Dwight Garner

Bernardine Evaristo’s eighth work of fiction, “Girl, Woman, Other,” shared the Booker Prize this year with Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” These novels are linked for posterity now, like conjoined siblings.

Was this split decision a dereliction of duty on the jury’s part or is more the merrier? Two Nobel Prizes in literature were distributed this year as well, for a different reason. (The gold medal, diploma and check were withheld last year because of sexual harassment and corruption in the academy.)

Perhaps this is a health-giving direction. Iris Murdoch, in 1967, wanted the Beatles to be jointly named Poet Laureate in England. After scanning the cable news most nights, I’d hardly be averse to voting for the cast of “Oklahoma!” for president in 2020.

“Girl, Woman, Other” is a big, busy novel with a large root system. The characters start to arrive (Amma, Yazz, Dominique, Carole, Bummi and LaTisha) and they keep arriving (Shirley, Winsome, Penelope, Megan/Morgan, Hattie and Grace). Everyone should be provided with a latte and a nametag.

We meet these characters’ friends and sometimes their families, too. Lorrie Moore has written that Ann Beattie’s fiction is a valentine to friendships. The same is true of Evaristo’s. This novel is a densely populated village where everyone leans on one another in order to scrape by.

The primary character is probably Amma, a black lesbian playwright, now in her 50s, whose new play is being produced at the National Theater in London. Success has taken her out of range of some of her old anxieties about life and put her in range of awkward new ones.

After a life spent on the margins, criticizing the center of the culture, is Amma selling out? If privilege is the original sin of wokeness, what happens when you accumulate privilege yourself?

This slice of the story is semi-autobiographical. Amma founds a theater company with a friend. Evaristo was co-founder, with two other women, of the Theater of Black Women in the early 1980s.

Amma’s story is followed by 11 others that drift back and forth in time. One character, Carole, attends Oxford (she complains about the “revolting Stone Age food”) and becomes an investment banker. Another, Hattie, is 93 and lives on a farm in Northern England. Still others are young and live in contemporary London.

This polyphonic novel, packed with interconnected stories, is similar in some ways to the monologues in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” It may also remind some readers of Alison Bechdel’s warm and sophisticated comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.”

Like that comic, “Girl, Woman, Other” presents a landscape of abiding multicultural sensitivity. Evaristo’s dedication sets the tone: “For the sisters &amp; the sistas &amp; the sistahs &amp; the sistren &amp; the women &amp; the womxn &amp; the wimmin &amp; the womyn &amp; our brethren &amp; our bredrin &amp; our brothers &amp; our bruvs &amp; our men &amp; our mandem &amp; the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.”

This dedication will prompt many readers of my acquaintance to rush inside and just as many others to flee in the opposite direction. A few, like squirrels on two-lane blacktop, will lose all composure and become roadkill.

A reason to stick around: Like Bechdel, Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions. When you are feeling your way into new ways of living, she understands, there must be room for error.

Carole keeps Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” as her ringtone because she wants to appear classy and repeats a morning mantra: “I am highly presentable, likable, clubbable, relatable, promotable and successful.”

Dominique dates an American woman named Nzinga, a “radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder” with epic dreadlocks and a “swamp-diva-voodoo-queen” vibe, only to discover that her real name is Cindy. Cindy is tough; she aims her cultural commentary as if into a spittoon. She’s even tougher on Dominique. Escape will be necessary.

“Girl, Woman, Other” is written in a hybrid form that falls somewhere between prose and poetry. Evaristo’s lines are long, like Walt Whitman’s or Allen Ginsberg’s, and there are no periods at the ends of them.

There’s a looseness to her tone that gives this novel its buoyancy. Evaristo’s wit helps, too. Yazz describes herself as “part ’90s Goth, part post-hip hop, part slutty ho, part alien.” We learn how useful a hijab can be when you want to have a hands-free cellphone conversation.

This looseness can detract as well. There is sometimes the sense that Evaristo loves all of her sentences a little bit but few of them quite enough. This essentially plotless novel grows longer, but it does not always appear to grow richer.

There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather settle into the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. You begin to feel you are always between terminals at a very large airport, your clothes and toiletries in a little wheelie suitcase behind you. It’s possible to admire this deeply humane novel while permitting your enthusiasm to remain under control.

A lot of human experience is packed into “Girl, Woman, Other.” Penelope, who hasn’t had sex in ages, thinks to herself: “It had been a long time since she’d been seen in a state of undress by anyone other than the matronly bra-fitter at Marks &amp; Spencer.”

Dominique worries that her penchant for sleeping with blonde women means that she’s been brainwashed by a beauty ideal. Amma turns around in her mind the implied whiteness of a British accent.

Amma’s play opens at the National. Dominique greets her backstage and says, “afro-gynocentricism caused a femquake tonight.” The ground rattles further for another character when she gets the results of a mail-order DNA test.

Identity — artistic, cultural, familial — is slippery in “Girl, Woman, Other.” Yazz gets a surprise when she opens a drawer under her father’s bed. It’s a surprise she deserves. She thinks: “You never know people until you’ve been through their drawers / and computer history.”

