Blog - www.richardjespers.com

The Two Real Lolitas

11/23/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.
Lauren Tarshis
Born November 23, 1963

My Book World

Weinman, Sarah. The Real Lolita: The
Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel
That Scandalized the World. New York:
HarperCollins, 2018.

Weinman takes two narratives—one, the actual kidnapping case of Sally Horner, in 1948, and two, author Vladimir Nabokov’s shaping of his 1950 novel, Lolita—and weaves them into a single, seamless story. About halfway through the Weinman’s book, Sally Horner is rescued by the FBI and returned to her mother. Two years later, Sally dies, at fifteen, in a car accident, and I wonder, In what direction could the author possibly now take this book?

All along, Weinman has woven the saga of how Nabokov writes Lolita with the story of Sally Horner, providing textual proof by way of his notecards and other documents that Nabokov was indeed influenced by Horner’s story. To what degree foments a debate between Nabokov and the literati that Weinman covers extensively. She also develops the idea that Nabokov has long been fascinated by the narrative of pedophiles and the children to whom they are attracted; in Lolita he finally produces the right combination of elements, one of which is the deployment of an unreliable narrator to steer the reader away from what a sinister crime he is actually participating in. Weinman skillfully stitches together these two narratives and provides a long, relaxed denouement tying up all the loose ends: relatives affected by Sally’s premature death, the imprisonment of her captor, a discussion of the abuse of young girls and women, and more.

Because of her unrelenting research and attention paid to detail, Weinman provides a satisfying read combining the genre of true crime with serious literary discussion of Nabokov’s novel. It is one of the few books I’ve read this year that I have not been able to put down once started. It’s that good.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-31 South Carolina

Thinking in Twelves

9/14/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
Geraldine Brooks
Born September 14, 1955

G. Brooks

My Book World

Houston, Pam. Contents May Have
Shifted: A Novel. New York: Norton,
2012.

Pam H., R. Jespers, K. Dixon, 2005, Taos

I first heard Pam Houston speak in 2000 when she gave a reading for her new book, Waltzing the Cat. As she addressed a sizeable audience, and, as I met her afterward at a reception I told myself if I ever got a chance to take one of her workshops I would. I managed three: Taos, 2004 and 2005; I even journeyed to Mallorca, Spain to study with her. I didn’t do so as a groupie necessarily (though I am); it took me three different week-longers to digest her method for creating fiction—a method that resonated with me, using one’s own life and one’s own observations to create narrative.

I’ve always admired Houston’s ability to transform intensely autobiographical information into strong fiction. Some writers refuse to touch such material; others wallow in their biographies like dogs in the dust, trying but failing to rid themselves of their demon fleas. Pam has been the most influential contemporary writer, in that respect, on my thinking about writing. She taught me how to transform my autobiographical material, or perhaps she taught me to give myself permission to do so because by being that honest writers can hurt someone they love or even people they don’t. And you have to balance your honesty against how much you value the relationship, and honesty doesn’t always lose out.

Anyway . . . I feel that I was in on the inception of Contents, as well as several of its chapters because during class or at a meal, Pam would share an anecdote that eventually wound up in this novel. In 2008, at a Point Reyes bookstore, I heard her read one of the book’s short chapters-in-progress. At the time, she planned, I think, to write 144 of those chapters giving voice to the many hundreds of trips she had taken around the world, the hundreds of places she had visited in the States, the myriad human beings who had influenced her life. Why 144? “I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves” (308), Pam declares in the very last section of her book, the “Reading Group Guide.” She ends up with 132 chapters and 12 airplane stories, but still, I think she delivers on her original plan. The novel feels very global, in its fast-paced, jet-flight episodes knitted together like bones on the mend. How else could she portray a trip around the world, one which may never end as long as she lives?

Both Pam-the-person and Pam-the-author nearly lose their lives as four-year-olds when their fathers seriously abuse them, and their mothers cover up the story, amuse themselves through retelling it over cocktails, falsehoods about her pulling large pieces of furniture over on top of herself. Nearly losing their lives gives both Pams permission to push their lives to the limits because otherwise they might not be worth living. Planes that almost fall out of the sky. Boyfriends who don’t work out. Bedeviled by chronic pain since the childhood accident. . . neither Pam is comfortable unless her contents have shifted a bit since her last outing. She must be on the move, searching for that next glimmering glimpse of life, whether it is of a Tibetan monk or the life of a child whom she helping to raise. She must move.

