The Pierre had shut down its hotel operations on March 22nd and laid off eighty per cent of the staff, some three hundred and fifty people. Luiggi recalled thinking, “We’re pausing for a few weeks—but we’ll reopen by Easter.” A year later, the Pierre and other New York City hotels remain nearly empty, and the majority of their staff out of work. With mass vaccinations under way, Americans could return to many aspects of their pre-pandemic lives by the end of this year. But the city’s hotel industry is haunted by questions: When will travellers return? And when will New Yorkers and others feel comfortable crowding into a hotel ballroom again?
Mythic language will forever find a home in the Black American experience. Jail is the shadowed and forgotten realm to which mere chance can consign you. Jazz is Prometheus bringing fire to humans. The Great Migrations are Old Testament journeys, a rights-affirming Supreme Court case a New Testament parable. So myth is the tone of Morowa Yejidé’s second novel, “Creatures of Passage,” a modern-day fable about the fight for the soul of a boy who witnesses, and struggles to make sense of, an act of molestation at school.
The voice of a bright, stunted, 35-year-old orphan named Frankie pulls me smack into Jessie van Eerden’s Call It Horses and does not release me until well after the book’s last word. That voice sounds rasped, imperfect, and running the full register. When such a voice speaks, whispers, and sings a story about love, life, brokenness, pain, and the merging and tearing of relationships; about death; about becoming — well, I’m hooked.
For all its looseness, the story is signature Jo Ann Beard. It takes you to places you don’t necessarily expect, one association leading to another, jumping around in time and place with confident fluidity. “Every moment of your life brings you to the moment you’re experiencing now. And now. And now,” she writes at the end of the book. Some of these moments are real and some imagined; all of them are true.
“Mine!” sets out to change the way we think about what we own, which is often decidedly at odds with reality. The authors cast the idea of ownership broadly, taking in not just land, cash and cars but also the confounding array of things we claim as our own, or try to, in our lives. Who is entitled to those few precious inches of space between our knees and the inevitably reclining seat in front of us on airplanes? Can someone force me to lop off the tops of my trees just because my neighbors have decided to install solar panels on their roof? Do I really need to tell my doctor not to steal my cells while I undergo surgery? And what exactly does Amazon mean when it says that the e-book I just purchased — or thought I did — “may become unavailable” to me?
That Frankel is willing to point out that the movie is flawed is part of what makes the book so essential — Shooting Midnight Cowboy is a history, not a paean, and he asks viewers to reconsider what the movie meant, not just to American culture, but to the cast and crew who made it. Frankel's book is a must-read for anyone interested in cinematic history, and an enthralling look at Schlesinger's "dark, difficult masterpiece and the deeply gifted and flawed men and women who made it."
The novel of the “new ethics” is not all novels, however. It’s not even most. But insofar as The Novel and the New Ethics describes a subset of highbrow literary fiction — a small but significant corner of the literary marketplace — it is an astute, oftentimes convincing study. You might choose to see this study as the history of a certain kind of novel, and, equally, an endorsement of a certain kind of reading.