Ultimately, what New York’s vision of the city provided, beset as it was by legitimate concerns about overcrowding and flimsy technology, was an expanded idea of how we might live together. Against the prescriptions of Howard and his ideological successors, New York refused an austere definition of nature that would prescriptively guide what people wanted and how they settled. In doing so, the city toyed with the limits of its own control, finding disaster never far from the inventiveness that characterized its way of life.
But Chris is more hopeful. “It’s important to me to be optimistic about the future,” he said. “For now we have to keep planting and raising shellfish, hoping that things will eventually get back to normal.”
“Fisherman adapt,” he added, “and always find a way to keep moving forward.”
I can’t remember a time before Pee-wee Herman. This is true chronologically, as Paul Reubens began appearing exclusively as his most iconic character years before I was born, but Pee-wee has also been a constant in my family story. My first trip to meet him was a cover for my parents’ separation and the harsh means through which it was achieved. As a result, I experienced what should’ve been the defining traumatic event of my early life as something else entirely: a big adventure.
You could be forgiven for thinking that adultery, a cornerstone of so many great nineteenth-century novels, had been exhausted as a subject. Sexual barriers have long since been torn down, taboos lifted, transgressions neutralized; from Anna Karenina’s point of view, things would look positively utopian. Yet the heart is as muddled by freedom as it was by constraint, and that is where the mordant, bruising “Luster” charges in.
I first read the book as part of the selection process for the Observer’s annual January lookahead to the best first novels of the year. It sang then and returning to it now has been a delight. Rarely does a debut novel establish its world with such sure-footedness, and Stuart’s prose is lithe, lyrical and full of revelatory descriptive insights. This is a memorable book about family, violence and sexuality
Benjamin Piekut’s book Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem is a biography and study of Henry Cow, a British collective of musicians whose existence spanned roughly 10 years from incubation to dissolution (1968–’78). But its aim is grander than that. The book is also a meditation on a range of issues: what Piekut calls “the vernacular avant-garde” in music (but with implications for artistic practice in general); the racial and sexual politics of contemporary music; communal life as an art project; improvisation and uncertainty as a method for living in the world; and (as the book’s subtitle, borrowing a phrase from one of the band’s members, suggests) on the world not as a given reality but as problem to be confronted and resolved.
The hearing aid was warm from his ear
when he slipped it into mine,
and what I remember isn’t the brief blazing
of his fingers along my earlobe,