Perhaps, though, the act of explicitly reimagining a classic is not entirely distinct from what novelists do as a matter of course. "Novelists are quite parasitical in our approach to material, whether it's our own lives or turning people we've met into characters," says Biles. "There's always an element of harvesting material and producing something new with it."
"We underestimate how much a part of literature is rewriting existing literature," agrees Newman. "You want to write something that says what the last book you read didn't say. When you narrow it down to one book, the scales fall from your eyes, and you realise that that's what you've been doing all along."
To us humans, glass is ubiquitous and banal; to birds, it’s one of the world’s most confounding materials. A tanager or flicker flying toward a transparent window perceives only the space and objects beyond, not the invisible forcefield in its way. The reflective glass that coats many modern skyscrapers is just as dangerous, a shimmering mirror of clouds and trees. Some birds survive collisions, dazed but unharmed. Most don’t, done in by brain injuries and internal bleeding. Per one 2014 analysis, glass kills as many as a billion birds every year in the United States alone.
Chicago, among the largest and brightest cities within North America’s Midwestern flyway, is especially lethal—both during spring migration and again in fall, when the survivors fly south. The millions of artificial lights that glow across the Windy City present as a galaxy of false stars, confusing migrant birds that orient themselves by starlight and enticing them toward the glassy buildings below. In 2019, researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology ranked Chicago the country’s most perilous city for birds—a metropolis that doubles as an ecological trap.
Wherever he goes now, home will feel as close as the nearest Chinese restaurant, his lifelong classroom and proof of the resilience of his family and Asian immigrants everywhere.
“We’ve always, you know, had uphill battles,” he said. “The odds have always been stacked against us, but we just persevere. And it’s all you can do.”
“Causal determinism,” the philosopher’s unlovely term for that unsettling hypothesis, is the default assumption of most modern science. It matters a good deal if the idea implies that none of our actions are what we call “free.” If science tells us to be determinists, and determinism is incompatible with freedom, shouldn’t we give up on judging people for doing what they were destined to do?
That’s what the Stanford neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky urges. He thinks the time has come to accept the truth about determinism and acknowledge that “we have no free will at all.” What follows? Early in his book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” (Penguin Press), Sapolsky lists, with the morbid relish of a man daring to think the unthinkable, the implications of his heresy: no one is ever blameworthy—or, equally, praiseworthy—for doing anything. No one, Sapolsky writes, “has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.” Ordinary human sentiments—resentment and gratitude, love and hate—are pretty much irrational in their normal forms: “It makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house.” One practical implication is that, since nobody’s to blame for anything, criminal justice shouldn’t be about retribution. Accordingly, he tries to view human beings without judgment. Free-will skeptics are, he suggests, “less punitive and more forgiving.”
Torres stitches together the parts of his novel to create a whole, but one in which the seams are rough and visible. It’s part of the brilliance of the writing, which in drawing attention to the writer’s craft demonstrates that all stories are spliced together to create meaning. By switching back and forth between the testimony gathered by Jan Gay, her own life, and the memories Juan and the narrator share with each other, Torres makes visible a novelist’s sleight of hand. The result is a mille-feuille, a novel of multiple layers with various flavors on the palate.
What kind of a novel is “Baumgartner,” then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate “Baumgartner” in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty. For starters, we’ve got a bookish and earnest male protagonist and author’s proxy (Auster is a family name in the novel). We’ve got narrative instabilities that have us reading closely from Baumgartner’s point of view and then from some offstage “Pigs in Space”-type narrator’s: “Perhaps this odd confabulation will help the reader understand our hero’s state of mind at that particular moment.” Auster also splices in poems and pieces written by Baumgartner and his dead wife, Anna; forays into their past; and extended metaphors that require some unpacking. So it’s definitely a Paul Auster novel. Albeit more tender and less playful than some of his other work.
In the publishing world “The Vulnerables” is classified as a novel but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving you alone with a bad case of writer’s block.
The narrator broods about the writing life even though she knows that “whenever I write something about writing or being a writer, I am annoying the hell out of some people.” Indeed, self-awareness is a great part of her charm. “For the writer,” she muses, “obsessive rumination is a must.”
Maurice Blanchot once quipped that exhaustion is the start, and not the conclusion, of mental toil. Nobody believes this excuse, but telling someone you’re just too tired to meet them at the restaurant that night is the unassailable banner under which a great deal of writing often gets done. Exhaustion or tiredness (fatigue, in French) is writing’s condition of possibility—something to which Darrieussecq’s book can attest. Insomnia is excruciating, but it is also, for this reason, remarkably productive. Forced vigilance forces you to start writing things down: unable to ever really drift off, you might double down on your mental fixations and put them on the page. All the better for us that the coils of Darrieussecq’s fixation wound so tightly around the subject of sleeplessness itself.
Bohannon’s feminist revision of evolutionary history feels like an important counterbalance to the male-dominated narratives we tell ourselves about who we are, where we came from and what our purpose is – but one of the advantages of being a big-brained, hard-to-birth being is that we needn’t let our past define us.