Parul Sehgal

At 23, F. Scott Fitzgerald — a sudden celebrity with the success of his first book, “This Side of Paradise” — told the press that his ambitions were to write the greatest novel of all time and to stay in love with his wife forever.

Fitzgerald died young, at 44. In the years left him, however, he produced an abiding American classic, “The Great Gatsby,” and never stopped loving his wife, Zelda. And as St. Teresa of Ávila wrote, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”

Despite their mutual preoccupation, the Fitzgeralds’ marital unhappiness was legendary, and proved to be the great quarry for Scott’s literary imagination. In photographs, the couple resembled each other, with soft faces, sulky mouths; they looked like bad, beautiful children — and behaved with joyless destructiveness, smashing up everything in arm’s reach. There were appalling scenes at airports, hospitalizations, suicide attempts. Their daughter was sent to live with Scott’s literary agent. Friends grew leery of giving the couple their home addresses. In 1930, Zelda was first hospitalized after a breakdown (the diagnosis was schizophrenia but there is now a prevalent belief that she suffered from bipolar disorder) and she would remain institutionalized for much of her life, dying in 1948, in a hospital fire.

Various versions of the couple’s letters have been published over the years, but “Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda” claims to contain the fullest collection of Zelda’s side of the correspondence. The editors, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, write that “the new letters, placed chronologically with those collected previously, allow us to view their relationship in a more evenhanded manner than heretofore has been possible.”

Did your eye snag on “evenhanded,” as mine did? Suspicious little word; it’s only ever deployed with partisan intent. But there are only partisans when it comes to the Fitzgeralds’ marriage — or any marriage, for that matter. There is Hemingway’s opinion of Zelda as a succubus envious of her husband’s talent and determined to lead him to ruin. More recent perspectives on Zelda cast her as a proto-feminist heroine, one of the lost women of history, like Dorothy Wordsworth or Alice James, whose gifts were overshadowed by the famous man in her life. In the case of Zelda, there was outright appropriation — Fitzgerald famously lifted passages from her letters and diaries for his fiction — and when Zelda wanted to write a novel based on her breakdown (later published as “Save Me the Waltz”), the same territory he was exploring in “Tender Is the Night,” their marriage combusted.

This collection has been marshaled with the hope of rehabilitating Scott’s reputation, to portray him as a victim, too — of his alcoholism — and as more supportive of Zelda than commonly believed. The editors and the Fitzgeralds’ granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan, who contributes an introduction, want absolution for Scott, but where is he in this book? His letters are wan and few compared to Zelda’s, often dictated to a secretary. He was never a dazzling letter writer — far too querulous and carping and always, you sense, warming up to ask for a loan. His correspondence, Gore Vidal once said, ought to be preserved, not published.

Read this book for Zelda, even if you’re weary of the cultural obsession with her. Better yet, if you’re disinterested entirely, as I was, and perplexed by the cultural fascination (in recent years, there have been four novels based on her life, and three major biopics are in the works).

I had a vague sense of her as the prototype for Fitzgerald’s lovely, reckless heroines, and that he had cribbed material from her, including Daisy Buchanan’s line in “The Great Gatsby,” upon learning she had given birth to a daughter: “I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” I was anticipating someone doleful, distracted — not this funny, hard-boiled observer of her own life whose letters read like short stand-up sequences. From an early note to Scott: “You know everything about me, and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me.”

She remains this way: arch, amused, self-mocking, writing parodies of the kind of simpering love letters expected of young women. “Men love me cause I’m pretty — and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness — and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness — One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of course, I was acting.” She has no secondhand impressions or turns of phrase — everything she writes and thinks feels tart, original, lightly distressing.

A great many of these letters were written while Zelda was institutionalized. At first glance it seems obscene to deem them “love letters,” these pleas for pocket money and visits, her desperation for meaningful work. “Lonesome,” she writes four times in one short note, and again in letter after letter. “I’m so lonesome all the time.” “It’s desperate to be so alone.” “Terribly lonely.” She demands to be let out of the institution: “Please. Please let me out now.” “Every day more of me dies.” “The longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get.”

But then, a mercurial shift in mood. “Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed?”

Ardor is her mode, and Scott her “sungod.” “Don’t you think I was made for you?” she writes. “I feel like you had me ordered — and I was delivered to you — to be worn. I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm.” In these letters — mostly written from institutions in Switzerland, North Carolina and Maryland — she sat in her room, yearning for and conjuring up her husband: the way he held his cigarettes (“way down, wedged between your fingers”), his smell (“the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls”), the look of his wrist emerging from his sleeve.

Her life never creeps into the letters; little can be gleaned about the institutions in which she often made her home. She scarcely mentions her doctors or treatments, which were reportedly barbarous. She doesn’t inquire about the world, the war, her friends. She croons only one song — “darling, my dearest”; “dearest, my love.” “If you will come back I will make the jasmine bloom and all the trees come out in flower,” she writes. There will be clouds to eat, and bathing “in the foam of the rain — and I will let you play with my pistol.”

They never did very well when he did come back, however. Her symptoms, including intolerable eczema over her whole body, would worsen; there were bitter fights. Their love flourished mainly in these letters, full of her intense longing for nights of “soft conspiracy,” for Scott at the seaside all “salty and sunburned,” his legs sticking together in the heat.

It’s a peculiar fact that “The Great Gatsby,” a fairly bitter, even furious novel about class and disillusionment, murder, bootlegging and corruption, is so often remembered only for its parties and shimmering love story. Strange, too, is the misapprehension when it comes to Scott and Zelda. We recall their raucous early days, their extravagant unhappiness, but after reading these letters what strikes you is their steadiness, a shocking word to apply to them. They could not handle early success, Bryer and Barks write, and after a point they did not live together. Fitzgerald took up with writer Sheila Graham in his final years. But that bond with Zelda proved stubborn and sturdy, and survived it all. In their last letters, they are still loving and vexing and shoring each other up. “Happily, happily foreverafterwards,” Zelda once wrote. “The best we could.”

‘Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’

Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks

Illustrated. 400 pages. Scribner. $22.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/books/dear-scott-dearest-zelda-fitzgerald-love-letters.html" id="c260cac4-36a8-3bee-ae0b-f6c7b743388a">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times)

A Stubborn and Sturdy Love in the Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

She knew, but she didn’t participate — not fully. She participated, but she didn’t know — not everything. She was a bystander. She was an anomaly.

The full role of white women in slavery has long been one of the “slave trade’s best-kept secrets.” “They Were Her Property,” a taut and cogent corrective, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, examines how historians have misunderstood and misrepresented white women as reluctant actors. The scholarship of the 1970s and ‘80s, in particular, did much to minimize their involvement, depicting them as masters in name only and even, grotesquely, as natural allies to enslaved people — both suffered beneath the boot of Southern patriarchy, the argument goes.

Jones-Rogers puts the matter plainly. White slave-owning women were ubiquitous. Not only did they profit from, and passionately defend, slavery, but the institution “was their freedom.” White women were more likely to inherit enslaved people than land. Their wealth brought them suitors and gave them bargaining power in their marriages. If their husbands proved unsatisfactory slave owners in their eyes, the women might petition for the right to manage their “property” themselves, which they did, with imaginative sadism.

