Franzen sat on his kitchen counter, drinking an espresso he had made, his feet up on the island. The sun came through the slat blinds on the windows, so that they cast what looked like prison bars across his body. Above him hung a piece of artwork made of wires twisted to look like a surveillance camera that he and Chetkovich bought in Utica, N.Y., at the art studio of a friend of a friend. Surveillance is a theme of “Purity,” but a kitchen-mounted camera is an actual plot point of “The Corrections.”
He wasn’t angry that the show appeared to be canceled, he said. He had been paid for the work. He did the work. He did a good job. (Later, on the phone with me, Scott Rudin, who optioned “Purity” and set it up at Showtime, used the word “excellent” to describe the scripts.) And Franzen did it with no attachment to the outcome. “I’m a ’70s guy,” he said. “I’m a process guy.”
It’s for the best. Really. Really. Now he could fully turn toward the projects that had been whispering in his ear during all these months of writers’ rooms and outlining and script writing. He wanted to write a story for National Geographic about seabirds. Their population is down two-thirds since 1950. “Seabirds are in great trouble,” he said. “Seabirds are amazing, and they are in great trouble.”
Photography on social media, if you know where to look, can astonish with its hypnotic stream of inexact repetitions. We think we are moving through the world, while the whole time the world is pulling us along, telling us where to walk, where to stop, where to take a photo. Why have so many people looked straight down a stairwell at the New Museum and taken a photograph there? Each person who does it feels a frisson of originality but unknowingly reveals something that was latent in the stairwell all along.
The resultant images are rarely individually “great.” What they offer, as a sequence or as a grid, is a fleeting form of poetry: the poignant commonality of our eyes. The world individually mesmerizes us toward reiteration. Our coincident gazes overlay the same sites over and over and over again, as though we were caught up in a slow-motion religious fervor. Through the affordances of terrain, we are alleviated of the burden of originality without always being aware that we are being unoriginal. Take a photo here, the site whispers. It’s yours, but not yours alone.
We tend to think of ‘the city’ as expansive, even endless; a vast nervure of connectivity; a network rendered by myriad fragments and countless pathways. But Chombart de Lauwe, an urban sociologist, was trying to illustrate the narrowness of our real lived urban experience. Because when we say that we live in Paris or London or New York, we actually mean to say that we live somewhere in Paris or London or New York—in some (not-so) arbitrary collection of spaces, environments and zones. We live, that is to say we experience, a tiny specialised version of the city, itself inflected by concomitant associations and memories. His diagram tries to illustrate the city as it’s lived—not in expanse but in peculiarity.
To look at one’s own movements from a great distance, decontextualised, seems always to illustrate how one is enmeshed in the same coercive patterns as everybody else.
Trauma is a lot of things. It defies analogy. But it isn’t an excuse. We don’t write off the things we destroy by saying, “Once upon a time I suffered”. We heal. We take the shards out of ourselves and take responsibility for the things we’ve cut. We put things back together.
We come off the ledge.
We stop going onto ledges.
Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act. The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice murmuring in your ear. No wonder Victorian parents used to read out loud to the whole family (a chapter of Dickens a night by the precious light of the single candle); there’s nothing lonely about laughing or crying together—or shrinking back in horror. Even if solitary, the reader’s inner dialogue with the writer—questioning, concurring, wondering, objecting, pitying—fills the empty room under the lamplight with silent discourse and the expression of emotion.
“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is a disarming title for an essay collection by Alexander Chee, given that he’s fresh from the success of a novel that on the face of it was anything but autobiographical. That book, the justly celebrated epic “The Queen of the Night” (2016), was an operatic drama that followed a fictional 19th-century soprano as she rises to fame in Paris and navigates Second Empire intrigue on a scale to make Victor Hugo proud. What could be farther from Chee’s own life? But one of the things you learn in this collection is that, for most writers, “novels are accidents at their start,” an answer to questions the author never knew to ask. In Chee’s telling, the writer’s life always lurks just beyond the page, and not only in the way that Gustave Flaubert was Madame Bovary or Henry James the prepubescent heroine of “What Maisie Knew.” In a revealing essay called “Girl,” Chee recalls his first time in drag, on Halloween in the Castro in 1990. The cosmetic transformation allowed him to collapse his identities as a gay man, a Korean-American and a New England transplant into a pleasing totality: “This beauty I find when I put on drag, then: It is made up of these talismans of power, a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures, an act I’ve engaged in my whole life, here on the fulcrum I make of my face.”
Tisdale does not write to allay anxieties but to acknowledge them, and she brings death so close, in such detail and with such frankness, that something unusual happens, something that feels a bit taboo. She invites not just awe or dread — but our curiosity. And why not? We are, after all, just “future corpses pretending we don’t know.”