What if Emily Brontë’s achievement in Wuthering Heights is really its dramatic correlation to her own passage from child actor to adult novelist, serving as a natural extension of her language play, and espousing play as necessary work? This isn’t an earth-shattering idea. After all, why do we call plays plays? For decades, psychologists have written reams on the power of play—how it allows children to work cooperatively as well as independently, try on different personas, and work through various problems.
Lately, though, I have found myself thinking less about Eliot’s depiction of individual characters and more about the novel’s subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life.” When Eliot set out to write “Middlemarch,” what she seemed to have in mind was a panoramic examination of a small town and its inhabitants that would capture not just the stories of individuals but would also say something about the way a community works, and about the state of the nation. “I am delighted to hear of a Novel of English Life having taken such warm possession of you,” her publisher, John Blackwood, remarked, when Eliot conveyed her intentions to him. Revisiting “Middlemarch” in the England of 2019—a year in which Britain was due to leave the European Union but instead has been mired in parliamentary paralysis, which the forthcoming election may or may not resolve—Eliot’s ironic observations about the electoral system have a new piquancy, and her representation of the innate conservatism of English provincial life has a topical relevance.
Once a man was brought in who had jumped from the Forth Road Bridge. He had fallen 150ft, shattered his ankles and three of his vertebrae; “A fall on water from a height like that is like falling on concrete,” one of the nurses told me. He had crewcut hair, a scar across his lip and lay as if pinioned to the bed, eyes wide with fear. “We’ll need to keep a close eye on him,” the psychiatrist told me. “No one jumps from a height like that on a whim.” It was not the first time he had tried to end his life; I remember the pinched face of his mother when she came round at visiting time, the drawn bun of her hair, the tremble in her hands as she sat at his bedside.
Later, as a doctor in the adjacent emergency department, it would be my job to break bad news to the families of those who had been rushed to A&E too late or too broken to survive. Horror was a common reaction. Shock, of course, and grief, but so, too, was a kind of wretched acceptance. Often, the bereaved families had previously sat at bedsides on ward 1A, with a brother or mother, sister or spouse, and with the completion of the act there was sadness, of course, but also something akin to, but different from, relief – that a great and unappeasable suffering had finally come to an end.
Thanksgiving isn’t about just any old food. It’s about the food that’s native to our land, the food that sustained indigenous people long before Europeans landed on these shores, the food that connects us to the world around us. It’s what we often think of when we talk about sustainable food. But what is sustainable, anyway?
One of the best people to ask is Ruth DeFries. She teaches about sustainable development, land use and food systems at Columbia University (her work has won her a MacArthur Foundation fellowship), and she asks her students that same question: What is sustainable?
Among other things, “The Mutations,” a feisty first novel by the Mexican writer Jorge Comensal, is a dark, extended lawyer joke, made at the expense of Ramón Martinez. A decadent urban professional about to enjoy another pork sandwich, Ramón becomes a dyspeptic, housebound mute after the sudden pain he feels at his favorite cantina turns out to be a tumor, “which throbbed in his mouth like a tiny, misplaced heart.” Comensal’s brisk, if at times diffusive, storytelling — in a translation by Charlotte Whittle that conveys both his blunt and sharp humor — coheres around the question of how a person (as well as his family members, friends and colleagues) deals with the felt and future consequences of sudden dire news.
Your lover leaves the toilet seat up,
forgets what color your eyes are, misses
your calls four times out of five.