I know that writing, for the most part, writing essays and literary fiction, publishing mostly in online journals, running feminist blogs, is no cash cow. I know that people who appear to be making a lot of money from their art alone for long periods of time are often people who received an inheritance, or married into wealth, or are quietly running side hustles. Or worse. It seems that The Institution of Literature, or rather, The Institution of Publishing, still runs on some archaic machine built by old white men, and we Third World Others are still puzzling out how to retrofit ourselves and our stories to fit this model.
My part, the part I’m most ashamed of, is perpetrating the myth that we are all each other’s competition. I am constantly fighting the urge to isolate, to hide and work on my own, to hoard information, access to editors or journals. This secrecy leaves other writers to lean on rumor because so many people are elusive, or obscure the truth. This has left our community of dreamers, particularly women and writers of color, ripe for exploitation.
What do we mean, then, when we say we care about privacy? We might mean that we want the right to be left alone, beyond the gaze of other people—to have our private lives protected from public encroachment. Maybe we want to protect a more internal realm of intimacy or secrecy, where we share only what we choose with only those we have chosen. In politics, the value of privacy is associated with the liberal tradition, from Locke to John Stuart Mill, whose ideas are invoked to defend the separation of the public sphere from the private, in which one is free to make one’s own choices without interference. What matters about the private, in this view, is that the choices we make in that realm are our own—they belong to us. If the state fails to protect our capacity to make those choices—if its surveillance, policing, and monitoring of citizens goes too far—it ceases to be a liberal state and becomes something more sinister.
Many of these ideas about privacy are drawn from a canon that was invented largely by liberal educators and historians of ideas during the Cold War as part of efforts to undercut the expanding security state. Conventional histories of privacy tend to associate it with this tradition, and they present a paradox. Some tell the story of privacy’s triumph. Over the course of the twentieth century, citizens wrested their privacy from powerful, bureaucratic states. In the United States, it became a constitutional right in 1965. Thanks to the reproductive and civil rights struggles, it came to be seen as a human right, owed to all. Others tell the story of privacy as one of decline. Privacy is here a thing of the past, caught between the rise of the national security state and Facebook’s data-gathering regime, which monetizes our personal information and turns our intimate conversations into targeted advertising. These two contradictory histories point to our puzzling situation. Most of us worry, some of the time, about privacy. But we also willingly give it up. What does it mean to worry so much about something of which we seem to want so little?
This is the house that Kathryn Maris built: it has “only an attic and a basement”. What does it signify to have a bodiless house? The title is typical of this crisp, funny, lightly disturbing collection. Maris is a mistress of fragile structures. A wit informs her sometimes painful, mannered poems – their affectation a coping strategy. What Women Want is formed by layered futility: the woman’s superstitious initiative rendered null by the husband’s incurious loftiness. It plays with the pointlessness of its subject until the poem becomes the point. The charm of the book is that it is the poems themselves that offer stability. It is they that bridge – where a bridge is possible – the gap between the sexes (“The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin/ the woman in the attic read stories with heroines”). This is the gap that keeps threatening to become a void.
The Seas, Samantha Hunt’s first novel, is as disturbing as it is beautiful. It is a literary equivalent of the Rubin vase, the ambiguous image, multistable perception that shocks us back and forth between two possible realities of a story all dependent upon the gaze of the reader at particular moments. Our narrator is either a real mermaid or a schizo-affective depressive circling down the drain of a heavy mental breakdown. We think we have to choose between these sides of perception but we don’t. The richest understanding of The Seas comes as we see that these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. We can witness the vase and the face.
This busy, squirming, roomy novel has a tidy ending, one that too neatly dispenses prizes and gives Barry a stab at redemption. We come to see that he is not so different from his autistic son. We come to see, in fact, that in some ways the reality of being on the autism spectrum, with all its challenges and rewards, is this novel’s great clandestine subject. It can be hard to get a handle on people with autism. It’s even harder to get a handle on Barry. He’s hard; he’s soft. He’s gregarious; he’s a loner. He’s a wolf of Wall Street; he’s a high plains drifter. He wants to fleece people; he wants to save them. His mind is like a bed that gets made, and then remade, on every other page. Is Barry hollow or is he holy? Shteyngart’s prose holds you in a way that Barry himself never does.
There's a lot going on in Ohio — a sprawling cast of main and supporting characters, and a series of interconnected events that doesn't come together until the book's shocking conclusion. But Markley handles it beautifully; the novel is intricately constructed, with gorgeous, fiery writing that pulls the reader in and never lets go. It's obvious that Markley cares deeply about his characters, even the unsympathetic ones — he treats them with respect, never writing condescendingly about these people whose lives have been battered and bruised by circumstances they don't quite understand.
Tradition still has a reckoning in store for those who turn away from it, and Pamuk’s novel is masterful in drawing out the inherent tension of a society in the midst of an identity crisis related to its own history and values.
We need more thinkers as wise as Appiah and Fukuyama digging their fingers into the soil of our predicament. And we need more readers reading what they harvest.