Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they?—the rejection plot spoils everything upfront: they won’t. There the story stalls; but, strangely, continues. Even with no hope of requital, desire can persist, even intensify, with no guarantee of ending. The lack of happening is the tragedy.
Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. (I say this as someone who writes at least twice a week.) Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. The best columnists lean into their good ideas and minimize their output the rest of the time. Most columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery, spitting out work that is acceptable enough to fill space on a page, yet rarely worth taking the time to read. Their careers are like room temperature bowls of cream of wheat left on a table, still edible but not appetizing. Other columnists are gifted with a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad. Thomas Friedman is the Platonic Ideal of this type: taken seriously by important people and utterly full of shit. Will smart phones change the Middle East? Thomas Friedman will most certainly coin a phrase to answer that question, and his answer will be wrong. This sort of columnist is actually malicious, but hard to uproot. The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions, like everyone else.
The most interesting variety of columnist, though, is the type who should never be there in the first place. This is the person who is handed a columnist job as some sort of professional reward, for reasons unrelated to editorial output, and who then proceeds to quickly use up their meager handful of ideas, and who then faces the existential torture of having to fill the empty space on the page every week without any of the intellectual tools that might make doing so manageable. Watching these people grow increasingly desperate, grasping for ever more trivial topics as time goes by, is like standing on shore and watching someone that you despise trying to bail out a sinking rowboat. You know that you should feel bad for them. And yet.
Framed by the vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert, a lone man faces the camera. All around him, rough hills roll off into the distance. Clouds trail across an enormous sky, and mountain peaks decorate the horizon. “My name is Shaun Overton,” he says. He grins, then points to the barren ground at his feet. “And I’m turning this into a desert forest.”
Growing trees in this unforgiving terrain is a promise Overton makes every time he introduces a new episode of Dustups. The video series documents his attempt at “turning 320 acres of wasteland into a desert forest in the most isolated spot in Texas.”
Perhaps I should have. Written it down, I mean. As a writer, it feels like a duty. To keep a journal is a near-ubiquitous piece of introductory advice. Start a journal. Write in it every day. We hear so often about the journals of famous authors—Woolf, Sontag, Kafka, O’Connor, and so on—that it’s as if the rest of us are lazy, negligent, bad writers. Letting the raw material of our art slip through our hands. In a world of endless writing prescriptions and inspiration, such is the party line. As a writer, few things fill me with more guilt that I nevertheless, steadfastly do not do. Why is that? Every day, I wonder if something is happening to me that I’ll want to remember. I fail to write all of it down, and I repeat.
Put that way, it sounds like abject insanity. But hints abound that other notable writers are like the rest of us: abortive and lapsed in their recordkeeping, skeptical of what kinds of truth a journal offers anyway. They offer some hope for the rest of us, that lax recordkeeping is not the death knell for an aspiring writer.
With its fascinating backdrop, a cast of compelling characters, and a moral conundrum that will leave readers on the edge of their seats, Thomas’s debut has well and truly set the stage for one of this year’s most original historical novels.
Crash Landing is more literary than its action-packed cover art suggests. The conflicts are internal, the pacing measured, and despite all the skateboarding terms, the scenes about Woolf flow more organically than those set in the skatepark. Li Charmaine Anne’s writing invites reflection, and Jay’s story provides plenty of material.
For a book drenched in destruction, Everything Must Go is not depressing, and often wryly funny. It is incredibly deeply researched, fluently written, moving deftly between close-up detail and broad-brush analysis. And as a character in On the Beach explains, for “end of the world” we should really read “end of humanity”: “'It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along alright without us.’”