing, gee, only 70 or 80 years back, that ‘self-reference’ itself is like anything that defines a genre, a Scene, a place-and-time—just another window, thick and unclean, bulletproof and parallax, where where you stand informs what you look at, where sound and gesture split and everything Outside’s quiet and everyone’s alone, and free.

It’s necessary to stay with DFW at this unhappy moment, this moment of frustration, because it’s precisely that: a failure of his most potent ability and fervent belief, a failure to connect, even a failure of reciprocal recognition or love, only a few months after he had finished the final edits on “Westward,” with that last line, “You are loved,” still firmly in place. “Westward” is a story-as-sample, plundering and mangling and re-using Barth’s text and his authorial persona, that is in DFW’s own description shamelessly hip-hop and ‘80s in its affect and style, but somehow he can’t see it. What he can see, at least in this moment, is his own whiteness: where “everything Outside’s quiet and everyone’s alone, and free.”

Signifying Rappers came and went in an instant, in 1990, likely because, for those who cared, there was much more nuanced and better informed criticism available; I never encountered it until it was reissued; but this passage contains the tablature for a generational affect of white sadness and antisocial isolation that only rarely, if ever, named itself in racial terms. In this way Wallace was, unironically, peerlessly, a fucking Nostradamus, not only the voice but the prophet of his generation. The mimetic effect of rap’s perceived rejection, I would venture to say, was to make white hipsters hermetic, congealed into a depressive pose, and even, in some cases, ironically racist. Or sometimes, as DFW was, as “The Depressed Person” was, just depressed.

Before going into my year-end reading list, let me quickly remind you that books make the best gifts, and pre-ordering a book coming out in 2026 (like my new collection of short stories, Storyknife) will make you an author’s best friend. Most of you probably know that Bookshop.org is a fantastic alternative to Amaz*n; but even better than Bookshop is walking into your local independent bookstore (call ahead to order books if you’re looking for specific titles—they can usually get them in a couple of days). Another great thing to do is order a subscription from an indie press like Nightboat, where you get all the books they publish in a year at a discount.

2025 was a terrible year by any measurement, and one element of its awfulness, for me, was my inability to find a good book. By which I don’t mean that the world isn’t full of good books—the problem was my sheer inability to, as the kids say, “lock in.” I finished fewer books in 2025 than I have in many years. My reading was episodic and anxious. And, for some reason, I found myself drawn to a number of very long, multi-volume books that (at the rate I read) I will probably never finish. Insert shrug emoji here.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s American Abductions (published in 2023, pictured above) was far and away the most important novel I read this year, and a book everyone should read—but few people will. Another novelist remarked to me recently that Cárdenas is an “uncompromising stylist,” which is a polite way of saying he’s a believer in difficulty and opacity as the chief novelistic virtues, in this case falling somewhere between Ulysses and Satantango, though neither of those comparisons really work. American Abductions is a blizzard of voices describing a near future (or basically a perfected version of the present) in which all Latin Americans in the US are subject to deportation, abductions by government agents are routine events, and various forms of surveillance are used to track and capture potential abductees, including one named, mysteriously, for the English-Mexican surrealist novelist Leonora Carrington. Another character, equally mysteriously, is named for Roberto Bolaño. Cardenas was born in Ecuador, educated at Stanford, and writes in English; he’s among a growing group of transnational, mostly US-based Latin American writers—Sebastian Castillo, Nicolás Medina Mora, Valeria Luiselli, Christina Rivera Garza—who move back and forth between the Spanish and English-speaking literary worlds, with clear reference points in both. And American Abductions is very much a transnational book, about people who unapologetically live in both worlds and languages and refuse to behave otherwise.

I resisted the pull of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, definitely one of the hot books of the past few years, partly based on things said about it by people who ought to know better (“A new dimension of literary exploration”? “You have never read anything like this”?) On the contrary, the premise is banal: it’s Groundhog Day, but the main character is a rare book dealer who lives with her husband in a provincial city in France. The interesting thing about it is the quiet, muted movement of the narrator from amusement to astonishment to panic, as she realizes she’s trapped in the same day and isolated from her husband, who is likewise trapped but doesn’t realize it—and then moving beyond panic to a more otherworldly state that’s hard to define. There are seven volumes of this novel, apparently, and I only read volume one, released in 2024—volume three was just released this fall. I very much doubt I’m going to make it to the end, but I have more tolerance for this project than other Scandinavian mega-novels of the recent past (My Struggle and Fosse’s Septology)—all of which seem in their own way to be meditations on the sleepy passivity of life within the Nordic welfare state.

Speaking of multi-volume projects I will likely never finish: I read Rainer Stach’s Kafka: The Early Years (part of a three-volume biography) while in Prague for the first time this spring, and learned more about the late history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire than I have anywhere else. Stach pays exhaustive attention to the crosswinds of central European history that shaped Kafka’s early life: the liberalization of anti-Jewish laws in the late 19th century, the emergence of eccentric forms of modernism in Prague, shaped by its provincial status on the fringes of the German cultural scene; Kafka’s intimate familiarity with the Czech underclass (especially servants in his own family) during the rise of Czech nationalism. I’m usually not a fan of artists’ biographies because of the sweeping generalizations biographers usually make about the connections between the life and the art, but Stach’s method is similar to that used by Robin D. G. Kelley in his Thelonious Monk biography, probably my favorite ever: intensive, even exhaustive research and historical analysis, and an emphasis on the life as a life, full of loose threads that never get tied together.

Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism is a book I’ve been meaning to read for years. Published in 2018, it emerged as part of a wave of hybrid-creative-nonfiction-and-scholarship (also sometimes called “autotheory”) books, some of which became bestsellers, like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Like The Argonauts, Socialist Realism is loose and improvisational, not bothering to pull the threads of an argument too tightly together; like many, many other books by millennials, it’s about disappointing relationships, straight, queer, and somewhere in between. But it also has a markedly different perspective than most, because Trisha Low leads a transnational life, born and raised in Singapore but educated (in college) in the US and still a resident here—at least as of 2018. Her political leanings veer sharply to the left, but she’s still the daughter of an unapologetically capitalist (and wealthy) Chinese Singaporean family, and therefore her whole frame of reference for what socialism means, and even what “the state” consists of, are very different from that of a typical American writer/intellectual. Socialist Realism is (as you can probably guess) only indirectly about socialist realism as an aesthetic movement (although Low touches on that too) but it is an earnest inquiry into contemporary artistic and political life, one of the best I’ve ever read.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was a friend and protegé of Borges who set out at a very young age to write a Borgesian novel (something Borges himself never did) and produced this masterpiece, which is well known as a classic in the Spanish-speaking world but very little known in English. The Invention of Morel is one of those cerebral mind-twisting fantasies that make you look up and question everything around you. Borges himself compared it to The Turn of the Screw, and to that I would add The Haunting of Hill House, D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, and Gerald Murnane’s The Plains. I’m hoping to read more Casares next year; unfortunately only one of his other books is in print in English, and the others are scarce, even in the Internet’s vast well of used bookstores. The Invention of Morel was also the basis of the classic film Last Year at Marienbad, which I watched in college and have now forgotten completely, so I’ll have to return to that as well.

As previously noted (and as I wrote about back in 2023) I’m in general a fan of Big Novels, even ones I’m not likely ever to finish, and here is yet another one in that category. Weiss is pretty much exclusively known in English for his play Marat/Sade, but apparently in German this is considered his masterpiece—three volumes, roughly a thousand pages, and bearing what must be one of the worst titles of all time. Who wants to read a novel that sounds like a ponderous work of postwar leftist philosophy? (Apparently I do?) The Aesthetics of Resistance (originally published in the 1970s and ‘80s but just published in English this year) is about a group of young friends—former students, workers, activists in their late teens and early twenties—trying to determine their way forward as Nazism sweeps Germany in 1937. It’s a densely intellectual novel narrated in long paragraphs (15-20 pages, in most cases), but once you’re immersed it’s surprisingly easy to follow. Most of the early pages are set in the Pergamon Museum and Humboldt Forum, and would be a great companion for anyone visiting those museums, if you’re willing to spend a lot of time sitting on benches and reading (this sounds like an ideal vacation to me, but I may be alone there). It reads very much like autofiction, but it’s not, precisely—while Weiss did live as a teenager in Berlin in the 1930s, his parents were well-to-do Czech citizens who were able to leave, first to England and then to Sweden in 1939, where Weiss spent the rest of his life.

The one author I read at length this year—because I’m an addictive reader of mysteries—is Ruth Rendell. I’m a little more than halfway through her Inspector Wexford series, which started in 1964 and only ended with her death in 2015. Rendell was one of the most popular British mystery authors of her time, parallel with her nemesis P.D. James; whereas James was a Thatcherite conservative, hostile to the post-1960s cultural changes in England and deeply pessimistic about the future (she also wrote the classic dystopian novel Children of Men), Rendell was a left-leaning progressive whose otherwise tidy village mysteries feature radical feminist lesbians, transgender shop-owners, Isle of Wight-era seventies pop stars, health-food obsessives, commune-dwellers—an awkwardly well-meaning (if sometimes tone-deaf) social history of England over fifty years. As a mystery writer, she’s a classicist, all about solving the puzzle rather than generating suspense—it’s pure detective work with no car chases, hostage-taking, gunfights, and no serial killers, thank god. Also no staged Scooby Doo-style confessions (“If it weren’t for you meddling detectives…”)

So that’s that. In 2026 I’m looking forward to a new novel from Jordy Rosenberg; my friend and former student Tara Menon’s debut novel Under Water; my dear childhood friend Kate Crane’s memoir What Ever Happened to Eddy Crane?; Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund; Benjamin Moser’s new history of anti-Zionism; and M Lin’s book of stories The Memory Museum, among many others. I’m hoping to do a few events when Storyknife comes out in August 2026 and beyond; if you run a reading series or festival, please nominate me. Stay in touch! And happy new year—we made it through one of the worst ever. Onward.

12. Bad Bunny, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE”

2025 as a musical year belonged to Bad Bunny and Kneecap, artists who’ve channeled the power of simply speaking another language into first-tier stardom in the English-speaking pop world. I was never a huge fan of Bad Bunny—I just don’t get the appeal of mumbling, whether it’s rapping or singing—but he’s one of those artists whose cultural vision is so large it doesn’t really matter what I think. The way he mocks and shames American monolingualism isn’t just fun to watch, it’s also a way of telling Americans that shrinking their vision to the horizons of white supremacy means they will wind up impoverished—economically, due to the crushing effects of tariffs and immigration crackdowns, but also culturally and spiritually. It’s already happening.

11. Mule Jenny, “It’s Over Now”

Speaking of cultural overlap, I absolutely fell in love with this English-singing French math rock band, whose record Take Enough Leeway came out in September. A little like Jawbox, a little like the Jesus Lizard—beautifully produced, sharp, unforgiving.

10. RXKNephew, “John Fetterman”

I had never heard of this Rochester, NY-based rapper, previously most famous for writing 400 songs in one year (!), but “John Fetterman” was one of my top songs of the summer, a bizarre and offensive bit of ridicule for AIPAC’s favorite bought-and-purchased senator, whose turn from progressive standard-bearer to neoconservative (and likely mentally ill) warmonger was chronicled at length this year by former staffers. “John Fetterman” was removed from Spotify—probably at the behest of Fetterman’s powerful allies—which just shows that real protest music is alive and well in 2025.

9. Storey Littleton, “At a Diner”

Storey is the daughter (and musical collaborator) of Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell of Ida, a band Sonya and I have loved for more than 30 years—we got to see them play during a long-awaited reunion tour with Tsunami in March. Her own songwriting is very much like her parents, but with her own twisty sensibility and sophistication. Highly recommended.

8. Clipse, “Ace Trumpets”

2025 was finally the year for the long-awaited Clipse reunion, almost fifteen years after Malice, one half of this brotherly duo, renounced the rap game and devoted himself to Christian music. (For that period of his career he was known as No Malice.) There’s nothing really admirable about Clipse—their unapologetic love of the drug trade makes for a lot of weird juxtapositions on this record about losing their parents and embracing family life—but they are simply the best rappers alive. Malice’s brief verse on this song is stacked with double and triple entendres and that evasive, almost disembodied voice that speaks to his ambivalence about the lifestyle that made him famous:

Over half a mill’ we call focaccia, reachin’ for akasha
Never leavin’ home without my piece like I’m Mahatma
From the tribe of Judah, I’m Mufasa
Never turn the other cheek, you’ll die at the Oscars
Persona non grata, mi casa su casa
Drugs killed my teen spirit, welcome to Nirvana
You was Fu-Gee-La-La, I was Alibaba
Dressed in House of Gucci, made from sellin’ Lady Gaga
Hakuna Matata, island wearing tie-dye
Umbrella in my Rolls match the one that’s in this Mai Tai
Listen, you are not I, cross T’s, dot I’s
I done disappeared and reappeared without a “voilà”

7. Kneecap, “No Comment”

I’d been aware of Kneecap for years before 2025, but it was my son Asa who prompted me to actually listen to them. (We watched the Say Nothing miniseries early in the year and have had a lot of animated conversations about the history of the IRA, the principles of armed anti-colonial struggle, and the correct pronunciation of “Tiocfaidh ar la,” the IRA’s slogan—“Chuckee ar la,” it means “Our day will come.”) Kneecap’s performance at Glastonbury this past summer was a galvanizing event for the support of Palestine in global popular culture, as was their canceled tour in the United States—another sign that creeping fascism is making culture more dangerous, and more relevant, than it’s been in decades.

6. Ogbert the Nerd, “Don’t Quit, Get Fired”

Ogbert’s sophomore album What You Want came out in summer 2024, but I didn’t catch up with it until this year. It’s an absolutely pitch-perfect expression of Gen Z Jersey angst. I’ve been cheerleading for this band since the pandemic, because they keep me young.

5. Kassa Overall, “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)”

You can’t help but cheer for Kassa Overall, a jazz drummer who’s collaborated with most of the greats and speaks the hybrid language of jazz and hip hop fluently—there’s nothing new about what he’s doing, in the footsteps of Robert Glasper, the Bad Plus, Guru, etc etc, but I’ve been waiting for years for a jazz version of this Wu-Tang classic, and now it’s arrived.

4. Oso Oso, “Bad News”

I never know quite how to describe Oso Oso. They fall somewhere between emo, indie rock and, I don’t know, dream pop? Not sure how the categories work with the young ones these days. All I can say is “Bad News” is the best pop song I’ve heard this year, and Jade Lilitri (the songwriter and only permanent member) ought to be as famous as Chapell Roan or Lucy Dacus or Hayley Williams or the “Stick Season” guy—and maybe one day he will be. My day always gets better when I listen to Oso Oso.

3. Algernon Cadwallader, “noitanitsarcoP”

One of the very best things to happen in music over the last few years has been the reunion of Algernon Cadwallader, the Philadelphia band that led the 2010s “emo revival” (or, as it’s come to be called historically, fourth-wave emo). I didn’t have very high hopes for their new album Trying Not to Have a Thought, because I doubted they could capture the youthful, anarchic, shambling spirit of their two previous records. And they didn’t try. They made a much more polished, musical, pop-forward record that is still fucking fantastic, especially this song (if you’re too lazy, it’s “Procrastination” backward, ha ha ha).

