Welcome to the second monthly issue of A Reader’s Review. My enthusiasm for what I and you, my readers, can make of it grows. As I said the first time around, I welcome not only you but also your comments and thoughts about how the review might evolve.
As a reminder, A Reader’s Review is a two-part series at Homo Vitruvius combining free and paid elements. The first, free part, every four weeks, on Thursdays, is what you are reading here, titled “A Reader’s Review.” In this monthly review, I’ll offer recommendations, with brief commentary and greater quotation, of some of the best of what I’ve been reading in periodicals over the past month, in print and online, including Substack. The standards will be idiosyncratic, which is to say mine. If you read me regularly, I’ll hope then that you’ll find the selections congenial and if, rather, provocative, then provocative in a congenial way. If not, you can tell me in the comments or send me an anonymous threat: just leave your name with security to acquire your anonymous threat pass.
As with any literary review, you can pick and choose, if you wish, among the offerings.
On the Monday following each Review I will share “A Reader’s Review: A Closer Look.” In that paid subscriber essay (always with a substantial free portion at the start), I’ll explore ideas from one of the selections in the previous Thursday’s review. I’ll dig deeper, think more widely, make connections, take issue and argue – all depending.
For April 2024, we begin with
Book Review: ‘Knife,’ by Salman Rushdie - The New York Times
“Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir,” Dwight Garner | New York Times Book Review.
“Knife” is an account of the writer’s brush with death in 2022, and the long recovery that followed.
“So it’s you,” Salman Rushdie remembers thinking on the morning of Aug. 12, 2022, as a black-clad man, a “squat missile,” sprinted toward him on an auditorium stage in Chautauqua, N.Y. Rushdie thought: “Here you are.”
. . . .
In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” Rushdie describes what happened next. The black-clad man, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including his favorite, No. 130.
. . . .
His attacker was at last subdued. Blood was everywhere, pooling. Rushdie’s clothes were cut off him. His legs were raised to keep what blood he had left flowing to his heart. He remembers feeling humiliated. “In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist,” he writes. The reader considers it a good sign, for Rushdie’s health and for the tone of this humane and often witty book, that among his first thoughts was, “Oh, my nice Ralph Lauren suit.”
A member of his surgery team later tells him, “When they brought you in from the helicopter, we didn’t think we could save you.”
. . . .
“Knife” is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for. Rushdie’s friend Christopher Hitchens, in the wake of the initial fatwa, eloquently explained the stakes. The affair drew a line between “everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.” His words apply to this book.
Garner offers only small caveats amid his praise. Rushdie castigates himself for failing to put up a defense. In 1989, the year the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa was issued against him, I stood amongst hundreds rallying in Rushdie’s support in front of the downtown Manhattan offices of PEN America. If you check the next morning’s New York Times, you can find my bald pate amidst the crowd in a frontpage photo. (I’m sure had the photographer known of my presence, he’d have timed or adjusted his framing not a bit.)
This past week Rushdie was feted for his new book at, of course, Manhattan’s Waverly Inn. (“Salman Rushdie Is Again the Toast of Literary Manhattan.”)
“I remember being at parties as a teen in London in the 1990s, and I’d always see him, and I’d think, ‘Wait, doesn’t half the world want to kill this guy right now?’” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “I always thought he was a badass.”
. . . .
“I saw him when he made this appearance not that long after it all happened, but even then he still had his wit and grace,” Ms. Crosley said. “I went up to hug him, but I was nervous, and I didn’t want to squeeze him too hard. I remember he told me, ‘What’s the point of it all if you can’t squeeze too hard?’”
Past Tense - The Drift (thedriftmag.com)
“Past Tense: Our Historical Fiction Hang-Ups,” David Schurman Wallace | the Drift
If you read or write historical fiction, you will want to read this very rich consideration of so many vital practical and theoretical issues.
The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time, particularly before everyone else — in possessing a sensitivity to the zeitgeist. This grasp of the bleeding edge, crucial to literature considered broadly countercultural, is used by writers (in a downtown bar, or up in a garret) to make history, not to recall it, even if no one would be so dull as to admit such ambitions. After all, the other hallmark of coolness is effortlessness. And the felt effort of historical fiction — research, dates, facts, figures, articles of clothing you didn’t know the name for until you looked them up — is always present. To the uninclined reader, this is homework. It’s boring. Yet a desire to visit the past springs eternal. There’s always that child curled up on the train or plane with a brick of a book, immersed in a vast world, a somewhere that’s electrifying in how different its ordinary is. As the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, with great nostalgia for that innocent feeling, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
. . . .
