A WRITER'S WIT I have to admit that I don’t care as much for The Great Gatsby as many people do. I think it should have been a hundred pages longer and that Fitzgerald should have developed the characters and their relationships more meticulously and in more detail. ​Jane Smiley Born September 26, 1949

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Kent Andreasen

A WRITER'S WIT My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder. ​William Golding Born September 19, 1911

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Geoff McFetridge

“‘I’m here for Hayley Ward,’ I said. ‘I’m the nanny for the Ward twins.’ Though I had made no decision, I felt happy, expectant. I needed a family. And here Hayley was bringing one to me. Love was about practice, the book on happiness had said. Or maybe it hadn’t said that. I think it was that winning at squash was about practice, and then it turned out that victory had been insufficient? I didn’t know. Maybe I could learn on the job” (79).

A WRITER'S WIT Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured. ​Lynn Abbey Born September 18, 1948

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the nineteenth in a series of twenty-four.

My Book World

Isherwood straightaway explains the idea of caste: “To understand Caste as an idea rather than as a system, we have to go back to the Bhagavad-Gita, which dates from about the fifth century b.c. and is still the most widely read work of Hindu religious literature. In the eighteenth chapter of the Gita, we find Caste presented as a kind of natural order. The four castes are described in relation to their duties and responsibilities, without any mention of their privileges” (7).
 
“Ramakrishna replied calmly that this was the right way to meditate [naked]. Man labours from his birth under eight forms of bondage, he told Hriday: they are hatred, shame, fear, doubt, aversion, self-righteousness, pride in one’s lineate and pride in one’s caste-status. All these forms of bondage tie man’s mind down to worldly thoughts and desires and prevent him from raising his mind to spiritual things. The sacred thread reminds a man that he belongs to the highest caste, that of the brahmins; therefore it makes him proud of his birth. And so it must be discarded, along with every other pretension, possession, desire and aversion, before one can approach the Mother in meditation” (59).
 
“The Hindu will therefore entirely agree with Oscar Wilde’s epigram that ‘every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.’ But a saint is still a human being and an avatar is not; he is other than a saint. An avatar has no ‘past’ in this sense, for he has no karma. He is not driven by his karma to be born; he takes human birth as an act of pure grace, for the good of humanity” (94).
 
“In India, when a disciple comes to his guru for initiation, he is given what is called a mantra. The mantra consists of one or more holy names—Om is usually included—which the disciple is to repeat to himself and meditate upon for the rest of his life. It is regarded as very private and very sacred” (106).
 
“Mother heard the news and expressed some grief—but then she started to console me. ‘This world is transitory,’ she told me, ‘everyone must die some day, so what’s the use of grieving?’ and so forth. It seemed to that the Divine Mother had tuned Mother to a high pitch, like a stringed instrument keyed up to a very high note” (149).
 
“Something has already been said, in Chapter 4, about the influence of the British upon India. One of the many evils of foreign conquest is the tendency of the conquered to imitate their conquerors. This kind of imitation is evil because it is uncritical; it does not choose certain aspects of the alien culture and reject others, but accepts everything slavishly, with a superstitious belief that if you ape your conquerors you will acquire their superior power” (154).
 
“We have seen that Ramakrishna did not expect too much of the Brahmos; their previous conditioning had left them incapable of any radical change of life and mind. Contact with them made Ramakrishna long all the more earnestly for some really dedicated disciples—young ones preferably—who would be ready to renounce every worldly desire and follow his teaching without any reservations. The others, he was accustomed to say, could no more be taught true spirituality than a parrot can be taught to speak after the ring of coloured feathers has appeared around its neck” (167).
 
“During his first visit, Ramakrishna subjected Baburam to certain physical tests. Ramakrishna often did  this, saying that an examination of a man’s physical characteristics revealed his spiritual character—at least, to the insight of an initiated person. For example, Ramakrishna would say that eyes shaped like lotus petals betokened good thoughts; that eyes like those of a bull betokened a predominance of lust” (219).
 