2. Shudder to Think, “Playback”

Speaking of reunions: Shudder to Think recorded all their best music between 1987 and 1994, including the perfect album Pony Express Record that’s now widely acknowledged as a transformative moment in rock history (as much as it was ignored and derided at the time). When I saw them play in October as part of a brief reunion tour I had no idea they had recorded anything new, and then out came this unbelievable song, as sexy and off-kilter as anything they did more than thirty years ago.

1. Portraits of Past, “For Want Of”

2025 is technically the 40th anniversary of emo, the subset of punk music that has changed and shaped my life, since it was in 1985 that Rites of Spring released End on End, the album that first inspired the mocking sobriquet “emo-core” in the DC punk scene. In recent years I’ve gotten to know Guy Picciotto, the singer of Rites of Spring (and later one of the singers in Fugazi), and while he was reluctant to acknowledge the anniversary publicly, I know he appreciates the good wishes of his fans. The best tribute to Rites of Spring came from the 1990s/2000s screamo band Portraits of Past, who released this devastating cover of RoS’s best song in May to mark the anniversary.

Photo credit: Rites of Spring performing in 1985, photographer unknown.

Note: I have a new book coming out! Storyknife is my first collection of short stories in 15 years, a collection of metafictions, experiments, and good old-fashioned tales about white liberal America teetering on the brink of (and then going over the brink of) disaster. It’ll be released by Ecco in August 2026. There’s a sneak peek of the cover below.

Over the coming year I will be highlighting each story in the collection in a brief post. “Take the Child” was originally published in Boston Review way back in 2010, and if you like you can read it on their website.

Like “Summer Song,” “Take the Child” was written in the years Sonya and I lived in Princeton, where she was getting her PhD, and where we became parents: Mina and Asa were born at Princeton’s small and sweet community hospital just before it was torn down and turned into condominiums. “Take the Child” is the only story I ever set in Princeton, and I feel like it embodies all the shades of feeling I had in my years of pushing a stroller around that pastoral and (seemingly) benign town.

The title comes from a 1988 song by the band Shudder to Think, a haunting revamp of the gospel story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well:

Jesus met the woman at the well to say “I love you, but my head is full of ‘all may rise’ and X-ray eyes.”

Jesus met the woman at the well to say “I need you, but my heart is full of silent nights and neon lights.”

Havilah, just take the child away…

I wanted the story to have a hallucinatory ambiance and a tinge of Gen X memory as well (which runs through Storyknife). But in this case the hallucinations aren’t from drugs: the main character of the story is a young mother whose husband has abandoned her with a baby, and who, locked in post-partum depression, has started to believe the baby can communicate with her telepathically. To make matters worse, she’s a fiction writer, or ex-fiction writer, who went to an MFA program, struggled, and stopped writing, and she can’t help seeing her situation as a kind of cosmic, fantastic joke:

Before you were born, she tells Leona on their morning walk, I was writing a novel from the point of view of a giant squid. It was a kind of wishful thinking, I guess. I was doing all this reading about how a squid’s skin isn’t even really actual tissue, it’s a hyperpermeable membrane, halfway between a liquid and solid. Only the interior organs are actually, physically, there. We’ve been chasing them with submarines and cameras and lights, and in fact there’s no chance of a human even comprehending what it would be like to see a squid alive in the deep ocean. See isn’t even it at all. Our eyes are useless down there. You know, when a squid strangles a whale, it isn’t like a fair fight or anything. You can’t fight an ectoplasm. The squid just materializes when it wants to. That’s the kind of novel I wanted to write. You’re looking through it, it’s clear, it’s like a window, and then it starts to shake, it wavers, and then you realize you’re already inside the squid. You are the squid. I wanted a novel with invisible tentacles.

Leona yawns: a tiny pink tongue, no bigger than a cat’s, drawn back over smooth gums, with no indication of teeth. Why are you telling me this? she asks. Don’t you know better than to tell your family about the novel you’re writing? As if I’m supposed to care about your life as an artist?

“Take the Child” was written at a time when I was just beginning to think about metafiction as a viable way of writing for myself; I was in love with John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (and David Foster Wallace’s hilarious and vicious satire of Barth, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”). Up until that time I had thought of metafiction as annoying, trivial, cynical, postmodern gamesmanship (and it is, at times, all those things) but I hadn’t grasped the point Barth is trying to make at the end of “Lost in the Funhouse”: that what metafiction is really trying to do is foreground the existential crisis of the storyteller who always lives at one remove from life, trying to solve problems in fiction that can never be solved in reality.

But instead of making that a springboard for a dry, esoteric, cerebral view of the world (a trap Barth and DFW fell into, in different ways) I wanted to make metafiction feel, as it were, wet, animalistic, organic, taken up with problems of the unconscious and the unreal. In this way, “Take the Child” is a precursor for the way I used metafiction in The New Earth, identifying the novel as a kind of animal, a being with fur, who smells bad, who sits in the corner of the room staring at you. Around the time I was writing this story I was also reading French feminist psychoanalysts (Julia Kristeva, Luce Iragaray, Helene Cixous) and I think, without intending to, I was drawing on Kristeva’s idea of the chora: a “pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic space of drives, emotions, and bodily experiences that precedes the formation of the subject.” The chora, in Kristeva’s description, is neither male nor female, and in “Take the Child,” even though the baby is ostensibly a girl, she speaks from the space of the chora, an unformed, perhaps even un-human being.

Why did I go down this dark road of writing about a young mother who’s severely depressed and dangerously self-destructive? As a parent of babies you’re constantly reminded of how fragile they are and how hostile the world is to their survival. You’re also constantly surrounded by bodily fluids, and your life is governed by the baby’s bodily needs: eating, sleeping, changing, cleaning. Many years before writing “Take the Child” I read William LaFleur’s book Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan, which introduced me to the East Asian belief that newborn infants belong as much to the beforelife (in Buddhist terms, tathagatha-garbha, the womb of Buddha-nature) as they do to conscious human life—this is why it’s traditional not to give newborns a name until 100 days after birth. I wanted to have the baby speak from that place of otherworldliness:

I hate it here, Leona says. I hate this dry world. It makes my skin crawl. All these blankets, all this cloth. It’s unnatural. I belonged in the water; I never minded being wet. I wanted to breathe water. We didn’t need to speak when I lived in the dark. We just were. I never had to correct you. Why couldn’t you let me stay there?

You know why.

Then you should have let me go back where I came from. Why did you let them take me out and hold me up to the light? I thought they’d burn my eyes away.

So disturbing, right? Fifteen years later, I would not be able to write these words. I’m proud of this story, but it haunts me—a record of a turning point in my artistic life I would not want to return to.

Photo credit: An anonymous stock photo of the Princeton Public Library plaza, a key location in “Take the Child”—minus the teenage skateboarders.

On October 7th, 2023, I was en route to Seoul for a conference held by my Zen school every three years, The Whole World is a Single Flower. I didn’t see the news alerts about the Hamas attack on the Gaza border until my plane landed; I was foggy and jet-lagged after fifteen hours in economy, and traveling alone, surrounded by strangers. So it was only to myself that I said the words, quietly, dragging my rolling suitcase up the ramp to the terminal: “It’s finally happened.”

What does “The Whole World is a Single Flower” (世界一花) mean? Mahayana Buddhists believe the universe is a manifestation of Indra’s net of jewels, where each jewel has countless facets that reflect each other jewel’s countless facets. This teaching goes back to the Avatamsaka Sutra, or “Garland of Flowers” sutra, thought to have been compiled in the second or third century CE, but similar teachings about radical interdependence and singularity-as-multiplicity can be found in contemporary quantum mechanics, astrophysics, computer science (and in the Kabbalah, and many other sources).

In practical terms, the teaching Mahayana Buddhists derive from the Avatamsaka Sutra is called asvabhava, meaning nothing comes only from itself, nothing is singular or exists, as Mahayana philosophers say, “from its own side.” This is like the simple observation that there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. Of course, the other dimension of this thinking is that everything is bound up in a web of causal connections called karma. Nothing comes to be on its own, only through causes and conditions—that is, actions and the consequences of actions. (“Karma” in Sanskrit means “action.”)

The Buddha also taught that anyone who tries to understand karma fully will go insane.

In October of 2023, I was not even six months past the publication of my novel The New Earth, which I’d worked on for more than ten years, and which is centered around Palestine and American pro-Palestine activists, so I knew quite a bit about the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza. Like just about everyone who’d tracked the mounting atrocities against Palestinians over the preceding decade, I suspected that at some point soon Hamas would stage a major attack against Israel. Israeli intelligence expected the same thing, and Netanyahu, who had spent decades cultivating Hamas as a necessary ingredient to his plan for permanent warfare and instability in Palestine, was banking on it to help him stay in power. This is why he moved IDF units to the West Bank from the Gaza border in the months before the attack: he wanted to make the residents around the border, including kibbutzim who opposed him and supported peace with Palestinians, more vulnerable. And they were—extremely vulnerable.

That was the limit of my predictive power. I knew the situation in Palestine was not stable and would likely lead to further violence on a large scale (especially after the IDF massacre of peaceful Gaza protesters during the Great March to the Sea in 2018, which occurred while I was in Jerusalem doing research for The New Earth). I didn’t imagine that American Jews, including friends I knew personally who were disgusted with Israel and highly skeptical of its propaganda, would respond to October 7th, a not-at-all-surprising development in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by comparing it to the Holocaust. I hadn’t realized that Biden was an unreflective, unthinking, radical Zionist. I didn’t imagine that the Democrats of 2023 would fall into position behind Netanyahu’s war machine the way they backed George W. Bush, catastrophically, in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In other words: I was pessimistic, but not nearly pessimistic enough, about Israel/Palestine and about the US. Also about climate change, the global rise of misogyny, the imperial boomerang, the amorality of corporate university administrators—it’s a long list, it’s a nearly endless list.

Aristotle used the term anagnorisis, ἀναγνώρισις, to refer to recognition in a tragedy: the moment when the hero (and, ideally, the audience) grasps the underlying hamartia, or “tragic flaw,” that put the events of the plot in motion and led to whatever ghastly outcome is at hand. Buddhists have lots of terms for perception, but not one that has the flavor of anagnorisis, or, as the Internet puts it, “Well, well, well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.”

The capacity of the West to catapult backwards to the horrors of the 20th century, fascism and genocide, has melted away all our ideas of civilizational progress, our techno-utopianism, the victory of the liberal global capitalist order, the long arc of justice, and returned us to some new version of the ancient world, where genocidal warfare was common, even taken for granted. (The Buddha’s own people, the Sakyas, were wiped out by invaders during his lifetime.) Those of us who oppose fascism and genocide are mostly reduced to the quivering emotions associated with catharsis (horror, terror, pity, helplessness) without catharsis either in its formal Greek sense (which would require belief in the power of the gods of Mount Olympus) or the secular, defanged, modern sense of a peace process or UN intervention. No one is coming to save the Palestinians. The only possibility is if mass protest across the West turns into actual mass revolt—an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist revolution.

Recently I’ve been reading Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, a three-volume autobiographical novel set in Berlin in the mid-1930s, about a group of young students working in the antifascist resistance while the Nazis are consolidating power. Visiting the Pergamon altar in its museum in the center of the city, one of the characters, referring to the altar’s celebrated friezes of the Greek gods, says, “We are living in events set in motion in that remote past.” That’s all that can be said today. We’re fully facing the worst aspects of human history and we can’t look away.

I’m not usually a person to set reading goals, but this summer I did commit myself to one: I wanted to read the world’s oldest known novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe.

“Why have I never heard of this book?” you may wonder. If you google “world’s oldest novel” or ask most literature specialists you’ll hear the names of the earliest well-known novels, like The Tale of Genji (11th century) or Don Quijote (17th century); if you plunge into the weeds with books like Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History you’ll give up on ever getting a straight answer. But if you use the basic description of a novel as “a fictional narrative in prose longer than about 40,000 words,” Chaereas and Callirhoe, likely written in the first or second century CE, is the most obvious contender. There are novel-like texts written before 1000 CE in other languages, but Chaereas and Callirhoe is the earliest one (or one of the very earliest) any modern reader would recognize as a novel.

A little background: Chaereas and Callirhoe was written in Greek by Chariton, who, like virtually every novelist after him, had an unpleasant day job: he identifies himself as the assistant to a rhetor (that is, a lawyer) named Athenagoras who lived in Aphrodisias, a Greek city in what is now Turkey. Nothing else about him is known. He lived at the height of the Roman empire, probably (according to scholars’ best guesses) in the first or second century CE, which puts him at least 500 years after the classic era of ancient Greek literature—Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, et al. In order to give Chaereas and Callirhoe the romantic and heroic tone of an earlier age of Greek history, Chariton set the novel in Syracuse (a major Greek city in what is now Sicily) in the fourth century BCE, during the reign of Alexander the Great.

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This is part of what makes Chaereas and Callirhoe, to my mind, delightfully modern—not just that it’s a historical novel, like so many of the major novels of our own time, but that it’s an anxious and self-conscious historical novel, striving to be authentic to an earlier era and not quite getting there. It’s packed with quotations and allusions to Homer and the great Greek playwrights and lyricists; Chariton is always looking over his shoulder and saying things like: “She appeared dressed in black, with her hair let down; with her shining countenance and her arms bared she looked even more beautiful than Homer’s goddesses of the ‘white arms’ and ‘fair ankles.’” The heroine, Callirhoe, is so beautiful people who encounter her think she’s Aphrodite—not like Aphrodite, actually Aphrodite. But unlike a major character in a Greek tragedy or Homeric epic, her story isn’t driven by fate and divine intervention; it’s violent, sordid, funny, surreal, and thoroughly human, sort of like Pirates of the Caribbean written by the Coen Brothers.

Without summarizing the whole plot (that would ruin the suspense, and it’s a story that depends on suspense): Callirhoe, noble daughter of a famous general, is married to a handsome but gullible young man, Chaereas, who suspects her of infidelity, flies into a jealous rage and kicks her so hard he kills her. Or at least it appears he’s killed her—actually she’s buried alive. When she wakes up in her tomb, it’s being pillaged by pirates, who take her prisoner, intending to sell her as a slave in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Through a series of plot twists, Callirhoe winds up married to another nobleman, Dionysius, having given birth in the meantime to Chaereas’s child—when Chaereas reappears on the scene with a search party from Syracuse.

If any of this rings a bell, it’s probably because Chaereas and Callirhoe resembles the romantic tales in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which provided much of the source material for Shakespeare. Chaereas and Callirhoe would have made a great play on the Elizabethan stage. But it’s very much a novel, dense with everyday detail and with the rich inner lives of its star-crossed lovers. You live in it, the way you do with any novel. It has an audience of one.

What’s most amazing about this novel is that it survives at all. Chaereas and Callirhoe is thought to have been quite popular in the Greek-speaking communities around the eastern Mediterranean, but like many prose works of the ancient world, it was very nearly lost in the Middle Ages. (Even Petronius’s Satyricon, one of the earliest novels written in Latin, barely survived, with major parts missing.) The complete Greek text only exists in one manuscript that dates to the 13th century. I first learned about it in Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet; as a classicist, Carson takes it for granted that Chariton and his contemporaries (Heliodorus and Xenophon, among others) were the first novelists, even if their work lay forgotten for centuries.

Carson also has something particularly interesting to say about how we should approach romances and comic novels, where we know there will be a happy ending:

To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim. We should dwell on this point for a moment. As readers, we are…drawn into a conflicted emotional response which approximates that of the lover’s soul divided by desire. Readership itself affords the aesthetic distance and obliquity necessary for this response. The reader’s emotions begin from a privileged position…We know the story will end happily. So we stand at an angle to the text…two levels of narrative reality float one upon another, without converging.