Such a novel reflects the life that Pam lives, right? In any given year, Pam-the-author is equally at home on her ranch in Colorado, which she purchased after the phenomenal success of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, equally at home on campus, equally at home teaching scores of workshops or giving readings, equally at home traveling to remote parts of the world to test her physical or emotional strength, equally at home revealing the parental abuse she was subject to as a child, lovers who have betrayed her. In this book, in particular, she manages to transform the latter three issues into a gross of clipped chapters, in which Pam-the-character (in the manner of Christopher Isherwood naming his protagonist Herr Issywoo after himself) makes herself at home on flights to Exhuma in the Bahamas, to places as obscure as Ozona, Texas. Tibet. New Zealand. Paris. Chapters named with a flight number: UA #368. Your life, as long as you are reading this book, is as discombobulated as Pam-the-character’s. You live it with her, the flashback in which Pam-the-character is hospitalized for injuries caused by her abusive father. Pam Houston—the author—gives her all to every minute that she lives, I would suspect, even when she is lying very still, devouring the pages of a new book or romping with her Irish wolfhounds through the meadowlands of her ranch. As long as she is breathing, she is inhaling the content of her next book, itself spinning inside her brain while all she seems to do is become a vessel for it, channeling the narrative burning inside her at that moment. That is what Contents May Have Shifted is about. After having been moved and enlightened by her first four books, I can now say the same for this one.

And Pam Houston’s new tome, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, comes out January 29, 2019. You’d better believe I’ve already ordered it, that I can’t wait to begin feasting on her pages once more. You see, I’m still learning from Pam.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee

Handmaid's Tale: Literature of Witness

8/24/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
Born August 24, 1899

J. Borges

My Book World

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale.
With a new introduction by the author.
New York: Anchor, 2017.

I suppose I always felt this book, originally published in 1986, was a woman’s book—chick lit—but after viewing the MGM/Hulu production of Atwood’s novel, I believe I was wrong. A dystopian world in which women are nothing more than baby makers and terribly devalued if they cannot deliver is not a world any of us want to live in. Such a world is also one in which all human beings are devalued, consigned to rigid gender and social roles. Atwood herself may articulate the novel’s greatest value in her new introduction:

“But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret annex” (xviii).

Atwood concludes her remarks with the following statement:

“In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere—many, I would guess—are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.
Will their message be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not” (xix).

Indeed. A novel in which almost half of the chapters are entitled “Night”—and are alternated with ones like “Jezebel’s” and “Salvaging”—readers should be duly warned that we, too, could descend into a world of moral darkness, that we should take heed from this, our literature of witness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-20 Florida

'Patrick Melrose': the Skeletal Remains of a Family

7/27/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Write every day. Don't kill yourself. I think a lot of people think, “I have to write a chapter a day,” and they can't. They fall behind and stop doing it. But if you just write even one hundred words a day, it's not that much. By the end of a month, you'll have three thousand words, which is one chapter.
Cassandra Clare
Born on July 27, 1973

C. Clare

My Book World

St. Aubyn, Edward. Patrick Melrose. New
York: Picador, 2015.

I more often read a novel before viewing a film version, but less often do I read the novel after tuning into something like, say, Showtime’s “five-part limited series,” of the same title. It is one of those series which may have been equal to the book, or books, because Patrick Melrose is a compendium of St. Aubyn’s five novels about the same character, and it unfolds almost as luxuriously as the book.

Patrick Melrose may be one of the best contemporary novels to come to grips with the life of a drug addict. But more important, I believe St. Aubyn traces the aspect of abuse within a family over several generations, and how, unaddressed, it can devastate a family—wealthy or not. Substance abuse is merely a symptom of the deeper problems buried in the Melrose family history.

Patrick Melrose, born in 1960, approximately the same time as his creator, experiences physical abuse when his father perpetrates sodomy on him at an early age—repeatedly over several years. But then there is also the emotional abuse, when Patrick’s father, David, swears Patrick to secrecy or he will be “very severely punished” (79). (In the film, he says he will snap him like a twig.)