After a long parable about a snake and a cowherd, and how the snake lets the cowherd beat him: “You have to hiss at wicked people. You have to scare them, or they’ll harm you. But you must never shoot venom into them. You must never harm them” (270)

A WRITER'S WIT We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved. ​Joshua Foer Born September 23, 1982

My Book World

In her introduction, Franke states: “State licensing means your relationship is now governed by law, and that you have to play by law’s rules. An affair or a breakup now has legal in addition to emotional consequences. Put most bluntly, when you marry, the state acquires a legal interest in your relationship. Cloaking freedom in state regulation—as the freedom to marry surely does—is a curious freedom indeed, for this freedom comes with its own strict rules” (9).
 
The author points up a number of problems with marriage equality, one of which is the following: “Given that sexual orientation-based discrimination is legal in twenty-nine states, many Americans in same-sex relationships find themselves in the situation where they have a right to marry but exercising that right could result in losing their job once their employer learns of their marriage” (59).
 
“Lawyers who advise non-traditional families on their legal rights have noted that once states started to allow same-sex couples to marry, the rights of couples in non-marital families began evaporating. Whether it be relationship contracts between unmarried partners, de facto parental rights, or rights that might accrue between two partners as a matter of common law, little by little courts are saying: you could have married, and since you didn’t we won’t recognize you as having, or being able to create, any kind of alternative family relationship between or among you that is legally enforceable. The right to marry, thus, extinguishes a right to be anything else to one another” (98).
 
Franke later reasserts what she claims in her introduction, which is worth repeating, for it seems to reinforce her thesis: “Getting married means that your relationship is no longer a private affair since a marriage license converts it into a contract with three parties: two spouses and the state. Once you’re in it you have to get the permission of a judge to let you out. And what you learn when you seek judicial permission to end a marriage is that it’s a lot easier to get married than it is to get divorced” (121).
 
As Franke begins to conclude her arguments, she often shifts to speculative language. “Of course we can’t know for sure, as the court documents tell us far too little. But I have a couple of guesses about why these unwed mothers went to court and filed form papers announcing the fathers of their children” (174). “Another possible explanation for the frequent filing of bastardy petitions was the mothers were initiating these cases not for a local legal audience, but for one up north” (176). “It’s not hard to imagine unmarried mothers’ turn to ‘bastardy petitions’ as a way of healing the deprivation of kinship that all enslaved people suffered” (177). “The police had been summoned by another of Garner’s lovers who was jealous and had reported to the police that ‘a black man was going crazy’ in Lawrence’s apartment ‘and he was armed with a gun’ (a racial epithet rather than ‘black man’ was, in fact, probably used)” (181). Well, which is it: “probably” or “in fact”? The latter example, in particular, seems inauthentic if the author cannot, in fact, locate a proper citation to prove her assertions.
 
Near the end of her book, Franke sets up an important and stimulating question: “One might also provocatively ask whether marriage is better suited for straight people. By posing this question I don’t mean to align myself with those, such as the conservative National Organization for Marriage, who feel that only straight people should be allowed to marry, but rather to ask whether the legal rules and social norms that make up civil marriage have heterosexual couples in mind. Put another way, is there something essentially heterosexual about the institution of marriage? Are marriage’s rules and norms well suited to govern the lives and interests of same-sex couples?” (209). Yes or No? Her question would make for an interesting debate!
 
“One lesson we can draw from the early experience of same-sex couples with the right to marry is that marriage may not be for all of us. While we might all support the repeals of an exclusion from marriage as a matter of basic constitutional fairness, we need not all jump into marriage to demonstrate our new rights-bearing identity. If this book has any overarching message it is that we ought to slow down, take a breath, and evaluate whether marriage is ‘for us’” (225).

A WRITER'S WIT Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I'm about to cry any second—and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly. Andre Dubus III Born September 11, 1959

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Jason Ford

A WRITER'S WIT There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are. Jonathan Kozol Born September 5, 1936

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Alex Merto