This is what makes always makes novels distinctive: they have readers. Not listeners or viewers. They’re not visual entertainment, and they’re not accompanied by music, as lyric poetry and epics always were in the Greek world. They’re read silently, one person at a time. The reader has to choose to keep reading the second, third, and fourth time they pick up the text; they have to be actively engaged. That’s what’s so haunting about a novel like this, written before printing, bookstores, or Kindles. It had to teach the reader how to appreciate it. Which is (in a different sense) still the challenge for novels today.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, an image of a 2nd century CE manuscript fragment of Chaereas and Callirhoe. The Egypt Exploration Society - Grenfell, B.P. et al. Fayûm towns and their papyri (London: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1900)

Note: I have a new book coming out! Storyknife is my first collection of short stories in 15 years, a collection of metafictions, experiments, and good old-fashioned tales about white liberal America teetering on the brink of (and then going over the brink of ) disaster. It’ll be released by Ecco in July 2026. Over the next year I will be highlighting each story in the collection in a brief post, starting with the most August of all August stories, “Summer Song.” It was originally published by Tin House in 2012 and isn’t available online, but I’ll include plenty of excerpts below.

As a hopeless lover of all aspects of summer—backyard parties, swimming holes, outdoor concerts, lobster shacks, sangria, gazpacho (I make really good gazpacho)—I was always destined to writing something like “Summer Song.” I even had the title in mind: it comes from the chorus of Buffalo Tom’s “Summer,” which I had on constant rotation in 1995, when I was an Outward Bound instructor on an island in Boston Harbor: Summer's gone, a summer song / You've wasted every day / Summer's gone, can't wipe it off my hands / Write it in the sand—

But it wasn’t until about 2010 that I came up with the idea of making a summer story a kind of incantation, told in the third person plural. Here’s how it starts:

Perched on the edges of lawn chairs, on barstools, on damp and moldy-smelling picnic blankets, on park benches, in the spreading branches of oaks, maples, copper beeches, they watched World Cup games, Wimbledon matches, jazz sets, Yasojiru Ozu marathons, and hundreds of performances of the 1812 Overture, with cannon and fireworks, or without; they watched flag-football and street hockey, bocce and badminton, ultimate frisbee and frisbee golf, lacrosse practice and swimming practice, roller derby and tai chi. Much of what they did that summer involved watching. With the windows open, and the ratcheting of the katydids, or with the windows closed, in the low hum of the central air, they watched cable news, broadcast news, televised movies, streaming movies, YouTube hits, home movies, 16mm experimental films from Dad’s days at USC in the Seventies. They watched Shrek and Bride of Frankenstein, Deliverance, The Breakfast Club, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. There was a special relief in the darkness, after so many hours of retina-splitting daylight, in the blue glow of LCD or plasma screens, and many remarks were heard, particularly from watchers over sixty, about how much larger TVs have gotten, how immense, how gargantuan, how lifelike, how they occupy an entire wall of the living room now; and a few remembered that in Farenheit 451 every house had been equipped with wall-size television screens that played incessantly, at screeching volume, how the fugitive had been pursued by TV helicopters and watched, on TV, by those whose houses he was passing by. A few wondered if Ray Bradbury was still alive, and one or two said, “Totally, I read an interview with him in the Paris Review.”

Who is the “they” in “Summer Song”? Originally I chose the epigraph of the story from the Communist Manifesto as a joke: “The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best.” I was preparing to read the story at the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ summer MFA residency (where I was faculty at the time) and one of my students remarked that instead of reading their own work they felt they should get onstage and read Marx. But the epigraph isn’t really a joke at all; it was more or less the guiding truth of my upbringing. 2010, when I wrote this story, was the era of the Great Recession and Occupy Wall Street; I had just recently spent a summer camping trip—yes, there’s summer again—swatting mosquitoes and reading Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, one of the classics of modern Marxist thought. “Summer Song” is very much a meditation on hegemony, that is, about how elites naturalize themselves and their way of life—in this case, the predominantly white liberal East Coast bourgeoisie I was born into and am still adjacent to:

They visited. They vacationed. Too often the one passed for the other, the obligation imagined as voluntary, the responsibility made recreational, vacation days, sick days, contractual days, all poured into the well of compromise plans, meetings in between, discount hotels three blocks from the beach, borrowed houses in Wellfleet where the toilet overflowed and raccoons shuffled all night through the attic. Nonetheless, they swam, kayaked, sailed, hiked, ballooned, snorkeled, biked, hosteled, marathon-trained, spelunked, water-skied, fly-fished. They lay awake on strange sheets—who buys satin sheets anymore, and who would keep them in a summer house on a lake in Maine, for god’s sake?—and listened to frogs harrumphing across the pond. They stumbled filmy-eyed down strange hallways and mistook closets for bathrooms, the kid’s room for Uncle Tom’s room. They had awkward reunions with siblings, parents, aunts, great-aunts, people they hadn’t seen in fifteen years and hadn’t wanted ever to see again, at anniversary cruises, cousins’ bat mitzvahs, yacht club and country club and Rhinebeck lawn and North Jersey Indian weddings.

The moment when I was writing “Summer Song” was the moment I was realizing the values of that class were no longer my values; as Jedidiah Purdy (who is exactly my age and had a similar upbringing) puts it, I had become an accidental neoliberal. I was realizing Democratic politics had become a smokescreen for the rise of a new corporate oligarchy that not only controlled the party and its politicians but had convinced the rest of us that, as Frederic Jameson (and later Mark Fisher) put it, “It’s harder to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The passionate incrementalists, policy wonks, and inveterate pragmatists I was surrounded with growing up are exactly the kind of people Jameson had in mind; in that world, the correct path led from prep school to the Ivy League to graduate school (law, public policy, economics, journalism) to a job on Capitol Hill, a think tank, a federal agency, a “good cause nonprofit,” or the Washington Post. You were supposed not to participate in the world’s problems but study them, often from the vantage of a beach chair in Rehoboth Beach, Nantucket, Jacob’s Pillow, Truro, Booth Bay, Vinalhaven—the places I’ve tried to evoke in “Summer Song.” When I was writing Your Face in Mine, the phrase I came up with to describe this life of this particular class of people was “white dreamtime,” which perfectly describes “Summer Song” as well:

There were moments when they worried about the inchoate, almost unmentionable things you can’t talk about at parties, like the problem of evil in light of God’s omniscience, or the potential for decades-long economic depression following a global credit collapse, the futility of recycling, the country’s general embrace of fascism. Was it OK to hang Fourth of July bunting from your porch in order to promote the town economy, the revitalization of Main Street, the success of Wallaby’s Organic Market, where red white and blue vegan cookies were on sale at $10.99 a pound?

The thing about summer is that it’s a time people live most vigorously inside their dreams and fantasies, and to the extent “Summer Song” is pretty bleak satire (especially considering how badly the world has fared since the early 2010s) I am very much one of its targets. Last year I wrote about the spectacular misadventure my family has had with our second home in Vermont, which is threatened by the rise of catastrophic flooding in the Northeast (and around the world, of course). That is my personal talisman for how the values and fantasies I was raised with no longer apply to the world as it is today.

But what comes next? This is when I start to feel extremely old. My memories, my associations and resonances, stretch back to the late 1970s. I can remember Reagan’s election in 1980. Which means I’ve been witnessing the slow decline of the white liberal professional class my entire life. Sometimes I feel (in the way probably a lot of American writers today feel) like a German author in the mid-1930s, looking forward into the abyss but also looking backward into our own rich and plangent memories of a world about to go extinct. The whole point of Storyknife is that a story can turn into a knot that chokes us but also be the blade that cuts through it. Maybe in the case of “Summer Song” the story is the knot and the epigraph is the knife—because as Marx knew very well, elites keep assuring themselves that everything is fine until the moment the lights go out. Those lights are flickering right now.

If you haven’t seen Materialists yet, I’m going to ruin it for you. But that’s okay, because if ever a movie arrived pre-ruined, this is it: Celine Song, who worked as a matchmaker in Manhattan before making her debut with Past Lives, has absolutely steeped Materialists in the performative cynicism of contemporary dating. And because the orientation is straight-women-seeking-straight-men, the focus of the movie’s attention shifts from beauty standards for women to, well, beauty standards—standards of attractiveness, acceptability, competitive advantage—for men.

This is refreshing, to say the least. “Women destroying themselves to keep their looks” is such a widespread staple of American film and TV that it can’t even be called a subgenre; it runs the gamut from flesh-churning body horror in The Substance to incidental anorexic subplots in nearly every streaming series about teenagers or twenty-somethings. To have Pedro Pascal playing a man who’s taken radical and risky steps to alter himself purely for romantic success—there it is! That’s the plot!—isn’t just refreshing. It’s Song’s way of calling out the so-called “Manosphere” on its misogynist fantasies of rational, confident, decisive men in a world of weak, distracted, superficial women. Alpha males, like the ones Pedro Pascal plays in Materialists, are made, not born—that is, made of male insecurity, narcissism, vacuity, and also some sober calculation about what it takes to “succeed” in the algorithmic world of elite courtship. That’s where the leg-breaking comes in.

I happen to know a lot about this, because I’ve lived most of my life in the shadow of an earlier trend in male cosmetic enhancement: the use of synthetic human growth hormone to help boys grow taller. I was among the very first boys to take synthetic HGH, in 1986, after an endocrinologist, with the prompting of my parents, gave me a brand new medical diagnosis: “idiopathic short stature.” In my case, as anyone can tell, HGH didn’t exactly produce eye-popping results; endocrinologists informed my parents afterward that it was impossible to know if it had any effect at all. This moment is the genesis of a book I’ve been writing for the last five years: On Being Short: Men, Masculinity, and Not Measuring Up. (It’ll be published by Graywolf in 2027.)

To me the most interesting aspect of height bias or prejudice—sure, you could call it “heightism” or “sizeism”—is that most people, like the characters in Materialists, don’t think it exists. They treat it as something natural or obvious, not as a form of irrational bigotry (which, of course, it is). Short men and tall women are both targets, as Susan Cohen and Christine Cosgrove demonstrate at great length in their study Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height, but this bias has almost never been legally documented or classed as discrimination, even though there are reams of studies demonstrating that height plays a significant factor in romantic and career success, lifetime income, and mental health. Being outside-of-average-height is a little like being fat: it brings all kinds of stereotypes and assumptions and aversions into play, including very real moral/biological judgments—for example, that short women shouldn’t have children with short men, because of what many a pesky grandparent or intrusive friend will call “the obvious disadvantages” of having short boys. But fatphobia is a well-understood and (in some contexts) legally actionable form of discrimination; height bias is not.

Of course, nothing about this symbolic order that privileges 6’ men and 5’6” women is natural or obvious; it’s all part of the commodification of the body in the social order of Western capitalism, which leads us back to Materialists. Dakota Johnson plays a willowy young Manhattan matchmaker from a working-class family who has become an expert at her job according to the numbers, matching clients according to an exact ratio of what incomes/heights/backgrounds/personalities fit together. She herself has sworn off dating for the same reason some chefs eat nothing but undressed lettuce: she knows too much. The only person she would ever date, she avers, is a wildly rich man who can give her the financial security she never had—especially not with her ex-boyfriend, a struggling (and bad) actor who still lives with roommates in Queens. Enter Pedro, who is, as she says, a “unicorn”: tall, rich-from-a-rich-family, extremely handsome, capable of holding a conversation, most likely not a rapist. (That last caveat is not a joke, as anyone familiar with dating knows, and as Materialists makes crystal clear.) Pedro wants her, even as she keeps insisting—and she really means it—that they’re not compatible, that he can do much better, and that he doesn’t really love her, he just wants to own her. Finally Pedro gets the message, she decides to try again with miserable ex in Queens, they have a romantic date with food from a halal cart, exeunt.

This is all great material, a rom-com for people who know the term “late capitalism” and have unread books by David Graeber and Thomas Piketty on their shelves, but it would be pretty unremarkable if Celine Song hadn’t twisted the knife in one particular way, revealing a detail about modern life even Dakota Johnson’s character couldn’t anticipate. The “unicorn” was originally 5’6” and had leg-lengthening surgery along with his brother as a young man, calculating that the money and pain involved would pay dividends in the future. In one of the film’s most notable scenes, Pascal’s character bends his legs to simulate his real height, suddenly appearing even shorter than Johnson (who’s an ideal 5’7”)—a poignant, pathetic demonstration of why he was obviously right to grow six inches.

Is that what leg-lengthening surgery actually does? There’s a great in-depth investigative piece in GQ that goes into all the details, but the upshot is: it’s very expensive (in the six figures), extremely painful and somewhat risky, takes a year or more to complete, and yes, it can make your legs 4-6 inches longer. It doesn’t change the rest of your anatomy, meaning your arms will always look too short, among other visual oddities. Contrary to the fantasy Materialists perpetuates, it will not turn you into Pedro Pascal. (In this sense, Song’s movie is a prime example of prestige art shamelessly morphing into marketing, or what I’ve started to call “flattire”.)

Of course that’s not all it is. Leg-lengthening surgery, like hair plugs or other procedures designed to enhance masculinity, is gender-affirming care for straight men. It’s a profound statement about the power of conventional norms of masculinity, economic, social, and (in some situations) racial power. It resonates with the oldest modern plastic surgery, rhinoplasty, which, as Sander Gilman details in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, was developed by German Jewish surgeons in the 19th century to help Jewish men conform to the Teutonic ideal of the masculine face. (Gilman’s book was one of the inspirations for my novel Your Face in Mine, which is about cross-racial plastic surgery or “racial reassignment surgery.”) Rhinoplasty, which is of course still very popular, is intrinsically entwined with European antisemitism and the ideal proportions of the white European body; medical “solutions” for short boys and men, though they seem very recent, actually evolved out of the same era—as I discuss in On Being Short, hormonal treatments for short boys began in the 1920s and were a key reason for the development of endocrinology as a medical field.

Should height bias be condemned, should short men and tall women be considered a protected class, vulnerable to discrimination? These are important questions, but not my questions. I’m more interested in the ostensible subject of Materialists: dating. Dating—in an earlier era it would be called “courtship,” in an anthropological sense, “courtship rituals”—is where sex, class, race, gender, and money become hopelessly interlocked. As Dakota Johnson and her matchmaker colleagues know all too well, it’s where people reveal their real desires, which much of the time are explicitly, unapologetically racist, misogynist, discriminatory in every way. Technically speaking, Manhattan (where Materialists takes place) is a site of elite biological and economic reproduction, where good genes wrap around good bank accounts, or vice versa. (I wrote about this years ago in a short story about my alma mater, another key site of elite biological and economic reproduction: “Dear Yale”.) As a short boy becoming a short man, I was exposed to the unfairness, the discriminatory and highly economic nature, of desire early and often. It’s okay! I survived. Given that my arms still match my legs, I came out of it with a sense of proportion.

Image credit: a screenshot of a website showing a TikTok edit of what is likely a pirated version of Materialists, by Celine Song, 2025.

Note: This morning I saw a post from my friend Alexander Chee about reading Middlemarch for the first time. Someone said, “I love Eliot’s authorial intrusions,” and Alex wrote, “She relishes them.” That took me back to this lecture I gave on the unexpected joys of reading George Eliot as an experimental writer—back in 2009. The audience was MFA students in creative writing, and my tone is, I have to say, kind of dry and pedantic. I don’t write lectures like this anymore. But I agree with every word.