This article originally appeared in

'Girl, Woman, Other,' a Big, Busy Novel About New Ways of Living

(Books of The Times)

Harold Bloom, the imperious and convivial scholar and literary critic, the last colossus in terms of his ardor and prodigious memory, a self-described “tired, sad, humane old creature,” and a man who was increasingly isolated in his opinions about what the great books are and why they matter, was nothing if not prolific.

Bloom, who died Monday at 89, published more than 40 books. Sometimes two squeezed through one’s door at the same instant. A story used to go around about him back in the 1990s. A graduate student had telephoned him at home. Bloom’s wife answered and said, “I’m sorry, he’s writing a book.” The student replied: “That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

Bloom was a powerful synthesizer of texts and ideas, notably in books like “The Anxiety of Influence” (1973), “The Western Canon” (1994) and “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998). More saliently, perhaps, he was a kind of prophet of sublimity.

It was impossible to read deeply in Bloom without him flooring you with feeling. “Walt Whitman,” he wrote, “overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others — Dante, Shakespeare, Milton — consistently flood my entire being.” In today’s world, there is competition to be more concerned than anyone else. In Bloom’s, there was competition to be the most exactingly delighted. There were more arrows in him, aesthetically, than in St. Sebastian.

He read like a man picking up crumbs with a moistened index finger. He often considered loneliness in literature. You felt he was attracted to loneliness as a theme for the same reasons that Ishmael, in “Moby-Dick,” liked to join funeral processions. It made him feel more open, invigorated and alive.

Bloom’s most important book, “The Anxiety of Influence,” remains a touchstone. He wrote it quickly, after a personal crisis. He investigated the way poets and other writers struggle to create without being smothered by the work of those who made them want to write in the first place.

“The Anxiety of Influence” is among those fortunate books in which thesis is embedded in title. The book’s ideas may be complicated and heavy, but there’s a simple handle with which to pick them up.

The title of another of his major books, “The Western Canon,” is also a kind of planted flag. That book examined the work of 26 writers, largely but not entirely male and white — the list included Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Fernando Pessoa — whom Bloom saw as particularly sublime, and pivotal to our understanding of what it means to be sentient.

It was also an attack, from a crenelated embankment, on what he called the “School of Resentment” — critics and scholars he would later describe, in a 1991 Paris Review interview, as “displaced social workers” and “a rabblement of lemmings.”

“Literature is not an instrument of social change or an instrument of social reform,” he said in that same interview. “It is more a mode of human sensations and impressions, which do not reduce very well to societal rules or forms.”

The sound you heard Monday, at word of Bloom’s death, was the cheering of some of his enemies. To dabble in the canon wars from anywhere near the right of center is to see oneself fired from that canon.

Bloom could be painfully oblivious to the ways in which shifting and enlarging of the canon was not merely necessary but joy-filled work. One reduces him to a caricature at one’s peril, however. To read him closely, to get down into the grass with him, is rarely to find a padlocked mind.

He saw how the women in Saul Bellow’s work were, to use his word, absurdities. In a later interview with writer Amy Bloom (no relation), he noted how much great American poetry came from gay or bisexual writers. An uncompromising highbrow, Bloom sought to hoist his readers up to the level of what he saw as the greatest books.

He was born in New York City, where he grew up speaking Yiddish in an Orthodox Jewish household. His father was a garment worker from Ukraine. He lost many relatives in the Holocaust. Bloom’s life was a bildungsroman with the bildung done quite early; he seems to have emerged from the womb a capacious reader, starting with the Bible and Hart Crane.

His abiding interest in religious thought led him to write “The Book of J” (1990), in which he asserted — without a great deal of evidence — that the first author of the Hebrew Bible was a learned woman in King Solomon’s court. He would later say, “Emerson is God,” and remark to an interviewer: “You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were.”

I met Bloom (he had hands like big damp croissants), but never studied with him. For a while he was, at the same time, the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. To get a flavor of his teaching, turn to Larissa MacFarquhar’s magnificent 2002 profile in The New Yorker.

“When Bloom teaches, he uncoils and grows even larger,” MacFarquhar wrote. “He seems to his students not quite in control of himself: He gets carried away, he throws himself around, he slips his hand inside his shirt and grasps his chest, he quivers with feeling. He is a superb spectacle. He worships, he adores, he falls at a poet’s feet, but not deferentially — intimately. He is rabbinical, prophetic; but he is also, in his bigness and his emotion, like a giant mother. He is disarmingly feminine: His voice, emerging out of the roomy torso, is a gentle tenor. A number of his female students find the combination of these qualities overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive.”

That last line is a reminder, perhaps, that in 2004 writer Naomi Wolf accused Bloom of sexual “encroachment” by touching her thigh when she was a student at Yale two decades earlier. It is a charge he has denied, but many more hints emerged over the years of affairs with students.

