By his own account, 2019 was a “roller-coaster” year for poet and fiction writer Ocean Vuong. In June he published his debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” to rapturous reviews, and it became an instant bestseller.
In September, Vuong received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, freeing him from financial worries, at least for the next five years. Less than six weeks later, his mother, Rose, died at age 51, not long after being diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer.
We are now in the mature stage of a book-to-film boom that is quietly transforming how Americans read and tell stories—and not for the better. The power of this force is hard to quantify because intellectual property is now being bought in Hollywood in such unprecedented volume and diversity of source material. Almost all written works that achieve prominence today (and many more that don’t) will be optioned, and increasingly it is becoming rare for film and television projects to move forward without intellectual property attached. America’s higher echelon of long-form journalists can now expect to make more money from Hollywood than they do from the publications that print their stories. The emergence of streaming services from Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney, and even Walmart has driven a demand for writing on a bulk commodity scale at a time when the business of publishing—especially but not only in the world of magazines—has largely abdicated its responsibility for paying writers an amount that would secure a decent life.
The cultural weather has changed since David and Goliath in 2013. In response to raised political stakes, the discourse has acquired an urgency and stridency at odds with Gladwell’s cool, playful tone. He has thrived on riding the zeitgeist, but today, if you had to identify the public intellectual who captures the moment, it would not be Gladwell, but Jordan Peterson. Both are Canadians of a similar age (Gladwell 56, Peterson 57) and Peterson teaches at Gladwell’s alma mater, the University of Toronto. I ask Gladwell what he thinks of him. “He’s unbelievably interesting. He’s not someone you need to agree with in order to value.” What people misunderstand about Peterson, he says, is that in Canada, raging against liberal norms makes you a contrarian. In America, it just makes you a Republican.
While Peterson tells the world how to live – and you’re either with him or against him – Gladwell is essentially happy for you to live however you want. And while Peterson is certain about everything and responds with truculence to criticism, Gladwell is OK with being wrong and would like more people to consider that they might be, too. To use Christopher Hitchens’s distinction, Peterson is a literalist, Gladwell an ironist. No wonder Peterson is in the ascendant.
In Jorge Luis Borges's very short story “On Exactitude in Science,” the imperial cartographers perfect their art. As they hone their practice, the maps become larger and larger to accommodate more detail. Finally, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” There is a joke here: a perfect map is a futile map. A map requires exclusion to be of use. A narrative is a useful map, a way through that retains a settled — even relentless — relationship to what it discards. The reliable narrator brings forward what is necessary, with no emotional remainder.
The unreliable narrator has an unsettled relationship to what has been left behind. She charts a useless map, offering no promise to lead us from here to there such that, upon arrival, here and there are magically inverted as though where we end up is where we’ve been headed all along. In her brilliant debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, Aria Aber writes, “I understood what it meant to have an unreliable narrator as a mother.” Afghan refugees living in Germany — like Aber’s own parents — the parents in Hard Damage are shaped by what they’ve lost, as well as by the brilliance of their creation in the face of that loss.
The overarching joke of Such a Fun Age is that while the white characters fret over what black people think of them and their progressive values, the black characters are busy getting on with their lives and trying to keep up with one another.
Say the name McDonald’s, and what comes to mind? Tasty hamburgers or hardened arteries? Entry-level jobs or dead-end McJobs? Responsive community outreach or mercenary corporate power?
In “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America,” Marcia Chatelain has written a smart and capacious history suggesting that McDonald’s should summon all of those thoughts, and then some.