“Happy Halloween,” said the young Norwegian museum attendant in crisp, British-accented English. She sounded solemn, like she was welcoming me to a funeral. I was an American in the Pomor Museum in Vardø, Norway, and, judging from the emptiness of the museum, the streets, and my hotel, I was the town’s sole tourist.
Any wicca wannabe with an Urban Outfitters smudge stick and a Hot Topic “Resting Witch Face” t-shirt can find their way to Salem for Halloween. Salem is just one of the four Massachusetts townships that held witch trials during America’s 17th century witch panic, but it’s the best known and more or less synonymous with the 19 people hanged for witchcraft between 1692 and 1693. Three centuries later, Salem has turned persecution into profit; the greater Salem area sports almost 20 witch-related shops, from wiccan apothecaries to witch-infused glass-blowing, t-shirts, and ice cream. Witchery is a business, and money is a charm. Welcome to the dark side, will that be debit or credit?
There is little help available to girls and women, after all, within a community that prizes not drawing attention to oneself and so by its very nature upholds sexually threatening vendettas. This twisting and turning of language, is also, then, for middle sister, a way of inuring herself against a reality wherein communal inaction and abuses of power recurrently intersect. It is an impulsive, learned reconsideration of the world around her, so that while her daily life might be matter-of-factly measured by her proximity to peril, upon sighting girls dancing in the street she can observe them as “beribboned, besilked, [and] bevelveted.”
Moving between poetry and prose, dialogue and history, Robin Robertson’s “The Long Take” is a propulsive verbal tour de force. The book, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, is also a hymn to destruction that exposes our country’s betrayal of the American Dream in the years following World War II. If you think T.S. Eliot’s “unreal city” was full of the misbegotten and woe, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Still, Oppenheimer’s deepest secrets would remain as hidden as anyone else’s, if Hall relied only on biographical data. What shocks us into a new understanding of this complex and secretive soul are his psychological ties to the invented main characters. Hall uses them to perform seven thought experiments, as if Oppenheimer, like a subatomic particle, could be revealed only indirectly, through his collisions with others. As if, as one character reports him saying, “any given entity can only be defined as a function of its observer.” The resulting quantum portrait feels both true and dazzlingly unfamiliar.
The only time I’ve ridden on a Greyhound bus was in 2012, en route to New Hampshire to watch the primaries unfold. The trip itself was uneventful, and in electoral time it feels as if it happened eons ago. I may believe you if you tell me that the Republicans’ choice of Mitt Romney as their presidential nominee occurred in an age before air travel. I may even agree to take buses exclusively from now on if it means there will be a saner politics waiting at the end of the road.
Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success is a novel centered on Americans’ nostalgia for the Greyhound bus. But it’s also a novel that skewers us for that nostalgia. Long-haul bus rides may seem the perfect vehicle for post-partisan populism. The Greyhound, we may imagine, combines beatnik fantasies with Middle America geography as it transports those too poor to buy a plane ticket and too down on their luck to be politically correct. But anyone who gets aboard the Greyhound to live out a sociological experiment rather than to simply secure an affordable ride from point A to point B is probably carrying some baggage of his own. This is certainly the case with Barry Cohen in Lake Success.
There are no cosy places to settle in the short stories of Lucia Berlin. The long-overlooked American writer walks us coolly into the unthinkable. “There are things people just don’t talk about,” says the teenage narrator in Dust to Dust, having witnessed the bloody death of her friend in a motorcycle race. “I don’t mean the hard things, like love, but the awkward ones, like how funerals are fun sometimes or how it’s exciting to watch buildings burning.”