For those who choose a career in entertainment or the arts, there is no 9-to-5 job, consistent and secure, to greet you every day. There is no pre-set career path laid out before you with obvious and logical steps up from entry-level to top of the heap. There are no paid holidays, no bonuses, nothing remotely resembling any type of security. For me and countless others in my circle, the only comfort and security is being wrapped in a blanket of others in the same position, a collective of fellow dreamers providing desperately needed emotional support, any time, day or night. Providing love.
But like most love affairs, I couldn’t really see or appreciate it until it was over.
Throughout Don DeLillo’s nearly fifty-year corpus of fiction, the number seven appears and reappears as a kind of talisman, a charm that his characters carry through the crossfire of American history. Jack Gladney, the narrator and professor of “Hitler studies” in “White Noise” (1985), pauses mid-monologue to stare at the carpet and count to seven, a moment of private ritual as he lectures about the Führer. Lianne, of DeLillo’s 9/11 novel “Falling Man” (2007), whose husband has narrowly survived the attacks on the World Trade Center, finds “a tradition of fixed order” in the act of counting down from a hundred by sevens. And, in “The Silence” (2020), DeLillo’s most recent novel, set on Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022, one character turns to the same habit after a mysterious digital apocalypse blacks out the big game—and everything else.
During one key moment, E. Lily Yu’s disquieting debut novel On Fragile Waves offers a kind of authorial self-critique regarding the representation of diasporic migrants. A character Yu calls “the writer” has traveled to Australia to interview asylum seekers in the Afghan migrant community there and to visit detention centers as part of her research. The writer is given a tour by Sister Margaret, a nun and a tireless advocate for refugee families — including the Daizangi family, whose story forms the center of the novel.
Irish. That is the one-word review I wanted to write after finishing Michelle Gallen’s début novel “Big Girl, Small Town.” I mean it as the highest of compliments, but the Books editor would not welcome the logistical nightmare of laying out a one-word review and, in the end, it’s probably a disservice to Gallen and could be interpreted as dismissive or snarky. It’s not.
The intergalactic conspiracy to which Winter's Orbit builds is less gripping than Kiem and Jainan's rise to power couple. But when these sensitive boys figure out what actually makes their match work, that's when sparks fly.
At Jones Point Park, I seek out
the Boundary Stone in its niche
in the retaining wall.