Shakespeare and Company’s green-and-yellow facade and weather-beaten sidewalk book bins telegraphed old-world charm. Inside, thousands of books both new and used lined the shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling. More books were heaped on tables crammed into corners. I’d never seen so many books packed into a space. Tara had told us on the way over that this English-language bookstore, founded in 1951, had long been the center of expat literary life and that many famous writers had visited and even slept there over the years. Looking around the store, an extraordinary tribute to reading and writing as surely as the Musée d’Orsay was to art, I could see why.
“The Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have the Great Wall, the British have immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers.” wrote Kenneth T. Jackson in his 1996 article “The World’s a Mall.” Jackson, an eminent historian of New York City, turned his gaze to the suburban phenomenon of the American mall and found it to be a striking synecdoche for a particular epoch in American history. And he wouldn’t be wrong. The mall––in its sameness, and abundance, its hidden seediness and advertised cleanliness––captures the ethos of capitalist post-war America and the rise of neoliberalism. But as time churned on and neoliberalism became the defining structural tenet of American life, even the mall’s half-hearted attempt at creating public space was cannibalized by a system orchestrated under one flag: profit maximization.
I knew going in that Crane’s own marriage ended after 15 years. I also knew that despite the best (and worst) efforts of all the self-help columns, books, call-in shows and podcasts in the “can this marriage be saved” industry, the most revealing accounts often come in the form of an autopsy.
And that, Crane’s book, “This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After,” most definitely is. Categorized as a memoir, it deals almost exclusively with the author’s marriage to artist and woodworker Ben Brandt, which ended in a way that seemed, to her, sudden and baffling. He left her for another woman, a client for whom he had been installing windows. (To be fair, they appear to have been very fancy windows that required a lot of design and, well, collaboration.)
All nations beguile themselves with stories, and Ireland has long been susceptible to the warm tingle of mythology. Some cherished beliefs, though, are not only comforting but at least partly true. For instance, during the collapse of the Roman empire, Irish scholars really did salvage much of Europe’s literary heritage. Mind you, this had as much to do with their remoteness and obscurity as their zeal for learning.
Emma Donoghue’s latest novel takes a disenchanted view of these events. Set in the seventh century, it strips away the misty hagiography shrouding this period, dispensing with saints and scholars in favour of striving and imperfect humans. Though it retains some of the starkness and figurative grandeur of mythology, this is a tale that entertains no illusions.
There are lessons in these essays about creating new types of narratives for the era of climate crisis that loosely link them to the others in the collection; but what lasts are these little brutal gems of images, the Wilk whose involuntary trauma-response to stress is to fall suddenly asleep, the Wilk who receives a consensual slap by a stranger at a Nordic LARP-ing quest. In these essays, it is the lucidly observed idiosyncrasies of everyday life, so profoundly strange, that expand our sense of the beautiful and the possible, no landrus required.
I’ve mentioned the title of this memoir to some people who have dismissed it out of hand, remarking that being glad one’s parent is dead is crude and a sentiment that should be kept to oneself. But those people haven’t read the book. McCurdy takes her time to remember difficult and complex moments of her life, staying true to her younger self while ultimately trying to come to terms with who she is as an independent adult. It’s a triumph of the confessional genre.
today i went to the grocery store
and bought several organic fruits