To understand the 1938 broadcast from the perspective of our new fake-news moment, we have to understand the play’s true meaning. The journey of those murderous Martians in the US began well before that Halloween eve, with the popular pseudoscientific understanding of radio itself. Reproduced sounds have always had an uncanny presence in US life. The reaction of Scientific American to the invention of the phonograph was to exclaim that it would allow the living to hear the voices of the dead. Sure enough, some people began to record their voices before they died so that they could speak at their own funerals, and a Washington Post column wondered if radio itself could pick up vibrations from the dead, according to the sound historian Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past (2003). One of the earliest understandings of radio, writes the cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce in Haunted Media (2000), was that aliens might already be using it to attempt contact with humans.
The moment that print ceded position to radio might be 1936, when US incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt secured reelection despite a fierce shellacking in print: 80 percent of the press rejected the President only to watch him win in an almost vindictive landslide. ‘Election day 1936 was judgment day for America’s daily press,’ wrote the Christian Century after his victory in a letter to newspaper publishers. ‘When people voted, they voted against you.’
There is much to say when death encroaches. But when you only have a moment, you just say the truth.
On Jeopardy!, everyone — from host Alex Trebek to the studio audience to the show’s fans — understands that a lifetime of vacuuming up arcana into your head has a tendency to create an arch strangeness in a person, and so the show never judges or mocks its contestants for their eccentricities, instead offering them the opportunity to show the world why they’re worth celebrating. In fact, the only contestant I can ever recall not rooting for is Brad Rutter, the smarmily handsome Jeopardy! champion who, after winning over a million dollars on the show, moved to Los Angeles to become an actor in what feels like a complete betrayal of the show’s ideals.
Some critics and readers perceived the narrator’s decision to turn away from the world as a critique of the cheap self-care platitudes that have long dominated our media and, in the last decade, social media. But the mystery at the heart of this novel is more basic than that — is, in fact, Camus’s eternal question, why not suicide? as filtered through the lens of an artist reflecting on her practice. “The project,” the narrator explains about her decision to sleep, “was beyond issues of ‘identity’ and ‘society’ and ‘institutions.’” What she wants, she tells us later during a visit to see still life paintings at the Met, is “to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit […] Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they’d crushed those withered grapes between their fingers?” My Year is not so much a transgressive modern parable as it is a mordant cry of creative despair.
Above all, reading Moshfegh’s novel made me wonder what a literature that focused on our place in the world, rather than on our desire to flee from it, might look like. What would it mean for a writer of literary fiction in 2018 to venture beyond the self and existentialism, to find out what lies on the other side?
In the September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine, the Canadian poet and classicist A. E. Stallings reflected on living in Athens, where she moved with her husband in 1999. “The one thing people will ask you here,” she writes, “if you are, as I am, clearly a foreigner, is: Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go back?” Nearly 20 years after her move, Stallings continues to live and work in Greece, where the immediacy of contemporary Athens collides with ongoing meditations on motherhood, mythology, politics, and poetry. In Like, her latest collection from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Stallings presents a diverse quiver of poems — arranged in alphabetical order — polished and sharpened by her typically innovative use of traditional verse forms, poised vocabulary, and a playful dexterous teasing-out of simile and metaphor.
While the alphabetical arrangement of the collection creates a kind of echoing, it also reveals Stallings’s distinct threads and themes. Prominent among them is her interest in writing about all-encompassing, everyday parenting. Recalling what the inside-cover calls Stallings’s “archaeology of the domestic,” which grows and changes with her children, as in “Ultrasound,” from Hapax (2006), these poems continue in the spirit of her previous collection Olives (2012), written “smack in the middle of life, marriage and kids,” as she says to one interviewer, “and [which] I hope is full in the way that my life is currently very full.”
The Canadian writer and actor Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is a fine person to write a book about hangovers, not only because he’s a tenacious researcher but also because he’s willing to get thoroughly torn up on a consistent basis in colorful circumstances. He gorges on single-malt Scotch in Las Vegas, swallows a dozen pints of ale in a series of English pubs, binges on tequila and collapses beside a cactus near the Mexican border, wears lederhosen to a German beer festival and so forth. Reading his chronicle, “Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure,” has an effect not unlike recovering from food poisoning or slipping into a warm house on a frigid night. You turn the pages thinking, “Thank God I don’t feel like that right now.” Or maybe, “Thank God I’m not this guy.”
And maybe that’s what all of this is about. Writing as the imagining of those people we do and do not know, of what was and what can never be. People we care about even though time and distance and death leave its mark. People in their houses writing and on the streets protesting and in their swimming pools swimming, alive and living in our fictions. This is the work of literature as Chee gives it to us: rendering people, the world, and ourselves as reflected in our particular ideas and experiences.