A novel is not a scratch card or a buried archeological treasure; it has no prior existence waiting to be uncovered. The novelist, like the wayfarer in Antonio Machado’s poem, has to make the way by going. In the case of my novel, Lux, the going took seventeen years. It began with that single word, Lux, written in a new notebook on 30 December 2000. The word had a charge that I felt might lead me on into a story and into a world. It was the name of the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Wyatt’s beloved falcon, to whom he addressed a poem while in prison. He envied her her freedom and felt the difference between her loyalty and the conduct of his fair-weather friends. The name plays on the light of its Latin meaning and also on the luck that was such a fugitive feature of Thomas Wyatt’s eventful life.
Last fall, at a party, my husband and I and two friends decided to start a “Stupid Classics Book Club.” It began as a joke, and then struck us as a genuinely good idea. The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had. None of us were English majors, so we’d missed a lot. I pulled out a notebook, and we spent the next hour and a half in a corner, coming up with a list of “stupid classics.” As we went, we had to figure out exactly what we meant by “stupid”—we did not mean lacking in intelligence, or bad. For me, “stupid” meant relatively short, accessible enough to be on a high school syllabus, and probably rehashed into cliché over time by multiple film adaptations and Simpsons episodes. The quintessential example was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anything too long or serious—Proust, Middlemarch—was excluded from the list, even if we all wanted to read it, due to failing those criteria. We did not assume any of the classics would actually be stupid.
We were wrong on that last count.
One woozy afternoon, the former department chair admitted that they had, in fact, hired one of my junior colleagues by mistake — the secretary confused the two lists of candidates and called to offer him the job, and the chair was too gentlemanly to withdraw it — but that I shouldn’t worry: they actually had wanted me. But what they wanted me for was unclear. Junior faculty, at that time, had no courses of their own. They “precepted” for senior faculty. It really didn’t matter what our dissertations had been on. We were the grading faculty. Colleagues who were ahead of me in years of service got their pick of whom to serve as “preceptors”: the charismatic Chaucerian, the baronial Americanist, the aristocratic Shakespearian. Someone, perhaps the very secretary who had called the wrong candidate, found out that I had done the English philology degree at Oxford. And so, as a tenure-track TA, in the interview suit I wore every teaching day for the entire first semester, I was assigned to “precept” the history of the English language.
It was Google Street View, of course, a function I had used a few times for apartment hunting, but which had only just come to this region of Russia. It was magic. I clicked and clicked. I wandered around Vorkuta for hours, past the fading Soviet propaganda painted on the ends of buildings, past last year’s snow heaped in the center of parking lots. I saw the Palace of Culture, an empty playground, the stack of a coal plant, satellites clustered on rooftops like mussels at low tide. I saw litter, graffiti, cell phones clamped to ears, the price of popsicles, pastel dumpsters, and the trash truck emptying them.
The buildings in Vorkuta are spread out, as though the town is trying to compete in breadth with the sky, so its pedestrians are left with long distances to cover. An old woman walked down one street, the closest buildings small behind her. A plastic bag dangled from each of her hands. Ilya would pass her on his way to school, I decided, and just like that I fell back into my novel’s world.
Another reason why there’s no bus shelter in front of Tony’s Barber Shop is the street design. Figueroa is a major artery with five travel lanes, two parking lanes, modest sidewalks, and storefronts that come right up to the edge of the property line. You can’t install a shelter here without disrupting underground utilities near the curb (a right-of-way controlled by multiple city agencies), violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (which requires four-foot clearance for wheelchairs), or blocking driveway sightlines. The same goes for street trees. On this block, shade is basically outlawed.
Sidewalk inspectors forced Cornejo to take down the canopy in the summer of 2015, just before the worst heat wave in 25 years rolled through Los Angeles. A spokesperson for the Department of Public Works said sidewalks have to be “safe and secure,” and he pointed to a section of the municipal code prohibiting “obstruction in the public right of way.” Never mind that Cornejo’s shelter, open at both ends, let pedestrians pass freely. It was deemed a safety hazard. You could argue that the law should be more flexible, and that as temperatures rise in this sun-baked city, the meaning of public safety should evolve. But in fact the city code had been revised to be more punitive, so that violators could be fined and repeat offenders charged with misdemeanors under the city’s “overgrown vegetation enforcement program.” The hardline approach was pushed by councilmember Greig Smith, who wanted to promote the “aesthetic value” of “tidy and attractive” neighborhoods like the ones in his district, an affluent, car-dependent part of the San Fernando Valley.
I have no serious rebuttal to any of these objections. They’re mostly true. I’m a single black gay man, and therefore an unlikely champion of the American romantic comedy: What’s in these movies for me?
And yet here I am, in a state of panicked rumination: Who are we without these movies? Romantic comedy is the only genre committed to letting relatively ordinary people — no capes, no spaceships, no infinite sequels — figure out how to deal meaningfully with another human being. These are the lowest-stakes movies we have that are also about our highest standards for ourselves, movies predicated on the improvement of communication, the deciphering of strangers and the performance of more degrees of honesty than I ever knew existed — gentle, cruel, blunt, clarifying, T.M.I., strategic, tardy, medical, sexual, sartorial. They take our primal hunger to connect with one another and give it a story. And at their best, they do much more: They make you believe in the power of communion.
The Mexican-American neighborhood is home to the perfect flaky tortillas at Doña María Mexican Cafe, scratch-made in flour or corn, and ready to be folded around eggs with the fine threads of dried beef called machacada. It has the off-menu roasted tamales at the Original Alamo Tamales, with blackened husks and caramelized edges of masa and meat. And there’s Taqueria Chabelita, where the owner, Isabel Henriquez Hernandez, makes pinto beans whose smoky intensity comes not from pork fat, but from a slow char in a hot pan.
For Mr. Medrano, who grew up in San Antonio with generations of relatives on both sides of the Rio Grande, this is all his comfort food, his culinary heritage, his comida casera, or Mexican home cooking.
Just don’t call it Tex-Mex, he said. He prefers to describe it as Texas Mexican, which is also how he describes himself.
The unreliability of memory; the ways we talk to ourselves and to each other; how we can act as detectives in our own lives, combing the past for clues; how places can seem clearer from afar than when we are there — all these themes are touched on in Savas’s spare, disarmingly simple prose. She writes with both sensuality and coolness, as if determined to find a rational explanation for the irrationality of existence, and for the narrator’s opaque understanding of herself.