The archipelago is far geographically from my home in Princeton, N.J., though I was also searching for a different kind of distance. Two summers ago, I lost a teenage son to suicide. Two seasons ago, I was next to my father when the doctors took him off life support. “The only thing grief has taught me,” Emerson wrote in 1844, in “Experience,” after the death of his young son, “is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality. ... An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists.”
In the past 18 months, I have reread “Hamlet” many times, written in the years after the death of Shakespeare’s son. I have listened to the compositions of Smetana and Dvorak, in which they mourned the deaths of their children. But Emerson’s words, which are less accessible, made me wonder if his mind had traveled further. I was not unrealistic enough to expect grief to vanish on a trip, but I wanted to see if it could shed some light on Emerson’s thinking.
The most meta duality of Tender Is the Night lies in the fact that there are two versions of the novel. The original version, released in 1934 in a serial format, features a fractured structure and chronology with a prolonged flashback midway through (and a very strange fast-forward back to the present). A second version, published posthumously in 1951, puts all events in the order that they occurred. It tells the story of the Divers chronologically, from their first meeting as beautiful teenage psychiatric patient and bright young doctor to their final separation and Dick’s decline. There’s no flashback, and Rosemary isn’t introduced until midway through, once we already know the Divers and their complex relationship.
In “Gaudy Night,” a classic of the golden age of detective fiction by Dorothy L. Sayers, the heroine, Harriet Vane, wonders whether mystery novels can ever rise to the level of literature. Harriet is a successful author, like her creator, but suffers from writer’s block. The relationships between her characters “were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that.” Harriet wonders what might happen if she were to “abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.”
More than eighty years after “Gaudy Night” was published, in 1935, we’re enjoying another golden age of detective stories. Mysteries and true-crime narratives seem to satisfy a need for women in particular, as the journalist Rachel Monroe writes in her new book, “Savage Appetites.” Stories about the worst things that can happen to a person serve to excavate a “subterranean knowledge,” Monroe notes, opening up “conversations about subjects that might otherwise be taboo: fear, abuse, exploitation, injustice, rage.” In 2012, the novel “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn, introduced Amy Elliott Dunne, a character whose fury at the false promises of life and marriage prefigured the mass unleashing of women’s anger a few years later. Writers like Tana French, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, and Celeste Ng have won both popular and critical praise with stories about the damage that the world inflicts on women, and, sometimes, about the damage that damaged women do. The mystery genre, with its plots that patrol the outer borders of believable human behavior, has proved uniquely suited to illuminate a generalized hostility toward women, one so normal and pervasive that it’s often almost impossible to see.
There were “edible artifacts” of capitalism like cheeseburgers and energy bars, passed on trays bearing museum-like labels. Lines formed around the more interactive pieces, including a hand-cranked “minimum-wage machine” and a disassembly line where visitors, armed with hammers and pliers, were subjecting discarded shoes and cellphone chargers to enthusiastic creative destruction.
“We want to encourage people to talk about it, to figure out what this thing is that is too close for us to see,” Timothy Furstnau, who, with Andrea Steves, works as the curatorial collective Fictilis, said, elaborating on the project’s goal of “making capitalism strange.”