Though there can be no one metric for success, historical novels have not only sold well for decades, but also garnered far more critical acclaim than their zeitgeisty peers. In a new history of recent historical fiction, Writing Backwards, Alexander Manshel argues that since the 1980s, literary institutions have privileged the “aesthetic, pedagogical, and political value of the historical past,” something borne out on college syllabi and in major American literary prizes, with “novels set in the past comprising nearly three-quarters of all shortlisted novels between 2000 and 2019.” At least half of the past dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, by my count, could be called historical novels. Today, the historical novel may be the dominant form of literary production, exceeding the small clutch of more “innovative” work in footprint. Only its theory lags behind the present.
. . . .
In Lukács’s view, there is no distinction of genre between the true historical novel and realism, and he insists that “the question of the historical novel as an independent genre only ever arises if for some reason or other the proper and adequate connection with a correct understanding of the present is lacking, if it is either not yet or no longer present.” Today, we typically view the historical novel as a separate genre; if Lukács is right, we’ve ceased to think of past and present as one continuum, all of it “real,” all equally available to our intelligence. The existence of a compartmentalized genre implies a blockage in understanding our own historical predicament, in drawing together two eras. What, for us, is lacking?
[All emphasis added.]
“‘Write Like a Man’ Review: Diana Trilling’s Challenge,” Benjamin Balint | Wall Street Journal
“The New York Intellectuals Were a Boys’ Club,” Sam Adler-Bell | Chronicle of Higher Education
Two reviews of Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, by Ronnie A. Grinberg
If you were growing up in the 1960s and in the 1970s coming of age and aspiring to think and write on the public stage, about literature and politics and ideas of all kinds, if you were American, but especially a New Yorker – and New York governed so much of American intellectual life – then your intellectual world, its issues and battles and history, was shaped by “the New York Intellectuals.” And if you were Jewish and attended City College of New York . . . I was Jewish and attended City College of New York.
Writes Adler-Bell,
The origin story of the New York Intellectuals long ago acquired the status of myth. (Genesis, to be precise.) The details can be recited catechistically: Paradise was City College of New York, whose cafeteria was divided, like Babel, into numbered niches by ethnicity, hobby, and sect. In “alcove one,” the non-Stalinist left, devotees of Trotsky, Marx, and modernist literature, sharpened their dialectical swords for combat against the middlebrow Communists of “alcove two.” The CP crowd had an easy answer to every question, so long as they’d read that morning’s Daily Worker; the Trots, by contrast, relied on theory and wits alone to metabolize the world’s information and make with it an argument for world socialism and against Stalin’s perversion of that dream.
On both sides, the combatants were predominantly Jewish, but only alcove one produced thinkers like Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell. (Kristol would mordantly joke that the most illustrious alumnus of alcove two was Julius Rosenberg.) Not every New York Intellectual graduated from City College; some weren’t even Jewish or from New York. But Alfred Kazin, Sidney Hook, Harold Rosenberg, and the Partisan Review co-founder William Phillips all passed through what Phillips affectionately called “the poor boy’s steppingstone to the world.” And it was from this roughly shared experience — of working-class life in immigrant New York, of Marxist quarrel and quandary — that a shared intellectual sensibility was forged.
Writes Ballint,
In “Write Like a Man,” Ronnie A. Grinberg recounts this scene to illustrate how members of this “testosterone-driven literary circle,” as she calls it, “came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo” as they reinvented both themselves and liberalism to meet the exigencies of Cold War politics. When old anxieties were magnified by new ideological challenges, Ms. Grinberg writes, “a masculinity centered on strength, toughness, and virility” became a defining feature of New York intellectual life.
These were, Ballint says, “a group of intellectuals—men and women both—who “prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.”
They bestrode American intellectual life in the middle of the Twentieth Century like gladiators of the mind, with the great and small passions of gladiators, too, and their time was passing even as I was learning to think and write and argue under their influence.
On Guernica – Guernica (guernicamag.com) | Magogodi aoMphela Makhene
Moving Forward – Guernica (guernicamag.com) | Michael Archer
If you are unfamiliar with the details of what transpired at Guernica Magazine last month, here is the New York Times account.
