Why did Gilbert take this seriously? When she says she does “not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced … grievous and extreme harm,” her sympathy is well-placed but muddled and indulgent. She stops short of an apology to avoid the appearance of scandal, and she doesn’t call for peace to show she had never supported anything else. In other words, she says as little as possible, passing on the easy opportunity to defend her right to free expression and anyone’s right to read or not read whatever they want, both of which are currently and repeatedly threatened in Russia, Ukraine and the United States.
How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?
Thai Food Near Me is a small but powerful symbol of Google’s far-reaching impact on businesses over the past two decades and the lengths their owners will go to try to optimize their operations for the company’s platforms. The name is both notable and obvious — if you’ve spent any amount of time searching for things online, you will understand the reference immediately. The turn is that 25 years after Google Search first arrived, the name says the quiet part out loud.
“When you have a million restaurants close by, you will be in the bottom [of rankings] if it’s a random name,” Jirapraphanan says. “But [when] we used Thai Food Near Me, people started knowing us.” Customers, like Jirapraphanan, were searching for the exact phrase and stumbling upon the restaurant, they told him.
Ever since I was a kid, watching re-runs of ancient cartoons at my Grandma Marge’s house in Hubbard, Nebraska, I’ve been a fan of Casper the Friendly Ghost, especially the original episodes from the late 1940s. The first installment opened with baritone radio announcer Frank Gallop intoning: “There are some people who believe in ghosts, and there are some people who don’t. If you’re the believe-in-ghosts kind, then this story is about one. And if you’re the don’t-believe-in-ghosts-kind, well, just for fun, this story is about one anyway.”
I believed, I wanted to tell Frank Gallop; I was in the former category, even though I’d never yet been lucky enough to see one.
This is a novel with enough frame narratives to make the ghost of Joseph Conrad come and listen; the story told by Adanson is itself surrounded by other people, other considerations. Diop takes a risk in devoting the long first section to Adanson’s daughter Aglaé, her complicated middle life, and her feelings about a father more interested in compiling his Famille des plantes than in his own young family. Though this is deeply appealing biographical terrain, it’s not clear where the central path of the novel will open up. By the end we can return with pleasure to this beginning, meeting Aglaé in her greenhouse, understanding how far this is a book about inheritances that come late or in roundabout ways and are sometimes not wanted at all. The inheritors have their own lives to be getting on with. That fact provides a nice counterweight to the grandeur of emotion with which Adanson tells his tale.
This is the difficulty. Is child-rearing on some level not arduous, boring, numbing, and then suddenly revelatory? By the end of the novel, Rose has her first smile, and Helen and Rose briefly fall asleep to a Winnicott lecture. Moments like this may make everything feel worth it to some. Others may still wonder what the fuss is about, like they don’t even know what a human is anyway.