Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. It can convince us of a candy-coated vision of “the good old days,” making us myopic to the wider schema of structural inequities, resistant to progress’s pull. And yet. We seldom speak of the grief about our nostalgia for vanishing public spaces; but it smarts all the same. For many among us, our distress is one of stolen inheritance. We pictured ourselves handing down certain experiences to younger generations, moving for a time in the same, warm psychic spaces. Connecting, despite our differences.
I’m already barreling through time, thinking about a future version of my daughter, grown desperate for her own version of teenage independence. Where will she spend her formative years, if not at the mall?
On Washington's San Juan Island, a national historical park harks back to a notorious 1859 border dispute when the British and Americans almost went to war over a pig.
Like all of Strout’s novels, “Lucy by the Sea” has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. It is meant to feel like life—random, surprising, occasionally lit with flashes of larger meaning—but it is art. The Shaker plainness of Strout’s prose stretches to accommodate Lucy’s bewilderment as she goes about her life’s great project: attempting to understand the people around her. Despite powerful moments of intuition—that her son-in-law’s father has contracted the coronavirus, that her daughter is contemplating an affair—Lucy, who’s in her sixties, keeps telling herself that she knows nothing. It becomes an unspoken article of faith for her, and a humble spur to her curiosity.
The maze, the monster, the fire, the water: Serpell reminds us on every page that nothing is less reliable than language—that every story is necessarily a betrayal. I don’t want to tell you what happened. The result is a novel that reclaims and refashions the genre of the elegy, charging it with as much eros as pathos. Furrows are the tracks we make and the tracks we cover up, and the shifting ground of Serpell’s novel denies every certainty save that the furrows are where we all live.
Count me among those who rely on NPR reporter Nina Totenberg's crystalline explanations for all things legal, especially Supreme Court arcana — no one is clearer and more incisive.
Now comes Totenberg with Dinners with Ruth, a memoir ostensibly about her long friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“Life’s Work” is one of the best books about television I’ve read. It’s funny, discursive, literate, druggy, self-absorbed, fidgety, replete with intense perceptions. It does not read, as too many El Lay books do, as if it were filmed with a Steadicam at golden hour.