How have so many historians gotten it so wrong?

According to Jones-Rogers, they have not been listening to the right people. “They Were Her Property” draws on the customary sources — letters and other documents from slave-owning families and the like — but radically centers on the testimonies of formerly enslaved people in interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration.

From these stories, Jones-Rogers brings an unseen world to life: of white women’s instruction in domination, a process of grooming that began in infancy. WPA interviewees recount threats, abuse and whippings administered by white children. “It didn’t matter whether the child was large or small,” one woman said. “They always beat you ‘til the blood ran down.”

“They Were Her Property” joins a tide of recent books — among them, Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton,” Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” Walter Johnson’s “River of Dark Dreams” and Caitlin Rosenthal’s “Accounting for Slavery” — that examine how slavery laid the foundation of American capitalism, including the invention of financial instruments such as bonds that used enslaved people as collateral. Jones-Rogers writes, “If we examine women’s economic investments in slavery, rather than simply their ideological and sentimental connections to the system, we can uncover hitherto hidden relationships among gender, slavery and capitalism.”

Previously invisible sectors of the market are illuminated, many created and controlled by white women. Historians long asserted, for instance, that Southern women used wet nurses only “as a last resort,” but the testimonies of formerly enslaved people — and advertisements from the 18th and 19th centuries — tell a different story. The practice appears to have been widespread. One woman recalled that her enslaved mother always gave birth at the same time as her mistress, so she would be available to nurse the white baby. “These recollections make it clear that enslaved women were giving birth on a routine basis. But what often remains unexplored is what led to these constant conceptions,” Jones-Rogers writes. Some were “undoubtedly the result of sexual assault.”

In horrifying, meticulous detail, this book illustrates the centrality of violence to capitalism. Baptist argued the same point in “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It was sheer brutality that dramatically increased the cotton yield between 1800 and 1860, he wrote. No new technology or innovation surfaced in those years, but constant beatings, sexual abuse and waterboarding had become common practices. In that era, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

Jones-Rogers reveals how the violence of slave-owning women especially could go unchecked, particularly when the victims were black children. She gives the example of Henrietta King. As an 8- or 9-year-old, King was accused of stealing candy. Her mistress wedged King’s head under a rocking chair. For about an hour, she rocked back and forth on King’s head while her young daughter whipped her. King’s face was mutilated. For the rest of her life she was unable to eat solid food.

King lived, though. There are, somehow, even more painful stories in this book. Many of Jones-Rogers’ findings give credence to historian Thavolia Glymph’s claim that enslaved people faced significantly more physical violence from their mistresses than their masters.

Jones-Rogers is a crisp and focused writer. She trains her gaze on the history and rarely considers slavery’s reverberations. They are felt on every page, however. It is impossible to read her on “maternal violence” — the abuse of black mothers and babies during slavery — without thinking of black maternal mortality rates today. This scrupulous history makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.

“White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”

Illustrated. 296 pages. Yale. $30.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/books/review-they-were-her-property-white-women-slave-owners-stephanie-jones-rogers.html" id="a7abd329-179c-38dc-a70a-3a7bf9f51dac">The New York Times</a>.

Reconsidering the Master's Wife

In 2014, there was a surge in unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border — 80,000 children, including infants and toddlers, were detained in less than a year, most of them from Central America. They had traveled on trails littered with human remains, evading ranchers who had taken to hunting migrants for sport. By some estimates, 80 percent of the girls and women had been raped as they passed through Mexico. Countless others died or vanished along the way.

Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli closely followed this news, struck by how the language used to describe the children — illegals, aliens — so efficiently dehumanized them. Many were fleeing gang violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Luiselli wondered why no one called them refugees—or even just children. She began volunteering as a court interpreter, helping the children with the intake questionnaire that might establish a case for asylum, and has since written two books inspired by that work.

In “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions” (2017), she interspersed the experiences of the children with her own, as she applied for a green card. “Lost Children Archive,” her much-anticipated new novel, and her first written in English, stages the questions she had only posed in her previous book: How best to draw attention to the refugee children — and is it even her story to tell? Is it ever defensible to make art out of someone else’s suffering? If so, how on earth to keep it from turning pious and dully moralizing?

These are the signal concerns of much contemporary fiction, as Western writers have begun cautiously responding to the refugee crisis, typically with careful and complex fictional portraits of migrant characters: see Donal Ryan’s “From a Low and Quiet Sea,” Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Go, Went, Gone.”

The typical way is not the Luiselli way. The author of three cheerfully wayward novels and one essay collection, her imagination is keen and uninhibited. Each project has been its own experiment — a palimpsest of texts (“Sidewalks”) or a collaboration with readers in serial format (“The Story of My Teeth”). The novel truly becomes novel again in her hands — electric, elastic, alluring, new. And the story of the migrant, she believes, insists upon a new form: How else to tell a story that has no end?

“Lost Children Archive” begins with a journey — not of a fictional migrant but of an unhappily married couple. The narrator and her husband were both single parents when they met while working on a project cataloging the sounds of New York. “We fell in love,” the narrator says, “completely, irrationally, predictably and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird, not knowing who the rock was and who the bird.”

She finds out soon enough. Her husband turns distant, and she watches him hungrily, mourning him as if he is already gone — “the process, both meticulous and intuitive, by which he makes coffee in the mornings, makes sound pieces, and sometimes makes love to me.” When he plans a new project, to travel to the ancestral homeland of the Apaches in Arizona, she fastens herself to him. She will record the sounds at the border and also search for the undocumented daughters of a friend, who have gone missing. (The real-life inspiration for this story appeared in “Tell Me How It Ends” — two young Guatemalan sisters make the journey across the border with the phone number of their mother in Long Island stitched into the collars of their dresses.)

“Lost Children Archive” is a retelling of the American road novel, with a twist. In this version, there is no flight from the domestic — the journey has been taken to save a marriage, and the squalling children are in tow. Luiselli is a superb chronicler of children, and the narrator’s 5-year-old daughter and her husband’s 10-year-old son feel piercingly real — perceptive, irreplaceable, wonderfully odd. “Imagine the first person who ever milked a cow,” the boy wonders out loud, to no one in particular. “What a strange person.”

The novel is organized around the boxes each family member carries along on the trip. They overflow with newspaper clippings and snapshots, research materials and nested narratives about lost children, real and invented; histories of the Apaches and of kudzu. The book becomes an archive — of curiosities, yearnings, of the life of a new, fragile, fracturing family, animated by the narrator’s restless energy as she churns over a way to tell the story of the refugee children.

Her own children come to her aid. She notices that they refer to the refugee children, many of whom go missing, as “the lost children.” She adopts the term: “They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.” We see her start to understand how language can be used as an agent of violence and repair. We see her searching for a form — and then, suddenly, as if to illustrate how such a form might be possible, the book breaks out of the meandering rhythms of the road trip and into a heart-stopping 20-page, single-sentence climax.