“On Guernica” is a brief statement by the new publisher, Makhene. It is trite before it is banal, but too banal in its bland, empty formulations to rise even to the level of stale. At a moment when a magazine of any intellectual or political consequence should have dived head first – the head being its publisher’s – into the issues that brought it to crisis, Guernica instead has offered a declaration of intellectual inconsequentiality.
The magazine’s founder, Archer, offers mostly a vague recounting of events. But he does say this of note:
Given Guernica’s long history of publishing the sharply crafted prose that pull from intimate terrains of impact, this piece felt jarring in both its timing and its approach. Rather than mine the personal to expose the political, individual angst was elevated above the collective suffering laid bare in the extensive body of work Guernica has published from the region.
The spurned essay was nothing if not about “intimate terrains of impact”; it unacceptably included Israeli terrain. This was the “approach” found “jarring.” What Archer states about the relation of the political and the personal, the individual and the collective is the hallmark of the kind of publication it was, that behaved as it did, and that it now commits itself to remaining.
Whatever reasons may draw readers to Guernica in its future, neither intellectual originality nor humane daring will count among them.
* * *
Responses to the upstart show were mixed: Critics referred to the group as a “gang of nihilists,” “intransigents,” “Communards” and even “insane.” Others appreciated the emergence of a new style among the core of the exhibitors, and the designation “Impressionist” was born when one critic described how these works, with their loose brushstrokes and emphasis on immediacy, create the sense of an experience, as opposed to its direct representation. Many reviewers fixated on Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872), a view of a misty sunrise over the port of Le Havre, in which a bright orange sun beckons through a hazy mauve sky. Although the artist had hastily named his piece, the characterization stuck.
The show was not a financial success and the Société was dissolved shortly afterward. Seven more Impressionist exhibitions took place, each varied in form and content, assembled by different groups of artists practicing under the loose umbrella of the term. (Only Pissarro showed in all eight.)
The Musée d’Orsay, home to the world’s largest collection of Impressionist art, has mounted an exhibition that challenges the mythology of the movement’s origins and the ossification of its aesthetic concerns.
Two richly detailed links from the French Ministry Culture cover the famous first and all the subsequent exhibitions.
1874 – Première exposition (culture.gouv.fr)
The eight Impressionist exhibitions (1874-1886) (culture.gouv.fr)
Lowell, Plath, and Sexton in the Same Room | The National Endowment for the Humanities (neh.gov) The Steve Moyer | Humanities
A brief, meaningful period of convergence.
The three shared not only the same literary vocation but personal experience with mental illness. All three, in fact, had been patients in McLean Hospital, near Boston: Plath was moved there after shock treatments at another facility; Sexton for five days of extensive examinations; Lowell, a manic-depressive, checked himself in at various times, including sometime soon after the last class with Plath and Sexton in April 1959.
The dynamic of the seminar briefly held Plath, Sexton, and Lowell together in a tight orbit. Sexton caught Plath’s attention by fearlessly taking up personal aspects of her own life as her subject, and Lowell had a guiding hand in releasing Plath from self-imposed structural constraints on her verse. In class, Sexton, by her mere presence, was a help to Plath with substance, while Lowell was a help with form. Heather Clark meticulously covered every inch, seemingly, of the terrain of Plath’s passage through this world, including the seminar with Sexton and Lowell, in her NEH-funded biography, Red Comet.
. . . .
After graduating from Smith, Plath taught there, too, briefly, and was well equipped to appraise Lowell as a teacher, one time noting that, in his “mildly feminine ineffectual fashion,” he allowed statements from students to stand that she as a teacher would not. Lowell protégée Kathleen Spivak observed, though, that Plath never cracked a smile, not even at Lowell’s jokes.
In stark contrast with Plath, Anne Sexton had little or no training as a poet, was vivacious, even flirtatious, and received praise from established poets such as Pulitzer Prize-winner W. D. Snodgrass, with whom she studied in the summer of 1958 at the Antioch Writers’ Conference.
One of the originators of what became known as cultural studies, a thinker born in a Welsh mining town and forged in the miners’ strike of 1926, Williams went on to teach not only at Cambridge but also, like Paolo Freire, adult education.
In short, society was what happened to us: industrialism, the growth of cities and the clearing out of the countryside, the rise of mass communication and mass politics. Culture was what we made of what happened: the product of unending everyday efforts to understand how to live together. Politics needed culture—solidarity, a shared vision of the world, an orientation toward one another and to the future—and culture was politics: a way of organizing shared lives at the level of meaning.