George Eliot’s most quoted statement about the nature of fiction comes from her first novel, Adam Bede, in the form of a chapter-length digression in the middle of the novel (Book Two, Chapter 17). In this chapter, addressing the reader directly, she invokes a hypothetical question any nineteenth-century novelist would be expected to take very seriously: why can’t you make your characters better than they are? That is, more noble, more virtuous, more up-to-date, more expressive of general public opinion, or the author’s presumed opinions? Here is Eliot’s answer, in truncated form:

…It happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness box, narrating my experience on oath.

If this argument seems so self-evident as to not even be worth arguing, of course, it’s because this conception of realism—call it “holding a mirror up to nature”—has become so much a part of our aesthetic DNA that we no longer are aware of its source. Fiction, in short, is not about ideals, but about empirical truth: what can actually be observed. Eliot illustrates this turn in a sentence that travels the distance from Milton to Thomas Hardy in the flick of a phrase:

I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to to an old woman bending over her flowerpot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her stone jug, and all these cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her…

“Cheap common things”: one hears echoes of this phrase in Flaubert’s letters, in Zola, in Chekhov, even to a degree (perhaps without the damning word “cheap”) in Henry James and Virginia Woolf, but more to the point, for our purposes, in every textbook on fiction, every introductory creative writing course in use today. Describe what you see. Or, as Joseph Conrad put it in his famous preface to The N— of the Narcissus: “My job is to make you see.” It’s no coincidence at all that realism in fiction arrived on the scene, in Anglo-American discourse, at the same moment as photography. Reality, what exists in the real world, is the subject of interest here; this is true subjectively (that is, the work is supposed to portray the workings of the mind as it actually happens) but also objectively (the work is supposed to focus on what actually exists in the world, however humble, rather than what we wish was there). Reality is, as Eliot and many other writers of her time (and later) insist, the “proof” on which fiction depends: “I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness box, narrating my experience on oath.”

There’s a logical problem with these analogies that becomes obvious as soon as we detach ourselves a little from Eliot’s argument. This interpretation of realism blurs the line between representation—mimesis, the creation of likenesses—and reproduction, that is, creating an image of something that already exists. It strongly implies that fiction should aspire to reproduction; that reproduction is the only dependable, “provable” art. The difficulty, of course, is that fictional characters and situations don’t already exist. There is no such thing, in fiction, as “reproduction,” in the sense that there is in photography, or in legal testimony. There is no original, no referent, no event, only the carefully crafted perception of such an original. As the English literary critic Terry Eagleton says, this makes the standard Eliot proposes—“narrating my experience on oath”—not only unattainable but a little unfair:

If realism is taken to mean ‘represents the world as it actually is’, then there is plenty of room for wrangling over what counts in this respect. You cannot decide whether a work is realist simply by inspecting it. Suppose we discovered a piece of writing from some long-vanished civilisation which we knew was in some sense fictional, and which paid inordinate attention to the length of men’s noses. We might categorise the work as non-realist, until further archaeological research revealed that the civilisation in question regarded nose-size as an important index of male fertility. In which case the text might shift into the category of realism. Literary critics in the distant future would not be able to tell that Endgame was non-realist unless, for example, they had historical evidence that putting old people in dustbins was not standard geriatric practice in the mid-20th century.

What Eagleton is proposing here is that we treat realism less as a de facto standard for evaluating all works of fiction and more as a question of intent within a certain cultural and historical moment. In other words, realism is only a subjective question: if a writer seeks out “what actually happened,” and produces something recognizably like the material fabric of existence in a certain era, then that is realism, whether it bears the label or not.

The problem, however, from a writer’s point of view, is that when we acknowledge that what we’re doing is representation and not reproduction, we may begin to doubt the accuracy, the persuasiveness, of our own perceptions. On the one hand we have an impossible epistemological demand: make it feel like it actually happened. On the other hand we have our own limited imaginative perception, our own tiny corner of worldly experience. How can we make others believe what we ourselves don’t know if we believe?

I’ve chosen George Eliot as the subject of this essay because I have the feeling that at the end of her writing career she began to struggle with this kind of self-doubt, not so much because she doubted her abilities but, on the contrary, because she was such a virtuoso that she could make her readers believe virtually anything. I believe this not on the basis of research into her letters or biography but because her last novel, Daniel Deronda, confronts the question head-on.

For Eliot the problem of the verifiability of fictional assertions had a profound moral dimension. She came to fiction relatively late in life; as a child and young adult she belonged to an evangelical Christian sect, and later broke with orthodox Christianity when she translated The Life of Jesus, one of the first texts to engage in skeptical historical interpretation of the Bible. (It was at the same time that she took up a twenty-year cohabitation with an older, already married man, which did nothing to endear her to her Christian brethren). Only in her forties, after two decades of translating and writing philosophy and theology, did she turn to writing novels. She brought to fiction not the sense of a religious vocation but rather a post-religious concern with translating Christian values and principles into a secular, historical world. Which is another way of saying that to her realism was a matter of moral and spiritual integrity, as well as aesthetic success. And that, I think, contributes to the uncertainty she demonstrates about the realist “project” in Daniel Deronda.

It’s not really necessary to know the whole plot of the novel to understand these examples, but here’s a rough outline: Gwendolen Harleth is the beautiful and prodigal daughter of a widow; she has been educated in the grand style, expecting that she will enter into high society one day, but at the beginning of the novel, she learns that her mother has lost all her money. Faced with the prospect of becoming a governess, she allows herself to be wooed by an immensely wealthy man, Grandcourt, even though she has grave doubts about his character. Grandcourt turns out to be a brutal, psychologically abusive husband. The novel’s other main character, Daniel Deronda, is the adopted son of Grandcourt’s uncle, a noble and generous young man whom Gwendolen falls in love with, but who ultimately rejects her. (Deronda also, in the course of the novel, learns that he is Jewish and ultimately leaves England for Palestine, but that doesn’t enter into the passages I will quote here).

The first passage I want to look at treats Gwendolen Harleth directly as a subject for debate. It occurs very early in the novel, when Gwendolen has just returned home to her newly impoverished family.

Always she was the princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have her breakfast-roll made of the finest bolted flower from the seven thin ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver fork kept out of the baggage. How was this to be accounted for? The answer may seen to lie quite on the surface—in her beauty, in a certain unusualness about her, a decision of will which made itself felt in her gracious movements and clear unhesitating tones…This potent charm, added to the fact that she was the eldest daughter…may seem so full a reason for Gwendolen’s domestic empire, that to look for any other would be to ask the reason of daylight when the sun is shining. But beware of arriving at conclusions without comparison. I remember having seen the same assiduous, apologetic attention awarded to persons who were not at all beautiful or unusual. Some of them were a very common sort of men. And the only point of resemblance among them all was a strong determination to have what was pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves disagreeable or dangerous when they did not get it. I doubt whether even without her potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might not still have played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her inborn energy of egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to what she might say or do. However, she had the charm, and those who feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies.

Since very few contemporary writers use this kind of explicit authorial commentary at length, to our ears this passage might seem most similar to the voice-over we hear on certain TV shows: Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, or Gossip Girl. And up to a certain point this is not an inaccurate comparison. George Eliot’s tone here begins, like one of those omniscient female narrators, as snide condescension mixed with envy, luxuriating in the narrator’s power not only to control but to evaluate and ridicule. And this is why the line in the middle of the passage so powerfully brings us up short: “But beware of arriving at conclusions without comparison.”

What kind of thing is that for an omniscient narrator to say? Rather than dangling Gwendolen in front of us like a puppet, Eliot invokes, in a subtle but troubling way, the question of verifiability: is it enough to say that Gwendolen, like the wicked stepsister, gets her way because she’s beautiful and gracious, and the eldest in the family? No, it is not. Gwendolen’s power lies in her “egoistic desire,” and we know this because we can compare her with other similar cases, a kind of control group. (Where these other cases come from is not specified, and this is only one among several ways that Eliot plays with the narrator’s ambiguous status). Moreover, Gwendolen is not, like the wicked stepsister, secretly detested by those around her; “those who feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character.” In this passage Eliot proposes an empirical problem—how do we know we know how Gwendolen gets her power over the family?—and, by drawing some unspecified, but convincing, bit of observable wisdom, seems to solve it.

The second, and more challenging, passage I want to look at in Daniel Deronda occurs later, when we are introduced to Gwendolen’s future husband, Grandcourt, for the first time. This is the first part.

He was slightly taller than herself, and their eyes seemed to be on a level; there was not the faintest smile on his face as he looked at her, not a trace of self-consciousness or anxiety in his bearing; when he raised his hat he showed an extensive baldness surrounded with a mere fringe of reddish-blond hair, but he also showed a perfect hand; the line of feature from brow to chin undisguised by beard was decidedly handsome, with only moderate departures from the perpendicular. It was not possible for a human aspect to be freer from grimace or solicitous wrigglings; also it was perhaps not possible for a breathing man wide awake to look less animated. The correct Englishman, drawing himself up from his bow into rigidity, assenting severely, and seeming to be in a state of internal drill, suggests a suppressed vivacity, and may be suspected of letting go with some violence when he is released from parade; but Grandcourt’s bearing had no rigidity, it inclined rather to the flaccid.

This is Eliot working at the height of her descriptive powers. Looking at the rhythm of the prose alone for a minute, consider the way she deploys semicolons to mark the movement of the first sentence, each statement rising, cresting, and falling like a wave. Grandcourt is not beautiful the way an Apollonian statue is beautiful; instead he expresses that highest Victorian aspiration, order and proportion: “he showed an extensive baldness surrounded with a mere fringe of reddish-blond hair, but he also showed a perfect hand.” Already extremely wealthy, born into high society, used to getting his way, he projects a sense of wanting nothing and being impressed by nobody—which is just the beginning of his power over Gwendolen.

On one level, we can easily say that Grandcourt feels like a person we might meet (were we to live in England in the late nineteenth century): Eliot describes him in such a richly nuanced way that it’s difficult not to feel that he is a flesh-and-blood person sprung to life. At the same time, the prose is so carefully structured—sculpted—that it is impossible to ignore that Grandcourt is a verbal creation. Again, Eliot runs up against the problem of artifice, of unverifiability. And here she issues a much more strident challenge to herself, and to the reader:

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being? even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumberable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. I am only mentioning the points that Gwendolen saw by light of a prepared contrast in the first five minutes of her meeting with Grandcourt: they were summed up in the words, “He is not ridiculous.”

Perhaps the most important phrase in this passage is “by light of a prepared contrast.” Here Eliot is explicitly poking a hole in the analogy of realist fiction to photography, or photo-reproduction. Gwendolen’s introduction to Grandcourt is not “natural” or simply “mirrored in her mind”; it’s carefully staged, backlit, somewhat melodramatically engineered into the narrative. But there’s an even more disconcerting ambivalence in Eliot’s preceding statement: “Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumberable impressions under differing circumstances.” Innumberable impressions, that is, more impressions than are ever possible in the text of a novel, even one as long and comprehensive as this. In the midst of the most suspenseful moment in the novel thus far, Eliot simultaneously presents and washes her hands of Grandcourt. You could call it virtuosic ambivalence, or, as I like to think of it, a kind of meta-realism.

In his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty proposed that philosophers abandon the traditional notion that what we think reflects reality in a determinable, systematic way. Drawing on a century of “anti-foundational” philosophy—that is, philosophy that argues against a stable, universal, unchangeable notion of truth—he argued that instead of constantly trying to establish a common basis of agreement we should pay attention to how reality is understood within certain local, specific conditions, without privileging one set of conditions over the other.

I invoke Rorty here because although it would seem that fiction is by its very nature anti-foundational—after all, as I said earlier, it has no original, no referent—within a realistic narrative our tendency as writers and readers is to cling to certain foundational assumptions with the tenacity of a ten-year-old who insists on explaining the difference between High Elvish and Low Elvish while watching The Lord Of The Rings. No matter how tenuously a character may be described or referred to in a fictional text, our minds have a tendency to grant that person a full, though not necessarily complex, existence. This generalizing capacity is exactly what George Eliot is referring to when she asks, in the passage I quoted above, “Who can all at once describe a human being?” We tend to take it on trust that any fiction writer can; if they’re not fully capable of describing a human being, of vivifying inanimate words through a kind of Frankensteinian juju, what business do they have writing fiction at all?

All the same, what George Eliot is doing in these passages in Daniel Deronda is not metafiction, in the sense of Borges, Robert Coover, or John Barth, or Tristram Shandy, for that matter. She is not interested in disrupting what John Gardner called the “vivid, continuous dream” of the realist novel; she is not destablizing narrative itself at all, but rather taking it for granted that the reader wants to believe in the existence of this fictional world as much as she does. What she is doing is something more Rorty-esque, by asserting, through the narrator, her provisional, not total, authority over the story. When Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was published, it occasioned howls of protest among philosophers and cultural commentators, from both the right and the left, who accused Rorty of undermining the basis for law, morality, and science, by saying that no one set of principles could ever be declared absolutely or innately true. Rorty’s response, which infuriated his critics, was that everyone should basically relax and keep doing what they were doing before, as long as they acknowledged that “’objective truth’ is no more and no less than the best idea we currently have about how to explain what is going on.”

Part of what makes Eliot’s approach especially interesting is that Daniel Deronda stands at the end of a long period in which the implied author/narrator held sway in the English novel. The generation after her—Thomas Hardy, George Gissing—was much more reticent in its use of authorial commentary. By the turn of the twentieth century, the author had begun to disappear into the modernist convention of authorial silence, which has come down to us in the dictum of “show, don’t tell.” (For more on this turn toward authorial silence in the modernist era, check out Wayne Booth’s classic The Rhetoric of Fiction.) Of course, in its own way, authorial silence is just as absolute in its claim of epistemological authority as the Victorian use of authorial commentary: either way we are expected to take the “existence” of the fictional universe as a given. George Eliot proposes, in these passages, something that is more like a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and this, again, is why Rorty is a particularly interesting parallel, because what he advocates in place of absolutism is a kind of philosophic conversation:

…Coming to understand is more like getting acquainted with a person than following a demonstration. In both cases we play back and forth between guesses about how to characterize particular statements or other events, and guesses about the point of the whole situation, until gradually we feel at ease with that was hitherto strange.

This is not at all far removed from what Eliot said in her little disquisition on Grandcourt: “We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language.” In both cases we’re more focused on an ongoing process than any kind of absolute result. But we’re not focused on the process as a means of undoing the process, as is, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy, which slows down a sequence of events almost to the point of stasis in a deliberate effort to frustrate the reader’s expectations of a temporal sequence. Meta-realist writing, as I like to call what Eliot is doing here, is not experimental as much as interrogative.

I want to sharpen my definition of meta-realism by looking at a contemporary example that couldn’t be more different from Daniel Deronda. This is James Alan McPherson’s short story “Elbow Room,” published in the collection of the same name, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. “Elbow Room” is, as its center, a story about an interracial marriage in San Francisco in the early 1970s, but it is also, simultaneously, a debate about how—and whether—it is possible to tell the story of an interracial marriage in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Echoing the paranoid style of the times, McPherson stages this as a debate between the narrator (here named “Narrator,” with a capital N) and “Editor,” with a capital E, who begins the story by announcing,

Narrator is unmanageable. Demonstrates a disregard for form…questioned closely, he declares himself the open enemy of conventional narrative categories…In order to save this narration, editor felt compelled to clarify slightly, not to censor but to impose at least the illusion of order. This was an effort toward preserving a certain morality of technique.

