It was October 2016. Hurricane Matthew had just rolled out to sea, Samsung phones were catching fire, Hillary Clinton was up by double digits in the national polls and the unthinkable was still unthinkable. Shailagh Murray had spent two terms in the White House helping to lead the administration’s communications strategy and it appeared to have taken its toll. With Obama just a few months away from leaving office, journalists wanted exit interviews; they wanted to be first, biggest, loudest. She was sick of the egos, the same old questions.
The letters, she said, served as a respite from all that, and she offered to show some to me. She chose a navy blue binder, pulled it off the shelf, and opened it, fanning through page after page of letters, some handwritten in cursive on personal letterheads, others block printed on notebook paper and decorated with stickers; there were business letters, emails, faxes and random photographs of families, soldiers and pets. “You know, it’s this dialogue he’s been having with the country that people aren’t even aware of,” she said, referring to Obama’s eight-year habit of corresponding with the American public. “Collectively, you get this kind of American tableau.”
Obama had committed to reading 10 letters a day when he first took office, becoming the first president to put such a deliberate focus on constituent correspondence. Late each afternoon, around five o’clock, a selection would be sent up from the post room to the Oval Office. The “10 LADs”, as they came to be known – for “10 letters a day” – would circulate among senior staff and the stack would be added to the back of the briefing book the president took with him to the residence each night. He answered some by hand and wrote notes on others for the writing team to answer, and on some he scribbled “save”.
I’m not arguing that neurotypical writers should never create autistic characters (that would lead to even greater invisibility than we have at the moment). I’m suggesting that it’s time those characters reflected reality, based on careful research, and contact with real, autistic people. In the course of that research, writers might come across the occasional Don or Christopher, but they’ll also find far more diversity than they ever imagined; people brimming with creativity, empathy, wisdom and good humour; and people facing physical, sensory and intellectual challenges far greater than fiction has portrayed. The psychiatric literature is playing catch-up here, to the extent that it’s not a useful source of reference.
Readers, too, need to be more critical when faced with stereotyped autistic characters – as they now are with a range of other minority representations. When encountering characters from vulnerable or minority groups, we must all learn to ask who is doing the writing, why, and on what authority. It is time to grow tired of ‘folklore autism’ being used to jazz up a tired book, and to seek out the freshness and life of authentic accounts, written by autistics.
“Adorkable.” “Manspreading.” “Frenemies.” Coining new words to fit modern needs is a practice that goes back to the beginning of language; Shakespeare, for example, is said to have introduced somewhere from 1700 to 3200 new words. Peter Hill may not be Shakespeare, but he has cataloged around 3000 new words in the indigenous Lakota language. Hill, a Philadelphian who married into Lakota fluency, runs a language immersion school at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Over the past six years, Hill and other Lakota speakers have hashed original phrases to encompass newly English concepts such as “smartphone,” “methamphetamines” and “same-sex marriage.”
For Hill, the effort to craft neologisms is key to revitalizing a marginalized language — a tongue the federal government took pains to suppress. Today, the words developed by Hill and other native speakers provide a look into how languages evolve and shape themselves. At Hill’s immersion school, everyone — from teachers to students — tries to speak Lakota 100 percent of the time. Children ages 1 to 5 run through classrooms, and play in areas filled with Lakota picture books. Hill opened the school in 2012 via online fundraising with the mission of reviving the Lakota language, which had only about 2000 speakers left as of 2016, according to the nonprofit Lakota Language Consortium.
Relationships between writers never work out. We know this. They fall apart, dramatically, tragically—Plath and Hughes, for example—but even if they don’t, they’re indelibly marked with misery: jealousy, obsession, resentment. Somebody usually writes a memoir and their partner never forgives them. Somebody wins all the prizes. Of Joan Didion and John Dunne, a literary couple who really did appear to love each other, biographer Tracy Daugherty wrote, “Though neither could imagine not being married to a writer, though they counted on each other for editorial and professional support, an edginess grew between them—not competition so much as sadness that things could not always be equal.” Things cannot always be equal. It is not surprising that literary relationships so frequently fail.
Just over 10 pages from the start, in a second beginning, Wash tells us he was a “freeman” by the age of 18, and it is clear that Edugyan is coming at her subject sideways, not with gritty realism but with fabular edges, and as much concerned with the nature of freedom as with slavery, both for her white characters and black.
This is, in fact, less a book about the effects of slavery and more about the burden, responsibility and the guilt of personal freedom in a time of slavery.
Critics, like exterminators and exorcists, are in the business of bringing what is hidden into the light. To make the implicit explicit, as Samuel Johnson had it, to root out elusive associations, half-invisible effects — to identify how a text works, and why.
On good days, that is. “We That Are Young,” a hectic new novel by Preti Taneja, a retelling of King Lear set in present-day India, was published last year in Britain to much acclaim. It’s a doorstop, full of sound and fury, more nihilistic than Shakespeare’s original, with all the blunt and dismal machinations of a soap opera.
Like the best speculative fiction, Severance also aims for more than chills and thrills: without being preachy, Ling Ma's story reflects on the nature of human identity and how much the repetitive tasks we perform come to define who we are. That's why the images of the fevered in this novel are not only terrifying, but poignant: the fevered mother who keeps setting dinner dishes down amidst rotting food; the fevered taxi cab driver who'll keep on driving until gas runs out; and even un-fevered Candace herself, who has such trouble breaking away from the daily round of a job she doesn't even like.