. . . . He treated elite reformers such as Matthew Arnold, Romantic rebels such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and radical anti-industrial conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle and William Cobbett not simply as confused or as class enemies, but as people engaged with fragments of a genuine and urgent question: what culture, what “whole way of living of a people,” could do justice to human possibility? Was there a way, in a rapidly changing and often bewildering world full of exploitation, degradation, and self-degradation, for people to become free and joyful together? No one could do it in Romantic solitude; hoarding culture among elites was immoral and, finally, self-defeating. But no one yet knew how to make what Williams called “a common culture.”
. . . .
“There are in fact no masses,” he continued: “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Seeing in that way cuts off the possibility of democracy.
. . . .
Facile ideological denunciation and marketing patter were both forms of moral surrender that shielded the self from risk. By contrast, a more full-hearted communication might contain the seeds of a future beyond domination and exploitation. It was a morally charismatic vision, and, especially for a radical of the left, intensely personal.
[Emphasis added.]
The terror of reality was the true horror for H P Lovecraft, Sam Woodward | Aeon Essays
“Terrifying vistas of reality”
Makes far too strenuous an effort to cast Lovecraft as an actual philosopher, but the essay clarifies in fine personal and literary detail the philosophy behind his vision: the dread and terror of the weird tale follow from the unreasonable reaching beyond human limits for reason the universe does not possess to offer.
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint … of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Crucial to the weird tale is its cosmic, beyond-human orientation. Lovecraft’s injunction that weird fiction authors suspend or defeat the ‘fixed laws of Nature’ is particularly elucidating. As any strict materialist and determinist knows, violating natural law is impossible in practice. But Lovecraft’s stories are dotted with attempts to describe the impossible within the limitations of human expression and experience.
“The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance,” Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry | The New York Times
Increasingly for a long time now, Times coverage of an array of social and political matters has simultaneously weakened in principle and emerged as tendentious. At the same time, its cultural and multimedia coverage and production is ever more creative and rewarding.
On March 21, 1924, Jessie Fauset sat inside the Civic Club in downtown Manhattan, wondering how the party for her debut novel had been commandeered.
The celebration around her was originally intended to honor that book, “There Is Confusion.” But Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke thought the dinner could serve a larger purpose. What if the two Black academic titans invited the best and brightest of the Harlem creative and political scene? What if, over a spread of fine food and drink, they brought together African American talent and white purveyors of culture? If they could marry the talent all around them with the opportunity that was so elusive, what would it mean to Black culture, both present and future?
What the resulting dinner led to, nurtured over the years in the pristine sitting rooms of brownstones and the buzzing corner booths of jazz clubs, was the Harlem Renaissance: a flowering of intellectual and artistic activity that would give the neighborhood and its residents global renown.
….
It would take time for the seeds of the Civic Club event to fully take root. Locke, Du Bois and Johnson spent the next year writing letters, raising money and convincing young artists like the painter Aaron Douglas to come to Harlem. Zora Neale Hurston arrived in Harlem in 1925 as the first African American student at Barnard College. She spent her first few nights in town sleeping on the couch at Dream Haven.
….
Still, the audacious bet by Locke, Johnson, Du Bois, Anderson and many others in the room that first night more than paid off. In the decade after the dinner, the writers who were associated with the Renaissance published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. That body of work transformed a community as well as the landscape of American literature.
“Star Struck”
The literary world is abuzz over it. When I read it, I thought, oh, my, this is Renata Adler-Pauline Kael-level scorching (in a 1980 New York Review of Books essay) – it’s in that class of surgical disembowelment. Manov even (coincidentally?) invokes Adler, though in a kind of infrared inversion of assignment, in relation not to herself but Oyler.
But Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.
(“The Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot” is a lollipop of snide criticism I could suck on all day.)
More to the point of the present book and its predecessor,
Much like Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, with its Women’s March plot, long meditations on social media trolls, and thirty-nine-page parody of Jenny Offill, No Judgment is already dated, even before its release.
A good deal of Manov’s essay is devoted to what she presents – apparently from research of her own – as the shallowness, one might say the pretense, of Oyler’s research, reading, and thinking.
