A little more than a decade ago, I wrote an article for The New Yorker about American reading habits, which a number of studies then indicated might be in decline. I was worried about what a shift to “secondary orality”—a sociological term for a post-literate culture—might do to America’s politics. “In a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with,” I wrote. I suspected that people might become less inclined to do fact checking on their own; “forced to choose between conflicting stories,” they would “fall back on hunches.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think that I got this part wrong. But I’ve often wondered whether I was right about the underlying trend, too. Were Americans in fact reading less back then? And are they reading even less today? Whenever I happen across a news article on the topic, I wonder if I’m about to find out whether I was Cassandra or Chicken Little.
What Sennett does do — probably better than any other scholar could — is pull urban planners out of the daily grind of pragmatism. He offers the sort of intellectual provocation that can make inquisitive planners question just about everything they do and everything they think about cities. That’s not to say that Building and Dwelling will cause anyone to abandon their principles. Rather, it presents a time-out for the reassessment of principles and a reminder that city-building is, to invoke another duality, as much an intellectual endeavor as it is a pragmatic one.
Throughout the essays, McNally’s self-deprecating humor and openness about stumbling blocks, including depression and addictive behaviors, are a comfort to fellow sufferers who continue to seek methods of reinvention for work that failed to launch. There is a balm in knowing that other writers persist, despite depression, despite everything, which is perhaps why many writers congregate on social media in the first place. In a culture that values instant success, this is a book to hand to a writer who is planning to continue writing for the long term.
In this and his other books, Mathews appreciates frauds and forgers, those who recognize the disconnect between who people are and who they pretend to be. In one of the most memorable stories-within-a-story in this book, a Polish refugee named Malachi develops his own Oulipian game for selling refurbished Ford automobiles while presenting a televised dramatic serial that relies on a “theory of syntactic fracture as a new way of getting viewers involved in a plot.” The trick, he decides, is to create “writing that cuddles up to the so-called truth but never pretends to be it” — a fine and memorable expression of the magic that happens when readers read good fiction, especially the good fiction of Mathews. Then, in this small novel’s final pages, just when the various convolutions and tale-tellings seem too various and contradictory to resolve, the fractured identities come together in a set of small, miraculous and carefully contrived revelations that never feel contrived at all.
Edgerton’s penultimate chapter, A Nation Lost, is about Thatcher’s Britain. She inherited, “uniquely in British history”, a nation self-sufficient in food and – thanks to North Sea oil – about to become a net energy exporter. She left behind a net importer of manufactures whose assets had been flogged, a riven people increasingly captive to European federalism – anything but the socially conservative Britain with a strong manufacturing base in private hands that she seems to have wanted. Thatcher planted the “bullshit Britain” that was harvested by Blair, a polity simultaneously capable of and vulnerable to centrifugal separatisms even as it encourages “fantasies of transformative revival and distinctiveness”.
It is a measure of declinism’s grip that, for Brexiters, leaving Europe is the only way to escape it, while for remainers the same course of action will make it worse. Edgerton prides himself on being immune – which makes his final bilious pages all the more disconcerting. “Only satirists, not historians, could do justice to this turn of events” is his last line, referring to the spectacles of Blair working for dictators and a state funeral for Thatcher. Hearken to the sound of an intellectual throwing in the towel.