In the evening it started to rain, pooling in the backyard until the earth couldn’t swallow it anymore and the grass went under, a jade gleam like a rice paddy. Then it started coming in, finding the weakness under the sliding doors, seeping and spilling so gently across the white tile of the living room, almost apologetically, because it had nowhere else to go.
In Hawai‘i, it rains almost every day, but for the most part gently, at the edges of waking life, early in the morning and again at night, what the weather reporters duly describe as passing windward and mauka (mountain) showers. When it does fall during the day, you can usually see it before you feel it, dark clouds massing in a corner as the rest of the sky stays that ridiculous blue, a color impossible to prove to anyone who doesn’t live here. It can feel like rain is a place apart, with borders; you can drive out of it in a minute—walk out of it, even, by simply crossing to the sunny side of the street.
We were two or three weeks into building a cabin when the first two-by-four became the target of a sudden, white-hot flash of anger. It was the summer of 2018, in the middle of Washington’s emerald-soaked Cascade Range, and I was on the phone with my father, seeking advice about some framing conundrum, while my longtime friend Patrick (who goes by Pat) was wrestling a 16-foot board toward a miter saw. When the whir of the blade stopped, it became immediately clear that he had cut it wrong. The sawdust still airborne, Pat reached down, grabbed a two-by-four with the conviction of a Baptist preacher, and sent it flying into the forest with a short, crisp, “Fuck.”
Can a person with a tattoo have a soul? To judge from a broad swath of contemporary fiction, the answer would seem to be no — at least if the tattooed person in question is young, lives in a place like Los Angeles or Austin or Brooklyn and works in the arts. In that case, the character is clearly a member of the species “hipster,” almost always written about ironically, portrayed as too vain and ridiculous to be taken seriously.
It’s refreshing, then, that David Goodwillie’s very good new novel, “Kings County,” depicts such people with genuine, unmitigated sympathy and good-fellowship, as if, in spite of their fashionable lifestyles, they are as fully human as anyone else.
“Inferno” is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos. We still don’t like to talk about postpartum mental illness, or the fact that, when a mother becomes ill and doesn’t have a support system or access to mental health care, the emotional damage to both her and her children can reverberate across generations.
“Carcass. Cut in half. Stunner. Slaughter line. Spray wash.” From the first words of the Argentine novelist Agustina Bazterrica’s second novel, “Tender Is the Flesh,” the reader is already the livestock in the line, reeling, primordially aware that this book is a butcher’s block, and nothing that happens next is going to be pretty.
“Migrations” is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over. It’s a story about our mingling sorrows, both personal and global, and the survivor’s guilt that will be left in their wake.
Blume reminds us that Hersey’s work still best describes what that would look like on an intimate level; like his original reporting, “Fallout” is a book of serious intent that is nonetheless pleasant to read. There are knowable reasons for this, including Blume’s flawless paragraphs; her clear narrative structure; her compelling stories, subplots and insights; her descriptions of two great magazine editors establishing the standards of integrity that continue at The New Yorker and other high-end magazines today; the oddball characters like General Groves who keep popping up; and most of all, the attractive qualities of her protagonist, John Hersey. In a world sick with selfies, Hersey’s asceticism still stands out.
Not to give anything away, but “in about five billion years, the sun will swell to its red giant phase, engulf the orbit of Mercury and perhaps Venus, and leave the Earth a charred, lifeless, magma-covered rock.” That’s how Katie Mack starts her story. It’s downhill from there.
Through that story, she ultimately offers a transhistorical definition of literariness: literary texts fabricate belief, but they also raise belief as a question, troubling it, reconfiguring its meaning. And although Kahn herself does not go so far, The Trouble with Literature might also prompt us to wonder what role literature plays in the organization of contemporary categories of knowledge.
Listen: there is no proof that this moment,
silver nitrate and sparkling, will be remembered.