Editor’s effort, however, is partly unsuccessful; the narration keeps slipping away from his “standards,” and between passages McPherson inserts an ongoing debate in italics between the two:

The above section is totally unclear. It should be cut.

I would leave it in. It was attempting to suggest the nature of the times.

But here the narrative begins to drift. There is a shift in subject, mood, and focus of narration. Cutting is advised.

Back during that time there was little feeling and no focus.

What is it about the story that is so unacceptable to Editor? First, the narrator’s insistence on blurring the distinction between himself and the story he sets out to tell; second, the narrator’s insistence that there is no way of telling the story of this couple without treating them as actors in, and victims of, the circumstances of the times. Consider this passage in which McPherson describes the black woman in the couple, Virginia, who joined the Peace Corps to escape an impoverished background, and returned with a highly cosmopolitan sensibility:

In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, people gathered in groups and told similar stories. They thought in terms new to them. In conversation they remarked on common points of reference in the four quarters of the world. The peasants among them had become aristocratic without any of the telling affectations. The aristocrats by birth had developed an easy, common touch. They considered themselves a new tribe.

But then their minds began to shift. In the beginning it was a subtle process. During conversation someone might say a casual “you know?” and there would be a hesitation at first, denying affirmation…People began to feel self-conscious and guilty…Inevitably, many people in conversation began saying, “I don’t understand!” It took several months before they became black and white.

This is a beautifully compressed and heartrending description of the way racial discord evolved among educated, liberal Americans in the Sixties, but it is also, from the Editor’s point of view, a “violation of conventional narrative categories.” What is social history of this kind doing in a short story about two individuals? Shouldn’t we be paying attention to the lived experience of their relationship, and not what’s happening in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago? Even more galling to the Editor is the narrator’s insistence that this state of affairs had seeped into literature itself:

The life-affirming peasants of Chekhov and Babel sat wasted and listless on their porches, oblivious to the beats in their own blood. Even Pushkin’s firebrands seemed content with the lackluster: mugging old ladies, killing themselves, snatching small change from dollar-and-dime grocers…Men with greatness in them spoke on the telephone, and in private, as if bouncing safe clichés off the ear of a listener into an expectant and proprietary tape recorder.

And the caste curtains were drawn, resegregating all imaginations.

What McPherson is doing here, above all, is working at the far edge of the fiction writer’s ability to generalize, to place characters in a larger social and cultural fabric while still insisting on their fictional autonomy. Rather than push his characters to be exemplars of a particular social tendency—to make them exaggerations, objects of satire—he wants to reserve the space for them to act as individuals without insisting on their absolute individuality. Referring to the Kansas-born Paul Frost, Virginia’s white husband to be, he writes,

I know that when I looked I saw dead Indians living in his eyes. But I also say a wholesome glow in their directness. They seemed in earnest need of answers to honest questions always on the verge of being asked.

Consider how close this is, in a sense, to Eliot’s presentation of Grandcourt:

The correct Englishman, drawing himself up from his bow into rigidity, assenting severely, and seeming to be in a state of internal drill, suggests a suppressed vivacity, and may be suspected of letting go with some violence when he is released from parade; but Grandcourt’s bearing had no rigidity, it inclined rather to the flaccid.

Categorical statement: then individual exception. It’s the tension between these two things—between what we know we know and what we’re willing to concede, for the purposes of getting on with the story—that make meta-realism different from other kinds of experimental fiction that more often want to deny the reader the mimetic experience of the story at all. As Richard Rorty never stopped arguing, the turn away from absolutist forms of epistemology never spelled the end of philosophy, and, in a similar way, the meta-realist practice of upending narrative without destroying makes it impossible to argue, as many cynics do, for the end of the novel as a form of intelligent art.

Image credit: Portrait of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), pencil drawing by Samuel Lawrence (Wikimedia commons)

You have to give it to Mike White: he’s a sicko who knows how to read a room. The most telling news about season three of The White Lotus came a few weeks ago, when news emerged that after the election last November he cut a key early scene in which Carrie Coon’s character, a New York single mom/lawyer, tells her friends about her nonbinary child and the awkwardness of they/them pronouns. “Now, there’s a vibe shift,” he said. “That’s not the kind of attention I want...The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about.”

God forbid any of us should be overwhelmed by politics. But that’s not my point! You can’t fault White for not being a polemicist; that’s never been his thing. The White Lotus, like a lot of supposedly-highbrow television, surfs the zeitgeist, picking up stray material from the news and discarding it the minute it feels stale or played out or overdone. It’s all supposed to serve the larger purpose of the story: in this case, a carefully counterpointed, excruciatingly detailed satire of rich Americans (and a few international guests) on vacation, each family or friend group a ticking bomb of resentment and dysfunction, on the verge of imploding—

Only they don’t.

The end of the third season, with its shower of themed merch, seals the deal: The White Lotus, the show, is functionally identical to The White Lotus, the resort, which offers its core group of guests an exhilarating week of conflict, misadventure, hurt feelings, drunken rants, but then in the end ties all their problems up in a bow and sends them home spiritually refreshed and renewed. In other words, it’s not satire at all; it’s sincere hedonism-as-therapy, like The Love Boat, wrapped in fancy ironic wallpaper.

When I teach the basics of satire to my undergraduates, as I do almost every semester, I start by asking them to describe the difference between The Simpsons and South Park. This distinction—between a relatively gentle, humane, affectionate depiction of society and a caustic, bitter, scabrous, bloody one—is the key to understanding the two dominant modes of satire, sometimes called Horatian and Juvenalian or, as Max Eastman puts it, “teasing” versus “biting.” Lately I’ve been thinking I have to give up this exercise, and not just because fewer and fewer of my students every year have seen The Simpsons AND South Park (or, for that matter, either one). I’ve started to think Horatian satire, in the present moment, has more or less ceased to exist. Juvenal still walks among us—caustic satire is one of the great art forms of our age, and particularly of the 2010s Black Art Renaissance. (Think Paul Beatty, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, Colson Whitehead, Boots Riley, just to name the most obvious examples.) But the warmer, more affectionate, less bloody kind, which holds out the possibility of comic reversals and unexpected redemption? I can’t think of a single good example.

Instead, in the mode of The White Lotus, we have deliberately failed satire, a kind of reverse deus ex machina in which the show creator arrives at the last minute to spare the characters the consequences of their actions. If you haven’t watched the last episode of season three and still for some reason want to, stop reading now. The two family or family-like groupings of white American tourists at the heart of the season’s storylines both seem to be headed for a disaster. In one case, three middle-aged women, former childhood friends on a “girl’s trip” paid for by the richest of the trio, have been sniping, competing, and generally regressing to their school-age selves for a week. In the other, a wealthy family from North Carolina (stressed financier dad, Ativan-addled mom, three neurotic almost-adult children) is facing ruin because of the dad’s financial crimes back home, only they don’t know it, because the “wellness-themed resort” has encouraged them to lock up their phones. The dad, amiably played by Jason Isaacs aka Lucius Malfoy, attempts suicide, loses heart, and then, in a South Park-cum-Aeschylus touch, decides to poison his family with a tropical smoothie laced with seeds from a toxic fruit growing outside their villa.

Nope. Nothing. Full retreat. I won’t detail the nails-on-a-chalkboard way White reverses course in the last fifteen minutes; suffice to say he sacrifices every shred of narrative credibility to send his white characters happily home—an ending so bad the New York Times wrote a story about it. (The NYT’s wall-to-wall, consensus-culture coverage of TWL has been so thorough it almost defies their treatment of Succession two years ago, which I wrote about here.)

What’s the word for this? There should be one, because deliberately failed, self-thwarted satire is one of the hallmarks of our era, even if most of it is achieved more elegantly and less openly than The White Lotus. You could almost say it’s HBO’s stock in trade. Whenever you find yourself feeling queasy in the middle of some TV show, novel (Ottessa Moshfegh, for example), movie (The Menu), art show, etc, wondering if you’re supposed to despise or envy the people you’re looking at, it’s likely you’ve wandered into the realm of failed satire-that-is-really-flattery, or what I’ll call “flattire.” Yes, you could say this is a mode that goes back to the origins of satire itself (which always has to do with an ambivalent attitude toward the lives and mores of the rich and powerful), but the seamless nature of art and commerce today, the synergy between What-a-horrible-person and I-want-to-buy-his-shoes, lifts the genre to a new and special level.

So there you have it: flattire. (You could also write “flatire,” but that sounds like an idiomatic French verb for flatulence.) It’s the kind of story where, to paraphrase Banksy (who nailed this convergence ages ago), you know you’re going to exit through the gift shop. Whether you can actually escape the gift shop, though—that’s another question entirely.

Comic by Eli Valley, @elivalley, originally published in French for Le Monde Diplomatique in January 2025

The other day I read a Facebook post by the political theorist Alex Gourevitch which summarized our current moment so succinctly it’s worth quoting at length. Here goes.

One question people have wondered is why the resistance to Trump is so much less organized and vigorous than last time. There are a lot of reasons. Probably the most significant is just that Trump won the popular vote this time around, so he has a democratic authority he lacked last time.

But here's another factor. One of the main liberal institutions, in and through which a lot of the resistance happened last time around, spent 2024 vigorously suppressing free speech and protest. With very little objection from mainstream liberals, sometimes with a great deal of support. Here's how severe the repression was. At the peak of the anti-Vietnam protests in 1969, when millions were protesting, about 4000 students were arrested. Last year, almost the same number were arrested or detained, despite the encampments and protests being orders of magnitude smaller than the Vietnam movements. And less widely reported, because the numbers are hard to find, universities have initiated thousands more private disciplinary proceedings, including suspensions, expulsions or mandatory expulsions if students are caught breaking university rules again. This happened across private and public universities, in blue states and red.

Despite the fact that these protestors were doing more or less the same thing as campus protestors have been doing for decades, across a range of issues, this time around they were suddenly determined to be a threat and to be unacceptably trespassing and too disruptive and so on. And now that they have marks on their record, disciplinary proceedings, or are still facing legal charges or in court cases, the costs of protesting again are even more severe. Meanwhile, universities have rushed to rewrite their rules to restrict this activity even more severely. Some of contemporary liberalism's most authoritarian tendencies were used to shutdown protests, by those who tend to be the most active protestors (anyone paying attention knows that most were not the kind who only protest about Palestine). And now it's mostly heads down and silence. With universities themselves facing yet more threats, just as they cut their own noses off to spite their face.

And if one thinks this all happened because of some ways in which the Israel-Palestine thing is exceptional, whatever the truth of that, it also set a series of precedents for the next time and for other kinds of protest. It is true that universities were already under significant pressure at the time. But mainstream Dems, the universities, the liberal press, etc., did not even come close to pushing the boundaries of what they could do to defend the right to protest.

…Everyone understood that universities weren't going to be just quiet places of study and career-making. They are places that people live, play, collaborate, think, organize, and also study, credentialize, and make careers. They are universities because the entire universe of human activities takes place within that self-contained universe. Which means one has to accept that some areas are commons, where things like protest happen, and that this kind of activity will be tolerated, even embraced as part of that experience. But there has been a gradual chipping away at that idea, which was slammed shut with vigor last year. The university has also become a place with more extensive security protocols, speech codes, administrative interference in student life; where the emphasis has been on credentialing, making one's way through and out; where property rights, including university property rights, matter more than the community's collective activity and the rights relating to that activity. It's possible that the clearing of the Gaza encampments signals a real shift, where those accumulated recent marginal changes have become a new paradigm, the end of that right to protest that was a standing feature of university life.

At NYU, where I’ve taught since 2021 and where my wife Sonya has taught since 2012, the change in the climate and physical environment of the campus has been particularly stark. To put it mildly. NYU, as any visitor immediately realizes, doesn’t actually have a campus. It’s a bunch of buildings sprinkled around lower Manhattan; its focal point is Washington Square Park, a city park. The number of open outdoor spaces NYU actually controls is tiny: Gould Plaza, in front of the Stern School of Business; a walkway between Bobst Library and the admissions building; another walkway next to the hideous new eyesore in Mercer Street known as the Paulson Center.

Since the protests against the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023, all those spaces have been the sites of encampments and protests, and they are all now walled off, protected by temporary fences and walls, closed by private security to all but NYU ID holders.

NYU advertises itself (even today, with no sense of irony) as a “campus without walls.” For undergraduates especially, that is its institutional brand, born in the era of neoliberal global capitalism 30 years ago. Now, this brand has never particularly made sense. The campus may appear open to the city, but its paywalls are very steep. It’s always been difficult—and now is often impossible—to hold an educational event at NYU that’s accessible to the public. Apart from its tiny art museum and sub-par performing arts center, nothing at NYU can be described as primarily existing for the public good. And as for NYU’s much-vaunted global campuses: the two largest ones are in authoritarian states, China and Abu Dhabi, where there is no pretense of a right to free expression. (While NYU claims academic freedom prevails on its overseas campuses, the record definitely demonstrates otherwise.)

That said, until 2023, NYU was a campus where left-wing thought was allowed to flourish with few restrictions, for the benefit of its students and the intellectual world at large. Eve Tuck, the Native scholar whose essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” defines the modern study of settler colonialism, teaches at NYU. So does Fred Moten, whose book The Undercommons advocates for a practice of fugitive resistance against the modern university. Vivek Chibber, one of today’s most influential Marxist social scientists, is a mainstay in NYU’s sociology department. The list goes on and on. Of course, as at all research universities, the progressive activists and theoreticians at NYU are vastly outnumbered by those who are vaguely liberal but politically disengaged, or by those who teach a variety of centrist or conservative positions: mainstream economists, business-school professors, pseudo-scientific celebrity “thought leaders” like Jonathan Haidt. And then there are NYU’s most eccentric right-wing conspiracist professors like Marc Crispin Miller, a 9/11 truther and fanatical opponent of vaccines and masks, and the late Stephen Cohen, a strident Putinist who appeared often on the Russian state propaganda channel RT.

The faculty, in other words, has always been a cranky, squabbling, chaotic, dissonant body, mostly focused on whatever is happening in their own subfields, taking for granted that the protections of tenure and academic freedom will shield them from the disapproval of the college administration, or the vehement hatred of professor X down the hall, who believes their entire field of study, and the principles behind it, shouldn’t exist. (This is more common among academics than you might think.)

No longer. Since October 7th, 2023, as Alex Gourevitch writes, NYU, like virtually all American universities with an activist student body, has criminalized any form of speech that mentions Palestine or describes Israel’s actions in Gaza, correctly, as genocide. At NYU, protests are banned from all campus spaces, including many that were the sites of loud, vigorous demonstrations during the Black Lives Matter and Sanctuary protests of the last decade. All of these developments have been covered at great length over the past year and a half. The deeper question is: why, and why now? The immediate, obvious and (as far as it goes) correct answer is the Palestine exception; if you don’t know what that is, please watch this film or read this report or this one. But is Palestine a sufficient explanation for the extraordinary, creative, totalizing way universities have implemented repression and censorship since October 7th? After all, pro-Palestine, anti-occupation activism on college campuses, and censorship in response to it, is nothing new; that’s why the phrase “the Palestinian exception” exists.

