If you’re a straight woman with some artistic sensibility, you may have dated a David Foster Wallace: a red flag who charmed his way into your heart by claiming you were the only one to truly understand him, but who turned out to be less sensitive than he at first seemed, to say the least. Chances are your David Foster Wallace read David Foster Wallace, an author whose writing left an indelible mark on the literary world. Over the years, Wallace has transformed into an avatar for a certain kind of lit-bro who scorns anyone who hasn’t read Infinite Jest, but doesn’t consider why he hasn’t read a female writer in his entire adult life.
If you’re Adrienne Miller, who, in 1997, became the first woman to serve as Esquire’s literary editor, a position she held for nearly a decade, you have dated the David Foster Wallace, and part of your story is contending with the late writer’s near mythical status, which has grown more complicated in the #MeToo era. Miller’s new memoir, In The Land Of Men, grapples with that experience, in the context of a larger industry that celebrated, coddled, and enabled all sorts of terrible men.
One risk in being a very good critic, however rare, is that one’s own judgments might become bigger performances than the art one sets out to describe. Criticism of all kinds is bounded by the assumption of a binary: There is the subject of analysis, there is the analyzer, and never the twain shall meet. Once that binary breaks down, other dangers may surface. A reviewer might get high on the power of playing gatekeeper, and start trumpeting ideology without seeing the ego involved. (William Logan is such a case, and perhaps the early Michael Robbins.) In better situations, though, the aggrandizement of the critic simply exposes criticism for what it is: creative writing, an experience that engages the head and the heart both, and that is based, like all the best writing, in passionate investment. What I really want to see when I read a good writer is that they love something—isn’t that always the point?
A finely tuned lost-and-found system, however, cannot exist on infrastructure alone. Fostering a culture that emphasizes returning lost property is also needed, and in Japan, it is a lesson that begins at a young age.
In a now-viral Twitter post, a woman named Keiko recounted how her young son found a 50-yen coin in a park in Japan’s Hokuriku region. He insisted on turning in the money—worth less than 50 U.S. cents—at a nearby koban. At first, Keiko (who requested that her family name not be used) worried what reaction the 6-year-old would get from the officers on duty, but the police response surprised her: “Several officers came out [of the koban], asked where and when the coin was picked up, and filled out the official [lost and found] document” and offered praise to her son.
The notion of the Earth stopping its majestic rotation, and setting in motion dire aftereffects, dates back at least to the Bible, when “the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.” Since then, there has been a steady stream of similarly themed stories, novels and movies, from H.G. Wells’s 1898 “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” — and the 1937 film adaptation — to last year’s “The City in the Middle of the Night” by Charlie Jane Anders.
Andrew Hunter Murray’s debut novel, “The Last Day,” also instantiates such a cosmic alteration in daily life. But Murray has so thoroughly thought through the ramifications of his conceit and conjured up such a dramatic plot and stellar cast of characters that he might have set a new standard for such tales.
Why does one spring clean, declutter, or otherwise slough off the collected detritus of bygone years? To free up space for more, newer stuff, of course. But minimizing one thing also can help to maximize something else: less work means more free time; fewer possessions means less upkeep. For Henry David Thoreau, a Spartan-like existence offered a way to “suck out all the marrow of life,” whereas for some aristocrats in Marcel Proust’s time, “playing at simplicity” was a kind of high-society conceit, charming “people only on condition that they know that you are capable of not living simply, that is to say that you are very rich.”
The latter form is still going strong. In The Longing for Less, journalist and art critic Kyle Chayka reminds us of an iconic 1982 photograph of Steve Jobs posing at home in a room containing almost nothing but a luxury antique lamp from Tiffany. Chayka shows that minimalist living has since become a fully commercialized “brand identity” and lifestyle for educated, middle-class young professionals. Through best-selling books, popular social media channels, and Netflix series, self-help coaches like the Japanese cleaning guru Marie Kondo have “profited on their minimalism expertise,” he writes, by encouraging their followers to shed any possessions that do not “spark joy.”
At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn’t know we needed, but very much do.
No, I don’t mean pathos. I mean the term coined by Alexander Pope to signify “the art of sinking in poetry,” as does Daniel Mallory Ortberg. In the essay collection “Something That May Shock and Discredit You,” he uses the 18th-century term for “anticlimax” as an excellent, if surprising, vehicle for writing that he calls, in the acknowledgments, “memoir-adjacent.”
When we suffer, we often no longer feel connected to the things we know; in many ways “This Brilliant Darkness” is a document of the searching that follows grief. On one page, Sharlet might be writing about Skid Row. On another, he’s discussing a postcard he wrote to his mother (who died of breast cancer when he was still in his teens). Poignantly, Sharlet also writes about sharing snapshots with his subjects. The book ingeniously reminds us that all of our lives — our struggles, desires, grief — happen concurrently with everyone else’s, and this awareness helps dissolve the boundaries between us.
If “In the Land of Men” sometimes seems at odds with itself, it’s because Miller — who can be witty and knowledgeable about the clichés of fiction written by men — apparently regards Wallace as too special and too fragile to have been held to the rules that she applies to others. “Troubled male genius” is an old trope, but Miller elevates it to new heights.