Since Montaigne, the best essays have been, as the French word suggests, trials, attempts. They entail the writer struggling toward greater knowledge through sustained research, painful introspection, and provocative inquiry. And they allow the reader to walk away with a freeing sense of the possibilities of life, the sensation that one can think more deeply and more bravely—that there is more outside one’s experience than one has thought, and perhaps more within it, too. These essays, by contrast, are incapable of—indeed, hostile to the notion of—ushering readers, or Oyler herself, into new territory, or new thought. The pieces in No Judgment are airless, involuted exercises in typing by a person who’s spent too much time thinking about petty infighting and too little time thinking about anything else.
“Airless, involuted exercises in typing”: we have from Manov some historic pith for the annals of critical excoriation.
How to receive all this?
I don’t know Oyler’s work so I’m uninvested. Though the criticisms read to me as very well grounded, to anyone uninvested, such an aggressive, contemptuous take down can be seen as souring the milk of human kindness in a hungry world beset by ills far greater than a bad book. In contrast, in the case, decades ago, of Adler (a spiritual cousin only), I knew Kael’s work all too well, felt deeply invested in the world of film criticism she ruled with a thousand acolytes, and received every dead center critical arrow into the joints of her style and the ligaments of her ideas with a righteous and unholy fist pump.
In either case, these are personal reactions, shaped by myriad subjective contingencies of a self in time and place. Do such contretemps signify anything greater than the furies of their dissent?
That’s what I will consider in my “A Closer Look” essay this coming Monday: “Agonies of the Agon.”
SUBSTACK RECOMMENDATIONS
Among my most rewarding reading and learning experiences on Substack these first few months of 2024 have come these from
at Personal Canon Formation. Professor of English and medievalist, John is currently leading his readers through a deeply edifying read of Lord of the Rings. Earlier this year, it was a five-week read along of the far too little read Beowulf, in a translation from the Old English by Seamus Heaney. John is especially good at elucidating how such epics reveal our cultural origins to us.is a writer who can really soar, in prose that offers the brilliant surfaces and fine-edged perceptions of a jewel. He first caught my attention at 100 Stories through installments in two different series. One, Finnestere, drew my interest because it recounts what turned out to be Adam’s moving experience of walking Spain’s historic Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage trail a thousand years old. Since the Camino figures in my novel in progress about the 1519-1522 Magellan expedition that circumnavigated the earth, I was eager to read of someone who has made the walk in present day. I quote, though, instead, from a series I discovered at the same time, a memoir of Adam’s parents and family life.What are the implications of this narrative turn? Most obviously, it indicates that Beowulf cannot defeat the dragon alone, that heroic action and indomitable will can carry him only so far. More subtly, however, I think that it recalls Beowulf’s speech about the sorrow of Hrethel, which we discussed last week. That speech suggests that despair in response to a future that appears bleak is a mistake—because we do not know the future. Hrethel saw no hope for his people after the death of his eldest son, but he did not foresee the meteoric rise of Beowulf. The remainder of the poem after Beowulf’s death once again suggests that the future looks bleak, but we do not know the future.
The stakes were terrifying for him. My father wasn’t a hobbyist. He wasn’t a dabbler. He wasn’t toying with the pursuit of wealth; his identity was caught up in it. All expressions of elegance, of manners, of breeding, of class – considerations of the deepest importance for him – could only be legitimized by wealth. Wealth was the red blood that would run through his wax figure and make him real. In the absence of that lifeblood, all style, grace and intellect were a poor man’s theater – even if you were actually elegant, well-bred and classy which my father unquestionably was – both by breeding and instinct.
You can play a king and you can mount the stage in costume ermine and wave your broom-handle scepter and dismiss your fool and divide your kingdom among the players, but theater is theater if you don’t believe in it. No matter how the crowd weeps and roars, if you go home to an actor’s tiny apartment with a dollhouse kitchenette it’s all so much sound and fury. And you cannot fool the Self who makes the rules, our one true and terrible Lord, and you cannot touch your weightless finger to His scales.
Your loved ones can’t either. The stakes were terrifying for all of us.
That’s some fine writing.
Faire un essai with you all on Monday, when I put some things in focus.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
Inclusion of that essay and those two paragraphs in particular borders on moving for me. Hitting "Publish" on that essay was a Rubicon. Thank you for calling the work out. It honors me as a writer, but honors my father as well. 🙏
Interesting stuff. Enjoyed your info and insights on the Oyler, which I recently started perusing and had very ambivalent reactions to...