Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. As the physiologist J. Scott Turner writes in “The Extended Organism”: “Animal-built structures are properly considered organs of physiology, in principle no different from, and just as much a part of the organism as kidneys, heart, lungs or livers.” This is true for termites, for example, who form a single organism in symbiosis with their nests. The extended body of the organism is created by the extended mind of the colony.
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” McBride’s triumphant novel that follows the widely acclaimed “Deacon King Kong,” serves up a riot of life crammed into a cacophonous corner of 1920s America – the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. McBride works well in tight spaces. As he proved with the streets of south Brooklyn in “Deacon King Kong” and the life of James Brown in his 2016 biography “Kill ’Em and Leave,” constraint breeds depth. There’s a world of work, hurt, absurdity, and hope in Chicken Hill, offering McBride ample ways to ponder the appeal and elusiveness of the American dream.
Exaggerated rumors about the death of the novel have been spreading for at least a century, but I’m not concerned about its imminent demise. As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, “Tremor.”
In The Lives of Animals (1999), a pair of lectures delivered in fictional form, Elizabeth Curren has become the ageing novelist Elizabeth Costello, who is much concerned with the “enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing” of animals, which to her “rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of”. The abuse of non-human animals is a constantly recurring theme in Coetzee’s work, one that obviously causes him as much anguish and outrage as it does his fictional avatar.
In the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee effectively killed her off and sent her to a Kafkaesque afterworld. Over the years since then he has resurrected her in a series of enigmatic short stories. Those stories are collected in The Pole, preceded by the eponymous 150-page novella.
Now Sarah Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers — the “word nerds” — who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time.
The germ of Ogilvie’s book lies in a discovery she made when about to leave her job working on the dictionary itself: Murray’s address book, lying unexamined in the basement archive of the Oxford University Press. “The Dictionary People,” then, is the result of following up these leads, digging into the lives of Murray’s volunteer army.