My adventure begins heading south on US 67, eager as I am to avoid the slalom of misery known as Interstate-35. Taking US 67 out of Dallas and then heading south on US 281 has emerged as the softer, gentler path to move north and southbound through our state. I pass haystacks and pastures as I glide through towns like Midlothian, Alvarado, and Glen Rose, home to Dinosaur Valley State Park and fossils of the Acrocanthosaurus that once roamed these parts.
Glen Rose is also where the late author John Graves lived and not too far from where he ended his canoe trip down the Brazos River, a solo expedition that formed his classic 1960 travelogue, Goodbye to a River. These days, canoeing sounds as outdated as dinosaurs, but Graves was a philosophic soul who believed the past lived inside the present. So I row my Honda down the auto-river, knowing that wherever I am headed, dinosaurs and native tribes and non-indigenous settlers and curious writers had helped to pave the path.
Six days after the miracle, when the boys were cocooned in a sterile hospital and the divers had flown home and almost all of the journalists had dispersed, people came to the cave again. There were villagers from the flatlands beneath the Doi Nang Non, the mountains that rise between Thailand and Myanmar, and there were volunteers, hundreds of them in their lemon yellow shirts and sky blue caps, who had been there for most of the 18 days the miracle had required. There were monks, too, at a makeshift dais on the footpath to the cave, and there were dignitaries—local authorities, the families of the boys who'd been blessed by the miracle—in rows of chairs under a long tent.
The people, many of them, brought offerings. Below the mouth of the cave and in front of the big sign that announces the place as Tham Luang-Khun Nam Nang Non Forest Park, in a clearing cut into the dirt at the side of the road, they planted small white pennants and sticks of incense and candles the color of goldenrod. On a table near the monks, they left fish and fruit and the severed heads of pigs.
These were gifts to the spirit of the cave. For almost three weeks, Tham Luang had held within her a dozen young soccer players and their coach, who were trapped by flooding rains without food or water or any possible way to remove themselves. For most of that time, it also was assumed, if rarely spoken aloud, that some of those boys—perhaps all of those boys—could die.
The miracle was that they did not.
This is where Christopher L. Miller’s smart and engaging study, “Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity” (Chicago), enters the conversation. Miller is a literature professor at Yale, so he has been around the “death of the author”/“there is no ‘outside the text’ ” block a few times. He says that he was drawn to the subject of hoaxes because he was interested in the games they play with readers’ expectations—that is, for old-fashioned literature-professor reasons.
But as he was working on the book the world turned, and he realized that fakery is no longer just a classroom sport. “It is harder to see the fun in deception when the fate of the world seems to depend on resisting lies, ‘alternative facts,’ and ‘fake news,’ ” as he puts it. It seems to have taken the election of a man who is the personification of perspectivalism to reset the ethical calibrations of literary criticism.
My first reaction to learning this was a sigh of disappointment. This legendary childhood of Goldman’s never actually existed. This memoir was fiction. This bit of real magic was just plain make-believe, and I had built my ideas of the kind of writer I could be on unsteady ground.
But the next thing I felt was awed. Not the awe inspired by a beautiful personal history, but the kind awakened by an encounter with a truly creative artist. It made the wonder-struck optimism at the heart of the novel even more radiant—while I cannot say whether there was any truth to the personal crisis he depicts, from which his “abridged version” was born, I do know that this feat of innovation burst out of him while he was bedridden, recovering from pneumonia. This world-within-a-world that Goldman created makes The Princess Bride a fairytale wrapped within another fairytale, and subsequently his own life as a writer into the stuff of legends. The power granted to me as a writer had just been upgraded from “chronicler” to “sorceress.”
The US academic Kristen Ghodsee has lived in several eastern European countries so she doesn’t wear rose-tinted spectacles, acknowledging that Albania and Romania have always been awful places for women, but she seeks with great brio and nuance to lay out what some socialist states achieved for women.
At heart this is about what happens when women are no longer economically dependent on men and childcare is collectivised.