For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology—the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets—hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration away. For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.
But alarms of late have grown more urgent. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds.
“People aren’t history,” scoffs Adela, vice secretary of the Ministry, whose work is shrouded in secrecy and subterfuge. This retort comes late in Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, “The Ministry of Time,” but it’s a telling line. Its dismissal of individual lives reveals the novel’s stakes. If people aren’t history, what is? This is a disturbing statement to come out of the mouth of a high-ranking British bureaucrat. For a book that could also be easily described as witty, sexy escapist fiction, “The Ministry of Time” packs a substantial punch.
It may be me, but I find the three stories of Russell Banks’ posthumous American Spirits collection to be examples of gallows humor despite the grim accumulation of fatal gunshots, dead children, and bodies in water. Even though each story culminates in disturbing death and disaster, I get the sense that the underlying point is a version of what fools these mortals be. I have no idea whether Banks emulated Kafka, who laughed aloud when he read Metamorphosis to friends, but Banks’ characters embody ludicrous human folly.
Passport Photos is a unique genre-bending book, constantly shifting among photographs, poetry, novel selections, essay passages, historical episodes, postcolonial theory, words on street signs, and Kumar’s often impassioned voice. His ability as a writer of fiction and nonfiction, with several books and many magazine publications, a Guggenheim grant, and a PhD, serves as the passport that gives him liberty to roam among all these sources as well as to explore myriad corners of human existence.
The book’s method involves transcending intellectual and literary boundaries, but the book’s substance focuses on exploring economic and social boundaries, those of living places, of education, of occupation, of income, of gender, of opportunity, and—most essentially—of power. Not only can a person in a booth on a border control another person’s ability to pass into a different circumstances, many other judges, seen and unseen, concrete or abstract, function as sources of domination that determine our choices and our opportunities.
Throughout the 500-plus pages of Dorian Lynskey’s overview of the art and literature of the end of the world, terrible things are done to the Earth. It is frozen, boiled, irradiated and desiccated. It is bombarded by asteroids, comets and rogue planets; volcanoes and earthquakes destroy it from within. The planet is depopulated, or overpopulated, then riven by pandemics, droughts and disease. The seas drain away or rise, drowning everything. And even if the Earth itself survives, its inhabitants are easy pickings for the genocidal zombies, aliens, robots and artificial intelligences that artists have imagined along the way.
In less skilled hands this 10-Armageddons-a-page pace might make for a depressing read, but Lynskey’s encyclopedic knowledge (we race from James Joyce to Joy Division, from Alan Turing to The Terminator), and his glee at the sheer inventiveness of the doomsayers’ creations, make this an unlikely page-turner.