The narrator’s own children go missing. They run away, reasoning, “Ma would start thinking of us the way she thought of them, the lost children. All the time and with all her heart. And Pa would focus on finding our echoes, instead of all the other echoes he was chasing.” In this way, by visiting the terrors that refugee children routinely face upon these children — our children, as they have come to feel in the novel; children expected to be spared — Luiselli drives home just how much pain and sacrifice we are prepared to accept in the lives of others. She dramatizes what it takes for people to stare hard at their own families, to examine their complicity in other people’s suffering.

To call these morals or messages does a disservice to the novel’s rangy storytelling and panoptic curiosity. Better to think of it as a challenge.

As the narrator once tells the boy: “Look hard and tell me everything. We are all counting on you.”

Illustrated. 383 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/books/review-lost-children-archive-valeria-luiselli.html" id="f5a8d47c-e10d-3eda-abe9-85065e17c178">The New York Times</a>.

Valeria Luiselli's Latest Is a Mold-Breaking New Classic

Writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died in 1988, at age 46 — young, brilliant and, for the most part, unknown.

It was a tragic if not entirely unusual fate. What was striking was how instantly her work was embraced after it was rediscovered — like a missing piece somehow anticipated and long yearned for.

In 2015, her film “Losing Ground,” which had shown at festivals in 1982, had an official wider release and was heralded as a pillar of American independent cinema. The next year, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” a collection of her short stories, written in the 1960s, lampooning racism as well as racial pieties of all kinds, was published for the first time, to much praise. Now a new book has arrived, “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a grab bag of letters, diary entries, short stories, plays and screenplays (including “Losing Ground”).

Let me get my grousing out of the way. The revival has been slightly shoddy. Some of the stories and plays are drafts, at best. The collections contain little in the way of biographical information — no context for when particular pieces were produced or reasons for their inclusion. These omissions prove especially frustrating in the case of the new book. In interviews, Collins’ daughter (and editor), Nina Lorez Collins, has described coming across packets of her mother’s correspondence — “I could practically trace the arc of her development as a woman, as an artist, as a mother” — as well as a diary of her final year, as she succumbed to breast cancer. Why serve us such slender portions? We see only smatterings of the writing she alludes to and none of the truly interesting letters. Without any explanation, the selection feels desultory, designed to show off the artist’s range, rather than her strengths.

This is admittedly my greed talking. For those under Collins’ spell, our plaint will always be the same: more. Give us more — more letters, more diary entries, more careful curation of the work. What we really want for her is more life. And more art, because what we have — even when raw, unfinished or this carelessly presented — is dazzling.

Collins’ primary characters are always some version of herself: a black woman, an intellectual with a voracious mind and, occasionally, a disappointing husband. There will be a quest of some kind — pursuit of “the darker mysteries of the self” — that might lead to a ritual of some sort and, often, a bleakly comic interlude. She is often compared to Grace Paley, lazily, I think, as another “ethnic” observer of New York in the ’60s. The two do overlap politically and share a certain generosity to their characters, but no one sounds like Collins — a Sorbonne-educated civil rights activist turned filmmaker who directed the occasional porn movie to finance her other projects. Her voice and vision are idiosyncratic and pitiless, combining mischief and crisp authority, formal experimentation and deep feeling. More and more writers, I hazard, will start to sound like her. (I am fighting the impulse here myself; her voice is strong and contagious.)

There is the sleekness of her sentences, and the burrs. There is cool skepticism but also hunger for rapture. There is humor a knife’s edge from despair. One of her characters on mastectomies: “I like the idea of losing one” — one breast. “It throws into dispute any strict female notion of myself,” she says. “It’s silly, one’s body is silly.”

Above all, there is Collins’ avowed obsession to resist what she sees as the American tendency to idealize black characters — to depict them as “sinners or saints.” “I am not interested in mythology,” she told a filmmaking class at Howard University in 1984. “I am interested in ideas. I am interested in how human beings evolve — a consciousness which is true to who they are in the center of their being. And I am interested in telling stories that give pleasure to the psyche.”

A character in “Losing Ground,” an older actress, makes this point wryly: “I’m not longing to do ‘Macbeth,'” she says, “but I’d love to play a real 60-year-old Negro lady who thinks more about men than God.” In an essay in The Times on recent “racial justice cinema,” including “The Hate U Give,” “Black Panther” and “BlacKkKlansman,” Reggie Ugwu observed the continuation of this tendency toward stock or larger-than-life storylines: “The films’ common dependence on the tropes of superhero stories and revenge fantasies, whether explicit or in disguise, suggests the difficulty of making reality-based cinema out of the history we’re currently living through.”

Collins had no such trouble (although getting her films seen was another matter). There was nothing binary in her characters, her thinking or her desires. She wanted it all, all the complication. The best training to be a writer, she once said, was to keep a diary of moments of discomfort and dishonesty. In her notebooks, she refers to fullness instead of happiness (“It has been the fullest, the most pleasing of times,” she wrote). There is a powerful drive to encounter the world in every dimension, to use herself to the hilt: “leaving nothing untapped. That is what it is all about: the excesses, the anxiety, the restlessness, the pain,” she wrote, “carrying around in me this irrepressible need to fulfill myself in every way possible.”

In the stories collected in “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” we encountered Collins the sharp, skillful satirist, especially where respectability politics were concerned. In “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” we see her imagination spill more freely — in quick character sketches and case studies in tension, like the one-act play “The Reading,” about an argument that breaks out between a white woman and a black woman in the waiting room of their psychic, or the story “Nina Simone,” about a love triangle told from the roving perspectives of a black woman, her white husband and the black man with whom she’s carrying on a flirtation.

“I’m on shaky ground,” a character says in “Losing Ground.” The acting notes read: “upset, but laughing” — as neat an encapsulation of Collins as you could wish for. The movie’s title itself, I realize now, is beautifully, characteristically ambivalent. Does “losing ground” mean to fall or fly? In this stylish, morally disheveling work, there might be less of a distinction than you think.

“Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins”

448 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $17.99.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/books/review-notes-from-black-womans-diary-kathleen-collins.html" id="0d129f99-cae0-390d-a042-379bd25da5f4">The New York Times</a>.

A New Chapter in the Revival of a Writer

Flannery O’Connor once expressed a wish that a novel could be published as quietly as a short story, “without having to hear from all the bright people in the Sunday papers.”

Imagine her bemusement over “Cat Person.” Published in late 2017 — in the thick of #MeToo revelations — the viral short story by Kristen Roupenian, then an MFA student, became The New Yorker’s second-most-read piece of the year, and a flashpoint in conversations about consent, its gray areas and how men metabolize rejection into rage.

After the story’s success, Roupenian received a seven-figure, two-book deal. Her first collection, “You Know You Want This,” has just been published.

“Cat Person,” included in the book, is a sour romance between Margot, a college student, and Robert, older, schlubby and insecure. It’s a brisk, efficient piece of storytelling with a skillfully modulated sense of vertigo as Margot begins to realize she knows next to nothing about the man she is dating. By the time she is able to see past her projections, they’re in his bedroom and he is undressing. It’s like sending food back to the kitchen after you’ve ordered it, she reasons. A skin-crawling sex scene ensues. Margot later breaks off the relationship, and Robert handles it about as well as you might expect.

