When a new issue of The New Yorker arrived at the very end of August, the cover featured a generic picnic scene, with people sunbathing, hiking, riding horses. The first few pages held the usual ads for nylons and women’s clothing from Lord & Taylor or Bergdorf Goodman. But there was something unique about this issue: there was no “Talk of the Town,” few cartoons, no book reviews. The entire issue was devoted to one feature, 68 pages long (some thirty thousand words), written by war correspondent and novelist John Hersey. His temporary titles for the piece, “Events at Hiroshima” or “Some Experiences at Hiroshima,” had fallen away in favor of the simple and powerful: “Hiroshima.”
Sometime in the 1980s Catholic primary school teachers in Ireland abandoned the concept of sin, considering it too harsh for the six-year-olds they were training for the confessional. They reached instead for the phrase “a failure to love,” a devastating switch that moved children from the pleasures of transgression (who doesn’t like a good sin?) to the wilderness of abandonment. It was like accusing them of causing their own loneliness. There is, perhaps, a game to be played with novels along these lines, dividing fictional characters into those who sin and those who are merely wrongheaded and sad. It might also be useful to ask if the latter are more often female.
The narrator of Miranda Popkey’s first novel, Topics of Conversation, is the daughter of an old Hollywood family, now in gentle decline. Her nice, white life “was going to be suburban, it was going to be upper-middle-class,” but she throws all that into disarray when she decides to leave her husband, John, who loves her. She does this despite the fact that he was “so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener…everything a liberated woman is supposed to want.” Her remorse is partly political: How can a woman refuse all that for herself, when it is exactly what she wants for women in general? Her regret is also, in part, simply human—she does not love a man who loves her, and the pain he feels when she leaves him makes her feel badly about herself.
It is hard to know how to classify Toronto author Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s second book, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness). Marketed by the publisher as “a brief survey through the illustrious forms and genres of literary expression,” it is neither a traditional collection of short stories nor a conventional novel. What it does offer is a bewildering, subversive, and at times extremely funny exploration of how style shapes reality.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic is a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking novel. I want to discuss it around tea, preferably while in the mountains, preferably somewhere well-lit. I remember placing my bookmark in the book and thinking, I should not have read this before bed.
I was afraid of what I might dream.
I heed a path trotted for me before.
I am this impaired — forgetting
and forgetting and forgetting. What else
is this wave crashing into shore
but an attempt to cleave remembrance?
As I was walking all alane,
they came to me,
and they were very well,
their upper lips beaded
with Tamiflu,