Patrick’s mother? Well, her abuse of him manifests itself as ignorance—blissful, willful ignorance of how David is treating their son. She, too, has suffered abuse as a child and at the hands of her husband, and they, without even trying, do their best to destroy Patrick’s life. What is most remarkable about this novel is that St. Aubyn manages to limn the skeletal remains of the several generations of this family without any shortcuts or platitudes. On the next to the last pages of the book, Patrick has earned the profound conclusions at which he arrives:

“He imagined himself as the little boy he had been at that time, shattered and mad at heart, but with a ferocious, heroic persona, which had eventually stopped his father’s abuses with a single determined refusal. He knew that if he was going to understand the chaos that was invading him, he would have to renounce the protection of that fragile hero, just as he had to renounce the illusion of his mother’s protection by acknowledging that his parents had been collaborators as well as antagonists” (855-6).

“He was after all not an infant, but a man experiencing the chaos of infancy welling up in his conscious mind. As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help” (856)

My God, in a nutshell, the entire novel portrays the unraveling of this moneyed British family, their accumulated abuses and how they lead to “drug and alcohol abuse” by Patrick, his chosen method of coping. Cause and effect, folks. Cause and effect.

I have only a couple of observations which might manifest themselves as criticisms: In spite of St. Aubyn’s lyrical and commanding prose, sustained over nearly nine hundred pages, I was often distracted. First, he participates in what American workshoppers call head-hopping, that is, employing the third-person omniscient point of view, not commonly used since the nineteenth century. Yet, I must probably applaud him because he manages to employ it with great skill, and, in a novel of this breadth, it is amusing and strategically important for the reader to know exactly what each character is thinking at any given time.

And two, the author uses, repeatedly, speech attributions which seem inappropriate or awkward. What do I mean? Any speech attribution, to my way of thinking, ought to be a synonym for the word “said,” or “spoke”: “declared,” “replied,” or similar verbs. Not so here: “The daughter is impossible,” grinned Laura (408). “Grin” is not a synonym for “said,” and it gives the sentence an amateurish patina. I wonder: Is this an acceptable practice in the writing of fiction within the United Kingdom? I should hope not. Another scathing example: “You may well ask,” scowled Nicholas (704). Seriously? How is “scowling” like “speaking?” This questionable practice is rife throughout the novel, marring what is otherwise impeccable prose, and could have been nipped in the bud by a good editor. Please help me to understand, Mr. St. Aubyn. Why would you do this to your book?

NEXT TIME: Final Installment of Defeating A Fib At Last

Strout's Endless Possibilities

7/20/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.
Franklin Foer
Born July 20, 1974

F. Foer

My Book World

Strout, Elizabeth. Anything is Possible.
New York: Random, 2017.

Strout is a master at creating simple stories that are riddled with complexities and nuance that are difficult to apprehend with one reading. You might think you’re finished reading about one character, and then he or she returns to another chapter. Charles Macauley, for example, has layer upon layer added to his part until we might think we understand him. In the meantime, we learn of others: Two sisters, one who marries well, one who does not. And a prodigal daughter/citizen, who becomes a famous author and returns to her humble beginnings to have more than a little abuse heaped upon her. But now Lucy Barton is ready to face it all.

NEXT TIME: Defeating A Fib at Last-3

Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life

4/13/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Born April 13, 1906

S. Beckett

My Book World

(Liveright)

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather
Haunted Life. New York: Liveright,
2016.

Roger Straus, Jackson’s first publisher, often called her “a rather haunted woman” (2). She had plenty to haunt her life, especially a mother who fiercely dominated her daughter, even after she became a literary success.

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).

Jackson spends nearly the rest of her life fighting against her mother about how to raise her own children, how to cook and keep house, how to go about her career even though her mother had never had one of her own. At the same time that Shirley attempts to establish a literary career while being supportive of a husband in the related business of literary criticism and raising four children, she seems to love being with her children. She often packs them up into the car to go on day trips. She more or less lets them have free run of the house and town, while at the same time, scolds her children with the same invisible criticism that she learned from her mother.

