Throughout the many revisions, the conceit was always clear: the novel would be a letter addressed to Vuong’s mother, who is illiterate. It uses a narrative structure called kishōtenketsu, commonly seen in the work of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, a form that refuses to deploy conflict as a means of progressing the story.
“It insists that a narrative structure can survive and thrive on proximity alone,” Vuong says. “Proximity builds tension.”
There are no villains, no victims, and no clear arcs. His goal: to create “a new gaze, a new attribution to American identity,” he says.
Over ten years ago, Tillim began to place his camera on a tripod at city street corners and would remain there for long periods of time, occasionally clicking the shutter. From a given corner, he photographed distinct moments, separate in time. He then displayed the images in groupings of two, three, or four—each photograph framed by a thin white line in order to preserve its individuality, but hung side by side as if together, they showed a panorama of the continuous street. By creating these diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs, he wasn’t telling a story through a sequence, but trying, in his words, to “escape the tyranny of the single frame.” As if in reaction to Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” the photographer’s famous phrase for the significant fraction of a second in which a scene’s essence is captured, Tillim worked with a more diffuse sense of time and purpose. He has never believed that one frame can capture the essence of a situation. For Tillim, all moments could be decisive.
Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, Frankissstein, makes space for itself in a crowded field thanks to a deeply pertinent engagement with hybridity. Here, hard science and dreamy Romanticism exist in both tension and harmony. Beginning, evocatively, with Shelley composing Frankenstein, the novel leaps confidently into the present day to tell the story of Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor self-described as “hybrid”, meeting Victor Stein, a celebrated professor working at the bleeding edge of “accelerated evolution” through “self-designing” life. His interest in Ry is both sexual and detachedly philosophical. In Ry’s post-surgery body, he sees transhuman implications. “You aligned your physical reality with your mental impression of yourself,” he tells Ry. “Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could all do that?”
Whether or not you attach credence to the more outre aspects of Wiles’s techno-paranoia, his prose is consistently stylish and funny. The book also includes a white-knuckle descent into alcoholism, which Wiles freely admits is based on his own experience of drinking earlier and earlier in the day. “Another shameful first,” Jack concedes. “Maybe there wasn’t much material difference between drinking in the shower in the morning and drinking on the Tube on the way into the office.”
If any concrete counsel can be inferred from this absorbing and refreshingly sane polemic, it’s that we should ditch the aspiration to turn our sleep into an impregnable fortress, to acknowledge instead its intrinsic fragility. Perhaps we’d manage those passages of wakefulness better if we experienced them less as an enemy than as an integral part of our nocturnal lives.