In 1996, upon my arrival in the United States, I attended a university orientation for international students, which began with the organizer asking us to stand and face what she said was the east. Orientation, she explained, came from the word orient. To be able to tell east from west, north from south, was the first step to finding one’s way in a new country.
This memory returned while I was reading Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, The Hero of This Book, when the narrator, an American writer visiting London, is momentarily lost on a Sunday morning, until she hears the bells of St. Paul’s. “I came around the corner and there was the cathedral, as startling as an elk in the road.” I wonder if this is the first time that St. Paul’s has been compared to an elk. Some writers describe human habitats eloquently; others write about nature with wisdom. McCracken sees the elk in the middle of London, an image that perfectly encapsulates the essence of her fiction: seemingly nonsensical and yet making perfect sense. The world, strange in the first place, is often made stranger by our minds. McCracken captures the twilight zone between consciousness and subconsciousness, where intuitions are not yet filed away, impulses not yet stifled.
On this day, the day that Mom canned the peaches, things were more or less normal. No one was fighting yet, no rain, and boots had been taken off at the back door. So far. I waited, practicing patience, because Mom said we must do one thing at a time. I sat on the kitchen floor. Soon, she would scrub it again. The tiles were like a tessellation and many of these spear-like shapes had come undone. We kept all the loose tiles in a wicker basket beneath the bar counter in the kitchen. In a nook, between two stools where the wicker basket was, I picked out the tiles and, matching each shape, put them back in the spots where they fit best. Mom said if I was going to do that then I should Superglue them, because Dad would never get around to really fixing them with the grout and everything they’d need to stay secure. My dexterity, though decent, we knew wasn’t good enough that I could handle Superglue without every limb being stuck together until I formed my own shell, so I knew she must have been being passive-aggressive and just wanted to complain about him. I didn’t have those exact words for it at the time, but I knew what it meant when adults said stuff like that. I knew she wouldn’t give me the Superglue though I looked at her excitedly when she said it.
I was eating French fries at the Odeon when I noticed that a server had begun to repeatedly check in. “Oh,” I realized, “she needs the table back.” It was 6:22 p.m. The restaurant was full. Once, 11:40 p.m. had been “a little too early for Odeon,” according to “Bright Lights, Big City,” Jay McInerney’s 1984 chronicle of druggy downtown Manhattan, which featured the spot’s red neon marquee on its original paperback cover. “We sometimes didn’t get busy until, like, 8:30,” says Roya Shanks, the restaurant’s longtime maitre d’. But lately, she reports, there are “waves of people making 5 o’clock reservations” — unheard of just a few years ago. Farther uptown, at Danny Meyer’s Ci Siamo and Gramercy Tavern, “People sit down at 6:30, and our restaurant is full,” says Megan Sullivan, the director of operations for Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. “Eight o’clock is what was hot for New Yorkers,” adds Roni Mazumdar, a co-owner of Dhamaka, a difficult-to-reserve Indian restaurant on the Lower East Side. “Now, people email, ‘Can I come in for that 6:00 reservation?’”
Interpolation is central to storing and communicating electronic data, constructing cryptographic schemes, and more. It’s why you can scratch a CD and still hear music, or get a QR code dirty and still scan it. It’s why space missions like the Voyager program could send clear digital images back to Earth. It’s why a cluster of computers can perform a complex computation even if one of those computers malfunctions.
These applications all rely on a strikingly beautiful and conceptually straightforward use of interpolation: so-called Reed-Solomon codes, and the codes that build on them.
We just sat there listening as we took slow drags from cigarettes and really tasted the liquor in our glasses. One of the girls lit a candle and danced so she could watch her own shadow on the wall, and even though it was irksome and pretentious, it clarified what we were learning, which is that jazz was a way to drill down to some emotional marrow, some shimmer in our senses we didn’t know we had in us.
This book is a paean to the Bay Area in the 1990s, and to the uncertainties of anyone who is just trying to fit in. It’s also, in its own quiet way, an act of kindness.