Bloom wrote too much. By the end, he was rehearsing the same material, pressing “shuffle” on the same orotund playlists, and his work lost much of its consecrating power. Many critics turned against him. He said, memorably: “As someone sympathetic once said of my reviews, ‘It’s an invectorium.’”

“Maybe one writes to ward off death,” he commented. “I’m not sure. But I think in some sense that’s what poets do. They write their poems to ward off dying.” For Bloom, the worst part about death was surely that he could not take a book with him.

(An Appraisal)

He Lifted All Readers in His Path

Once upon a time in America, Toni Morrison wrote in “Beloved,” her masterpiece, the presence of a black face in a newspaper would induce something close to horror in certain readers.

That face wasn’t there for any happy or noble reason. It wasn’t even there because the black person had been killed or “maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated,” because those things didn’t qualify as news. The purpose of the photo had to be more unusual.

Over the course of her long and exceptional literary career, which included the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, Morrison, who died Monday at 88, brought a freight of news about black life in America (and about life, period) to millions of readers across the globe. Much of this news was of the sort that, in terms of its stark and sensitive awareness of the consequences of racism, opened an abyss at one’s feet and changed the taste of the saliva in one’s mouth.

Morrison had a superfluity of gifts and, like few other writers of her era, bent language to her will. Her prose could be lush, or raw and demotic, or carefree and eccentric, often on a single page. She filtered folklore, biblical rhythms, dreams, choral voices and a steep awareness of history into her work. In the best of her 11 novels — these include “The Bluest Eye” (1970), “Sula” (1973) and “Song of Solomon” (1977) — she transmuted the basic matter of existence into profound works of art.

Her spiritual forebears were many, and they were elite. You sensed in Morrison’s fiction the sweep and brooding power of Ralph Ellison, the complicated warmth and riddling wit of Zora Neale Hurston, the explosive intellect of James Baldwin and the bent-shovel cadences of William Faulkner. Yet Morrison’s idiosyncratic music was her own. She was a colossus of 20th-century fiction.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, where her father was a welder, Morrison wrote her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” while raising two children alone. She woke every morning at 4 a.m. to write.

She composed “The Bluest Eye,” she once said, because it was a book she wanted to read. Set in 1941, the novel concerns the life of a young African-American girl named Pecola who has internalized racism, who considers herself unattractive and unlovable because of her dark skin. The novel probes, as Morrison wrote in the foreword to a later edition, “what it is like to be actually hated — hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.”

Like many of Morrison’s later novels, “The Bluest Eye” is told from a variety of perspectives, including an omniscient third-person narrator. In a 1993 Paris Review interview, conducted by the novelist Elissa Schappell, Morrison spoke to the importance of including more than one voice in her fiction.

“It’s important not to have a totalizing view,” she said. “In American literature we have been so totalized — as though there is only one version. We are not one indistinguishable block of people who always behave the same way.”

In that same interview, Morrison commented on the difficulty of some of her later novels, with their nonlinear structures and dense, superheated language. About people who ask her why she doesn’t write books that everyone can understand, she said: “I don’t think they mean that. I think they mean, Are you ever going to write a book about white people?” She added: “I’m going to stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me.”

The center found her. Morrison was that rare critical and commercial success, even before Oprah Winfrey became her steady champion. “Song of Solomon” was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1977, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in 1940.

In addition to the Nobel, Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize (for “Beloved”) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (for “Song of Solomon”). A 2006 New York Times Book Review poll of 124 prominent authors, critics and editors named “Beloved” as the single best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years.

As a novelist, Morrison understood that some wounds must be reopened in order to heal. She understood better than most the suppurating sores beneath the skin of American life. She also comprehended, in a subcutaneous manner, something that Iris Murdoch put this way: Being nice is not the same as being good.

A great deal of humor floats to the surface in Morrison’s work. (“Laughter,” she remarked, “is a way of taking the reins into your own hands.”) Even more often, she wrote about loneliness. Many of the scenes in her best novels reverberate with desolation. “Pain,” she wrote in her novel “Jazz” (1992). “I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweet tooth for it.”

At the heart of “Beloved” is as indelible a scene as we have had in this country’s literature in the past 50 years. A runaway slave, about to be caught, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw rather than have her returned to subjugation.

Morrison was a sensuous, first-rate writer about many things, not only about race. Her novel “Tar Baby” (1981) is about a love affair between African Americans from separate worlds — Jadine graduated from the Sorbonne and is a fashion model, while Son is impoverished. But it also contains writing like this, about the natural world:

“Bees have no sting on Isle des Chevaliers, nor honey. They are fat and lazy, curious about nothing. Especially at noon. At noon parrots sleep and diamondbacks work down the trees toward the cooler undergrowth. At noon the water in the mouths of orchids left there by the breakfast rain is warm. Children stick their fingers in them and scream as though scalded.”

Morrison had her critics, especially when it came to some of her later novels. There’s no doubt that her prose could veer, at times, toward the pretentious. Her novel “Paradise” (1997) is especially notable for its didactic and purplish patches. Morrison could write a less-than-superb novel without shaking anyone’s sense of her magnitude.

