Spend some time with masters of finance over a few glasses of whiskey and you may detect a curious streak of mysticism running through these apostles of the empirical, these obsessive quantifiers. Often they stray into metaphor when explaining cold calculation; they may speak of the market in terms of the currents of history or the spirits of the vasty deep. They’re fully aware that finance is tied up with intangible, mysterious elements that can scarcely survive scrutiny. The U.S. dollar, the basis of the world economy, was once backed by gold. Today it is backed by . . . nothing. A bank like Lehman Brothers can be a pillar of the community today, then collapse overnight. Bankers listen eagerly to the music of the spheres.
Yet few bankers are men of letters, hence few are equipped to sing to us of the twilight zone of the inscrutable. Here it is useful to consider the multiplier effect of two seemingly unrelated talents. Walter Bagehot was not the most revered banker who ever lived, and he was not the most revered essayist who ever lived. But among bankers, he was an unusually gifted essayist, and among essayists he had an unusual knowledge of banking.
The first time the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson met Emily Dickinson, he remembered five details about the way she entered the room: her soft step, her breathless voice, her auburn hair, the two daylilies she offered him—and her exquisite white dress.
Dickinson’s white dress has become an emblem of the poet’s brilliance and mystery. When Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Dickinson’s hometown in the 1880s, she gushed about the poet’s attire. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth … She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, believes Dickinson began dressing primarily in white in her thirties, and it was common knowledge around town that a white dress was the poet’s preferred article of clothing. Dickinson realized people gossiped about what she wore, and once joked with her cousins, “Won’t you tell ‘the public’ that at present I wear a brown dress with a cape if possible browner, and carry a parasol of the same!”
Because I grew up around bad English, I was bad at English. I was born in L.A. but wasn’t fluent until the embarrassingly delayed age of six, maybe even seven. Matriculating at school was like moving to another country. Up until then, I was surrounded by Korean. The English heard in church, among friends and family in K-town, was short, barbed, and broken: subject and object nouns conjoined in odd marriages, verbs forever disagreeing, definite articles nowhere to be found. Teenagers vented by interjecting Korean with the ever-present fuck: “Fuck him! Opa’s an asshole.”
The immigrant’s first real introduction to surviving in English is profanity. When my cousins came over to the United States, I immediately passed on a cache of curses to them to prepare for school. My uncle said he used to start and end all his sentences with “motherfucker” because he learned his English from his black customers when he was a clothing wholesaler in New York. My uncle, a profane and boisterous man, has since returned to Seoul and keeps up his English with me.
In Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, originally published in 2009 and released in translation from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman in 2015, we meet Makina, who crosses the United States and Mexico border in order to find her brother. Makina knows what is required to cross the border: while the physical threats are very real, crossing also carries with it existential threats. Lots can be lost on the journey. Crossing the border also means that Makina will subject herself to a crossing within herself—it’s not just the land and countries that change, but it is the language, the thoughts. Time away from home changes a person.
As Norah moves through the public and private lives of Katherine O’Dell, she not only re-creates a great actress in all her fascinating complications, she plumbs the depth of her own affection for a woman she was often too quick to judge. Stripped raw of any sentimentality, the result is a critique, a confession, a love letter — and another brilliant novel from Anne Enright.