The philosophical character of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose subtitle is How Toys Become Real, reflected Bianco’s abiding interest in the relationship between reality and the imagination. “The child mind is far more logical and orderly, far more concerned with the value of realities, than is sometimes supposed,” she wrote. “The fact that these realities may differ from our own has no bearing on the question.” Children are perfectly well aware that the lives of their beloved playthings are imaginary; what they lack, Bianco believed, are the barriers that will be erected in adolescence between imagined realities and material ones. After all, it is quite easy to prove that the imagination makes things real: We call this reading. The little boy’s love for his treasured rabbit is not so different from an adult’s absorption in a good book. For Bianco, the necessary role of fiction was to act as a mental preserve for the once-wild faculty of the imagination, whose domestication is a bittersweet but essential condition of adulthood.
But then I picked it up again, and then put it down, and then picked it up. Confusion gave way to fascination. I realized that the fitful syntax and refusal to explain or contextualize was rendering the experience of having trouble speaking. It’s a difficulty that can be heightened by having one’s language suppressed or displaced. Cha’s parents, both Korean, were raised in Manchuria during Japan’s occupation of Korea and China, and forced to learn and work in Japanese. Cha herself learned English as a second language at eleven, after her family immigrated to the United States. “Dictee” ’s intentionally fractured syntax evokes these experiences of colonization and displacement. Cathy Park Hong, in her 2020 book “Minor Feelings,” says that, when teaching “Dictee,” she instructs students to “approach the book as if they’re learning a new language, so that language is not a direct expression of them but putty in their mouths that they’re shaping into vowels.” What is commonly called “broken” speech, or speech that is not fluent, often provides the underlying music of “Dictee”: “Being broken. Speaking broken. Saying broken. Talk broken. Say broken. Broken speech. Pidgon tongue.”
But the toughest lesson Strong shares in “Flight” is that not every story can have a satisfying conclusion. True reconciliation, safety, stability, fulfillment: These are destinations along a flight path forever uncertain — though shot through, like this novel, with moments of transcendence.
Reading “Toad” is like rummaging through the junk drawer of a fascinating person. It is chaotic, intimate and unruly. There’s not much of a structure or a plot. Still, it’s impossible not to share Naomi Huffman’s bewilderment at the book’s burial. Dunn’s style is unlike that of anyone living or dead: simultaneously practical and bonkers; lovely and nasty. If the story of Sam and Carlotta is slightly dated — a tragedy of misdirected ’60s radicalism — it comes to us by way of a narrator whose psychological pain is horrifyingly timeless.
The story of humans measuring things is no less than the story of civilization — a claim that sounds like irritating hyperbole but in this case turns out to be true. Vincent conveys how measurement developed as a “scaffold for knowledge,” encouraging us to categorize and make comparisons. It is also extraordinarily powerful, “a tool of social cohesion and control.”
To say that the act of a woman is the act of a foreigner, an
immigrant, to set itself to and from these coordinates.