Somehow, there was “only” one Black writer praised in 1963; at least, so argued novelist John A. Williams. This solitary writer was James Baldwin, who had replaced Richard Wright, who had, in turn, replaced Langston Hughes. That succession, according to Williams, was because Black writers are only compared to each other. And this narrowness, warned Williams, “confine[s] them to a literary ghetto from which only one Negro name at a time may emerge.”
Scientists have been intrigued by animals that lack senescence for a long time. The experimental zoologist Abraham Trembley first studied the hydra nearly 300 years ago, cutting one in half in an effort to figure out whether it was an animal or a plant. He incorrectly hypothesized that if it survived and regenerated itself, it had to be a plant. Not only did it live, both halves grew into fully functioning hydras.
Pretty much since humans were first able to conceive of the limits to their time alive, they’ve searched for the secrets of immortality. The quest to live longer has animated many scientific endeavors and field research, some more sensible than others, and today continues to preoccupy many in the tech world who seek the vast profits that potentially await. Many look to the natural world for inspiration or models that humans might emulate in order to avoid the usual consequences of the progression of time. Though humans do now live longer on average than ever before (mostly as a result of improved standards of living, inoculation against disease and better sanitation practices), no breakthroughs in the quest to defeat aging have yet been made.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Restaurants don’t invest in their pastry program because not enough people are ordering dessert. So they put what New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells calls “numbingly predictable” low-labor desserts on the menu. Then customers—who have palate fatigue from experiencing the same few dishes over and over—decide to skip dessert and just get the check. And restaurants go on operating without pastry chefs, thinking they aren’t needed.
As Tampa bakery owner Villacorta sees it, “We’re becoming extinct.”
Reading Dane Bahr’s The Houseboat — a gothic noir set in 1960s Iowa — I was reminded of an observation that Jonathan Lethem once made about James Brown. The genius of Brown, Lethem argued, lay in his ability to develop an entire oeuvre out of the interstitial, transitional sounds of R&B songs. Brown turned “the barked or howled vocal asides, […] the brief single-chord jamming on the outros,” and “the drum breaks and guitar vamps” into the core theater of his unique music. Essentially, he moved background into foreground.
Bahr — a debut novelist from Minnesota, the same region where his story takes place — does something similar in The Houseboat. He turns those elements of style, theme, and motif that typically litter the periphery of traditional detective novels — the dark, bleak, foreboding imagery; clever similes; sexual perversion; alcoholism; haunted pasts and metaphorical ghosts — into the central focus. He moves background into foreground. Everything else sloughs away.
“Liberation Day” is a spiky, at times difficult collection, seldom providing the reader with much in the way of catharsis. But these are stories worth reading, the best of them as thought-provoking and resonant as a fan of Saunders might expect. Eschewing the speculatively richer, more dramatic question of what happens after the system comes crashing down, Saunders focuses instead on the queasy, knotty consequences of our present dilemma: What if it doesn’t?
In addition to a horror novel and a work of historical fiction about the 20th-century American South, “The Hollow Kind” is also an environmental allegory, a creepy variation on Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax.” As with that children’s book, for Nellie, the only path toward survival is to accept that there are certain boundaries humankind wasn’t meant to cross.