Many heralded the story, when it first appeared, not as a piece of fiction but as a dispatch from the murky zones of sex and dating. “'Cat Person’ is basically a documentary” is a take I remember from the time. Others sniffed, saying relatability shouldn’t be embraced as an artistic criterion.

Some men felt personally attacked by the description of the male character, only to carry on a bit like him online — not least a National Review columnist who wrote an angry and wounded open letter to Margot, chiding her for her behavior.

It was the usual internet life cycle, in other words. Everyone used the story to scold everyone else — for liking it or not liking it enough or liking it for the wrong reasons. A few people made cat memes; everyone moved on.

The 11 other stories collected in “You Know You Want This” are far more extreme. They lead with caustic opening lines (“Ellie was a biter”) and scenes of gaudy violence. The friendships are treacherous, the mothers more so. The sex might kill you. The man you’re in love with might turn out to be an old thigh bone tied to a mirror (an actual plot point). Pedophilia, necrophilia, child abduction, child murder, mass murder — go down the menu of fears and outré fantasies; they’re all here.

And for what? This is a dull, needy book. The desire to seem shocking — as opposed to a curiosity about thresholds physical and ethical — tends to produce provocation of a very plaintive sort.

How do we spot the difference between those related but very different aims? Artists who ritually engage with cruelty see that engagement as a form of truthfulness — a way to be frank; a way to honor the reader, not to bludgeon her. Here is O’Connor again, writing to a novelist friend about his work in progress: “Isn’t it arbitrary to call these images such as the cat-faced baby and the old woman that looked like a cedar fence post and the grandfather who went around with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger — perverse? They are right, accurate, so why perverse?” Or turn to Mary Gaitskill, whose influence can be felt on every page of Roupenian’s collection, and whose fiction is full of brutality but also deep sympathy for her characters: “I’m picturing a small core place in a person’s heart that is hard to touch but that everyone wants touched,” she has said about her work.

With Roupenian, there is just the giddiness of her imagination, of what she can get away with. In the first story, “Bad Boy,” a couple becomes fixated on having a friend overhear them having sex. After a while, they invite him to watch, and later, participate. They order him into various acts of humiliation that culminate in a gamy little climax that would be horrifying if it weren’t so sudden, so random and, finally, so meaningless. When the couple taunts him — “Look at what you’ve done” — I was shaken out of my numb disdain into a kind of anger. No, it’s what the author has done, and why? I wanted better for these characters — lives with real emotional stakes, actual personalities and not just kinks.

Ellie in “Biter” bites. Ted in “The Good Guy” needs to fantasize about stabbing women to sexually perform. Laura in “The Matchbox Sign” imagines that her body is crawling with parasites — and her boyfriend participates in the fantasy. These characters remain their pathologies; the curtain falls on them before we can ever ask: Now what?

There’s none of the simmer of “Cat Person” or its attention to language in the rest of these stories. Roupenian will work a metaphor until it screams. On a walk in the woods: “The vaginal lips of a pink lady’s slipper peep out from behind some bushes; a rubber shred of burst balloon, studded by a plump red navel knot, dangles from a tree branch, and the corpse of a crushed mushroom gleams sad and cold and pale.”

I might stay indoors for the rest of my life.

But there might be another chance for this book’s raw material. The collection will be a series on HBO. “You Know You Want This” has a quarry’s worth of raw suffering; maybe in the adaptation, we won’t be just shocked, but shocked into something — into a kind of understanding or feeling. That’s what I know I want.

Publication notes:

‘You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review-you-know-you-want-this-cat-person-kristen-roupenian.html" id="35491662-aa1f-3883-a033-80e83e056d35">The New York Times</a>.

'Cat Person' and Other Tales of Discomfort in a Debut Collection

There is a Borges story about a map so exact, so precisely detailed, it grew to the size of the place it depicted. The map had become the territory.

“Anniversaries,” Uwe Johnson’s oceanic, nearly 1,700-page masterpiece, performs a similar trick. Originally published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, it has been translated into English in full, for the first time, by Damion Searls. It is a novel that swallows reality — as noisy and demanding as the world itself.

To be fair, if the book subsumes your life, it’s because it leaves little time for anything else — at least at the rate I set to meet my deadline: a daily regimen of 500 pages or (more usually the case) until my eyes started to sting. I had entertained visions of Somerset Maugham traveling across the desert, as the story goes, reading Proust and ripping out each page as he completed it. But my experience felt closer to shoveling snow in the middle of a blizzard. With a fork. Any progress seemed futile against the rush of information. This book aims to be comprehensive on every topic it takes up — among them, village life in postwar Germany, housing segregation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, media coverage of Vietnam and the lead-up to the Prague Spring. I read to the point of word intoxication, passed out on the page, woke up, kept going.

“Anniversaries” is not difficult reading, but it is painstaking. The story is tangled, the characters traumatized and suspicious of language. It requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention — for attention is its great subject.

The novel takes the form of a yearlong diary by the enigmatic, rather brilliant Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year Hitler came to power. Through some shady maneuvering she got herself and her small daughter, Marie, to New York in 1961. Gesine is haunted — by her family’s embrace of Nazism, her mother’s suicide, the death of her daughter’s father — and she takes an apartment in Manhattan and enters into a new kind of nightmare. It is a city of empty lots, roiling protests and “scar-encrusted cats.” Gesine is horrified by the Vietnam War and the savagery of American racism, how quickly Marie learns to act casually superior to black people and how ferociously white New Yorkers, and her Jewish neighbors, work to keep the city segregated.

“Subjectivity remains the most important criterion of the diary,” German writer Christa Wolf wrote in her own very unusual diary, “One Day a Year,” in which she recorded the events of a single day — Sept. 27 — for over 50 years. In “Anniversaries,” however, subjectivity is annihilated. The pronouns are wildly unstable: Gesine refers to herself as “I,” then “she,” then sometimes even “we.” Her accounts of “her” day are given over to news reports, sometimes in full (she is obsessed with The New York Times, and the paper inspires in her all the passion, pleading, scorn and occasional disappointment of a love affair). Or she channels the past of her ancestors — or her ancestors intrude into the narrative to taunt or praise or beg for her forgiveness. Other times, the diary follows Marie, a worldly 10-year-old flâneur, “cool as a gherkin,” who combs the Bowery looking for adventure.

This kind of syntactic ambiguity sets off a burst of ethical questions: Where do the borders of a person, and her responsibilities, really begin and end?

We follow the world through Gesine’s diary — the long, bloody year of 1968, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. As Marie grows up, the questions mother and daughter pose to themselves and each other grow ever more complicated. When is attention without action sinful? When do we use our responsibilities to our children as a way of shirking other, perhaps even greater obligations? Searls’ superb translation inscribes Johnson’s restlessness and probing into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves, which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world as it is.

“America was a rumor. I came to verify the rumor,” Johnson told The Times in a 1966 article about his own move to New York, to the same address he gave Gesine: 243 Riverside Dr., Apt. 204. (He and his narrator also share elements of the same family history, of Nazi relatives and abandonment). Johnson had been a fiery prodigy; at 27, he was the third recipient of the International Publishers’ Prize, after Samuel Beckett and Borges. He fled the stifling world of German literary celebrity and took a job with a New York publishing house, assembling an anthology of German literature. He floundered, and considered devoting his life to translating his beloved Faulkner when he had a chance sighting.