Franklin goes into great detail about Jackson’s literary life, each novel, her famous story, “The Lottery.” She paints an honest picture of Jackson’s life, one that is so interesting, I didn’t want the book to end.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—10 West Virginia

Using Texting as a Metaphor

1/29/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
Anton Chekhov
Born January 29, 1860

A. Chekhov

My Literary World

Iron Horse Literary Review 19.4 Connections, “Like Breadcrumbs, Like Shards,” Lucas Southworth. Lucas Southworth won AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, in 2013, for his collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun. He is a professor of fiction and screenwriting at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

“Like Breadcrumbs, Like Chards”:

Even though I am gay, came out a long time ago, have been with the same Grady for forty-two years, not until I reached the following sentence on the second page of Southworth's story did I realize I was reading about a gay couple.

“At first glance my husband fills so many gay stereotypes. He’s all muscle, all tank top on the weekends, all styled hair and double-entendre” (4).

Now . . . is my failed perception my fault or the writer’s? I’m willing to accept at least half the responsibility; I was lulled into the hackneyed convention that a husband must be paired with a wife, not another husband. But would it have been too unsophisticated to let the reader know this tidbit a wee bit earlier?

In this story where young marrieds are struggling to become acquainted, the narrator, Mike, often texts his husband Grady—even when they are located in the same dwelling or in the same room. Seriously? Has texting become so ubiquitous that it has seeped into our literary fiction? Must we now work texting into the weft of our stories for them to be real, to be truly au courant? Okay, okay. F. Scott, I’m sure, employed an early phone or two, had a character cable someone that he didn’t love her any longer. I am totally humble and down from my horse. Mike’s texting his husband is a manner in which he attempts both to be close to Grady and yet distant from him at the very same time.

At one point Mike uses an emoji of the Swiss flag (to indicate fidelity?) and in the same text a heart with an arrow shot through it to communicate his feelings. Is this how removed he is from the relationships with his husband, his mother, and mother-in-law, at least what he can find of his feelings?

Southworth purposely keeps the reader at a distance from the character’s feelings—not entirely but enough for us to get the message. We can see the words on the page, or the text on the screen, but I’m not sure we can feel them.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

Call Me by Your Name, Romance with a Big "R"

1/26/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.
Novala Takemoto
Born January 26, 1968

N. Takemoto

My Book World

Aciman, André. Call Me by Your Name.
New York: Farrar, 2007.

This novel is a romance, both with a capital “r,” the kind that emphasizes subjectivity of the individual, and the small “r” kind, the Harlequin type that you must devour page by page, word by word, until you come to the final sentence of this desperate love affair between two young men.

I found the first half tediously slow. But then I thought, Aciman must want us to be inside the head of the protagonist narrator, Elio. These are the mind and heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t decide who he is whether it’s with regard to sexual orientation or his prodigious musicianship (he transcribes manuscripts from one instrument to another and sells them). His mind belabors everything including the appearance of a young graduate student, Oliver, who comes to live in his family’s Italian villa for the summer of 1983, a tradition Elio’s father, a professor, has begun years before: the summer intern.

Both Elio and Oliver waste half the summer semi-rejecting one another, making love to girls, until finally Elio becomes more aggressive and discovers Oliver has wanted him since they first met. Their first kiss doesn’t occur until page 81. But for a short, intense two weeks they become so close that they almost become one, wearing each other’s clothing, Elio especially in love with a red swim suit of Oliver’s. The very idea of calling each other by their own names—taking the name your parents have given you and calling your lover by that name—is a mental flip the reader must make to understand the depth of their intimacy:

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3).

Aciman carries the development of this intimacy, which in the form of a deep friendship is to last forever, to the very last sentence of the book:

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248).

Through the specificity of this scenario, Aciman reveals a universal story of desire and love. We’ve all been there, and wow, should our lives turn out as exciting as those of the two men characterized in this romance.

NEXT TIME: My Literary World

Award Winner Nails Story

1/15/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
Osip Mandelstam
Born January 15, 1891

O. Mandelstam

My World of Short Fiction

January/February 2018, David Greendonner. “Lionel, for Worse”: This story, winner of the Kenyon Review Short Fiction 2017 competition, is a gem of understatement. Narrated by a woman, she tells of her husband, Lionel, who a month earlier has lost his best friend, Stan. The woman and Lionel discuss how they’d like to have their ashes disposed of someday. While making a trial run on the shore of Lake Michigan of just such a disposition, using ashes from their own hearth, they encounter some high school girls, one of whom says, “I’m so sorry for your loss” (5). The line is both humorous and subtly poignant concerning the man’s true loss.

