Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.
Supernormal experiences were a delicate question in the late 19th century, especially when they bore on such wobbly tenets of Christianity as immortality. Educated elites increasingly wished to strip religion of its supernatural excrescences and make it a sound pillar of society. The development of both anthropology and psychiatry encouraged them to explain away unearthly visions, ghosts or demons as relics of primitive thought or symptoms of mental illness. Yet the reductionism of these new disciplines was as brittle as it was ambitious, and Lang became their ardent critic. Like the SPR, whose president he later became, he sought evidence to challenge or at least stretch scientific naturalism’s pinched vision of reality. In a voluminous grimoire of ghost stories he published in 1897, he confessed that he was in a ‘balance of doubt’ about their truth. John Sloan’s new biography of Lang explores his attempts to frame and hold that balance. It reconstructs the development of a professional gadfly, who skipped across the hardening boundaries of literature, anthropology and history to insist on the strange origins of religion.
Composed of three narratives about 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas, Choice has been termed a triptych by its author and, like its visual forebears, the novel needles our moral impulses. The issues in question, from climate change to global poverty, are modern, but the novel’s interest in sin and virtue is redolent of the triptych’s medieval preoccupations. Where Choice differs is that, in its world, there are no unambiguous rights or wrongs. As one character observes of another: “No escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.” This is a triptych for a secular age – without hope of salvation, however hard humans try.
You can read “City in Ruins” as a meditation on honor, revenge and justice, but the book also challenges readers to examine beliefs about morality. In “City in Ruins,” whether you’re in the world of gangsters or law enforcement or the casino industry, Winslow shows us that morality rides a sliding scale.
It’s a beautiful story of life and love and loss, and the journey that all of these characters go on throughout the novel isn’t one that readers will forget in a hurry.