I was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. My favorite activity in the classic role-playing game was not slaying monsters but creating new characters, which I did by rolling three six-sided dice (in D&D parlance, “roll 3d6”). The resulting numbers generated attributes such as strength, wisdom, or dexterity. But there was another more enigmatic attribute with which each character was blessed or cursed: charisma. It determined how well my paladin or mage could charm, persuade, and coax others to do their bidding. A nimble and charismatic thief could separate a druid from his stave or score a discount when buying a magic cloak.
This quality lies at the heart of Morgan Ames’s book The Charisma Machine. Ames, a faculty member in Berkeley’s School of Information, uses the One Laptop Per Child Program (or “OLPC”) to explore the “complicated consequences of technological utopianism.” Announced at a meeting of the World Economic Forum before an enthusiastic gathering of businesspeople, celebrities, and other thought leaders, the audacious OLPC set out to put inexpensive laptop computers in the hands of tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of children in the Global South.
“I feel successful being part of a bigger whole,” she says. “It’s such a man thing to want your effigy. That may be a reason why women have been so forgotten.”
She is referring to her foremothers, the female mathematicians and scientists whose names have been left out of textbooks or who are recurrently “recovered” only to be lost again—women such as Emilie du Chatelet, Sophie Germain, Ada Lovelace and Emmy Noether. When Princeton hired Dr. Daubechies, “they wanted to make a big thing about it,” she recalls. “I didn’t like that. I thought they should be ashamed that they didn’t have a tenured woman on their [mathematics] faculty until 1994.”
Roughly a dozen years ago, a woman I was seeing paid to have an abortion. I went with her to the clinic, but I did not help with the bill. Many details from that time are unclear to me now, like how we met or how long we’d known each other. Mutual friends. A bar. More than a few weeks. Not more than a few months. I was new to the city, she was from around there. I couldn’t tell you what she did for a living aside from the rough idea that she had regular hours and maybe a desk somewhere. I find it hard to even remember what I was doing for a living at that time. Temp agency day labor? Dawn shifts at a bakery? A d.j. gig? We had not seen enough of one another to call it a thing. I know we had a few long conversations about the abortion, though I can’t recall what we talked about. I can tell you there was a second urgent phone call because I missed the first. I don’t remember spending much time talking about who would pay for it. Yet, that’s the part I’m certain of. No one forgets who picked up the tab.
In a fairer — or at least weirder — literary world, Stephen Wright would be as famous as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo. He's has only written five novels since his debut in 1983 with Meditations in Green, but two of them, M31: A Family Romance and Going Native, are among the best of the last century. Wright is an unpredictable author with an unwavering commitment to the surreal; you get the feeling he couldn't write a straight story even if he wanted to. And it's pretty clear he's never wanted to.
Wright's latest book, Processed Cheese, is every bit as bizarre as its predecessors. It's a novel that's simultaneously angry and resigned, a darkly funny satire of American consumer culture in all its greed, lust and sloth — really, just name a deadly sin. Dizzying and bleak, it's Wright at his best.
Woods creates memorable characters in all four settings, each with a distinct purpose that helps make the impossible relatable. Remembrance is a well-researched, epic historical fantasy that, despite its flaws, delivers upon the themes of pain and suffering, loss and survival — and how they can drive the creation of a safe place that by its very existence is timeless.