What’s really at work is a new step in the transformation of American universities themselves—a transformation from the inside—and NYU is a perfect example. This is a story that goes back decades, and has been described in detail in books like Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things and Sarah Ahmed’s On Being Included, and I can only provide a microscopic, bullet-point summary, but here goes:

• After the Reagan revolution, many of the most prominent leftist thinkers and activists of the 1960s and 1970s retreated from the public sphere and took up academic positions.

• Over time—assisted by affirmative action programs that made universities far more diverse—these thinkers cultivated generations of students and new schools of thought—again, largely out of the view of the public.

• In the 1990s and 2000s, the students came into new positions of power and influence, and took these new intellectual concepts into the public sphere.

• In the 2010s—the decade of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter—the students of those students took those concepts out into the streets (and onto college campuses) in a new era of popular protest with radical goals not widely visible in the US in 50 years.

Prison abolition. Income inequality. Structural racism and Critical Race Theory. Intersectionality. Late capitalism. Anti-globalization theory. Queer theory and Gender Trouble. Debt resistance and the debt jubilee. Settler colonialism. All academic concepts generated, or popularized, on college campuses over the last 40 years; all brought by students and activists into the mainstream. It’s no wonder, given this tremendous success, that white supremacist ideologues like Christopher Rufo will do anything to destroy academic humanities and liberal arts programs (“using financial pressure to put universities into existential terror”) and tech-libertarian-fascists like Marc Andreessen think universities as a whole need to be deleted, like failing companies, and replaced en masse:

No way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? It fails and another company takes its place. That’s how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.

These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out, we have built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system.

But why are major universities—Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Cornell—not fighting back; why are they cooperating with an authoritarian government that quite literally, and explicitly, wants to defund them as a whole, demoralize them, remove their autonomy, and (if allowed) raze them to the ground?

The answer has to do with what universities today actually are: profit-producing, self-sustaining financial entities. They are corporations with enormous capital holdings (endowments, real estate, patents and another intellectual property, sports teams, globally recognizable brands, and so on) largely protected from taxation because they are, nominally, educational nonprofits. And like other large American corporations (Amazon, Starbucks, Whole Foods) there is one thing they fear more than anything else:

Unions.

Over the last 30 years, the same cadre (yes, let’s call it a cadre) of leftist and progressive academics have helped drive a unionization movement on college campuses, particularly among graduate students, non-tenure-track professors, and student workers. (There have also been efforts to unionize college athletes, but these have fallen by the wayside in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow athletes to profit from NIL contracts, effectively making them into individual entrepreneurs and free agents.) These union drives have been ugly, bitter, and divisive. Many ostensibly liberal college administrators, like Amy Hungerford (previously Yale, now Columbia) became dedicated union-busters. At NYU, in the last 20 years, there have been difficult and protracted struggles not only to unionize grad students, adjuncts, and contract faculty (ongoing), but a lengthy public battle over the construction of NYU Abu Dhabi, which (like most buildings in the Emirates) was built by contract laborers from South Asia, who are often subject to exploitation and abuse.

And what do the Palestine protests, and the present crackdowns have to do with unions? Quite a lot, because of that key leftist concept: solidarity. Leftist and progressive students and faculty are not single-issue activists. They are annoying and hard to shut up. They have succeeded in creating new unions in a conservative and anti-union moment in American history, and there’s a chance (however remote) that they might someday grasp the holy grail of higher-ed labor: overturning or subverting the Yeshiva decision, which prohibits professors at private universities from joining unions.

It’s becoming clear, in this current stage of college crackdowns alongside campus invasions by police and DHS and ICE agents directed by Trump, that universities are well aware of who they’re targeting, and why. Read, for example, this Twitter thread by Grant Miner, a Columbia student expelled for taking part in the Gaza protests, who is also the head of Columbia’s union of student workers:

“They are universities,” Gourevitch writes, “because the entire universe of human activities takes place within that self-contained universe. Which means one has to accept that some areas are commons, where things like protest happen, and that this kind of activity will be tolerated, even embraced.” Wouldn’t that be nice? Of course, the truth is that for decades many US universities haven’t maintained a commons—a public mission, an intellectual and educational commitment to free discourse and knowledge for its own sake—so much as a tasteful simulation of one. Now they’ve decided the simulation is over.

And here’s the key point: university crackdowns on academic freedom and the right to protest are having an enormous depressive effect on broad-based organizing against Trump, just as they had a major role in weakening young voters’ enthusiasm for Kamala Harris. Pressure and energy and organizing from the left has been the key to major Democratic successes going back to Obama’s victory in 2008 (even as the Democratic Party itself has done everything it can to marginalize, delegitimize, and defund its progressive wing, from Bernie, AOC, Ilhan Omar on down). Now corporate universities, with ostensibly liberal leaders and mission statements, are doing their part to crush student activists and silence the professors who inspire and encourage them.

What comes next? NYU clearly hopes that by demonstrating its own commitment to repression it will be spared the worst of Trump’s crackdown on campus protest: that is, what’s now happening at Columbia, where the administration has succeeding in extorting interim president Katrina Armstrong into gutting its Middle Eastern Studies department and adopting a blatantly racist and nonsensical definition of antisemitism by threatening $400 million in federal funding (for medical research, among other things). The New York Times, not exactly alarmist in its approach to Trump, calls it “a stunning level of deference to the Trump administration from a top private research university.”

How can these passive corporate managers, often too afraid to show their faces on campus, actually believe, in the face of all available evidence, their universities can ride out the storm with their core resources and reputations intact if they just strike the right bargain? As M. Gessen has written recently, there’s a reason people like this obey fascists in advance: they’re trying to save their own skin. It almost never works. When the NYT uses words like “stunning” and “annihilation,” you know things are serious. Andreessen, Thiel, Musk, Trump, and Rufo are not interested in negotiations; at the very least, they want to do to all American universities what DeSantis and Rufo are already doing in Florida (eliminating entire college faculties, imposing strict ideological conditions on syllabi, encouraging scholars to flee) but their ultimate goal is to shrink American higher education nearly to nothing: for-profit online business schools, diploma mills, and a few hollowed-out flagship schools dedicated to the Politburo-style “cultural promotion of ‘Western civilization’.”

The only way to resist this catastrophe is one I’m afraid is unlikely to happen: liberals and leftists have to start working together again. The broad coalition that went out into the streets to protest the Iraq War, to defend the 99%, to elect Obama, and to support Black Lives Matter, has to fight for its basic, existential goals: to defeat fascism and protect democracy. If we win (and the chances are not good) on the other side we will need to transform American higher education to restore its public mission and obligations, including stronger protections for free speech, restrictions on private endowments and tax exemption, broader union protections for students, staff and faculty, board reform, governance reform—it’s a long list. Universities, if they survive, will have to have a very different relationship with their communities and the public as a whole.

It’s a very big if.

In geologic time, which is not normally how one starts a year-in-review, the main event of the year for my family was the July 12th flood in Plainfield, Vermont, where we’ve owned a house since 2020. It was the worst flood in the Great Brook watershed in at least 100 years, and since there aren’t great records of floods before the mid-19th century, maybe longer than that. It destroyed about 10 houses and tore a small apartment building, nicknamed the Heartbreak Hotel, in half. Many other houses in the center of Plainfield were flooded and some are uninhabitable.

Our house sits on the Great Brook but, as of July 11th, was situated about 20 feet above it and 50 feet back. The flood tore away ten feet of riverbank and probably twenty mature trees. As the water was rising in the dark, at about 9 pm, we drove up the hill to our neighbor’s farm and spent the night there; when we came back, the sweet, sparkling creek we had known for four years was replaced by a forty-foot-wide gravel-and-sand flood plain, like a desert arroyo. It was a violent re-alignment of the landscape very much like what happened to western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene.

Now we’ve applied for a FEMA buyout, along with nearly all of our neighbors along the Great Brook (and homeowners across Vermont) both those who lost their houses and those, like us, who fear being flooded the next time. Unlike most people whose homes are threatened by climate change, we have resources, time, and options. We will figure it out. For the time being, we represent the best case scenario in a world of worst case scenarios.

I started off the year with a piece about my inability to say anything useful about the genocide in Gaza, having spent a decade writing a novel about Palestine—but predicting that we would soon, in Mahmoud Darwish’s words, find ourselves “all together in the last passage.” Another way to describe it, to borrow a phrase from Michelle Goldberg: “The Great Capitulation.” In 2024 American universities, corporations, political parties, and other institutions, large and small, embraced authoritarianism on a massive scale, not even waiting for Trump to sweep the swing states in November. At NYU we’ve seen this close up. (I know I’ll be writing about that more in 2025.) So many things have become unrecognizable so quickly, down to my own backyard. All year I feel like I’ve been struggling with the question of how to describe this moment of extreme flux. And, correspondingly, a lot of the works of art I encountered this year seemed weirdly displaced: either they were commenting acutely on our present from a great distance away, or they were representing the present in a way I thought was deformed or unrecognizable. In some cases both.

For lack of a better term, I’m calling this problem of misrecognition, of not-fully-seeing-what’s-right-in-front-of-me, as “the weirdness.”

All forms of art, and especially novels, have a strange relationship with the present. It takes years of writing, and then usually at least a year of production, before a novel hits the shelves, and it’s common for a publication date to be moved around by extraneous factors the writer can’t control. You might feel like you’re addressing the novel to the present, as I wrote in a piece on The New Earth back in September, but in that strange interim between writing, publication, and when people actually read it, the present may have moved on. My hands-down-favorite book of 2024, Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, is a contemporary Palestinian novel written before October 7th, 2023; this doesn’t make it “dated” in any sense, but it does mark a moment in time. It couldn’t take place today, but it could have taken place yesterday.

The Coin takes place in a kind of twilit millennial-melancholy New York, not unlike Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Raven Leilani’s Luster, Ling Ma’s Severance. The narrator is a young Palestinian woman from a wealthy Jerusalem family, a trust fund baby whose brother sends her checks every month, far more than she needs to live on. We don’t quite know what she’s doing in New York, or where she lived before. Needing something to do, she takes a job teaching literature at a prestigious public middle school that attracts low-income students from across the city. She enters into an even stranger and more fraught alliance with a fashion-obsessed gay man, who fraudulently buys and resells Hermès bags for a living. She cleans her apartment, and herself, obsessively. Her thoughts, her rationalizations, her self-analysis, seem superficially reasonable and then utterly batshit.

Like Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, only more eccentrically, The Coin is about Palestinian identity as a private nightmare, an existential conundrum no individual can answer. What I loved about it, apart from the sheer beauty of each carefully controlled sentence, was its uncooperative, nasty, arrogant streak. This is a book that can’t be easily assimilated, even by the most “sympathetic” reader. I still don’t fully understand the ending, and I’m haunted by it.

Elias Khoury, the great Lebanese writer who dedicated his life and art to the Palestinian struggle (and wrote what many consider the greatest novel about Palestine, Gate of the Sun) died in early September, shortly before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. In October I reviewed his most recent novel to appear in English: the second volume of his trilogy Children of the Ghetto, subtitled Star of the Sea.

As I wrote in my review, “Children of the Ghetto is a picaresque, though one without comic intentions: Like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, Adam is an orphan and a rogue, a survivor and a trickster, even a bit of a romantic. It’s also about racial shape-shifting, appropriation and invisibility; you could put it on the same shelf with Passing or Invisible Man.” What amazed me about it is Khoury’s willingness to embrace one of the oldest, most timeworn forms of the novel and yet make it utterly contemporary. Khoury taught at NYU, and he uses the area around the campus as the setting for the New York sections of Children of the Ghetto—he even named one of the principal characters Mamoun, after Mamoun’s Falafel on Macdougal Street. It’s a Palestinian novel I can walk through every day.

Another Palestinian book published in 2024 that sits astride the pre-post-10/7 world is Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger, originally delivered as the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia in September 2023, published with an afterword written in January 2024. It’s a very short book and not weird in the slightest, until you realize that Hammad probably wouldn’t have been allowed to deliver it at Columbia today.

In her afterword, referring to the genocide in Gaza, Hammad asks what now seems to be a purely rhetorical question: “Is this the beginning of a capitulation to disintegrating consensus, and to the flimsiness of basic democratic principles and international law?” She goes on to sum up 2024 in a sentence: “Somewhere recently humanity seems to have crossed an invisible line, and on this side naked power combined with the will to profit threaten to overwhelm the collective interests of our species.”

What other weirdness happened in the literary world this year? There was American Fiction, the movie version of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure (technically released in December 2023, but seen by almost everyone early in 2024). Everett wrote Erasure in the late nineties as a satire on the success of Sapphire’s novel Push; the premise is that mainstream American culture ignores cerebral, experimental, sophisticated Black art but has an endless appetite for stories of Black trauma and victimization. I assumed Cord Jefferson, the director, would update the script to make sense in a post-Obama, post-George Floyd world, where innovative Black writers like Everett have become more visible and successful. But for the most part American Fiction’s plot mirrors Erasure pretty faithfully, as if the last 25 years of American cultural life never happened. It’s full of beautiful and funny scenes whenever Sterling K. Brown is around, but weirdly, even wishfully, detached from the present. I wasn’t outraged by it, as Jason England was in his seething review in Defector (“American Fiction lobs stones made of Styrofoam…while the movie is content to set up and then knock down its array of pantomime villains, the equivalent figures and forces of our present time go conspicuously ignored”) but I was puzzled. It could have been a wickedly sharp cultural sendup; instead, it’s a weirdly evasive one.

Another, much more serious and tragic rupture between the past and the present: the news broke in July that Alice Munro, one of the most idolized (all but canonized) fiction writers in the English-language world, spent decades concealing the fact that her second husband sexually abused her daughter—his stepdaughter—for a period in the late 1970s. When I wrote about the case for the Washington Post, I wanted to focus on how much of Munro’s fiction itself is obsessed with secrecy, guilt, and parents who fail and abandon their children. If I had more time and patience, I’d like to write a longer piece about why I considered including Munro in White Flights, and ultimately decided against it. The short answer is this: Munro absolutely practiced the same kind of moral obliviousness and self-deception about whiteness (particularly the white settlement of Canada, and the erasure of Native Canadians) found in Marilynne Robinson, Anne Tyler, and others I wrote about in that book, but I always had this nagging feeling that Munro’s real motivation was obliviousness about something else. I suspect that other critics are writing reassessments of her fiction that try to get to the heart of the moral (and aesthetic) amnesia, the sheer pleasure of forgetting, now so painfully evident in everything she wrote.

The 2024 book I had the most mixed feelings about was Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, which has racked up awards and praise from all sides. Akbar’s prose is brilliant much of the time; his narrator, Cyrus Shams, is funny, inventive, and obnoxious; and Cyrus’s life story—he lost his mother on Iran Flight 655, which was shot down by a US warship in 1988—is compelling, to say the least. But about two-thirds of the way through I looked up from Martyr! and realized what the novel reminded me of so insistently: Everything is Illuminated. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re one of the few remaining Jonathan Safran Foer fans, and like novels built around the conceit of “Troubled, self-pitying young genius discovers the truth about his family through a series of absurd coincidences and jaw-dropping revelations.” But I lived through the era when that kind of wackiness was all the rage, and I don’t want to go back. This particular weirdness was not for me.