The point of an essay like this one, written in the hours after a writer’s death, is in some regard to blow “Taps” over a meaningful life. It’s a rolling of credits. With Morrison it feels different. The credits are only partial. This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-appraisal.html" id="68279213-f43d-3491-aca7-634736d8c8cf">The New York Times</a>.

Toni Morrison, a Writer of Many Gifts Who Bent Language to Her Will

Gabriel García Márquez, “Gabo” to his friends, lived for journalism. He wrote for newspapers and magazines his entire life, and he founded six publications himself. He once said, against the wisdom of the ages, “I do not want to be remembered for ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspapers.”

García Márquez (1927-2014) inhaled fresh ink the way the press critic A.J. Liebling did, as if it were cigar smoke. He called journalism “the best job in the world” and “a biological necessity of humanity.” He understood that newspapers and magazines not only deliver data but that they add, through commentary of all variety, to the gaiety of a society.

A resonant new collection of García Márquez’s journalism, “The Scandal of the Century,” demonstrates how seriously he took reportage and what’s now sometimes called (would Liebling approve?) long-form narrative.

There are intricate, involving stories here about the death of a young woman who seemed to lead a double life; about the 1978 political siege of Nicaragua’s Palacio Nacional by the Sandinistas; and about the international efforts to save a young boy who needed a hard-to-find rabies serum raced to him within 12 hours.

These are articles that, in their confidence and grace, put the reader in mind of “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor,” the García Márquez book, first published in English in 1986, that was based on a series of articles he wrote for a Bogotá newspaper in 1955 in the voice of a Colombian sailor washed overboard from the deck of a destroyer.

Most of his journalism, like most of his fiction, is centered on his native Colombia. So many of the best pieces in “The Scandal of the Century,” however, are essays, unpretentious and witty meditations on topics like barbers and air travel and literary translation and movies.

You get the sense that, were he allowed to start one last magazine from beyond the grave, García Márquez would edit a version of one of those casual publications, like The Spectator, The New Statesman or The Oldie, that the British do better than the rest of the world. Magazines, that is, composed entirely of commentary, the combined contents of whatever is on their columnists’ minds.

“The Scandal of the Century” comprises 50 articles, published between 1950 and 1984. It’s one of two new books that deal with García Márquez’s work and life. The other is “Solitude &amp; Company,” a charming and rowdy if slight oral history of his life edited by Colombian journalist Silvana Paternostro and translated by Edith Grossman.

“Solitude &amp; Company” isn’t meant to replace Gerald Martin’s authoritative 2009 biography of García Márquez. It’s a book that gathers his old friends together, as if around a table, and lets them talk. Few can believe what a big deal their old drinking buddy Gabo turned out to be, how he floated away from them on a nimbus of success. They aren’t quite willing to cast palm fronds in front of him just yet.

García Márquez wrote some of his early fiction on rolls of newsprint that he liberated from his day jobs. Perhaps this accounts, in some small way, for the manner with which his fiction and nonfiction can seem to bleed together.

The articles and columns in “The Scandal of the Century” demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. (Irony was the fan that reliably cooled the intense projector of García Márquez’s mind.)

He wrote his journalism, he said, with “the same conscience, the same joy and often the same inspiration with which I should have written a masterpiece.” The sprinter and the long-distance runner in him were oddly in sync. He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding; he didn’t know how to phone anything in.

He was a world-class observer. Watching President Dwight D. Eisenhower disembark from a plane in Paris in 1958, he noted not just his “wide smile of a good sport” but, better, “his long and sure Johnnie Walker strides.”

Airplanes figure often in García Márquez’s journalism. He hated to fly. About air travel after he became famous, he wrote: “I always fly so frightened that I don’t even notice how anyone treats me, and all my energy goes into gripping my seat with my hands to hold it up in order to help the plane stay up in the air, or trying to keep children from running in the aisles for fear they’ll break through the floor.”

He dilated on writers and their economic hardships. Take cigarettes, for example. “The best writers are the ones who tend to write less and smoke more,” he proclaimed, “and so it’s normal that they need at least two years and 29,000 cigarettes to write a book of 200 pages. What that means in good arithmetic is that just on what they smoke they spend more than what they’ll earn from the book.”

García Márquez’s journalistic influence is still felt. In 1994, he founded the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, better known as the Gabo Foundation, in Cartagena, and it is still prospering.

In a foreword to “The Scandal of the Century,” the investigative reporter and foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson notes the “paradox that one of the most emblematic authors of the Latin American Boom in fiction should also be regarded today as the maximum godfather of a new boom in Latin American journalism.”

The humble García Márquez put it this way: “I am basically a journalist. All my life I have been a journalist. My books are the books of a journalist, even if it’s not so noticeable.”

He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.

Publication Notes:

‘The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings’

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

302 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told With Help From His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls’

Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

Illustrated. 336 pages. Seven Stories Press. $26.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/books/review-scandal-of-century-gabriel-garcia-marquez.html" id="7a735cfe-3b2e-380e-a4e7-7a82fc7937f0">The New York Times</a>.

