Just inside Shelley Jackson’s Brooklyn brownstone, a pastel-splotched creature several feet tall held out its plastic paws in an attitude of supplication, or welcome. Its huge eyes had a lysergic taint, like those of a feverish child. Jackson, the author of six physical books and three works of hypertext, as well as the progenitor of many hard-to-categorize literary experiments, is a self-declared lover of—and advocate for—the monstrous. Among the other treasures jostling for space inside her living room were a taxidermied two-headed chick, a tchotchke of conjoined twins, an ear trumpet from the eighteen-hundreds, and a ventriloquist’s dummy. “I like things that give me the creeps,” she told me. “That’s really where I start writing anything—when I have a reaction that is uneasy, squeamish in some way.” Jackson had found the giant pastel creature, a kangaroo, on the side of a street. She and I stood and considered it for a moment. “I think she’s a diaper holder,” Jackson said, lifting a grubby-looking plastic apron to reveal a cavity stuffed with plastic bags, which she uses on walks with her three-legged dog, Bailey.
For Jackson, inanimate objects—like the bizarre marsupial—bear the suggestion of sentience and the strange promise of communication. She feels, she told me, as if “they’re kind of trying to tell you something, but, because they can’t fully articulate it, it stays suspended there.” Her new book, “Riddance; or, The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children,” is a ravishing novel charged with the idea of the incommunicable. It’s set in a boarding school for stammerers, where a megalomaniacal headmistress named Sybil Joines trains her pupils to speak with the dead—an act of necromancy that requires, Joines claims, a complete erasure of self. The book takes place in 1919, when a flourishing of spiritualism coincided with the arrival of new communications technology. As Jackson has pointed out before, Thomas Edison believed that he might be able to get the dead on the phone.
The seven-story Don Quijote megastore in the Shibuya district of Tokyo is open 24 hours a day, but it’s hard to say when it’s rush hour, because there’s always a rush. A labyrinth of aisles leads to one soaring, psychedelic display after another presided over by cartoon mascots, including the mascot of Don Quijote itself: an enthusiastic blue penguin named Donpen who points shoppers toward toy sushi kits and face masks soaked with snail excretions and rainbow gel pens and split-toe socks. The candy section is vast, with cookies and cakes printed with Gudetama, Sanrio’s lazy egg character, and shiny packages of dehydrated, caramelized squid. It’s one of the few places where an extensive array of Japan’s many Kit Kat flavors are for sale. Though the chocolate bar is sold in more than 100 countries, including China, Thailand, India, Russia and the United States, it’s one of Japan’s best-selling chocolate brands and has achieved such a distinctive place in the market that several people in Tokyo told me they thought the Kit Kat was a Japanese product.
A Kit Kat is composed of three layers of wafer and two layers of flavored cream filling, enrobed in chocolate to look like a long, skinny ingot. It connects to identical skinny ingots, and you can snap these apart from one another intact, using very little pressure, making practically no crumbs. The Kit Kat is a sweet, cheap, delicately crunchy artifact of the 20th century’s industrial chocolate conglomerate. In the United States, where it has been distributed by Hershey since 1970, it is drugstore candy. In Japan, you might find the Kit Kat at a drugstore, but here the Kit Kat has levels. The Kit Kat has range. It’s found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores, a single ingot to a silky peel-away sheath, stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse. The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper. Flavors change constantly, with many appearing as limited-edition runs. They can be esoteric and so carefully tailored for a Japanese audience as to seem untranslatable to a global mass market, but the bars have fans all over the world. Kit Kat fixers buy up boxes and carry them back to devotees in the United States and Europe. All this helps the Kit Kat maintain a singular, cultlike status.
Some months ago—actually, it’s been over a year now—I moved from one part of Manhattan to another. The distance wasn’t tremendous, less than a mile, but the psychological shift was sizable; I was vacating a way station that had passed as a home, for a room of my own. Even though I’d lived in the apartment I was leaving for over twenty years, I’d shared it with a number of friends and too many ideas about what constituted generosity and receptivity. If you had a roof over your head, then it behooved you to share it with others, no matter the financial and spiritual cost—giving might make someone else, anyone else, better. That was my mother’s ethos; she raised me and my five siblings in Brooklyn.
But, in the last years leading up to leaving my first Manhattan apartment, I’d felt crowded in it, or, more accurately, crowded out of it. Even though I ostensibly lived alone surrounded by piles—books, records, photographs, magazines—my body had been afflicted by emotional piles for a long time before I left all that junk behind. You see, everything that I’d learned about hospitality from my mother had caved in on my soul; I could no longer sustain the platonic soup kitchen that I’d been raised to stock and preside over. I could no longer maintain my mother’s lessons of the heart. By the end of my stay in my first New York place, all those bodies that had crossed my threshold had impressed themselves on me. Those former friends were now a part of my body, and I could no longer bear their weight, or the weight of any of it.
We will soon be able to identify the likelihood that a newborn baby – perhaps your baby – will be susceptible to depression, anxiety and schizophrenia throughout his or her life? We will know the probability that our newborns will have difficulty learning to read, become obese and be prone to Alzheimer’s disease in their later years. Good news?
Robert Plomin thinks so. In Blueprint, he argues such insights should make us more tolerant of those who might be overweight or prone to depression; they will enable us to support our children better and plan for our own life’s course. He is equally pleased with the discovery that much of what we think of as nurture – the caring, supporting environments we build for our children – has, on average, no impact on our loved ones’ development. Plomin explains that nurture in the home is as irrelevant as the school environment for influencing whether we become kind or gritty, happy or sad, wealthy or poor, and that this leads to greater equality of opportunity than would have otherwise been the case. The only thing that matters for our personalities and much else is the DNA that we inherit and those chance events of our lives beyond anyone’s control.