The source of le Carré’s popularity might be that he understood keenly the yearning to do work that is good, in every sense, and our collective sadness that so few options exist for it. Many of his characters are quiet, ordinary people longing for honorable work and finding, as we do, all paths riddled with complicity and compromise. Sometimes it feels like there’s no way out except to disappear into fantasy—but le Carré wrote fiction that refused to lie to us. Deceit was his old job.
It was after reading “Happy All the Time” that I started writing fiction again, after decades away. My only goal, at first, was to write scenes that made me feel the way “Happy All the Time” made me feel as I read it. It was the only way I could keep myself going, honestly, writing while navigating family life and a job and the very typical problems of a sandwich-generation dad. And so when I found myself edging toward darkness, I steered toward the light instead. Writing at 10:45 at night, after I’d put the kids to bed, I just didn’t have it in me to put my own characters, or myself, through truly terrible things.
But all these cartoons did exist. In fact, they were very popular. They are a problematic, essential part of the fabric of American life, and of the world that came before the one in which we’re now trying to raise our children. More than nearly any other cultural product, Looney Tunes makes it possible for children to have a sophisticated conversation with the past, because its entertainment value is undimmed by its continuity with the parts of that past that are disposable, unprofitable, or embarrassing. These films must not simply vanish in an ecstasy of corporate bean counting. They belong to history, and they belong to us.
Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind? No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.
Over the past three decades, Stephen Amidon has produced a series of novels as compulsively readable as they are hard-edge about such uncomfortable facts of American life as race, class and money. His latest, “Locust Lane,” adheres to this bracing tradition with the story of a young woman killed in the affluent Boston suburb of Emerson and the ugly truths about several of its elite denizens that come to light in the murder’s wake.
“Rough Sleepers” follows Dr. Jim O’Connell, a Camus-quoting, onetime philosophy graduate student turned Harvard-trained physician who, since 1985, has been treating Boston’s most vulnerable unhoused population: the city’s “rough sleepers” (a 19th-century Britishism and Dr. Jim’s preferred term), men and women who dwell mostly out of doors, on the margins of the margins — in parks, in subway tunnels, on sidewalks. In an increasingly expensive, gentrifying Boston, these people inhabit a uniquely hellish landscape. Bedding down outside, they die at 10 times the rate as housed Bostonians. They die of overdoses, of being set on fire, of being beaten to death, of suicide, of falling asleep in the snow and never waking up. “The best feeling in my life, the best feeling, was going to sleep,” says one, Tony Columbo (a pseudonym; Kidder has changed the names of many of Dr. Jim’s patients), after he overdoses on fentanyl. “The worst feeling was waking back up. To realize, first of all, that tomorrow there’s no such thing as religion or God. … It’s just that I want to disappear.”
Malcolm’s unusual form offers up the idea that all we really have of the past is a box of Old Not Good Photos that we must work very hard to understand. She is writing about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to us. She asks, “Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud? Doesn’t the lock on the bedroom door permanently protect them from our curiosity, keep us forever in the corridor of doubt?”
This particular quest – in search of the idea of paradise in the midst of political complication – is something of a summation of that roving life.
I wake up and eat a banana.
Stand naked in my kitchen.
Shave and listen to Billie Holiday.