Gabriel García Márquez, Journalist? A Book Revives the Novelist's First Calling

In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Don DeLillo called The Warren Report “the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel.” He admired the way it captured “the full richness and madness and meaning” of the events surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s death in Dallas.

At 26 volumes, the report’s abundance impressed him, too. “When I came across the dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother, I felt a surge of admiration,” DeLillo said. “Did they really put this in?”

The Mueller report is not that sort of kitchen-sink chronicle. At 448 hungrily awaited pages, it is long but hardly an epic.

It perhaps necessarily lacks both the novelistic sweep of the 9/11 Commission Report and the intimate — “prurient” would be a more exact word — scene-setting of the Starr report on President Bill Clinton. (“She and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or ... ”)

The Mueller report is a dense slab of verbiage. It is not written in bureaucratese, but it is not far from it either. If you were to put a droplet of its syntax under a microscope, you’d find a swirling necktie pattern of small white starched shirts and three-ring binders and paper cups of stale black coffee. Reading between the lines, you might spy tiny handcuffs as well.

This is not a narrative that warms in the hands. There is no sweeping language. It appears to have been designed to make minimum political impact. Because its language about not exonerating President Donald Trump is written in the negative, the most important sections are hard to quote.

A typical line is: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.” A plausible title for the paperback editions that will soon be in bookstores might be, “We Didn’t Not Find Anything.”

Reports by special counsels and select congressional committees are a genre of their own by now. The Mueller report is a thorny, patriotic addition to this curious American shelf.

Its findings, especially those about the president’s ostensible attempts to obstruct justice, have been called a road map for further congressional action and other investigators. With its blacked-out redacted passages, the report more closely resembles a reverse crossword puzzle. We will collectively be solving for its inky elisions for some time, perhaps the rest of our lives.

This is a document that, like the Badlands National Park, one has to visit for oneself. If you rely on the velvet fog of Attorney General William Barr’s Cliffs Notes, you will get an “F” on the exam.

So much of what’s in the Mueller report is already known, thanks to what never again should be referred to as “fake news,” that reading it is like consuming a short story collection that’s already been excerpted in every magazine you subscribe to. But its two volumes nonetheless have the power to shock and appall.

Volume I is a report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. It commences, like a super-sleuth literary or political biography, with tempered gloating about the author’s indefatigable fact-finding.

“During its investigation the Office issued more than 2,800 subpoenas,” the report declares, and “executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants.” This paragraph contains many similar figures. It ends by noting that the special counsel’s office “interviewed approximately 500 witnesses, including almost 80 before a grand jury.”

The authors wish to be transparent and helpful. For older readers, the report pauses to explain, in footnotes, what an online troll is, as well as things like botnets, spearphishing emails and malware.

The Russians worked diligently to subvert the 2016 election, and the Trump campaign was grateful for the support. There was perhaps no collusion, to use a word that Mueller dislikes. (He prefers “conspiracy.”) But there was cheerleading. There was dancing in subversion’s end zone.

The theme of the Mueller report, like the theme of Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” is lies and the souls of those who tell them. Through the entirety of the report, Trump is observed to lie, at almost every moment, like Falstaff telling Hal how many thieves he fended off. Others tell untruths for the president, sometimes at his request, sometimes out of loyalty, and get caught in gummy webs of their own devising.

In Volume I, we’re reminded of the fake Facebook and Twitter accounts that churned out pro-Trump propaganda. The authors reprint a poster, created by the Russians, for Pennsylvania rallies under the title “Miners for Trump.”

In Volume I, too, the prevarications of figures like Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Michael Cohen, among many others, are intensely scrutinized.

Fetishizers of crime-novel forensics will enjoy details like this one, about Erik Prince, the founder of security contractor Blackwater: “Cell-site location data for Prince’s mobile phone indicates that Prince remained at Trump Tower for approximately three hours.”

There is not space to divulge the context, but I hope the phrase “a long caviar story to tell” — written to Manafort by Russian and Ukrainian political consultant Konstantin Kilimnik — enters the lingo, perhaps via a Gary Shteyngart novel.

Volume II of the Mueller report, like the second volume of Bob Dylan’s greatest hits, is the more stereophonic and satisfying. It is more cohesive; the narrative about obstruction flows and is blunt in its impact.

Saul Bellow said that for a writer, “the fact is a wire through which one sends a current.” There are so many heated wires in Volume II, about the corruption that the president spawns wherever he turns, that the reader will burn his or her fingers.

This is not the place to rehearse all of the details. Please feast on the reporting elsewhere in this newspaper. Yet two scenes are indelible. We will be running up against them in films, plays, novels and histories for the remainder of our terms on Earth.

The first is the account, like something out of reports of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in the fevered last days of Nixon’s presidency, of President Trump learning from Jeff Sessions that a special prosecutor had been appointed. According to the report, the president “slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’”

The second, most resonant, moment occurs when Trump asks his White House counsel, Donald McGahn, “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who takes notes.”

