The air conditioner was malfunctioning. When I bought the car used in January, the owner said she had just fixed it, but here I was on a steamy August day on the Atlantic coast of Senegal, with the vents pouring hot air into the already hot car. So, it was my imminent dehydration talking when I skidded to a stop in front of a roadside fruit seller’s table. I was once told by a grandmother, who lives in my seaside village but grew up in the northern dry regions where the Senegal River winds across a crispy and prickly savanna not far from the great desert, about a watermelon varietal called beref, which is cultivated mostly for its seeds but also serves as a kind of water reserve.
“There’s water that you can drink from it like a coconut,” she said.
Broadway’s digital turn will have effects beyond the sensory experiences of individual theatergoers. It is not just that the tap of a thumb on a smartphone has replaced the grasp of printed cardstock within the theatrical sensorium. As the platforms evolve that manage our ingress to those playhouses in the vicinity of Times Square (home of another media empire, subject to its own sea changes), so does information about theatrical culture.
Night Watch is tough reading, even excruciating at times, but far from unrelentingly bleak; small notes of grace appear throughout the novel, especially, albeit briefly, at the end. If at one juncture ConaLee remarks grimly “I’d not seen the war except in what it ruined”, she and some of those around her at the asylum are also offered a glimpse of what might, with time and care, be restored. “Much of [the civil war] is encrusted in myth or still unexplored,” the late Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, wrote in 2010. With this excellent novel, Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light.
It is difficult to talk about guns in America without talking about denial. With every new tragedy, we look the other way in a naive attempt to escape responsibility for our role in sustaining the cycle of gun violence.
Alexander Sammartino shows a keen sensitivity to this dynamic in his raucous, irreverent debut novel, Last Acts. Guns occupy center stage in Sammartino’s sly and darkly humorous take on modern masculinity, appropriately set among the unforgiving sun and tacky strip malls of the American southwest. Sammartino uses the father-son relationship at the heart of the book to poke fun at 21st-century American machismo, though his readers will be forgiven for wondering if Sammartino is always in on the joke.
You’re in the presence of a master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics. Reid spots all the grains of irritation and deceit that get caught in the machinery of social life until the whole contraption suddenly lurches to a calamitous halt.