In short, the zeitgeist is rarely on your side. You write toward it, only to see it evaporate by publication day. And while some authors may catch the moment just right, and honestly, without mercenary intentions, such serendipities of art and chance are accidents, almost always. Those who aim, however earnest or well-intentioned, are doomed to miss the target by a mile.
Why are gimmicks often comically irritating? The very sound of the word seems to grate on popular philologist Ivor Brown, who nonetheless gives it a full entry in 1958’s Words in Our Time: “Comedians have their gimmicks, either as catchphrase, theme song, or bit of ‘business,’ which they exploit in…their appearances.” Gimmicks seem to provoke contempt simply because they are job-related: mere tools that have a strange way of stealing attention. In addition to being what Brown calls a “poor kind of artifice,” the gimmick irritates because it “abbreviates” work and time.
Repulsive if also strangely attractive, with a layer of charm we find ourselves forced to grudgingly acknowledge, labor and time-saving gimmicks are of course not exclusive to comedy. We find them in shoes and cars, appliances and food, politics and advertising, journalism and pedagogy, and virtually every object made and sold in the capitalist system.
Thirty years on, the A.D.A. has reshaped American architecture and the way designers and the public have come to think about civil rights and the built world. We take for granted the ubiquity of entry ramps, Braille signage, push buttons at front doors, lever handles in lieu of doorknobs, widened public toilets, and warning tiles on street corners and subway platforms. New courthouses, schools and museums no longer default to a flight of stairs out front to express their elevated ideals. The A.D.A. has baked a more egalitarian aesthetic of forms and spaces into the civic DNA.
But there’s still a long way to go.
What constitutes being “alone” can be fuzzy, but it ultimately comes down to the physical and psychological boundaries one draws around oneself. Honjok might partake in leisure activities alone, maintain a single-person household, avoid a workplace or office setting, limit social circles, abstain from sex or romantic relationships, or reject marriage or children. At its core, honjok culture is about resisting South Korea’s establishment society and putting individual needs and desires above loyalty to hierarchy and authority. But living independently doesn’t automatically make someone honjok, and identifying as honjok doesn’t preclude being part of a community — especially when that community is virtual.
There’s a danger that novels affirming the value of kindness and connection can tip into cliche; Joyce knows her material well enough to avoid this for the most part, and her deadpan humour undercuts any sentimentality. Her endings may not always be neatly happy, but they are fiercely hopeful.
Just when you think you can hear beyond
the mowers and raw hum of traffic
to the sound in high tree tops of the hermit thrush,
Now for a moment’s calm. Maybe it will go on
and on, like a Strindberg play,