Profile of author from contributor’s page: "David Greendonner is from Bridgman, Michigan, and is a graduate of Western Michigan University’s MFA program in fiction. From 2015 to 2017 he was the managing editor of the literary magazine Third Coast" (115).

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States | 2-Oklahoma

Vacationing up a Lazy River

12/18/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.
Tom Parker Bowles
Born December 18, 1974

T. Parker Bowles

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**December 18 & 25, 2017, Zadie Smith, “The Lazy River”: A British family vacations on the metaphorical Lazy River in Almería, Spain. Smith’s latest novel is Swing Time, which came out last year.

NEXT TIME: ON HOLIDAY HIATUS UNTIL AFTER JANUARY 1, 2018

Cat People Sneak Up On You

12/11/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination.
Devdutt Pattanaik
Born December 11, 1970

D. Pattanaik

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**December 11, 2017, Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”: Margot, a twenty-year-old college student who works at a movie theatre begins texting a young man who turns out to be thirty-four.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

A Dog Story

12/4/2017

A WRITERS' WIT
Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity.
Cornell Woolrich
Born December 4, 1903

C. Woolrich

new yorker FICTION 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

December 4, 2017, J. M. Coetzee, “The Dog”: A young woman who passes by the yard of a vicious guard dog each day confronts the owners about introducing her to the dog. Coetzee’s most recent novel is The Schooldays of Jesus.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

November 27th, 2017

11/27/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.
Gail Sheehy
Born November 27, 1937

G. Sheehy

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 27, 2017, Will Mackin, “The Lost Troop,":The narrator unravels an episodic tale of American soldiers in Afghanistan, 2008, involving themselves in a series of very unwarlike events. Mackin’s collection, Bring Out the Dog, will come out in March 2018.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

The Perfect Couple

11/20/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Fiction is a report from the interior.
Deborah Eisenberg
Born November 20, 1945

D. Eisenberg

new yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 20, 2017, David Gilbert, “The Sightseers”: Robert and Paulette, residents of a newish high rise overlooking Central Park, prepare for and attend a party given by another couple in their social circle. Gilbert’s most recent novel is & Sons.

NEXT TIME: Farewell to a Piano

Which Way to Turn

11/6/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
At school, if I was ever bored in class, I would draw maps of islands or detailed interior of boats or lists of provisions and equipment I would need when I went camping in the summer.
Michelle Magorian
Born November 6, 1947

M. Magorian

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**November 6, 2017, Anne Enright, “The Hotel”: A woman flies from Dublin to New York then to Milan and finally to a German-speaking nation she cannot identify. The author’s most recent book is The Green Road published in 2015.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Fatherhood to the Max

10/30/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
The secret of power is not that it corrupts; that is well known. What is never said is that power reveals.
Robert Caro
Master of the Senate
Born October 30,1935

R. Caro

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

John Clang

***October 30, 2017, Joseph O’Neill, “The Sinking of the Houston”: A Manhattanite father of three teens sets out to retrieve his mugged son’s phone. ¶ This story which strikes one note at the beginning—FATHERHOOD—quickly veers and intersects a larger history. In his high-tech fashion—monitoring son’s mugger by way of a track-your-child app on his own phone—Dad looks to rectify this wrong. After weeks of surveillance, he sallies forth in what looks like will be a kill and in the elevator encounters an old-man neighbor who soon reveals that when he was a teen he’d survived the sinking of the Houston in his engagement with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1962. The reader never learns whether Dad locates the mugger, but this chance meeting with a former teen does seem to change the context of his mission. O’Neill’s collection, Good Trouble, comes out in June 2018.
Photograph by John Clang

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Strangler Bob and Other Freaks

10/23/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.
Ned Rorem
Born October 23, 1923

N. Rorem

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 23, 2017, Denis Johnson, “Strangler Bob”: In 1967, eighteen-year-old Dink lands in jail for car theft along with a cast of characters with names like B.D., Dundun, and Strangler Bob. Johnson’s posthumous collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, comes out in January 2018.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

More Than One Snake

10/16/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
Günter Grass
Born October 16, 1927