The report continues: “McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he is a ‘real lawyer’ and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing. The President said, ‘I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.’”

Two thoughts: McGahn is one of the few Trump advisers who come off even remotely well in this account. America will never get Cohn out of its moral DNA.

Throughout the report, the special counsel’s team bends over backward to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.

If the Mueller report were to analyze the aftermath of young George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, it would include lines like: “It is possible that Mr. Washington swung his ax 27 times in the direction of the tree because he was attempting to ward off a hornet. It is also possible that the tree begged to be chopped down.”

The Mueller report tells you what it is going to say, says it, and then tells you what it just said. It is hardly pleasurable to read, on textual as well as emotional grounds. It is ill-making about the amorality of an administration.

The new Ian McEwan novel, “Machines Like Me,” will be out soon in America. It contains a line that echoed for me across the time I spent with the Mueller report: “I’d never thought that vomiting could be a moral act.”

The Mueller report feels less like an ending than an uncertain beginning. It plants seeds into the ground.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/books/review-mueller-report.html" id="efcba27b-0540-3b6e-a1a6-e0eaecfd8505">The New York Times</a>.

The Mueller Report: A Thorny, Patriotic Addition to a Curious American Bookshelf

Sally Rooney’s sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact. There’s nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. She’s like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon.

Rooney employs this artery-nicking style while writing about love and lust among damaged and isolated and yearning young people. They’re as lonely as Frank Sinatra on some of his album covers, as lonely as Hank Williams’ whip-poor-will. The effect can be entrancing.

You’ve likely heard of Rooney. She’s the young author, born in 1991 in the west of Ireland, who was excellently profiled by Lauren Collins last year in The New Yorker. She has written two fresh and accessible novels, “Conversations With Friends” (2017) and now “Normal People,” which have been met with euphoric reviews in the Anglo-Irish press. “Normal People” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Rooney’s new one is a lot like her old one; her books glide along similar tracks and can bleed together in your mind. Both are about intense but furtive love affairs that are thwarted by misunderstanding after misunderstanding.

“Intense love always leads to mourning,” poet Louise Glück has written. Still, you stare at Rooney’s hapless characters almost in disbelief: How were you two able to screw things up this time?

Her novels share themes and obsessions. One is social class — how, as a character puts it in “Normal People,” some people “just move through the world in a different way.” Because her characters come to Dublin from the rural west of Ireland, they have accents they sometimes try to lose. They’re outsiders, scorned as “culchies,” among other derogatory terms.

Rooney writes about financial imbalances among friends and lovers. Her characters, innocents in search of experience, in the thrall of first love, are sometimes budding writers. Her writing about sex is ardent and lurching. She writes about smart young women who are attracted to sexual masochism.

Here is another thing that links her two novels: There’s no sawdust, no filler. Her intimate and pared-down style can be reminiscent of Rachel Cusk’s. Rooney’s novels are satisfying, too, because there aren’t dueling narrators or cat’s cradles of plotlines. You buy Rooney’s ticket, you take her ride — not three muffled half-tours through bosky, dimly related hinterlands.

There is so much to say about Rooney’s fiction — in my experience, when people who’ve read her meet they tend to peel off into corners to talk — that I’ve omitted the wit in her books.

One moved through her first novel stepping around throwaway lines like, “If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets,” and “No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.” In the new novel, there is less of this kind of thing but perhaps something better. There is, in the pointed dialogue, a reminder of why we call it a punchline.

“Normal People” is about Marianne and Connell, teenagers when we first meet them, not yet flowers but small tight buds. At school, he’s popular and an athlete. She is offbeat and withdrawn and friendless. She’s wealthy, however, and he isn’t. His mother cleans Marianne’s family’s white mansion.

Like the central character in “Conversations With Friends,” like perhaps nearly all teenage girls, Marianne is an ugly duckling and a swan at the same time. There is also a coldness in her, a sense of detachment.

Marianne is formidable. She says things to her teachers like, “Don’t delude yourself, I have nothing to learn from you.” She comes from an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive family. She feels unfit to be loved, and “trapped inside her own body.”

About her relationship with Connell, we read things like, “She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.” And, “He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him.”

He betrays her at a crucial moment, a moment that marks the original sin of their long friendship. “His attraction to her felt terrifying, like an oncoming train,” Rooney writes, “and he threw her under it.”

This novel tracks Marianne and Connell across four years. They are both gifted students and wind up at Trinity College in Dublin. They are never quite boyfriend and girlfriend in the conventional sense. They merely break each other’s hearts over and over again.

At college, their situations reverse. Marianne finds her crowd, and Connell becomes the depressed and isolated one. She can now date, he thinks, the guys who “turn up to her parties with bottles of Moët and anecdotes about their summers in India.” There will be further reversals.

Rooney is almost comically talented at keeping the lovers in her novels frustrated and apart. When you are deep into “Normal People,” you may start to feel that she has gone to this particular well one too many times.

