There’s a moment late in Emma Straub’s novel This Time Tomorrow that I hesitate to even allude to, because reading it, and realizing what she’s been doing, is one of those experiences that suddenly casts the world into slightly sharper focus. The book offers a revelation about a defining emotion of modern life, and it surprised even Straub herself. “What’s so funny about being a novelist is how stupid one is, really,” she told me last month over Zoom. She knew that the novel was about grief and about pre-grief, the strange purgatory of knowing that someone you love is going to die, when life feels indefinitely suspended. What she didn’t know was what the completed work would ultimately expose: that being human is largely about loss. That we lose pieces of ourselves—treasured possessions, beloved places, entire stages of our loved ones’ lives—with such regularity that we scarcely think to grieve them at all.
Say you’re a writer (everybody says so nowadays), and you aspire to sign a Mephistophelean contract with a major literary agent, because you hanker after a lucrative Big Five contract and assorted fornication partners.
If your pitch passes the marketability muster, you will be assigned to a Stylist, whose job is to comb through your “property” (the major agent doesn’t bother) and compel you to remove anything that might be offensive. All your previous publications must also be scrutinized, and, if anything is found to be potentially hurtful toward members of marginalized communities, you can kiss off representation. (And here you thought style referred to the effective arrangement, rather than the socialization, of words.)
Pirkko Saisio’s novel The Red Book of Farewells opens on perhaps the most harrowing loss of all for an author: the complete disappearance of an already finished work. While hiking across an island, the protagonist, also named Pirkko Saisio, receives a phone call from her agent inquiring about the state of a manuscript Pirkko’s supposed to be turning in. “It’s gone,” she says while looking at a dead seal that lies among the rocks before her, its innards exposed, mouthful of yellow teeth open to the air. (For clarity, I will refer to the writer as Saisio and her character as Pirkko.) Her companion vomits. “The whole book?” asks the agent. “It’s all gone, the whole book,” Pirkko confirms. From the start, then, the reader understands that the version of The Red Book of Farewells they’re holding is something reconstructed, rewritten—a reference to an original gone forever.
Whether she is writing about a couple that reads prophecies on the shells of red-winged blackbirds or an Italian grandma who believes a garlic necklace is a cure-all, McIlwain brings to life a luminous world of plants and animals that even the extraction industries, sleazy bettors and smooth-talking city hunters “with slick cars and six-figure salaries” cannot destroy.
In her fourth collection of essays, Quietly Hostile, the bestselling author and television writer renews her love/hate vows with the human race — as well as her relationship with her own flaws and failings. By her own admission, she's lousy with money, she sounds like an idiot on podcasts, and she is more apt to down a six-pack of Diet Coke on any given day before she touches a glass of water. Luckily for the reader, she never wallows in loathing, self- or otherwise. Instead, she lets us all in on the joke. And what a joke it is.