Maybe poetry only requires typography — but doesn’t it also require sound, the sense that at least in theory you could hear the poem? I do feel I can “read” that long m — it has a sonic quality — and the Saroyan poem “lighght.” An ampersand alone on a page would represent a pronounceable word. But what about a parenthesis, or a semicolon?
How does a writer of fiction approach a national horror that is also profoundly — one is tempted to say unspeakably — personal? How and why tell stories about it? What sort of stories?
The achievement of Memorial is not in its mainstreaming of gay sexuality but its accomplishment of something far simpler and foundational to the novel: what is it like to see the world from Benson’s perspective? What is it like to see the world from Mike’s? Only in shifting perspectives, in temporarily relinquishing our own, can we inhabit a relationship from two sides.
Robert Jones Jr.’s striking debut novel “The Prophets” imagines how Isaiah and Samuel, two enslaved young men, create a space for mutual affection in an American era that suppressed not only their freedom of sexual expression but their right to be human altogether.
Not far into “Beginners,” Tom Vanderbilt’s tribute to the life-changing magic of learning new skills, he describes taking his young daughter snowboarding. At the time, Vanderbilt was nearing 50; he decided to approach the activity with an open mind, freed from all expectation, even if he was old enough to know what the risks were. “I had no goals other than avoiding the hospital,” he writes, after referring to the novelist Norman Rush’s comparison of being in love to going into an undiscovered room. “I just wanted to enter a new ‘room.’”