The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time, particularly before everyone else — in possessing a sensitivity to the zeitgeist. This grasp of the bleeding edge, crucial to literature considered broadly countercultural, is used by writers (in a downtown bar, or up in a garret) to make history, not to recall it, even if no one would be so dull as to admit such ambitions. After all, the other hallmark of coolness is effortlessness. And the felt effort of historical fiction — research, dates, facts, figures, articles of clothing you didn’t know the name for until you looked them up — is always present. To the uninclined reader, this is homework. It’s boring. Yet a desire to visit the past springs eternal. There’s always that child curled up on the train or plane with a brick of a book, immersed in a vast world, a somewhere that’s electrifying in how different its ordinary is. As the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, with great nostalgia for that innocent feeling, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
My story begins in the fall of 1970, when Mr. Horowitz became an associate fellow of Silliman College, my residential college. (He accepted this appointment with the proviso that—in his words—“I do understand that there are no duties and responsibilities attached to such Associate Fellowship.”) Two years later, Silliman hosted a small private reception for Mr. Horowitz, organized by John Palmer, dean of the college, and two students, Michael Palm ’73 and Thaddeus Carhart ’72.
The next year, I decided to follow up on this first meeting, with the unstated goal of nudging Mr. Horowitz toward performing in public again. I sent him a letter suggesting that a small group of students could visit him at his home. In a return letter, he expressed interest in a possible visit and said he was willing to correspond further. In April 1974, a letter from his secretary divulged his telephone number—a valuable and closely held secret. During the following few weeks, I talked to Mr. Horowitz three or four times on the phone. We discussed a variety of topics, while I engaged in the delicate task of encouraging him to play for us without scaring him off by seeming too insistent or eager. Once I gained his trust and convinced him that I could assemble an enthusiastic young audience, belying his concern that we “would rather go to a football game,” we planned a recital.
O’Hara is now working on a far larger project that aims to use genetic analysis to map the history of biodiversity in the oceans over the past 100m years. “My dream is to be able to say: ‘We can see that 20m years ago, all the animals in the Atlantic flooded downwards, and then the circumpolar current swept them around so they populated Tasmania,’ and so on. Because if we can do that, we can make an animated map that shows the swirling movement of biodiversity across tens of millions of years.”
Would such a map change the way we imagine the deep? It seems likely it would, if only because it would make it clear that the ocean’s depths are not an alien realm, but intimately entangled with every other part of the planet. In particular, such a map might provide an antidote to the tendency to treat the ocean – and particularly the deep ocean – as a convenient place to dump waste that is too dangerous or expensive to store on land.
I remembered what Jack Laws said: “Feel the bird. Be the bird.” What did the hummingbird see in my eyes? Is that how a bird evaluates trustworthiness? As he fed, I examined the tiny feathers on his head, the pink, orange, and red color at his throat, the wing blur, the exquisitely tiny feet. I tried to mentally recite what I was seeing so I could later draw the hummingbird: The overlay of tiny feathers on its head are successively larger as they move from the front of the bill toward the back of the head. The legs are short, and its toes are the width of dental floss. What is he noting about me?
Today, nearly two decades into our post-mall era, much more has vanished than just a single, central place to gather, shop, eat, and perhaps get your ears pierced or have studio portraits taken. No single location has supplanted the mall in fostering such formative extracurricular experiences as I and many others had. Nixon agrees, admitting that she rarely finds herself at the mall now. “People think that with social media, kids don’t need a place to come together. But they definitely need a physical space to go to.”
The terrors in Colin Barrett’s debut novel, “Wild Houses,” seep across the page like black mold. Oh, there’s action in this thriller, too — fights! kidnapping! extortion! — but what’s most harrowing takes place in the penumbra of small-town crime where hopes are snuffed out and opportunities are cauterized.