Robert Stone was one of those novelists who try to wrap their arms around America itself. His career spanned almost 50 years, but he never really stopped writing about the ’60s and their fallout—American power and virtue collapsing in an eruption of violence and drugs and moral chaos, under the 10,000-mile, decades-long shadow of Vietnam. In 1971, Stone contrived to get a London alternative weekly to send him to Saigon so that he could research a novel about the war that was consuming American life. “I realized if I wanted to be a ‘definer’ of the American condition, I would have to go to Vietnam,” he later said.
Stone’s America is a dark place, but its failures are commensurate with the scale of its aspirations. His protagonists—they can be roughly divided into seekers and ironists, each representing aspects of their creator—are haunted by a vision of life more abundant, a sense of possibility that’s betrayed by their own weakness and the destabilizing undercurrents of history. His prose, with its potent mix of hard-boiled irony, romantic excess, and violent dissolution, can render the mood of a whole period instantly indelible. “If the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men,” thinks John Converse, the small-time American journalist in Dog Soldiers (1974) who’s preparing to smuggle heroin from Saigon back to the States, “people are just naturally going to want to get high.”
“Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose,” wrote the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick in a 1953 essay about literary correspondence. “In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope.” Only in our letters are we able to frame our cleverest selves, to pose both the questions and answers, to make ourselves known as we wish to be known. Those of us experiencing a serious uptick in our email correspondence right now — it seems all it took for us to re-embrace the epistolary form was a global pandemic — are freshly acquainted with the clever breeziness, the missives framed as “just checking in,” from people we once knew far better than we do now.
For me, the well of individual experience has run dry, the mountain been mined, the carcass picked clean. The only one to tell me the truth—about the twin agonies of bodily sickness and mental obsession, and the need to get worse before I got better—was Nathan Zuckerman. Not only does the limitation of the physical being cause depression, but the tension within the mind can make the body sicker.
By all common measures of musical value, “Wellington’s Victory” is schlock. But in his detailed instructions on the number and positioning of instrumentalists, Beethoven reveals how carefully he crafted this sonic assault on listener. “One has to imagine these performances not like an evening at the Berlin Philharmonie, but rather like a modern-day rock concert,” the musicologist Frédéric Döhl has argued.
Beethoven’s preoccupation with making the concert experience really, really loud may mark the beginning of a musical arms race for ever louder and ever more stimulating symphonic performance.
Whether they are true to life or imbued with the magical qualities of a revered fantasy saga, video game worlds often teem with wonderfully bizarre flora and fauna. It’s no wonder, then, that documentarians are embarking on virtual expeditions to capture the awe and mystery of these digital realms, and the curios and cynosures that inhabit them.
For example, did you know that an arcane colossus resides deep in the abyssal, oceanic recesses of Titan in Destiny 2? Or perhaps that the largest species of moth in Destiny's world inhabits the chasms constituting the Moon’s underground? In terms of more realistic documenting, Red Dead Redemption 2’s ecosystems exist in a perfect state of flux, with bear cubs learning to track their first stags, and wolf packs singling out bison who have strayed from the herd.
The elegy is a poetic form with so ancient a tradition, so many dauntingly famous examples, and so large an accumulation of expectations that Victoria Chang’s reluctance to resort to it is understandable, despite its seeming fitness for her circumstances. Her father suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009, and her mother, after a long engagement with pulmonary fibrosis, died in 2015, involving Chang in a cascade of endings: of language, logic, optimism, ambition, and secrets, to name a few of the losses recorded in this volume. She chose to record them, though, not in the august and ceremonial form of the elegy, but in the homelier confines of the obituary—the obit, in the abbreviation journalists use—short prose poems the width of a newspaper column, headed with a name and a date.
Chang’s obits, though, come as if from a parallel universe of obituaries, with different rules about what obits can say and how they can say it. Newspaper obits tend to linearity and coherence, for instance, hoping to convince us that our lives make a nice, consistent package; Chang’s are as quicksilver as memory in their leaps and landings.