This novel proves her to be mortal in other ways. Some of the plotting feels heavy-handed and expedient. Her characters cry perhaps more often than you will cry over them. This story can tip over into melodrama. But, then, what is young love without that?

Loneliness, Cusk wrote in one of her Outline trilogy novels, “is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.” Rooney’s characters are similarly estranged from their environments and from one another.

Rooney herself, on the other hand, seems completely plugged in. She’s an original writer who, you sense, is just getting started.

Publication Notes:

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/books/review-normal-people-sally-rooney.html" id="af0b24ce-1a10-36c4-a9c6-4baeca7b1d1a">The New York Times</a>.

Sally Rooney's 'Normal People' Explores Intense Love Across Social Classes

Namwali Serpell’s audacious first novel, “The Old Drift,” is narrated in small part by a swarm of mosquitoes — “thin troubadours, the bare ruinous choir” — who declare themselves “man’s greatest nemesis.”

They’re a pipsqueak chorus, a thrumming collective intelligence, a comic and subversive hive mind. They are here to puncture, if you will, humanity’s pretensions.

“The Old Drift” is an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia, the landlocked country in southern Africa. It closely tracks the fortunes of three families (black, white, brown) across four generations.

The plot pivots gracefully — this is a supremely confident literary performance — from accounts of the region’s early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis. It pushes into the near future, proposing a world in which flocking bug-size microdrones are a) fantastically cool and b) put to chilling totalitarian purposes.

Serpell’s mosquitoes observe the dozens of wriggling humans in this novel, and they are distinctly unimpressed. We were here before you, they imply. We will be here long after you are gone. In the meantime, thanks for the drinks.

The reader who picks up “The Old Drift” is likely to be more than simply impressed. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel — biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology — but it retains a human scale. It is filled with love stories, greedy sex (“my heart twerks for you,” one character comments), pot smoke, comedy, inopportune menstruation, car crashes, tennis, and the scorching pleasure and pain of long hours in hair salons.

Serpell is a Zambian writer; she was born in that country and moved to the United States with her family when she was 9. She teaches literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

There’s a vein of magical realism in her work — one woman cries almost literal rivers, another has hair that covers nearly her entire body and that grows several feet a day — that will spark warranted comparisons to novels such as Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Serpell does not try to charm her readers to death. Her men and women are not cute (except, sometimes, to each other), and they are not caricatures. Even the most virulent racists in “The Old Drift” aren’t one-dimensional.

Serpell is a pitiless and often very funny observer of people and of society. She describes polo as “that strange game that seems like a drunken bet about golf and horse riding.” A man on a leather sofa is commended for “expertly unlocking that complex apparatus — a clothed woman.”

She offers this definition of “history”: “the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure.”

Here she is on a young white woman in Zambia: “She seemed both weak and imperious, helpless yet haughty. In a word: British.”

This is a matrilineal epic. It is packed with grandmothers, mothers, daughters. They are hardly placed on pedestals or lit by false, ennobling, autumnal light. They’re all struggling. Some drop out of school, steal or dabble with skin-whitening creams. Some open businesses, others turn to prostitution. Still others turn to protest. Nearly all are hoping to find love and, in the interim, to avoid being raped.

This book is intensely concerned with women’s bodies. Dissertations will surely be written about the multiple meanings of hair in this novel. We’ve learned too much from male writers about what it’s like to walk the planet guided and plagued by one’s reproductive apparatus. This novel, with wit and sensitivity, flips and revises that familiar script.

One young woman gets her period on her wedding day. Her friends, her family, the many guests — they’re all here. “All she wanted,” Serpell writes, “was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.”

Serpell is keenly interested in olfactory information. She lingers on people and places and scent. In one scene, a blind woman smells eucalyptus and knows she is nearly home. In another, a mother dislikes her daughter’s “new teenagery smell,” described as “a melony-lemony-biscuity scent that Adriana found both puerile and daunting.”

The plot of “The Old Drift” is not simple to unpack. The book begins, at the start of the 20th century, at a colonial settlement on the banks of the Zambezi River called the Old Drift. A dam is being constructed that will change many lives, a dam that some will wish to bring down.

The first women we meet, beginning around 1940, are: Sibilla, a white girl so unusually hirsute that at one point later in life she will be referred to as “an NGO for hair”; Agnes, a “pale, mad” and blind British girl who marries a black professor and engineer; and Matha, a bright girl whose prospects collapse after she becomes pregnant. She is this novel’s copious weeper, “the heartbreak queen of Kalingalinga.”

We get to know their daughters. One operates “Hi-Fly Haircuttery &amp; Designs Ltd” (and perhaps a shadier business); another is a stewardess who once had artistic ambitions. One of these daughters has a long affair with a doctor who is working on a vaccine for HIV.

About a potential vaccine, we get shrewd snippets of dialogue like this one: “'Beta version,’ Naila scoffed. ‘They should just say black version. They’re testing it on us.'”

