There are moments when being a lover of literary minimalism can feel like being part of a secret society. A particularly obscure secret society, and one that’s closer in tone to a bizarre eating club than, say, a revolutionary faction looking to burn it all down. Nonetheless, the novella (or short novel; I’ll be using the two interchangeably) can feel like an overlooked form: concise enough to be an exercise in restraint, and yet too short to be deemed commercially viable.
You know the philosophical problem, the ship of Theseus? The one where a famous ship is replaced, board by board, until it’s a matter of metaphysical debate as to whether or not it’s the same ship? Late night is the ship of Theseus: The hosts have changed, the writers have changed, and for the most part, it’s neither produced nor viewed late at night anymore. The ship has the same name, but it’s dry-docked and being used as a novelty restaurant. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I, for one, love restaurants shaped like dumb shit.
One significant change in the history of late night that has been on my mind this week is pretaping. Late-night hosts took a much-deserved vacation during the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, and they’ve been handling it differently than their forebears would have. Busy Philipps and Stephen Colbert pretaped shows before and after Thanksgiving, respectively. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers ran reruns. Both options would have been unthinkable a decade or so ago.
“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad” I read, “and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.”
I remember looking up when I read these words to see if anyone was watching me. I was alone, sitting in the English Resource Center, which was a small library controlled by the English teachers in my high school. On most days, there were a handful of students hanging around — all members of an unofficial clique of mostly freshmen and sophomores who liked reading and discussing books. This is where the literary magazine Savannah was cut and pasted together, literally, twice a year, and where six of us hatched a school newspaper in our sophomore year. Kids came to the ERC to read, hang out, think revolutionary thoughts, and practice our best avant-garde poses. There were several second-hand couches and chairs, which together formed a sad little lounge area; an adjoining office with a mimeograph machine, typewriters and filing cabinets; and of course, the books, which were displayed in several creaky free-standing bookshelves that leaned forward from the white-painted cement-block walls, threatening to collapse into the center of the room from the sheer weight of intellectual curiosity. The shelves were jammed with novels and literary nonfiction — some philosophy and history too — and the air in the ERC always carried a faint whiff of paperback, that mouldering acidic smell that any collector of books will immediately recognize. I had thumbed through nearly all of these books, discovering for the first time names like Hemingway, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard.
For our entire lives, we advance and retreat, advance and recede across the long plane of our own prismatic geographies. These geographies, multivalent and shifting, bear all of our paths, bear witness to all of our paths, and bear the load of the paths. Some of the routes we take become well-worn because we ferry ourselves across them again and again. Some paths we take only once and perhaps we presume their imprint falls then rests in a gathered heap somewhere in the recesses of our periphery. But I think each of the paths finds a way to engrave itself upon us, embed itself in us, become part of our subcutaneous logic. Sometimes the logic is a fixed engraving onto a firm, certain surface. Sometimes it is onto a mutable object. But always, in our own silos, our own logic becomes calcified, firm, ardent. Every single time we advance, there is a new imprint made, until there is a catalogue of imprints, countless intersection and grids, layered paths that form across the planes of logic, supposition, and summary we inhabit. Even if we take the same course 1,000 times, it’s never exactly the same, there’s always a tiny bit of vagrancy—we stray—somewhere. When we veer from the well-worn path even a little, a new imprint is made to take into account for that meander, that striving.
What does it mean for a person to go missing? And what in particular does it mean when a girl or woman — as opposed to a boy or man — goes missing?
The figure of the missing girl is a familiar one in literature, both ancient and modern. Most narratives of her experience draw upon an implicit premise: unless she’s a young child, the missing female has somehow, without meaning to, provoked her own fate. This capacity to provoke isn’t synonymous with choicefulness, or with personal agency or power. The missing girl’s intentions and desires, her state of mind, her awareness (if any) of her sociopolitical context: little of this bears directly on what occurs when she goes missing. She is someone to whom things happen rather than someone who makes things happen. In effect, she’s a vessel, a carrier of messages.
Contemporary sleep evangelizers worry a good deal about our social attitudes toward sleep. They worry about many things, of course—incandescent light, L.E.D. light, nicotine, caffeine, central heating, alcohol, the addictive folderol of personal technology—but social attitudes seem to exercise them the most. Deep down, they say, we simply do not respect the human need for repose. We remain convinced, in contradiction of all the available evidence, that stinting on sleep makes us heroic and industrious, rather than stupid and fat.
For a novel about life under multifarious forms of totalitarian control—political, gendered, sectarian, communal—“Milkman” can be charmingly wry.
Considered together, the two collections leave little doubt she is one of the greatest American short story writers of the 20th century. That her work went unheralded during her lifetime has numerous likely reasons: sexism, no novels (a grave sin in some publishing circles), alcoholism, and a career with smaller presses. It is a small, but worthwhile, consolation that Berlin has found a readership 10 years after her death — an imperfect and bittersweet success, not unlike many of the pieces in this latest collection. These 22 stories show her startling range and unwavering devotion to remaining open, refusing to judge any of her characters, whether delinquent, conniving, or alcoholic.