Once you’ve finished “Telephone,” the latest book by Percival Everett, you may be talking about it with another reader and finding that you disagree on what happened.
That is intentional.
“There are three different versions of this novel, they’re all published identically, and you can’t know which one you’re getting,” Everett said during a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. With an apologetic chuckle, he added: “It’s going to piss a lot of people off, I’m afraid.”
If you’re wondering why rereads are what you most want, the answer is simple: Your brain, much like the rest of you, is tired. As many experts, including coach and author Alexis Rockley, have recently explained, our cognitive energy is a finite resource, steadily being used up by every piece of “new abnormal” we have to manage. The stress of information overload and lack of control was already overwhelming, even before adding the emotional stress of walking six feet around everyone, remembering masks and gloves and devouring yet another package of Oreos (maybe that last one is just me). When even getting the groceries involves a 15-step containment process and constant proximity vigilance, there is no autopilot. Everything is new, so everything is exhausting.
Ah, hello. How lovely to see you. Welcome to the inside of my head. Forgive the dreadful mess. When you’ve got a few miles on the clock as I have, you do tend to acquire a bit of clutter. Ignore the problematic Sally James tableau over there; a little something left over from my grubby adolescence. And that bulge, draped in a dusty sheet, is where I keep all my sublimated fears. I try not to look under it too often and you shouldn’t either. Instead, come through to this lovely space. It’s where I keep all my favourite restaurant memories. Yes, I know. It’s as confused and tangled as everything else in here, isn’t it?
In these times, when our world has shrunk to its essentials, and many of the pleasures we take for granted have been wrenched from us, the inside of our heads can be a vital resource. I like to wallow in memories as if they were an orange blossom-scented bubble bath. I can wallow for Britain. I take myself stage by stage through the greatest experiences; the ones that didn’t just tick all the obvious boxes but which, at the time, let me live in the moment. Now I can live inside them again.
Someday, if she finds herself in isolation and I am not there, she will have her own songs and some courage based in these walks and this circuitous make-believe (as good as any philosophy), a rhythm of talking and walking etched in her memory to repeat on her own, an inner life rich with voices and creatures and the remembered pressure of our hands. I hope so. Her grip suddenly drops mine as she begins to run toward home. We are learning together how to be alone.
Few readers will come to Emily St John Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, unaware of her fourth, 2014’s Station Eleven, which imagined a world ravaged by a hyper-lethal form of swine flu. That book was always going to cast a shadow over its successor – such is the curse of a career-defining blockbuster. But as we face Covid-19, the strange, masochistic allure of havoc-lit has catapulted Mandel’s post-pandemic tale of itinerant Shakespearean actors back into bestseller territory. How better to while away a stint in lockdown than by bending our waking terrors into the most comforting and redemptive of shapes – the narrative arc.
“All Adults Here” is deliciously funny and infectiously warm – a clever blend of levity and poignant insights. Straub’s flair for irony and wit shine, and she puts a fresh (and progressive) spin on the age-old multigenerational family saga.
I lose a lot of things
Keys, pencils, books, rings.
But there is one thing —
Specifically a pair —