In short, humans may live very differently than chimpanzees, but the structural plans of our biology necessarily can represent only modest tinkerings to the genetic material that we inherited from our last common ancestors. Language, regardless of how it is instantiated in our brain, represents a comparatively tiny cognitive enhancement relative to the mental machinery we inherited from our last common ancestor. The same is true for the underlying biology of each of our cognitive innovations.
If it seems like scientists trying to find the basis of human uniqueness in the brain are looking for a neural needle in a haystack, it’s because they are. Whatever makes us different is built on the bedrock of a billion years of common ancestry. Humans will never abandon the quest to prove that they are special. But nor can we escape the fact that our minds are a modest tweak on an ancient plan that originated millions of years before we came onto the scene.
My way of reading Russian Doll can’t, logically speaking, be the best way to read Russian Doll. Nobody makes a show about how the high-functioning mentally ill live in a fundamentally different world from the merely neurotic. But on my second time through that’s still all I see: No one except for Nadia or Alan can save Nadia or Alan, for all of the love and therapy and friendship, because no one else is in their social-material position. Nadia and Alan blend into the world of middle-class creatives and professionals (who are, of course, neurotic wretches), but its regularities and rhythms, the insistent gravitation that keeps you in orbit of a lifeworld even though you have, of course, gone half-insane in this late capitalist hellscape, aren’t theirs. You can stay here, but you can’t go home.
We live in a cruel time, when people attack you when they see a hint of vulnerability. So, it’s extra important to stick with emotional honesty even after people take advantage of your vulnerability to inflict pain. Vulnerability is the only means we have to build relationships, and relationships are the only means we have to experience joy.
Something extraordinary happened at the Rewriters’ Workshop. Arnold Mitchell, a first-year student who had barely escaped the wait list, came down with a severe case of writer’s block: the kind that could make or break an author’s career. A group of us went to offer our congratulations, though not without skepticism. It’s not uncommon for a student believed to be experiencing “the block” to discover later that it had been a temporary thing, like a head cold.
But the cruise goes very far to make introverts and the socially awkward comfortable, as well. At check in, everyone is offered two “Friendshipping” buttons that describe your attitude toward conversation: a big green YEAH for those who invite contact, and a red NAH for those who would rather not. The concept, which has precedents in the autism community, works beautifully for the merely shy. Sections of the ship are deemed quiet zones, and those who don’t want to attend the crowded, raucous evening concerts can watch a simulcast in a darkened lounge or even on the television in their cabins. The result is a floating community of friends, even if they have never met. “You’ll never find a group of nicer, more kind people,” said Linda Shapley, a former managing editor of The Denver Post making the trip with her husband, Ed.
One longtime sea monkey, CeeCee Stein, found the community so accepting that several years ago she decided to use a cruise as her moment to transition from male to female. “I got on the plane as Christopher, and I got off the plane as Christina,” she recalled. “It seemed like the group of people I would most want to lay my soul bare in front of,” she said.
She added, “I call it my birthday.”
When Henry James remarked, in his preface to “The Portrait of a Lady,” that “the house of fiction has . . . not one window, but a million,” he could not have anticipated the genre of fiction to which we have given the inexact term “science fiction.” Still less could he have anticipated the sort of literary-humanist science fiction associated with Ted Chiang, whose début collection, “Stories of Your Life and Others” (2002), garnered multiple awards in the science-fiction community, and contained the beautifully elegiac novella “Story of Your Life,” which reëxamined the phenomena of time and memory in terms of language. (The novella was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film “Arrival.”) Other stories in the collection reinterpreted the Biblical Tower of Babel, imagined an industrial era powered by Kabbalistic golems, and revisited the oldest of theological arguments regarding the nature of God. Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways.
In his new collection, “Exhalation” (Knopf), his second, Chiang again presents elaborate thought experiments in narrative modes that initially seem familiar. Contemporary issues relating to bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of A.I. are addressed in plain, forthright prose. If Chiang’s stories can strike us as riddles, concerned with asking rather than with answering difficult questions, there is little ambiguity about his language. When an entire story is metaphorical, focussed on a single surreal image, it’s helpful that individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal.
But the Scottish marvel Ali Smith breaks rules better than anyone. She can build entire narratives around dreams and hallucinations. She can start a new novel in the middle of another. She can let a single exclamation point stand as an entire paragraph. It wouldn’t surprise me if she can write hanging upside down like a bat. And she’s given us, with “Spring,” the third in a planned quartet named for the seasons, an addition to a work-in-progress both as raw as this morning’s Twitter rant and as lasting and important as — and I say this neither lightly nor randomly — “Ulysses.”
This is a novel which, while fulfilling the first function of fiction – which is to entertain, to give pleasure – also invites reflection about the state of morality today, about the lust for witch-hunts and the zeal to punish – even before any guilt has been established. So, while being a well-written and enjoyable crime novel, it’s also a disturbing one – though one crying out for an editor who recognises that in novel writing less is often better than more.