On April 18, 1967, at 5:30 p.m., the sun dipped behind a cloud and Johnson saw a woman he recognized, walking on the south side of 42nd Street, along Bryant Park. He knew her by the way she held her head and “her relaxed yet vigilant way of swinging her right arm, with a small black purse in her hand (perfect for hitting back with, if necessary), locked into place by her fingers, from the first two of which the frame of her sunglasses was swinging.” It was Gesine.

Johnson always referred to his fictional characters as people in their own right. He resurrected them from one book to the next (Marie’s father, Jakob, is the protagonist of a previous novel, “Speculations About Jakob”) and reported running into them in the city. Johnson claimed that Gesine, upon seeing him that evening in April, protested: “Oh no. Not again.” She knew he had a use for her.

The novel took 15 years to complete. By some accounts, Johnson wrote himself to death, passing away, at 49, just months after handing in the last volume, in a small English seaside town named, appropriately enough for Johnson, Sheerness.

The excess of this book can feel occasionally oppressive, the detail mismanaged even — must every tertiary character come equipped with such a lavishly imagined backstory? But two days without the novel now, and I’m lonesome for its patient, laboring gaze, a kind of holy attention that Gesine recalls in her youth: “As children, in haystacks, caught in a storm, we thought: Someone can see us. We are all seen.”

——

Publication Notes:

‘Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl

Translated from the German by Damion Searls

1,668 pages. New York Review Books. Boxed set, $39.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/books/review-anniversaries-uwe-johnson.html" id="36550b5a-ff88-3e20-a7cf-eeceec82e7f3">The New York Times</a>.

A Masterpiece as Demanding as the World Itself

This was a lament, not a boast. How austere advanced mathematics can seem to the layperson — a confluence of the intimidating and the irrelevant. It’s easy to forget that math has been vaunted as a source of pleasure, even consolation. In the Symposium, it is described as a source of the most sublime eros, second only to the Platonic ideal of beauty. Late in life, Thomas Jefferson reported that its contemplation was a balm against the despair of aging.

Karen Olsson’s beguiling new book, “The Weil Conjectures,” arrives as a corrective, describing mathematics — its focus, abstraction, odd hunches, blazing epiphanies — as a powerful intoxicant, a door to euphoria. She twines her arguments around the story of the Weil siblings: André and Simone, the philosopher and secular saint — “the only great spirit of our time,” according to Camus.

The precocity of the Weil siblings is the stuff of legend. At 9 years old, André was tinkering with doctoral-level math. By 12, he had taught himself Sanskrit, become a proficient violinist and taken his younger sister’s education in hand. The pair spoke to each other in rhyming couplets and Ancient Greek. Their idea of play was to recite long passages of Racine and Corneille aloud to each other, with any errors earning a hard slap across the face. (That’s one alternative to “screen time.”)

When Simone, barely into her teens, felt hopelessly outpaced by her brother, she contemplated suicide. “I didn’t mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides,” she later wrote. “I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.”

Her genius was for the moral imagination, for empathy so extreme it flirted with self-erasure. At 5, she gave up sugar in solidarity with French troops stationed at the front of World War I. It’s not merely that she was preternaturally attentive to the suffering of others, she was determined to cast her lot with them — to live without heat and keep strict rations, to fling herself into factory work and volunteer in mines and fields — often with disastrous results. Her parents, marvels of forbearance, frequently had to swoop in to save her from her noble, quixotic ambitions. In 1936, she made it to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, posing as a journalist. She could barely handle her heavy gun — and promptly stepped in a pot of boiling cooking oil. The skin came off her foot along with her sock; she required weeks of convalescence and care.

“The Weil Conjectures” takes its title from a series of propositions written by André that led to the development of modern algebraic geometry. “The word ‘conjecture’ derives from a root notion of throwing or casting things together,” Olsson writes. To the story of the Weil siblings, she adds her own infatuation with mathematics, which she studied briefly in college before turning to fiction (she is the author of two novels). Those years spent swotting away at equations retain a special sheen in her memory: “We were a small band of students giddily, exhaustedly trekking through an abstract moonscape,” she writes. “The egos, the insecurity, the unabashed nerdiness! I miss it still.”

As a “midlife mother of two,” she is perplexed to find herself returning to math, watching university lectures online, finding comfort in the steadiness of numbers “given our present-day world’s particular instabilities and alternative facts.”

The book unfurls effortlessly, loose and legato. There are no real revelations — the subjects are well-known and long dead. There are no stakes; there is no suspense. I was riveted. Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge. André “gorges himself” on mathematics and Sanskrit. Simone crawls between her books arrayed on the floor, “leans over Descartes like an animal drinking.”

What’s curious is that we never learn why she was reading Descartes so intently (or that he later became one of her prime philosophical sparring partners). There are slow pans of André at his desk, his cat perched on the edge, but we are rarely privy to the work itself. Olsson remains breezy on the finer points of their intellectual interests, perhaps to keep the narrative from being bogged down.

The glamour of mathematics is what excites her, its colorful stories. The book advances in fragments, historical divagations that drift by, smoothly as clouds: Hippasus of Metapontum supposedly flung off a ship for his discovery of irrational numbers, or the unearthing of the Rhind papyrus of 1700 B.C., one of the oldest mathematical documents, with an insuperable opening line: “Directions for Attaining the Knowledge of All Dark Things.” Olsson is drawn to anecdotes that emphasize the role of beauty and chance. Why do we represent the unknown with x? Credit René Descartes’ printer, who was running out of letters while producing copies of the treatise “La Géométrie.” X, y and z remained, and the printer settled on x, the least used letter in French.

If there is an x in this book, it is Simone Weil.

For all of Olsson’s skill at untangling knotty mathematics, she is baffled by Simone, insensible to her charisma and put off by her prose — “awfully high in fiber,” she describes it, and lacking in style. It is a freakish version of the thinker she offers us, a gaunt catastrophe in wide skirts. “The more I learn,” Olsson writes, “the more I begin to wonder whether his sanity somehow implicated his sister’s extremity, whether in the Weil family, the two roles were divided between them: He would be the great mathematician, and she would come unhinged.”

The issue of Weil’s mental state has long preoccupied and divided her biographers. She died at 34, from tuberculosis, aggravated, it is said, by prolonged malnutrition from restricting herself to children’s wartime rations. “Unhinged” is a crude diagnosis, especially in a book that gives short shrift to her work and influence. From “The Weil Conjectures,” it’s difficult to discern how rich and various her life truly was; or to grasp her political shrewdness and the intellectual concerns and the style that has irrigated the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iris Murdoch, Giorgio Agamben, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag.

The mathematician Henri Poincaré, a mentor to André, imagined that thoughts lived in the mind like static particles, “as if hooked to a wall,” Olsson writes. Thinking liberated them and allowed them to crash into and attach to one another. Her book is full of such moments of connection, combustion and surprise. And if x goes unsolved, there is something apt and beautiful there, too. For all the riddles of mathematics, there is also the ordinary and eternal mystery of other people’s minds.

