Take us back, little time machine, with your bleepings and your flashings; take us back to crusty old London in the late 1650s, so we can clap the electrodes onto the sleeping head of blind John Milton. Let’s monitor the activity in the poet’s brain. Let’s observe its nocturnal waves. And let’s pay particular attention as his sightless eyes begin to flick and roll in deepest, darkest, dream-friendliest REM sleep, because it is at this point (we presume) that the spirit whom he calls Urania, a nightly visitor with a perfect—not to say Miltonic—command of blank verse, will manifest before his unconscious mind and give him the next 40 lines of Paradise Lost.
An acquaintance of mine, a comedy writer, once admitted to feeling disappointed that she hadn’t won any awards or recognition for her work, even though she also admitted not having done much to deserve it. We were listening to music at a local venue with a destroy fascism sign on the wall, and I remember thinking mockingly about the irrationality of my artsy friends. But when I started to tell the story to a publishing colleague during a lunch date in the park the next week, I realized that I too was living with the same quiet and ever-present disappointment—the sense that everyone around me was climbing some indescribably crucial ladder, without having much memory of why we had started climbing or what it was we hoped to find at the top. I complained, to myself and sometimes to others, that I hadn’t yet had any promising conversations with publishers who wanted to buy my book, despite the fact that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what my book even was and had certainly not written any of it.
It begins with the violins — orderly and baroque. The choir rises. The audience rises. And before you know it, the concert hall, church, rec center or school auditorium fills with the triumphant sound of one of the most beloved musical works of the season: Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.
Over the next four minutes (and change) the choir will repeat the word hallelujah 48 times, but the audience and musicians never seem to tire of it. Credit Handel’s vibrant melody, but also the almost mystical power of that combination of vowels and consonants.
When you talk to people about Jell-O, associations vary. One friend thought of hospitals: Why do they feed sick people a bowlful of sugar? My mom asked if Jell-O was making a comeback, citing Costco’s premade Jell-O shots. A lot of people mentioned the 1950s. No one said “yum.”
Nonetheless, I informed my mother that yes, Jell-O is indeed making a comeback.
A prolific novelist and essayist, Hustvedt has established a reputation for writing across the fixed borders that separate science from the humanities. Her last collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, pursued its subject down intersecting paths of personal reminiscence, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and the visual arts. Sometimes her cerebral approach can seem dry and extravagant, but now Hustvedt has combined the lively and tactile with more wide angled philosophical questions about perception and reality. Mothers, Fathers, and Others sifts a wide range of memory, experience and disciplinary perspectives into essays that bring into focus the profound contradictions of motherhood. These contradictions, Hustvedt asserts, are eclipsed by the cultural idealization of mothers as the model of self-sacrificing nurturance.
Smart about sexual desire and the ease of analyzing — but the difficulty of escaping — familiar gender roles, Sea State offers a close up view of the white, working-class resentments that helped fuel both Brexit and the Trump presidency. As a journalist, Lasley commits the cardinal sin of getting involved with one of her subjects; but as memoirist, her transgression saves Sea State from the tone of faintly anthropological distance that books about the working class often have.
But there are more poetic reasons, too, why Dr. Darwin’s old garden provides a good entrée to his son’s work. Gardens civilize our relationship with nature, but only barely so; there’s always the serpent of surprise lurking somewhere in the shrubbery. Ms. Piesse’s “The Ghost in the Garden,” with its many asides, intensely personal stories, and sometimes delightfully unrelated material—she includes a blurry photograph of an old gate that wasn’t the one she was looking for—offers a radiant literary analogue for such botanical unpredictability. But the book also directs us to a more fundamental parallel.
“Let’s Get Physical,” Danielle Friedman’s fact-packed but bouncy new book about women and exercise in 20th-century America, catalogs many such material curiosities: vibrating belts, Suzanne Somers’s ThighMaster, Get in Shape, Girl! toy sets. It also maps less obvious signposts on the long road from a sedentary standard for the fairer sex — they didn’t call boned bodices “stays” for nothing — to today’s sometimes punishing ideal of regular vigorous activity. Tampons, for example, which came to market in the 1930s but didn’t become widely popular until the 1960s, when they were marketed to the “active woman”; and jagged Vidal Sassoon coifs — “Without having to worry about ruining their carefully crafted bouffant hairdos,” Friedman writes, “women could move their bodies in new ways.”