In Lionel Shriver’s novel “The Mandibles,” it’s 2029, the United States has defaulted on its loans, and the country is plunging into an economic abyss. Suddenly, a cabbage costs thirty-eight dollars. Savings accumulated over a lifetime evaporate in an hour. Former hedge-fund managers compete for jobs as waiters. (Their new patrons are foreigners; America, like other failed states, has become a magnet for tourists who can afford luxuries that the natives can only dream of.) Everyone is grimy, because water shortages have rendered showers brief and infrequent. This is made particularly troublesome by another post-apocalyptic issue: there’s not enough toilet paper.
“I found that really gratifying,” Shriver said, as she considered her prescience, one recent afternoon in London. Since the lockdown went into effect, she has been sequestered with her husband, Jeff Williams, at their row house in Bermondsey. It is a modest, comfortable place, decorated with thrift-store finds and small ceramic sculptures—smooth, faceless figures—that Shriver made, along with memorabilia that Williams has gathered in his decades as a jazz drummer. But Shriver was not feeling cozy. “Truth is, I’ve never been this shaken,” she told me. She wasn’t worried about getting sick. “The virus doesn’t faze me,” she said. She was afraid that she would prove oracular about more than toilet paper, and that we are hurtling toward global financial cataclysm—what she described in “The Mandibles” as “an ongoing, borderless nightmare ended only by death.”
What Broom is writing, is preserving, what she is creating in the present, is important, for it’s steeped in the histories, in the stories, in the hurt of the family. She tries to convey that hurt by asking the reader to imagine her street being “dead quiet, and you lived on those dead quiet streets, and there is nothing left of anything you once owned.” The street may be dead quiet, and their father, who built and repaired so much of that house, may have passed, but still her brother watches over the land, and she watches over him, writing it all down. And without the both of them, this could all be lost. Broom writes of how “The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst.” The Yellow House witnessed the Broom’s family life, so now Broom wants to witness the life of the Yellow House, and see what information and stories she can find in whatever remains, rebuilding the story of the family so they can all be together again.
The new and revised technology-related entries in the Stylebook also reflect some interesting shifts in what the Associated Press believes journalists can expect general audiences to know. In general, many of the recommendations tend to urge journalists in the direction of greater specificity about the technologies they are describing and away from more generic, dated terms.
Although reading a news article is not the same as reading a novel or a narrative nonfiction book, experts say it isn’t helpful for adults to dismiss the reading that many teens are doing.
In their book “Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want — and Why We Should Let Them,” adolescent literacy experts Michael W. Smith and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm spotlight the fact that the kids they studied had a “surprisingly rich engagement with texts that we didn’t much value.” According to Smith, a secondary education professor at Temple University, “Many were avid readers of marginalized texts.”
If this all sounds like a lot, you have to understand that everything about my sense of style is maximalist: I love bright colors, feathers, fringe, animal print — typically not all together, but sometimes … all together. Let’s just say that I prefer to ignore Coco Chanel’s advice to take one accessory off before leaving the house.
But my proclivity for holding onto ornaments doesn’t exactly conform to an age where a Marie Kondo-endorsed sense of minimalism is in vogue. There’s also the practical matter that my apartment is a 400-square foot studio, and one woman’s cheerful collection of objects is another’s sanity-stretching clutter. Sometimes I am both of those women.
The protagonist of “Parakeet,” Marie-Helene Bertino’s new novel, is a 36-year-old woman, a week out from marrying a man she doesn’t love, whose dead grandmother has come back to taunt her in the form of a wisecracking bird. The bird grandmother gives our narrator a mission: to leave the Long Island hotel where she is camped out to “decompress,” and find her brother, a reclusive heroin addict and renowned playwright from whom she’s been estranged ever since he overdosed at his wedding years prior.
Then the bird defecates all over her wedding dress.
When I look up
my soul is water, it
trembles beneath your breath