The third generation goes on to work on microdrones, on further AIDS research and on political protest, seeking redress for the wrongs of history. One character also works on the vexing future of wearable technology — digital beadlike chips, implanted into the skin, that with the help of permanent tattoos of conductive ink turn one’s hands into approximations of smartphones.

“Government is controlling us,” one character says near the end of the novel. “And the worst part is — we chose this. We held our hands out to them and said PLEASE BEAD US!”

Serpell carefully husbands her resources. She unspools her intricate and overlapping stories calmly. Small narrative hunches pay off big later, like cherries coming up on a slot machine.

Yet she’s such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in “The Old Drift,” like dervishes, are set whirling. When that whirling stops, you can hear the mosquitoes again. They’re still out there.

They sound like tiny drones. They sound like dread.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/books/review-old-drift-namwali-serpell.html" id="1809231d-c00b-3f8d-af9f-0df871685aa0">The New York Times</a>.

'The Old Drift' Is a Dazzling Debut Spanning Four Generations

J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” the surprise best-seller published in 2016, is a frisky memoir with a bit of conservative moralizing dangling off, like the price tag on Minnie Pearl’s hat. Nearly everyone likes the memoir sections. (His portrait of his grandmother, a “pistol-packing lunatic,” is indelible.) The moralizing has been divisive.

A new anthology, “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy,'” edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, presents the most sustained pushback to Vance’s book (soon to be a Ron Howard movie) thus far. It’s a volley of intellectual buckshot from high up alongside the hollow.

Vance’s book tells the story of his chaotic childhood in Ohio, where part of his extended family migrated from Kentucky’s Appalachian region. Some of his brawling, working-class kin are alcoholics, and some are abusers; nearly all are feisty beyond measure.

The book is about how young J.D. survived his mother’s drug addiction and a long series of hapless stepfathers and went on, against steep odds, to serve in the Marines and graduate from Yale Law School. It’s a plain-spoken, feel-good, up-from-one’s-bootstraps story. It would have gotten away clean if Vance hadn’t, on his way up, pushed Appalachians back down.

He calls Appalachians lazy (“many folks talk about working more than they actually work”). He complains about white “welfare queens.” He’s against curbs on predatory payday lending practices. He harkens back to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial “culture of poverty” themes.

This kind of criticism, for many Appalachians, verges on the personal. When Vance spoke on a panel at the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association conference, a group called Y’ALL (Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners) staged a protest, turning their chairs away from him, booing and singing Florence Reece’s anthem “Which Side Are You On?”

To be fair to Vance, he finds some positive things to say about Appalachians. And he writes that government has a role to play, if a smaller one than some might wish, in helping a population battered by plant closings, geographical disadvantage, environmental despoiling and centuries of the most rapacious capitalism imaginable.

To hear the writers in “Appalachian Reckoning” tell it, the problems with “Hillbilly Elegy” start with its subtitle: “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Those last three words are a lot to swallow. They illustrate Vance’s habit of pivoting from personal experience into the broadest of generalizations. His is a book in which the words “I” and “we” are slippery indeed.

As Dwight B. Billings, a professor emeritus of sociology and Appalachian studies at the University of Kentucky, puts it in this new anthology, “It is one thing to write a personal memoir extolling the wisdom of one’s personal choices but quite something else — something extraordinarily audacious — to presume to write the ‘memoir’ of a culture.”

Billings quotes a Democrat from Ohio, Betsy Rader, who wrote: “Vance’s sweeping stereotypes are shark bait for conservative policymakers. They feed into the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are to blame for their own poverty, so taxpayer money should not be wasted in programs to help lift people out of poverty.”

In her perceptive essay, Lisa R. Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, boils down Vance’s advice this way: “'Hillbillies’ just need to pull themselves together, keep their families intact, go to church, work a little harder and stop blaming the government for their woes.”

Pruitt compares Vance’s memoir to those by Barack Obama and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. What if Obama, she asks, had condemned “those he worked among as a community organizer in Chicago, even while basking in his own success as the obvious fruits of his own labor.”

She continues, “Or imagine Sonia Sotomayor, in her best-selling memoir ‘My Beloved World,’ taking complete credit for her class migration from the Bronx’s Puerto Rican American community to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, all while saying the Latinx youth and young adults left behind simply lacked the grit and discipline to achieve similarly lofty goals.”

For every essay in “Appalachian Reckoning” that’s provocative, another is unreadable. The academic language in some of these pieces — “wider discursive contexts,” “capitalist realist ontology,” “fashion a carceral landscape” — makes it seem as if their authors were walking around on stilts.

You may find Vance’s policy positions to be rubbish, but at least they are clearly articulated rubbish.

There are a few pro-Vance pieces in “Appalachian Reckoning.” And not everything here is a polemic. The volume includes poems, photographs, memoirs and a comic piece or two.

I’m not entirely sure why it’s in this book, but Jeremy B. Jones’ love song to Ernest T. Bass, the fictional character on “The Andy Griffith Show” who was addicted to throwing rocks, is a pleasure.

Dwight Garner

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