He’s used to a certain degree of struggle when it comes to his writing. “Keep in mind that The Magicians was my first hit, and that came when I was 40,” Grossman says. “I previously had two flops. If I had then two more flops? I’ve got three kids; they’ve got to eat. I had to sort of bet on myself. But it took a lot of sidestepping before I finally did.”
One reason The Bright Sword took so long was that Grossman initially kept his day job as a journalist. “I only ever wanted to write fiction, but I was really bad at it for a long time, so I needed to support myself. Being a journalist is what I ended up doing. But it wasn’t my childhood dream,” he says. “From the outside, it looked like I had a mid-career pivot to writing novels. I was always writing novels. It was just that people didn’t want to buy them.”
But I think this story is wrong. Fixing life remains difficult – but, in terms of understanding it, the course of cell and molecular biology over the past several decades isn’t a tale of unfulfilled promise. On the contrary, we’re in one of the most exciting periods since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA’s double helix in 1953. The transformative advances of the post-genomic decades are revealing nothing less than a new biology: an extraordinary and fresh picture of how life works. And ironically, those advances turn out to undermine the skewed view of life on which the HGP itself was predicated, in which the genome sequence of DNA was (in the words Watson put into Crick’s mouth) the ‘secret of life’.
If that’s so, why haven’t we heard more about it? Why hasn’t it been trumpeted and celebrated as loudly as the HGP was? Part of the reason is that science is inherently and necessarily conservative: slow and reluctant to change its narratives and metaphors, not least because we have all (scientists and public alike) got accustomed to the old ones. And we have yet to find compelling new stories to replace them. Talk of a genetic blueprint, of selfish genes, of instruction books and digital codes gave us a narrative we could grasp. Even though we now know this to be at best a partial and at worst a misleading picture, it’s likely to remain in place until there is something better on offer.
The shōgayaki (ginger pork) was on the chewy side and the udon noodles were mushy. The ginger-and-plum mackerel could have used more soy sauce, while the onigiri (rice ball) was a tad salty. But these are minor complaints when you’re in the middle of a natural disaster.
These dishes didn’t emerge from a restaurant kitchen but from pouches and cans of saigaishoku (disaster food), emergency rations my family had kept in our home in disaster-prone Japan for years, in case an earthquake, tsunami, or some other catastrophic event trapped us for days. I decided to dig in, not out of necessity but curiosity. Could I actually survive for days on this stuff if I had to?
Living can be a heavy business. No Small Thing, the debut novel by Orlaine McDonald, concerns itself with the accretive weight of thwarted desires, familial responsibilities and the relentless, life‑dominating grind of poorly paid labour. Slim and episodic, the novel tracks a year in the life of a south London family – grandmother Livia, daughter Mickey and granddaughter Summer – as they haltingly attempt to care for one another against a background of abandonment and resentment. Also present, in the broadest sense, is Meriem, the disembodied voice of Livia’s own mother, offering gnomic wisdom and serving as a reminder that since we tend to carry our dead with us, we may as well listen to them while we are at it.
Abandoning the usual sombreness and gravity of the genre, Tan’s promising work turns to whimsy and sparkle to reckon with the fear of death, a thwarted sense of time conditioned by illness, and her double identity as both doctor and daughter.
The book simultaneously demystifies genius, by arraying all of the literal work that goes into creation, while also making it clear that there is something ineffable about being creative.
The final years of Alexander’s life have often been used by historians to impart any number of moralizing lessons often rooted in anti-Asian racism. Even in his lifetime, Alexander faced criticism that his campaign into Asia corrupted him. As he conquered further lands, the story goes, he became megalomaniacal: unnecessarily violent, easily offended and preoccupied with conquest. In this version of the narrative, Alexander’s offenses piled up to the point that some historians insisted he couldn’t have died of natural causes and must have been assassinated.
Which is why Rachel Kousser’s new biography, “Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great,” is a breath of fresh air on its subject. Kousser neatly sums up the myth of Alexander’s “trajectory from upstanding Macedonian monarch to corrupt, violent Oriental despot” and then spends a few hundred pages refuting it.