G. Grass

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 16, 2017, Tessa Hadley, “Funny Little Snake”: A nine-year-old girl in 1960s London goes to visit her father and young stepmother who at first does not want the child around. Hadley’s latest book is Bad Dreams and Other Stories.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

To Like or Not to Like

10/9/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it—this is a hard lesson.
Bruce Catton
Born October 9, 1899

B. Catton

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 9, 2017, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum , “Likes”: With the 2016 election and a twelve-year-old ballerina’s social media posts as background, a father attempts to cope with his daughter’s puzzling leap into adulthood. One of Bynum’s recent books is Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Memorial with a Hole in It

10/2/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene
Born October 2, 1904

G. Greene

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**October 2, 2017, Ben Marcus, “Blueprints for St. Louis”: Roy and Ida, architects designing a memorial for victims of a mass bombing, differ on how to achieve their goal—just as they differ on how to live as a married couple. Marcus’s most recent collection is New American Stories.

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A Bachelor Party to Remember

9/25/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Born September 25, 1897

W. Faulkner

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**September 25, 2017, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “As You Should Have Told It to Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died”: When police storm the door of a man, he, as narrator, assumes that his friends have designed an elaborate practical joke in lieu of bachelor party. Khemiri’s latest book is Everything I Don’t Remember.

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Negotiating That Last Sunset

9/18/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.
Steven Pinker
Born September 18, 1954

S. Pinker

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**September 18, Edwidge Danticat, “Sunrise, Sunset”: A Miami Haitian family must accept that their aging mother is suffering from dementia and her daughter from postpartum depression. The author’s most recent book is The Art of Death.
Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli

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When a Bowl Is Not Just a Bowl

9/4/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
Richard Wright
Born September 4, 1908

R. Wright

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

**September 4, 2017, Miranda July, “The Metal Bowl”: A young woman makes a single but popular pornographic video, a momentous event that continues to influence her life seventeen years later. July's most recent novel is The First Bad Man.

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Running Scared

8/28/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Born August 28, 1749

Goethe

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Cromwell | Rea

***August 28, 2017, Lauren Groff, “Dogs Go Wolf”: Two unnamed girls, ages four and seven, are abandoned at a fish camp on a Florida island and must fend for themselves. ¶ This story unfolds as any living nightmare might, with the consciousness of the two girls running wild like the story’s dog which keeps returning to camp then running into the woods: revealing their squalid nomadic past, the unnurturing nature of their mother and all her friends, the everyday search for food when sources run out, boiling stagnant pond water to stay hydrated until they run out of charcoal and must gather wood. The abuse of abandonment multiples tenfold each hour they are without loving, adult care. When other people arrive on the island—after what must be weeks—the girls don their mother’s shifts and apply lipstick to greet them. The older girl

“put the lipstick back into her pocket. She would keep the gold cartridge of it long after the makeup inside was gone and only a sweet waxy smell of her mother remained” (74)

Haunting, yes, haunting that a child would still think fondly of a parent after being treated so harshly, but that’s exactly what many of us do, find it in our hearts to forgive. Groff’s most recent novel is Fates and Furies.
Photograph by Rose Cromwell

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The Difficulty of Calming Shame

8/21/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I worked at Sears as a salesperson when I was in college. Makes me nicer to folks to have to stand all day and be nice to picky people.
Sharon M. Draper
Born August 21, 1948

S. Draper

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
** —Above Average
* —Average

Tillmans | Zwirner

***August 21, 2017, Garth Greenwell, “An Evening Out”: A man celebrates the end of his seven-year teaching career in Bulgaria through a drunken night out in Sofia with two former students, both male. ¶ Perhaps the nameless narrator (except for Gospodinut, male teacher), Z., and N. are emblematic of the shame the story engenders when, in an unseemly display, he gropes and ogles one of the men on the dance floor of a noisy night club. Perhaps the excessive clamor, the excessive liquor, the excessive jubilance numb Gospodinut’s shame, but in the soberness of morning he is positive it will overwhelm him. Yet as he staggers toward his campus apartment, Mama Dog, a mascot, approaches him and becomes symbolic of a subtle change about to take place in Gospodinut’s life. This story achieves what most writers of gay stories would kill to achieve: both a specificity and universality that arrive in harmony on the page. Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You, came out in 2016.
Photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans c/o David Zwirner Gallery

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