The most altogether warped novel of 2024 (among those I read) was without a doubt Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations, about Cunningham’s experience as an very young aide to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign. Like Elias Khoury, only 100 times more perversely, Cunningham borrows both the title and the structure of a 19th century novel for this bildungsroman about a sensitive, precocious, highly literary young Black man who almost accidentally stumbles into a job in politics. It sounds like an extremely funny premise, or at least an occasion for biting satire, but Cunningham plays it earnest and straight, as if an ordinary part of working in politics is to fall into a reverie while looking at a Renoir in a wealthy donor’s apartment. It’s a novel filled with long, lyrical descriptions of beautiful scenes and landscapes, but also subtle and at times quite blunt assessments of the coalition of liberal donors, philanthropists and power players that paved the way for Obama’s win. It shouldn’t work, but in a way it does.

I’m going to end on a happy note by talking about jazz, which this year, even more than usual, I felt was saving my life. An entirely good example of the weirdness of 2024: McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson’s “new” record, Forces of Nature, recorded at the New York club Slugs in 1966 with Henry Grimes on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Jack DeJohnette, who is semi-retired, turned up the tapes in his personal archive a few years ago.

In 1965 and ‘66 Henderson and McCoy were jazz’s dynamic duo, playing together on some of the most important records of the era: McCoy’s The Real McCoy and Henderson’s In’N Out and Inner Urge. But they went separate ways in the later part of the decade, and never recorded a live album together. I had no idea they ever played with Jack DeJohnette, who in 1966 was just beginning his career, playing the drums faster and louder and in a more unhinged manner than anyone else. Make no mistake, the studio recordings of Henderson’s “In’N Out” and “Isotope” are energetic and bombastic; he made those albums with Elvin Jones, who is most famous as the drummer in John Coltrane’s legendary quartet, and Elvin was maybe the second-loudest drummer in jazz at the time. But the version of “In’N Out” on Forces of Nature is nearly 27 minutes long, played at a clip that seems to only get faster, and DeJohnette’s drums sound like a hurricane behind McCoy’s titanic left hand movements and Henderson’s fierce extrapolations. It sounds like DeJohnette is trying not so much to play the drums as break them. At about the halfway point, Tyner stops comping and just lets DeJohnette and Henderson go at it, with Henry Grimes gamely holding it together behind them.

I actually think the history of jazz might have been different if Forces of Nature had been released in the sixties. It’s one of those weird displacements of feeling that are common in the 2020s, an age of constant reissues and nostalgia tours, when we have access to a wealth of historical material that wasn’t available in its own time. We see the past much more sharply and acutely now. Which, of course, raises the question: what will the historians of the 2070s make of us?

In 1968, JG Ballard published a short story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” in his book The Atrocity Exhibition. Reagan, at the time, was a famous Hollywood actor who had recently been elected governor of California. Ballard was the British author of a series of science fiction novels, whose work was becoming increasingly—is there a better word?—depraved. Not long after The Atrocity Exhibition he published the novel Crash, about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents, which was made into a decent 1996 movie by David Cronenberg (not to be confused with the excruciating 2004 Paul Haggis movie of the same name).

“Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” interestingly, is a kind of preliminary sketch for Crash, because, in Ballard’s imagination, it’s impossible erotically to separate Reagan from “rear-end auto collisions”:

INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with “Reagan” proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects…Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that the caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12% of cases, the simulated anus of post-costolomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98% of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan” in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto collisions with one and three year model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies…

Despite the title, this isn’t a story narrated in the first person. It has no first person, no individual voice, except that of the detached social scientist observing the experiment. It’s the public, the focus group, who wants to fuck Ronald Reagan, or be fucked by him. Like most of Ballard’s fiction—not so much the car-accident stuff but his dystopian climate change novels and especially his urban nightmare High-Rise—this story is astonishingly prescient.

Unfortunately, being a short story, it never made much of an impact on American politics. (As I tell my students, you could include the nuclear codes for the US arsenal, the original key to BitCoin, the true identity of JFK’s assassin, and the name of Madonna’s plastic surgeon in a short story, and no one would ever notice; that’s why they’re so perversely fun to write.) When Reagan ran for president in the late 1970s, anonymous protestors circulated copies of “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” at the RNC, but no one noticed. It wasn’t until about 20 years later that American politics entered its hardcore era, so to speak, when the Starr Report moved the Overton window from NC-17 to XXX. The blue dress. The cigar. Nicholson Baker’s phone-sex novel Vox. In The New Yorker, Lorrie Moore wrote that American politics had an “autoimmune condition,” which was a great line, but not quite right: not an autoimmune but an autoerotic condition.

All that was before Sarah Palin entered national politics, during John McCain’s ill-fated 2008 campaign against Obama, and almost simultaneously made porn history: Lisa Ann, playing “Serra Paylin,” became one of the most popular adult actors of all time, most famously in the Larry Flynt-produced classic Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, released on election day.

Do politicians masturbate to images of themselves? You have to assume many of them do. After the 2016 election, as a thought experiment, I tried to imagine a work of fiction that Trump—a famous non-reader, obvs—would actually read, and the only thing I could think of was porn about himself: that is, about shiny buildings, shiny airplanes, shiny helicopters, piles of Big Macs, guys with pinky rings having sex in long limousines with fake-breasted Eastern European models. In a way that very few people ever achieve for very long, Trump has managed to live a life that’s simultaneously fantasy and (for him) tangible and real. It’s his uncanny valley. It’s why he’s so singular and so beloved. He doesn’t need to be a porn star: he is porn.

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But we all knew that. None of that is new. The new porn in politics in 2024 is the obsession Israeli soldiers have with finding and cosplaying with women’s underwear in Gaza. There are thousands of photos that attest to this. As Belén Fernández puts it, writing for Al Jazeera:

There is plenty to say about this sort of exercise in militarised semi-pornography as a calculated assault on the dignity of women in an overwhelmingly conservative society. Ultimately, the taunting display of Palestinian lingerie amounts to an almost pathetically cliched violation of the intimate space of Gazan women. But to be playing around with the panties of people you are killing takes depravity to another level. Call it Orientalist fetishization with a genocidal twist.

Granted, it’s not just the females of Gaza who are eligible for such “demeaning” treatment; Gazan males can be intimately humiliated, too. In December, dozens of Palestinian men and boys sheltering at two Gaza schools were detained by the Israeli army, stripped to their underwear, and made to kneel on the ground.

The degradation of Palestinian women is all the more obscenely hypocritical, however, in light of the Israeli military’s condemnation of Hamas for its “discrimination” against women in the territory it controls. A section on the military’s English-language website devoted to “The Status of Women in Gaza” laments that “basic rights are often systematically denied” to females, who are faced with “decreased educational opportunities” as well as “limited employment opportunities” – a situation that is clearly best rectified by Israel’s bombing of most such opportunities to smithereens.

What Fernández doesn’t say, or doesn’t stress, is who these images are intended for: they’re produced to be shared on Israeli social media and disseminated worldwide by Israel’s supporters, who take great delight in them. The genocide in Gaza is probably the most widely filmed, memed, mocked, and joked-about event in Israeli history, and other than the tiny, embattled minority of antiwar activists, few have objected to the pornification of the quote-unquote “war.”

Societies built on racial domination, those with violently enforced racial power structures, have a strange relationship with shame. Whites in the American South, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, were obsessed with preserving the gentility, dignity, and elaborate social rituals of antebellum Southern society; they also celebrated lynchings as festive occasions, posing for souvenir photographs alongside the horrifically dismembered, often naked, bodies of Black men and women. There was a widespread trade in postcards of lynchings and “souvenirs” of lynchings, including the severed genitals of Black men preserved in jars. These fetish-objects of subjugated peoples have incredible symbolic importance in American culture, with a long and complicated afterlife.

Is it fair to call these popular images and documents and fetish-objects of communal atrocities “pornography,” though? The people who circulated and delighted in them wouldn’t have used that word. Adorno, writing about how psychoanalytic theory can be used to understand the rise of European fascism, insisted that “since the libidinal bond between members of masses is obviously not of an uninhibited sexual nature, the problem arises as to which psychological mechanisms transform primary sexual energy into feelings which hold masses together.” But the relationship between pornography, sex, and politics is wildly different in 2024 than it was in 1934. MAGA supporters aren’t turning rallies into orgies, but, as anyone who’s ever seen plastic testicles dangling from the back of a pickup truck knows, they are extremely uninhibited and extremely sexual. I don’t just mean Mark Robinson, the wannabe “Black Nazi”; I mean speeches like this one by Tucker Carlson, which may be remembered as a paradigmatic moment of the 2024 race. Drawing on ubiquitous porn imagery, Carlson describes Trump as the angry father coming home to say to America, “You’ve been a bad girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking. And no, it’s not going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you more. And you earned this.”

As many people will remember, the American thinker who argued most vociferously that porn has a major role in public life was Andrea Dworkin, who in the 1970s and ‘80s campaigned against the growing acceptance of X-rated movies, Playboy and Penthouse, strip clubs and peep shows, arguing that pornographic depictions of women are not just propaganda for misogyny and rape, but a social reinforcement and legitimation of a rape culture that already exists. "Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape,” she wrote. “The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women.” Dworkin insisted that pornography should be banned a second time (since it was only legalized the first time in the 1960s) because it was an attack on women’s civil rights, not because it was prurient and obscene, but this distinction largely disappeared when she joined forces with the religious right’s anti-pornography campaign in the 1980s.

After that, Dworkin was widely viewed as a traitor to feminism and marginalized by her former allies on the left; her writings were largely forgotten. It wasn’t until the last decade that younger feminists, some of whom hadn’t even been born during Dworkin’s heyday, rediscovered her work and praised it as an antidote to the failures of what Moira Donegan calls “a more individualistic and conciliatory approach to women’s rights.” To my mind, the most important aspect of Dworkin’s work is its insistence that the fusion, or interpolation, of private fantasy and public reality is a political fact, a fact we have to accept and weave into any larger political analysis. It matters, for example, that white Americans have a tendency to fetishize Native American human remains, especially skulls, using them in private clubs, in much the same way that remnants of lynchings were used (maybe still are used) as fetishes in the South. There’s a ridiculous and childlike quality to the inner workings and rituals of powerful secret societies historically restricted to white American men—Skull and Bones, Michigauma, the Bohemian Grove, the University of Alabama’s “Machine”—that only starts to make sense when you see them as a deeper kind of cultural gratification, a scene that melds together ridiculous fantasy worlds with the exertion of political, social, economic power.

If you think of pornography as extreme play in the realm of infantile fantasy, which can happen in public as much as in private, you can see why Dworkin was so limited, even confused, in her description of the relationship between pornography and propaganda: she was fixated on X-rated material, when the most potent pornography is PG. The most influential piece of American sexual propaganda in the mid-1980s wasn’t Debbie Does Dallas. It was Top Gun, which is often described these days not just as homoerotic but blatantly homosexual. Dave Holmes, writing in 2022 in Esquire:

[In the] beach volleyball scene, a shirtless Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Rick Rossovich (plus a wisely shirtful Anthony Edwards) face off in a high-stakes pickup game to the sound of Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With The Boys.” My brother, ten years older, married with four kids now, took me to see Top Gun in the summer of 1986. We left the theater exhilarated. “Man,” he said, “they oughta have a recruitment table outside the theater.” “They really should,” I said, knowing down deep we were talking about very different recruitment tables. If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun spoke directly to you. And what it said was: “You’re gay now. Good luck.”

Top Gun was recruitment into gayness and recruitment of straight boys and men into the ostensibly heterosexual, but also extremely homoerotic, US military, which in the eighties was busy compensating for American national humiliation in Vietnam by extending its phallic empire (F-16s, aircraft carriers, M-16s in the hands of the Afghan mujahideen who would later go on to form the nexus of al-Qaeda) around the globe. There’s something so particularly American about the combination of innocent earnestness, sexiness, and deadliness in Top Gun—something about simultaneously arousing your libido and soothing your anxious inner child. You could say it's the same quality shared by Hallmark movies, chocolate chip cookies, mac and cheese, superheroes, and the most superhero-like of all sports, American football, a pageant of impossibly beefy men in spandex. It’s this quality that Trump knows how to tap into, where the most brutal is also the most banal.

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Sometime before his death in 2020, David Graeber gave a brief talk summarizing the essential problem of liberal centrists in the Democratic Party. “In France,” he said, “they sometimes talk about the extreme center, and I think that’s a fitting phrase. The moderates are the most immoderate people possible. They’re uncompromising because they don’t have a lot of positive arguments. They’re not really for anything. Obama worked because he was the kind of guy who looked like he would have a vision—he acted like a visionary, he had the intonation, the way of standing, he looked into the distance like a guy who believed in something. And it shows you just how much visionary politics has been killed, when it didn’t occur to people to ask exactly what his vision was. His vision was not to have a vision.”

When the diagnostic reports on 2024 roll in—it’s the day after the election, so they’ll start any minute now—they will likely say that the polls once again undercounted Trump’s support, that the country under Biden actually experienced a dramatic rightward shift, because the election wasn’t nearly as close as most pundits predicted. It may be that nothing short of a fundamental change to the party’s DNA would have saved the Democrats. At the moment I’m too heartsick to speculate. But I don’t think anyone will deny a significant factor was that anti-genocide independents, progressive Democrats and Arab Americans defected to third parties, voted for Trump, or chose not to vote at all. Harris never gave a single indication that she intended to change US policy toward Israel; she went out of her way to alienate the substantial portion of her base outraged over the Gaza genocide, not even allowing a single Palestinian to speak at the DNC.

Or, to put it another way: good vibes don’t work against porn. Or, weird but true, in juxtaposition with porn. The liberal Biden/Harris administration, which was elected to champion human rights and the rule of law, refuses to admit it has yoked itself to a settler army perpetuating acts of pornographic fascism, atrocities comparable to the worst acts ever carried out on American soil. Harris supporters insisted that joy actually was a platform, and that a cross-racial coalition of women enraged by the defeat of Roe would emerge to save the day. It didn’t work. The reasons are large and complex, but one of them, surely, was the number of left/liberal women (and others) who responded with memes like this:

There’s no way to get around the simple fact that in all senses—private, public, fascist, genocidal, misogynist, sadomasochistic—pornography won on November 5^th, 2024. It has won throughout 2024, in Jerusalem, Moscow, Italy—everywhere right-wing imagemakers are in power. It’s about to become the dominant style in American politics in a way Andrea Dworkin in her darkest moments might have predicted. Given his obsession with penises, Trump is likely to keep talking about them at every occasion. If he doesn’t personally film a porn scene in the Oval Office, his aides probably will. If not his aides, the young online influencers he cultivated throughout his campaign definitely will.

I have no idea how Democrats on the national level will respond to this moment—the most stark repudiation of their principles, in my reading, since Bill Clinton formulated the so-called Third Way during his 1991-92 campaign. But I know what those of us on the left will do. Arielle Angel sums it up beautifully in a Jewish Currents article from last summer, “Florida is Everywhere,” describing how the Desantis government has eroded civil liberties, eviscerated public universities, driven up the cost of living, and turned the state into a haven for criminal billionaries and ex-dictators, while the state Democratic party stands by wringing its hands:

If there is any hope in this bleak picture, it is to be found in those people who are already facing the onslaught, who are making homemade hormone therapy and providing mobile services to the unhoused; the organizers going back to basics—reaching out one-on-one to every member of the union to ensure it can withstand attacks, building difficult and unlikely coalitions on narrower issues in hopes of expanding from there. We must regroup, to the fullest extent we are able. Florida is everywhere—and, as is clear from the water lapping at our ankles, we are all out of time.

