Friday evening, 8 p.m., early summer, New York City. I sit at my desk, face aglow in Macintosh luminescence. On the desk sits the detritus of the hour, of the day, the week, the season. There is dinner of sushi in the little takeout tray from the supermarket. There is leftover coffee in a mug from the afternoon. There are books and notebooks and checkbooks. There are pens and lip balms and hair ties and postage stamps and unmatched earrings and a MetroCard. There are a gazillion paper napkins for some reason. There is a computer modem whose lights flash with the irregular, listing cadence of a heart murmur. There are several Word documents up on that glowing screen, each competing for attention, not so much with one another, but with the email interface to which all roads lead back.
It is 1997. It is 2017. It doesn’t matter. It is both. In 20 years, my life has come full circle, 360 degrees for real. People often say 360 degrees when they mean 180. They say full circle when they’re really talking about a semicircle. It’s an oddly human error, as though they can’t quite grasp the concept of a human being turning on an axis as readily as the earth itself. But in my case, it’s true. At 47, my life looks uncannily the same way it did at 27.
Juxtaposed with the drawing of the Plaza’s turrets and flags is a picture of “the bubble,” the squat, inflatable emergency shelter for incoming refugees, where Amira lives — and where Fitzgerald, a Berlin-based American comic artist, volunteered to teach comic drawing classes. “I couldn’t imagine two more different places to spend your youth.”
Beautiful, sensitive, illuminating, and at times quite funny, Fitzgerald’s book tells the story of this drawing class, and the intimate, fragmentary glimpses into her students’ lives that the drawings offer. If she begins by stressing the difference between the Plaza and the bubble, she also finds humor in their unexpected similarities: “Like the Plaza,” she notes, “the bubble had rotating doormen,” in this case, caustic guards who can never find her weekly class on the schedule.
Nobody who has read the Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin’s brilliant, profoundly unsettling novel Fever Dream, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2017, will be surprised to learn how well suited her talents are to the short-story form. Her disciplined economy in creating atmosphere and effect is allied to a refusal to overexplain. That stubborn, unapologetic resistance to revelation is one of the things that makes Mouthful of Birds, her debut collection in English, such a success.
“Ten years of speaking to strangers, burying myself deep in journals, and speaking to yet more strangers, has changed that.” Love, she concludes unexceptionably, is “one of the greatest joys we can experience as humans” but it takes work. And the work is, as the psychologist Erich Fromm has put it, not “falling in love” but making a conscious decision to “stand in love”. There’s no app for that.
Like Charles Reznikoff’s incomparable Testimony, the only real antecedent that comes to mind, this is a book that is meant to be read quickly and reread slowly. An incredible work of poetic imagination, historical scholarship, and an insightful look at how we got to where we are now … Oh, and it’s about as noir it gets.
In creating the Golden State, Winters says he wanted to build a world just different enough that readers would have to look at our own reality in a new way.