“The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown”

214 pages. Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux. $26.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/books/review-weil-conjectures-math-karen-olsson.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Two brilliant siblings and the curious consolations of math

(Books of The Times): At the 1994 reception for the prestigious Kyoto Prize, awarded for achievements that contribute to humanity, French mathematician André Weil turned to his fellow honoree, film director Akira Kurosawa, and said: “I have a great advantage over you. I can love and admire your work, but you cannot love and admire my work.”

None of this, we understand, counts as a betrayal of his expectations.

“Say hi to Major Ellie,” he introduces himself. “My whole C.V. could fit onto two lines: one man, 637 missions, a few thousand tons of the finest explosives deposited in some of the world’s most evil places. Some hits. Some misses. Current status: lost.”

Ellie is dupe, villain and victim in Mohammed Hanif’s “Red Birds,” which depicts a universe populated exclusively by the dupes, villains and victims of America’s forever war, along with a few charlatans, people driven mad by grief and, to my great unhappiness, one talking dog (talking animals are up there with precocious children in my annals of literary sins).

It is the bleakest, most mournful book by an author celebrated for his barbed tongue and high silliness. A former fighter pilot with the Pakistani army and longtime BBC correspondent, Hanif made his name with his Joseph Heller-influenced burlesques about the horrors and hypocrisies of war. “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” (2008), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, lampooned the assassinated Pakistani president, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, lavishing upon him, among other humiliations, a spectacular case of anal worms. In “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” (2012), Hanif excoriated violence against women — “a sport older than cricket but just as popular” — but with slapstick instead of sanctimony. (Hanif is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.)

With “Red Birds,” he explores the entanglement of aid agencies and the war machine. Ellie is taken in by the refugee camp he intended to bomb, in an unnamed country. He becomes the casual captive of a teenager named Momo, who hopes to use him to recover his brother, Ali, who has gone missing — perhaps sold to the Americans. The moral center of the book is Momo’s very depressed and philosophical dog, Mutt, who has a broken leg, a brain fried from a near-fatal electrocution and the ability to sense the ghosts circling the camp.

Hanif’s writing has always been anchored in Pakistan, and in a very Punjabi sense of humor. Here it floats free, leached of color and all local detail. For the first time he plays with parable — and what an exciting departure it might have been.

Instead, we get an alarmingly sloppy and choppy ghost story. The Americans sound incongruously British. There are welters of pronoun confusion, and the pacing is all wrong. There’s a bog of exposition to wade through at the beginning, and when Ellie and Momo finally meet, the story picks up for a page only to shudder to a halt. These characters don’t speak to one another; instead, in rotating monologues, they soliloquize, each making the same point repeatedly: Ellie reflects on the endlessness of the forever wars, Momo dreams of money, Mutt philosophizes. When a moment of climax arrives (the only real plot point) and the characters storm an abandoned hangar, rather than escalation or revelation, we get chaos, a supernatural flurry of action. This isn’t a spoiler. Trust that I have no idea what happens — flapping wings and much shouting were all I could register.

Criminally — for such a savagely funny writer — the jokes don’t land. The worst lines belong to the benighted Mutt, who ought to have suffered enough: “Paw on my heart,” he is forced to say. “Woof off.” Gladly.

The Hanif I remember comes to life in his social critiques. “If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place?” Ellie says of an American development worker at the camp. “Make them orphans, then adopt them, that’s how the world goes.” These electric observations are all too infrequent, however, and they can’t enliven a narration that always returns to characters parroting their few key points.

What’s gone wrong here? When a writer this conspicuously talented makes so many elementary, inexplicable errors — and, more seriously, when he jettisons his style, his moves — something is happening, something that merits not censure but a closer look. A painful transformation is afoot.

Wrestling with the novel, I began to feel I was reading less a document about trauma than a document of trauma. The story is weirdly repetitive. Characters reintroduce themselves to us every time they appear, unnecessarily reminding us of their particulars. The narration is listless until it turns furious and then it collapses, lost and weary. The book behaves like a grieving person.

From the first page, there’s an intimation that the novel is animated, in part, by private sorrow. In 2013, Hanif wrote a nonfiction book about the enforced disappearances in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, “The Baloch Who Is Not Missing Anymore and Others Who Are,” published by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In 2015, his friend, the human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud, held an event on the disappearances at her community space in Karachi. She was killed on her way home. “I don’t think I or any of my colleagues have recovered from that shot,” Hanif has said. Mahmud supplies one of the epigraphs to “Red Birds” — a little line asking the audience to silence their phones, presumably before the gathering that night.

Hanif made his name writing some of the boldest satire of his generation. What happens when satire begins to seem like a statement of impotence, when it loses its power to shame? What lies beyond it? And what happens to a writer when he recognizes the limitations of his favorite form? This novel isn’t riddled with mere flaws but heartbreak.

“I think the novel is set in a war-torn, devastated, half-forgotten place,” Hanif said in a recent interview. “That place is my head.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f7917251-e93e-4206-9e9b-d29bc5f16f54" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/books/review-red-birds-mohammed-hanif.html">The New York Times</a>.

A savagely funny writer shows a bleak side

(Books of The Times): A man is falling from the sky, falling slowly, like a petal. He lands on the sands of an unknown desert with his torn parachute, more dead than alive. There is no sign of his American fighter plane, its American bombs. He is frighteningly calm.

In her extraordinary new book, “No Visible Bruises,” Rachel Louise Snyder reports on what the World Health Organization has called “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.” In the United States alone, more than half of all murdered women are killed by a current or former partner — 50 women every month. Domestic violence cuts across lines of class, race and religion; it is the leading cause of maternal mortality in cities including New York and Chicago, and the second leading cause of death for black women nationwide.

A United Nations report in 2018 put it starkly: The most dangerous place for a woman is her own home.

Domestic violence lurked in the background of every piece Snyder reported, as an investigative journalist for public radio, from Cambodia to Honduras. “An unfortunate fate for the unlucky few,” she used to think, “a matter of bad choices and cruel environments. A woman hard-wired to be hurt. A man hard-wired to hurt.”

Grievous, common errors. This book, winner of the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, takes apart the myths that surround domestic violence, many of which Snyder herself once believed: Restraining orders and shelters are always effective responses. Abusers never change. Visible signs of violence point to the greatest threat.

Far from being a private or isolated act, domestic violence — or “intimate partner terrorism,” as Snyder prefers, arguing it more accurately describes the psychological dynamics — has links with mass shootings and is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half of homeless women. She powerfully dismantles the question of why women seem to stay in violent relationships: “We mistake what we see from the outside as her choosing to stay with an abuser, when in fact it’s we who don’t recognize what a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving actually looks like.”

Like Michelle Monson Mosure. At the heart of “No Visible Bruises” is the story of the 2001 murder of Mosure, a Montana woman, and her two children by her husband, Rocky Mosure, who then turned the gun on himself. Michelle was barely a teenager when she met Rocky. He was older and volatile; he began to control how she dressed and where she went. He began to beat her in front of their children.

And then there was the rattlesnake. Rocky supposedly kept one in a cage in the living room. He threated to slip it into her bed while she slept, or drop it in with her while she showered.