“Back to basics” sounds like the only possible proposition to me. How about you?

Photo credit: @marahfidahya

Five years ago, in the middle of writing The New Earth, I became fascinated by Uwe Johnson’s 1700-page novel Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cesspahl, originally published in German between 1970 and 1983 and finally translated in full and published by NYRB Classics in 2018. Johnson, an East German writer who fled to West Germany in the late 1950s, lived and worked in New York from 1966-68, and Anniversaries is based, in microscopic detail, on the life of a German expatriate woman he met there. It’s a novel consumed by dailyness: Gesine, the single mother of a young daughter, reads The New York Times on the subway to work every morning, and Johnson reproduces headlines and articles from the Times verbatim. It’s the beginning of the descent into all-enveloping chaos in Vietnam, and Gesine is a keen, if detached, observer of how the war is warping American society.

I only managed to read about 300 pages of Anniversaries, because the pace is excruciatingly slow and I had too much else going on, but I loved the idea of what Johnson was doing: a novel told at the pace of the daily news, which is (at least for those of us who follow the news) probably the defining punctuation of our lives: the way we track our days. The Latin word punctum means “a point,” which gives English “puncture” and “punctual” in addition to “punctuate.” In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes used it to describe the arresting, often accidental detail in a photograph that pricks the eye and makes the image hard to forget:

The  punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum. Reading Van der Zee's photograph, I thought I had discerned what moved me: the strapped pumps of the black woman in her Sunday best; but this photograph has worked within me, and later on I realized that the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing; for (no doubt) it was this same necklace (a slender ribbon of braided gold) which I had seen worn by someone in my own family, and which, once she died, remained shut up in a family box of old jewelry (this sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid, and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her dreary life). I had just realized that however immediate and incisive it was, the punctum could accommodate a certain latency (but never any scrutiny).

Anniversaries takes the news-as-novel to a kind of formal extreme that makes it very daunting to finish; in a way it reminds me of Day, Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2003 conceptual poem that consists of copying every character of a single day’s edition of The New York Times, including the ads, the page numbers, the stock quotes, as a single text. The result is 904 pages long, and it’s not clear that anyone (including the author) has ever read it from beginning to end.

In The New Earth I wasn’t interested in that kind of literal capturing of a durational process (I had other formal experiments to worry about). Instead I wanted to capture a family living in the day-to-day shadow of the news at a dark moment in history: April to August 2018, or what seemed at the time to be the darkest part of Trump’s presidency, before he lost control of Congress in the November 2018 elections. I’d originally intended the novel to be set in 2013, the tenth anniverary of Bering Wilcox’s (and of course, Rachel Corrie’s) death in occupied Palestine, but after the 2016 election it became clear to me that I had to set the novel during the Trump administration, when the global dehumanization of refugees, migrants, and occupied populations was (I thought) reaching a kind of historical crescendo, the way that in 1968-69 the world seemed to have reached a turning point that would undo the present order—in the US, in Europe, in China, in Vietnam.

Of course, I didn’t know what would happen next. I wrote the majority of The New Earth in the period in which it was set, as Uwe Johnson began writing Anniversaries by retyping articles from the Times as they appeared on the newsstand. I finished the first draft in the spring and summer of 2020, working furiously through the chaotic early months of the pandemic, when it was clear the world was undergoing yet another violent shift. I always intended for the novel to be raw and jarring, ragged and chaotic, and for its tone to be a kind of invigorated despair, as the Wilcox family is shaken out of its 15-year state of torpor and forced to confront one another by a state of national, and familial, emergency.

There are the superlatives—Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for children in decades; the deadliest conflict for journalists, for aid workers; “the worst deliberately inflicted famine in modern times”—and then there are the pictures of starving children, headless children, families burned alive, Israeli soldiers gleefully setting fire to mosques, posing with women’s underwear. There are the convulsive protests and encampments all over the world. None of it, seemingly, has made much of an impact. Israel’s leaders are acutely aware of how fast the global outrage cycle rotates, and they’ve made a winning bet, at least so far, that the ongoing genocide will be normalized and routinized in the “ongoing horrors” category of world affairs. Zionists often cry out, in their own defense, that they’re being held to a higher standard than, say, the Saudis in Yemen, or the Assad regime, or Myanmar’s military, which is a way of saying those are their peers: Israel aspires to be another genocidal regime the world does nothing about.

But the genocide in Gaza has done one thing: it has cleaved the US liberal/progressive/left coalition in two. On one side are the liberals and centrists who will tell you nothing matters more than keeping Trump out of office, and, of course, that even given “the ugly realities of the occupation, Israel has the right to defend itself.” Progressives and leftists, on the other hand, recognize that Biden and his enablers, including Kamala Harris—more than any administration since George W. Bush, more than any Democrat since LBJ—are directly responsible for the slaughter of massive numbers of civilians, most likely upwards of 50,000 casualties, a calculated and organized act of population elimination that doesn’t look likely to stop any time soon. It’s a new frontier of necropolitics, the organized and efficient politics of mass death, and there’s no better illustration of it than the image of Netanyahu receiving a standing ovation in Congress in July while he vows to “finish the job.”

This liberal/left split has emerged as two different ways of relating to the news, or thinking about what “the news” is. Those of us who are paying close attention to Gaza follow Twitter or Instagram or Telegram or Signal accounts, plus Al Jazeera or other similar channels, that give us minute-by-minute updates and images recorded by Palestinians on the ground, who may or may not be reporters as such. Since October 7^th, that has been the principal form of news in our lives. Ordinary liberal news consumers, relying on NPR, The New York Times, and the BBC, might not even hear a single mention of Gaza in a day. The Israeli government has done everything in its power to censor and blockade news coverage within Gaza, with very little outcry from its pseudo-democratic allies in the West.

Often these days I think some variation of one thought: the emergency of 2018 is still going on, has in fact gotten much worse, but a new kind of torpor and denial has set in. There’s a feeling of slipperiness about these days, a marked lack of punctuation, as the Supreme Court has legalized unchecked authoritarian presidential power and blown up the legal basis for government regulations, while the Democrats go on suppressing discussions of Gaza at every turn: the whole rationale for Western liberal democracy seems to be sliding away. When someone asked me at my paperback launch (on July 10^th) how my thinking has changed about the world since 2018, I replied that if I were writing The New Earth in 2024 I’d be thinking more along the lines of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani’s indelible novel about the last days of a wealthy Italian-Jewish family before the beginning of World War II.

In other words: in 2018 in the US the liberal/left political opposition was outraged, energized, and (at least superficially) unified. Six very long years later, the party in power—the institutional Democratic party—is in locked in a state of oblivious complicity and denial, and the antifascist left, as in Europe in the late 1930s, is isolated and marginalized. The images coming out of Gaza get worse and worse, the implications for global politics get more and more dire, and Democrats—now swept up in a swoon of enthusiasm over Kamala Harris, the less-bad alternative—don’t seem to care. There’s no punctum. The images don’t penetrate.

Readers of The New Earth will remember that the second-to-last section of the novel (the scene of Winter and Zeno’s marriage in Maine) is titled “America is Dead.” I wanted the reader to feel a sense of absurdity about that statement, which both can and cannot be true. On the one hand, the land called the United States of America was here before European colonization and will always exist no matter what political formation(s) temporarily control it. On the other, the great right wing project of undermining American democracy at its core, and replacing it with a permanent authoritarian state ruled by a white minority—first outlined and planned in the 1970s by visionaries like Paul Weyrich—is now closer to realization than it was when Trump was in office in 2018. Israeli ethno-nationalism, of course, is a mirror image of what the Republicans want. You can’t support one and not the other. Which is why the mainstream Democrats of today are busy with their own version of authoritarianism—embracing bans on asylum seekers, bulldozing encampments of unhoused people, militarizing police, and, at every turn, suppressing and condemning protests against the Gaza genocide.

It's a terrible thing to write a highly pessimistic novel and later realize it wasn’t pessimistic enough, but I’m afraid that’s what’s happened to me. To put it another way, the worst nightmare of The New Earth—the fatal collision of Palestinian genocide and American democracy, fatal for both sides—is happening, but in a compressed, collapsed, suffocated form, in which it feels like there’s no longer any air with which to speak, let alone tell a story. Uwe Johnson wrote his novel of 1968 over thirteen years, and left it (at least according to some sources) unfinished when he died in the early eighties. I’m glad my novel of 2018 is complete, so I’m not tempted to revise it. It stands on its own, like any account of the past, out of reach.

(Photo by Chris Bentley/Here & Now)

I’m here not with a new post as such but a link to a new essay I published today on LitHub. They chose an Internet click-worthy title (as they have to) but I’m sticking with the original, “Franchise Children and Disney Adults: What Would Happen if Writers Decided to Stop Selling Themselves?” I originally intended this to appear here on the Substack, but once it passed the 4000-word mark I thought I should find a larger venue for it.

In the meantime, here are some of the books I’m in the middle of reading (or plan to read) this summer.

Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy and Borders, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Vanessa is an incisive, in-your-face commentator on contemporary pop culture. This is her first book.

I haven’t gotten very far into my friend Justin Taylor’s new novel Reboot, but I can already tell it’s the funniest book I’ll read this year. A scorching satire of the music business and the mores of the indie-hipster class.

I found Marta Morrazzoni’s The Invention of Truth (originally published 1995, long out of print) on one of my new favorite Twitter accounts, Neglected Books. It’s a tiny, jewel-like novel with one thread about the last days of John Ruskin and the other about the weaving of the Bayeux Tapestry. FFO Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, John Haskell.

Also a Twitter recommendation, also long out of print. For obvious reasons, I’m interested in the post-Holocaust political imagination of American Jews these days, and will probably end up writing about this subject in On Being Short or elsewhere. Also on this subject, Ruth Wisse’s Jews and Power, Ari Shlaim’s The Iron Wall, and David Mamet’s essays, especially Writing in Restaurants.

Italo Calvino once wrote that this was the greatest novel written after World War II. I should have read it while I was writing The New Earth, but the problem with trying to write a Very Long Novel is that you never have time to read and absorb all the other Very Long Novels. If you liked Cortázar’s Hopscotch, you a) probably already own a copy of this book and b) will really enjoy it if you ever get around to cracking it open.

Simon Wu is a fascinating young art critic and curator (full disclosure, we’re both on the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute) and a very smart writer who’s able to glimpse horizons of contemporary aesthetics that old people like me just…cannot. That’s why we need him.

Thank you as always for reading and clicking, and I’ll be back with another, longer post soon.

Jess

I read John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” for the first time in graduate school, in my mid-twenties, out of mild curiosity. Although I was from Baltimore and he was the most famous of all Baltimore writers—it’s a pretty small group—I’d never had much interest in him before that; I thought of him as a writer of sprawling postmodern epics of the 1960s and 1970s who was hopelessly outdated and probably unreadable. None of my teachers had any interest in him. It was a dismissive time and I was an arrogant, dismissive twerp.

But then, as a grad student, I got interested in narrative theory and theories of the novel, and because I couldn’t find any courses to take, I started assembling my own floating syllabus. My teacher Charles Baxter, who had known Barth as a professor when he was a PhD student at SUNY-Buffalo in the early seventies, told me I had to read Barth’s essays “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment.” So I bought Barth’s first book of essays, The Friday Book, named because he devoted every Friday to writing nonfiction (judging from his output, he must have spent every other day writing fiction, including Saturdays and Sundays). And then at the Ann Arbor Library Book Sale, where you could buy a grocery bag full of books for $5, I happened upon a paperback of Lost in the Funhouse, and thought, what the hell, at least they’re short.

As it turns out, “Lost in the Funhouse” (the title story in the book) is one of my all-time favorite short stories, and the first piece of metafiction that ever made sense to me. It was written in 1968-69, around the same time as “The Literature of Exhaustion,” and although Barth was temperamentally conservative and not a fan of the student revolts of that time, he later acknowledged that his writings in those years had “a whiff of tear gas about them.” (I now think of Lost in the Funhouse as part of a little group of essential, groundbreaking experimental collections published in the late sixties, including J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Julio Cortázar’s End of the Game, better known by its later title, Blow-Up.) It’s an ars poetica story, a “why-I-write” statement of purpose, at once deeply nostalgic about the innocent pleasures of storytelling and utterly disillusioned about the possibility of recapturing that innocence.

It had its intended effect on me, although I was reading it more than thirty years later: it summed up the uneasiness I felt about the American realist tradition I was being trained to emulate (and, later, teach) as an MFA student. But it also worked on me the way any piece of fiction is supposed to work: it made me lose myself in full attention to what the writer is doing. Metafiction (I thought) was supposed to be cerebral and clever and stand at a distance from the reader, but this worked in exactly the opposite way. I felt completely, weirdly seen.

The basics: Ambrose is a 14-year-old who lives in rural Maryland (as Barth did) during World War II; he’s on a day trip to Ocean City, which is—then as now—a tacky beachside resort with a boardwalk and amusement park. (I visited there as a teenager Ambrose’s age in the 1980s). Ambrose spends much of the story gazing longingly at Magda, a 15-year-old family friend who came along for the ride. At the end of the day, he convinces Magda and his older brother Peter to go into the funhouse, where he promptly gets lost.

Metaphysically lost. One of my students recently described the funhouse as a “metaphor for everything,” which is true, until it becomes clear that this is a portrait of the artist as a young man:

He wonders: will he become a regular person? Something has gone wrong; his vaccination didn’t take; at the Boy-Scout initiation campfire he only pretended to be deeply moved, as he pretends to this hour that it is not so bad after all in the funhouse, and that he has a little limp. How long will it last? He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had enough imagination. He could design such a place himself, wiring and all, and he’s only thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in every cranny of its cunning of its multifarious vastness; a switch-flick would ease this fellow’s way, complicate that’s, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or frightened, all the operator had to do was.

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

Sigh. More writing about writers! On the other hand, every novel is the story of how it was written, covertly or overtly. The best novels invent a new language and then teach you how to read it. (Many critics have said that in one form or another, but I’m paraphrasing John Updike, of all people, in a 1990s review of The God of Small Things that has always stuck in my mind.) I read this in my mid-to-late twenties with a shock of recognition like none I’ve ever experienced, before or since. I suspect David Foster Wallace felt the same way, and that’s what drove him to write “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” a novella-length sendup of Barth and “Lost in the Funhouse” that appeared in Girl With Curious Hair. I always teach the two together, as a way of showing my students what happens when you love a work of art so much it drives you over the edge. My own summation of “Lost in the Funhouse” appeared in my story “The Ax,” originally published in Tin House in 2014 (it’ll appear in revised form in Storyknife):

The thing about being a writer of fiction is this: you spend a lot of time having feelings which are not really your feelings to have. Or conjuring feelings in others that aren’t your feelings to give. The risk is that you lose touch with any sense of reality and just float around in a fog. You can almost imagine handing the reader an ax and saying, here, solve this problem for me. Prove to me I’m real. Free me from this mildness.

Almost.

Barth died last week in Bonita Springs, Florida, at 93, having been absent from the literary scene for decades. I’m sad I never got to meet him in person. But I met him on the page, which for fiction writers—for better or worse—is the important thing. Or is it? In the end, which mattered to him more?

The point of having all these mirrors, I think he might have said, is not having to choose which reflection matters. You can love them all.