“Perfect” is a defensive word. Other terms of praise home in on desirable attributes—this view is glorious—or describe an effect on the viewer: look at those ravishing mountains. But “perfect” ruminates on the possibility of flaws in order to deny their existence. Because it depends on the absence of error, it exalts not creation but excision, deletion, its logical endpoint a beautifully intact nothing.
A new book, “Scratched,” by Elizabeth Tallent, is the tale of a life lived in search of that nothing. In the nineteen-eighties, Tallent’s short stories appeared frequently in The New Yorker; she published four works of literary fiction with Knopf. Then, for twenty-two years, she published almost nothing at all. “Scratched,” which is subtitled “A Memoir of Perfectionism,” attempts to explain her long silence. It is a fascinating, busy document. The sentences are worked and reworked, twisted into wires and drawn through multiple clauses. Straightforward memories alternate with meditations on family dynamics and quotes from psychologists and social scientists. Tallent, who takes pass after pass at her elusive subject, evokes a fisherman in a fairy tale, repeatedly casting his rod. There is something compulsive at work here, and a pathos that rises from the simultaneous breadth and modesty of the author’s yearning. Tallent wants nothing less than perfection, because nothing less will make her safe.
As creator and host, Funt masterminded hundreds and hundreds of ruses, leaning on his yen for amateur psychology and sociology more and more as the years went by. Some segments dispensed with the wool-pulling entirely and chronicled revealing interviews between Funt and ordinary folks. He found the peculiarities of homo sapiens endlessly fascinating.
The other thing to know about Allen Funt is that, like many red-blooded Americans, he enjoyed looking at people with their clothes off. It was the marriage of these two great passions — quirks of pathology and full-frontal nudity — that yielded the illuminating historical footnote What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? 50 years ago this month.
But for the most part, the half a dozen or so national critics in the UK are the writerly equivalent of bareknuckle fighters. Where US critics generally give restaurants three months to bed in, we may go the moment the soft launch has finished. If they’re charging full price, they’re surely fair game? US critics go three to five times. Generally, we go once. As I often say, how many times do you need a lousy meal to know a restaurant is lousy?
In countries such as the United States and India, the populists of the far right are dominating politics. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, they are overturning democracies degenerated into ochlocracies (mob rules) into majoritarian tyrannies. Against such a depressing backdrop appears the English translation of Yoko Ogawa’s novel, originally published in Japanese in 1994. The Memory Police is a work of extraordinary artistic defiance, an exploration, urgent and seething, of the abrasive relationship between the role of dissidence in shaping public consciousness and the modern state’s totalitarian proclivities to create a political order founded on the organizational principle of fear.
Indeed, perhaps the most striking feature of this well-crafted novel is the highly selective access we are afforded to the narrator’s inner life. He is candid and transparent when ruminating on family and friends, but of his sexual machinations we get zilch. This makes for a convincing rendering of the compulsive, thoughtless nature of certain kinds of destructive behaviour.
Teddy Wayne's fourth novel is written in the key of Edward Hopper. Apartment is a portrait of loneliness and male insecurity set against the backdrop of the hyper-competitive world of Columbia University's graduate writing program, where ambition and self-doubt go hand in hand, and the workshops seem designed to separate the anointed from the hacks — or, in this case, the men from the boys.
Leduc follows the bread crumbs back into her original experience with fairy tales — and then explores their residual effects. Her daring approach is a hybrid of memoir, literary criticism and cultural commentary. She moves fluidly between grade-school memories and scholarly analysis. She quotes from medieval texts and TV shows. She’s equally familiar with the Brothers Grimm and the X-Men.
Halfway through her debut essay collection, Minor Feelings, author and artist Cathy Park Hong makes clear her mission: "I have some scores to settle ... with this country, with how we have been scripted."
The "we" here are Asian Americans and how we're seen in this country in a time when the us-versus-them dynamic can feel overpowering. In Minor Feelings, the author asks us to reconsider the effects of racism against Asian Americans and how it persists.
We love what’s best in our beloved, what’s worst in them.
You have to like what time does. Each day I talk to the part
of me that is my beloved from a tiny telephone in me.