“What we’re talking about anthropologically is contagion magic,” Arthur Fournier, a broker of archival material and rare books, tells me, lifting his copy of The Golden Bough, James George Frazer’s canonical text from 1890, into the Zoom frame as a means of citation. The concept of sympathetic or contagion magic is that an object might bear traces of those who come into contact with it; in this case, the belief that Didion’s paperweights and trash bins might hold some mark, some residual energy, of the writer. Fournier is quick to condemn Frazer’s framing of this magic as primitive and points to “a long chain of unbroken belief in civilizations all over the world” that objects might hold some “intimate proximity, which is soulful and spiritual.”
I have made reckless pronouncements of love. These declarations are usually inappropriate, always unexpected, and often result in consequences I neither anticipate nor desire.
I first realized this after I graduated from law school and started seeing a gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago hospital. As a law student, I’d seen the specialist in Student Health, a gently alcoholic woman who was quite capable before 5:00 p.m. but less reliable after hours. In contrast, Dr. Glassman was an expert in the field. He was a short, bouncy Wallace Shawn of a man with hair like a tonsured monk and a heh-heh-heh giggle.
Carlisle Martin, the 43-year-old choreographer protagonist at the center of Meg Howrey’s fourth novel, struggles to make dances that will disrupt classical ballet’s often formulaic roles and plotlines. “There are no mothers-in-law in ballet,” she paraphrases the renowned choreographer George Balanchine. In other words, this is “not an art form suited for portraying complicated family relationships, or psychological subtleties.”
But literature is. With “They’re Going to Love You,” Howrey, a former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet who previously revisited the ballet world in her 2012 novel “The Cranes Dance,” proves herself a talented choreographer in her own right. She deftly arranges her characters’ betrayals, fidelities and accumulated disappointments to portray a family stymied by its own silences, one in which “nobody knew how to stop themselves from being themselves.”
It’s not easy being Michelle Obama. Fabulous, yes. Easy, no. She is a world-class worrier, a change-avoider and, by her own admission, a bit of a nervous Nellie. (As a child, she almost missed her chance to be in a Christmas play, wearing a beloved red velvet dress and patent leather shoes, because she was terrified of sharing the stage with a stuffed turtle.) And let’s just say that spontaneity is not her strong suit: “I’m not a leaper or a flier, but a deliberate, rung by rung ladder climber,” writes the former first lady in her new book, “The Light We Carry.” I’m pretty sure she makes lists, then makes lists of those lists, then color-codes them all.
So it is perhaps no surprise that Obama’s road map for uncertain times resonates in ways that other self-help books do not. If I am going to have someone guide me through this terrain, I don’t want to hear from preternaturally poised Martha Stewart or unflappable George Clooney or, for that matter, that tower of cool and confidence Barack Obama. For this crew, self-assurance seems like a birthright.