For faithful readers, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga came to an end more than a quarter century ago. It happened in 1996, when DC Comics published The Sandman #75, the final issue of a critically acclaimed run that didn’t just establish Gaiman as a force, but helped legitimize comics as a medium. (Norman Mailer once famously described it as “a comic strip for intellectuals.”) After seven years, 75 issues (plus one special edition) and a storyline that spanned millennia, The Sandman was over—a rarity in mainstream comics, where characters often outlive their creators.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t over at all.
Everyone knows bookstores are the greatest places on earth. Having a terrible day? Go to a bookstore. Need something to do to end a lovely day, go to a bookstore? I love the smell and the sounds the way it feels to walk around and I love all the knick-knacks and if there’s a café? Heaven. But if you want to ruin bookstores for yourself, become a writer.
Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt makes the most of its fraught and carefully bound setting: in the aftermath of World War II, Leigh Welles returns from Edinburgh to her remote Scottish island home in the wake of her father’s death. Leigh arrives broke and alienated from her successful brother Sam, an army veteran; without other recourse, Leigh is forced to try to live a life on an island seemingly caught in time. The folk traditions that had been, in her childhood, perhaps quaint and suffused with only enough danger to be cautionary and exciting, seem increasingly desperate. The crows that arrive each October—called the sluagh—have become terrifying; islanders board up their windows and write warning signs in blood to keep them away. One man is missing an eye from an attack, and even animals as large as sheep have been found torn apart by the flock. The sluagh form one of the central mysteries of the novel: are they simply crows acting at the apex of their natural intelligence and stirred to aggression by biological and environmental factors, or are they, as some say, the unquiet and now malevolent souls of the dead unable to pass properly into the afterlife? Rather than answering that question early and directly, Seckel wields multiple strategies of constraint to expand the novel’s speculative possibilities and, most importantly, establish a thoroughly compelling set of character relationships that infuse the supernatural stakes with organic urgency.
Before I’d read any psychoanalytic texts, or attempted therapy myself, I was drawn to the practice for its facility with plot. This intrigue began in high school, when my mom went into training to become a clinical psychologist. Occasionally, she would arrange for a classmate to try the inkblot test on me. As a result of these sessions and of being exposed to the new terminology floating around our household, I began to sense that a problem, stared at over time, changed form—it generated its own alternatives. Strangers met up in the same room for years to talk each other into new realities. It was all very exciting, enough so that this method I barely grasped inspired me to begin writing fictional stories of comically exaggerated circumstance. One was about a woman who shows up to every session dressed as a different historical figure who shares her name. (She has no wardrobe budget for this fantasy.) In another, which was written as a play, two characters—Freud and his unconscious—are each other’s friends, family, lovers, and enemies.
This is the sort of enthusiasm for the drama of psychoanalysis that animates Judith Rossner’s novel “August,” from 1983. Reading it for the first time, last year, was like returning to the home of an old family friend after a long absence, somewhere filled with the comforting noise of loved ones rattling off associations. Before coming across “August,” I’d read some novels in which characters go to therapy, others that take the form of a patient’s confession from the couch, and plenty with characters trying to overcome their pasts. But this was something different: heaps of melodramatic stories, recounted in sessions between a therapist and one of her patients, interspersed with scenes from the therapist’s personal life, and written by a master of middlebrow genre romps that were themselves informed by Freudianism and developmental psychology.
The opening sentence of “The Last White Man,” the latest novel by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, may sound overfamiliar — “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown” — but who wouldn’t read on? A protagonist as erudite as his creator might have been grateful not to turn into a giant bug; Anders, who works in a gym and seems as aliterate as he is inarticulate, feels only rage at losing his whiteness: “He wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before.” But the self-divided Anders — could he have a more Nordic name? — calms down when he learns there’s a pandemic of changelings; the formerly white come to include his yoga-teacher girlfriend, Oona; Oona’s racist mother; and, eventually, everybody who was born white. (All except Anders’s dying father, a secondary character who gives the book its catchy, if misleading, title.) By the end, a pulp-magazine premise has metamorphosed into a vision of humanity unvexed by racial animosities.
In her new memoir, “Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility,” the nurturing impulse already manifest in Tea’s work is made literal. A “dare to the universe” turns into a dream, peopled with friends and a devoted partner. What does it mean to “conjure a life, and in the process, deeply unsettle my own?” Tea asks. Tea interrogates each element of pregnancy — how to inseminate, with whom to inseminate, how to name a child, how and with whom to parent a child — with studious commitment. These questions underlie the values that have shaped Tea’s life and work for decades: They are the building blocks of a community in which inherited forms, particularly those of romance and kinship, are never taken for granted.