In secret, Michelle took classes and planned an escape. She ran away only to return, filed charges only to recant — behavior that might look weak or mystifying, but Snyder reveals how carefully she was trying to assess the risks to her and her children. She was trying to placate Rocky until she felt safe enough to make a move. She was relying on the tools that had kept her alive.

We meet others making these terrifying calculations. Snyder travels to shelters and along with the police. She encounters so many women, so many hollow-eyed children. There’s an immediacy in these scenes, the raw, ragged tension of people exhausted by fear, that recalls Donna Ferrato’s portraits of domestic violence in “Living With the Enemy.” I read Snyder’s book as if possessed, stopping for nothing, feeling the pulse beat in my brain.

What did I miss? What could I have done? Michelle and Rocky’s parents churn over these questions obsessively. Snyder wants us to share in them, make them our own. There is so much that can be done; for all the suffering in the book, it is also full of actionable changes.

Domestic violence initiatives, after all, are fairly new in this country; until the 1990s, we had more animal shelters than women’s shelters. Snyder takes us through the history — how the O.J. Simpson trial and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, in 1994, transformed the understanding of domestic violence — and up to the series of steps that can save lives today. Prosecute cases without the victim’s help, as we do murder trials. Treat restraining orders like DUIs and keep them on file, even after they have expired. Train clergy members and doctors to recognize and respond to domestic violence. Promote battering intervention programs. Choking nearly always precedes a homicide attempt; teach police to recognize the signs, and instruct doctors to assess women for traumatic brain injury. And, of course, there is the near-unanimous recommendation from law enforcement and domestic violence advocates: “You want to get rid of homicide?” a retired forensic nurse asks. “Get rid of guns.”

In its scope and seriousness — its palpable desire to spur change — this book invites reflection not only about violence but about writing itself. What kinds of reportage really move policy? What kinds of narrative — what sorts of tone, structure, examples — can stoke a reader’s outrage and then translate that outrage into action, keeping it from curdling into cynicism or despair?

This is the interesting paradox of this particular genre. Books that want to raise an alarm don’t always aspire to literature, but to be effective — to persuade — they must be literary; they must be obsessed with matters of rhythm, form and language. “Silent Spring” is a toxicological examination of 19 chemicals, but we recall it for its beauty and precision, for its eerie prelude, in which Rachel Carson conjures a poisoned, silent world that once “throbbed” with the music of birds.

Snyder is the author of a study on the costs of fast fashion, “Fugitive Denim,” and a novel, “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing.” She brings all of fiction’s techniques to this new book — canny pacing, an eye for the animating detail and bursts of quick, confident characterization. There is a fullness and density to every one of her subjects — the former prison guard turned restorative justice advocate, the notorious pimp who now holds anti-violence classes for abusers. She glides from history to the present day, from scene to analysis, with a relaxed virtuosity that filled me with admiration. This is a writer using every tool at her disposal to make this story come alive, to make it matter.

‘No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us’

This article originally appeared in <a id="06735a28-9315-4632-8d50-f446ba21677f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/books/review-no-visible-bruises-domestic-violence-rachel-louise-snyder.html">The New York Times</a>.

An extraordinary new book dismantles the myths that surround domestic violence

(Books of The Times): Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat. During that same period, in the United States, more than three times as many women died at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends.

She has no way of knowing that she stars in a book that is part of a wave of its own: “#MeToo novels,” they’re called, these disparate stories of sex and power suddenly regarded as timely, and read through the lens of an unfolding movement — with happy results, I’m about to argue (irritating Nunez’s teacher, I imagine, and rather surprising myself).

It does not feel reductive to read fiction through this prism, nor will you find the numbing sameness Nunez’s narrator deplores — in fact, these books deliver us from numbing sameness. They are remarkably various, and they trouble debates that traffic in certainties. They come laden with confusion, doubt, subtlety — is it excessively earnest to call it truth?

The original “Me Too movement” was created by civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, out of her work with young women of color who had experienced sexual abuse. Since the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke in 2017, the term has been adopted as a rallying cry for survivors of all kinds of gendered violence. The “#MeToo novel” shares this range; it has been applied to everything from Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” with its gentle May-December romance, to Édouard Louis’ autobiographical novel “History of Violence,” which recounts a rape and attempted murder.

There is Anna Burns’ “Milkman,” set during The Troubles and awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize (“I hope this novel will help people think about #MeToo,” the judges’ chairman said). See also Pat Barker’s “The Silence of the Girls” (called “an ‘Iliad’ for the age of #MeToo” in a review in The New York Times), Miriam Toews’ “Women Talking” (a “Mennonite #MeToo novel”) and Idra Novey’s “Those Who Knew” (“the definitive #MeToo novel,” according to Entertainment Weekly). Reissues, like “The Street,” a 1946 novel by Ann Petry, are included in the category, as well as a rare #MeToo novel by a man, James Lasdun’s “Afternoon of a Faun.”

Recent feminist dystopias imagine the further erosion of reproductive rights (Bina Shah’s “Before She Sleeps,” Maggie Shen King’s “An Excess Male,” Sophie Mackintosh’s “The Water Cure,” Leni Zumas’ “Red Clocks”). Several books feature charismatic, predatory teachers, including Nunez’s “The Friend,” Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” and Kate Walbert’s “His Favorites.” There are revenge fantasies (Naomi Alderman’s “The Power”), romance and young adult novels that grapple with consent — even a #MeToo western.

The best of these books are heretical where narratives of sexual violence are concerned. “A History of Violence,” “His Favorites,” “Asymmetry,” “Trust Exercise,” “Those Who Knew,” “The Silence of the Girls,” “The Friend,” “Women Talking”: Their titles run together in my mind, like the fragments of a rumor I’ve heard too many times before, but the books topple conventional stories of heroes and victims. They exist as reminders of the kind of touchyethical explorations the novel makes possible.

Adrienne Rich once wrote that Virginia Woolf’s style — that detachment and banked rage, that light, calculated charm — revealed a woman who never forgot she was being overheard, and evaluated, by men. Reading the flood of public writing about #MeToo in recent years — the op-eds and testimonies — I’d occasionally experience a prickly feeling of recognition. Here again, I’d think, was writing that stemmed from outrage, and often shame, but remained impeccably well-mannered and sure of itself, almost legalistic in structure and presentation. Necessarily, perhaps — women must constantly perform credibility.

“The whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts, and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or, having believed them, allow those facts to have consequences,” Rebecca Solnit has written. These pieces often felt preoccupied with their imagined reception — straining to appease, convince, console — conscious of being overheard, in Rich’s phrase, but this time by women as well as men.

Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition.

In “Trust Exercise,” a woman called Karen (not her real name, she tells us) confronts her youthful relationship with a much older man and finds she cannot arrive at any comforting conclusions. She feels victimized but also entirely responsible. Her feelings for young women in similar situations are “violently mixed”; “these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.” She wants them to shut up but hates them for their silence; she wants them to move on but cannot forgive them if they refuse to take revenge. Where does this leave her? What should she do with her pain? (I advise against following her example. Mostly.)

“We all make our own choices,” a character in a play in “Trust Exercise” says. “Do we?” responds another. “Milkman,” a stream-of-consciousness novel dictated by a young, isolated woman stalked by a shadowy paramilitary figure, asks what sexual consent might mean to people who have never had any experience of control: “I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.”

#MeToo is a moment full of reappraisals — of beloved artists, public figures, ourselves. How do we respond to this feeling of unmooring? By tightening our grasp on what we have always known? By jettisoning one set of scripts for another? In “Women Talking,” based on a true story, the women and girls living in a fictitious Mennonite colony in South America called Molotschna discover that men from their community have been drugging and raping them for years. They gather in a hayloft, and decide what to do: Stay, leave, fight. Over the course of the novel, much of it written in dialogue of the plainest possible language, they ask what separates justice from punishment. They re-examine every one of their premises: “When we know something we stop thinking about it, don’t we?” one character says.

It’s a habit of mind this woman is talking about — a habit of skepticism toward the self, the ability and willingness to change your mind. These novels offer a kind of training in this way of being. They are full of narrative tripwires that force us to pay attention, reassess our reflexive responses, revise what we think the story is about. “His Favorites” has a circular structure, with vertigo-inducing shifts in time. “Trust Exercise” has odd, double-jointed sentences that flip between points of view; Karen refers to herself variously as “I,” “she” and “we” — experiencing herself as both subject and object. In “Milkman” there are no names at all — characters are “Somebody McSomebody” and “longest friend” — and only a few proper nouns.

In several of these books, there is a fundamental confusion about what we are reading in the first place — is it a novel within a novel? Who is narrating? Do they have a right to the story? A striking number of these books — “The Friend,” “Asymmetry,” Trust Exercise,” “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Those Who Knew” — all involve a parallel plot, in which the story of a relationship, either lopsided or abusive, is juxtaposed with the story of a character who draws upon the experience of another in their own writing, often a tell-all.

As an acting exercise, the drama teacher in “Trust Exercise” would turn off the lights in his classroom and have the students find their way around by touch. He’d watch them, talk to them: “Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?”

The answer, of course, is always. “We’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other,” Choi writes. “You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled.” We’re all here together, in the dark.

This article originally appeared in <a id="785308ed-30f3-445c-94cc-9517f33e0e6e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/novels-me-too-movement.html">The New York Times</a>.

#MeToo is all too real, but to better understand it, turn to fiction

(Critic's Notebook): In “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, the narrator, a writing teacher, grumbles about her students’ personal essays on sexual violence. Always the same nouns, she complains to us (scar, bruise, blood), always the same verbs (choke, starve, scream). The dull, depressing sameness of these stories. Their horrifying number.

Ann Petry’s first novel, “The Street,” was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world — the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies. It is the story of a catastrophe in agonizingly slow motion. A mother and her young son living in Harlem in the 1940s are ground down by poverty and the bitter racism and constant predation in their neglected neighborhood.

“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs,” the mother, Lutie, thinks. “The method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place.” The book was greeted as a female counterpart to Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” a new classic of social realism and one of the early (and only) glimpses into the lives of black working-class women. Its author was feted and photographed and made utterly miserable.

Petry experienced celebrity as a kind of spiritual theft.

“My soul was no longer my own,” she recalled to The New York Times in 1992. “I was a black woman at a point in time when being a writer was not usual, and I was besieged. Everyone wanted a part of me.”

She fled Harlem for her hometown in Connecticut, where she lived in seclusion until her death, at 88, in 1997. The threat of exposure still loomed, and she destroyed her letters and other pieces of writing, and remained ambivalent whenever her work was reissued: “I feel as though I were a helpless creature impaled on a dissecting table — for public viewing,” she wrote in her journal.

The Library of America recently published “The Street” in one volume along with Petry’s 1953 masterpiece, “The Narrows,” and a sampling of her critical writing, edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor of English and African American Literature at Columbia University and the author of “Harlem Nocturne,” a group biography of radical women artists in the 1940s, including Petry. Read together, these works by Petry reveal, with fluorescent clarity, the through line between the life and the work — an intimate knowledge, and horror, of surveillance.

“In ‘The Street’ my aim is to show how simply and easily the environment can change the course of a person’s life,” Petry once said.

It is impossible not to connect her own childhood to that privacy she found crucial for self-preservation. Her family was one of four black households in small-town Connecticut and faced routine harassment. She was ordered to leave a public beach as a child, and pelted with stones as she walked to school, where white teachers refused to instruct her. These experiences of feeling scrutinized, even hunted — and her observations of Harlem from her time writing for Adam Clayton Powell’s newspaper The People’s Voice — course through her fiction. The fact of American racism is so large and encompassing it finds personification in her novels as the elements themselves, the winds that assault the characters, the fog that blinds them.

“She never felt really human until she reached Harlem,” Petry says of Lutie. Only there, “away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women” and the “openly appraising looks of the white men,” can she feel free — if only for a little while. Mrs. Hedges, who runs a brothel in their apartment building, takes a covetous interest in her. Worse, there is the building’s sinister super; “she could feel his eyes traveling over — estimating her, summing her up, wondering about her.” He wants her terribly, and sneaks into her bedroom when she’s out, to fondle her clothes. When rejected, he coolly decides to “fix her good” — how convenient that she has such a vulnerable young son.

Petry’s characters are watched constantly but cannot themselves see. In the first scene of “The Street,” Lutie struggles to read a “for rent” sign in the middle of a gale; in “The Narrows,” a black man and a white woman meet in the middle of a dense fog, each mistaking the race of the other.

It is just the beginning of their troubles. The novel is often (and naïvely) described as an interracial romance between Camilo, a white heiress, and Link, a black war veteran. A pact of assured mutual destruction is more accurate. They cannot recognize each other’s humanity. To Camilo, Link is inexorably his race; to Link, Camilo is a beautiful machine, “a racehorse or an airplane, all the essential parts in the exact right place.” They have been designed to destroy each other.

Petry wrote unabashed protest art, in the mode of Steinbeck and Stephen Crane.

“It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel or La Gioconda, ‘Madame Bovary’ or ‘War and Peace,’” she wrote in her essay “The Novel as Social Criticism,” which is included in this volume. “The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not.”

This Petry — the surprisingly pugnacious practitioner-critic rising to the defense of her own work, as social realism was falling out of fashion — might be my favorite of all her registers, but she does her writing a slight disservice. Her work endures (despite her own efforts) not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry.

“Sometimes when a writer is regarded as ‘before her time,’ we don’t quite understand that the same work is still right on time,” novelist Tayari Jones has written in praise of Petry.

Petry will always feel on time. Her kind of talent will always feel startling and sui generis: The music of her sentences and their discipline; her unerring sense of psychology; the fullness with which she endows each character, which must be understood as a kind of love; the plots that commandeer whole hours and days. (I am writing this review in a swivet of shame, in fact, in the baleful eye line of an unwalked dog, unwashed dishes, unanswered emails.) Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it.

806 pages. Library of America. $35.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c152ba6a-86e0-44f9-9f6c-17412dd3d5f0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/books/review-street-narrows-ann-petry.html">The New York Times</a>.

Realism reissued, but still right on time

Parul Sehgal

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